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thomblake comments on The Correct Contrarian Cluster - Less Wrong
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I don't think that QM, P-Zombies and Many Worlds are good examples at all. Frankly, I tend to think that the use of nuance, the use of careful distinctions between proposed hypotheses rather than the endorsement of slogans is a very good sign. For precisely this reason, however, I thought that http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/what_do_philoso.html was a fantastically useless survey. If you summarize a philosophical debate in a slogan and ask people for a 'yes/no' answer you should expect the best thinkers to be able to explain exactly what would cause people to endorse each side and how those causes establish or fail to establish correspondence to reality.
I don't see what's "useless" about it; at least, I hear a lot of speculation about what sorts of things philosophers generally think, and there hasn't previously been a good dataset for that.
A related concern is that I've run into a lot of philosophers who think that "practically nobody" believes X, where X is one or another view on a major philosophical question. For example, I sat in a car with a compatibilist and a believer in libertarian free will, each of whom thought their view was nearly universal amongst philosophers. It was an eye-opening experience that maybe a lot of people will have looking at results like this. Even if it's not representative of philosophers in general, it points out that the number of philosophers who (for instance) "Accept non-physicalism" is not "approximately 0".
Of course, I might be slightly biased since my dissertation is in part a piece of experimental philosophy, and in part because I'm happy to see that virtue ethics won.
No, it wasn't a competition, and yes, it is now.