Saturday, January 11, 2014

Ave, Malcolm!

My e-friend Malcolm Pollack lays out a "salmagundi" of links in a recent post. One of those links is to a political-orientation survey/quiz by Time Magazine titled "Can Time Predict Your Politics?" The article cheerfully states:

Social scientists find many questions about values and lifestyle that have no obvious connection to politics can be used to predict a person’s ideology. Even a decision as trivial as which browser you’re using to read this article is imbued with clues about your personality. Are you on a Mac or PC? Did you use the default program that came with the computer or install a new one? [NB: Neither of these questions actually appears on the quiz!]

In the following interactive, we put together 12 questions that have a statistical correlation to a person’s political leanings, even if the questions themselves are seemingly apolitical. At the end of this (completely anonymous) quiz, we’ll use your responses to guess your politics.

Malcolm, unsurprisingly, took the survey and came out 85% conservative. So how did I do? I've taken the Political Compass many a time (see here, and scroll down, for results over the years, betraying a slow rightward crawl); it's a much longer, much more detailed questionnaire which, to my mind, makes its results a bit more trustworthy. That said, I like Time's quiz, too, because it's so compact. My results? About what I expected, which makes me think Time's quiz is, along with being compact, also fairly reliable (click image to enlarge; hover cursor over un-clicked image to see caption):


So: about 60/40 in favor of a rightward tilt. Centrist, I'd say. Unfortunately, the results that you see above don't include a restatement of the strength of my convictions. When you take the survey, you see that you're supposed to "slightly (dis)agree" or "strongly (dis)agree." No middle-ground responses are allowed. When my preferences were shuffled into the two columns, "Liberal Qualities" and "Conservative Qualities," I was no longer able to see how strongly I exhibited the qualities in question. I think there were only two questions for which I answered "strongly agree"; one of them was something like, "Are you proud of your country's history?" To the chagrin of most liberals, my answer was "Hell, yes!"

Does this mean that I think my country has been perfectly angelic on the world stage? Of course not. We carry our measure of shame, and we still make plenty of mistakes. But I wouldn't trade my American birthright for anything: I know I've had it good, and I'm deeply thankful. (That's why I can't understand someone like Noam Chomsky who, despite his vehement hatred for so much that's American, doesn't pack up and move to North Korea or Cuba... but then again, I can guess why that old hypocrite doesn't budge: he, too, knows he's got it good in the ol' U.S. of A. In the end, his love of material comfort and the side-benefits of freedom of speech trump his avowed principles. He'll never have the guts to become another Alejandro Cao. Cao is an asshole who deserves to be shot, but he at least has the courage of his convictions. Chomsky is just an old coward.)

Perhaps it's time to take the Political Compass survey again...




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9 comments:

John said...

Ha! I'm only slightly more conservative than you (68%).

Kevin Kim said...

Which now makes me question the survey's reliability. I'd have thought you'd be somewhere in the 80s.

John said...

Well, the problem with these surveys I think is how you define what being "conservative" means. I am a fiscal conservative who believes people should keep what they rightfully earn and who sees government as the problem, not the solution. But in some circles that makes me a racist, homophobic, misogynist, Bible-thumping bastard. And of course I'm none of those things, with possible exception of bastard.

I guess if I were going to label the type of conservative I am (and I expect you are as well) the best term I can think of is "sane".

Charles said...

Hmm. I end up being 71% liberal. I thought I would be more toward the center. The interesting thing was that I ended up with more conservative qualities (7/12), but I guess I felt a lot more strongly about the liberal qualities.

I was a little confused about your explanation of the question on being proud of your country's history. You said that you wouldn't trade your American birthright for anything. I'm with you there, but what does that have to do with being proud of our country's history? Did I misunderstand the question? I answered "slightly agree" to that one because I'm not ashamed of U.S. history--but I also don't really see the point in being proud of something I had nothing to do with. The fact that I was born an American is an accident of fate--a happy accident, for sure, but an accident nonetheless. I suspect that I may be interpreting this question in a very different way from the one intended; it just seems a bit weird to me.

Also, the question on how the government should treat the lives of citizens of other countries struck me as highly political, despite the statement that the questions were "seemingly apolitical." Same goes for the question on nations and borders.

Kevin Kim said...

Charles,

"I was a little confused about your explanation of the question on being proud of your country's history. You said that you wouldn't trade your American birthright for anything. I'm with you there, but what does that have to do with being proud of our country's history? Did I misunderstand the question? [...] I'm not ashamed of U.S. history--but I also don't really see the point in being proud of something I had nothing to do with. The fact that I was born an American is an accident of fate--a happy accident, for sure, but an accident nonetheless."

I guess I thought that what I had written was obvious. If I were ashamed of my country's history, it's likely I'd wish I were from a different country, so I'd harbor a desire to trade my heritage for another. In saying that "I wouldn't trade my American birthright for anything," I was only affirming that I felt no need to belong anywhere else. I didn't intend anything deep or convoluted.

As for not being proud about an accident of fate—yes, I've heard George Carlin's take on that matter, in the last performance he gave before he died. It makes a certain logical sense, I suppose, but then again, it's also an accident of fate that you were born into the family you have, and I'm sure you'd say you were proud of your family members, despite not having "earned" a place among them. You can be proud of your family, although you sit at the tail end of its history. This pride isn't necessarily a pride related to achievement; it's more a pride that springs from a sense of belonging.

My thought, anyway.

I agree about the political nature of some of the questions and, truth be told, I felt most of the other questions were transparently political, too. Such as the one about porn and your significant other. And messy desks.

Kevin Kim said...

Another remark: Malcolm's exceedingly liberal friend Peter (a.k.a. "the one-eyed man"), a frequent commenter and naysayer at Malcolm's blog, scored 85% conservative on the survey, thus calling the survey very much into question as a predictor of political orientation. I'd be curious to know how he answered all the questions. One of the few things he mentioned was that he, like me, was proud of his country's history.

Charles said...

"This pride isn't necessarily a pride related to achievement; it's more a pride that springs from a sense of belonging."

Ah, I see. And I get that. But I still think it is a rather tricky thing linguistically. By this I mean how we use the term "proud." As I was thinking about your comment, I decided to go to dictionary.com to look up the definition of proud. This was the first definition:

"feeling pleasure or satisfaction over something regarded as highly honorable or creditable to oneself."

There are a total of ten definitions there, and the first four directly reference the perceiving self ("one's self," "one's own," "self-esteem"). Couple this with the idea of "pride of belonging," and I suppose what we can take away from this is that people draw a large part of their sense of self from the groups they belong to. OK, I can buy that.

Hmm. There's more that could be said about this, but I need to mull it over a bit. This needs to stew a little more before it's ready for serving.

I'll stop clogging up the comments now.

Kevin Kim said...

No cloggery at all. The word "pride" and the phrase "proud of" have multiple meanings. We could talk, for example, about "an artist's pride in his work" versus a person burdened by "the sin of pride." The first type of pride is about holding oneself to high, rigorous standards and is, in my opinion, a very healthy type of pride. The second, however, is more a synonym for arrogance, i.e., thinking oneself to be better than others or above them in station. The first pride is rooted in conscience; the second is rooted in ego.

So yes, there are different shades of meaning when it comes to pride. It's worth discussing.

The Maximum Leader said...

For what it is worth, I scored 68% conservative. I have seen a test like this elsewhere, and sadly I cannot recall where. As a general indicator it may have some relevance; but as a serious tool for assessing one's political outlook it isn't much.