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...?
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
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.
@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?
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.