IMPORTANT: If you came here because I emailed you about this meme, you should know that I’ve modified it. I was pretty psyched about the idea, but a friend of mine convinced me that it could backfire in its original form. Specifically:

"Originally, I was going to do the IPIP-NEO/Political Compass Meme. Ales Rarus passed it along as a fun idea. I think the originator of the meme was well-intentioned. But as I typed in my IPIP-NEO results, I became concerned. The IPIP-NEO is a psychological inventory test. I don’t know it’s validity. I’m not going to bother to look up it’s validity because whether it’s valid or not, I don’t want someone having access to ‘my’ results."

"Do I want a prospective employer Googling those results? If they’re not accurate, they could cost me a job. If they are accurate, I want that prospective employer to justify his need for them and then leave the decision to me. Putting them on the net is a bad idea, at least for me. I suspect it’s a universally bad idea."

I’m indebted to my friend for pointing this out. Rather than bag the whole thing, however, I’ve deleted my sub-section scores and only left the main section scores (I’ve left the political coordinates, though.). Perhaps the research possiblities for the meme are reduced that way, but people, including me, ought to feel safer. Without further ado, here’s the slightly modified IPIP-NEO/Political Compass Meme.

This is a cool meme that I think is worth passing on.

"The idea of a Go-meme (which I owe to Nova Spivack) is that it involves a ‘track list’ at the end of the post, rather like an extended hat-tip, with links to those who passed on the meme ‘upstream’ of you. This allows us to track the meme’s propagation through blog-space: just search google for your GUID (global unique identifier – it should be a short string that currently yields no results in a google search) to find all those who subsequently picked up the meme ‘downstream’ from you. It also provides an incentive to join the meme, so as to receive all those bonus links."

"To enhance the information value of the [IPIP-NEO personality test] data that this meme produces, I’ve added a few demographic questions, plus the two dimensions assessed by the Political Compass quiz. I think it would be especially interesting to learn if there are any correlations between particular personality traits and political or religious positions." [emphasis mine]

On a side note, If you decide to take the Political Compass quiz, please leave a comment with your score. I’d like graph the political leanings of my readers. If that turns out as well as I hope, I’ll post the results and hopefully other bloggers will inspired to do likewise. You also might wish to submit your coordinates to the Blogosphere Political Compass Project.

The Blogosphere Political Compass Project is graphing the approximate political affiliation of bloggers from all corners of the Internet. The chart below shows the relative positions of the bloggers who have responded thus far; graphing is done two-dimensionally in order to show both economic (liberal vs. conservative) and social (authoritarian vs. libertarian) leanings.

I’ve added Chris Lightfoot’s improvement upon the Political Compass quiz (on which I scored left/right: -2.568 and pragmatism/idealism: -5.2243) to the meme. If you give me a score for that test, I’ll map it as well.

OK. Enough hype.

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