Randolf 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: Normal_Anomaly 07 December 2011 09:58:05PM 5 points [-]

Cryonics - lower

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

So long-time participants were less likely to believe that cryonics would work for them but more likely to sign up for it? Interesting. This could be driven by any of: fluke, greater rationality, greater age&income, less akrasia, more willingness to take long-shot bets based on shutting up and multiplying.

Comment author: Randolf 08 December 2011 01:07:21AM 1 point [-]

I think the main reason for this is that these persons have simply spent more time thinking about cyronics compared to other people. By spending time on this forum they have had a good chance of running into a discussion which has inspired them to read about it and sign up. Or perhaps people who are interested in cyronics are also interested in other topics LW has to offer, and hence stay in this place. In either case, it follows that they are probably also more knowledgeable about cyronics and hence understand what cyrotechnology can realistically offer currently or in the near future. In addition, these long-time guys might be more open to things such as cyronics in the ethical way.

Comment author: gwern 08 December 2011 02:51:39AM 5 points [-]

I think the main reason for this is that these persons have simply spent more time thinking about cyronics compared to other people.

I don't think this is obvious at all. If you had asked me before in advance which of the following 4 possible sign-pairs would be true with increasing time spent thinking about cryonics:

  1. less credence, less sign-ups
  2. less credence, more sign-ups
  3. more credence, more sign-ups
  4. more credence, less sign-ups

I would have said 'obviously #3, since everyone starts from "that won't ever work" and move up from there, and then one is that much more likely to sign up'

The actual outcome, #2, would be the one I would expect least. (Hence, I am strongly suspicious of anyone claiming to expect or predict it as suffering from hindsight bias.)

Comment author: CarlShulman 08 December 2011 10:05:35PM 3 points [-]

It is noted above that those with strong community attachment think that there is more risk of catastrophe. If human civilization collapses or is destroyed, then cryonics patients and facilities will also be destroyed.

Comment author: brianm 14 December 2011 03:03:43PM 0 points [-]

I would expect the result to be a more accurate estimation of the success, combined with more sign-ups . 2 is an example of this if, in fact, the more accurate assessment is lower than the assessment of someone with a different level of information.

I don't it's true that everyone starts from "that won't ever work" - we know some people think it might work, and we may be inclined to some wishful thinking or susceptability to hype to inflate our likelihood above the conclusion we'd reach if we invest the time to consider the issue in more depth, It's also worth noting that we're not comparing the general public to those who've seriously considered signing up, but the lesswrong population, who are probably a lot more exposed to the idea of cryonics.

I'd agree that it's not what I would have predicted in advance (having no more expectation for the likelihood assigned to go up as down with more research), but it would be predictable for someone proceeding from the premise that the lesswrong community overestimates the likelihood of cryonics success compared to those who have done more research.

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