Introducing the Lee Ideology Sorter
Like the Kiersey Temperament Sorter, only calibrated to ideology rather than temperament, and devised by Yours Truly. This is a very rough, very early draft. Some of the subjects about which I ask are somewhat abstract. Links are provided which hopefully explicate some of the more technical concepts. Oh, and scoring has not yet been implemented 🙂 For now, I’m seeking suggestions as to questions to ask, and suggestions as to how they might be scored. Appropriate questions are those questions that lend themselves to agree/disagree responses on a sliding scale, and which do not engage in package-dealing, or implying that two ideas are equivalent (further explanation, with examples). Questions should also be free of value judgments; avoiding words with strong positive or negative connotations, etc. Kudos to and kind words for Clarissa for helping me find a round tuit for this project.
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Name:
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| Strongly disagree |
Disagree somewhat |
Neutral, or no opinion |
Agree somewhat |
Strongly agree |
|
| Section 1: Beliefs about Human Nature | |||||
| Left to their own devices, human beings will slaughter each other. | |||||
| Self interest is an inherent feature of human nature. | |||||
| Self interest could be realized against others’ freedom. | |||||
| There are no inherent features of human nature, i.e. there are as many types of human nature as there are humans. | |||||
| Territorialism is a component of human nature. | |||||
| Section 2: Beliefs about Power | |||||
| There is more Power in government than there is in business. | |||||
| That which is not 100% coerced is 100% voluntary, and vice versa, i.e. there is no in-between—every action is one or the other. | |||||
| Human social groups are inherently hierarchical. | |||||
| Section 3: Beliefs about Authority | |||||
| Authority is the ultimately the last line of defense against Power. | |||||
| There is no such thing as legitimate authority. | |||||
| Legitimate authority is a matter of expertise—the bootmaker is an authority concerning boots. | |||||
| Section 4: Beliefs about Economics | |||||
| The potential wants of individuals for economic goods are limitless. | |||||
| The Economic Calculation Argument of Ludwig Von Mises is accurate. | |||||
| All economic actors (including the government) are price takers—there is no such thing as a price maker. | |||||
| All private entities are price takers. | |||||
| Economics is a human invention. | |||||
| Some parts of human experience are outside economics. | |||||
| Section 5: Sex | |||||
| There are some contexts in which fair competition between humyns of differing sexes is impossible. | |||||
| The phenomenon called biological sex imposes hard constraints on knowledge and experience. | |||||
| Section 6: Identity, nationality, social groups, etc. | |||||
| Dunbar’s number is a hard constraint on the size of consensus groups. | |||||
| The Law of Fives is correct. | |||||
| People from underprivileged minorities need to be offered advantages to compensate for their underprivileged status. | |||||
| Section 7: Religion | |||||
| Without widespread belief in the truth of some religion, life would be very unsafe. | |||||
| There are aspects of reality that are truly transcendent. | |||||
| Section 8: Human development | |||||
| Some childhood imprints are so deep as to be immutable. | |||||
| At least in the eyes of the larger society, the transition from childhood to adulthood should be instantaneous. | |||||
| It takes a village. | |||||
In defense of anagorism 
I hope there will be a section on sexual morality. Also, one on religion. It’s always good to spice things up. 🙂
Really liking the !!! after sex. 🙂
If more sections are needed to refine the search, I could suggest: social safety net / welfare, censorship, nationalism / patriotism. People often find their central ideological sore points around these issues.
Safety net seems to fall under economics, and censorship perhaps under authority, although “information” to me is a very political subject (as they say, information is Power) and might merit a heading of its own. Nationalism/patriotism seems to fit in the general category of “identity politics,” a subject about which you seem to have much to say, and hopefully can supply some questions.
For identity politics: people from underprivileged minorities need to be offered advantages to compensate for their underprivileged status.
“The Economic Calculation Argument of Ludwig Von Mises is accurate.”
My answer is “strongly agree” for criticizing statist socialism, but this argument is not applicable to socialist anarchism.
“Self interest is an inherent feature of human nature.”
My answer is “Strongly Agree”, even if I’m not a Randian egoïst. I support Stirnerian egoïsm, which is different. I suggest to keep this affirmation but add this another affirmation: “Self interest should be expressed against other’s interests.” or something better than that.
Or better is this: “Self interest should be realized against other’s freedom”
Or: “Self interest could be realized against other’s freedom”
I’m still working on this thingie. Right now I’m sort of taking a crash course in PHP. Within a few weeks I expect to take this survey live. Still undecided as to how to do scoring and reporting of results. First scripted draft will probably be to collect people’s filled-out forms (anonymously, of course) followed by some statistical analysis to identify clusters. Sort of keep it “agnostic,” ya know.
Your idea is promising.
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Naturally, visitors to AIS are disappointed that their inputs are not tallied into a “score” or something along the lines of “according to your responses, you are an X.” The good news is that I am closer to having something to offer along those lines. I finally figured out how to use the mdp.pca function which is provided by the python-mdp package, which I can use to squash the 27-dimensional plot of each user’s responses (to the 27 survey items) down to two dimensions, so any day now that feature will be added to the survey website.
Here are x and y coordinates for the first 30 survey participants:
The next step, of course, is to render this graphically. Unless I come up with something more elegant, I think I’ll be using the .text method of the ImageDraw class, once I figure that thing out. Give it a couple weeks at most, unless the shit hits the fan or something.
The same dimension-crunching analysis can be performed on the questions. This would perhaps shed some light on what it means to inhabit a particular quadrant. I find that negative numbers in both columns seem to what are conventionally thought of as conservative propositions, but I don’t see any pattern of social conservatism and economic conservatism tending negative in a particular column. Readers’ insights on what patterns, if any, are seen here, are of course appreciated in the form of comments.
Getting a handle on graphics in python. Here’s the preliminary result:
Some refinements are in order, but in any case this feature will be added to the website, probably within 2 days.