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gwern comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong
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Current status of these suggestions:
"What activities do you enjoy? Check all that apply"
[] Fishing
[] Boating
[] Hiking
[] Climbing
The reason is that I haven't been able to figure out how to computer process these effectively; I end out with rows of boxes like "hiking,fishing" or "fishing,boating,climbing" and it's apparently beyond my limited skills to get SPSS to separate these out into separate chunks of information. I could do it like this:
Do you enjoy fishing?
[] Y
[] N
Do you enjoy boating?
[] Y
[] N
And so on, but the more options you want, the less happy I am doing this. Or, teach me a good way to solve this problem using Google Forms and SPSS.
I am reluctant to change questions that have been on the survey since previous years. For example, Will's suggestion to change the Politics question is good, except that if we did it we would no longer be able to confidently say something like "Less Wrong has gotten more liberal since the last survey". I would rather just include a political compass in the Bonus Questions, plus maybe maybe a more complicated one-word political affiliation question.
This is also part of my beef with "other", along with the fact that it's going to mean people who are 99% similar to one option but don't feel it perfectly describes them are instead going to pick something that gives us zero information. I very much agree with Vaniver here. I might or might not add it.
I'm balancing ability to totally perfectly capture all answers with ability to let people who just want to take a basic survey do that without answering a thousand mostly-similar questions. So while I understand that it might be theoretically desirable to separate out for example race vs. ethnicity, or country of birth vs. country of residence, or asexual romantic relationships versus sexual romantic relationships, I'm reluctant to bloat any section too much more than it's already bloated - especially the one on sex. I can already see someone like that tabloid reporter from a while back going "And also, the latest Less Wrong survey included 256 questions about your sex life!"
Can I get around the ethnicity problem by replacing "White (Non-Hispanic)" with "Latino"? It seems like it should work, but I'm suspicious because none of the US surveys I've encountered have ever done it.
Kind of want to avoid beating a dead basilisk.
IQ suggestions sound good.
ACT suggestion sounds good.
Most other bonus question suggestions sound good.
Happy to include Big Five test, AQ test, etc in the Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions section.
Will fix the Singularity question
Will probably fix moral views question to mirror PhilPapers version, even though that screws up past-survey-comparison
Will correct all typos
If you don't beat it, someone else will, as XiXi, RationalWiki, and that newspaper demonstrate; and by omitting a question on it, we lose the ability to be able to point out that the overwhelming majority (or whatever it turns out to be) disagreed with that moderation decision. This would be one of the few questions which is genuinely useful, as opposed to interesting.
Good call here, btw. I've been going through random reddit comments to posts that link to LessWrong (http://www.reddit.com/domain/lesswrong.com), discarding threads on /r/hpmor /r/lesswrong and other affiliated subs. The basilisk is brought up far more than I expected – and widely mocked. This also seems to occur in Hacker News, too – on which LessWrong was once quite popular. I wasn’t around when the incident occurred, but I’m surprised by how effective it’s been at making LessWrong low status – and its odd persistence years after its creation. Unless high IQ people are less likely to dismiss LessWrong after learning of the basilisk, it’s likely significantly reduced the effectiveness of LessWrong as a farm league for MIRI.
It really is amazingly well-optimized for discrediting MIRI and its goals, especially when amplified by censorship – which is so obviously negatively useful.
I wonder if EY actually thinks the basilisk idea is both correct and unavoidable. That would explain things.
It works much better than the previous go-to slur, cryonics and freezing heads, ever did. I'm not sure why - is it the censorship aspect? Or is it the apparent resemblance to Pascal's wager?
That and believing in hell is more low status than believing in heaven. Cryonics pattern matches to the a belief in a better life after death, the basilisk to hell.
Do you expect RationalWiki or journalists to check the survey results and report them if it turns out that people disagreed?
Not at all. I expect it to be linkable in comments or rebuttals, or simply edited in, as I have in fact already done twice: http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=LessWrong&diff=prev&oldid=1035808 and http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=LessWrong&diff=prev&oldid=1035812
Do you think that an overwhelming majority of people taking the survey know enough about the case to make an informed judgment?
Given how people have been describing the basilisk to me in IRC and private messages as being a' fascinating secret' and 'attracting people with mystique' and 'laugh at how they circumvented the censorship', I think more people know about it than one would expect (and that by now, it is more well known than it ever would've been otherwise).
But even if all that was wrong, that is easily addressed with the usual options like 'Other' or 'No opinion' or 'Don't care'.
In the case that SI is in favor of the meme, doesn't believing in the meme means that you are bound to spread the meme? The meme had the danger of making LessWrong a lot more cultish.
Handling a dangerous meme in a way where people who come into contact with the meme don't focus their attention on the meme but laugh about the context of the meme is quite an accomplishment. It primes people for not taking it too seriously.
You wouldn't want the meme to become like Scientology's Xenu, which people actually start to buy into when they meet the meme after years in Scientology.
Er... what?
So making a bit of amusement is a satisfactory compensation for handing critics a club and also exposing countless more people, perhaps orders more, to it?
The meme has some self referential properties if you take it seriously.
Not every exposure is created equally. Exposing people to the idea in a way where they don't take it seriously doesn't do much harm.
Not every exposure is equal, but you've done nothing to show that censorship - in the hopes that it will result in mockery - will cut the risk by so many orders that it will more than counterbalance the orders more exposure and also pay for all the reputational damage.
In hindsight, clouds may have silver linings - but only an idiot tries to set up a mine in the sky.
I certainly never would have heard of the idea if it hadn't become so infamous.
I probably never would have heard of the idea if someone hadn't pointed out its conspicuous omission on the census. I read completely through the original test census and it didn't even register as something so noteworthy on first pass... just another thing that I would probably understand better if I actually read more LessWrong, but since I hadn't, I'd leave my answer blank. Now I know a lot more about it and could probably (p=70%) actually put an answer down with some confidence.
Since it appears the final version of the census has been backedited onto the draft version, can anyone mention (rot13, probably, if it's that controversial) what the question was which was removed?
The "Don't care" option would be nice.
I would like to have one option that cannot be interpreted that it is a 'fascinating secret', whether it means 'fascinating secret which was successfully hidden from me', 'fascinating secret which should remain hidden forever', or 'fascinating secret which should be exposed'.
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