After looking through the JS code that power the survey, a thought occurred to me and I thought it warranted consideration from the admin and the other contributors on here. As a formality, JavaScript code is usually placed in its own separate file, and just linked to in the HTML file. This is supposed to make it easy to deal with each part separately when working with the code. Now obviously this doesn't need to be done with all of the JS code, specifically the JS code I added in Pull Request #43 for the front page (index) that is literally just one line. However, the code for the quiz and results pages might be better served with each being in their own separate file.

I would be happy to do this as PR #43 is still open and it would fit nicely in with the theme of improving the HTML code, but I wanted to know the thoughts of the admin and the other contributors before I proceeded. I do honestly believe the JS code for the quiz and results should be in its own separate file, but I'll leave that choice up to y'all.

The points for "Gun ownership should be prohibited for those without a valid reason." should add liberty instead of oppression. And I don't know why it adds militarism.

Playing around with the data (and the ideology values), in order to get Deleonism, I have to answer a lot of questions that'd seem at odds with general syndicalist views.

   {
      "question": "The very existence of the state is a threat to our liberty.",
      "effect": {
         "econ": 0,
         "dipl": 0,
         "govt": 10,
         "scty": 0
      }
   }

Given that DeLeonism is 100/30/30/80, and DeLeonists are essentially syndicalists, and probably a lot closer to say, Anarcho-Syndicalists (at 80/50/100/80) than Lenonism (100/40/20/70)....

DeLeonism's only real influence in the state isn't perpetuating existence of it, but in the deconstruction of it as a means to the end (which is where it differs from most anarchist types). But given the question suite at hand, it's much more difficult to grok that kind of nuance of what the purpose of the state is and more importantly differentiation between the state & union power, but to do that on 4 axes would be a bit more tricky.

DeLeonism is analogous to anarchist syndicalist tendancies only from a marxist perspective vs an anarchsit background, and all of those are relatively similar to left communism/socialism. I think it's a good distinction to have, but the amount of nuance & granularity you can get with the system in place necessarily allows the distinctions in place. Some of these based on the ideology numbers are better off grouped together & displayed that way (as a narrow, similar range).

Given a little bit of time, I might be able to do some combinatorial stuff to put together the possible questions in order to get to individual ideologies & could take a look if any of the combinations make sense. I was trying, to get Religious Anarchism, and in order to get that, you had to accede to significant number of state questions to drop the govt score to 0. And I think it's interesting that Religious Socialism isn't dovish (higher on the dipl scale), and it's harder when things are tied together like

{
      "question": "It is important that we work as a united world to combat climate change.",
      "effect": {
         "econ": 0,
         "dipl": 10,
         "govt": 0,
         "scty": 10
      }
   },

Where dipl & scty are tied together (I support the EU, Fascism, Absolute equality), it becomes markedly difficult for one to actually get the values required while maintaining reasonable applications of the question from the position given.

I've done it about 20-30 times and the ones I can get based on reasonable application of the questions are the Left-Lib ones, social democracy, progressivism, RW Populism, Liberalism, Moderate Conservativism, Reactionary, Capitalist Fascism, AnCap.

I had to bend the rules a bit to get Libertarianism & Moderate Conservatism (and it takes a while to do those because I have to keep a calculator because I haven't forked the source yet which I probably shoulda done first).

Anyway. Thanks for all the hard work on this, this ain't easy.

It would be great if there was an undo button. I mean if I make a mistake I have to repeat all the questions, that's a huge pain in the ass :D

as mentioned in #8 , it would be nice to have a bit of context around the quiz: a bit more about yourself, motivations, inspiration, how you came up with the questions etc. as well as a link to this repo

Humans actually SUCK at deciding what they agree with (even when the claim they do), agreement seems like just a function derived from intuitive likelihood/probability assessments.

We actually lack anything numerical which has a relationship to real-life processes which maps to "agreement phrases", but we do have something like that for likelihood/probability:

http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/wp-content/uploads/v32n5p167-168.pdf

https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/55739/kesselman_thesis_final.pdf

(Note however that actually, Kesselman didn't exactly distinguish between likelihood and probability, although one definitely should:

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/2641/what-is-the-difference-between-likelihood-and-probability

However, that seems not so bad.)

As an example, a statement like:

"Oppression by corporations is more of a concern than oppression by governments."

Becomes, for example:

"How likely does it seem that oppression by corporations posses more of a concern than oppression by governments?"

Note: Rephrasing the question like that seems to immediately reveal various problems with the original question! So, It'd probably end up better to split up the question into many more, for example:

"How likely does oppression by corporations seem?"
"How likely does oppression by governments seem?"
"How likely would oppression by corporations affect you?"
"How likely would oppression by government affect you?"

Bonus: If you do it that way, you unmask the link between socio-economic status and political orientation...

Some of these questions just don't seem necessary and are a bad way of scoring people's values. The ones like "Communism/Capitalism/etc aren't as bad as people think" come to mind here. You're basically trying to score people's values based on what they think other people think. I've had a hard time answering this trying to come up with which "other people" is best to refer to in each case.
It also assumes people really understand these ideologies and what they stand for, which I think goes against the whole point of these quizzes which is to reveal what people's actual values are without the baggage of words that rile people up like "communism" and "capitalism".

Other issue: The question about terrorism, "Terrorism is a major threat, and some civil liberties must be sacrificed to prevent it," could be quite difficult to answer for the average person. Sure, logically it makes sense that if you disagree with the precedent and antecedent, you disagree with the whole thing (because of the and), but you should avoid assuming people understand that. A lot of people may think "well I do think terrorism is a major threat, but I'm not so down with surveillance, so I'm not sure how to answer this".
Possible suggestion: leave out the major threat part, something like "The sacrifice of some civil liberties is necessary to protect us from acts of terrorism".

Because to me the issue is that I do not think wars can be justified at all. So I cannot agree or disagree with this.

Great work your doing, but at this point it still got quite a bit to go for an encompassing test, say for example the UNAbomber wouldn't have his political views correctly(he's an Anarcho-primitivism)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies might help

I don't know if it's okey to create pull requests directly to this repo as it seems like there is no i18n support for this project. So I forked and translated a Chinese Simplified version of 8Values here (LimiQS/LimiQS.github.io). If you think that the translation may be helpful to the project, please feel free to use it. The translation is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 International.
Translation for images is WIP.
Translated by LimiQS.

Hi, currently one of the questions says 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' I believe that 'their' or 'his/her' is a better way of saying it. Another option is to skip the pronoun altogether: 'From each according to the ability, to each according to the need.'

The opposition to one side of the axis does not mean support of the other side.
For example, on the Nation/World axis, the opposition to the current international bureaucracy does not mean pro-nationalism.
On the Equality/Market axis, a sentiment against the power of market self-regulation should not be counted as pro-social.

It would be good to have internationalization so non-English speakers could take the test.

I could work in adapting the repository for it; and if the maintainers have a preferred strategy to achieve it, I would follow.

The question is problematic because single-payer is a type of universal healthcare, but not all universal healthcare systems are single-payer. See: every UH country in europe.

On the canvas image thing, some ideology names are long enough to clip into the "8values" title.

This needs an additional question asking whether or not I believe in taxing institutions separately from individuals.

Ideology mapping is currently very rough, and currently works by comparing a person's results to a list of ideologies with programmed values. This isn't really a great approach, and I plan to implement a more robust system where ideologies will be programmed by defining value "ranges" for which that ideology can be mapped.

It would be nice to have a handle on the dataset, and see how each of the results compare along where you live, study, education level, etc. A friend and I would gladly submit a code with statistical analysis to work on something along these lines. So, is it feasible to add an option to download the latest dataset?

The bottom image at the end cannot be long-clicked to download, and there is no specific button for it either. Tested in Chrome for Android and MIUI Browser.

I believe in wealth taxation, so I don't want to increase taxation (as a percentage anyway) but I also believe that money should be removed in larger amounts from the rich for the poor. The question should be rephrased to something like "More money should be taken from the rich to provide for the poor". Unless the writer means that the amount paid should be increased, rather than the percentage, in which case in needs more clarification such as "The percentage of tax paid should be increased on the rich to provide for the poor" coupled with an additional question: "The total amount of tax paid should be increased on the rich to provide for the poor".

I figured it might make sense to have an issue that collects all known value axis used by other models, to offer something to reflect against for further improvements.

For example, http://www.abtirsi.com/quiz2.php uses 5 value axes. which I'll quote here:

• Collectivism
• Authoritarianism
• Internationalism
• Tribalism
• Liberalism

Explanation key:

• Collectivism refers economic intervention, whether the society or state should intervene in the economy to redistribute wealth from the more to the less successful. The negative percentages indicate opposition to such intervention.

• Authoritarianism refers to state power to control the actions of individuals to prevent them from harming others or themselves, and also to establish the will of the majority over society. Negative percentages indicate opposition to state power.

• Internationalism refers to political involvement in other nations or global affairs, either via war, treaty or international organizations. Negative percentages indicate isolationist beliefs, and the belief in national sovereignty.

• Tribalism refers to identity or nationalism, favoring your own nation over foreigners. Negative percentages indicate opposition to national or ethnic identity and oriented towards pan-humanism.

• Liberalism refers to acceptance of historically illegal or immoral social practices or customs. Negative percentages indicate opposition to such acceptance.

It would be nice if it was easier to send scores via Twitter, Facebook, BBCode, or other similar mechanisms, for instance with share buttons. This would probably require changing how the image is generated, though.

It would be cool if one could see or in the best case compare test results as radar plots.(Wikipedia). There are already nice libraries for stuff like this(Example).

The question is:

All people - regardless of factors like culture or sexuality - should be treated equally.

Culture, unlike sexuality or race, is mutable. Was this question deliberately worded to conflate a mutable attribute and an immutable attribute?

Looks like an interesting survey, but I won't do open ended surveys.

Is it 10 questions, 50, 100? And how long should it take?

You may wish to inform your visitors.

The updated labels for "Markets", "Nation", and "World" in values.svg seem to be using a different font from the other labels, or not have a font set entirely.

The points for "The means of production should belong to the workers who use them." in questions.js are like for capitalism instead of socialism/communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_fist

"The salute dates back to ancient Assyria as a symbol of resistance in the face of violence"

Perhaps an Eagle (used by many autocracies and fascist governments) would be a better solution?

I believe those two could be separated as Inheritance and Capital Gains can be completely different subjects to some Social Libertarians, also some circles argument that Inheritance is anti-free-market/meritocracy, whilst Capital Gains are pro-free-market/meritocracy. Maybe this question could be only about Capital Gains?

https://github.com/8values/8values.github.io/blob/master/questions.js#L231

This seems to be an error, because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for international cooperation on research to decrease one's final "World" score. If there is a good reason for this, or an artifact of a previous iteration, it might be a good idea to reword this question.

I got "libertarian communist", but the first two letters of "libertarian" overlap with the "8values" header:

Tried in Safari on an iPad running iOS 11 beta 4.

It would be interesting to compare the results with the results from other persons for example as a radar plot. #59.
Also It would be cool to have an comparison possibility for preset historical figures, parties or ideologies.

What is Stalinism-Maoism? I have never heard this, and some comrades of mine were also really confused by seeing that in the ideology list. The only *-Maoism I have heard of is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM) which is pretty common.

The might/peace axis really measures nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, and the axis should be changed to reflect this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_socialism

Just because I'm a socialist doesn't mean I'm a leftist. Just the fact that I answered the fascism question with "Agree" and it told me I'm a leftist is ridiculous.

Communism is a form of socialism. Libertarian communism and anarcho-communism are exactly the same thing. Also, anarcho-communism is pretty much impossible to get. It seems apparent to me that you have no idea what these terms mean.

And there are a few statist-biased questions, which make anarchists more right wing or more authoritarian.

Hi,
As a Georgist/geo-libertarian, I'm happy to see a multi-dimensional political spectrum, since I've always thought that the 2-dimensional "political compass" was way too simple.

However... 8values also seems incapable of capturing the scale on which Georgism operates - judging from the questions.

An example would be:
"Public utilities like roads and electricity should be publicly owned."

A Georgist would argue that roads are completely different than "electricity" (I suppose we are talking about the energy - not the distribution network).
A road is a monopoly on a natural opportunity. Producing energy is not. Some specific resources needed for electricity production might be - but not the electricity it self.

The question makes little sense to a Georgist.

I don't understand why question 1 doesn't impact the civil axis along with the economic axis, at least the way it's presently worded. It seems to indicate a dichotomy between oppression by corporations and oppression by governments, so shouldn't the "oppression by governments is worse" answer (i.e. disagree or strongly disagree) be correlated with a more liberty oriented value?

Also, this is perhaps more of a philosophical suggestion, but I think there should be more questions that impact two or more axes, especially in ways that run counter to the traditional left-right axis. A lot of the time, solutions in politics aren't so clear cut as to only have one effect (the EU question is a good example of this; automation yields progress but can exasperate income disparities between education levels by driving down the demand for low skilled workers, ect). Stuff like that I feel would yield more realistic results, because in real politics, when I side with a policy I support on one axis but oppose on another axis, it inherently decreases the totality of support I have for the second axis, since I'm willing to compromise it.

There's a few other terms for it due to the fact there's a naming conflict between the AltRight and AltLite, but "National Capitalism" is still generally associated to anything that passes as Capitalist Fascism on this quiz (although you'll need to do "National Capitalism (ethnic/AltRight)" and "(civic/AltLite)" or something like that for v2).

Question 56 reads "Same-sex marriage should be legal." This inadequately represents those who oppose the adoption of same-sex marriage as such, since most do not believe that it should be illegal, but rather that the terms "same-sex" and "marriage" are a contradiction in terms.

The question should read "Same-sex marriage should be legally recognized."

At the moment, statement 33 ("A strongly hierarchical state is most efficient.") is a bit vague if I understand it correctly.

One could agree that a state would be most efficient when organized in a hierarchical manner, but also believe that efficiency is not the most important thing to strive for in society.

One possible way to rephrase it would be something along the lines of "A strongly hierarchical state is desirable", or "most efficient and therefore desirable" if you want it to be really verbose.

I was looking through the list of possible political ideologies that can be received by taking the test, and I noticed there was no listing for Objectivism. While it's not completely unsimilar to Libertarian Capitalist, or something like Anarcho-Egoism, Anarcho-Capitalism, or Market Anarchism, it definitely is different from these specific categories. It would be cool to see a specific option show up for Objectivist in the test. If you don't like, or don't want to use the term "Objectivist", then you could also call it "Rational Egoism", as that term represents the same philosophy as does the term Objectivist.

I can provide more information if necessary, but I can give a sorta easy way to think of it. If Libertarianism is an umbrella term, then Objectivism is a specific kind of Libertarianism, although most Objectivist reject this idea simply because of the implication of being conflated with Libertarians.

There are many questions where many people would answer "It depends", because the answer to each question might be dependent on each person's situation.

I noticed that on the front page of the test, there is no link back to the main GitHub page for the project. This means the only way to find the GitHub page from the test itself is to go and search GitHub to find it. Not overly hard, but somewhat inconvenient. All that needs to be added is a simple hyperlink back to the GitHub page somewhere near the bottom of the page.

I'd be happy to add it to save y'all the trouble if you'd like me to. :)

"Libertarian" seems like a weird descriptor to use because all communism is libertarian.

Attaching an MIT license would be great so that this can be safely used by others.

I am a supporter of markets, over equality.

However, I passionatly believe that the neoliberal way of doing things, with trickle down economics and balancing the budgets, Is anti-market. I think there are market crashes every 8 or 9 years because of this, and this hurts the markets as well as anyone else.

So, when I see questions like 'Balance the books, over social inclusion', well, Balancing the books will, eventually cause depression. It has to... there is no other way, which means business collapse, unemployment, etc etc. How can I support this as an Economic positive?

Serializing the answers into a base64 blob would permit optionally adding them to the URL so your friends could take the quiz and see which questions they differed from you on. Not sure what the best UI would be, but the first step would be permitting granular export rather than just the final tally.

Question 6 is a loaded question. Agreeing is pro internationalism, while also being pro trade, while disagreeing is not only nationalistic, it's also anti trade. One can be pro internationalism but anti trade.

Question 16 don't leave room for being against the UN without also being against internationalism.

Same goes for question 18, the centralized transnationalistic governments such as the EU - being against that don't mean you are against internationalism nor diplomacy.

How can question 20 on a world government (ultimate centralization) not be scoring any points in 'government', but it scores in diplomacy? - One can wholeheartedly be against a one-world-government without being against diplomacy...