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Yoreth comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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I have some half-baked ideas about getting interesting information on lesswronger's political opinions.
My goal is to give everybody an "alien's eye" view of their opinions, something like "You hold position Foo on issue Bar, and justify it by the X books you read on Bar; but among the sample people who read X or more books on Bar, 75% hold position ~Foo, suggesting that you are likely to be overconfident".
Something like collecting:
your positions on various issues
your confidence in that position
how important various characteristics are at predicting correct opinions on that issue (intelligence, general education, reading on the issue, age ("general experience"), specific work or life experience with the issue, etc.)
How well you fare on those characteristics
Whether you expect to be above or below average (for LessWrong) on those characteristics
How many lesswrongers you expect will disagree with you on that issue
Whether you expect those who disagree with you to be above or below average on the various characteristics
How much you would be willing to change your mind if you saw surprising information
What data we could get from that
Problems with this approach:
Politics is the mind-killer. We may not want too much (or any) politics on LessWrong. If the data is collected anonymously, this may not be a huge problem.
It's easier to do data-mining etc. with multiple-choice questions rather than with open-ended questions (because two people never answer the same thing, so it leaves space to interpretation), but doing that correctly requires very good advance knowledge of what possible answers exist.
Questions would be veeery carefully phrased.
Ideally I would want confidence factors for all answers, but the end result may be too intimidating :P (And discourage people from answering, which makes a small sample size, which means questionable results).
I would certainly be interested in seeing the result of such a survey, but for now my idea is too rough to be actionable - any suggestions ? Comments ?
You may like the Correct Contrarian Cluster.
In general I'd be interested in more specific and subtle data on political views than is normally given. In particular, on what issues do people tend to break with their own party or ideology? That's a simpler answer than you're asking, but easily tested.
Oh, and I would probably want to add something on political affiliation - mostly because I expect a lot of "I believe Foo because I researched the issue / am very smart; others believe ~Foo because of their political affiliation"; but also because "I believe Foo and have researched it well, even though it goes against the grain of my general political affiliation" may be good evidence for Foo.
How do you propose to determine what constitutes a 'correct' opinion on any given controversial issue?
I don't :)
If there is a disagreement on, say, the status of Taiwan, even someone who doesn't know much it might agree that some good predictors would agree that some good predictors would be "knowledge of the history of Taiwan", "Having lived in Taiwan", "Familiarity with Chinese culture", etc.
And it can be interesting to see whether:
People of different opinions consider different predictors as important (conveniently, those that favor their position)
Everyone agrees on which predictors are important, but those who score highly on those predictors have a different opinion from those that score lowly (which would be evidence that they are probably right)
Everyone agrees on which predictors are important, but even among those who score highly on those predictors, opinions are split.
I guess what I'm getting at is "If you take the outside view, how likely is it that your opinions are true"?
The only way that makes any sense, see how closely they match her own! :)