Although it is designed as part of libertarian recruitment and is used to start discussions with people about freedoms they already support and then "draw them in" by gradually exposing them to other ideas, the reality of the data is that not many people score libertarian (the Web data isn't very accurate because you get a lot more libertarians visiting the site).
In my younger years I did some tabling for the Libertarian Party, giving the quiz, letting them place a dot on a blow up of the quiz grid to let them mark how they scored and compare with others. And I have to say, in all that time, I did not encounter one person out of several hundred that scored libertarian who was not already a card-carrying member. In fact, if anything, most people score down in the authoritarian range.
This is just the data set I've collected, though. Maybe there is a better one out there than the one you can find from the online version of the quiz.
Maybe. But they did a version that was less obviously biased through an actual polling firm and got these results which represent libertarians as eight times more common than the number of people who identify as libertarian. Now maybe there really are those kinds of sympathies for the libertarian position, I'm not sure. But it doesn't give me a lot of confidence since the one online is worse.
But even if it doesn't skew libertarian it still lumps way to many people as centrist for it to be particularly useful. And any test that labels people as "authoritarian" (something usually reserved for totalitarian regimes) is pretty ridiculous.
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?