Political Test - Evaluation please

H3LL

Illuminator
H3LL
Joined
Jul 21, 2004
Messages
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Personally I feel this type of test has very little credibility.

To me they always have a political bias and in many cases tend to lead people.

Two questions:

Is this test any good?

Political Compass

Is it ever possible to create such a test that is not bias?

Thanks.
 
I dont know if it is objective or biased, but my results confirm where I would put myself without taking the test:

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -6.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.56
 
H3LL said:
Personally I feel this type of test has very little credibility.

To me they always have a political bias and in many cases tend to lead people.

Two questions:

Is this test any good?

Political Compass

Is it ever possible to create such a test that is not bias?

Thanks.
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Poorly written test but it put me about the same place others have, which is two squares toward the right/bottom quad away from the exact center

this question struck me odd

Multinational companies are unethically exploiting the plant genetic resources of developing countries
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Most of the questions were loaded but this one was possibly so loaded I couldn't make heads or tails of it.
 
H3LL said:
Is this test any good?
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No. The questions are vague, some are meaningless, some don't have any correct answer, and some are full of just wrong information (like the one about abstract art not being based on anything when that's non-objective art).
 
Wow, I get to be in the same quadrant as Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama. :)
 
Re: Re: Political Test - Evaluation please

shanek said:
No. The questions are vague, some are meaningless, some don't have any correct answer, and some are full of just wrong information (like the one about abstract art not being based on anything when that's non-objective art).
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One that struck me as meaningless is "Controlling inflation is more important than controlling unemployment.", since everybody now knows that this trade-off simply doesn't exist in the long run.
As to H3LL's question ther eis no thing as a totally unbiased test, but it's possible to come a lott closser than this one.BTW

for what's it's worth (and with this test that's not a lot) I scored.
Economic Left/Right: 1.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.90
 
Might be interesting to compare Europeans to the US-Americans. (whatever this test means...)

Economic Left/Right: -2.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.49

So I am quite on the bottom.... :p
 
Just as silly as all these "quick test" quizzes, to generalise, half the questions can't be answered with the options given!

Economic Left/Right: -6.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.41
 
ingoa said:
Might be interesting to compare Europeans to the US-Americans. (whatever this test means...)
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Well, I know as a European I am expected to be a little left off the center, but according to this test the Dalai Lama is a right-wing dictator compared to me. :eek:
 
Re: Re: Political Test - Evaluation please

shanek said:
No. The questions are vague, some are meaningless, some don't have any correct answer, and some are full of just wrong information (like the one about abstract art not being based on anything when that's non-objective art).
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None of which is actually a relevant complaint.

This "test" isn't like a set of medical boards that you sit to prove your mastery of a body of knowledge and recieve a licence to practice. It's a political categorization tool, rather like a political version of the MMPI or the Myers-Briggs. So the whole point is to ask vague and meaningless questions to see how people respond.

As long as people consistently respond the same way, and as long as their responses can be fit into a useful and reliable set of categorizations, the test might still be useful.

I'd be interested in seeing the reliability and validity numbers myself. I suspect, like most of the lightweight "personality tests" you see in glossy magazines, that this isn't a very good test. But the idea that a test of political psotions must have questions with "correct" answers is silly.
 
Re: Re: Political Test - Evaluation please

I enjoyed the test, but I have certainly tried better.

Economic Left/Right: -1.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.51
 
When I posted my results I thought I was somehow "radical" on some answers. Now that I see the results of others, it results that Im not that extremist! :D ;) :p
 
Re: Re: Re: Political Test - Evaluation please

Kerberos said:
One that struck me as meaningless is "Controlling inflation is more important than controlling unemployment.", since everybody now knows that this trade-off simply doesn't exist in the long run.
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Yeah, the Phillips Curve, a piece of Keynesian garbage that was thoroughly trashed in the '70s.
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Political Test - Evaluation please

shanek said:
Yeah, the Phillips Curve, a piece of Keynesian garbage that was thoroughly trashed in the '70s.
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In the long run, the tradeoff does exist in the short run.
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Political Test - Evaluation please

Kerberos said:
In the long run, the tradeoff does exist in the short run.
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Sort of. And sometimes.

I remember my economics professor showing us graphs where economists had applied the Phillips curve. One was a very clear Phillips curve. Another looked like a random mess of dots. He then overlaid what the economists had drawn. They had drawn four Phillips curves, in different places, at different heights, and had simply skipped over the dots that didn't fit in.

So the Phillips curve works...as long as you ignore the places where it doesn't.
 
Entered the results into a little script I wrote, the output is attached to this post. It displays the data exactly as the original site, but plots the red dots at their precise position, not rounded values. No Pope, no Blair, no Bush so far:
 
Well, I could not answer 2 of the first 3 questions:
If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.
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I think that globalization serves humanity and corporations. How do I answer this?

No one chooses his or her country of birth, so it's foolish to be proud of it.
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I should not be proud of my country because I was born here. I should be proud or ashamed according to its actions.

What surprises me is that the stupidity of the questions seemed to be universal - not as biased as I would expect.

I came out where I expected, what I call libertarian and what they call right libertarian. The one thing that I like is that no politicians are there with me. I think this is probably fairly correct.

CBL
 
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