so I've been catching some glimpses on the nerd-o-sphere about this new political quiz:
From the feedback I was seeing, apparently it's better than the venerable Political Compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org/), if only because it provides more granularity?
Well, aside from the fact that the political compass quiz results come in two axes and this one has *four*... I guess more is good?
In any case my results are as follows, which... I don't get it? I thought libertarianism and socialism were like... kind of opposite ends of the governmental interference spectrum?
Like, how is this thing calculated anyway? What are the possible answers? What's the underlying theory in naming these political ideologies?
luckily, this thing was hosted on Github Pages, so finding the repo was fairly straightforward. It's at https://github.com/8values/8values.github.io, of course.
And quick glance nets me this JS file with all the possible responses: https://github.com/8values/8values.github.io/blob/master/ideologies.js
dafuq is “Anarcho-Egoism”. Apparently there's a difference between Nazism, Fascism, and Capitalist Fascism. You can have Communism that is Religious.
Huh...?
Like, *how* did the devs come to this decision? The website has a quick summary, but unlike their venerable competition, there's no talk of how they put their numbers in. There are no implications of what these values mean. They don't take contemporary political figures in the news — the Political Compass has a page in the French Presidential Election and tried to score them based on their system: https://www.politicalcompass.org/france2017
People question them, but at least got justification.
Man, I'm like so disappointed tho. It's a pretty neat and elegant quiz system that let the developer to lay something down quickly and cheaply.
Too bad we didn't get a clear idea what their reasoning was, or what was the point of this quiz, and why it matters.
Too bad there doesn't appear to be any licensing info, so the Berne convention is more or less in effect, i.e. the code is copyrighted. Welp. The code would be easy to reproduce, since the ideas aren't particularly profound anyway.
@tariqk Making a clean-room implementation of the code behind it seems easy enough to the point I might even do it as a weekend project at some point. The problem is I don't feel nearly qualified enough for the questions themselves or how to rank them- I'm no sociologist, psychologist, or just generally knowledgeable enough about social sciences. A crowdfunded effort with a transparent explanation for each question would be pretty dang nice.
@EntropiaFox don't disagree. it would be *great* to have a walkthrough of the test designer's reasonings, if only for critique and further improvement. I don't know if crowdsourcing the questions would make it more transparent, unless the quiz's goals were to “just” describe the political position, but even the act of defining the axes will require some bias, because you're making a position that some principles matter in describing one's political position.
@tariqk
Sometimes you get what you wish for. I'm the developer of 8values and I just signed up on this site so we could chat about it. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
@TristanBomb LOL, okay. Welcome to Mastodon, I hope you find the fediverse interesting enough to stay and contribute.
I only really got one question though, honestly:
What was the thought process that made you want to do such a quiz? More specifically, who were you aiming this for, who are you comparing this quiz against, and what were the limitations of those quizzes that your quiz was meant to address?
@tariqk there were some Christian organisations from just after the Reformation in UK that believe(d?) in common property ownership such as the Diggers. Not sure if such views are common or even found nowadays anywhere (although there are many Christians around today who have socialist economic views and progressive views on society).
@vfrmedia yeah, as @SuzanEraslan pointed out. And yet I'm like... so that's what the developer meant?
@tariqk anarcho-egoism sounds like it might mean Stirnerism... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Max_Stirner?wprov=sfla1
@abgd I was going to say, then call it that, because you've got De Leonism, Trotskyism and the like. What's bugging me isn't the names as much as they're plucked from as if the ether.
@tariqk Religious communism was a pretty standard organization of Northern European and Eastern European towns during the Middle Ages. The idea that communism is inherently anti-religious is from Marx, who didn't invent, or claim to invent, the idea.
@SuzanEraslan Was that what the developer intended, you think?
@SuzanEraslan @tariqk I'd guess they meant more like Tolstoy, but there's no way to know.
@tariqk I have no idea what they intended... these tests are always really opaque as to what the creator actually understands about political spectrums. It's very high school civics and government level understanding of politics. Like, how could you possibly get religio-communism from something with that test? All the religious questions are all anti-science and pro-war, which is not typical of religious communism as it has existed.
@SuzanEraslan I'm making grimacing expressions while strangled variants of “SEE” and “EXACTLY” are escaping my oral cavity through clenched teeth.
@tariqk also took it and honestly it feels like libertarian propaganda more than anything.
@queeractivist that's possible. but what made you feel that way? i just thought it was poorly-thought out.
@tariqk I'm not certain, and it may just be that. But defining someone who's more liberty than authority as "libertarian" seems like a serious mis-definition. I also noticed that I got that result even though that axis actually had the least strong result of the four (I had stronger results for pacifism and progress).
@queeractivist Hmm. The dev did say that they were having trouble matching ideologies. I suspect that the problem may not lie with the matching algorithm (like, seriously, it's probably just choosing the nearest point to you, that's Cartesian geometry, even if it's 4-D space), but how they've defined those ideologies in the first place. GIGO.
You'll notice that each ideology has four target numbers, which correspond to a point in the 4D matrix that this quiz... I guess looks for the closest point for? And if you answer the questions you'll get points added and subtracted from?
Which is pretty much what happens: https://github.com/8values/8values.github.io/blob/master/questions.js