assess your global beliefs

October 29, 2003 11:03 AM

American Choices is a pretty cool new site that guides you through a series of questions aimed at telling you where you stand in terms of foreign policy philosophy. It reminds me a lot of the Selectsmart presidental voting thing that matches you up with a candidate.
posted by mathowie (21 comments total)

got to the homepage once then everything fell apart.
posted by poopy at 11:07 AM on October 29, 2003

Crap, it was working fine for me earlier.
posted by mathowie at 11:15 AM on October 29, 2003

Man we're powerful.

; )
posted by silusGROK at 11:28 AM on October 29, 2003

it's been mathowied
posted by machaus at 11:29 AM on October 29, 2003

Just FYI, when I attempted to visit this site, all three times my browser hung, my disk drive started threshing, and I experienced my first Windows XP-based BSODs. Stop that, mathowie!

But then my ideal candidate for president is apparently a blank web page, so who knows. WTF, mate? ^^
posted by WolfDaddy at 11:40 AM on October 29, 2003

More details/options on the Selectsmart site would have been nice, but for what it is, I like it. I got a 96% match w/the candidate I prefer, so it's accurate in my experience. Anyone else have similar findings?
posted by widdershins at 11:41 AM on October 29, 2003

The American Choices site works now, here's what I just got:

Primary: Human Rights
Secondary: Diplomacy, Global Markets, Cooperation

Makes me sound like a complete globalization pansy, but I answered most divisive questions with a "I barely agree with this choice over the other"
posted by mathowie at 11:53 AM on October 29, 2003

Interesting quiz... some hard choices there.

Fantasy World Order is another foreign policy-type quiz that's been around for a while, which I also enjoyed.
posted by plep at 11:57 AM on October 29, 2003

FWO seems a bit simplistic, some of the questions seem to assume I have one position just becuase I disagree with something else. Thinks I'm a protestor, which is odd as I tend to think they are a bunch of simple minded pillocks.
posted by biffa at 12:04 PM on October 29, 2003

biffa :- I definitely think Fantasy World Order is probably left-leaning (most of the respondents are categorised as 'protesters') , but then again most of these sites contain axiomatic biases of some kind in the way the questions are worded. For me, this is something which can make such sites interesting because the wording of such questions illuminates the underlying positions in asking them.

Maybe it's a bit simplistic; that's probably inevitable because these are complex issues and each situation is different; what they are trying to draw out is broad philosophies, rather than going into specifics.
posted by plep at 12:22 PM on October 29, 2003

Okay, I might have spoken too soon about the accuracy of the Selectsmart site. My boss just took it and got a 100% match with Bush (...) and an 87% match w/Kucinich. I, on the other hand, got a 19% match w/Bush and a tied 96% match w/Kucinich. He also got only a 10% match w/someone he would otherwise have picked as his closest match. I know he answered all the questions. How is that possible?
posted by widdershins at 12:32 PM on October 29, 2003

widdershins: It's just not a very good quiz. It consistently tells me that I'm a green, even after I give several direcltly-opposing answers.

Someone needs to go and fix their principal-components, or whatever engine lurks behind it.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:20 PM on October 29, 2003

Your Foreign Policy Priorities:

Primary: Global Markets
Secondary: Military, Human Rights, Cooperation

I'm a militant capitalist. Who knew?
posted by jengod at 1:52 PM on October 29, 2003

Another day, another mathow... hey, waitaminit!
posted by soyjoy at 2:40 PM on October 29, 2003

American choices is highly annoying. It gives you two options out of a much larger number of possibilities, and they're nowhere near being opposite.

Do you want to

Punch all foreign dignitaries in the face or Make fun of german chancellor Gerhard Schröder's mother?
posted by fvw at 3:02 PM on October 29, 2003

Primary: Cooperation
Secondary: Diplomacy, Human Rights, Protections

How very Canadian of me.
posted by Salmonberry at 6:27 PM on October 29, 2003

Your Foreign Policy Priorities:

Primary: National Interest
Secondary: Diplomacy, Sovereignty, Global Markets

I had no idea I was from Quebec. I will have to ask mom and dad about this new development!
posted by shepd at 6:45 PM on October 29, 2003

Primary: Diplomacy
Secondary: Global Markets, Cooperation

Canadian over here, too. But I agree with others up top: this was not the best quiz for this kind of stuff, with nowhere near enough options to the questions.
posted by ashbury at 6:59 PM on October 29, 2003

They're not supposed to be opposites, fvw; they're just trying to find out what your priorities are. That's why the same statements keep coming up in different combinations.
posted by Mars Saxman at 7:45 PM on October 29, 2003

Primary: National Interest
Secondary: Diplomacy

I have often thought of myself as the kind of American who would have agreed with Woodrow Wilson's isolationist policy before the U.S. became engaged in World War I. Fat lot of good it would have done me, since we became involved in that and all the other wars since. (*Heaves a sigh*)
posted by Lynsey at 8:54 PM on October 29, 2003

I got two primaries and two secondaries on my results page; I'm not going to quibble with its assessment of my views. I got the impression that the last question asked was an attempt to have me fall on one side or the other on a sliding scale. All four scales shown were so close to the middle that I might have been another person entirely...simply by answering four questions differently.

So, um. I guess what I'm saying is that political views can change. Not just mine. Really, more might be accomplished by assessing the quizzed's underlying ethical priorities. But who wants to hear that 'You are a cynical, lying snake who believes that everyone is generally evil because you fear the ugly truth about yourself'?

I sure do.
posted by attackthetaxi at 1:40 AM on October 30, 2003