INtpxQUISITION

[Utisz]

So i just got back from the department's summer barbecue. I'm pretty drunk, haha. I need to code the stuff. It should be doable in that I'm not that drunk or whatever, but it might not get done tonight.
Also I must answer myself before I look at anything!!

Anyways, thanks to all who responded. I hope to at least have some results tonight but it might be a few hours.

Did the whole questionnaire, realized I formatted the entire thing incorrectly five minutes after sending it.

As I mentioned, don't worry. I think there's a pattern I can follow.

I did the advanced questionnaire and then failed to have a super strong opinion about most of the questions. Yay me.

Don't worry!! I haven't looked or anything, but it'll be normalised so basically if you don't have a super strong opinion about most questions, that's the way to answer!

Done the advanced one. Some questions were funny.

Really? Which one was funniest.

So this is amazing what you've put together, and I was totally going to take the time to fill it out, but I find that so many of those questions are completely irrelevant to me in terms of how I evaluate other humans, or even care to know about other human beings.

Alternatively, if you added a "this question and its potential answers make me roll my eyes" as an option, I'd be curious to find out if anyone had responded similarly to me.

(Any questions of "morality" just make me walk the other way)

Thanks! I get you on the questions of morality. Actually I added them last to bulk up the philosophy aspect, which to be honest is not something I know/care a lot about. The thing is though I didn't want to just add questions that I liked but wanted to keep it broad if ya know what I mean. (More below.)

I guess my advice is really pick and choose like any questions you can answer if you think you can pick out more than 25 or so.

Also there's the possibility to slice and dice the data in various ways afterwards, so even if you don't give an answer (but try to answer all) that's info too: that you don't like the question.

I'm open to suggestions on ways to summarise the data by the way (so long as it doesn't have any danger of revealing individual answers).

I either eye-rolled or took objection to about a quarter of the question+answer combinations. About half the time, I found the answer options unsatisfactory, but "close enough" to render a choice for the sake of trying to fill in as many answers as reasonable truthful.

Yeah, I completely hear ya! I really fought with that somehow, like I wanted to add more answers to fill in the grey areas, but a major usability point was to keep the answers to as few as possible, particularly for the advanced version where folks have to evaluate answers. Also I had to anticipate that more answers makes the similarity algorithm a lot more complicated, like if there's 5 answers, then there's 25 possible pairs of distance to give a score to, you know? So keeping it mostly boolean was a pragmatic choice because I'm the most grey motherfucker around.

I skipped two or three questions because my answers were not represented (the free will one, for example - too complicated), but didn't find anything wrong with the questions in general.

[Madrigal]

Really? Which one was funniest.

If I tell you I might seem like a sociopath.

[Ptah]

I would like to publicly applaud this thread.

[Utisz]

@Dot, @gator, @Guess Who, @Lud, @Madrigal, @oxyjen, @Ptah, @TeresaJ, first results are in.

Spoiler: results

edit: better to see post #2 since there's already been updates.

Similarity results: given two users U1 and U2, it's the ratio of the number questions that they answered the same versus the questions that they both answered.
Preference results: given a user with prefs U1 and a user U2, 0 is the min score possible according to prefs, 1 is the max score possible according to prefs.


(Also copied into the second post.)

Just a first shot for tonight. There's a lot more could be done with the data/formatting and suggestions welcome!!

[Utisz]

Also, given that y'all are sending me potentially "intimate" answers, to keep things reciprocal, I'm happy to PM my own extended answers to anybody who already sent me answers for most/all questions in the extended version so long as they don't share them on.

So if you already did the advanced version, just let me know (PM, rep, post, whatever) if you wanna see my answers.


Also code is here (Java):

Attachment 1088

[NedLudd]

This seems like a nerd version of "fuck, marry, kill"

[Deckard]

Nice idea. I'm curious about how the scoring works. Could you post the code in a different way? The attachment doesn't seem to be working.

It might be because of how people answered questions on the advanced version, but I expected there to be more of a disparity in scores. Maybe the "----" rating could be weighted higher since it represents a deal-breaker answer.

[Blorg]

I looked back at my answers and realized that I accidentally reversed the +'s and -'s for at least one (the armpits one). So I don't know how accurate my answers are.

[ACow]

Nice idea. I'm curious about how the scoring works. Could you post the code in a different way? The attachment doesn't seem to be working.

It might be because of how people answered questions on the advanced version, but I expected there to be more of a disparity in scores. Maybe the "----" rating could be weighted higher since it represents a deal-breaker answer.

In practice people cluster a lot more within a possible measurement scale than they realise. I think i joked in one of the other political threads that as far as the political compass goes, practically the entirety of the online community (or at least the ones I involve myself with) cluster the in the bottom left quadrant.

Depending on how much @Utisz likes coding, he could standardise/normalise based on the entire distribution of scores received.

I also like the idea of scoring the preferences in a variety of ways: say negatives push people apart but strength of positives are all just absolute matches and then the scores are standardised to place relative weight on strength of disagreements (and vice versa).

And then there's the possibility of reporting on some of the correlations and clustering within the questions themselves :P

[Deckard]

In practice people cluster a lot more within a possible measurement scale than they realise.

Yeah that's true for basic correlations, I guess I just assumed the +s and -s would count for more. For instance, if I have a strong preference that a question is answered one way or another, that should count for a lot more than an ordinary match / lack of match. If someone hits 2 or more answers I specify as deal-breakers, that could begin to outweigh any other accumulated matches. Something like:

Unweighted match = 1

+ = 2
++ = 4
+++ = 6
++++ = 10

- = 2
-- = 5
--- = 10
---- = 25

So for example if someone hits 2 of my dealbreaker questions where there would otherwise be a 50% overall match, it'd change the score from:

56/112 = 50%

to

56/(110+25+25) = 35%


[edit] @Utisz With the preferences results grid, I assume the vertical axis is people who did the advanced questionnaire, and each cell in my row represents how well they matched to my preferences (as opposed to how well I matched to theirs)? Is that right?