I feel like I’ve painted myself into a corner. A few weeks back, I conducted a series of polls in IMHO. I kept the purpose of the polls a secret so as not to affect the outcome, but my only purpose was to determine whether there might be one or more participants whose worldviews were compatible with my own. Basically, I wondered, “Does anybody think the way I do?”.
And now, after trying several times to interpret the responses, I feel like I might have messed up, and I was hoping the board’s resident stats experts could tell me whether that’s true. For one thing, I did multiple polls (three total), reasoning that each succeeding one would take nuances from the previous one. For example, after determining that a person was not a naturalist, I wanted to know whether he was an existentialist. That way, anyone who, for example, believed in a supernatural entity with contingent existence would be eliminated.
Unfortunately, I did two things that make the tally very difficult: (1) I allowed people to participate in polls II and III who did not participate in I; and (2) I allowed people to respond without explanations, reasoning that if we both believed the same thing, the reason we believed it didn’t matter.
But it does, as I see now. For example, one of the choices was between a quote by Eddington and a quote by Kant. One of the people chose Eddington (which is agreeable to me) but only because she felt Kant was generally incoherent. Therefore, even though we agree on the particular item, we would not necessarily agree on something else where Kant was right and Eddington wrong.
And as far as people participating in one poll but not another, it seems that I miss whether the person who matched me almost exacty in poll III would have matched me at all in I and/or II.
Is this salvagable, or were the design flaws too great? Is there a way to determine whether one compatibility is any greater than another?