[FRIAM] Political compass teest

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Wow, Glen.  I would hate to argue with you on a Monday. 

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Monday, October 12, 2020 9:16 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Political compass teest

This test is propaganda, pure and simple.

sunday: Economic Left/Right: -8.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.92

monday: Economic Left/Right: 7.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 5.9

Self-reported data isn't, at all, a reliable measure. It's shocking to
buttress our conversations about lacking free will, behaviorism, complexity
from simple rules, stochasticity, etc. against an apparently ingrained
belief that idealistic answers to a questionnaire like this are meaningful.
I suppose one *might* take the approach that such a questionnaire is one
tool for *biasing* near-term behavior. The recent article on whether a
belief in a controlling god affects one's self-reported attitudes toward
"environmental support":
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167220948712?journalCode=ps
pc  The result is basically yes, you can manipulate thoughts with other
thoughts. Does that translate AT ALL to any sort of action/behavior? Pffft.

The political compass test, I can argue, phrases their questions to bias the
result toward the lower left. The difference between my sunday score and my
monday score is, I think, solely in how I interpret the questions, merely
altering which words would "trigger" me. Words like "sometimes" and "should"
are so ... poetic ... so open to arbitrary interpretation as to be
completely useless as an indicator for political positions, much less
political action.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were a correlation between what you eat for
breakfast and where you land on that plane. You'd need a refractory period
between each response, of course, otherwise you'll simply memorize the
questions and "teach to the test". Every day would be too frequent. Once a
month might work, though. Once per quarter would be better. And randomized
intervals would be best ... a longitudinal study over maybe 5 years. And a
good study would use an upper ontology for the questions so that the wording
could change each time you took it, but where each was a slightly different
expression of the same concept. You'd still be biasing thought with thought,
steering the subject into affinity with the ontology, but it would be easier
to tease out the ephemeris from the noise.

I wonder if this is what cult leaders do implicitly ... hound their
followers with "surveys" ostensibly posed to *ask*, but ulimatately designed
to *steer*. AA, Synanon, and NXIVM apparently use[d] such. And I suppose
Scientology's E-meter is the same type of thing. And let's not forget
Socrates! If you steep yourself in Plato's rendition, you get
self-righteousness. But Diogenes has the more realistic, data-driven
approach.

On October 10, 2020 2:21:53 PM PDT, jon zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com>
wrote:
>I just took the political compass test and surprise surprise, I am a 
>left-libertarian.
>
>Take the test here if you are interested:
>https://www.politicalcompass.org/test
>
><http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/file/t395744/Screen_Shot_2020-10-10_
>at_3.png>

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