The DrugMonkey Scale
November 16, 2007
David Ng of World’s Fair launches yet another meme, this one to establish your own scientific eponym. A few interesting offerings include the Teammate Desirability Factor, Stemwedel Index, Higgins-Levinthal Dictum, Gorton’s Law and Sciencewoman’s Law. You will note that these are faux equation heavy measures since, of course, you need to be “quantitative” to be a RealScientist. Gack.
In this post I am happy to present the DrugMonkey Scale as metric to evaluate the degree to which one is outraged upon reading blog entries or commentary supplied by readers. Feel free to use it on this blog and elsewhere :-).
As is appropriate for an Experimental Psychology type of blogger, the DrugMonkey Scale is in the form of a traditional neuropsychological response scale, the classic being the eponymous Likert scale. These types of scales are typically a 5, 7 or 9 interval decision/response option. The scale may be anchored by numbers or, commonly, by subjective descriptors (Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree) which are intended to be a more intuitive way to calibrate subjects’ responses.
The DrugMonkey Scale is an intuitive, non-numeric 5 point scale. For the subjective anchoring I’ve selected the most iconic of monkeys, Curious George, who also happens to be the iconic figure for a monkey intoxicated on drugs. I give you, the DrugMonkey Scale!
A few technical notes on use, again, completely traditional. (This is one of the ways someone makes money off an incredibly simple pen-and-paper neuropsychological “instrument”!)
Background: The DMS relies on the increasingly common colloquial assumption/accusation that someone who expresses an opinion or comment that is idiotic may possibly be addled by psychoactive intoxicants.
Methods: Place scale and pencil on table. Read over textual material (such as a blog entry and/or following commentary) and then place a pencil mark along the scale to indicate the degree of intoxication you believe the writer was under when composing their statements.
Data Representation: As a subjective and arbitrary scale the units need to be coded for ease of use. The following numerical codes and handy English language equivalents are as follows:
- What have you been smoking?
- Are you high?
- You are seriously tripping!
- Are you on crack?
- Dude, you need to lay off that shit! No, seriously.
If you are reading this and have a science blog, consider yourself tagged- you may wish to get some initial advice from Samuel Arbesman.
[Update: 11/20/07: Of course I’d forgotten I already created the d-index.]
DrugMonkey 
November 16, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I am just a lowly vassal on the DrugMonkey estate. Am I “tagged”?
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November 16, 2007 at 3:43 pm
of course. everyone gets their own scientific eponym, eh?
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November 23, 2007 at 12:01 am
[…] Drugmonkey Scale (keywords: drugs, reaction to blog post, neuropsychology) link […]
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November 24, 2007 at 5:42 am
Like too many scales, this one is not being applied to the person choosing to utilize it. There is always the possibility that he, too, might be imbibing something, and thus producing unreliable data: a person rating the maximum drugmonkey number can not possibly be a good judge of some other simian’s substance abuse. Given that many posts are read by people already searching out reasons to rant renders results that almost have to be biased.
Reactions to blog posts can more accurately be measured by what I choose to call the “Quaker Axiom,” which is as follows:
“The whole world is crazy except thee and me, and sometimes I wonder about thee.”
Oh, and where do Nazi references figure into this scale?
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