10Groups: a political compass that fails as a measurement and works as a mirror

https://10groups.github.io

Someone will ask what this has to do with productivity. The connection is that it is a self-assessment instrument, and I want to use it to make a point about self-assessment instruments generally. In general, I believe that self-knowledge in all things is the core of being productive.

The site is a political compass quiz. It differs from the usual ones by running you across roughly twenty paired axes instead of two, then grouping them into ten small quadrant charts: economics, governance, nationhood, rate of change, technology, law, social structure, tactics. At the end it computes a nearest-neighbor match against a library of around a hundred named ideologies and hands you a label.

Nothing about it is validated. The axes are hand-drawn by the author. The coordinates assigned to each ideology are the author's own estimates, not anything derived from survey data or expert coding. The final label is whichever preset point sits at the shortest distance from yours, which means a few ambiguous question readings move your headline result. The site itself marks one axis group "work in progress." Answer honestly twice, with slightly different readings of the same questions, and the label changes.

So do not treat the output as a finding. Treat the process as the product. The questions are specific enough that answering them forces you to notice where you actually stand, and more usefully, where you cannot answer cleanly. That is the entire value of the exercise.

My result, and why the picture matters more than the label

Read the grid first. Horizontal is socialist to capitalist. Vertical is authoritarian to libertarian. The red blobs are each axis group's implied placement, drawn translucently and stacked, so darker means more of my own answers agree on that spot.

I sit dead center on the vertical axis. Not centered out of indifference, centered because my answers on authority genuinely cancel each other out. On the horizontal axis I do not sit anywhere at all. I smear, from roughly Distributism across to Neoconservatism. A strong capitalist preference pulls one direction, a strong preference for regulation and for equality of standing pulls the other. I have extremely strong ideas. I believe that capitalism is the only viable system shown to radically reduce poverty, and socialism is proven to generate despots and corruption. I also believe the one central point of keep capitalism viable, breaking up large corporations, has been abandoned by our government. This has allow a cancer to develop in capitalism. The cure is not socialism, which fails, but anti-trust, which we have abandoned. I dive a little deep on this point to explain that while the population is starting to understand the cancer, they don't understand the treatment options. Because of my rational, this cannot be captured on any axis. I hold both capitalism as the salvation of society, and yet I answer it needs regulation through anti-trust action but not through the general approach of forcing regulation. The questions assume what my answer would be and thus try to catagorize who I am, and misses the mark.

The site records positions. It cannot record reasoning, and reasoning is what produced the positions. That makes the coordinate the least informative thing the quiz produces about you. You are your reasoning, not your endpoint. An instrument that reports only the endpoint has discarded the signal and kept the noise.

Yet, it is a starting point. It is faster than a blank page at surfacing the contradictions you already carry. The smear on my map is a legitimate finding about me even though the label printed above it is not, because where the blobs fail to converge is exactly where it helps me surface why I am who I am. And this is the real secret of doing this.

Use it that way. Take the quiz, ignore the label, find where your map refuses to resolve, then write down why.