Made out of people

Multiple dimensions

Might you be a libertarian? Rate yourself on social and personal liberty

Maybe you sit better on a multiple-axis personality set: Myers-Briggs from Extroversion-Introversion; Sensing-Intuition; Thinking-Feeling; and Judging-Percieving.

Maybe the axes you need are dwarf-elf; ninja-pirate

It seems that we get these several-dimension systems every once in a while. I find them as cool as anyone else: I want to see where I fall onto various scales¹. I think that mostly what's fascinating about them is the fact that there is more than one dimension, and that gives them a certain degree of universality. We're all pretty annoyed at the charicatures of "left to right" or "good to evil," but with two dimensions---ah, with two dimensions, we can express some choices.

And we can draw it nicely on paper. Which leaves us with cool maps that are nicely clear and highly visible.

In other words, the 2×2 analysis appeals to our sense of fairness, our sense of balance. And it's hard enough that we can stick with the two, thankyouverymuch.

Of course, there's no guarantee that two dimension are nearly enough: for example, one research project that I was involved in casually found that movie preferences wanted something like five dimensions to cover the vast majority of the variation in the sample.

Perhaps five dimensions would be a more useful scale. Could we, perhaps, modify this usful system? We might now analyze a given person on the five-dimensional space of rockity, paperness, lizardicity, spockacity, and scissizznit.

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¹ One friend of mine was taking an undergrad abnormal psychology class. A side effect of such classes is that all students end up reading, then ranking themselves and their friends, by the entirety of the DSM IV . She wandered about shouting that various people were "scale six!"--a reference to a five-point scale of adjustedness. I guess exceeding the bounds isn't quite the same sort of phenomenon, but it gives the same sense of placing people on a scale.