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lavalamp comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Suggestion: "Which of the following did you change your mind about after reading the sequences? (check all that apply)"
Many other things could be listed here.
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.)
Originally I was going to suggest asking, "what were your religious beliefs before reading the sequences?"-- and then I succumbed to the programmer's urge to solve the general problem.
However, I guess measuring how effective the sequences are at causing people to change their mind is something that a LW survey can't do, anyway (you'd need to also ask people who read the sequences but didn't stick around to accurately answer that).
Mainly I was curious how many deconversions the sequences caused or hastened.
Ok, so use radio-buttons: "believed before, still believe" "believed before, changed my mind now" "didn't believe before, changed my mind now" "never believed, still don't"
...and "believed something before, believe something different now"
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.