Difference between revisions of "2251: Alignment Chart Alignment Chart"

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(initial summary of alignment charts as memes)
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|[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio|IPA vowel chart]]
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|This chart shows the relationship between different vowels according to the International Phonetics Alphabet.
 
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|Lawful Neutral
 
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|Phase diagram
 
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|A phase chart shows the temperature and pressure points where a material changes phase.  The diagram included is the phase chart for water, which exists in three phases (ice, liquid water, steam) depending on it's temperature and pressure.  Phase charts are useful as the relationship is not always linear.  For example, the air pressure of Mars is such that there is no temperature at which liquid water can exist.  Water exists as ice until the temperature reaches a point where it sublimates directly into steam.
 
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Revision as of 11:57, 6 January 2020

Alignment Chart Alignment Chart
I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."
Title text: I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."

Explanation

Ambox notice.png This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created using the BOT template. Needs explanations of each alignment chart, and probably some editing for clarity.
If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

In the most general sense, an alignment chart is a meme template consisting of a blank chart or graph that can be used to categorize a set of related things (fictional characters, types of people, habits, everyday objects, abstract concepts, etc.) into different "alignments" representing morality or a vague "energy" or "vibe". Alignment chart templates are intended to be used over and over to plot different sets of things into those same categories. The original alignment chart is based on the Dungeons and Dragons alignment system, which classifies morality along two axes, one from Lawful to Neutral to Chaotic and the other from Good to Neutral to Evil, giving a three-by-three grid with nine categories. This format is still one of the most common, but numerous additional templates have been devised. Many keep the three-by-three grid structure but replace the lawful-neutral-chaotic and good-neutral-evil axes with others, such as distinguished-functional-disaster vs. gay-bi-lesbian and edgy-depressed-dumbass vs. bitch-thot-bastard. Some alignment charts use other systems of classification, like the McDonald's alignment chart, which is a ternary diagram, a way of plotting data points by the relative proportions of three components in them on a triangular plot.

This comic claims to be a meta-alignment chart, where nine "alignment charts" are themselves sorted into the nine Dungeons and Dragons alignments, following the use of alignment charts to humorously classify abstract concepts. However, these "alignment charts" are mostly diagrams used in academic classifications, which are being treated as if they were blank meme templates. There are two levels of absurdity here: first, the idea of using these technical scientific diagrams to classify things they were never intended to, like fictional characters or how people bag their bread, and second, the idea of assigning (facetious) moral weights to each of these classification systems.

In many pen and paper RPG games, particularly in Dungeons and Dragons, every character has an alignment, which is a sort of a personality archetype. A common way to denote alignment is to use two perpendicular axes, each axis having three words; the alignment of a particular character is a combination of one word from each axis. The two axes are:

  • Lawful/neutral/chaotic: this axis says whether a character is strongly devoted to, indifferent about, or categorically opposed to following the rule of the law.
  • Good/neutral/evil: this axis says whether a character is generally inclined to commit good deeds or evil deeds.

For example, a character's alignment can be "chaotic neutral". It means that they don't care about the existing order of the world, what is good and what is evil, what is allowed and what is prohibited. They're very prone to acting on emotions, and their actions often seem to be lacking rhyme or reason. There are nine possible alignments - any combination of the two axes is allowed. A character with the "neutral neutral" alignment is called a true neutral.

An alignment chart is a grid that divides the alignments, usually for the purpose of putting descriptions or particular characters on it. In this comic, Randall put on the alignment chart different kinds of charts that divide things into groups (which can be thought of as a generalized idea of the alignment chart - hence "alignment chart alignment chart", i.e. alignment chart of alignment charts.)

Alignment Chart Explanation
Lawful Good Soil chart
Neutral Good Punnett square
Chaotic Good [vowel chart] This chart shows the relationship between different vowels according to the International Phonetics Alphabet.
Lawful Neutral Phase diagram A phase chart shows the temperature and pressure points where a material changes phase. The diagram included is the phase chart for water, which exists in three phases (ice, liquid water, steam) depending on it's temperature and pressure. Phase charts are useful as the relationship is not always linear. For example, the air pressure of Mars is such that there is no temperature at which liquid water can exist. Water exists as ice until the temperature reaches a point where it sublimates directly into steam.
True Neutral Alignment chart
Chaotic Neutral CIE chromacity diagram
Lawful Evil Political compass
Neutral Evil QAPF rock diagram
Chaotic Evil Omnispace classifier Probably self-referential humour, in that the diagram created for this comic is considered to be chaotically evil.

Transcript

Ambox notice.png This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.


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Discussion

OK, hope someone will now explain it after I created this page. I'm lost on this one ;-) --Kynde (talk) 10:49, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Arrgh, edit conflict! Kev (talk) 11:55, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the Punnet Square is also a meme template...162.158.154.229 15:59, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

I vaguely remember Randall to refer to the clay-sand diagram (or whatever it is called) as his all time favorite diagram on what-if somewhere. --Lupo (talk) 12:35, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

You vaguely remember "Starsand" from https://what-if.xkcd.com/83/ with the quote "Fortunately, there's a wonderful chart by the US Geologic Survey that answers all these questions and more. For some reason, I find this chart very satisfying—it's like the erosion geology edition of the electromagnetic spectrum chart." directly applicabe to this chartTier666 (talk) 17:57, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

I fear any attempt to "explain" the CIE chromaticity diagram will devolve into arguments about why Randall chose it. I have found that folks outside the world of optics or neurooptical studies have a hard time understanding why the raw colors available in single wavelengths comprise that short curvy line inside the full colorspace. The way our brain processes the relative signal strengths from the different types of retinal cones is quite amazing. Cellocgw (talk) 12:57, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

CGW I'm shocked! Surely you know that single-wavelengths are the curvy outer boundary while the inner curvy line shows the response to blackbody spectra. ;-) -Fred 173.245.52.61 19:55, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for that; I was about to question the statement myself. All in all, I feel the current explanation of the chromaticity diagram doesn't really explain much, and seems unnecessarily biased to boot. I know just enough about chromaticity to think it's wrong but not enough to correct it. LtPowers (talk) 19:58, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
I agree that explanation isn't great, if it's not improved when I have free time tonight I'll take a stab at it. Or maybe CelloCGW will, since he IS an optics guru (which is why I had to raz him).173.245.52.61 20:13, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

@Fred - mea culpa. I should think before writing. Fortunately :-), the ratio of the colorspace to any 1-dimensional line's area is still infinite! Cellocgw (talk) 20:33, 6 January 2020 (UTC) .... now that someone did post some explanation of CIE, more comments. The current CIE spec may be paywalled, but it has changed little if at all over the last 40 or 50 years, so it's not all that hard to get the values. There are several sites (naturally I've lost the URLs) which provide algos to convert HSM to RGB to HSV and so on. See Wikipedia, https://law.resource.org/pub/us/cfr/ibr/003/cie.15.2004.tables.xls , and similar repositories Cellocgw (talk) 20:44, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

I redid the CIE explanation - focusing on describing the diagram, rather than one thing it might get used for (e.g. black body). I think the diagrams on the right are labeled chaotic because they are not some neat geometric shape over-all. I didn't really follow much of what was there, so feel free to revive some of it if it seems useful. (My background in color theory comes from computer science and graphics, rather than from physics or hardware design.) 162.158.107.201 00:57, 7 January 2020 (UTC)
It's better! Though it might be nice to explain what the x and y coordinates on the CIE diagram represent. (I personally have no clue, even after perusing Wikipedia.) As for chaoticness and shape, really CN and CE are the one two that aren't simple geometric shapes; even CG is a trapezoid. LtPowers (talk) 15:04, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm only familiar with 4th and 5th edition, but should the "Good/neutral/evil:" axis eplanation be changed to "selfless deeds or selfish deeds"? Good and evil are highly subjective ("One person's 'freedom fighter' is another person's 'terrorist'.") but at least in 5e the axis is explained as risking/sacrificing yourself for the benefit of others (Good) vs. sacrificing others for your own benefit (Evil). Also, the explanation of the CN character may benefit from dividing which parts of the explanation are "chatoic" vs "neutral". Finally the "lacking rhyme or reason" part of chaotic is highly debated within D&D circles. There are certainly people who play that way, but there are also others who feel that chaotic characters have just as much motivation and goals as a lawful or neutral character just that part of their motivation is to act contrarily to Tradition/Authority. 162.158.186.54 14:37, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

It seems from this page that even nerds tend to interpret the alignment system by the ‘common sense’ meaning of the names instead of the detailed explanation. I once simply went through the Wikipedia article, which cited the second edition IIRC: ‘lawful’ means sticking to some code of conduct, whereas ‘chaotic’ is a pure opportunist or behaves randomly. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ indeed mean selfless vs selfish deeds, but afaik in one of the official explanations ‘evil’ meant exercising authority over others—so all managers would be ‘evil’ automatically. Aasasd (talk) 16:42, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

I am not sure the phase diagram is for Water - that has nine solid phases. Surely it is merely a simple example. Arachrah (talk) 16:52, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

As an interesting note, this comic's alt-text also ends with a period inside of a quote. This was discussed at length in the previous comic. Agrasin (talk) 16:52, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm just upset that both a soil diagram and the QAPF were included, but not the TAS. Where's the love for extrusive igneous rocks? Mergelong (talk) 18:22, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

BTW, I offer my condolences and wish luck to the person who's going to make a transcript of this comic. Aasasd (talk) 22:28, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

"lawful heterozygous silty liquid" Is this not him being Lawfull, having inherited different forms of a particular gene from each parent, and basically a bag full of salt water? Nappy (talk) 07:51, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

A phase diagram was also used in https://what-if.xkcd.com/138/ 162.158.89.7 08:23, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

The phase diagrams for oxygen and radon look similar to the Lawful Neutral one here. 172.68.34.166 23:06, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Is it coincidence that the evil chaotic diagram looks a bit like a brain? --162.158.158.9 10:52, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Made a "real" one using actual picts from the internet based on this comic ... but ALSO using his comic. Meta, meta, meta, maybe? https://imgur.com/gallery/CagOh8s

I'm fairly certain that Randall is classifying himself using the Omnispace classifier, rather than referencing "the true neutral, neutral good, lawful good, and lawful neutral charts in the Alignment Chart Alignment Chart." as the current description suggests. If you look at the Omnispace classifier, Silt, Liquid, Heterozygous, and Lawful Good all share a common point on the chart. 172.69.68.207 17:55, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

It is unclear to me why the explanation claims that the chart in the comic is missing the low central vowel ä. The official IPA chart does not include this vowel, and the use of a diaresis to indicate centralization, like all other diacritics for indicating relative articulation, are given in a separate section from the main chart. Granted, the vowel chart on Wikipedia does include ä, but there is no reason that we should expect XKCD to do the same. That said, the omission of ɐ is quite odd, and seems to be an error. -- IcarusProblem (talk) 01:40, 12 December 2023 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Omnispace Classifier

I think the Omnispace Classifier is meant to be a horrific Frankenstein amalgamation of the other 8 kinds of chart. Theoretically it can "classify anything" since it can classify anything the other 8 can, but practically it would obviously be totally useless, or at least a lot less useful than just using the specific chart that works for the situation. Pureawes0me (talk) 12:09, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

In the description of the Omnispace Classifier, saying "the diagram created for this comic is considered to be chaotically evil." is wrong. The diagram created for this comic is not an Omnispace Classifier, it is an alignment chart. It's even in the title "Alignment Chart Alignment Chart". Pureawes0me (talk) 14:11, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

I concur. LtPowers (talk) 15:04, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

I feel the "Omnispace Classifier" is actually chaotic evil due to its mishmash of axes, which change randomly in topic and direction depending where you look on the graph. --GoldNinja (talk) 17:43, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Chart Position Rationale

The page currently tries to explain each chart's position based on the content of the chart, e.g. the political compass chart is lawful because politics relates to laws. I think this is wrong: the charts are arranged based on their properties as charts. It's not based on whatever it is they represent. This feels more in character with how Randall tends to do things. It also avoids making a bunch of value judgments about various topics. Khaim (talk) 23:05, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Possible explanations for each chart:

  • Soil chart: Information-dense, continuous, triangular
  • Punnett square: Simple, square
  • IPA vowel chart: Irregular shape
  • Phase diagram: Square, continuous
  • Alignment chart: "A is A"
  • CIE chromaticity diagram: Irregular shape, curved, nonlinear
  • Political compass: Square (lawful), highly subjective, not very useful
  • QAPF rock diagram: Diamond shape is misleading since it's actually two ternary charts stuck together, not very useful (unless you're a geologist?)
  • Omnispace classifier: Totally made up, irregular, completely useless

Khaim (talk) 23:31, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree with this, and it's how I first interpreted the comic.--GoldNinja (talk) 23:40, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
Well, the point is to make any connection to both axis of the chart. Your explanations do not do that properly either. e.g. for IPA vowel chart "Irregular shape" does not explain why it would be considered "good", while it is one of maybe more possible reasons for being considered chaotic. --Lupo (talk) 07:39, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

XKCD Alignment Chart

A while back, I was searching for an XKCD alignment chart, with no success, so I made one. It is not perfect, so I'm wondering what other opinions on the alignment of the characters are.

Lawful Good- Beret

Neutral Good- Ponytail

Chaotic Good- Mrs. Roberts


Lawful Neutral-Cueball

Neutral Neutral- Megan

Chaotic Neutral- White hat


Lawful Evil- Hairy

Neutral Evil- Danish

Chaotic Evil- Black Hat

--Fallencrow305 (talk) 22:10, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

What about Help I'm trapped in a drivers license factory Elaine Roberts? --JayRulesXKCD (talk) 15:48, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Or Hairbun? Or Science Girl? Here are my predictions: Elaine - Chaotic Good, Hairbun - Lawful Good, Science Girl - Lawful Neutral --JayRulesXKCD (talk) 16:00, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
What? How can Beret Guy be anything other than chaotic?— -- [[User:|]] ([[User talk:|talk]]) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
You did:
Lawful Neutral Chaotic
Good Beret Ponytail Mrs. Roberts
Neutral Cueball Megan White Hat
Evil Hairy Danish Black Hat
While False (speak | museum) 18:10, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

...while I see the slight logic of moving the above section away from the Main Page "Talk", it is only associated with this Explanation by having a common subject. Perhaps should have been re-asserted under a suitable bit of the Community Portal, or the (Talk of the) umbrella page for all characters? 172.70.86.147 15:54, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the Punnett square is neutral because the effect of a genetic combination can be good (resistance to HIV) or evil (Huntington disease). Nitpicking (talk) 03:36, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I object to the soil chart being lawful good. Two of the categories are concave. You can mix sandy loam with sandy loam and get loam, or silt loam with silt loam and get silt. DanielLC (talk) 07:15, 1 March 2024 (UTC)