The Political Compass

Ermarian

Ermarian

TNPer
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I've been away for a few weeks on a quest to learn the ancient lore of statistics, and the evenings were long enough to play around with PHP. :)

I suppose you've all heard of the test that maps your economic and social policy on a two-dimensional plane? It's an immensely arbitrary test, of course. Even your individual score will vary from day to day, because a few of the questions will be answered differently depending on current mood. About the only thing it can say with confidence is where people are in relation to each other.

That means the score isn't actually useful until you collect a lot of them in an online community and plot them all on a point cloud. *Then* you can get interesting information - say, where the mean of the community lies, how wide its spread (standard deviation) is, and how far out its most extreme points lie.

Hence my political compass map. If you want, you can take the test and enter your coordinates in my neat little form. Names are completely optional (as is ballot-stuffing, but I hope we can avoid muddying the data with multiple votes ;) ).

Feel free to post your results in this topic, too.

All data will automagically appear on this image:



(All right, I'm a dirty pinko commie hippie.)
 
Hey hey, a free-market libertarian! You're really rare on the PC maps I've seen - mostly the two coordinates are very correlated so that the points form a broad diagonal line through the center.

So... what do you think of Ayn Rand?
 
I have fixed a bug that made most of JAL's name invisible. The graphing tool (which is a standalone utility I wrote, by the way, named phpPlot) now takes care to position the label far enough from the edge to avoid cut-off.
 
I'm hanging in the bottom left hand corner with Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and my main man Syb-Syb.
 
The crosshair is still going to move as more people take the test though. But I'm curious - this is the most politicized community I've seen take the test. The other forum consists mostly of teenage RPG gamers. They're spaced on a thin diagonal from the lower left corner to just above and to the right of the center.
 
Ermarian:
Hey hey, a free-market libertarian! You're really rare on the PC maps I've seen - mostly the two coordinates are very correlated so that the points form a broad diagonal line through the center.

So... what do you think of Ayn Rand?
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I absolutely love Ayn Rand.

Perfect 10 score ftw.
 
Monte Ozarka:
I do believe you're hanging out in the excellent company of Margaret Thatcher and co.

It's a sad, lonely, unpopular world for you on the internet...
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Whil *I* have a lot of company in TNP, despite the "sad, lonely, unpopular world for you on the internet" thing seems to apply to me too... ;) :P
 
It's surprisingly liberal here - from previous discussions I got the impression that pacifism and anti-death-penalty are not very popular platforms.

A few polls are in order, perhaps? I've got no time though...
 
Hot damn! The majority of my state and I disagree! Maybe that's why I like the interweb so much. Or, at least, you kids.

And I've always thought Ghandi and I would get along fantastically. Now, I know..
 
IndieGirl:
Hot damn! The majority of my state and I disagree! Maybe that's why I like the interweb so much. Or, at least, you kids.

And I've always thought Ghandi and I would get along fantastically. Now, I know..
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Well, I won't tell 99% of Utah if you won't; ya gosh-darned Commie, trying to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!
 
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