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August 09, 2006
I'm In Better Company Than I Thought
At least I'm in better company than my friend Joe Cathey who challenged me (and a few others) to take an abnormally interesting "Political Compass" quiz.
Here are my numeric results:
Economic Left/Right: -3.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.05
On the "economic" scale, negative numbers show increasing liberal tendencies. On the "social libertarian" scale, negative numbers show increasing libertarian tendencies. Does the fact that negative numbers indicate the better tendencies show bias on the part of the authors of this quiz? 
According to the authors of the quiz, I am perhaps closer to The Dalai Lama than I am to Nelson Mandela and Gandhi but it does put me in very good company whoever is my nearest bigwig political neighbor.
This is where I have placed in other such quizzes and it also reflects how I feel about politics and social issues. In fact, I think I have taken a quiz very much like this one before but I can't find it.
This quiz was interesting, in part, because it had more than the usual 10 questions. There were times when I worried that they set up false "either/or" scenarios. For example, "The businessperson and the manufacturer are more important than the writer and the artist." I weakly disagreed but on some other day, I could have weakly agreed. The truth is I think it wrong to compare their importance in this way. One is more important in the area of economics, while the other is more important in the area of cultural/aesthetic expression and fulfillment. Just to muddy the waters a little more. Economic issues often reflect cultural/aesthetic issues and cultural/aesthetic issues often drive economic issues. Where would the MP3 player business be without music? There were several other questions that caused me to have the same reaction.
I always wonder about the sensitivity of this type of quiz. I've even done a few sensitivity studies myself, but I'm just too lazy today to work on this one. Perhaps someone else will try it.
Without naming names, I would be interested in how others scored on this quiz.
Posted by DuaneSmith at August 9, 2006 12:55 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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Comments
I'm in the same general area as you -- though you seem a bit more extreme! :-)
Posted by: Tyler Williams at August 9, 2006 04:06 PM
Abstract art that doesn't represent anything shouldn't be considered art at all... does that infer that all abstract art is meaningless? Interesting quiz and I'm sitting blissfully right next to the Dalai Lama (-7,-6.8). Fun quiz, thanks.
Posted by: steph at August 10, 2006 03:29 AM
Duane,
Thanks for this post. I pretty had you pegged on this one. I was probably an open book to many as well.
Cheers
Joe
Posted by: Joe Cathey at August 10, 2006 06:14 AM
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