Been a lurker for a relatively short time, took the survey.
I had some concerns over the extra credit questions and one thing in particular that prompted me to respond. I agree it seems there was meant to be no right answer to a couple of the questions, and the babies in the hospital was at least a clear statistical problem. I also had an admittedly whimsical objection to the lack of details on one question, thanks to the level of specificity seen in riddles, puzzles, and so on here, and maybe due to a programmer background thinking of pointers and assignments. The first CFAR question should have specified to start something like there are three people in a room. Then it's clear there's not a person looking at himself in a mirror, or more than three people with some having the same first name, or creatively a statue or painting, with one human looking at the artwork which is facing another human. (Would be a good one with Lisa implying the Mona Lisa, but connotations of names shouldn't be relevant)
However, what I was really curious about was the redwood question. Surprisingly, I knew the answer pretty much exactly and later noticed the complaints about using feet as a unit which was rather strange. I remembered this exact question was from a recent study in a psychology journal on cognitive biases.
It seems likely the question was written with knowledge of the study in mind, to test for anchoring bias, considering many other things could have been chosen other than the height of redwood trees in feet. I really hope the intention was not to take these results to say, "LW readers conclusively have less anchoring bias than people in the psychology study." As the maximum number that could possibly be generated by the RNG (999) iirc is lower than an anchoring number given in the study (1000), presumably few survey participants if any would answer the tree height is greater than that. Due to the RNG anchor likely being much closer to the true value anchoring bias will be less than in the psychology study by nature of how the question was presented.
11/26: The survey is now closed. Please do not take the survey. Your results will not be counted.
It's that time of year again.
If you are reading this post, and have not been sent here by some sort of conspiracy trying to throw off the survey results, then you are the target population for the Less Wrong Census/Survey. Please take it. Doesn't matter if you don't post much. Doesn't matter if you're a lurker. Take the survey.
This year's census contains a "main survey" that should take about ten or fifteen minutes, as well as a bunch of "extra credit questions". You may do the extra credit questions if you want. You may skip all the extra credit questions if you want. They're pretty long and not all of them are very interesting. But it is very important that you not put off doing the survey or not do the survey at all because you're intimidated by the extra credit questions.
The survey will probably remain open for a month or so, but once again do not delay taking the survey just for the sake of the extra credit questions.
Please make things easier for my computer and by extension me by reading all the instructions and by answering any text questions in the most obvious possible way. For example, if it asks you "What language do you speak?" please answer "English" instead of "I speak English" or "It's English" or "English since I live in Canada" or "English (US)" or anything else. This will help me sort responses quickly and easily. Likewise, if a question asks for a number, please answer with a number such as "4", rather than "four".
Okay! Enough nitpicky rules! Time to take the...
2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Thanks to everyone who suggested questions and ideas for the 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey. I regret I was unable to take all of your suggestions into account, because some of them were contradictory, others were vague, and others would have required me to provide two dozen answers and a thesis paper worth of explanatory text for every question anyone might conceivably misunderstand. But I did make about twenty changes based on the feedback, and *most* of the suggested questions have found their way into the text.
By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.