Poll: Think you think straight? Think again...

[-Ulven-]

20% I always contradict my own thoughts in a philosophical manner

And my friends always say that I am a natural leader of chaos XD

 

[Jackpot524]

Example:
"Its always wrong to take a life?"
this is where it should have "depends" button
no one should kill, but then again sometime bitches got to die (im looking at you al-quadaffi)
so why it may not be RIGHT it may also be NECESSARY at the same time.

Key for this one is "ALWAYS," Agreeing means that there is absolutely no reason to ever take a life, Disagreeing means that taking a life could be justified...

So you "Disagree" with this statement.

"It is quite reasonable to believe in the existence of a thing without even the possibility of evidence for its existence"
but what if there is evidence to support it, but its not recognized as valid evidence by some?

I'm a bit confused by your objection to this one... I think you might be taking this to heart on a particular subject.

Assuming that's the case, let's scratch that particular issue because you see the evidence for it's existence... Now, if there was NO evidence for the existance of a particular thing would you think it was reasonable to believe in it or not?

"Having made a choice, it is always possible that one might have chosen otherwise"
what the hell does that even mean? isnt that the point of 'a choice' the fact i could have chosen other wise? maby i'm missing the point, but im not exactly sure what these have to do with thinking straight.

You pretty much explained it yourself there, you "Agree," This just means you feel people have an internal locus of control and can make choices. As opposed to an external locus of control where things will just happen to them and whatever happened was their destiny.


Do you have any issues with what I said? Just let me know!

 

[Raven's Nest]

I agree. Atheists should not say God cannot exist, and therefore certainly doesn't, as they cannot prove that. Theists should not say that God certainly does exist, for the same reason.

Both groups being wrong when they say these things changes nothing though, it's still all a matter of faith.

For both of those extremes yes, the belief becomes a faith. But there are people on both sides that have doubts. Agnosticism is ripe amongst atheists, not so much amongst theists as they choose to have faith regardless, but they do exist.

Physical harm, yeah sure, go ahead and do whatever you want, as long as it's in the dark corner of the world and you have no one that could possibly love and care about your well being and didn't have an impact on anyone's life during your lifetime. Then yeah, sure, shoot 'er up.

Okay, that's some serious generalizing I just did, but I feel like I've done well in my 20 years of life despite all the bad and potentially bad parts mainly by considering these ideas.

Considering that a child witnessing someone injecting heroin is unlikely to either know that it is heroin (and that it is harmful to the body if abused) nor is it particularly likely to cause them to start injecting themselves. I don't see how witnessing the act can cause physical harm.

The response of the typical adult would most likely be one of disgust, again not exactly harmful in a physical sense.

The question is about personal freedoms however. If you agree that people should do what they want so long as they don't harm others (physically), you should also agree that drugs should be legalised for personal use. If you don't there is a conflict between your understanding of freedom and personal responsibility.

 

[conflictofinterests]

I wonder how we could re-state the statements to be both more all-encompassing and more layman-friendly.

I wonder if there is a way to circumvent the words "objective" and "subjective" entirely...

 

[Baneat]

"High - I'm the leader of the Liberal Democrats"

Can you list some examples of contradictions the Lib Dems hold? just curious, haven't actually looked into modern political philosophies employed by parties yet.

I wonder how we could re-state the statements to be both more all-encompassing and more layman-friendly.

I wonder if there is a way to circumvent the words "objective" and "subjective" entirely...

Hm, "Matter of taste/opinion" and "Matter of fact"?

I see the issue here, the guy's reaching out to people with a layman's interest and blindsiding them with terminology that stretches into srs bsnss

 

[s0m3th1ng]

Knowing what the test is for kind of skews the results a bit. Kind of like those "personality" tests for job interviews that ask a question several different ways to see if you are telling the truth about your personality. I got a zero percent because I was trying to fuck the test up. I also always play Chaotic Neutral if the option is there so...maybe I just loike to play the system and cause havoc?

 

[crudus]

I enjoy how it said "In order for there not to be a contradiction you need to..." and I was doing all of that while taking the test.

I actually did misread one of the questions though which it marked me off for. I read "The second world war was just a war" rather than "a just war". The test says 20% but I would say 0-7.

 

[OutforEC]

I was at 13% But I still have played mostly Chaotic Neutral characters in D&D So what does that make me?

A roleplayer?

 

[Eroen]

Okay, so now I have dismissed a (semi-)long list of statements as false, as they were based on false dichotomies and false absolutes, whereupon I'm told that further false dichotomies are present in my answers, indicating "tension."

Not impressed. Also, about ⅓ of the questions (presumably) only make sense from a North American POW.

Specific problems (from my list of "tensions," as it is ready at hand) which nullifies the specific "tensions" I was presented with:
- I consider "evil" to be an expression of cultural values. I recognize this might be different from the common opinion.
- I don't believe prohibitions by law to necessarily stop me from doing anything, they only control (potential) consequences. A lobotomy on the other hand, might stop me from accomplishing my goals.
- The consumption of "drugs" in the general sense includes (empirically observed) "harm to others." Simple examples: Increased government spending on healthcare. Unpleasantness, especially in the case of needle heroin.
- When questioned on matters of taste, my best/only resource for answers is *my* taste.
- In order for a procedure to be classified as medicine (alternative or otherwise), I believe it must be provably more effective than placebo. This is the case for some "alternative" procedures and not for some "mainstream" procedures. In the both cases this is generally simple, albeit controversial, to test by experiment.

Some of these points are lampshaded in their accompanying texts, but none are justified. However, there is an abundance of hand-waving.

I believe this demonstrates part of the reason I regard certain academic disciplines as "lesser" than others. Some of us actually (rigorously) prove our hypotheses, rather than state them as facts and wait for believers.

Uh...

I realize you consider morality to be subjective, but somewhere you picked an answer that indicated you believed otherwise. Or you believe there is at least ONE objective moral imperative, but then said all cultures have different moralities, which I would think a scientist would see the contradiction there.

I agree you have a point with some drugs, the question was poorly worded, but the sense the question was trying to convey was closely related to the legalization of marijuana which has been argued to be only as deleterious as or less deleterious than alcohol, which apparently falls under the heading "only hurts oneself"

For the art one, though it was poorly worded, it was checking for consistency with objective value in art. The statement was "Michelangelo IS" not "I think Michelangelo to be" or any derivation thereof.

As for your point on medicine, you appear to desire controls on medicine, and to ignore the fact that alternative medicine does not have to jump through the hoops mainstream medicine has to (or at least is supposed to).

Anyways, you have a superior air about you. Might I point out that science has never PROVEN anything. It only disproves things, and what is left is accepted as true FOR NOW.

1. The division was between morality being subjective and the (implicit) assumption that evil is objective.
2. 3. My main point was that most of the questions were sufficiently poorly worded to make the result hinge on the reader noticing the word "all," "always" or something similar.
4. The main disagreement here comes from an unclear definition of "medicine."
5. When I describe a method I believe to be better than some alternative and then proceed to do controlled measurements on the two, resulting in a quantified difference in performance with a known confidence value, it is said to be "empirically proven." If I ask a group of people poorly worded questions and count the answers I have something that can be used for analyzing reading comprehension and habits, not a valid psychiatric theory. The latter happens far to often.

 

[mechanixis]

I got 20% Tension.

Questions 1 and 27: Is morality relative?

76516 of the 172834 people who have completed this activity have this tension in their beliefs.

You agreed that:
There are no objective moral standards; moral judgements are merely an expression of the values of particular cultures
And also that:
Acts of genocide stand as a testament to man's ability to do great evil

The tension between these two beliefs is that, on the one hand, you are saying that morality is just a matter of culture and convention, but on the other, you are prepared to condemn acts of genocide as 'evil'. But what does it mean to say 'genocide is evil'? To reconcile the tension, you could say that all you mean is that to say 'genocide is evil' is to express the values of your particular culture. It does not mean that genocide is evil for all cultures and for all times. However, are you really happy to say, for example, that the massacre of the Tutsi people in 1994 by the Hutu dominated Rwandan Army was evil from the point of view of your culture but not evil from the point of view of the Rwandan Army, and what is more, that there is no sense in which one moral judgement is superior to the other? If moral judgements really are 'merely the expression of the values of a particular culture', then how are the values which reject genocide and torture at all superior to those which do not?

I was simply expressing my own personal interpretation of Morality. In my view, genocide, in most cases would be wrong, although, there could be exceptions depending on the circumstance. Otherwise, I fully accept that this my own personal interpretation of morality, which is a subjective invention to begin with.

My beliefs on Morality are essentially just personal opinions. Not everyone is going to agree with me and there is no true standard, nor does morality technically even exist, it's a fictional invention of sentient thought.

This is not a contradiction.

I think your mistake with a lot of these questions is that they never actually asked for your opinion, only what you think is objectively true. The question was "Is genocide inherently evil?", not "In your opinion, is genocide evil?"

If genocide is objectively evil, then evil objectively exists, and therefore morality is objective.

 

[bpm195]

13% and I contend that my beliefs are not actually contradictory. I condemned genocide and also said that there is no objective morals, which in retrospect I should have answered as yes because there are very few objective moral standards.

More alarmingly, it called it contradictory that I believe that price shouldn't be a factor when it comes it saving lives, but I don't believe in arbitrary taxation to do it. I do believe it's every persons obligation to help each other, but I don't believe it's anybody's right to force that belief on others. To use a practical example, I don't believe the American government has the right to take a dollar from every citizen to aid Japan, but I do think you're a dick if you refuse to give at least a dollar.

You could reasonably follow that logic to me being a hypocrite for not donating everything I can, and you wouldn't be wrong, but I'm not a perfect person or living a perfect life.

 

[Chrinik]

Atheist - Meaning one who does not believe in Gods. This does automatically assume the statement "There are no Gods".

Fixed! There are a ton of hypothetical and possible gods...and most religious seem to be politheistic, so there.

I just had 7%, my undoing was:

You agreed that:
The environment should not be damaged unnecessarily in the pursuit of human ends
But disagreed that:
People should not journey by car if they can walk, cycle or take a train instead

Which was actually more or less a typo...should have rechecked my answeres better.
This test is great, particulary because it showed me I´m not a hypocrit, at least as far as the test goes...might pass it around, thanks.

 

[zelda2fanboy]

I also think the test is somewhat flawed, but I sort of like the idea. I was 27% and most of my problems came from the questions using double negatives. I wouldn't prefer if it did not not do that. The other thing is the utter lack of relative relationships. I said it's okay to drive a car when you could walk, but I also said we shouldn't destroy the environment without good reason. The single act of one man driving one car to make his life slightly more convenient is not the same thing as tearing down the tree of life in Avatar.

I also said there are no objective moral standards, but also said genocide was bad. The former just acknowledges that genocide exists, not that I think it's okay. One is an opinion, the other is fact. A lot of the questions are like that.

 

[Chrinik]

I also think the test is somewhat flawed, but I sort of like the idea. I was 27% and most of my problems came from the questions using double negatives. I wouldn't prefer if it did not not do that. The other thing is the utter lack of relative relationships. I said it's okay to drive a car when you could walk, but I also said we shouldn't destroy the environment without good reason. The single act of one man driving one car to make his life slightly more convenient is not the same thing as tearing down the tree of life in Avatar.

I also said there are no objective moral standards, but also said genocide was bad. The former just acknowledges that genocide exists, not that I think it's okay. One is an opinion, the other is fact. A lot of the questions are like that.

See, that´s the thing. You gotta look at how the questions are written.
You didn´t say "Genocide is bad!" you agreed that Genocide is a TESTIMENT to the human ability to do great evil...which is contradictory if you believe there are no objective moral standarts, because evil differs from culture to culture, even from person to person, and therefore, if you believe that, genocide must not be a testiment to humans ability to do great evil, because that would mean that EVERYONE agrees it is evil...
I for instance, say that genocide is a great way to battle overpopulation and resource consumption.
I also said that "The second world war was just a war", because, it was<.< Apart from the Holocaust which made it famous, genocides happened in alot of wars (they sometimes are the REASON), so yeah, it´s just a war.
And that the Holocaust is no historical fact and happend as the history books proclaim, because even these differ from each other, not because I think it didn´t happen!
See what I mean? There is no universal truth, when you agree to that, you can´t say that Genocide is evil...it contradicts itself.

You also didn´t say "one person may drive a car" you said "It is okay to drive a car if you could walk", which makes it okay for EVERYONE...so when everyone is allowed to drive a car to their mail-slot, then that contradicts your statement that the environment should not be unnecesarly damaged...

But yeah, trains are "less" enviromentally damaging, but it seems like they don´t require fuel...they do, it is just not used in the train, but in the Power Plant that makes the energy for the train to run.

 

[Optional Opinion]

Too many big words.

 

[Olrod]

I got 7% because all cars damage the environment whereas trains never do, and people should be able to carry all of their grocery shopping home by hand at all times with no exceptions.

Yeah, what/ever.

0%.

 

[beniki]

47%

Yeah that seems accurate. As a contradictory person who is both logical and wilfully irrational at times, it seems about right.

I think some flexibility in the way I think is just as important as being a smart arse

 

[Nackl of Gilmed]

The effects of one persons drug use is rarely contained to just one person. What do they do when they run out of money for their drugs? or what they do when there high? Drugs don't just effect the user...

Yeah, the test seems to be a little less than perfect in considering all the ramifications of some of the statements.

 

[TheDrunkNinja]

Considering that a child witnessing someone injecting heroin is unlikely to either know that it is heroin nor is particularly likely to start injecting themselves I don't see how witnessing the act can cause physical harm.

The response of the typical adult would most likely be one of disgust, again not exactly harmful in a physical sense.

The question is about personal freedoms however. If you agree that people should do what they want so long as they don't harm others (physically), you should also agree that drugs should be legalised for personal use. If you don't there is a conflict between your understanding of freedom and personal responsibility.

Oh, you misunderstood me. I was just rambling on again about emotional and psychological harm again. Physically harming oneself can cause just as much, if not more, emotional or psychological harm to another, regardless if they are present during the specific act. Physically harming oneself is almost always due to and continually causes psychological or emotional issues (and I'm not referring to tastes in sexuality or of that subject). Our psychological and emotional state partially defines our behavior to other people. And the fact that behavior is such a sporadic, unpredictable thing, I feel it is best to minimize our mental stress as much as possible. There are so many factors as to how behavior of a person is defined to the point where behavior defines behavior. Acts that I do in the world will always have an impact on other people, whether good or ill (depending on the perspective) such acts may lead to such extreme feelings as guilt or even feeling a boost or drop in morale. That alone will effect how we act and treat people.

But now I'm over thinking this far too much. Far too many factors for anyone to analyze and connect for there to be a conclusive answer.

Oh, also, this thread was awesome. I always enjoy a little intellectual stimulation in my day.

 

[conflictofinterests]

SNIP

SNIP

1. The division was between morality being subjective and the (implicit) assumption that evil is objective.
2. 3. My main point was that most of the questions were sufficiently poorly worded to make the result hinge on the reader noticing the word "all," "always" or something similar.
4. The main disagreement here comes from an unclear definition of "medicine."
5. When I describe a method I believe to be better than some alternative and then proceed to do controlled measurements on the two, resulting in a quantified difference in performance with a known confidence value, it is said to be "empirically proven." If I ask a group of people poorly worded questions and count the answers I have something that can be used for analyzing reading comprehension and habits, not a valid psychiatric theory. The latter happens far to often.

Morality deals specifically with what is good and what is evil. If an act IS evil, then there has to be some objective form of morality, right? It isn't phrased as to say "I think this to be evil" but that an act "IS" evil.

I don't much care for poorly designed tests either, but you can't bag on whole disciplines for their nut-jobs. There are plenty of people who do try to control for as many variables as possible. And there are plenty of people in the physical sciences that fuck up pretty bad too. Pretty much everyone calls everyone out on everything they do wrong, at least if the results get published anywhere they can be critiqued.

In any case, and noting this will probably earn your ire, from a linguistic anthropological standpoint the questions are worded with sufficient accuracy to get their intended point across to at least some people, which are in all likelihood the intended audience. (That the wording was not designed for a broader intended audience is a problem in and of itself, but does not definitely indicate poor test structure on the authors part.) In any case, as was previously pointed out, the test is only meant to measure tension, not to declare that one's thinking is contradictory. As complexity is a form of tension, one could be a perfectly rational person, hold two simplistically opposite views, and still experience tension, because one has to think about more variables to reconcile them.