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This is topical for Brits whom are supposed to be voting today. The political compass is a representation of political opinion in two dimensions. The idea is a long overdue extension to the existing concepts of political 'left' and 'right'.Â
It is nice but flawed. Apart from some of the questions being ambiguously worded or unfair traps, there is an unspoken degeneracy in this 2D system. The questions are measuring 3 degrees of 'freedom' (liberties) but only have 2 axes. This is something I pointed out to friends years ago and have actually seen some other people on the web acknowledging my idea. So what are the 3 degrees of freedom that they are trying to measure? Civic, political and economic freedom. The degeneracy comes from the fact that the civic and political freedoms are plotted on the same axis, even if the two are heavily correlated when we inspect historic data the two are not intrinsically the same. But still this 2D compass is better than the greater blunder of putting all 3 degrees of freedom onto the same axis (ie the normal 1D representation of 'left' versus 'right' that plagues us). Asking questions that probe 3 dimensions but collapsing that information into 2 dimensions means that information is inherently lost from the system. All of this assumes that the questions consistently probe each dimension (degree of freedom) and that the answers match up fairly with the questions. The questions and answers can be constructed in such a way to force all the participants into one quadrant. I suspect there is a bias in the political compass questions/answers for the bottom left corner; however, that is a popular quadrant amongst people in the western liberalized world hence many people will be there anyway. Another interesting point to make is that this test is similar in concept to a Jungian personality test (MBTI these days). Where there are 4 dimensions or 4 degrees of freedom. The word 'freedom' was previously used in connection with liberties and, more subtly, to indicate independent axes or degrees of freedom as used in physics. Now in the case of a Jungian personality test I don't mean freedom as liberty but freedom as an independent dimension. The concept is really the same: you ask questions and receive answers. How the questions are answered will determine which quadrant you are in, eg Extraversion Introversion (-,+), Sensing iNtuition (-,+), Thinking Feeling (-,+), Judging Perceiving (-,+). Of course there are critics of the MBTI tests on the grounds that they are unreliable. Perhaps the same can be said of the political compass. So how to prove reliability and consistency of these tests? In concept I think they are consistent and could be reliable but it depends on how the tests are constructed. So where to look for inconsistencies? At the top level there could be unexpected correlations which might indicate that something more fundamental is wrong. There should also be some level of error associated with each answer, it can be an infinitely precise point on a graph. At a level below that we need to ask do the questions probe the dimensions of concern and do the questions match the answers; can a question receive an answer that modifies 2 dimensions? Yes, provided it is done correctly. Which then leads to something more fundamental: how is the system defined (mathematically) ? I thought about the above list but in reverse order. I started with the most fundamental and tried to create a consistent set of rules from which to start and then build upon that. By starting simple, yet fundamental, and then slowly adding complexity I saw that it was easy to go wrong at many different steps. I'd imagine that no one else has bothered to put as much thought into these tests. They implicitly assume a set of rules and then get on with it. That is 'fine' but it leaves a gap for me to exploit. *cue dramatic music* (More of my thoughts on this will follow soon)
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