Purpose, then what we learned

I built this so people would notice that ranking humans by levels of oppression, by characteristics they did not choose, is counterproductive if the goal is understanding each other and bringing people together. A ranking system of people by immutable traits leads to nothing but bad things. It goes against treating people as individuals. I was curious what would happen. The page could have been written more neutrally. It was not. The point was to shake people up. That is also why a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., and a few others, appeared after the test. Things feel fortunately better now than they did then. It is interesting to watch people reevaluate five, six, ten years later.

After the test, King was waiting on the other side of the sliders. On the public comment wall, remarks that named him ran 94 to 2 against the ranking: 88 treated the quote as an indictment, 5 as satire, 2 as a defense. That pile is not a random sample. Approved comments are 8.2% of the queue, all from 2018-2022, and the queue favored short punchy rebuttals. It is still a useful window. People heard the contradiction.

The extract that ends May 8, 2026 holds 1,441,570 scored rows.¹ A live counter on the homepage has kept climbing since then. I did not infer anyone's 2016 or 2020 vote. Those fields do not exist. What I have is the sliders, the timestamps, and a small optional survey in which 14,037 people, about 1%, described themselves as Left, Moderate, or Conservative. The live charts of dual intersections and country tables still sit on the Statistics page. This page is the why, and the evidence for it.

It was thirteen sliders and one number. Almost everyone showed up in 2018 and 2019.

The ranking was simple on purpose. One integer for a whole person.

The inputs were race, sex, gender, ability, age, richpoor, christian, muslim, jewish, native, english, education, and orient. Not fourteen. The output was one integer from 0 to 100.

77.9% of the scores landed in 2018 and 2019. The site did not go quiet after that. It kept reading, smaller, through 2026. If you came here expecting a 2020-2022 experiment, the clock is wrong. This is a late-2018 instrument with a long tail.

The typical visitor was told they were the privileged one.

Most people who showed up were ranked as the problem. That is what a hierarchy of immutable traits does in a room that is not the most marginalized.

Among 1,154,230 rows with a computed score, the median was 26 and the mode was 12. 44.1% of those scores sat between 5 and 25. The page did not flatter the room that showed up. Most people left with a low-twenties number and a sentence that said most other people were more marginalized than they were.

Almost nobody left more favorable toward intersectionality.

If ranking people by identity was going to bring anyone together, the survey would have shown it.

14,037 people took the optional three-question survey, about 1% of the score rows, most of them in 2019. They were asked whether they had heard of intersectionality, how they felt about it after the test, and whether they considered themselves Left, Moderate, or Conservative. That is self-report after a polarizing page. It is not a model of the electorate.

Of the 13,606 who answered the feeling question: 33.8% less favorable, 54.5% about the same, 11.7% more favorable. Conservatives: 58.8% less favorable. Liberals: 63.8% unchanged. The thermometer measured the prior, then handed it back.

Left and Conservative described different lives. Race was not the gap.

People are not interchangeable stacks. The two sides did not even report the same life on the sliders, and the split was not the one the page shouted loudest.

Left and Conservative used the same thirteen sliders and did not report the same person. Left versus Conservative means: sex 59.8 vs 32.4, orient 54.7 vs 24.1, christian 20.9 vs 52.0. Race was 32.6 vs 26.4. The loud slider on the homepage is not the loud difference between the people who filled it in.

Treat this as a 1% sample of people who opted into a survey after the calculator, not as America.

The same number. Two readings.

This is the evidence for the why. Hand two people the same integer and they do not take home the same meaning. A ranking of immutable traits does not produce a shared picture of a person. It produces two readings.

Left and Conservative did not take home the same score, on average. That is already on this page. Here is the sharper test. Hold the number still.

Among people who scored 20 to 40, Liberals left 14.4% less favorable and 18.2% more favorable. Conservatives in that same band left 52.4% less favorable and 4.1% more favorable. The means were 31.6 and 28.7. The page handed them nearly the same integer. They did not hand it the same meaning.

Knowing the framework already did not soften the landing. Conservatives who said they knew a lot about intersectionality before the test left 67.0% less favorable. Conservatives who had never heard of it left 55.3% less favorable. Liberals barely moved either way. Conservatives who scored 60 or higher, the page telling them they were the marginalized ones, still left 64.3% less favorable. The instrument was read as a political object, not as a personal measurement.

The survey is about 1% of the score rows, self-selected after a polarizing page. Treat it as a window, not as the country.

Peterson week filled the room. Floyd left a pulse. The election was silent.

The audience was not a civics class. People arrived because a tweet did, then kept reading, smaller, for years.

The week after Jordan Peterson shared the page, November 30 to December 7, 2018, produced 140,307 scores. The peak day, December 1, was 39,125. The George Floyd fortnight, May 25 to June 8, 2020, produced 18,009: a real pulse, an order of magnitude smaller than launch week. The 2020 election fortnight produced 1,989. Election day itself: 129.

Unrest left a fingerprint. The election did not. The instrument's real audience arrived because a tweet did.

I built this to make people think, and to see what both sides would do with the same vocabulary. They showed up. They moved the sliders. They mostly did not change their minds. They were not the same person on sex, orientation, or Christianity. They were closer on race than the page design would make you expect. When the number was the same, the verdict was not. That is what a ranking of immutable traits produces. It does not teach us how to treat people as individuals.

Take the calculator Statistics