Interpretations

An assistant's profile is eleven numbers. Eleven numbers are precise and almost impossible to hold in your head, and they do not tell you what kind of thing you are looking at.

So the same position gets described in several different vocabularies. Each one is a frame: an existing, well-developed language for describing character, onto which the measured position is projected. The numbers never change. What changes is the vocabulary you read them in, and each vocabulary makes a different thing visible.

Why more than one

A single frame would quietly become the answer.

If this site only reported Schwartz values, the natural conclusion would be that assistants really are configurations of human values, and the frame would stop being a description and start being a claim about what these systems are. Using several frames at once keeps them in their place. When the same assistant reads as high self-direction in one vocabulary, low authority in another, and Athena in a third, it becomes obvious that none of those is the thing itself. They are three angles on one position.

Multiple frames also let you choose the right tool. A comparison that is invisible in one vocabulary is often obvious in another, and a frame that flatters an assistant in one language will not necessarily flatter it in the next.

A frame is worth having when it satisfies three conditions: it was developed independently, by people who had never heard of this measurement; it is internally structured, so that its categories mean something in relation to each other; and it is legible, so a reader recognises the vocabulary without being taught it first.

The scientific frames

These come from published academic work. Their categories were defined by researchers for their own purposes, which is exactly what makes them useful here: nobody chose them to fit these results.

Schwartz basic values (10 categories) is the most widely used map of human values in cross-cultural psychology. It covers achievement, benevolence, conformity, hedonism, power, security, self-direction, stimulation, tradition and universalism, arranged so that adjacent values are compatible and opposite ones conflict. It is the best frame for reading what an assistant treats as worth pursuing.

Moral foundations (6 categories) maps the intuitions underneath moral judgement: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity and liberty. Where Schwartz asks what someone wants, this asks what strikes them as wrong. It is the sharpest frame for the justice and compassion dimensions, because it separates styles of moral reasoning that a single score blurs together.

Big Five poles (10 categories) is the dominant model in personality research, split here into its high and low ends so that both directions are visible rather than one being merely the absence of the other. It is the frame most readers already have intuitions about, which makes it a good place to start and a poor place to stop.

The narrative frames

The academic vocabularies are precise and slightly bloodless. Character has been described for far longer in stories, and those descriptions carry information that a category label does not: how a disposition behaves under pressure, what it costs, how it fails.

Odyssey figures (9) draws on a single work in which nearly every major character is defined by a distinctive way of handling difficulty — Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Circe, Nestor, Tiresias, Nausicaa, Alcinous, Eumaeus. Coming from one text, the roster is unusually coherent: the figures were written in relation to each other.

The Greek pantheon (12) uses the canonical Olympians. Gods are useful here for a specific reason: each is an unusually pure concentration of a single disposition, which makes them well suited to describing a position as a mixture. Saying that an assistant reads as part Athena and part Hephaestus says something a single label cannot.

The Norse pantheon (9) does the same work in a tradition with different preoccupations, which is the point of having it. Norse figures are shaped by constraint and consequence rather than domain and authority, so an assistant that looks straightforward in Greek terms can look quite different here. Where the two pantheons disagree, the disagreement is informative.

Each pantheon is kept on its own map. Mixing traditions produces a roster whose figures were never in conversation with one another, and comparisons across it mean less than they appear to.

How a frame is built

Every frame is fitted the same way, from the same frozen source material, so that differences between frames come from the frames and not from the method.

Each figure or category is described in a written portrait. Those portraits are scored on the same eleven dimensions as an assistant, using the same instrument, which puts figures and assistants in the same space and makes the comparison meaningful rather than metaphorical. An assistant's mixture is then its proximity to each figure, weighted so that close resemblances dominate and distant ones fade out rather than smearing everything toward the middle.

The frames differ in how their portraits were sourced, and each map says which applies to it. The scientific frames derive from published definitions. The narrative frames were drafted from scholarly traditions, and the Odyssey figures rest on the narrowest sourcing of any frame here.

What a frame is not

A frame is a description, never an identity. This site will say that an assistant's profile projects onto the Greek map as a particular mixture. It will not say that an assistant is Athena, and the difference is not pedantry: the first is a statement about distance in a measured space, the second is a claim about what something is.

Nothing in any frame ever feeds back into measurement. The scenarios and the scoring have no knowledge of values, foundations, poles or gods, and an automated check enforces that. You can ignore every frame on this site and read the eleven dimensions directly without losing anything.