Unnamed comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong

94 Post author: Yvain 05 December 2011 10:49AM

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Comment author: Unnamed 05 December 2011 07:20:42PM *  37 points [-]

Strength of membership in the LW community was related to responses for most of the questions. There were 3 questions related to strength of membership: karma, sequence reading, and time in the community, and since they were all correlated with each other and showed similar patterns I standardized them and averaged them together into a single measure. Then I checked if this measure of strength in membership in the LW community was related to answers on each of the other questions, for the 822 respondents (described in this comment) who answered at least one of the probability questions and used percentages rather than decimals (since I didn't want to take the time to recode the answers which were given as decimals).

All effects described below have p < .01 (I also indicate when there is a nonsignificant trend with p<.2). On questions with categories I wasn't that rigorous - if there was a significant effect overall I just eyeballed the differences and reported which categories have the clearest difference (and I skipped some of the background questions which had tons of different categories and are hard to interpret).

Compared to those with a less strong membership in the LW community, those with a strong tie to the community are:

Background:

  • Gender - no difference
  • Age - no difference
  • Relationship Status - no difference
  • Sexual Orientation - no difference
  • Relationship Style - less likely to prefer monogamous, more likely to prefer polyamorous or to have no preference
  • Political Views - less likely to be socialist, more likely to be libertarian (but this is driven by the length of time in the community, which may reflect changing demographics - see my reply to this comment)
  • Religious Views - more likely to be atheist & not spiritual, especially less likely to be agnostic
  • Family Religion - no difference
  • Moral Views - more likely to be consequentialist
  • IQ - higher

Probabilities:

  • Many Worlds - higher
  • Aliens in the universe - lower (edited: I had mistakenly reversed the two aliens questions)
  • Aliens in our galaxy - trend towards lower (p=.04)
  • Supernatural - lower
  • God - lower
  • Religion - trend towards lower (p=.11, and this is statistically significant with a different analysis)
  • Cryonics - lower
  • Anti-Agathics - trend towards higher (p=.13) (this was the one question with a significant non-monotonic relationship: those with a moderately strong tie to the community had the highest probability estimate, while those with weak or strong ties had lower estimates)
  • Simulation - trend towards higher (p=.20)
  • Global Warming - higher
  • No Catastrophe - lower (i.e., think it is less likely that we will make it to 2100 without a catastrophe, i.e. think the chances of xrisk are higher)

Other Questions:

  • Singularity - sooner (this is statistically significant after truncating the outliers), and more likely to give an estimate rather than leave it blank
  • Type of XRisk - more likely to think that Unfriendly AI is the most likely XRisk
  • Cryonics Status - More likely to be signed up or to be considering it, less likely to be not planning to or to not have thought about it
Comment author: Unnamed 05 December 2011 09:04:56PM *  18 points [-]

Political Views - less likely to be socialist, more likely to be libertarian

I looked at this one a little more closely, and this difference in political views is driven almost entirely by the "time in community" measure of strength of membership in the LW community; it's not even statistically significant with the other two. I'd guess that is because LW started out on Overcoming Bias, which is a relatively libertarian blog, so the old timers tend to share those views. We've also probably added more non-Americans over time, who are more likely to be socialist.

All of the other relationships in the above post hold up when we replace the original measure of membership strength with one that is only based on the two variables of karma & sequence reading, but this one does not.