BTW, I'd also disallow 0 and 100, and give the option of giving log-odds instead of probability (and maybe encourage to do that for probabilities <1% and >99%). Someone's “epsilon” might be 10^-4 whereas someone else's might be 10^-30.

I don't care about moral realism, but psychiatric diagnoses (and whether they're self-diagnosed or formally diagnosed) would be interesting.

I'm curious, what would you do with the results of such a question?

For my part, I suspect I would merely stare at them and be unsure what to make of a statistical result that aggregates "No, I already held the belief that the sequences attempted to convince me of" with "No, I held a contrary belief and the sequences failed to convince me otherwise." (That it also aggregates "Yes, I held a contrary belief and the sequences convinced me otherwise." and "Yes, I initially held the belief that the sequences attempted to convince me of, and the sequences convinced me otherwise" is less of a concern, since I expect the latter group to be pretty small.)

I think the question is too vague as formulated. Does any probability update, no matter how small, count as changing your mind? But if you ask for precise probability changes, then the answers will likely be nonsense because most people (even most LWers, I'd guess) don't keep track of numeric probabilities, just think "oh, this argument makes X a bit more believable" and such.

OTOH, using a vague definition isn't a good idea either, if you want to know something about what Less Wrongers believe about the world.

I had no problem with the question as worded; it was polling about LWers confidence in a specific belief, using terms from the LW Sequences. That the particular belief is irrelevant to what people who self-identify as various groups consider important about that identification is important to remember, but not in and of itself a problem with the question.

But, yeah... if we want to know what proportion of LWers self-identify as (e.g.) atheist, that question won't tell us.

Requires people to self assess next to a cultural baseline, and self assessments of this sort are notoriously inaccurate. (I predict everyone will think they have above-average involvement).

Strongly disagree with previous self here. I do not think replacing "gender" with "sex" avoids complaints or "philosophizing", and "philosophizing" in context feels like a shorthand/epithet for "making this more complex than prevailing, mainstream views on gender."

For a start, it seems like even "sex" in the sense used here is getting at a mainly-social phenomenon: that of sex assigned at birth. This is a judgement call by the doctors and parents. The biological correlates used to make that decision are just weighed in aggregate; some people are always going to throw an exception. If you're not asking about the size of gametes and their delivery mechanism, the hormonal makeup of the person, their reproductive anatomy where applicable, or their secondary sexual characteristics, then "sex" is really just asking the "gender" question but hazily referring to biological characteristics instead.

Ultimately, gender is what you're really asking for. Using "sex" as a synonym blurs the data into unintelligibility for some LWers; pragmatically, it also amounts to a tacit "screw you" to trans people. I suggest biting the bullet and dealing with the complexity involved in asking that question -- in many situations people collecting that demographic info don't actually need it, but it seems like useful information for LessWrong.

A suggested approach:

Two optional questions with something like the following phrasing:

Optional: Gender (pick what best describe how you identify):

-Male
-Female
-Genderqueer, genderfluid, other
-None, neutrois, agender
-Prefer not to say

Optional: Sex assigned at birth:
-Male
-Female
-Intersex
-Prefer not to say

In that case: use the exact ethics questions from the PhilPapers Survey (http://philpapers.org/surveys/), probably minus lean/accept distinction and the endless drop-down menu for "other."

For IQ: maybe you could nudge people to greater honesty by splitting up the question: (1) have you ever taken an IQ test with [whatever features were specified on this year's survey], yes or no? (2) if yes, what was your score?

I was also...well, not surprised per se, but certainly annoyed to see that "Native American" in any form wasn't even an option. One could construe that as revealing, I suppose.

I don't know how relevant the question actually is, but if we want to track ancestry and racial, ethnic or cultural group affiliation, the folowing scheme is pretty hard to mess up:

Country of origin: <drop-down list of countries>
Country of residence: <drop-down list with "same as origin" as the first option>
Primary Language: <Form Field>
Native Language (if different): <Form Field>
Heritage language (if different): <Form Field>

Note: A heritage language is one spoken by your family or identity group.

Heritage group:

Diaspora: Means your primary heritage and identity group moved to the country you live in within historical or living memory, as colonists, slaves, workers or settlers.

<radio buttons>
European diaspora ("white" North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc)
African diaspora ("black" in the US, West Indian, more recent African emigrant groups; also North African diaspora)
Asian diaspora (includes, Turkic, Arab, Persian, Central and South Asian, Siberian native)

Indigenous: Means your primary heritage and identity group was resident to the following location prior to 1400, OR prior to the arrival of the majority culture in antiquity (for example: Ainu, Basque, Taiwanese native, etc):

<radio buttons>
-Africa
-Asia
-Europe
-North America (between Panama and Canada, also includes Greenland and the Carribean)
-Oceania (including Australia)
-South America

Mixed: Select two or more:

<check boxes>
European Diaspora
African Diaspora
Asian Diaspora
African Indigenous
American Indigenous
Asian Indigenous
European Indigenous
Oceania Indigenous

What the US census calls "Non-white Hispanic" would be marked as "Mixed" > "European Diaspora" + "American Indigenous" with Spanish as either a Native or Heritage language. Someone who identifies as (say) Mexican-derived but doesn't speak Spanish at all would be impossible to tell from someone who was Euro-American and Cherokee who doesn't speak Cherokee, but no system is perfect...

If only White, how does the race change when one moves to another continent? And if White Hispanic, why not have also "Italic" or "Scandinavic" or "Arabic" or whatever other peninsula-ic races?

Because we don't have as much useful sociological data on this. Obviously we can start collecting data on any of the proposed categories, but if we're the only ones, it won't much help us figure out how LW differs from what one might expect of a group that fits its demographic profile.

Since I believe the question was intended to determine the cultural background of LW readers, I am surprised that there was no question about country of origin, which would be more informative. There is certainly greater cultural difference between e.g. Turks (White, non-Hispanic I suppose) and White non-Hispanic Americans than between the latter and their Hispanic compatriots.

Much of the difference in the example of Turks is captured by the Muslim family background question.

Offer a text field for race. You'll get some distances, not to mention "human" or "other", but you could always use that to find out whether having a contrary streak about race/ethnicity correlates with anything.

If you want people to estimate whether a meetup could be worth it, I recommend location rather than nationality-- some nations are big enough that just knowing nationality isn't useful.

Most LessWrong posters and readers are American, perhaps even the vast majority (I am not). Hispanic Americans differ from white Americans differ from black Americans culturally and socio-economically not just on average but in systemic ways regardless if the person in question defines himself as Irish American, Kenyan American, white American or just plain American. From the US we have robust sociological data that allows us to compare LWers based on this information. The same is true of race in Latin America, parts of Africa and more recently Western Europe.

Nationality is not the same thing as racial or even ethnic identity in multicultural societies.

Considering every now and then people bring up a desire to lower barriers to entry for "minorities" (whatever that means in a global forum), such stats are useful for those who argue on such issues and also for ascertaining certain biases.

Adding a nationality and/or citizenship question would probably be useful though.

I don't think I'd describe that post as regretting asking "do you have a Y chromosome". He's apologizing for asking for data for one purpose (checking with colorblindness) and then using it for another (color names if you're a guy/girl).

Why not ask for both?

You are aware that if you ask people for their sex but not their gender, and say something like "we have more women now", you will be philosophized into a pulp, right?

Only if people here are less interested in applying probability theory than they are in philosophizing about gender... Oh.

How about, "It's highly likely that we have more women now"?

Would you be willing to write a discussion post about the questions you want to answer?