Posted on by carl

Over 50,000 People Have Taken Version 7 of the Quiz

Have a look at the latest statistics for Version 7 of the Quiz. We are now up to over 52,000 takers! I would say that the statistics are significant, save that they are a bit biased. You can see the bias in the scatter plot:

allScatterV7_October_2014

A large fraction of my traffic these days comes from school sites. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll are a lot more appealing if you are a teenager than if you are a parent of a teenager. I think this explains most of the bias to the upper left.

Then again, it is also possible that the government is biased to the lower right compared to the population. I center the diagram on the amount of government we have today vs. any attempt at finding an average or median viewpoint. Whereas a democracy is supposed to reflect the median in theory, in practice we have Gerrymandering, a two-party system, and a funding bias towards towards incumbents — i.e., bribery.

There are more people at the upper corner than at any of the other corners because the Nolan Chart is a projection of a higher dimensional space that makes libertarianism appear a more coherent political philosophy than others. Other projections are possible. The Political Compass uses a different projection which measures how libertarian you are not at all, but does measure how much you agree with a certain hard left political philosophy.

One of these days, I’ll get around to making quizzes with different projections…

10 Replies to “Over 50,000 People Have Taken Version 7 of the Quiz”

  1. Hi Mr. Milsted.
    I was wondering. Why does your quiz consider immigration a personal issue and guns an economic issue? If I had been making it, I would have probably done it the other way around, and I’m curious as to what your reasoning was in doing the way you did.This isn’t intended as criticism, I’m just curious. Oh,and thanks for making this site and all your others. They’re very nice.
    Thanks,
    Malachi

    1. You are technically correct, which is not always the best kind of correct. I did it because the political right favors private gun ownership and the grassroots right favors restricting immigration.

      Methinks propertarians favor gun rights more than left leaners because guns are about protecting your stuff.

      But this is not a universal arrangement. Finland is pretty lefty by U.S. standards and they have strong gun rights. Robert Heinlein was all in for gun rights back when he was way to the left of Obama. (One can argue that universal gun rights are democracy in practice.)

      1. This doesn’t really have much to do with my last comment, but I also wanted to point out the existence of the American Solidarity Party. They could be put on the communitarian page. They’re pretty small, but don’t seem to be any smaller than the modern Whig party you have on some of the results pages, and seem to be the most communitarian party in America. (Please note that I do not endorse this party or their platform. I get a Right-Leaning Libertarian score when I take your test)

  2. Please re-do the scatter plots in such a way that we can see the whole distribution. Yours are too dense and just look like a flat smear. Make each point translucent, so that the highest stack of points just barely touches opacity, with the others at varying levels of brightness.

    Or just publish the raw data of all the point locations so we can plot it ourselves. This is important data for studying electoral reform.

    1. Actually, the points are translucent. Just a lot of them. I am overdo for a redo of the scatter plots. Maybe I’ll write a new script one day to do a 3-d plot using SVG. But don’t hold your breath. Busy with many other projects…

  3. For some time, Version 7 of the Quiz has not been working. Can you please take the time to fix it? The problem is that the JavaScript that calculates your results simply is not working anymore.

    1. Thank you for the heads up!

      PHP deprecated the “split” command, which broke my code. Should be fixed now.

      1. Are you planning on making a new version of Quiz 2D in preparation for the 2020 election?

        1. Had not planned on it. But come to think of it, this would be a good idea. I had begun some code for test driving various voting systems. I was going to use it as a 2016 Presidential do-over. I was wondering if Trump got elected because he gamed the system or if he was the closest thing to the most popular candidate.

          Maybe I’ll finish the code and use it with the 2020 declared candidates. (Might throw in some extra Republicans since most will not run if a sitting R is running for reelection.)

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