https://twitter.com/florencegaub/status/1514152917556727813?s=21&t=VSAV8PhJipQ5C94DEJGI6Q Whenever I see a big EU flag and Germany flag in the bio, Brace Belden’s 4th Reich theory just come to my mind. And I stopped reading at “Let me explain”

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Well I'll be honest, never seen a gerrymandered plot before. No clustering algorithm on gods green earth would make those groupings.

      Inb4 Russia more secular than the US

    • Krem [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      This is beautiful. 4/5 "West/south asian" countries are in southeast asia and are similar to israel, value-wise. Group them together!

      India, which you might think is south asian, maybe even THE south asian country, maybe even the origin of much of south asian culture and religion, and thus values, is ACTUALLY valually African-islamic.

      Yes, I'm sure you're all familiar with "African-islamic" values.

      By some coincidence, the home countries of most of the people peddling this logical superscience are in the cool and awesome top right corner. It just happens that their countries are logical and liberal and chill, values-wise.

      edit: whilst showering i got even madder about this. what kind of distinction is "traditional" vs. "secular" anyway? The confucian countries are ranked very high on the secular scale, but actual confucian values are really traditional (marriage between man and woman, a couple needs to produce male offspring for the family, the husband is the head of the household, if dad is out then oldest son takes charge) but since they don't necessarily mention a god, that means they're "secular" and thus the opposite of "traditional"?

      protestant europe could be renamed secular europe, because no one in northern europe goes to church, and by the way isn't germany and switzerland mostly catholic anyway?

      and then we have the "anglosphere" values category.

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        what kind of distinction is “traditional” vs. “secular” anyway?

        It's a complete asspull. the tradition <-> secular axis is supposed to measure influence of religion on values, but the questionaire they tried to measure these values with focusses mostly on issues that are controversial in christianity, and to a lesser extend islam and judaism - divorce, suicide, abortion. but not LGBT rights, that's part of the survival <-> self expression axis, because you can only gay when your basic needs like food and shelter are already met, otherwise you don't gay. That may sound confusing now, but it makes even less sense when you read up on it.

        This is ofc incredibly dumb and produces completely useless results, so they covered that up by just painting these colorful amorphous blobs for different cultures over their graph. The blobs are amorphous so the colors only have to align remotely with the actual placement on the graph. It's bullshit all the way down.

        • Krem [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          wow, so it's a test where questions in a questionnaire adjusts your position on one of the axes, and then you use both axes to chart your position in an cute little spectrum, and then conclusions were drawn based on these positions without any material analysis? reminds me of something...

          also a quick look at previous editions of this thing, where countries are in completely different positions, kinda makes this look a little bullshitty somehow. india is right in the middle in 2017 but I guess Modi made the whole country jump to the bottom left huh

          • AcidSmiley [she/her]
            ·
            3 years ago

            yeah it's honestly kind of fascinating how ... fractal the horseshit is with this one. as if you can zoom in indefintiely and constantly discover new layers of ass-pulls, smokescreens, data massaging and completely random results that do not lead to anything.

    • VapeNoir [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      This is just the political compass run through a phrenology filter.

      Besides that, Russia and Ukraine are like right next to each other on it!

    • AcidSmiley [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I've done a bit of a deep dive into that chart earlier today, i'll just dump this here:

      This is exactly what you get when the shambling animated corpse of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations fucks the Sinus milieus from German market research. Fucking terrifying.

      Edit: I made the mistake of looking this up and it gets worse and worse the more i read about it. Both the X and Y axis are just idealist bs, and it’s completely arbitrary if a questionaire item ends up on one axis or the other (abortion and divorce are on the tradition vs secular axis, LGBT rights are on the survival vs self expression axis because reasons).

      So this is how they assign these values to countries. That’s not where the fuckery stops, though. Notice how the boundaries of the clusters are worming all over the place? That’s because they had to shoehorn these in retroactively, after placing the countries on the graph, but still wanted to stick with their Clash of Civilizations brainworms. So while the PRC has, according to their bullshit metrics, more in common with Hungary and Ukraine than with Hong Kong and Macau, it is drawn as part of the orange confucian blob bc skull shapes. You just add an outgrowth of the blob and suddenly China is confucian again instead of being on the borderline between Orthodox and Catholic where their braindead questionaire would normally put it.

      And then, South Africa still ends up as Southeast Asia. lol wtf. This is the biggest clownshoes flim flam fuckery i’ve seen in a long, long while. Just absolute, ridiculous con artist nonsense that should forever ruin the authors’ reputation, but somehow they have been pulling this craniometry-tier baloney off for more than 20 years how. the. fuck. is. this. even. possible.

      Another edit: Oh wow i just noticed that according to this, Japan is the most secular country in the world! Could it be that your questionaire is so full of cultural bias that it just breaks down completely when it has to measure the values of people who were not socialized in a Western society? I guess that’s what you get when you make up research that … asigns India to the African-Islamic world.

      But hey, at least it looks as if the USA is giving Catholicism a prostate exam. Hit 'em right in the Belgiums, Yanqui friends!

    • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      mayos do this all the time with population genetics (aka actual race science)

      there'll be a continuous spectrum of different DNA, and they'll contort their minds into making random clusters that just line up with the made-up categories that they already perceive as their reality. For example, they'll undersample the Turkish population just so it looks like "West Asia" and "Europe" are separate, when in reality there's a bunch of western Turks that literally aren't shown, which genetically connect Greece and Turkey.

      That's why NewZealand and Iceland are in totally different clusters despite being equivalent lol.