2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey

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

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.

Click here to take the survey

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.

Comments (694)

Comment author: Kevin 01 November 2011 12:06:43AM 15 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 12:35:14AM 11 points [-]

Thanks for putting this together, Yvain! Recommendation to the Powers That Be: promote this to the main page so that more people notice it.

Comment author: dspeyer 01 November 2011 05:08:33AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: mindspillage 01 November 2011 05:32:30PM 0 points [-]

Unless you changed accounts at some point.

Comment author: komponisto 01 November 2011 12:36:45AM 8 points [-]

The "Anti-Agathics" question is ambiguous:

What is the probability that any person living at this moment will reach an age of one thousand years?

Two possible meanings (which, at least for me, would result in very different numbers):

  1. Given a randomly selected person living at this moment, what is the probability that they will reach an age of one thousand years?

  2. What is the probability that at least one person living at this moment will reach an age of one thousand years?

Comment author: Vaniver 01 November 2011 12:40:47AM 5 points [-]

I believe the 2nd one is intended, though I agree with you that switching to something like "at least one" would make it unambiguous.

Comment author: komponisto 01 November 2011 01:02:36AM 0 points [-]

I'm ready to hit the "submit" button as soon as Yvain confirms (or denies) this...

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 05:52:25AM 1 point [-]

Oh, dear. I assumed he meant the first one.

Comment author: pengvado 01 November 2011 10:07:12AM *  3 points [-]

Another ambiguity: Does the anti-agathics mean 1000 consecutive years, or does it include successful cryonics as a special case?

Comment author: wedrifid 01 November 2011 10:18:00AM 2 points [-]

Assume 1000 animated years. :)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 November 2011 01:09:36PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 November 2011 01:16:14PM 0 points [-]

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?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 November 2011 01:32:17PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Vaniver 01 November 2011 01:35:37PM 0 points [-]

Perhaps genetic modification is required for longevity, and the tech for revival can't simulate that.

Hm. This was my position before, and apparently I forgot about it when assigning my probability for the anti-aging question. Oops.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 01 November 2011 10:31:34PM *  2 points [-]

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...

Comment author: Alicorn 01 November 2011 12:39:26AM 9 points [-]

I took the survey :3

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 November 2011 12:41:25AM *  15 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Rubix 01 November 2011 01:19:38AM *  5 points [-]

Agree, especially with regard to mono/poly question.

Nearly forgot; I did complete it. Thanks for your work, Yvain!

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 November 2011 12:59:10PM 16 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 November 2011 01:14:52PM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 November 2011 03:19:32PM 11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 November 2011 05:16:34PM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: komponisto 01 November 2011 12:45:47AM 12 points [-]

(how many people have strong feelings on Three Worlds Collide these days?)

Many, according to some.

(Of course to actually get the answer, you would presumably have to...take a survey. :-) )

Comment author: Nominull 01 November 2011 09:03:16PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: dbaupp 01 November 2011 12:52:45AM *  11 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: RobertLumley 01 November 2011 01:06:19AM 2 points [-]

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...

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 01 November 2011 01:41:06AM 2 points [-]

Argh, I did it too. Fix mine too please?

Comment author: Dorikka 01 November 2011 01:41:07AM 1 point [-]

I also almost did this. Repeatedly.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 12:54:53AM 31 points [-]

Shouldn't you ask when the respondent thinks the Singularity will occur before mentioning the year 2100, to avoid anchoring?

Comment author: Gedusa 01 November 2011 12:57:59AM 13 points [-]

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)

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 01:12:07AM 4 points [-]

I predict high average IQ, but low response rate on the IQ question, which will give bad results.

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.)

Comment author: RobertLumley 01 November 2011 01:13:27AM 0 points [-]

Oh wow, is that what the IQ average was last time? Can I update my probability that mine will be higher?

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 01:15:22AM 2 points [-]

Last survey in 2009:

IQs (warning: self-reported numbers for notoriously hard-to-measure statistic) ranged from 120 to 180. The mean was 145.88, median was 141.50, and SD was 14.02. Quartiles were <133, 133-141.5, 141.5-155, and >155.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 01 November 2011 01:40:08AM *  2 points [-]

I predict with 70% certainty that we will get an IQ in the range of 140-145 again

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.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 November 2011 01:49:21AM 0 points [-]

(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.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 01 November 2011 10:36:25AM 0 points [-]

I put 140. Fixed.

Comment author: torekp 01 November 2011 01:18:27AM *  7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Gedusa 01 November 2011 02:00:08AM 0 points [-]

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.

excluded-middle bias

Yes! That's what I was thinking of :)

Comment author: pragmatist 01 November 2011 03:45:19AM 5 points [-]

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?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 November 2011 01:20:06PM 3 points [-]

I think I'm smart, but not that smart.

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.

Comment author: pragmatist 01 November 2011 07:10:17PM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 02:44:31PM 1 point [-]

but not that smart

Well, not with that attitude.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 07:24:29PM 1 point [-]

Anyone have any idea if these estimators should be trusted at all?

The scores are highly correlated. One must assume those charts are from a reliable source. So... yes?

Comment author: pragmatist 01 November 2011 07:34:18PM 2 points [-]

Does the correlation remain if you conditionalize on, say, having an IQ higher than 130?

Comment author: Vaniver 01 November 2011 08:05:59PM 2 points [-]

I wouldn't trust it. My GRE estimated IQ by that is wildly higher than my professionally measured IQ.

Also check out:

Note: Mensa considers that scores from after January 31, 1994, "No longer correlate with an IQ test."

Comment author: Nornagest 01 November 2011 09:21:20PM *  3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 01 November 2011 09:32:39PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: CG_Morton 01 November 2011 03:29:05PM 4 points [-]

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).

Comment author: Desrtopa 01 November 2011 03:36:44PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: saturn 01 November 2011 03:37:22AM 15 points [-]

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.

Comment author: dspeyer 01 November 2011 05:13:51AM 10 points [-]

I think it would be more informative to ask people to take one specific online test, now, and report their score.

Are there any free, non-spam-causlng, online IQ tests that produce reasonable results (i.e. correlate strongly to standard IQ tests)?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 November 2011 01:09:51PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: ciphergoth 01 November 2011 08:27:57AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 01 November 2011 08:50:37AM 7 points [-]

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!)

Comment author: Yvain 01 November 2011 08:39:48AM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 November 2011 01:14:58PM 4 points [-]

With everyone taking the same test, even if it's miscalibrated, people could at least see how they compare to other LWers.

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.

Comment author: kilobug 01 November 2011 08:24:42AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: quentin 01 November 2011 09:12:49PM *  4 points [-]

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?

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 10:08:25PM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: quentin 01 November 2011 10:43:46PM *  3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 10:48:57PM 4 points [-]

I've always wondered if there was some secret smart-person handshake that I wasn't privy to.

I was mostly going by the handshake.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 10:53:42PM *  0 points [-]

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.

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.

Also, I've been intuitively aware of the optimism bias for as long as I can remember, and estimates like ".01% and 99.99%" trigger my skepticism module hard.

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.

Comment author: Rain 01 November 2011 01:12:03AM 8 points [-]

There's no option for public sector (government) for Work Status. Non-profit may be misleading if it contains that as well.

Comment author: Prismattic 01 November 2011 01:18:33AM 12 points [-]

Does lurking time count for "how long in the community"?

Comment author: wnoise 01 November 2011 01:23:38AM 0 points [-]

I don't remember that far back, so I used my earliest comment (imported from Overcoming Bias) as the date.

Comment author: RobertLumley 01 November 2011 01:34:28AM 4 points [-]

I counted it.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 November 2011 01:43:07AM 4 points [-]

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".

Comment author: RobinZ 01 November 2011 03:08:52AM 1 point [-]

I counted it.

Comment author: Klao 01 November 2011 01:24:33PM 1 point [-]

I half-counted it. I counted from the time when I finally created an account at lesswrong.com.

Comment author: Prismattic 01 November 2011 01:31:51AM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 November 2011 01:41:34AM 6 points [-]

First thing I did upon completing the survey: looked up Principia Mathematica and gave a little whoop of self-congratulation.

Comment author: Prismattic 01 November 2011 02:00:28AM *  7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 November 2011 02:06:39AM 0 points [-]

Same thing. It's a calibration test, not a history trivia quiz.

Comment author: RobertLumley 01 November 2011 02:37:33AM 0 points [-]

I wasn't...

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 November 2011 02:45:19AM 0 points [-]

How far off were you?

Comment author: RobertLumley 01 November 2011 02:50:47AM *  0 points [-]

One century. I said svsgrra svsgl I think. Or maybe svsgrra friragl svir. I don't remember.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 November 2011 06:46:26AM 5 points [-]

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'.

Comment author: RobertLumley 01 November 2011 12:09:20PM 1 point [-]

Good idea, thanks!

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 November 2011 02:37:50AM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: dbaupp 01 November 2011 02:49:34AM *  1 point [-]

That doesn't mean you were underconfident; with a confidence of 65% you are correct 65% of the time.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 November 2011 02:54:11AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: dbaupp 01 November 2011 03:08:24AM 1 point [-]

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%.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 November 2011 03:12:27AM 1 point [-]

That's a good point. So a single data point like this doesn't really say much useful for my own calibration.

Comment author: dbaupp 01 November 2011 03:19:14AM 0 points [-]

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).

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 November 2011 03:20:43AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Vaniver 01 November 2011 02:54:38AM 2 points [-]

So, rot13 doesn't do much to obscure numbers.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 November 2011 02:57:32AM 0 points [-]

Good point. I've replaced the numbers with numbers that have been spelled out so the rot13 does now obscure them.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 08:07:14PM 1 point [-]

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.)

Comment author: kilobug 01 November 2011 08:16:15PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 08:21:36PM 0 points [-]

I made a similar mistake.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 08:20:27PM 1 point [-]

Does a Gaussian distribution really make sense here?

Comment author: Emile 01 November 2011 08:44:38PM 3 points [-]

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).

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 08:45:00PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 09:25:50PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 10:55:18PM *  1 point [-]

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.)

Comment author: CharlesR 01 November 2011 01:44:03AM 4 points [-]

Would be nice if we could assign probabilities to the "morality" question instead of having to put ourselves firmly in one camp.

Comment author: khafra 01 November 2011 01:55:32AM *  10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 November 2011 02:01:02AM *  2 points [-]

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.

Composed entirely of LW's resident experts?

Comment author: RobinZ 01 November 2011 05:31:46AM 0 points [-]

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.

That ambiguity didn't even occur to me!

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 02:58:01PM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: khafra 01 November 2011 07:16:28PM 2 points [-]

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).

Comment author: Nornagest 01 November 2011 02:30:58AM 11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: RobinZ 01 November 2011 03:03:23AM *  11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: peter_hurford 01 November 2011 03:05:05AM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: r_claypool 01 November 2011 03:11:41AM 6 points [-]

I just finished the survey. My estimate for the Calibration Year was 200 years wrong. How embarrassing, I need to learn the basics.

Comment author: Emile 01 November 2011 12:44:39PM 1 point [-]

That's only embarrassing if you gave a probability of 75% of being +- 15 years. If you put 10 or 20%, you're fine.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 02:52:20PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Desrtopa 01 November 2011 03:19:21AM *  7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 November 2011 06:36:20AM 6 points [-]

I think the prospect of multiple stressors in conjunction, such as international economic and food crises, leading to a breakdown of modern civilization

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.)

Comment author: Desrtopa 01 November 2011 12:42:22PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: pedanterrific 01 November 2011 01:19:23PM 2 points [-]

Agreed. (Not to mention 'asteroid strike'. Did anyone even pick that?) I put 'man-made pandemic', myself.

Comment author: HonoreDB 01 November 2011 03:42:51AM *  16 points [-]

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.

Comment author: arundelo 01 November 2011 03:45:31AM 7 points [-]

I took the survey. Thanks Yvain!

Comment author: mindspillage 01 November 2011 03:56:52AM 12 points [-]

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!

Comment author: dspeyer 01 November 2011 05:14:56AM 4 points [-]

The greatest risk question would benefit from a write-in option. I consider economic/political collapse a greater risk than those listed.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 November 2011 01:22:33PM 1 point [-]

Me too, more or less. My highest rank goes to infrastructure collapse.

Comment author: ata 01 November 2011 05:40:24AM 6 points [-]

I took the survey.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 05:59:01AM *  9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 01 November 2011 09:26:20PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 01 November 2011 06:53:47AM 6 points [-]

Og take survey. Og deny validity of single-factor, linearly ranked intelligence measurement, though. Og increasingly fond of Dr. Gould.

Comment author: Kutta 01 November 2011 07:44:03AM 7 points [-]

I praise Yvain for this.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 01 November 2011 08:00:52AM 4 points [-]

Why "Academics (on the teaching side)"? As an academic on the research side, what do I put?

Comment author: Yvain 01 November 2011 08:05:34AM 3 points [-]

Put "academic". I just meant "not a student"

Comment author: Yvain 01 November 2011 08:04:35AM 28 points [-]

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):

  • Added an "other" option in gender
  • Moved "date of singularity" above question mentioning 2100 to avoid anchoring. Really I should also move the Newton question for the same reason, but I'm not going to.
  • changed wording of anti-agathics question to "at least one person"
  • added a "don't know / no preference" to relationship style
  • clarified to answer probability as percent and not decimal; I'll go back and fix anyone who got this wrong, though. If you seriously mean a very low percent, like ".05%", please end with a percent mark so I know not to change it. Otherwise, leave the percent mark out.
  • Added a "government work" option.
  • Deleted "divorced". Divorced people can just put "single"
  • Added "economic/political collapse" to xrisk
  • Added "other" to xrisk
  • Added a question "Have you ever been to a Less Wrong meetup?" Please do NOT retake the survey to answer this question. I'll just grab statistics from the people who answered this after it was put up, while recognizing it might be flawed.

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 November 2011 01:27:08PM 9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: dbaupp 01 November 2011 01:53:57PM 2 points [-]

SAT option for intelligence measurement

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)

Comment author: Randaly 01 November 2011 04:01:34PM 9 points [-]

Some of us are still in high school.

Comment author: RobertLumley 01 November 2011 04:04:55PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 03:00:22PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 03:41:50PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: RobinZ 01 November 2011 04:23:37PM 3 points [-]

I think the percentage of LW meetup attendees is positively correlated with how quickly people take the poll, unfortunately.

Comment author: kilobug 01 November 2011 08:23:09AM 11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: spuckblase 01 November 2011 08:26:07AM 7 points [-]

I took it. Thanks for this, I'm excited about the results.

Comment author: MartinB 01 November 2011 08:52:59AM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Klao 01 November 2011 01:36:48PM 2 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: RobinZ 01 November 2011 04:21:40PM 1 point [-]

I posted a brief description here.

Comment author: wedrifid 01 November 2011 09:06:29AM 12 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 03:43:49PM *  1 point [-]

This criticism also seems to apply to the existence of God, supernatural things, and etc.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 07:38:17PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: nshepperd 01 November 2011 09:16:19AM *  6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: shokwave 01 November 2011 09:50:30AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 03:01:15PM *  2 points [-]

That's not really underconfident if you're only right on about 20% of such estimates.

Comment author: komponisto 01 November 2011 11:22:05AM *  13 points [-]

Survey now completed.

EDIT:

if you take it and post that you took it here, I will upvote you, and I hope other people will upvote you too

Let the record reflect that this comment currently has a negative score! :-(

EDIT2: No longer the case, obviously! :-)

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 11:24:41AM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Clarity1992 01 November 2011 01:31:49PM 8 points [-]

Taken.

Comment author: Klao 01 November 2011 01:40:12PM 13 points [-]

I completed the survey. Thanks, Yvain, for doing it!

The option "Atheist but spiritual" gave me a pause. What does it actually mean?

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 02:39:16PM 9 points [-]

"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.

Comment author: Klao 01 November 2011 02:46:52PM 3 points [-]

So, a person who doesn't believe in god, but still thinks that he has an "immortal soul" or something? Thanks for explaining!

Comment author: TheOtherDave 01 November 2011 02:58:10PM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 03:03:57PM 1 point [-]

Yes, that's roughly what I was referring to.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 November 2011 01:47:00PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Nectanebo 01 November 2011 01:58:35PM 9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: malthrin 01 November 2011 03:05:04PM 9 points [-]

Filled out.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 03:06:17PM 20 points [-]

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.

Comment author: bogdanb 01 November 2011 03:33:00PM *  1 point [-]

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.)

Comment author: DoubleReed 01 November 2011 03:10:47PM 10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: RobinZ 01 November 2011 04:17:54PM 10 points [-]
  • Consequentialism: anything is good which has the preferred results.
  • Deontology: behavior is good when it comports with the given moral code.
  • Virtue ethics: people are good when they are possessed of the proper character traits.

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:

  • A consequentialist calls them good because they improved the life of the victim they stopped to help;
  • A deontologist calls them good because they acted in accordance with moral edicts such as "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
  • A virtue ethicist calls them good because they have a charitable and benevolent nature.
Comment author: kpreid 01 November 2011 03:18:22PM 14 points [-]

Would it not be useful for the “Degree” question to distinguish between the two no-degree cases of current undergraduate students and not-trying?

Comment author: SimonF 01 November 2011 03:26:38PM 12 points [-]

Filled out the survey. The cryonics-question could use an option "I would be signed up if it was possible where I live."

Comment author: CharlesR 01 November 2011 05:45:08PM 1 point [-]

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?

Comment author: MixedNuts 01 November 2011 05:47:22PM 12 points [-]

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.

Comment author: JGWeissman 01 November 2011 05:55:21PM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 06:07:17PM 0 points [-]

What a weird assortment of questions apparently only tangentially related to cryonics.

Comment author: JGWeissman 01 November 2011 06:49:01PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 08:19:32PM 0 points [-]

Hence "apparently".

Comment author: ata 01 November 2011 06:21:35PM *  5 points [-]

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 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.

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'd have liked having that option too.

Comment author: Bugmaster 01 November 2011 06:30:09PM 2 points [-]

I know "male, female, FTM, MTF, other" is a standard gender/sex question, but I don't know why.

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 ?

Comment author: khafra 01 November 2011 07:23:16PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 07:29:02PM 9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Emile 01 November 2011 08:41:28PM 5 points [-]

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).

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.

Comment author: MixedNuts 01 November 2011 08:56:53PM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gjm 01 November 2011 05:54:40PM 8 points [-]

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: [...]".

Comment author: CharlesR 01 November 2011 06:03:38PM 9 points [-]

Filled out.

Comment author: Antisuji 01 November 2011 06:56:40PM 11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: XFrequentist 01 November 2011 07:01:30PM 10 points [-]

Like all the cool kids, I took the survey. You should too!

Scientia potentia est!

Comment author: Bugmaster 01 November 2011 07:11:51PM 6 points [-]

Out of curiosity, when will the results be published ? And what will the analysis tell us ?

Comment author: lavalamp 01 November 2011 07:13:23PM 6 points [-]

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...

Comment author: [deleted] 01 November 2011 07:51:37PM *  4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 08:13:28PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: pragmatist 01 November 2011 08:21:34PM *  4 points [-]

The distinction is standard in Marxism. From The Communist Manifesto:

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

[...]

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 09:49:46PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Nick_Roy 01 November 2011 07:54:39PM *  8 points [-]

Taken. Thanks Yvain, I appreciate this effort!

Nitpick: why no "Other" categories for Participation and Expertise?

Comment author: cata 01 November 2011 10:33:06PM 0 points [-]

What's the point? Surely everyone is a member of some community and has expertise in something! Everyone would check "Other."

Comment author: Nick_Roy 01 November 2011 10:45:09PM *  1 point [-]

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".

Comment author: shirisaya 01 November 2011 08:23:22PM 9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Dentin 01 November 2011 08:47:51PM *  8 points [-]

I took the survey. You should too!

Comment author: Giles 01 November 2011 08:51:24PM 12 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Suryc11 01 November 2011 09:17:09PM 8 points [-]

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)

Comment author: scav 01 November 2011 09:22:25PM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: atorm 01 November 2011 09:30:43PM 8 points [-]

I took this survey.

Comment author: Lapsed_Lurker 01 November 2011 09:31:52PM 10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: xv15 01 November 2011 10:56:49PM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 01 November 2011 10:01:19PM *  5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: RobinZ 01 November 2011 10:03:44PM *  3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: juliawise 01 November 2011 10:08:39PM 9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 10:13:11PM 8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: juliawise 01 November 2011 10:22:40PM 4 points [-]

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?

Comment author: thomblake 01 November 2011 10:43:49PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: qualityisvirtue 01 November 2011 10:24:52PM 8 points [-]

Took it. I liked the calibration questions a lot.

Comment author: cata 01 November 2011 10:28:01PM *  7 points [-]

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.