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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1971 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 28, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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New political compass test just dropped. Some people like taking these and I'd be curious where you guys end up.

I got Classical Liberalism w,hich is a bit surprising given how much Moldbug-posting I tend to do.

Kautskyism. Democratic socialism without revolution.

I hate these things (why are they always made by people who phrase the prompts so poorly?) but here we go.

People shouldn't be treated harshly solely because of some immutable characteristics.

Well which ones are we talking about? Eye color, or compulsion to murder?

The government should be used to incentivize people towards or away from certain actions.

Are we talking about drinking soda or about bank robbery?

Religion and culture ought to influence laws of communities and governments.

What else would do it? Is there an alternative? What is 'culture'?

Sexual deviancy is perfectly fine.

...? What defines 'sexual deviancy'?

Gender-and-sexuality-nonconforming individuals should be accepted for who they are.

Who are they?

Property is odious in its principle and murderous in its effects.

Yes, and still the best arrangement. How's this being counted?

Economic class systems are divisive.

What the hell does that mean? I think my take is "Yes and that's a good thing" but idk what they meant or how it will be counted.

The concept of society and social norms should be abolished entirely.

How would that even be possible without ending all human life? What is being asked here?

Wealth disparity of class groups is due to some individuals working harder.

Oftentimes? Other times not? What?

Okay I got "Jeffersonianism" but had to nullify like half the questions, so there you go.

I hate these things (why are they always made by people who phrase the prompts so poorly?)

Making a survey meant for the general population is the opposite of easy. We're wordcels on an argumentative wordcel forum, we have an unusually high tolerance for walls of text and complicated questions that consider counterfactuals and nuance.

For example, someone here crawled up my ass when I said that I agreed with (a statement asking if) genocide was evil, asking for a definition of evil. Some poor test writer or psychometrician really can't cover every edge case. Your best bet is to put yourself in a normie state of mind when evaluating a question, if not the answer.

Short of write-ins that are evaluated by humans, the only way to do significantly better is to use some kind of ML classifier or LLM to dig into things. Fuck it, I might see about making such a survey and grader myself. God knows that still won't stop some people from complaining about the validity of the questions, fair critiques or not.

"Modern liberalism"

Don't really understand how that one rolled out, that's certainly not how I see myself. One thing which always causes problems for me in this type of political tests is that I want both centralised government and the marketplace to have less influence than they do now in western society. What I want instead is more civil society and local communities and institutions that aren't run (directly) by a big centralised government. To be fair, the third best match which this test gave me was Distributism which is more in the ballpark of the kind of politics I want.

"Third Way Liberalism"

whatever that means!

EDIT: apparently that means I match most closely with: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Noah Smith

Fair!

Liberal conservativism.

Social Libertarianism, which feels like a weird way to say the left-most of the rightwing libertarians. My runner ups were Libertarian Distributism, Liberal Conservatism, Georgism, of which Georgism is the only one I've actually ever heard of.

I mostly consider myself a classical liberal.

I am boringly centrist and it is simply because they did not include the fun questions like 'are some races less worthy of existing' or 'would you kill' or 'is capital punishment justified'. Maybe the really heinous stuff is beyond what can be published online, but I'd really like a polcomptest to really just fucking commit.

Capitalism (reactionary liberal/neocameralist as runners up). You're welcome for food and technology, folks.

Slightly below dead center, so I'm apparently a "Modern liberalist".

As with most such tests, it is inherently flawed by failing to distinguish between absolute and relative scale in the questions as well as the questions being much too vague. A Finn like me giving this set of answers means something very different from an American giving the exact same answers, yet the test tries to match both under the same absolute banners.

I'm auth right. Checks out.

Pretty much in the center.

Closest Match: Progressivism

And that kids is the reason you should view those kinds of tests as long jokes with lame punchlines.

I got the same, which makes no sense to me. If I claimed to be anything, it'd be something like Old-school New England conservative Democrat. Which in modern political speak makes me a mutt. A "swing voter" who holds both conservative and progressive views and sees no contradiction in doing so.

Lower right, but still pretty close to the center. Prog/Con almost exactly center. The quiz calls this "Social Libertarianism".

Overall not surprising. I want a smaller government that focuses more on infrastructure and the essentials and less on social engineering and redistribution. I think most conservative traditions are positive and existed for good reason, but some lost their importance and we need to adapt them appropriately to modernity. Etc.

A "Hayekian Minarchist". Somewhere in the middle of the lower right quadrant.

Seems sensible enough. I'm not opposed to the idea of a state for the management of the commons and as a coordination mechanism, but it should be like a child, seen but not heard. The less interference with the affairs of consenting adults, the better. As you can imagine, living in the UK is torturous.

Jeffersonian and a filthy filthy centrist.

Modern Liberal, the lower left corner of the grill square. Almost perfectly balanced on the pro/con axis.

I really dislike questions framed as "X is immoral and should be made illegal", that's two very different questions in one! Maybe that's exactly what makes me a liberal.

Jeffersonian.

Some questions as usual I overthought. "Should the government be a means to an end and ultimately be abolished" can get Strong Agree from Ancaps or from Communists.

Dead center. Guess I'm an 'it depends man'.

I almost always get the exact dead center on these sorts of quizzes, and I did again here. I feel unless you go into the test saying to yourself "I want to get as [BASED/COMMUNIST] as possible!!" it is hard to get anything but centrist. Most of the statements put up for agreement are so absolutist that there is only really one reasonable response.

I think a lot depends on which arrow intensity you click on. I interpret the outermost arrows as "would I go full Unabomber/join mass protests/emigrate over this issue?", the middle ones as "would these affect my vote?" and the innermost ones as "would I defend this position on The Motte?", so I practically never click the outermost ones. Someone who has a different interpretation might click the outermost ones without a second thought.

If one builds a test broad enough to incorperate the full spectrum of political thought, then we would expect to see people tending to cluster around the middle simply due to the central limit theorem. I have seen people on Twitter around the edges for what it's worth.

Ended up with Jeffersonianism

My main beef with tests like this is that it doesn't distinguish well between things that are preferences and those that the test taker feels should be policy. For instance, on the question of traditional gender roles. I think they tend to work better and I think it's broadly good if people follow them, but I also don't think anyone has the moral ground to enforce them and that people who don't want to follow them should be allowed to (legally and socially). What would I answer? I could answer in the middle, but that would not capture my actual feeling (positive) towards the roles, and my opinion (negative) towards enforcement of them. My answer should push me more towards libertarian conservatism, not be neutral.

I am a Centrist. Which is kind of surprising to me because everywhere but here makes me feel like the I'm some weird far right fascist.

Yup, me too. My shorthand explanation is I like the policies of Bill Clinton, for the most part. Today that's most closely matched by Trump, therefore Im a fascist nazi bigot. Oh well.

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