17 February 2004

Shitty Scoring Algorithm

MRhe posted a link to this site which gives you a survey on a bunch of current political topics and then generates a compatibility score for each candidate in the Democratic primary and President Bush.



This is a neat idea, but their scoring algorithm is seriously screwed up. I was listed as 100% compatible with Dennis Kucinich, but there were several issues which he "Strongly Opposes" which I listed as "Strongly Favoring". If we are on opposite ends of the spectrum on even one issue, how can we be 100% compatible? Furthermore, the survey lets you weight different categories of questions depending on how important they are. I ranked "Security/International Policy" as most imporant and one of the questions where Kucinich and I disagree is on the war in Iraq. How can you not test your software for basic stuff like this? Also problematic (maybe a Safari issue?) is the "Compare Candidates" page which has all sorts of screwups in the DB queries used to get the data. The categories are all wrong and some of them have headings of "bad request". Bah.



John Kerry wasn't far behind at 93% compatible and the President is way the fuck down there at 27%. Interesting, since I'm strongly considering voting for him (although I'm heading toward Kerry every day).



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