Epiphany comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (479)
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
Political question solution:
Add an "other" option, then make a copy of the political question for THIS survey only, minus the "other" option, and ask "What would you have selected if "other" was not present?"
You can compare the results of the second question to past surveys and the first question to future surveys and therefore have a sense of whether LessWrong has moved in a particular direction.
Or, alternately, add a question below the political question saying:
"If you'd had an "other" option on the politics question, would you have used it?"
Or “is there any political label with which you identify more than with any of the five above”?
Hmm I like this one better. (:
OTOH, I've changed my mind and now like yours better -- but I'd replace "other" with "none of the above".
Really? Why?
Maybe there are people who don't identify with any political label at all, so not even "other" would be an accurate answer for them.
Hmmm. But if we were to reword your question to something like: "How would you describe your political views if different from the above?" (three words) then that would make everyone happy.
Except Yvain who would have to figure out how to display those results. That might annoy him.
If Yvain won't want to display all the results, then I think you're right with a "none of the above" question. Otherwise I'd rather see a box where you can fill it in how you want.
Yep. Let's not be the last straw that makes Yvain freak out and never open the survey! ;-)