For a lot of the economic/immigration ones, I took an educated guess (even though I agree their ‘correct’ answers should probably have more ‘we don’t know’). And for the ones I felt I knew, the two crime-related ones, the correct answer for both was ‘we don’t know’…
Yeah, this is one of the two weaknesses with the test, IMHO. If you think the link between human activities and climate change is unproven, and you’re completely confident about that, that shows some pretty huge bias in your thinking. If you think EU countries are almost as rich as the US, but you aren’t really sure, it’s definitely worth a callout, but isn’t nearly as weighty. Knowing where your knowledge ends is a major weapon in the war against bias, and this test completely misses that.
The other problem, as many have pointed out, is that some of the questions are less factual than the test makers believe. I love the idea of this test, but a better execution would have had 100% quantitative, factual questions with a confidence indicator.
I looked again, and you are correct. However, I think it’s still fuzzing up the questions by putting them in the context of political views based on scientific consensus and then asking a factual question. So do they want to know GMOs are unsafe, or if there is a scientific consensus that they are unsafe, or is it my political view that GMOs are unsafe, or is it my political view that there is a scientific consensus that GMOs are unsafe? I gave the answer based on the first option, which was the question posed on that page, and I think a lot of people will answer the same way.
I got to the first question. “What are your views on economic questions?” or however it was phrased. My real answer is that it’s a much to complicated field to grade on just one dimension where I don’t know the biases of the question asker.
And as far as I can judge from the other responses here I’d be biased towards guessing what the test designers consider the “correct” answer to the “factual” questions.
I suck. I got 50% correct and had a 70% bias. But I agree the questions were vaguely worded, and I tried too hard to guess what the “right” answer was.
Not to continue the hijack, but it’s still clearly “no” on the face of it. GMO food doesn’t contain a “GMO molecule” that might or might not be unsafe; it’s a process used to produce the food, different for each one. It’s like asking if “red is bright” or not, without specifying which red. It’s effectively impossible that all GMO food could be unsafe, since any given two GMO foods likely have nothing in common with each other. It’s part of what makes this “GMO is horrible” thing so inherently stupid. Could an individual GMO food be unsafe? Unlikely, given the regulatory hurdles they have to pass before entering the food supply, but possible. Even if you find one, though, it says nothing about “GMO food” in general
Given that they start by asking about your self-described political position, I suspect that they count any bias in the opposite direction as “0% bias”. Like, say, if you identify as liberal, but your mistakes are more often than not in the “conservative” direction.
No, the question stipulated that the genetic modification itself is not a problem, and that’s objectively true. GM is a technique, which is used to develop products. There’s nothing about using this technique that’s a problem, even though you have to evaluate each product on its own merits.
For me, 77.78% correct, 0% bias.
It’s amazing how casual bias lends to the reading of the questions. The question didn’t specify safe to EAT. There are several environmental factors that have cropped up with GMO crops that would lead me to answer at least “we don’t know yet” to the actual question, despite the crops being safe to eat.