It seems a bit transparent to me that there's no such thing as a "best level of aid to the Third World". That's asking "How much money do you have to throw at the problem to stop feeling guilty?" There are only marginal efficiencies which determine how much resources you would want to flow in that direction. In the case of Africa, African economists are pleading with us to stop the aid because it's destroying their continent. I don't know about the rest of the Third World. In any case it has to go project by project.
1. A question posed simply in terms of "the best level" would be measuring some sort of tangled-up combination of respondents' values and their opinions about facts. That might be a bad thing (though I note that the question about political affiliation, at least, has the same feature). Instead, one could ask something like "what level of aid do you think would maximize Africa's GDP after 20 years?" or "what level of aid do you think would maximize average expected QALYs at birth over the whole human population".
2. When conside...
Related to: Practical Rationality Questionnaire
Here among this community of prior-using, Aumann-believing rationalists, it is a bit strange that we don't have any good measure of what the community thinks about certain things.
I no longer place much credence in raw majoritarianism: the majority is too uneducated, too susceptible to the Dark Arts, and too vulnerable to cognitive biases. If I had to choose the people whose mean opinion I trusted most, it would be - all of you.
So, at the risk of people getting surveyed-out, I'd like to run a survey on the stuff Anna Salamon didn't. Part on demographics, part on opinions, and part on the interactions between the two.
I've already put up an incomplete rough draft of the survey I'd like to use, but I'll post it here again. Remember, this is an incomplete rough draft survey. DO NOT FILL IT OUT YET. YOUR SURVEY WILL NOT BE COUNTED.
Incomplete rough draft of survey
Right now what I want from people is more interesting questions that you want asked. Any question that you want to know the Less Wrong consensus on. Please post each question as a separate comment, and upvote any question that you're also interested in. I'll include as many of the top-scoring questions as I think people can be bothered to answer.
No need to include questions already on the survey, although if you really hate them you can suggest their un-inclusion or re-phrasing.
Also important: how concerned are you about privacy? I was thinking about releasing the raw data later in case other people wanted to perform their own analyses, but it might be possible to identify specific people if you knew enough about them. Are there any people who would be comfortable giving such data if only one person were to see the data, but uncomfortable with it if the data were publically accessible?