The following is part of a larger series discussing the ongoing development of PoliTree, an attempted political-compass killer which has been way too long in the making. To find out more, visit the introduction.
A decent amount of progress has been made since the last update: starting off, a Social Democrat branch has been added, which doing so this late into development was not at all an easy choice to make. But there was a sufficient amount of information and distinctions which neither the Social Liberal nor Democratic Socialist branches covered. This also means I’m gonna have to get around to rewriting some of the branch questions for the Progressive leaf (much to my dismay).
As for the Canopy questions, they’re done and fully written for the most part. This took quite a while, since I was conducting interviews and messing around with phrasing quite a bit to make it more accessible. Although I suppose I can fix up readability later. The main thing that still needs to be decided is how to distinguish the mixed leaves from the leaves fully within a single cluster.
The first question I was able to address a couple months ago using a decent amount of math, but unfortunately I don’t remember the specifics of what I did.
The matter of how many slots and how to allocate questions to slots was resolved a couple months ago using quite a bit of math (unfortunately I don’t remember the specifics of how I did it):
- There are 6 slots, each one holding a question the user gets to select
- Each slot contains 3 selectable questions; one per Focus
- There are 12 questions in the pool total; 4 per each Focus
- In total, there are 24 unique combinations a slot can have
It has to be this way because:
- Three questions per slot means that each Focus has equal opportunity to be picked
- Six is a good number of slots: if it’s too small, we won’t have enough info, if it’s too large we’ll run out of questions
- Six is divisible by both 24 combinations and 12 questions
Evangelical Christian, Marxist, and a bit of a Luddite. I run this blog as a way to compile my various theories and arguments spanning a wide variety of subjects from technology to politics.
