Came here to post Dynamics of Complex Systems. Just the information on renormalization groups and multi-scale behavior makes it worth the time. And it's Free!
I don't know about that. You just shouldn't strap more meaning onto it than that it's a survey that gives you a qualitative description of the answers you gave to it -- people have some innate attraction to such things and I find it hard to criticize them for it. I just don't think it's appropriate to use for career counseling, etc.
I too dislike the right/left classification. It didn't really exist until the French Revolution, and the attempt to stretch it into a universally encompassing political continuum has resulted in an impoverished view of politics, imho.
For instance, despite the similarities, I don't think that the prevailing progressivism in SV can be equated with classical Marxism, which is far-left in the original sense, since they disagree fundamentally on the most central questions to the Marxists, which are the centrality of economic class, and private property. I find the links between Fascism and far-right (again, in the original sense) Conservatism to be equally tenuous, given that they radically differ on the attitudes towards tradition and progress. Even the Republicans and Democrats don't really fit the mols. Think about it: what grounds do opposition to abortion and market liberalism have in common, really?
Trump doesn't fall neatly onto the line either, and I suspect that the tendency to place him somewhere on the old line has contributed to the rather confused, and reflexively negative reaction that many in the political class have had to his emergence and presidency.
It's best to think of political outlooks as clusters of positions in a high-dimensional space. The left-right model is like a poorly-executed PCA -- a reduction that confuses as much as it clarifies.
Yet we're posting in a thread relating to a massive replication crisis.
The geocentric model of the universe was equally obvious and functional to our ancestors in the context in which they used it. We are the same creatures as them and are subject to the same basic epistemological limitations -- just because we have seen further does not mean that we have seen everything. The whole concept of science is exactly to that point. It is implausible under currently available information that we could be missing some fact that would fundamentally change our understanding, but that is not the same thing as saying that there is no possible fact that could cause such a rupture.
One good heuristic to use when evaluating scientific research is the Lindy Effect. Essentially, the longer a finding has stood without being falsified, the longer you can expect it to continue to stand without falsification.
This runs contrary to what I was taught in high school science classes, which was that newer science is more reliable than older science. The truth is that the old stuff that still stands is really where it's at. Most "novel" scientific findings are not true. A smaller portion will be thought true for a while, then discarded. Only a very small amount of research will stand for a long period of time.
Another thing to consider is that the scientific method and its modern, institutionalized implementation is not very old at all. You cannot exclude the possibility that some of our fundamental scientific understanding is totally flawed, and we've yet to discover how.
I think people are (slowly) re-learning the importance of redundancy. Having multiple, competing implementations makes you far less vulnerable to shocks.