Less Wrong Polls in Comments - Less Wrong

Less Wrong Polls in Comments

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 02:19:36 +1000

Submitted by jimrandomh • 79 votes • 300 comments

You can now write Less Wrong comments that contain polls! John Simon picked up and finished some code I had written back in 2010 but never finished, and our admins Wesley Moore and Matt Fallshaw have deployed it. You can use it right now, so let's give it some testing here in this thread.

The polls work through the existing Markdown comment formatting, similar to the syntax used for links. Full documentation is in the wiki; the short version is that you can write comments like this:

What is your favorite color? [poll]{Red}{Green}{Blue}{Other}

How long has it been your favorite color, in years? [poll:number]

Red is a nice color [poll:Agree....Disagree]

Will your favorite color change? [poll:probability]

To see the results of the poll, you have to vote (you can leave questions blank if you want). The results include a link to the raw poll data, including the usernames of people who submitted votes with the "Vote anonymously" box unchecked. After you submit the comment, if you go back and edit your comment all those poll tags will have turned into [pollid:123]. You can edit the rest of the comment without resetting the poll, but you can't change the options.

It works right now, but it's also new and could be buggy. Let's give it some testing; what have you always wanted to know about Less Wrongers?

300 comments

kilobug on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T04:59:24.725833+10:00

Great features ! Thanks and congrats to those who made it happen.

One suggestion : you can't see the result until you voted, I guess it's not to bias/anchor the answer, but then it would be nice to add an option "I don't plan to vote, let me see the results", so someone who doesn't want to vote for any reason can still access the outcome. Or else, there is a risk of people not wanting to vote but wanting to see the outcome will vote "at random" and skew the result.

CCC on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T16:32:00.638721+10:00

RobinZ on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T04:20:00.193870+10:00

Excluding the ponies (which I didn't vote on, because I am one of sixteen people remaining on the Internet who doesn't pony yet), this is the earliest radio poll where the sum of the numbers in the column matches the "Total" number at the bottom.

Kaj_Sotala on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T18:02:48.996723+10:00

because I am one of sixteen people remaining on the Internet who doesn't pony yet

I am glad that you used the word "yet": accepting the possibility of getting better is an essential part of overcoming a problem.

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T04:21:50.792526+10:00

I am one of sixteen people remaining on the Internet who doesn't pony yet

It's a relief to know I'm not the only one...

Solvent on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T21:13:46.685006+10:00

I love what this poll reveals about LW readers. Many sympathise with Batman, because of his tech/intellectual angle. The same with Iron Man, but he's a bit less cool. Then two have heard of superman, and most LWers are male. And most of us don't care.

adamisom on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-29T04:05:10.938271+10:00

Results: 4+16+2+16+1+27(last option) = 144? WTF?

Kindly on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T21:35:33.434424+10:00

Spiderman! Why isn't Spiderman on there? I bet he'd be way more popular than that Flash guy whoever he is.

Epiphany on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T12:25:15.398016+10:00

What would be really funny is if, when you select "I don't care, but I'd like to see the results" you see that everyone else filled it out the same way.

Kindly on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T22:37:39.182107+10:00

nyan_sandwich on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T06:46:43.704489+10:00

Kindly on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T07:15:52.608502+10:00

I'm not conflating options, because I'm not really comparing Spiderman to not-Spiderman, I'm comparing Spiderman to the poll results in CCC's comment. The effect is the same as editing the previous poll to add Spiderman.

Also apparently it's "Spider-Man".

Unnamed on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T17:05:43.420791+10:00

This is a problem. Ideally there would be a separate button next to the "vote" button (a forum that I read has that feature, with the button labeled "View Results (Null Vote)"). Second-best would be to allow people to submit a blank vote (which is not as good, since it's not obvious to people that they have that option), but it currently does not work that way (even though the OP seems to say that it does).

Unnamed on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T16:44:50.418925+10:00

thomblake on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T01:06:10.793180+10:00

I love this poll

klfwip on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-27T02:44:54.513815+10:00

Some people don't pick very good schelling points.

Unnamed on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-10-21T09:01:57.232529+11:00

After one month and 120 responses, I'm considering this poll closed. The results are:

1) The third one: 21%
2) The fifth one: 15%
3) The second one: 14%
4) The first one: 32%
5) The fourth one: 18%

A chi-squared test says that these results are non-uniform, with a p-value of 0.02.

The correct answer, #5 "the fourth one", was chosen by 18% of respondents. The most common answer was #4, "the first one".

This poll idea was taken from a gamefaqs poll which was linked on LW last year. The results of that poll (which had a much larger sample size) were:

1) The third one: 17%
2) The first one: 24%
3) The last one: 21%
4) The second one: 26%
5) The fourth one: 11%

My hypothesis about that poll was:

The first option is most salient, by virtue of being first. Level 0 players will tend to choose option 1. Level 1 players will realize that this is what level 0 players will do, so they will tend to choose option 2 ("the first one"). Level 2 players will realize that this is what level 1 players will do, so they will tend to choose option 4 ("the second one"). Level 3 players will realize that this is what level 2 players will do, so they will tend to choose option 5 ("the fourth one"). Apparently there are lots of level 1 & 2 players, but very few level 3 players.

That hypothesis predicts that the most common responses on the LW poll would be the level 1 response, #4 "the first one", and the level 2 response, #5 "the fourth one". The data provide partial confirmation of this hypothesis; in terms of levels the most common responses to the LW poll were:

32% Level 1 (#4 "the first one")
21% Level 0 (#1 "the third one")
18% Level 2 (#5 "the fourth one")
15% Level 3 (#2 "the fifth one")
14% Level 4 (#3 "the second one")

And for the gamefaqs poll:
26% Level 2 (#4 "the second one")
24% Level 1 (#2 "the first one")
21% Level 4 (#3 "the last one")
17% Level 0 (#1 "the third one")
11% Level 3 (#5 "the fourth one")

GuySrinivasan on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:08:03.614765+10:00

Luke_A_Somers on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T22:53:03.466506+10:00

I see a 'Total 123' but the table and chart only show 2 votes. The raw data also have 123 entries.

Endovior on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T02:02:39.550919+10:00

Yeah, it looks like there's something seriously broken about this poll code. I'm seeing 159 total votes, and only 13 visible votes.

Sarokrae on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T06:58:02.583103+10:00

Total 139, chart shows 0 votes...

jeremysalwen on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T00:56:07.025742+10:00

Hey everyone, I just voted, and so I can see the correct answer. The average is 19.2, so you should choose 17%!

Epiphany on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T16:23:48.948480+10:00

Oooh great idea. Bugs / Suggestions:

The answers are transformed into this tiny little poll code with a poll id, so I assume it's being saved to a database. However, the questions are not being saved with them. I can edit my question after the poll has been answered. This may result in some pranks later where you ask some obvious question like "does the earth revolve around the sun" or whatever and everyone answers "yes" and then you can change your question to "are you a Scientologist?" and you will see everyone's votes saying "yes" to that. Much more malicious changes are possible, of course. Also, if the questions aren't stored in the database with the answers, you won't have as many options later for doing cool things with your database full of polls.
The code: [Poll] does not work because it's upper case, but this is not an obvious reason for poll failure, so one may end up wasting lots of time trying to figure it out or make annoying requests for support. Making this case insensitive is probably a good idea.
The poll seems designed for very short answers. My elitism poll results look bad for that reason.

Kindly on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T08:00:12.621232+10:00

The poll seems designed for very short answers.

Feature, not bug.

philh on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:23:37.231595+10:00

The raw poll data is sent with "Content-Disposition: attachment", which causes firefox to download it instead of letting me view it in the browser. Is this deliberate?

CCC on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T22:05:17.340943+10:00

Unnamed on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T16:49:20.063537+10:00

Bugmaster on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T06:00:26.633776+10:00

I used random.org to generate my answer.

But, when I submitted it, I got the following:

First Answer 0 (0%)
Second Answer 0 (0%)
Third Answer 0 (0%)
Fourth Answer 1 (2%)
Fifth Answer 0 (0%)
Total 58 (100%)

The raw data contained all the 58 rows, however. Seems like there might be a bug in the result-rendering code.

royf on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T03:03:05.909594+10:00

To anyone thinking this is not random, with 42 votes in:

The p-value is 0.895 (this is the probability of seeing at least this much non-randomness, assuming a uniform distribution)
The entropy is 2.302bits instead of log(5) = 2.322bits, for 0.02bits KL-distance (this is the number of bits you lose for encoding one of these votes as if it was random)

If you think you see a pattern here, you should either see a doctor or a statistician.

DanArmak on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T04:19:33.959385+10:00

I wish I could see a doctor-statistician. Or at least a doctor who understood statistics.

shminux on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T04:34:14.347859+10:00

Yvain might some day have his own practice.

kerspoon on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-25T22:29:23.092777+10:00

Here is one: http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html

gwern on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-27T06:00:42.284358+10:00

Well, it's worth noting people seem to be trainable to choose randomly: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85192141/1986-neuringer.pdf

Apropos of the PRNG discussion in http://blog.yunwilliamyu.net/2011/08/14/mindhack-mental-math-pseudo-random-number-generators/ for which I wrote some flashcards: http://pastebin.com/CKif0fEf

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T05:29:59.973013+10:00

Looks like we're better at randomness than the rest of the population. If I asked random people for a random number from 1 to 10, I wouldn't be surprised to see substantially less than 3.322 bits of entropy per number (e.g., many more than 10% of the people choosing 7).

scav on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T17:54:02.947991+10:00

Ha. I fail at random. In my defence, the universe is probably deterministic anyway.

BlazeOrangeDeer on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-25T10:58:22.159362+10:00

it's probably not, but you're still excused ;)

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T20:47:36.682021+10:00

Is (the seconds' figure in my watch) mod 5 random enough?

Luke_A_Somers on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T23:43:12.271645+10:00

I used the least significant digit on my time-remaining-to-full-charge. And ended up propping up the most populated entry.

BlazeOrangeDeer on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-25T10:59:59.163291+10:00

I needed 3 random bits (and threw out any overflow), which I got by checking whether arbitrary words or phrases I thought of had an even or odd number of letters. That's the most random completely mental (heh) way I know of, I wonder if there are others.

Luke_A_Somers on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-25T20:22:27.474375+10:00

... you could have done it more-reliably evenly by taking the mod 5 of the phrase/word length.

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-26T08:26:36.430503+10:00

Considering that the average word length in English is about five letters, I suspect that'd be quite far from being uniformly distributed.

Luke_A_Somers on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-26T23:39:01.343691+10:00

Average is irrelevant. What's relevant is the standard deviation.

Since standard deviation goes as the square root of the number of items being added, phrase length for any reasonably-sized phrase, so long as it wasn't a line of poetry, should be pretty evenly distributed.

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-26T08:23:00.466535+10:00

It's not obvious to me that it's unbiased. My gut feeling suspects that if I randomly chose a word it'd be more likely to have an odd than an even number of letters.

Unnamed on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-10-21T09:13:43.465581+11:00

After one month and 118 responses, I'm considering this poll closed. The results are:

1) 17%
2) 21%
3) 20%
4) 24%
5) 18%

A chi-squared test says that these results do not differ significantly from uniform random responding, with a p-value of 0.78.

The main reason why I ran this poll was because I thought it might have implications for the trickier poll above. It is interesting the option #4 was the most common response in this poll, that poll, and the gamefaqs poll which that poll was based on. #4 may seem especially random, and some respondents in the other polls may have just been trying to answer at random. But this poll ended up not providing much information about that; to test it we'd need a larger sample size, and preferably a poll where respondents did not use external sources of randomness.

mfb on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-10-01T03:32:46.776754+10:00

I think this would be even more interesting as "pick at random, without an external source of randomness". Sure you can get random numbers from random.org, your computer or the seconds on your watch (a nice idee), but those just blur the effect of mind-generated random numbers.

gwern on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-27T02:25:32.807540+10:00

For convenience: http://www.random.org/ or in Bash, echo $(($RANDOM % 5 + 1))

RobinZ on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-27T00:09:05.536016+10:00

Question: what's a reasonable prior over the probability distribution of poll answers? Because I downloaded the raw data, and it says:

...and I'm not sure what would constitute reasonable priors for the uniform distribution hypothesis versus the "aversion toward First Answer" hypothesis versus the "aversion toward First Answer and Fifth Answer" hypothesis.

othercriteria on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-10-01T01:34:09.808999+10:00

Your question is confused. The uniform distribution hypothesis only requires that the (assumed infinite) population picks the answers independently with equal probability. Under this hypothesis, the observed poll answers (for a fixed number of respondents) will follow a multinomial distribution with parameters (0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.2). A typical realization will not have an equal number of respondents giving each answer, although asymptotically the empirical frequencies will converge to equality.

Anyways, as a Bayesian, the better question is what should my posterior belief about the response probabilities be after running the poll and updating off the answers? The canonical way to do this would be to put a Dirichlet prior over the response probabilities. By the miracle of conjugacy, your posterior distribution will itself by a (generally different) Dirichlet distribution.

By taking the expectation of indicator variables like I{"probability of First Answer under 0.2"} under the posterior, you can figure out what degree of belief you must give to statements like "respondents have an aversion toward First Answer".

RobinZ on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-10-01T01:40:20.691191+10:00

That makes sense - I had imagined doing something similar, but I had never heard of Dirichlet priors.

othercriteria on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-10-01T02:00:20.505351+10:00

Happy this helped. The Dirichlet-multinomial model gets relatively little attention because it adds nothing really new to the beta-binomial model for polls with just two responses. It's easy to find lots of introductory, chatty introductions to the beta-binomial like this one or this one if you want to learn more...

Kindly on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-27T02:32:30.079979+10:00

My own feelings on the matter are that if you don't know what prior to have, compute worst-case bounds.

In this case, the model that maximizes the probability of seeing this data is that each answer is 15% likely to be 1, 22% likely to be 2, 21% likely to be 3, 24% likely to be 4, and 18% likely to be 5. We can compute the probability of seeing this data under this model, and also under the "all answers are equally likely" model, and conclude that our worst-case model makes us only 3.61 times as likely to see this data.

In particular, any other hypothesis you might have can only receive this little evidence, relative to the uniform distribution hypothesis; and I believe in close-to-uniformity enough that I'm not going to be swayed by what is fewer than 2 bits of evidence.

RobinZ on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-27T12:16:11.908243+10:00

Thanks! I didn't think of that particular brainhack - I'll be sure to use it in the future.

RobinZ on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T04:40:48.946050+10:00

I rolled 1d6, intending to reroll any 6s.

Epiphany on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T11:20:47.583360+10:00

Bug report: The right navigation bar on this page has scooted down as if it's being pushed out of alignment by something too wide in the comments section. The comments seem to have the same width as they normally do and I but perhaps the polls are interfering with the layout in some way?

FFX 15.0.1 W7

jimrandomh on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T02:06:55.803059+10:00

Benja on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T02:23:14.462711+10:00

Current results: Red: 0%; Green, 33%; Blue: 67%; Other: 0%.

I'm gladdened to see that even though we don't discuss politics on LW, the green scum are in the minority here!

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:34:51.454993+10:00

Now neither green nor blue are the absolute majority, with 34% voting “Other”. Those pesky sideways rope pullers!

ShardPhoenix on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T19:45:53.321045+10:00

I got an error the first time because I put a percent instead of a fractional probability. Upon correcting this, I now see the following erroneous result: http://imgur.com/IASqy

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:28:38.633757+10:00

What kind of question is, “Red is a nice color”? Some shades of red are nice and some aren't. Duh. (Also, who the hell has had a favourite colour for six dozen million times the age of the Universe?)

RichardKennaway on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T21:50:55.437878+10:00

Would it be useful to have a "choose all that apply" question type?

ArisKatsaris on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T22:24:14.579774+10:00

BUG: The display of the data for the multiple-choice polls seems to reset at some point, though I can still see the complete raw data when clicking at them... e.g. right now, though 68 people have voted for the "best pony", at the display I only see the choice of the 68th person (Applejack) having a single vote, and all the other choices are falsely at zero.

Similar things with other polls.

jimrandomh on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T02:52:36.025729+10:00

Confirmed. The issue is in an interaction between the polling code and Reddit's custom ORM which causes vote-totals to be cached, but not persisted to the database correctly. I have a fix, which I'm testing now. All polls created before the fix is applied will be affected; it'll be possible to restore them, but it'd take some work which isn't a priority for me.

wmoore on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T11:04:52.935585+10:00

I've just deployed a fix that will apply to all new poll votes. Thanks jimrandomh for passing on the bug report and initial patch.

Vaniver on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T00:04:34.080953+10:00

Here's a screenshot of that with my poll:

I still have access to the raw poll data.

MichaelHoward on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T08:31:08.068837+10:00

Do you ever have feelings of irrational nostalgia for hopelessly obsolete technology?

MichaelHoward on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T08:33:34.102151+10:00

Vote up for YES.

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T20:06:16.878206+10:00

I used a Nokia 3330 until last year.

MichaelHoward on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T08:33:24.369106+10:00

Vote up for NO.

MichaelHoward on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T08:33:15.646961+10:00

Karma balance.

Alicorn on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T05:53:19.063464+10:00

I would like a user preference that makes it possible to vote non-anonymously by default. But it's low priority - this is really awesome as is!

thomblake on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T05:59:27.363186+10:00

seconded

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T01:09:53.085231+10:00

(Or even it remembering whether you chose to vote non-anonymously in the last poll you took.)

RichardKennaway on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T08:58:18.382646+10:00

There is something wrong with the page formatting on this post (but on no others I've tried). The sidebar at the right has been shunted to the very foot of the page. The top of the sidebar overlaps the footer bar and the rst of it hangs down below the page content. I've tried this in two different browsers (Safari and Firefox on a Mac). Could the new poll formatting have interacted badly with the CSS? This doesn't happen if I load an individual comment on this page, for any of the comments I've tried.

Vaniver on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:17:33.039790+10:00

Awesome! But since we're stress-testing it, let's try doing things wrong.

First thing that I noticed is that it doesn't let you post if there's a poll error. That's great! ... except it doesn't respect four spaces to put something in code format, so I can't easily tell you what I tried and what failed. Putting tests in their own comments to make it more obvious when something passes.

[edit]Oops, this also floods recent comments.

Vaniver on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:19:26.184177+10:00

Vaniver on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:24:27.160506+10:00

Polls are stored by their id, which makes it so they can't be edited after the fact. (Probably wise.) But what happens when you refer to an old poll by its id?

This is |pollid:10|, which refers to the poll from this comment.

Error: Poll belongs to a different comment

What about a future poll?

Error: Poll not found!

faul_sname on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T17:09:25.673407+10:00

What if you then create the poll?

Vaniver on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:20:51.906225+10:00

Vaniver on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:18:12.776121+10:00

Testing the spaces to make sure I'm doing it right:

Yep, [I](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ekw/less_wrong_polls_in_comments/7gqv) am.

Now let's try a well-formatted poll:

Is this commented? 


 Yes


 No

Vote anonymously

CCC on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T16:47:55.757511+10:00

Total:25, but adding up the votes for each option gives 24.

Vaniver on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T23:57:19.476213+10:00

Fascinating, I got two and two (total 33), and after refreshing I see the poll text but it won't let me vote, because I already voted.

Also, I think it's sort of amusing that this is the only thing I found that looks like a serious bug to me, but it has the least upvotes of my tests.

MichaelHoward on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T06:25:05.458848+10:00

Antisuji on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T10:33:30.567644+10:00

This doesn't look right: http://screencast.com/t/qpRGihBG

The raw data says there are 13 votes for "0" and 20 votes for "1".

Kindly on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T12:44:40.430034+10:00

Looking at the raw data, it seems that at some point the True and False counts got reset, but then kept increasing as normal. The same thing happened in this poll and this one but not others.

Kaj_Sotala on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T18:25:08.199422+10:00

roryokane on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T13:16:18.088509+10:00

The solution on Mathematics Stack Exchange

Morendil on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T02:15:26.813358+10:00

RobertLumley on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T02:28:04.024061+10:00

After my vote:

" Mean 43.5 Median 75.0 Total votes 2"

Well this is mathematically impossible... My guess is the median isn't properly calculated for even numbers of votes.

jimrandomh on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T02:56:16.418771+10:00

Thanks for spotting this! I looked into it, and it seems to be double-counting the most recent result when computing the median. It's an order-of-initialization issue; it thinks it's getting all the results except the new one, adding it, then taking the median, but it's actually getting a list of all the results. The fix is straightforward; I'll email the admins to apply it.

wmoore on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T09:48:23.403806+10:00

Your fix for the incorrect median calculation has been deployed.

NancyLebovitz on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T22:30:56.057971+10:00

I got a mean of -9.91765890411e+16, so something is still wrong.

Kindly on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T23:25:18.102382+10:00

No, that's unfortunate but correct (several people entered things like entered -3e+18 as their estimate).

DaFranker on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T02:34:50.323799+10:00

...trolltastic.

"Mean 1.25e+18 Median 45.0 Total votes 8"

siodine on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T02:56:27.322820+10:00

Specifying a lower and upper bound on the input should be required.

ema on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T00:35:30.970727+10:00

That doesn't really prevent trolling, so i'm not sure that it would be helpful.

siodine on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T02:42:59.041734+10:00

It won't prevent trolling but it will minimize its effects. As it stands, you can input numbers like 1e+19 which will seriously throw off the mean. If trolls can only give the highest or lowest reasonable bound then they're not going to have much of an effect individually and that makes going through the effort to troll less worthwhile.

Kawoomba on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T03:33:03.751634+10:00

Well this is mathematically impossible...

Not necessarily:

Votes: 12 and 75

Mean: 43.5

Median (upper median): 75

While the standard e.g. wolfram alpha definition (which isn't normative) of the median would be 43.5 as well, it is an accepted practice (in plenty of CS grad classes, at least) to have the median guaranteed to be an element of the sample, normally the upper median is then chosen simply as "median". Hence the wiki definition having the qualifier "usual".

In fact, I was surprised that the median is strictly speaking not guaranteed to be an element of the set, using the majority mathematical definition.

So, not so much an error as a lazy CS convention ...

GuySrinivasan on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:19:17.063292+10:00

It correctly interpreted ۲ as 2. :)

Emile on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T05:47:49.421374+10:00

Emile on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T23:04:24.504863+10:00

So according to the raw data, 100 people voted, but what I see displayed is 3 votes for answer 4 of 5, one for 5 of 5, and no total.

Kindly on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T00:16:15.261271+10:00

The "no total" part is independent of the bug -- it seems that scale polls just don't report totals or percentages. (They probably should.)

David_Gerard on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T06:04:06.788458+10:00

This is great and I upvoted it, but being meta I think it should be in Discussion.

MichaelHoward on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T07:16:47.904020+10:00

GuySrinivasan on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:09:26.503847+10:00

MBlume on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:56:35.170814+10:00

OpenThreadGuy on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T13:04:27.904429+10:00

Psh, of course rationalists think Twilight Sparkle is the best pony.

Luke_A_Somers on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T23:36:23.805703+10:00

She's intellectual, but she reacts irrationally to the Pinkie Sense.

Also, poor Rarity.

MaoShan on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T13:28:12.852468+10:00

It's a trick question, Twilight Sparkle is a unicorn.

MugaSofer on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T22:46:00.990735+10:00

Unicorns are a subset of ponies in the MLP 'verse.

MaoShan on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T12:02:48.017560+10:00

How silly of me; next time I'll get my facts straight.

MugaSofer on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T22:04:38.430919+10:00

You'd better. My Little Pony continuity is SERIOUS BUSINESS.

Alicorn on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T05:54:11.032953+10:00

I think it's "Pinkie".

MBlume on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T06:00:03.107888+10:00

Well, no one's voting for her anyway.

Fyrius on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-24T03:00:35.168854+10:00

I beg to differ.

roryokane on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T14:05:49.639346+10:00

Indeed it is. A Google search for “Pinky Pie” autocorrects to “Pinkie Pie”, while the inverse is not true. The first result in either case is a wiki article on “Pinkie Pie”.

Epiphany on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T03:10:28.798904+10:00

My poll is now broken. The specific answers don't show up anymore in the results, only the totals at the bottom of each question show. Elitism Poll

shminux on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T06:15:27.776473+10:00

The FAI hidden deep in the poll code logic refuses to run stupid and trollish polls.

Epiphany on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T07:37:56.116647+10:00

LMAO

I disagree with the sentiment but I can still laugh at good humor.

MichaelHoward on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T07:09:45.080019+10:00

NancyLebovitz on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T22:34:52.812517+10:00

What about fuligin?

MaoShan on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T13:25:19.894655+10:00

Won't you also ask about my favourite colour?

MaoShan on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T13:37:24.538745+10:00

I don't know if it's specifically addressed anywhere in the Terms of Use, but free use of polls can have some very hurtful results; it might be helpful to somewhere post a guide to what type of polls are appropriate and tolerated.

Alicorn on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T13:43:02.247204+10:00

Can you be more specific about what you mean?

Epiphany on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T16:47:03.901863+10:00

This is an especially good point because you're currently able to change the question after the results are in, allowing you to prank the poll takers by making their answers seem to support anything you feel like.

DaFranker on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T06:23:59.647333+10:00

Cue in choice blindness dark arts for Fun and Updates!

(also for evil experiments and control groups, if someone figures those out)

wedrifid on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T15:35:13.324711+10:00

I don't know if it's specifically addressed anywhere in the Terms of Use, but free use of polls can have some very hurtful results; it might be helpful to somewhere post a guide to what type of polls are appropriate and tolerated.

What? About the same as the what you could write in comments already but prettier.

radical_negative_one on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T16:05:23.399265+10:00

AspiringRationalist on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T03:46:09.596696+10:00

The overall total equals the sum of the individual answer totals, in contrast to previous polls.

wedrifid on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T19:49:08.359017+10:00

What? About the same as the what you could write in comments already but prettier.

Epiphany on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T16:43:49.709527+10:00

Here's one: What if someone takes a poll asking if they should kill themselves? People could write "yes" in the comments, but they can select "yes" in a poll anonymously.

This may lead to more brutal answers to questions. The questions will be limited to whatever the poll creator types in, but that doesn't mean everyone will use common sense while creating their polls.

You may argue "they can already use comments as a polling system using karma" but I would then argue "okay, MaoShan still has a point, and it applies to karma, too."

Also

scav on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T18:09:37.029201+10:00

Most of the commenters here refrain from being antisocial dicks. There's no reason to believe anonymous polling will change that.
Anyone actually making life-or-death decisions on the basis of an internet forum poll has a non-trivial chance of being selected out of the gene pool for related reasons.
Sometimes you want or can accept brutal answers.
Individual responsibility. You can't legislate for or even concern-troll people into having common sense, even assuming common sense is a well-defined and useful property.

Epiphany on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T03:14:44.169986+10:00

Another thought: Just because a person asking people on the internet whether they should kill themselves isn't likely to survive in any case, this does not mean that LessWrong wouldn't be sued if said person posted a poll and it resulted in their death. For whatever reason, the US legal system has been known to grant large sums of money to people who are harmed by things that many consider inadvisable or "no-brainers".

scav on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T06:17:39.309799+10:00

And there we depart from the discussion of rationality into the realm of the law. :)

I am pleased to be able to give an immediate unequivocal answer on whether this is likely to be a problem: I have no idea.

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T21:06:18.554705+10:00

Upvote this comment and downvote the karma sink if you think I should not kill myself. :-)

(Edited to add smiley per Poe's law, especially in case someone sees this comment without seeing the parent first.)

wedrifid on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T19:56:09.422117+10:00

Here's one: What if someone takes a poll asking if they should kill themselves?

I suspect people would react against people asking that regardless of whether they include radio buttons. If I recall there has even been drama surrounding making observations about a former member suiciding. I'd be somewhat surprised if someone asking this question directly did not prompt that comment to be banned.

The questions will be limited to whatever the poll creator types in, but that doesn't mean everyone will use common sense while creating their polls.

No, I haven't observed common sense to universally constrain posting behavior in general. However explicit polls don't strike me as sufficiently different or more powerful than regular comments, (inherently anonymous) votes and private messages that a move from informal expectations that people don't behave like @#%$s need be changed to a formal "Terms of Use".

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T21:05:49.503470+10:00

Upvote this comment and downvote the karma sink if you think I should kill myself. :-)

(Edited to add smiley per Poe's law, especially in case someone sees this comment without seeing the parent first.)

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T21:05:22.910227+10:00

Karma sink.

MaoShan on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T12:20:55.431364+10:00

wedrifid on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T15:12:41.410096+10:00

We've covered this.

Seriously, what is it about this that is so hard to understand? I mean it was right there in the grandparent:

About the same as the what you could write in comments already but prettier.

You can insult people if you want. You can use text. You can insult people using using ad hoc polls with karma sinks that we've been making do with for years. You can insult people in comments and happen to use the new poll markdown syntax. You can even insult people with the markdown image feature that we've always had:

Either way the rules are the same: You can get away with insulting people to the extent that you can do so subtly, choose targets wisely and be well in tune with social dynamics.

RichardKennaway on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T18:08:15.824194+10:00

"Don't be an asshole" covers it. If you need a guide to tell you that, a guide will not help you.

Eugine_Nier on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T14:39:57.532291+10:00

Could you taboo "asshole"?

wedrifid on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T16:39:27.346987+10:00

Could you taboo "asshole"?

It's fairly taboo already.

RichardKennaway on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T03:11:27.663822+10:00

Could you taboo "asshole"?

Explain how not to be an asshole? Possibly, but I don't think anyone here actually needs an explanation, beyond pointing out that anything you shouldn't say for that reason in an ordinary comment, you shouldn't say in a poll either. The slightly different sort of thing that a poll is doesn't change the standard.

Eugine_Nier on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-24T04:13:32.014536+10:00

And I was hoping to extract your moral theory from you.

RichardKennaway on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-24T17:48:13.820832+10:00

I don't see this as anything to do with moral theory. It's pretty much general currency what constitutes being an asshole. I've seen it set out in umpteen comment policies on blogs, which often explicitly summarise it as "don't be an asshole", or even "don't be an asshole -- but you knew that already".

Eugine_Nier on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-25T09:22:14.486108+10:00

I don't see this as anything to do with moral theory.

I don't understand what you mean here. Is your concept of moral theory only something for thought experiments involving Omega but to abstract to apply to day-to-day life?

RichardKennaway on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-25T16:19:54.329124+10:00

No. I mean it in the same sense that we do not need to have a discussion of moral theory in order to agree on what actions we are talking about, when we talk about theft. We don't even need to have a discussion of moral theory to agree that we'd rather people didn't behave that way.

Kawoomba on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T03:54:42.048801+10:00

Towards FAI, one step at a time!

shminux on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T11:56:16.367003+10:00

ArisKatsaris on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T12:19:41.200619+10:00

Please don't do that.

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T19:19:23.392015+10:00

Either the first or the second depending on how busy I am.

shminux on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T04:27:08.263856+10:00

I'm surprised that so many people here are willing to give the benefit of a doubt to single-issue I-know-I-am-right irrationalists.

ArisKatsaris on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T09:34:31.968830+10:00

What you did in the ancestor poll was effecting pointing and laughing at an already isolated member of the community while encouraging others to join in the mocking and jeering.

It felt to me so stereotypically villainous bullying that I'm surprised I didn't actually experience a PTSD flashback or something to my highschool years.

shminux on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T10:02:00.015711+10:00

What you did in the ancestor poll was effecting pointing and laughing at an already isolated member of the community

I take an issue with your statement that eridu is "a member of the community". There are plenty of radical feminism communities, this is NOT one of them.

It felt to me so stereotypically villainous bullying that I'm surprised I didn't actually experience a PTSD flashback or something to my highschool years.

S/he is NOT required to visit this place every day for six hours, like you were in high school, so there are no parallels whatsoever with your unfortunate experience. S/he can happily stay among his/her man-hating online groups instead of proselytizing his/her vile message here.

This person's radical feminist posts make this forum a worse place by lowering the overall sanity of it, as has been commented on before. Rejecting this disease by silently downvoting his/her every post (and every reply) is the sane thing to do, short of banning him/her outright.

Bugmaster on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-24T21:14:16.378097+10:00

I downvoted plenty of eridu's posts, but I also upvoted a minority of them, because they actually taught me something about radical feminism (starting with the fact that it apparently exists in earnest, and is not a straw-woman argument created to discredit other kinds of feminism). Am I ever going to apply this knowledge in practice ? Probably not, but knowledge is still neat, and a good thing to have.

shminux on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-25T00:52:58.112690+10:00

Yes, I also clicked on eridu's link the first time (and I did not downvote that post), but his/her subsequent comments had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

MixedNuts on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T17:24:44.208957+10:00

If you're going to hate on a person rather than individual posts, a) don't and b) read enough to get his pronoun right.

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T19:07:08.199964+10:00

I take “the community” in ArisKataris's post to refer to the set of people who write here regularly. But yeah, a narrower meaning (e.g. people with non-negligible positive karma) would be more useful.

shminux on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-24T06:15:53.831263+10:00

people with non-negligible positive karma

That would probably cover 99% of the regulars, not an overly restrictive definition.

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-24T20:42:09.803540+10:00

But it would exclude eridu, that's the point.

wedrifid on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T17:11:49.473118+10:00

What you did in the ancestor poll was effecting pointing and laughing at an already isolated member of the community while encouraging others to join in the mocking and jeering.

Eridu isn't a member of the community and the account has actively positioned itself as external.

NancyLebovitz on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-10-07T05:08:01.760488+11:00

Would it be possible to have a preview for polls?

Vaniver on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-28T00:50:02.693228+10:00

Bug: If you write a comment responding to a comment with a poll, then vote in the poll before posting the comment, your comment is eaten.

badger on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-27T02:56:21.331584+10:00

Bug report:

I voted in this poll, and after reloading the page, I don't see the results. Sensibly, it won't let me vote again, but now I'm stuck with the survey form. I did see the results immediately after voting.

Edit: I can view the results now. Not sure what changed.

Lapsed_Lurker on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T07:50:07.051647+10:00

NancyLebovitz on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T22:39:42.940437+10:00

RichardKennaway on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T21:49:00.997089+10:00

TheOtherDave on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T00:11:06.313232+10:00

Should I do a weighted sum over descendant entities I deem fractionally me, or just over entities I deem "me"?

RichardKennaway on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T00:51:00.012967+10:00

However you choose to calculate it, that's your estimate of remaining QALY's.

For descendant entities you deem fully "you", but with fractional chances of existing, see my reply to Luke.

TheOtherDave on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T01:03:41.061259+10:00

(nods) Saw that, makes sense. Just so you know, at least one "more" answer reflects, not a confident prediction that the answerer will live more than a millenium, nor a two-order-of-magnitude increase in quality of life, but a willingness to identify fractionally with billions of living people.

Luke_A_Somers on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T23:46:34.681484+10:00

How to aggregate across the distribution of possibilities? Average? Median? Most likely range?

I'm 33, so it wouldn't take too much life extension to get me to 133, but a fair amount... I'd rate the probabilities as roughly 40%, 30%, 10%, 20%. So, each of the three answers is different.

RichardKennaway on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T00:52:47.509722+10:00

The most likely range. I'd rather this wasn't skewed by people putting down "more" just because they anticipate a tiny probability of a vast lifetime, but failing that expect to be dead as usual before very long.

thomblake on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-21T01:00:10.387567+10:00

I don't see how to correct for that.

RichardKennaway on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T00:17:02.583615+10:00

The bug concerning reporting of results is still present: currently the counts for the four categories are displayed as 9, 0, 0, 0, with a total of 39. According to the downloaded data, the counts are 28, 4, 1, 6 = 39.

SilasBarta on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T10:24:44.081735+10:00

ata on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T16:06:48.428340+10:00

The largest number is about 45,000,000,000, although mathematicians suspect that there may be even larger numbers. (45,000,000,001?)

Benja on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T05:34:44.542074+10:00

Set theorists sometimes remark that there are only very few natural numbers. I think this can be made more quantitative: Based on observations of their blackboard drawings and accompanying explanations, my current best estimate is that there are about five to ten. However, so far, my confidence in this estimate is only moderate; I still think the number could ultimately turn out to be as high as twenty.

Luke_A_Somers on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T23:49:05.149802+10:00

According to my I Ching calculator, beyond 4 is a suffusion of yellow.

This appears not to be a valid response. Curious.

Randaly on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T18:09:25.450535+10:00

Median 17.0

....

Nic_Smith on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-22T14:06:28.773783+10:00

I was hoping the mode would be 2147483647 (my answer) to at least provide some humor, but 0 has it beat handily.

MaoShan on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T13:24:03.289625+10:00

According to the poll, my understanding of what qualifies as an integer is very, very wrong. 1e+19=the universal integer limit. NO EXCEPTIONS!

arundelo on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T11:04:40.570697+10:00

I'll just leave Mr. Show's "highest number" sketch here.

AngryParsley on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T18:33:04.500196+10:00

The results so far (only showing answers with > 1 responder):

11 "0.0"
8 "-1.0"
7 "2147483647.0"
5 "3.0"
4 "42.0"
4 "1e+19"
3 "9.0"
3 "8.0"
3 "1.0"
2 "666.0"
2 "32767.0"
2 "24.0"
2 "2.0"
2 "1e+17"

To regenerate this, run grep -v "#" poll.csv | awk -F , '{ print $3 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr.

I'm not surprised by the number of votes for 2^31-1. It was the first number to pop into my head when I saw the poll.

CCC on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T16:49:39.973199+10:00

It does not seem to accept 'inf' or 'infinite'.

J_Taylor on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T13:10:08.562211+10:00

NaN

Mitchell_Porter on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T11:42:25.681153+10:00

Doesn't accept "⌊∞⌋".

paper-machine on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T11:51:42.022967+10:00

As well it shouldn't?

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T21:04:17.974858+10:00

Kindly on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T22:40:29.573706+10:00

Well, use of those would make the mean meaningless.

It wouldn't be a problem if the polls had upper and lower bounds, because then you could exclude them (but you could also make the upper bound infinite if you wanted to). I don't think there's a need for them, though.

army1987 on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T23:12:58.914156+10:00

You don't need to use infinities to make the mean meaningless: giving answers such as 1e100 will suffice. On the other hand, NANs are traditionally just disregarded when computing means (i.e., the mean of 1, 2, 3 and NAN is taken to be 2) -- essentially they would amount to a blank vote.

Incorrect on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-20T02:33:47.977004+10:00

gwern on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-11-03T07:18:13.193646+11:00

Is there any way to embed polls into the body of an Article/Discussion post? Or does it have to be in comments?

jimrandomh on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-11-03T07:27:09.034849+11:00

Currently it has to be in comments. Since comments and articles have entirely different markup and formatting systems (comments use Markdown, articles use constrained HTML), supporting them in both places at once is nontrivial.

gwern on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-11-03T07:34:56.541885+11:00

But the Markdown is converted to HTML in the end... As a workaround: Could I make a poll as a comment, copy the HTML of a non-voted-upon version of the comment, and insert it into the raw HTML of an article? And then delete the original comment?

jimrandomh on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-11-03T09:54:17.092414+11:00

There's a bit more to it than HTML, though - the submission and results display use some Javascript. You might be able to hack an alternative without Javascript, but hitting "submit" would take you to a broken page, rather than replacing the poll with the results in-place.

gwern on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-11-03T10:11:53.861660+11:00

Oh. Too bad then.

jimrandomh on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T10:23:33.485816+10:00

TheOtherDave on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T15:02:43.336525+10:00

If someone wrote the code to make the inclusion of an "Other" option a default, opt-out behavior of LW polls, I would not object if that code were added.

Fyrius on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-24T03:10:06.534626+10:00

Seconded.

NancyLebovitz on Less Wrong Polls in Comments

2012-09-23T15:37:03.318972+10:00

I would even be in favor of it.