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Roko comments on Aspergers Poll Results: LW is nerdier than the Math Olympiad? - Less Wrong
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Comments (33)
The bigger response bias problem comes from the fact that the survey was presented as a survey about Asperger's, which means that people who are on the autism spectrum probably tended to be more interested in it and more likely to respond to the survey. For instance, a survey about sexual orientation at Cognitive Daily found that rates of homosexuality increased from about 5% of respondents when the sexuality question was tacked on to an unrelated survey to about 15% when the poll was advertised as being about sexual orientation.
Perhaps LW should develop a convention for having surveys where the purpose of the survey isn't explained until after people have taken it.
It's hard to say, since the new set of respondents could have the same selection bias. They would be people who 1) opened your "Do you have High-Functioning Asperger's Syndrome?" post, 2) read the last paragraph of the post which mentioned the poll, 3) considered taking the poll but didn't, 4) opened this post about the Asperger's poll (or re-opened your previous post) and saw your request, and 5) decided to comply with your request and take the poll. Steps 1, 2, and 4 all seem likely to select for high-AQ people; steps 3 & 5 might shift your sample in the opposite direction but probably not as strongly (although the explicit concerns about nonresponse bias could make low-AQ people especially motivated to take the survey to counteract that bias).
To answer your question, I'll guess that the new mean will be slightly lower than the first result but not by much. Let's say a mean of 25 for your new sample, and a mean of 21 if we ever give this survey to a representative sample of the LW community (or at least a sample that doesn't know that the survey is about Asperger's).