It sorts you into four categories:
Trailblazer
Striver
Comfortable
Complacent
I was rated as a striver. I don’t think of myself that way. I might feel better if there were a category called “contrarian.” It would describe me, and I think it also would describe Tyler.
In terms of the categories as given, I would self-identify as comfortable now and a trailblazer when I was younger. I was very entrepreneurial in my 30s and 40s. Now, I just blog. My wife and I have visited many countries, but lately we would rather travel to visit relatives than to see new places. I would much rather go folk dancing than go to a party or have a new experience.
It could be that my score was affected by questions that were impossible to answer, forcing me to almost randomize. For example, dancing is the source of suggestions for music to which I like to listen. That was not one of the choices in the quiz.
Other comments:
1. The introduction to the quiz says that
Complacency is defined as self-satisfaction accompanied by unawareness of possible deficiencies or dangers
This differs from the definition that is offered in The Complacent Class, but I think it gets much closer to what Tyler means.
2. Making up a quiz is fun, but I wonder if it was made up with complacency (as defined above). In theory you ought to test your quiz to see how well it works. You would ask a bunch of beta testers to both self-identify in terms of categories and to take the quiz. If the quiz puts them in their self-identified categories, then it works. Otherwise, it needs to be tweaked.
In the first edition of The Three Languages of Politics, I used a made-up quiz. I only tested it out on a few friends beforehand. They said that it worked ok. I imagine that it was easier for people to self-identify as libertarians progressives, or conservatives than to self-identify into Tyler’s idiosyncratic categories. But in the new edition that is about to come out, I dropped the pretense of a quiz, and instead I just used the examples as illustrations of the three-axes model.
I do wonder how much of this is getting older, with some unawareness of the new, but with more awareness of the possible deficiencies or dangers of the new. Less complacence than weariness and wariness.
Comparing quiz results to self-identification isn’t necessarily a good way to determine if the quiz “works.” Isn’t the point of such quizzes to demonstrate to the quiz-taker that which he may be unaware of? If the quiz results only match self-identification, why bother having a quiz?
I was also a ‘striver’ and annoyed by the quiz. I’ll haven’t finished the book, but I wish there was a stronger case for the necessity of ‘shaking everyone’s kaleidoscopes’.
What did Peter Thiel get?
As somebody on MR pointed out, Warren Buffet would rank as “Complacent.”
Are there like single-digit Trailblazers?
I thought it was interesting as I ended being ‘striver’ although I should have Comfortable. In reality, I bet the most productive societies have the right mix of the four categories.
I think any Californian should not get credit for living a neighborhood where they are a minority. That is everyone in our state at some time in their lives! (Heck if you don’t move this could be true.)
It does seem like there is a kind of bias towards hipsters that try a new restaurant every night, and take off at a moments notice to where ever had the cheapest airfare.
I got ‘Comfortable’. I agree, for what it is worth. I like my life. But I can’t help but think the *quiz* really would not agree.
I am a software engineer that changes projects every few months, frequently working for startups, a Catholic convert (I read my way in by study of theology and philosophy, to the bafflement of family, and without knowing any Catholics), fly a plane, ride a motorcycle, smoke a pipe, own horses, and have been asked to give lectures three times in the past year on subjects outside (literature and theology) my profession.
I am “comfortable”, the answer is right, but I still can’t shake the feeling that quiz has a bit of a problem.
Trailblazers blaze trails to somewhere. Strivers strive for something. What do they do when they get there? Or attain what they were striving for?
Life doesn’t stand still for long, and likely soon info they will have to blaze somewhere new, or strive for something else, but I think these categories miss the importance of leisure, rest, reward, and delight in a balanced life: “Delight is necessary for happiness. For it is caused by the appetite being at rest in the good attained.” (Summa I-II, Q4)
I think what Tyler is trying to get from ten different ways is that a rut is not fulfilling, whether that rut is the same work, people, places, or habits, so people should do new things, meet new people, try new foods, go new places.
All of which is good in its way, but also ultimately empty (the new place is not that much different than the old place, the new people than the old people); hence the significant, though probably inadvertent, inversion of means and ends in things like his choice of “striving”.
He would do well, I think, to read Josef Pieper’s monograph the Philosophical Act (in Leisure the Basis of Culture). In the snippet below, I think Tyler would start by agreeing, but because his own view seems to be contracted to production and amusement, his answer, rather than leisure and contemplation, is to work/produce or play *harder* at an ever changing array of new and different things.
Suffice to say that love, religion, philosophy, and art do not fair well under such a view, as all those require a certain stability and tradition (ie, things handed down) to thrive.
The refreshment which we sometimes need for them is something more like what Tolkien referred to as ‘Recovery’ rather than constant change. Something which, in Lewis’ words, ‘restores to them the rich significance that has been hidden by “the veil of familiarity”‘.
But back to Pieper:
“Everyone whose life is completely filled by his work… is a proletarian because his life has shrunk inwardly, and contracted, with the result that he can no longer act significantly outside his work, and perhaps can no longer conceive of such a thing.
“Man steps beyond the chain of ends and means, that binds the world of work, in love, or when he takes a step toward the frontier of existence, deeply moved by some existential experience, for this, too, sends a shock through the world of relationships, whatever the occasion may be–perhaps the close proximity of death. The act of philosophizing, genuine poetry, any aesthetic encounter, in fact, as well as prayer, springs from some shock. And when such a shock is experienced, man senses the non-finality of this world of daily care; he transcends it, takes a step beyond it.
“The philosophical act, the religious act, the aesthetic act, as well as the existential shocks of love and death, or any other way in which man’s relation to the world is convulsed and shaken–all these fundamental ways of acting belong naturally together, by reason of the power which they have in common of enabling a man to break through and transcend the workaday world.”
I find one of the flaws with Tyler’s quiz to be the emphasis he places on movement. For example, you seem to get points for changing cities, but that can be less enlightening than assumed, especially today. I have never lived outside of Michigan, but I have lived in a suburb of Detroit, a rural small town and the conservative Christian west side. I’m guessing that provides me with greater exposure to a variety of life than people who go from Harvard to Wall Street to Silicon Valley.
I was in one of the bobo parts of Atlanta recently and it struck me that I could find the same slice of hipster urbanism anywhere. So while moving to Atlanta from Philadelphia, say, once meant something significant, it seems to have little meaning now.
It seems flawed at another level, which is that the unique culture, language, and life of a particular place finds its root precisely in the people that have not left it to go somewhere else.
Like most quizzes, this badly needs two other choices for each question:
o “Other”
o “Not Applicable”
…and possibly a third:
o “There is something wrong with this question”
I have only seen the latter in a quiz from the Association for Computing Machinery but I instantly recognized the need for such an answer, for example when the question contains an embedded assumption.
As an example here, I am not a music person, and there was no way to say “I don’t listen to music” in the music question. As another, I’ve been married for thirty years and have no idea what people do to find mates these days.
Yeah, I stopped the quiz at #7 for this reason. If I’m annoyed by #7 I doubt I’ll find the next twenty questions that interesting.
I liked your quiz! Fit me to a tee.
Why would you get rid of it? At very least it’s fun.