Bias in the Political Compass Test

I was taking the Political Compass Test, and I noticed something interesting… there’s no “neutral” option for answers, which is bad because some of these questions seem to be biased, particularly toward libertarianism.  What I mean is, I seem to be forced into appearing to disagree with a statement that is actually a far more complicated issue than is presented to me.  (Skip down to the bottom of this post if you want the smoking gun.)

Here are some examples of question bias:

• “Military action that defies international law is sometimes justified.”  Is the international law corrupt, or is it justified?  And what is the goal of the military action?  ”Sometimes” is a very vague concept.
• “Controlling inflation is more important than controlling unemployment.”  When?  How bad is unemployment?  How bad is inflation?  This isn’t always an either/or situation.
• “The freer the market, the freer the people.”  Does this even mean anything?  It’s like saying “fancy is as fancy does” or some other such BS.
• “All authority should be questioned.”  Asking questions doesn’t mean being anti-authority or even necessarily disagreeing with said authority.  This is far too ambiguous a statement to base a political ideology upon.
• “All people have their rights, but it is better for all of us that different sorts of people should keep to their own kind.”  Which people?  There’s a difference between expecting blacks to keep to their own kind and serial rapists to keep to their own kind, for example.
• “The most important thing for children to learn is to accept discipline.”  I don’t know of anyone who would say this is literally the most important thing a child could learn.  This question is obviously biased so as to be anti-authority (pro-libertarian) and also has nothing to do with political ideology anyway.
• “When you are troubled, it’s better not to think about it, but to keep busy with more cheerful things.”  Not even relevant!  Come on!
• “A significant advantage of a one-party state is that it avoids all the arguments that delay progress in a democratic political system.”  That may actually be a significant advantage… doesn’t mean I’d actually prefer a one-party state.  Nuance, people, nuance!
• “Abstract art that doesn’t represent anything shouldn’t be considered art at all.”  Lol wut.
• “Astrology accurately explains many things.”  I quit.

So now, the ultimate challenge: I “strongly disagreed” with literally everything on the list and ran the score.  The results were way into libertarianism, though on the line between left and right.  They did manage to balance the left/right scale, but they were not at all balanced on the libertarian/authoritarian scale (or as my friend Jay put it: “This compass definitely needs some declination adjustment”).  A well-written test will score perfectly center if the questions are all answered the same.  This test was clearly written in such a way as to make people squeemish about agreeing with the statements, thus allowing them to nudge their own score into libertarian territory.

In short, the Political Compass Test is a recruiting tool for an underdog political agenda, and is not to be taken seriously.

Communication and ADHD

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/may-i-have-your-attention/201102/i-cant-believe-i-just-said

As a person with ADHD, having conversations with single-thought people (my name for all you who only contemplate one thing at a time) can result in frustration and miscommunication, often without an obvious reason why.  My whole life has been trying to figure out why others act like I'm a bad person simply for being myself.  "You're so weird!"  "Don't you know how rude you're being?"  "Sometimes I think you do that on purpose."  Despite all that hostility, I'm still trying to figure out the secrets of so-called normal communication, and I'm getting better every year.

"But Andy!" I'm sure you're saying, "what about the secrets of ADHD communication?  I appreciate that you're trying to learn about us, but I want to learn about you too.  Don't be stingy, now."  I wouldn't dream of withholding such useful information, which is why I'm sharing this link I recently found.  It's the best summary I've ever read, and pretty much describes my experiences spot-on, but I'll go ahead and add my own notes below.

Blurting Things Out - This has nothing to do with how little I respect the person I'm talking with.  Instead, it has to do with the way my hardware runs.  I can't count how many times I was about ready to say something, tried to my tongue for a few seconds, and then completely forgot what it was I was about ready to say (and this has happened for very important issues too). As many people with ADHD are well aware, thoughts are transient things.  Any moment I'm thinking of something may well be the last, before it's lost forever to forgetfulness.  Sometimes I manage to make it to a pen and paper in time.  But often, I just say it, that way it gets out of my brain where I don't have to worry about it any longer.  You may wonder what was so important about squirrels that it couldn't wait a minute?  Well, let's just say that the fear of forgetting often overrides taking the risk to waste precious have decided that understand that yes, this cannot wait, it might be forgotten.  Also, if I'm spending time contemplating what I'm about to say, I'm diverting my attention away from what someone else is saying in a conversation, and I've just completely missed it all.  This is why I often just say what I have to say, then ask my conversational partner to continue where they left off.

Conversations that Go Everywhere - Apparently some people only think about one thing at a time.  I never saw the point.  After all, everything in life is interconnected (6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, anyone?), and drawing those diverse connections out into the open is an exciting way to learn new perspectives on familiar topics.  I you really want to focus on one particular point, let me know.  This doesn't mean I'll sit up straight and refuse to deviate (as if that were possible, ha!), but it does mean that I'll make sure to regularly touch base with that topic as we converse, especially if you bring it up again.

Monologues - If you don't like what I'm talking about, switch the topic.  I probably won't notice if you don't find my thoughts engaging.  I can't notice.  I'm about as useful for reading conversational cues as my tone-deaf father is for reading music.  The good news is, I rarely take a subject-change as a bad sign, and in fact could get excited because something new and different is now happening.

Extreme Defensiveness - I've been told I have this.  Possibly.  The author said it's because of years of being constantly criticized.  I do know I'm tired of being told I'm a bad person simply because I am neurologically different.  The best way to approach me is with the phrase "I know you may not be aware you're doing this..."

Poor Memory of Agreements or Incidents - I do my best, but I already have a long list of things I'm supposed to change about myself in order to fit in.  Your item probably got lost down at the bottom.  Just issue a gentle reminder, and I'll try to bump it up a bit.

Getting Lost in Conversations or Wildly Misunderstanding - I often get blamed as though I do this on purpose.  It helps if you use really specific examples during conversations for me to help define the topic.  In fact, tell stories, so I can form a vivid visualization of people acting out what you're trying to tell me.  Also, ask questions.  I do a lot of question-asking myself, and if they seem to be leading in the wrong direction, it's not because I'm trying to trip you up, it's because I'm trying to rule out what you're not saying to get a better grip on what you actually are saying.

There you go!  Hopefully the article and my comments help you out.  And if anyone has created a similar cheat-sheet for how single-thought people converse that is as good as this one, let me know.  I've been looking for one for over 2 decades.

Bling vs Specs

This is something I wrote for class because I'm too school for cool.

Bling (aka Large Ornate Gold Necklaces/Jewelry)
We've all seen it: the ostentatious medallion hanging around the neck of a wealthy performance artist.

       

The name was popularized by a 1999 song with the title Bling-Bling.  The term "bling" refers to the bling-bling of light reflecting off the facets of the jewelry.  This is key - it must be ornate, gaudy, a blatant display of the economic power of the wearer.  Traditionally, blacks are seen as poor and lacking in social status, so the in-your-face consumerism of bling can be seen as an empowering reaction against such negative stereotypes.  This is known as conspicuous consumption. So why consume conspicuously?  Well, let's use bling as an example.  When we think of a middle-class white adolescent wearing bling, the reaction is probably something similar to this:

I noticed that you're gangster... I'm pretty gangster myself.

  

We mock people like that, because we see them as trying to pretend to be what they're not, aka a poser.  We wouldn't do that if stuff is just stuff, clothes are just clothes, and each individual has a unique style.  Conspicuous consumption isn't just about wealth and self-expression, it's about identifying with a particular social caste or sub-culture.  As social creatures, we not only have an individual identity, we have a group identity.  We subconsciously label ourselves, even those of us who reject labels, by how we dress.  The bling-laden white boy in the West County suburbs isn't showing pride in his identity, he's engaging in an insensitive type of conspicuous consumption known as cultural appropriation.

Specs (aka Hipster Glasses)
Hipsters are a group of people who typically don't identify themselves as being a collective group of people for the simple reason that they share a common distaste for personal labels.  They're the natural result of our cultural cult of individuality taken to the extreme.  As such, they reject conspicuous consumption because that could potentially cause them to be mistaken for a member of a particular social caste (a practice which often causes them to be so rejecting of any culture close to themselves that the only option they have left is severe and shameless cultural appropriation).  And for a while, they were successful at being beautiful and unique snowflakes.

But a funny thing happens when enough people reject the concept of social castes - they become a social caste of people who share that common rejection.  This is where hipster irony is born.

 

Specs like these are nothing new, not at all.  Horn-rimmed glasses actually got their kick start in 1917 by actor Harry Lloyd.  They became rather popular in the 50s as well.  Some people never stopped wearing them.  So why do hipsters love them so?  Simple: they're ugly.  I mean, seriously.  They're so ugly, in the military they're known as BCGs - birth control glasses.  (They're the only style allowed at basic training [update: the military's policy has been changed since this paper was written].)

 

(Tasty.)  Hipsters caught on to the extreme unpopularity of these glasses and began wearing them ironically, as a rejection of conspicuous consumption.  Only, it caught on and became popular among the totally-not-at-all-affiliated-with-each-other hipsters themselves, and became a "hipster thing", to the point where it's now it's own meme.  That's right, you can take any image, add glasses, and it's instantly hipster.

I'm the biggest thing ever - I'm only being a hipster ironically.

"A hipster can be so emphatically, conspicuously hipster that he becomes a predictable caricature or stereotype so that he becomes, unwittingly, anti-hipster."  Ironic, isn't it?

A Memoir

I remember when I was about the age of 7 or 8 - yes, that young! - that I thought to myself "I don't think I should have been born a girl. It doesn't feel like me, it seems wrong. ...But boys are gross, I am definitely not a boy. I'm not a tomgirl either, because I hate sports. So I guess I'll just try to be a girl anyway." Even then, I knew the two options were both wrong. I simply had no others available.

I couldn't make friends with girls because trying to be "one of the girls" made me painfully aware of just how not one of them I really was. And I was still too girly to fit in with the guys, so I ended up being a loner. My first-grade teacher said something to my mother about it, she was so concerned, but what was she supposed to do? Really, there was nothing to be done.

A few years later, I landed the leading roll in a production of Oliver Twist as the boy Oliver. I was so happy! It didn't seem like a cross-gender role, it simply seemed like me being another facet of myself. I wanted to play more roles as a boy, but by the next year I had already grown breasts and was deemed too developed. I gave up on acting.

In middle school, I still didn't have many girl friends to speak of. I would eat lunch with a group of guys that generally accepted me, and I would be teased about all "my boyfriends". Well, they weren't my boyfriends, they were just companionship, people I could actually relate to. All the girls were off on their own table talking about girl things, whatever those things were, I couldn't relate and didn't care to. Sometimes when picking me up from school, my mom would point out how they all dressed and acted alike, and how I was different and unique. That was one of the few times I could feel proud that I was me.

In high school, I started becoming more sure that I didn't really think like a girl was supposed to think, and wasn't necessarily the straightest arrow in the quiver either. It was rather conflicting, because I was super-Christian and loved to learn as much about the Bible and theology as I could. I wrote my feelings off as being of the flesh, and thought that God could cure me of my transgender feelings and of my attractions to girls. After all, I sometimes felt girly, and I sometimes liked boys, so that made me normal, right?

But no matter what I did, it wouldn't go away. Yes, I was attracted to my husband, but sometimes I was attracted to him in a very explicitly gay way... it's difficult to explain if you haven't experienced it for yourself. Yes, I gave birth to a child, but immediately I knew something was "wrong": I had (and still have) no maternal instinct, and instead of growing a desire to nurture and interact, I grew a desire to work harder and provide for his well-being. I attempted to adopt a style of dress that was sexier and more feminine, but it felt more like playing dress-up for attention than like just embracing my own personal style; a style which, my ex husband would lament, was tragic and he had "rescued" me from it - a style that I've completely reverted to now that I'm free of his BS.

It was so obvious that I'm not really a woman that when I first got with my current boyfriend two years ago, he had doubts about whether he could really be with me, because of my gender identity. I was still of the opinion that I could live as a woman and that my non-womanly parts were just personality quirks. But the funny thing about nagging truths is that they just won't go away, no matter how hard we try to ignore them. "People won't believe me", I thought. "They'll think I'm making it up for attention." "I'll never be able to actually live life as my non-woman self, so I might as well stop trying to hog attention away from real transgender people."

Unfortunately (or perhaps very fortunately), the harder I tried to suppress my gender, the more it refused to be pushed away, until finally the nagging truth was keeping me up at night and I was a physical mess. Something had to give, and that something was my stubbornness. I finally told everyone the simple truth: I'm not a woman, I'm genderqueer, and you may not understand, but I'm willing to explain as much as you need to know.

Is it easy? No. Some people don't believe me. Some people think they can ignore me and act like I've said nothing. Some people even get angry and tell me that I know what my real gender is and I'd better start acting like it too! Except... I am acting like my real gender. And I know that I'm doing the right thing, because I'm starting to finally feel like I'm not lying to everyone anymore when I tell them that I'm a woman. I'm starting to forget what it's like to fret and worry about how to know if I'm really a woman. The cognitive dissonance has melted away and been replaced by a quiet cohesion of the self. I'm happier, I'm freer, I'm me-er!

Nerd is my Gender

What is your gender?  Man, woman, boy, girl, femme, bear, whatever?

Mine is nerd.  By that I mean, everything I’ve ever done that was nerdy fit me in a way that is beyond masculine or feminine.  I do not feel male or female.  My body doesn’t fit my gender, nor is there a body for my gender.

“Are you a girl?”  Yes, well maybe, but no, wait, that’s not really it…

“Are you a boy?”  No, it’s not it either, it’s just that…

“Well, what are you?”  I don’t know, I’m just my nerdy self.

Gender is tied in closely with sexuality, and mine is no different.  I am almost exclusively attracted to other nerds.  I am a homo-nerd, nerd-queer.

Do not expect a nerd to look or act a particular way.  This often leads people to confuse us with geeks and dorks.  What is the difference?  Nerd? Geek? or Dork?

So tell me: what is your gender?