A point by Debaser which needs rebutting yet again:
Some of them are, agreed. But these are, I venture, solely to find the genuine authoritarians and Law-Of-Jungle-Capitalsts. Similarly, some of the choices are worded to be harsh on Leftist/Social Liberal ideology, in order to find the true commies and anarchists amongst us. Focussing on these would imply conservative bias.
The vast majority of the propositions allow much difference of opinion amongst “real” people, as the 61 specific threads will hopefully show.
Lib,
Not so - the centre is utterly arbitrary. All one can meaningfully say is that the test orients you as being further Right than, say, me. Zagadka,
As I said, I hope the intellectual calibre of this board is such that we can see that these words are being used honestly and with their true meaning, and not be diverted by the negative loading such words might traditionally have received.
All the objections so far, some of which have some validity, do not appear so serious that a given candidate would receive a completely inaccurate score. I suggest we get on with discussing he specific propositions and leave further attempts to rubbish the test in its entirety solely in this thread.
[…sigh…] But I am NOT further right than you. I’m not further right than anyone. I’m nowhere on the right. Nowhere on the left either. I am neither conservative nor liberal.
I suspect I advocate greater state intervention in the economy than you. This is what I, and the Compass, mean by “further Left”.
Perhaps the specific threads will confirm my suspicion, perhaps not. You are free to make up your own Compass, with your own propositions, scoring system and axes. We are debating the one provided in the OP.
Let’s use an example of a liberal position distorted by a biased question: Universal health care. Let’s assume that the test taker is for it…
A test could ask:
“The benefits of socialized medicine outweigh the greater costs and ineffeciencies of such a system.”
If someone is in favor of universal heath care, they would probably still answer “agree” to this statement. However, they would have to hold their nose while doing it because it is worded so harshly against it.
If the test said:
“Providing universal health care to all Americans that is free and high quality is a fundamentally good idea.”
You could agree without holding your nose.
In any case, it’s just insulting to suggest that if someone thinks the statements are worded to be biased one way or another that there is some sort of problem with the positions that person takes on the issues.
Why is that worded harshly? All systems have inefficiencies. If anyone thinks this is worded harshly, my advice would go the same for them. It isn’t like they’re asking if I stopped beating my wife–all organizations are inefficient.
But the wording Debaser used said that universal healthcare has greater costs and inefficiencies [than other healthcare systems]. I completely see his point (and I’m down in the southwest quadrant). That’s why I agree with Zag that most of the propositions should come up twice in the test, with “opposite” wording (or occasionally one neutral, one slanted; or one neutral, one slanted right, one slanted left).
However, I don’t know that such things make the test inaccurate. There have to be occasional ones that only an extremely right authoritarian could ever agree or disagree to strongly… or they’d have no way of putting someone at the top-right corner (or bottom-right). I guess the problem is I can’t think of any specific ones for which only someone on the extreme left would have a unique response. Hopefully we’ll notice them as the discussion goes on.
Again: obviously. More people covered is a greater cost, requiring a larger organization which will have more inefficiencies. Anyone in support of universal healthcare should be aware of this.
I am almost entirely certain they do this on purpose. Why? Because pure libertarians/authoritarians need to score almost zero on the right-left scale, which means questions should have a certain bias so that fence-sitters can still answer without significantly changing the answers of people who have picked a side. Similarly, pure righties and lefties that care less for the social ramifications of politics have to center up.
There are two ways to do this. One is to allow an “I don’t know/don’t care” response that scores zero. The FAQ addresses this. The other is to slightly bias questions so that those who don’t know/don’t care will average themselves out of the picture.
Well, since you can’t see the bias in a statement that I wrote deliberately trying to show bias, it no longer surprises me that you can’t see any in the test either.
You seem to be in denial that it is possible to have a biased question affect the response of the reader. If this is the case, how do you explain the different responses that a poll can get by simply wording a question differently?
Of course questions can be biased. “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Then there are questions that assume answers not in hand. “Do you think the bible is more of a fictional novel than a myth?” Then we have yours, which assumes actual facts: that larger organizations have more inefficiencies than smaller ones[, all else being equal].
I’m -5.5, -6.15, and find myself in such august company as Gandhi, Mandela, and the Dalai Lama, not to mention Al Sharpton. We leftist libertarians rock. I’m way more libertarian than Libertarian. Anyway. Really wondering what my Strongly Disagree to the astrology question means politically. Maybe they should have a Santa Clause question in there too. Do they suppose that social liberals embrace nonsensical mythologies other than Christianity, and opposition to non-Christian beliefs makes you socially conservative? Well, my score bears out that I’m liberal, so it can’t mean that much.
I don’t know how meaningful this is. Inevitably any such test will have the stamp of whatever are the politics of the test’s designers. It reminds me of the ones Libertarians hand out and everyone finds out they are a libertarian.
You’re missing a number of things. One of the central tenets of the support of a socialized health care system is that the bolded statement you make above is not true. Depending on how each organization is managed and a lot of other factors, a larger organization can be much more efficient than a smaller one. You also assume that a socialized system would necessarily by larger than the entirety of the current health care system. To be fair, you can’t compare a socialized health care system against a single private health care provider. You have to compare it against the aggregate total of all private health care providers operating in the market space.
The statement Debaser proposed also assumes more than you recognize:
In order to agree with the statement as proposed without qualms about how one’s response will be interepreted requires that the respondent believe the following: “Socialized medicine has both greater costs and greater inefficiencies than a system of multiple private companies providing health benefits on a for-profit basis.” That statement is assumed to be true in the wording of the question Debaser proposed, yet it is a highly arguable statement that depends on a host of variables that are fairly difficult to quantify. It certainly isn’t a statement that is accepted without question by all parties in the debate.
Look, anyone asks you any question you can nitpick it to death. If the question has given you no reason to assume otherwise, then “all else being equal” isn’t particularly silly. If things were different they wouldn’t be the same.
Lesse… a system that covers every person versus a system that doesn’t cover every person… Hmm! What are we going to compare, cost? Salary? Number of people covered? Does Debaser’s question tell us?
I don’t have to assume that. Perhaps it is comparing it to “no system at all” which is perfectly efficient at delivering no services. The question doesn’t say. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a genuine answer. Of course, I did assume it because that’s how I feel about it. And for the record I would desire a form of socialized medicine. But I don’t think for a minute that what I pay for health care now would decrease is we adopted such a plan. That is certainly not why I want it.
As far as I can tell, the arguments for a socialized health care system almost all focus on a belief that all else is not equal. Therefore, I do see an assumption of “all else being equal”, in the case of socialized health care vs privatized health care, to be rather silly. The questions is hardly being asked in a vacuum, after all.
For the record, I’m completely undecided as to what system of health care would be optimal. I don’t know enough about the economics/requirements of the different structures to feel comfortable choosing one over another. I’m just coming at this as an observer.
If the system, through reduction of redundancies, elimination of the profit-motive, and other factors, can achieve a higher level of efficiency than the current system, it can indeed cover more people while still being the same size or smaller. Covering more people can be achieved through an increase in size of the system, an increase of efficiency of the system, or a combination of both. Whether this is realistically possible I don’t know for certain, but it’s certainly theoretically possible.
Many people do believe that the individual’s cost for health care would decrease under a socialized plan. An unbiased (or to be more correct, a more honestly biased) proposition would, given the fact that the true truth of the matter is uncertain, acknowledge this possibility or at least be more careful in how it defined itself.
The problem I have with the Political Compass is that it only reveals a portion of someone’s political views.
Take myself, for example. I took the test and came up with -0.88 on economics and -3.08 on social. That makes sense. I find myself quite moderate on economic issues and somewhat liberal on social issues.
The problem is that I am also quite conservative on foreign/international issues, and those feelings, which are very important to my complete political philosophy, don’t show up at all.
I think you are confused about what the word “bias” actually means. You should go and look it up. I seriously think this is the source of much of the disagreement here.
The examples you give of “bias” are in fact logical fallacies. The old “beating your wife” question is the fallacy of interrogation and the second one you mention is a false dichotomy.
Something doesn’t have to have a glaring logical fallacy in order to be biased, as you seem to believe.
A statement doesn’t even have to have something false or untrue in it for it to be biased.
My two statements regarding health care clearly would have resulted in different numbers of responses from readers. The reason was that one was biased against universal health care and the other was biased for it.
And if we were polling the general public rather than the SDMB crowd I might be much, much more inclined to let the matter lie. It is not a matter of saying there is no bias in the questions. I suggested the bias isn’t a problem in the test. And if you recognize the bias in the question, you shouldn’t have to hold your nose when answering it.
The questions need to be biased so that middle of the road people will cancel their own responses out and arrive towards the center in a test where there is no way to answer in the center.
Incidentally, to all those who feel that some of the conservative propositions are phrased such that nobody would ever Strongly Agree, you should note that friend Brutus polled an amazing (+8.12, +8.02). Clearly, there are people out there who will Strongly Agree with even the most Authoritarian propositions, and it is important that the test distinguishes them from more moderate conservatives.
But are you sure that he interpreted them that way as well? What I am asking is do his agreements really corespond to a strong authoritarian bent on his part, or does his agreement have more to do with some differing interpretation of the questions?
Blimey, I find myself in teh even more august company of liberal!
Economic: -0.50
Social: -1.18
Some of the problems with the ‘test’ have already been noted. I would comment that my own score surprised me on the economic, but not on the social. But perhaps that just goes to show how centrist I am compared with an ‘ideal’ American norm. I would consider myself further to the right economically having voted for Maggie three times.
BTW, how do they accord scores to politicans like Maggie and John Howard? Can hardly see them logging in and taking the test, and if they’re being given positions on the compass by another method, then there are obvious problems.
What are we going to compare, cost? Salary? Number of people covered? Does Debaser’s question tell us?