2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
The final straw was noticing a comment referring to "the most recent survey I know of" and realizing it was from May 2009. I think it is well past time for another survey, so here is one now.
I've tried to keep the structure of the last survey intact so it will be easy to compare results and see changes over time, but there were a few problems with the last survey that required changes, and a few questions from the last survey that just didn't apply as much anymore (how many people have strong feelings on Three Worlds Collide these days?)
Please try to give serious answers that are easy to process by computer (see the introduction). And please let me know as soon as possible if there are any security problems (people other than me who can access the data) or any absolutely awful questions.
I will probably run the survey for about a month unless new people stop responding well before that. Like the last survey, I'll try to calculate some results myself and release the raw data (minus the people who want to keep theirs private) for anyone else who wants to examine it.
Like the last survey, if you take it and post that you took it here, I will upvote you, and I hope other people will upvote you too.
Loading…
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (694)
Thanks for doing this, I just took it. With the gender question, in addition to the transgender questions, it's maximally inclusive to include a non-binary "genderqueer" option.
Thanks for putting this together, Yvain! Recommendation to the Powers That Be: promote this to the main page so that more people notice it.
For non-lurking time, there's no need to ask, is there? Just pull the signup dates from the user database for everyone who has posted recently.
Unless you changed accounts at some point.
The "Anti-Agathics" question is ambiguous:
Two possible meanings (which, at least for me, would result in very different numbers):
Given a randomly selected person living at this moment, what is the probability that they will reach an age of one thousand years?
What is the probability that at least one person living at this moment will reach an age of one thousand years?
I believe the 2nd one is intended, though I agree with you that switching to something like "at least one" would make it unambiguous.
I'm ready to hit the "submit" button as soon as Yvain confirms (or denies) this...
Oh, dear. I assumed he meant the first one.
Another ambiguity: Does the anti-agathics mean 1000 consecutive years, or does it include successful cryonics as a special case?
Assume 1000 animated years. :)
That's what I figured out.
I'd be interested to know what proportion gave an estimate for 1000 year lifespans which is at least as high as their estimate for revival from cryonics.
I suppose it's possible that suspended animation is incompatible with great longevity for those alive now, but it's hard to think of a mechanism. Perhaps genetic modification is required for longevity, and the tech for revival can't simulate that.
Hypothetical: if that were the case, would it be better not to thaw out cryonics patients as soon as it becomes possible to, in the hopes that the longevity problem would be solved in the future?
I suppose it depends on how likely rejuvenation is to be solved. If it's looking unsolvable, then reviving the person asap makes sense-- there's probably less culture shock in dealing with a less distant future.
Hm. This was my position before, and apparently I forgot about it when assigning my probability for the anti-aging question. Oops.
This question also heavily depends on the irrelevant fact of whether FAI should keep variants of original individuals, or there is something better that it should therefore do instead. In 1000 years, it's FAI or bust, so this directly controls the answer. But presumably motivation for this question is "Will the future be good in this here sense?", while the estimate is lower if the future can be even better...
I took the survey :3
For the gender question it may make sense to have a generic "other" option. The monogamous/polygamous question should also maybe have a no preference option also.
Edit: And finished.
Agree, especially with regard to mono/poly question.
Nearly forgot; I did complete it. Thanks for your work, Yvain!
I think it is generally good to avoid "other" options as much as possible.
There are a few biases related to filling questionnaires. For example, many psychological tests ask you the same question twice, in opposite direction. (Question #13 "Do you think Singularity will happen?" Question #74: "Do you think Singularity will never happen?") This is because some people use heuristics "when unsure, say yes" and some other people use heuristics "when unsure, say no". So when you get two "yes" answers or two "no" answers to opposite forms of the question, you know that the person did not really answer the question.
Another bias is that when given three choices "yes", "no" and "maybe", some people will mostly choose "yes" or "no" answers, while others will prefer "maybe" answers. It does not necesarily mean that they have different opinions on the subject. It may possibly mean that they both think "yes, with 80% certainty", but for one of them this means "yes", and for the other one this means "maybe". So instead of measuring their opinions on the subject, you are measuring their opinions on how much certainty is necessary to answer "yes" or "no" in the questionnaire.
Perhaps in some situations the "other" option is necessary, because for some people none of the available options is good even as a very rough approximation. But I think it should be used very carefully, because it encourages the "I am a special snowflake" bias. For example, if someone has no sexual feelings at all, then of course the "monogamy or polygamy" question does not make sense for them. But if it is "I like the idea of being in love with one special person, but I also like the idea of having sexual access to many attractive people" then IMHO this attitude does not deserve a separate category and can be rounded towards one of the choices.
There are a number of types of snowflakes.
If you decide in advance that you aren't going to listen to anyone who doesn't fit your categories, you might be missing something.
You can have:
a) a survey, where everyone's individual differences are rounded into a few given categories;
b) a collection of blog articles, where everyone describes themselves exactly as they desire; or
c) a kind of survey, where some participants send a blog article instead of data.
Both (a) and (b) are valid options, each of them serves a different purpose. I would prefer to avoid (c), because it tries to do both things at the same time, and accomplishes neither. An answer "other" sometimes means "no answer is even approximately correct", but sometimes is just means "I prefer to send you a blog article instead of survey data". The first objection is valid, and is IMHO equivalent to simply not answering that question. The second objection seems more like refusing the idea of statistics. Statistics does not mean that people who gave the same answer are all perfectly alike, but ignoring the minor differences allows us to see the forest instead of the trees.
I guess the "special snowflake bias" is officially called "narcissism of small differences". The psychological foundation is that we have a need of identity, which is threatened by similar things, not different ones. So when something is similar to us, but not the same, we exaggerate the difference and downplay the similarity. From outside view we are probably less different than from inside view.
That last varies-- sometimes people are exaggerating differences which are pretty meaningless. Sometimes the people setting up the classifications actually have an incomplete picture of the existing categories.
Many, according to some.
(Of course to actually get the answer, you would presumably have to...take a survey. :-) )
I still find myself thinking about Three Worlds Collide from time to time. The alienness of the aliens and the alienness of the humans (legalized rape?) made an impression.
I have a feeling that some people might answer some of the "what is P(...)?" with a probability rather than a percentage (i.e. 0.5 when they actually mean 50%). (I almost did it myself)
(EDIT: However, some people (such as myself) also used 0.5 to mean 0.5%, so an automatic conversion is probably impossible.)
Oh whoops. I did this. Worst of all, I noticed that he wanted percentages, and forgot to go back and change it...
Hopefully this is obvious to see and for him to fix...
Argh, I did it too. Fix mine too please?
I also almost did this. Repeatedly.
Shouldn't you ask when the respondent thinks the Singularity will occur before mentioning the year 2100, to avoid anchoring?
This is great! I hope there's a big response.
It seems likely you're going to get skewed answers for the IQ question. Mostly it's the really intelligent and the below average who get (professional) IQ tests - average people seem less likely to get them.
I predict high average IQ, but low response rate on the IQ question, which will give bad results. Can you tell us how many people respond to that question this time? (no. of responses isn't registered on the previous survey)
I predict with 70% certainty that we will get an IQ in the range of 140-145 again, though I think it will be a bit lower than last time. I'm very surprised if it's outside 130-150.
(Also took the survey. Would like more "other" options so I can ramble about my totally different opinions on many issues, but whatever.)
Oh wow, is that what the IQ average was last time? Can I update my probability that mine will be higher?
Last survey in 2009:
Awesome. I said my IQ was 140 and 50% probability that I was higher than average, because I figured I'd be almost exactly average.
(I hope you didn't actually put "140ish", right?)
I'm actually surprised the lower bound on the previous survey was 120. I would have figured more of a U-shaped curve.
I put 140. Fixed.
Are we encouraged to estimate IQ from SAT tests and the like? That's what I did. That could reduce the excluded-middle bias that Gedusa mentions.
I didn't think of that - given that a huge chuck here have probably taken such tests, if Yvain allowed such an estimation, it would be very helpful.
Yes! That's what I was thinking of :)
I've never taken an IQ test, so when I was responded to the survey I considered estimating my IQ based on my SAT and GRE scores. The result, according to the site torekp linked to, is surprisingly high (150+). I think I'm smart, but not that smart. Anyone have any idea if these estimators should be trusted at all?
What is your evidence?
I am not trying to convince you either way, but in my experience people aren't very good at estimating their own IQ.
My IQ according to the estimator would put me in the 99.995th percentile, but it seems to me that at least 5% of my friends and acquaintances are at least as smart as me. Part of this is probably selection bias, but I doubt that could account for it completely. I don't move in particularly exalted circles.
EDIT: If you had asked me to estimate my IQ before I consulted the website, I would have said 135. I'd probably still say that, actually. I'm guessing the GRE-to-IQ conversion is useless above some ceiling.
Well, not with that attitude.
The scores are highly correlated. One must assume those charts are from a reliable source. So... yes?
Does the correlation remain if you conditionalize on, say, having an IQ higher than 130?
I wouldn't trust it. My GRE estimated IQ by that is wildly higher than my professionally measured IQ.
Also check out:
I've only got the one data point, but my tested IQ is within a couple points of what that site predicts from my SAT score. I took the tests almost a decade apart, though, so this could be coincidental; scores for both tests aren't that stable over that kind of timeframe, I don't think.
My (limited) background knowledge is that SATs, GREs, etc. are designed for people near the average, and give imprecise results for the highest IQs. You're probably in that range the tests aren't very good for.
I underwent a real IQ test when I was young, and so I can say that this estimation significantly overshoots my actual score. But that's because it factors in test-taking as a skill (one that I'm good at). Then again, I'm also a little shocked that the table on that site puts an SAT score of 1420 at the 99.9th percentile. At my high school there were, to my knowledge, at least 10 people with that high of a score (and that's only those I knew of), not to mention one perfect score. This is out of ~700 people. Does that mean my school was, on average, at the 90th percentile of intelligence? Or just at the 90th percentile of studying hard (much more likely I think).
And of course, there are also SAT prep services which offer guarantees of raising your score by such and such an amount (my mother thought I ought to try working for one, given my own SAT scores and the high pay, but I don't want to join the Dark Side and work in favor of more inequality of education by income,) and these services are almost certainly not raising their recipients' IQs.
I think it would be more informative to ask people to take one specific online test, now, and report their score. With everyone taking the same test, even if it's miscalibrated, people could at least see how they compare to other LWers. Asking people to remember a score they were given years ago is just going to produce a ridiculous amount of bias.
Are there any free, non-spam-causlng, online IQ tests that produce reasonable results (i.e. correlate strongly to standard IQ tests)?
No chance.
To calibrate a serious IQ test, you need to test (1) many (2) randomly selected people in (3) controlled environment; and when the test is ready, you must test your subjects in the same environment.
Online calibration or even online testing fail the condition 3. Conditions 1 and 2 make creating of a test very expensive. This is why only a few serious IQ tests exist. And even those would not be considered valid when administered online.
And there is also huge prior probability that an online IQ test is a scam. So even if they would provide some explanation of how they fulfilled the conditions 1, 2, 3, I still would not trust them.
Yes - I'm quoting an IQ test I did as a kid which had a suspiciously high score, I'm pretty confident I'd get a much less spectacular score if I did one today.
Awesome. Definitely don't do another one then. (Unless you need to diagnose something of course!)
It's a bit late now, but if you recommend a particular test that's valid, short, and online, I can try that on the next survey.
There are two ways an IQ test can fail: a) it can be miscalibrated; b) it can measure something else than IQ.
If you only want to know your percentile in LW population, (a) is not a problem, but (b) remains. What if the test does not measure the "general intelligence factor", but something else? It can partly correlate to IQ, and partly to something else, e.g. mathematical or verbal skills.
Also you have a preselection bias -- some LWers will fill the survey, others won't.
For myself I took my result to the Mensa online pre-test, that I did for the purpose of calibrating myself a few years ago. It's not a fully professional test (and not done in test situation), but I consider it valid enough to be more than pure noise.
I was wondering if the IQ-calibration question was referring to reported or actual IQ. It seems to be the latter, but the former would be much more fun to think about.
Also, are so many LWers comfortable estimating with high confidence that they are in the 99.9th percentile? Or even higher? Is this community really that smart? I mean, I know I'm smarter than the majority of people I meet, but 999 out of every 1000? Or am I just being overly enthusiastic in correcting for cognitive bias?
I'd estimate with high confidence that I'm higher than that. Subjectively, I've only met a couple of people in my life who seem definitely smarter than me. And I've barely met anyone who was malnourished or lacking in education. That said, there is the "everyone else is stupid" bias.
ETA: In case it wasn't clear from the outset, on the outside view, most people with this notion are wrong, and there's a recursive problem in justifying that I'm special. But intelligence tests, though imperfect, are a good hint.
I'm not contradicting you at all, but I'm just curious: how do you know that you are smarter than virtually everyone you meet? If there is anything more to it than an intuition, I'd love to know about it. I've always wondered if there was some secret smart-person handshake that I wasn't privy to.
Personally, I'd say the lower 80 or 90% immediately identify themselves as such, but beyond that I try to give others the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they aren't interested in the conversation, don't want to seem intelligent, or or just plain out of my leauge. I don't value humility very highly at all; but there aren't many things that would convince me I or someone else was demonstrably in the top fraction of the top percentile.
Also, I've been intuitively aware of the optimism bias for as long as I can remember, and estimates like ".1% and 99.9%" trigger my skepticism module hard.
I was mostly going by the handshake.
I'd agree with that statement, revising it up to at least 95%. Once you've got it down to more than 19 in 20 people you meet being obviously-dumb, it's worth the effort to inspect the others more carefully, since it's always good having really smart people around.
I'm much more familiar with people thinking 95% is an orders-of-magnitude higher estimate than 80%, and so I tend to adjust others' carefully-thought-out estimates outward rather than inward, unless they are 0 or 1.
ETA: It's worth noting that one of the huge signals smart people give off is the "OMG you're talking about something that requires intelligence I'm so happy to have met a smart person because that happens to me less than 5% of the time" reaction, which if rarer than I think would significantly throw off my estimates.
There's no option for public sector (government) for Work Status. Non-profit may be misleading if it contains that as well.
Does lurking time count for "how long in the community"?
I don't remember that far back, so I used my earliest comment (imported from Overcoming Bias) as the date.
I counted it.
Err. I didn't count it.
It might be interesting to break up the question into "how long have you actively participated in the community" and "how long have you been reading the site".
I counted it.
I half-counted it. I counted from the time when I finally created an account at lesswrong.com.
I don't really understand why divorced would be separate from single and looking (or single and not looking, if the marriage was especially traumatizing). Also, one could be married and looking if one is polyamorous.
First thing I did upon completing the survey: looked up Principia Mathematica and gave a little whoop of self-congratulation.
First thing I did was look up Principia Mathematica and pat myself on the back for providing a sufficiently low confidence estimate.
At least I was in the right century.
Same thing. It's a calibration test, not a history trivia quiz.
I wasn't...
How far off were you?
One century. I said svsgrra svsgl I think. Or maybe svsgrra friragl svir. I don't remember.
Could you spell out those numbers in rot13? (It kinda gives it away.)
Actually, here: first is 'svsgrra svsgl' and second is 'svsgrra friragl svir'.
Good idea, thanks!
Huh. Apparently I was underconfident in that I was only 7 years off from the correct date and for the calibration estimated I was 65% sure I was within +/- 15.
My logic to get my year estimate:
Tnyvyrb qvrq gur fnzr lrne Arjgba jnf obea, naq ur fgnegrq qbvat fhofgnagvny jbex nebhaq fvkgrra uhaqerq. Vg gura gbbx gur Vadhvfvgvba n juvyr gb qb nalguvat naq ur fcrag znal lrnef haqre ubhfr neerfg. Fb Tnyvyrb pbhyq abg unir qvrq zhpu orsber fvkgrra guvegl. Fb Arjgba unq gb unir obea nebhaq fvkgrra guvegl gb fvkgrra sbegl. Arjgba jebgr Cevapvcvn jura ur jnf nyernql fbzrjung byq. Fb +sbegl lrnef tvirf nebhaq fvkgrra rvtugl. V jnf nyfb cerggl fher gung Cevapvcvn jnf choyvfurq fbzrgvzr va gur frpbaq unys bs gur friragrrgu praghel, fb gung jnf n (zvyq) pbafvfgrapl purpx. Ubjrire, V rkcrpgrq zl qngr gb or zber yvxryl bire engure guna haqre naq va guvf ertneq V jnf jebat.
That doesn't mean you were underconfident; with a confidence of 65% you are correct 65% of the time.
Yeah, but the fact that my estimate was pretty close to the correct date suggests that some underconfidence may have been at work. If someone had stated the exactly correct year, and had estimated only a 51% chance that they were in the correct zone, we'd probably look at them funny.
Maybe, but getting very close with low confidence is entirely possible with these estimation-calibration tasks: a uniformly chosen year between 1600-1800 could be the exact year but the confidence of such a guess is always 15%.
That's a good point. So a single data point like this doesn't really say much useful for my own calibration.
Yup. You might already know about it, but PredictionBook seems to get touted around here as a good method to calibrate oneself (although I haven't used it myself).
Yes, I've used it quite a bit. So far the main thing I've been convinced of from it is that my calibration is all over the place.
So, rot13 doesn't do much to obscure numbers.
Good point. I've replaced the numbers with numbers that have been spelled out so the rot13 does now obscure them.
My answer was 17 years off, and I gave 60% confidence. (Assuming a Gaussian distribution, 60% confidence for +/- 15 years means a standard deviation of 17.8 years, so I still was within 1 sigma.)
For myself I confused Newton's birth date and the date of the Principia Mathematica :/ So I was off more than 15 years, but still not too bad. I gave a 50% confidence to it, 15 years is too short on that time frame, my memory of dates isn't good enough.
I made a similar mistake.
Does a Gaussian distribution really make sense here?
As an approximation that makes calculations easier, I think it does (though it gives too high a probability to Newton publishing his book next week).
Not if for some reason you are nearly sure that it was before/after a certain date (which I wasn't); I felt that to a first approximation a normal distribution described my beliefs (as of the time I was answering) decently enough, but YMMV.
Certainly you're sure that Newton didn't live before 1000 AD and didn't survive to 1800 AD. Immediately a Gaussian prior can be improved, substantially. See Emile's comment above as well.
Meh. On a Gaussian prior of mean fvkgrra friragl, s.d. 18, knowing that it's between 1000 and 1800 (or even between fvkgrra uhaqerq and friragrra svsgl) doesn't change that much, does it.
(Edited to rot-13 the years... sorry for anyone who read them before taking the test.)
Would be nice if we could assign probabilities to the "morality" question instead of having to put ourselves firmly in one camp.
Good idea, and a good set of questions. However, while I might say I'm fairly knowledgeable about a few topics anywhere else, the feeling of going far out of my depth is one I associate strongly with LW. As an example, I would expect the list of those who could hold a heavy AI discussion with LW's resident experts to be about 5 people.
Also, "exists" when referring to the entire observable universe, makes me a bit tense. In our past light cone? In our future light cone? In a spacelike interval? It makes a big difference.
Composed entirely of LW's resident experts?
That ambiguity didn't even occur to me!
I think the phrasing there will probably cause weird effects. For example, it seems most LWers have only vague ideas of biology and medicine, and I can talk confidently with a biology researcher or physician of average ability, so I felt happy checking that box. If everyone reasons like me, we’ll see lots of checks in that box, not because people here are expert in biology and medicine, but because we aren’t.
Good point. It's sort of like the "guess 2/3 of the average guess" game, confounded by whatever dunning-kruger effect we enjoy.
Also, heavy discussions online are less cognitively stressful than heavy discussions at, say, a LW meetup (which we should still do sometime).
I took the survey. I'd really have liked an "other/no affiliation" option on the politics question, though, or a finer-grained scale. I suppose I could just have left it blank, but that seems not to transmit the right information.
I've encountered people online who would want an "Other" option for the Gender question.
Also, my only possible answer to "Relationship Style" is "I don't know."
Edit: Survey filled, though. Left Relationship Style blank.
I think there is a difference between "I have looked over all the evidence intensely and find the evidence and counter-evidence to weigh precisely in balance such that my estimate of the probability of event X is 50%" and "I don't know anything about X, so I will default to 50% even if it isn't reasonable".
It's the difference between "I know fair coins produce heads 50% of the time" and "what's a fair coin?". I wanted the second option when talking about many worlds -- I just haven't read the sequence on quantum mechanics yet, and I haven't read anything outside the sequences on quantum mechanics either. I just have an educated layman's understanding.
I just finished the survey. My estimate for the Calibration Year was 200 years wrong. How embarrassing, I need to learn the basics.
That's only embarrassing if you gave a probability of 75% of being +- 15 years. If you put 10 or 20%, you're fine.
I was 95% sure of the century, and was right about that much - but my 20% probability of +- 15 years didn't make any sense in hindsight, given the information that I had.
Embarrassing since lately I've been talking a lot about both probability and the history of philosophy after Newton.
For the Existential Risk question, I would have liked to see an option for societal collapse. It wouldn't have been my number one option, but I think the prospect of multiple stressors in conjunction, such as international economic and food crises, leading to a breakdown of modern civilization is more likely than a number of other options already on the list.
Okay, but... including the deaths of 90% of humanity? That's the sticking point, for me - I could see maybe 50% of humanity, but 90 seems like too much. (90 seems like too much for nuclear war, too, for that matter.)
If society collapses, we would lose the ability to support most of humanity. I wouldn't expect it to result in the loss of 90+% of the population within the space of a decade, but I could definitely see it dropping by that much.
I don't think it's all that likely, but I would definitely rate it above a natural pandemic wiping out 90% or more of the population.
Agreed. (Not to mention 'asteroid strike'. Did anyone even pick that?) I put 'man-made pandemic', myself.
Done. Definitely went through the whole "check the publication date"--whoop of victory--worry I was underconfident routine. Except silently because there's a sleeping person less than a foot away.
I'm amazed at the range of possibilities I considered for some of those probabilities. I definitely do not have a solid grasp of reality.
I took the survey. Thanks Yvain!
I took it.
I think some of the "pick one" options were too broadly grouped, though any multiple-choice is going to be. I'd have preferred a "no preference" for "relationship style", for example, and more political options. Also I'm not sure what counts as "participates actively" in other groups--I've been a member of transhumanism-related groups for over a decade, for example, but am mostly a lurker; I did not check the box.
I would have been interested in seeing a question about involvement in offline activities like local meetups, or participation in IRC/other LW venues.
Thanks for running the survey!
The greatest risk question would benefit from a write-in option. I consider economic/political collapse a greater risk than those listed.
Me too, more or less. My highest rank goes to infrastructure collapse.
I took the survey.
I took the survey. I would trust my probabilities for aliens, espers, and time travelers as far as I can throw them. I don't really think any number I could give would be reasonable except in the weak sense of not committing the conjunction fallacy.
I second the anchoring effect in the Singularity question. Based on previous comments I had written before, I would have expected a far more distant year than the one I gave in the survey. Oops.
Also, I missed the Principia question by ten years, and gave myself 80% confidence. I don't know if that was good or bad. How would I go about estimating what my confidence should have been?
I was disappointed that mathematics fell under the "hard sciences", but I suppose we can't all have our own category.
The confidence question was "how confident are you that you are within 15 years of the right answer?" which you were. You assigned 80% probability to the true outcome. That's pretty good.
Og take survey. Og deny validity of single-factor, linearly ranked intelligence measurement, though. Og increasingly fond of Dr. Gould.
I praise Yvain for this.
Why "Academics (on the teaching side)"? As an academic on the research side, what do I put?
Put "academic". I just meant "not a student"
After reading the feedback I've made the following changes (after the first 104 entries so that anyone who has access to the data can check if there are significant differences before and after these changes):
I did NOT add an "Other" to politics despite requests to do so, because I tried this last time and ended up with people sending me manifestos. I want to encourage people to choose whichever of those categories they're closest to. If you really don't identify at all with any of those categories, just leave it blank.
Should anyone retake the survey? I'd be willing to if you can cancel the my first version-- I'll give the same answers on the Newton question.
Not as good as if someone can find a satisfactory IQ test, but could you add an SAT option for intelligence measurement?
I used percents for all my probabilities, including the one which was .5.
Could you also add an ATAR/UAI, A-levels, Abitur and IB option?
(It might be better to add a box asking for marks/certificate received upon leaving high school and the name of the program; with sufficient respondents there may be enough data to say meaningful things)
Some of us are still in high school.
I'd also be willing (I'd probably rather) retake the quiz.
But there is a problem with calibration at that point, with the question about Newton.
I feel like several of the single-punch questions should be multi-punch. Both "profession" and "Work status" gave me pause. Also, I had to figure out what the right thing to fill in for "family religion" was, since we had several.
And there are several extremely common moral views not represented in your list of moral theories. One of the more popular is "All moral theories have some grain of truth, and we should use a combination along with our intuition". For questions like this, you might use as your model the Philpapers survey, though I also worry that this question might not make a lot of sense to most people without at least rough definitions alongside the answer choices.
I changed my estimated probabilities to reflect percentages, but didn't mark them with a percent sign because the version of the survey I took explicitly said not to.
It's mostly irrelevant anyway, these probabilities weren't even accurate to two orders of magnitude.
I think the percentage of LW meetup attendees is positively correlated with how quickly people take the poll, unfortunately.
I took the survey, I found the "Moral Views" question very hard to answer to, folding "moral views" in one of 4 broad categories is surhuman effort for me ;) but I did my best.
Also, not wanting to enter a political debate here and now, but your definition of "communism" seems a strawman to me.
I took it. Thanks for this, I'm excited about the results.
In the ethics field an option should allow for: i don't know enough of these to make a decision. I did not actually know half of the options given by their terms.
Same here. I had to look them up to understand what they are about and answer the question meaningfully. (But, after looking the options up the choice was actually easy.)
I posted a brief description here.
The cryonics question is broken! I couldn't answer it without suspecting it would be misleading. My p would be incredibly low but only because my p for the human species surviving is low. This is a technically correct way to answer the question but I am not at all confident that everyone else would answer literally, including the obvious consideration "if everyone else is dead, yeah, you die too". Or, even if everyone did, I am not confident that the appropriate math would be done on a per-participant level in the results for the p(cryo) to be meaningful.
This criticism also seems to apply to the existence of God, supernatural things, and etc.
I answered that question interpreting it literally, even though “I'd assign probability 1% that a randomly-chosen person cryopreserved as of 1 Nov 2011 will be eventually revived” doesn't imply “I think that approximately 1% of the people cryopreserved as of 1 Nov 2011 will be eventually revived”, since the probabilities for different people are nowhere near being uncorrelated.
Hmm. For the anti-agathics question I'm wondering if I should be taking into account the probability of x-risk between now and 3011. The question looks like it's about our technical ability to solve aging, which means I should answer with P(someone lives to 1000 | no XK-class end-of-the-world scenario between then and now)? (Though of course that conditional is not what was written.)
ETA: in other words, see wedrifid's comment just above.
If there's any status in comparing excessive underconfidence, I think I take the cake - one year off with 20% confidence in the interval. Good survey.
That's not really underconfident if you're only right on about 20% of such estimates.
Survey now completed.
EDIT:
Let the record reflect that this comment currently has a negative score! :-(
EDIT2: No longer the case, obviously! :-)
In the singularity year question, I interpreted that to mean “50% that a singularity occurs before YYYY, 50% that either it occurs later or it never occurs at all; leave blank if you think it's less than 50% that it ever occurs”, even though, taken literally, the first part of the question suggests “50% that the singularity occurs before YYYY, given that it ever occurs”. Given that my probability that no singularity will ever occur is non-negligible, these interpretations would result in very different answers.
Taken.
I completed the survey. Thanks, Yvain, for doing it!
The option "Atheist but spiritual" gave me a pause. What does it actually mean?
"Atheist" refers to the lack of a belief in gods. "Spiritual" includes all sorts of other supernatural notions, like ghosts, non-physical minds, souls, magic, animistic spirits, mystical energies, etc. Also, "spiritual" can refer to a way of looking at the world exemplified by religions that some atheists consider a vital part of the human experience.
So, a person who doesn't believe in god, but still thinks that he has an "immortal soul" or something? Thanks for explaining!
I've noticed some people using "spiritual" to describe notions they consider aesthetically sublime and morally uplifting but not well understood, when they are not particularly motivated to understand them, without any commitment to their being supernatural. This may be what you refer to in your second meaning, I'm not sure.
There is, of course, a lot of potential overlap here with supernatural notions.
Yes, that's roughly what I was referring to.
I just put together a discussion post about thinking about the probability of living in a simulation, but I'm not sure if I should ask people to fill out the survey (if they were planning to) before they read the post.
I took the survey, but unfortunately, when I saw "If you don't know enough about the proposition to have an opinion, please leave the box blank", I left all of the probability boxes blank afterwards because I just didn't feel like I could give an answer I would be happy with, even for some of the questions that could be described as clear-cut. Maybe next survey I'll be able to provide more useful details.
Filled out.
I did take the survey, however I found something I was unsure of what to put down and had to type in an explanation/question about:
It was for the question: "By what year do you think the Singularity will occur? Answer such that you think there is an even chance of the Singularity falling before or after that year. If you don't think a Singularity will ever happen, leave blank."
If I think the singularity is slightly less than 50% likely overall, what should I have put? It seemed off to leave it blank and imply I believed "I don't think a Singularity will ever happen" because that statement seemed to convey a great deal more certainty than 50+epsilon%. However, if I actually believed there was a less than 50% chance of it happening, I'm not going to reach an even chance of happening or not happening on any particular year.
As a side note, after taking that test, I realized that I don't feel very confident on a substantial number of things.
I interpreted this as “there is an even chance of the Singularity falling before or after, [assuming it does]”. That is, if you think the probability that the Singularity will happen is something low like 1%, you should answer a year such that the probability it happens by that year is 0.5%. The only way you can’t answer it is if you’re sure it won’t ever happen.
(For example, if I thought a Singularity is very [...] very hard to achieve, I might answer 5000 AD or 500000 AD, depending on how many “very” there are, even though I might put a very low probability on our civilization actually surving that long.)
Filled out the survey. Neat!
I didn't know those versions of morality. There wasn't an option for "don't know" but I guess leaving it blank is the same thing.
To modify an example from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: a Good Samaritan is widely agreed to be a good person, but the reasons vary:
Would it not be useful for the “Degree” question to distinguish between the two no-degree cases of current undergraduate students and not-trying?
Filled out the survey. The cryonics-question could use an option "I would be signed up if it was possible where I live."
I don't know how to interpret the Anti-Agathics question. If you lived to 100 and were cryopreserved and then revived 900 years later only to die a minute after you revived, would that count?
I know "male, female, FTM, MTF, other" is a standard gender/sex question, but I don't know why. A problem is that it implies that "FTM" is a distinct category from, rather than a subset of, "male" (ditto for female). This would be better if other questions had answers that were subsets of other answers, but you seem to try hard not to do that. This could be fixed by phrasing it as "cis male", but then you'd get people complaining about "cis" and "trans" not being a perfect dichotomy and complaining about the confusing word and so on. This could also be fixed by splitting the question into "gender (male/female/other)" and "Are you trans? (yes/no)", but then you'd get other complaints.
I wouldn't have been too far off on the Newton question if I had been able to remember the mapping between century numbering and year numbering. I ended up two centuries off. Fortunately I took that into account when calibrating.
Also, for the record: I'm not "considering cryonics". I'm cryocrastinating. Cryonics is obviously the best choice, and I should be signing up for it in the next five seconds. I will probably die while not signed up for cryonics, and that will be death by stupidity, and you will all get to point and laugh at my corpse.
I don't want to point and laugh at your corpse. Please implement what you consider to be the obvious best choice. If you don't know how to get started, contact Rudi Hoffman. He will walk you through the process. Get started today.
What a weird assortment of questions apparently only tangentially related to cryonics.
I am not sure which questions you are referring to. Some questions on the form are related to getting a life insurance policy to pay for cryonics.
Hence "apparently".
I was going to raise exactly that issue and suggest that solution. What complaints would you expect, though? I don't know if I'd really expect any non-trans LWers to be insulted at the mere suggestion that the question is worth asking.
I'd have liked having that option too.
Yeah, that confused me too. What's the point of asking that question in the first place ? Just to collect more features for some clustering model, or what ? Then why not ask people's age or weight or hair color, as well ?
More people on LW care about the gender of LW participants than care about the weight or hair color of LW participants. As I recall, the survey did ask for age.
As for me, I was surprised it asked about my racial background and my family's religion but not what country I grew up in or live in.
I don't think that implication creates confusion in the mind of anybody answering the survey, i.e. most people know what to answer. It's somewhat debatable whether it makes "more sense" to classify a FTM transsexual as male because of the gender role to which they identify, or as female because of the chromosomes they have, so sidestepping the whole question by using four categories seems like a reasonable solution for a survey (or at least, if I was doing a survey, that's why I'd use those four categories).
Using things like "cis male" might make the questions more technically accurate, but it won't make anybody less confused about how to answer, and will probably make some more confused.
FTM transsexuals usually consider it offensive not to be classified as men (either by being classified as non-men or by avoiding the question), though arguably we could take the stick out of our asses.
I didn't like the ethics question, because it could be interpreted as asking about one's theoretical position on metaethics, or about one's actual values, and the two can diverge. Specifically: I bet there are quite a lot of people on LW for whom something like the following is true: "I don't believe that moral judgements have actual truth values separate from the values of the people or institutions that make them. But I do have values, and I do make moral judgements, and the way I do so is: [...]".
Filled out.
Filled out. For the probability questions that I thought were very close to 0 (or 100) I thought about how many times in a row I would have to see a fair coin land heads to have a similar level of credence, and then translated that into percentages. A fun exercise.
Also, my calibration was a little off on the last question.
Like all the cool kids, I took the survey. You should too!
Scientia potentia est!
Out of curiosity, when will the results be published ? And what will the analysis tell us ?
Great, now I'm not sure if I'm horribly under-confident or freakishly lucky... (re: Newton)
The cryonics question could use a "cryocrastinating" option... I have filled out papers and not sent them anywhere...
The political question ought to have a “libertarian socialism” answer (green/southwestern quadrant in The Political Compass; extreme version described in An Anarchist FAQ). I answered “Socialist, for example Scandinavian countries” because it was the least unsatisfactory one. (Or at least there should be a “None of the above” answer.)
ETA: BTW, that's probably the most common understanding of the word libertarian outside the US.
Interesting link... it seems like they would do well to have a section devoted to jargon - I've heard people talk about being against "property" before, but had never encountered a description of the distinction between that and various other sorts of rights to use and possession.
The distinction is standard in Marxism. From The Communist Manifesto:
It does not seem like this is actually drawing out the distinction I was referring to. Or at least, as much as it is attempting to, it is associating various dubious concepts with the distinction, like "class" and "class antagonisms" and "exploitation". But then, that passage mostly reads like word soup to me.
The worry, when someone talks about abolishing property, is that one is thereby depriving the individual of rights on a standard Lockean analysis. As these sorts of socialists would agree, it is important that the worker control the destiny of the products of one's own work. This is identified with the natural right to property, and follows straightforwardly from the rights to life and liberty.
A "use/possession" non-property right seems to support the Lockean right to property, but only until the property is "released into the wild" - thus, presumably, someone else cannot just walk away with my computer, because I need it for my work, but I also can't just lock it up in a closet so nobody can use it. Similarly, I could maintain the right to the farm that I work, but could not exercise the right to prevent others from farming a plot of land I was not going to use.
I think there are still some serious problems with this picture from several different angles, but it's nonetheless an interesting notion of property.
Taken. Thanks Yvain, I appreciate this effort!
Nitpick: why no "Other" categories for Participation and Expertise?
What's the point? Surely everyone is a member of some community and has expertise in something! Everyone would check "Other."
True. It might be interesting to see if any hidden commonalities among Less Wrongians exist, however, if the "Other" option comes along with a "fill-in-the-blank" field. It might also be a good idea to include this "Other" option in addition to the other options to avoid everyone checking "Other".
I took the survey and was annoyed to realize that I didn't have a strong enough background to have informed answers to several questions.
I took the survey. You should too!
Everyone should take the survey before reading any more comments, in case they contain anchors etc.
I took the survey. My estimates will be very poorly calibrated (I haven't done much in the way of calibration/estimation exercises) but I'm hoping they'll at least be good enough for wisdom-of-the-crowds purposes and more useful than just leaving blank.
Minor quibble: shouldn't "p(xrisk)" be "p(NOT xrisk)"? Just worried about people in a hurry not reading the question properly.
Filled out the survey; the calibration questions really forced me to explore my reasoning behind some of my immediate intuitions.
Oh and by the way, second post ever!
(back to lurking)
Done. Was out by only 17 years on the Principia Mathematica.
Some of the questions made me feel a bit stupid, which is probably a good thing now and then. Had to answer Deist/etc. for the religious identity question, because there wasn't an option for epistemic untheist with Christian ethical heuristics and an admittedly indefensible level of wishful thinking. But "etc." will do :)
Here's hoping we all live to 2100 and find out whether we were right about that stuff.
I think the probability of 90% die-off by 2100 attributable to a single cause is low, but let's face it, an interconnected cascading clusterfuck of 5%-fatal catastrophes would be bad enough, and sadly I think that's more likely. Or I've been reading too much Jared Diamond.
I took this survey.
I filled out the survey, but I left a number of questions blank, on the basis that I don't feel qualified to answer them. I would have left the year of singularity question blank too, but it said that doing that meant I thought it definitely wouldn't happen.
I took the survey too. I would strongly recommend changing the Singularity question to read:
"If you don't think a Singularity will ever happen, write N for Never"
Or something like that. The fraction of people who think Never with high probability is really interesting! You don't want to lump them in with the people who don't have an opinion.
I disliked the moral philosophy question. I felt comfortable putting down "consequentialist," but I can see how someone might feel none of the answers suited them well. I would have made the fourth option simply "other," and maybe added a moral realism vs. anti-realism question.
See the <a href="http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl">Phil Papers</a> survey. On the normative ethics question, "other" beat out the three "standard" moral philosophies, and there's no indication that everyone in that category is a moral anti-realist.
Also, for the Newton question:
My answer: friragrra bu svir
Correct answer: fvkgrra rvtugl frira
Now I feel dumb for putting such a high confidence in my answer. Should I feel dumb?
I guess if I had thought about it more, I would have realized that my confidence that my 30 year range was not too low exceeded my confidence that it was not too high, and adjusted my answer downwards a few years, accordingly.
I would recommend writing out both your guess and the correct answer in words and in rot13, to avoid acting as a spoiler for others.
Edit: That is: "friragrra bu svir" for your guess and "fvkgrra rvtugl frira" for the answer.
One problem with the political question: Socialism is not what they have in Scandinavia. That would be social democracy (technically a form of government that's supposed to evolve towards full socialism, but they don't seem to have done that). It's unclear what option one is supposed to choose to mean "What they have in Scandinavia" rather than actual socialism.
political words like "socialism" mean very different things in different places, so a description like "what they have in Scandinavia" is supposed to pin down the extension enough for you to work out the intension.
I don't know anyone in Denmark or the US who calls Scandinavian governments "socialist". Is that a common way to describe Scandinavian governments in some other country?
Usually the primary word I hear used to describe governments in Scandinavia is "socialist". See (from the front page of Google hits for the words Scandinavia and socialism):
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/business/worldbusiness/13iht-compete.html
http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/5616.aspx
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081016132725AAoGdNo
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2213173/posts
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/scandinavian-irony-socialism-meets-liberalization/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism
In the US, I mostly hear the word "socialism" used as an umbrella term for any governmental economic redistribution.
Took it. I liked the calibration questions a lot.
I took it, but I would never post a content-free comment just for the sake of a few karma!
The results should be fun to see, so thanks for taking the time to do this.