Sat, 19 July 2008 @ 5:28 p.m. EDT  2 comments

Your Thinkerprint is shorthand for some of the information we have for predicting which statements you are likely to agree with.

Huh?

In our analysis of the data you are giving us, we can arrange people and the statements they believe along descriptive axes. These axes are still in development, but you can imagine some common axes that can be used to describe people: liberal vs. conservative (left vs. right), or active vs. inactive (sky-divers on one end and couch potatoes on the other). Our axes for your data are discovered using singular value decomposition, so they come out looking like a pile of numbers?

How do I read it?

We take the top 26 most descriptive axes over all of our data and assign them each a letter of the alphabet (A is the most significant). To compute your Thinkerprint, we rearrange the axes in the order that best describe you, so the first axis is the most significant for you. Then, we change each letter to be capital if you are on the positive end of the axis or lowercase if you are on the negative end. Don't be offended by being on the negative end of an axis: it just means you don't agree with the people on the positive end.

Why do movie reviews have them too?

Ah, sharp eye! We can do the same analysis for each review--in fact, the analysis does it at the same time. This gives you something you can compare, though: reading left to right, you can check to see whether or not the review's axes are remotely compatible with yours. Start by checking to see if the letters that are in common are in the same case. The order of the letters in the review's Thinkerprint then show the significance of that agreement/disagreement. You will likely not share all of the same letters. If you share no significant letters in common with the review, then it's like comparing apples and oranges.

Let's say your Thinkerprint is ABCdef. If you see a review that has Thinkerprint CdefAB, you have a pretty good chance of agreeing with the review. If you see abcDEF, you could not be more opposed.