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ArisKatsaris 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
Then will we be forever saddled with a significantly suboptimal question? Here's a compromise solution: This year have both the old question, unchanged, and also have a new one with the five groupings as suggested: "Reactionary", "Conservative", "Progressive", "Libertarian", "Communist"
Then in following years we can keep just this new question, while having a basis for comparison between the old and the new one.
I don't think that adding "reactionary" would have much information-benefit; it seems like reactionaries would just be splintering off from the "conservative" category, which was already very small (just 3% of respondents last year). The vast majority (97%) of people who gave a response chose liberal, libertarian, or socialist, which suggests that the way to add information-value would be to clarify or refine those categories. (Communists were under 1%.)
There was an attempt at a more detailed political survey after last year's LW census. Its breakdown (by percent) into 12 categories came out:
31 Left libertarian, moderate non-US liberal, or "liberaltarian."
28 US liberal, progressive, or social democrat.
11 Nothing like any of those.
9 Anarcho-capitalist or minarchist, but not paleo-libertarian.
5 Libertarian socialist, anarcho-socialist, or anarcho-communist.
4 Centrist or moderate.
4 I don't care about politics.
3 Paleoconservative, paleo-libertarian, alternative right, or nationalist.
1 Fusionist conservative.
1 Green, deep ecologist, or anarcho-primitivist.
1 Marxist-Leninist.
1 Neoconservative.
1 Religious conservative.
Again, most people chose something related to liberal, socialist, or libertarian. I'm not thrilled with the particular category labels from that survey, but the results do suggest that the highest value-added would come from splitting up libertarianism into subcategories, probably left vs. right (and maybe also splitting off a category for anarchic/minarchic).
But I don't know if that would be worth the trouble to do right now. For improving the annual survey, I think it would be better to take the approach of that politics survey and run smaller-scale surveys during the year to try out different ways of asking questions, rather than flooding Yvain with hard-to-implement suggestions right before census time.
I agree that splitting up libertarianism into subcategories would likely yield some benefit. As I understand the "left vs. right" aspect of this question, the difference would mostly come down to what the person thinks about the state's role in providing social insurance. Presumably all libertarians would support a high degree of economic and social liberty -- basically letting people make decisions for themselves so long as those decisions are voluntary and they don't hurt non-consenting parties. But where "left libertarians" would be more comfortable using taxes to provide some minimum level of welfare provisions, "right libertarians" would lean more toward minarchism and say that governments shouldn't go beyond things like courts, police, and the military.
It's entirely possible that others won't share my intuition around these concepts, but I do think this framing helps explain some of the confusion that arises from pointing to particular countries as example. European countries like Denmark and Switzerland have higher taxation and more extensive welfare states than the U.S., but they score higher on pretty much every other measure of economic freedom. That would probably make them fairly amenable to left-libertarians, but not right-libertarians/minarchists. This post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians does a pretty good job of explaining the distinction.
Relatedly, I'd say that minarchism fits more closely with something like right-libertarianism than with anarchism. There seems to be a much bigger gulf between "the state should do this small handful of important things" and "there shouldn't be a state" than between "the state should do this small handful of important things" and "the state should do this small handful of important things, and maybe a couple other ones too."
I am doubtful that switching to your version will get any fewer complaints or be any better than the old version, but on the principle of cheap testing I will include the second question. Please tell me exactly what you want for this new question, eg do you want sentence-length descriptions of each position and if so what are they?
Here's one possible version, no description at all, just asks for what label you would assign:
Which of the following labels would you consider to best represent your political positions?
That has the problem that different people will interpret "Libertarian" in different ways.