OpenPolitics
April 29, 2007 10:03 pm politicsI discovered OpenPolitics.ca while reading about the leader of Canada’s Green Party suing several web sites for defamation. I haven’t looked into it in detail yet, but it looks promising so far.
One of the first things I’ve investigated is their
Political Personality Quiz, which is very much like the one at Political Compass which I wrote about earlier, except that it has 6 axes instead of two. According to my results, I’m an “Anti-Nationalist”, which is a harsh-sounding term, but the writeup describes me pretty accurately. Further down they give an “alternate nickname” of “post-nationalist”, which I think is a better name: it implies that nationalism is a obsolete system rather than a bad one.
I’m sure I’ll be posting more from this site in the future.
April 30th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Initially I was suspicious of the test because if you answer “skip this question” to every one of the 59 questions, the test says you are an ABCLN - a Traditional Communitarian, one “who seeks to strengthen society by regulating social life as well as the economic order, focusing on “community values” as opposed to individualism”. That puts you in the same company as Mao Tse Tung and Kim Jong Il.
However, on second thought, the result made sense. It describes people who won’t answer your questions or at least not give you a straight answer. I’ve met a few of these “politicians” (in the broad sense). Among their
dislikes:
- ”high concept” ideas
- those who are disloyal
- challenges to authority
April 30th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Actually that would definitely indicate that the test is flawed; if you can’t provide it any information then it shouldn’t be making any predictions about your beliefs. You should be exactly balanced on every scale. The fact that it puts you into ABCLN could be something due to something as simple as a round-off error (zero results are biased in favor of one end of each scale).
May 1st, 2007 at 8:12 am
In fact the results did show exact balance on every scale.
I think there are two possible situations:
If someone CAN’T provide information about their beliefs, that might indicate that they don’t know what they believe.
If someone REFUSES to provide information about their beliefs, it may mean they want to hide what they really believe. Politicians do it all the time because if they alienate 20% of the people on each of three different issues, they may have trouble getting elected.
Both situations say something about the person and their beliefs. It appears to me that “Open Politics” has interpreted the “skip this question” response as the person refusing to reveal their beliefs.
In my experience “politicians” (in government, in business and in religious or other institutions) work to establish their image - eg. Mao Tse Tung the great liberator - to gain loyalty and strength of position before they reveal their true strategies. Given enough support, dictators will then proceed to discredit and eliminate their opposition - fomer allies become expendable and power is consolidated.