thomblake comments on 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey - Less Wrong

77 Post author: Yvain 01 November 2011 06:28PM

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Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 11:02:45PM 5 points [-]

There's an established way of correcting for this in market research (and other fields): coding. Let's say you have the following list:

  1. utilitarian
  2. deontologist
  3. virtue ethics
  4. other (please specify)

Then you have someone go through all the typed-in responses, and when someone types in "special snowflake utilitarian" you code that as a 1 rather than a 4.

This is also done for completely open-end responses. Sometimes something like "additional comments" will on the back end look like:

  1. positive
  2. negative
  3. neutral