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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3787 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is Hubski An Echo Chamber?

I almost commented in that thread about the validity of the test as a whole, but decided against it.

The problem with that test is that it is extremely loaded. On top of that, all political quizzes are for multiple reasons.

The person writing the quiz is going to be biased, and the questions will be loaded whether they intend to or not.

If you have multiple people writing a quiz like that, it will end in compromise. Person A gets to load question 1 the way he wants, person B gets to load question 2 the way he wants.

Another problem is with the design. Even a 4 point agree/disagree scale is not enough for some of these questions, for instance:

    If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.

This is trying to get you to "pick a side" on whether you think corporations are evil or good. That's a misnomer, as are most political questions in public debate. When evaluating corporations, you have to do it on a case-by-case basis, not "all corporations are good" or "all corporations are evil".

    I'd always support my country, whether it was right or wrong.

It all depends! I can't say "agree" or "disagree" here either! It all depends on the details of what my country is doing.

My biggest flaw in the system is that the four corner political quizzes are misleading. By preying on your knowledge that "left" and "right" are simply not good enough, they create a four corner strategy to show you that they are "more valid" than other political evaluations. If you look at it, there are exactly 441 possible outcomes (21x21 grid). On a planet with 7 billion people, there should be 7 billion outcomes since no human is ever going to 100% agree with each other on all topics.

So how do you design a fair political quiz? The answer isn't how we do such a thing, the answer is we simply cannot. Politics cannot be boiled down to simple quizzes like this. If you think they can, then maybe you're a Chandler and the drink that most represents you is an appletini.