Desrtopa comments on How can people be actually converted? - Less Wrong

5 Post author: yttrium 05 February 2012 10:13PM

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Comment author: Desrtopa 06 February 2012 04:00:33AM 3 points [-]

I would have readily agreed that there were easier and more effective ways to draw more women to Less Wrong than flirt-to-convert before reading this comment. It suggests to me that the relative power of flirt-to-convert to other strategies is far greater than I would have predicted, and implementing more effective ones may be harder than I thought.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 February 2012 05:42:35PM 1 point [-]

Instead of just guessing how people have come to find out about LW, I figured why don't we ASK?

I have made a poll, and posted the link on the discussion section. Please answer. Even if you are a lurker. ESPECIALLY if you are a female.

Click here to go to the post

Comment author: Desrtopa 06 February 2012 08:17:48PM 1 point [-]

We've had at least one thread on this before, and the question was also featured on the latest survey, although there's only a single category for people referred in person by another person.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 February 2012 02:35:05AM *  7 points [-]

I went ahead and played around with the survey data, and got some interesting results:

Women are more likely to have been brought into LW by either a friend or by reading HPMoR

Percentage of women referred by a friend: 18%
Percentage of men referred by a friend: 10%

Percentage of women referred by HPMoR: 33%
Percentage of men referred by HPMoR: 17%

Conversely, men were more likely to have been brought in by OB or other blogs:

Percentage of women referred by OB: 18%
Percentage of men referred by OB: 29%

Percentage of women referred by other blogs: 13%
Percentage of men referred by other blogs: 24%

Referral by search engines were about the same between the sexes, with 8% of females, and 9% of males. The rest were write-ins, most commonly of specific websites that referred them.

ETA- This is for the data for the big 2011 survey. Not for the data from the currently running survey

Comment author: [deleted] 07 February 2012 02:54:36AM *  2 points [-]

Also, both were about the same age, with females averaging 26, and males averaging 27.

Females however, had a higher self-reported IQ and higher average karma

Average female self-reported IQ: 145.4
Average male self-reported IQ: 139.7

Average female karma: 1,599
Average male karma: 600

Comment author: [deleted] 06 February 2012 08:35:25PM 3 points [-]

Thanks for the links! But the thread doesn't clarify between genders, and also doesn't come in an easy to manipulate format (such as a spreadsheet)

The survey does much better at this, but has almost half the respondents answer that they came from OB or HPMoR, where I am specifically asking "If you came from OB or HPMoR, then how did you find THOSE sites?"