Potato I have

I took this survey a few years ago, but don’t find my score at the moment (it was pre-blog). Taking it again I don’t think there is much of a change from that one, but I sure wish I had scores from my teens/20s/30s.

Today it is:

• Economic Left/Right: -4.88
• Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33

There are a graph and a rough “scatter table” of bloggers’ links on this Tim Lambert page, from late 2003; there is heavy clustering in the same lower-left quadrant where I find myself, but who knows what that means, the sample is anything but random. There is also some discussion of whether the survey is accurate/useful/etc.

Here is a self-described “better political compass;” those scores are not directly comparable, though I was much more centrist here (numbers in parenthesis are -1/1 normalized):

• left/right: -2.8628 (-0.1723)
• idealism/pragmatism: +0.8226 (+0.0495)

Both of these surveys were like almost every survey I take, in that I get caught up in trying to understand what the question is “really” asking, everything seems to depend on some definition or other, and I wonder how the heck these things can really account for all my mental jumping around. Though strangely, page six on the first survey was very black-and-white for me: I clicked right through those without hesitation, thankful for something simple.