2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
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...
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.
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Comments (733)
Muflax offers his feedback on some of the survey questions:
Survey: done. Learned about deontology/virtue ethics: done.
Thanks LW. First time poster. 8 month lurker.
Lurker, first time poster and done!
I took survey. Long time lurker 1St time poster
I took the survey before it was cool.
Some might claim that so did everyone else who took it. :-)
And done. I look forward to the Big Five scores, personally.
I took it. Thanks for doing this every year, the results are very interesting.
Done. I did all of the extra credit except the Myers-Briggs. The IQ test was the most interesting but three or four questions towards the ends were frustratingly difficult and refused to yield their secrets to me; even now I can feel lingering annoyance at the fact that I eventually gave up on them instead of wrestling with them for longer. Oh well.
Did the survey! Also, this is my first comment, as a long-standing lurker!
Took it. Yvain is a gentleman and a scholar for putting so much time and effort into this.
Just a few comments:
It could be a little clearer that the Calibration IQ question in Section 8 should only be answered by those people who reported an IQ in Section 5.
A GRE score question (as I requested in what is currently the fifth-most-upvoted top-level comment in the survey critiques thread) would have been nice. It was cool to see the Political Compass, AQ test, and iqtest.dk on there, though.
Took the survey, and a lot of the extra credit. I need a karma infusion, stat!
I assumed it was okay to use a pen and paper for the CFAR questions. For a few of the questions, I found it helpful to write down the given information and some rough calculations.
Also, on the probability estimates, I pretty much tried to translate my gut feelings about things into a number. (Contrary to the sequence posts that explicitly advise us against doing that.) I haven't worked to get a rigorous probability estimates for most (if any) of the questions posed. I imagine a lot of people are in the same position, and the conclusions drawn from the data should take this into account.
Took it!
Did any one else have trouble copy-pasting the links?
I normally score insanely high on Openness to experience (says she of the massive amounts of really weird hobbies), but for this test, I scored really low on Openness. Must be feeling particularly close-minded today. Weird.
took it. It's interesting to see how the questions change every time I take one of these.
I took the survey and all the optional questions. I love answering multiple choice questions.
Took it.
Took the survey. Does the god question include simulators? I answered under the assumption that it did not.
I took the survey. I did Political Compass for the first time, and I found its questions and results rather baffling. Political Compass themselves admit it is culturally biased and mainly for western democracies.
I took the survey.
I took it, on a Saturday night, and scored 7 on Extroversion. Pardon me while I step out to go to a party.
Took the survey, and all the extra questions.
Took the survey. Does the "Do you intend to have children" question refer to the immediate future, or in your lifetime?
Two questions, as I take the survey:
Took it.
Took the survey. Feels like I only very recently took the last one.
Took the survey and all extra questions bar IQ test.
Took it.
My browser was unable to copy/past most of the links which led to less than initially intended participation on my part. For instance, I took the big 5 quiz because the address was easy to glance at and type into another tab but didn't take other surveys/tests in the bonus question sections because i didn't feel like tabbing back and forth to get the web address correct.
I took the survey. Skipped out at the "unreasonably long" section. Will it handle things properly if I return to it another day?
Note, if you ask me question that I can look up in two seconds flat, and the next question is "without checking sources, assess the probability of the last answer being correct" then I'm not sure you're going to get the results you're looking for. I consider the Internet as part of my partly trustable memory that I reference when I want to achieve success in the world I.e. all the time - but its not clear that's a commonly held opinion.
I took the survey and participated in the complementary karma orgy!
Took it.
Done.
Pretense for posting here:
How are the redwood tree questions relevant, don't they mostly test trivia knowledge?
Took it. Nothing like a census/survey to make you feel like part of a community.
FYI
Also, in retrospect, I misremembered my own age. It's been ... a busy year.
I took it!
Took it. And I answered all the extra-credit questions that were applicable to me.
I took the survey! Including some but not all of the extra credit.
Took it, did most of the extra credit questions. I think that a mixture of already being familiar with the test, and being used to consciously correcting for some bias about self perception may have thrown off my personality stuff.
Well... that was a tense couple of hours (damn long survey) I answered every question except for the last.
Took the survey. Called it a day at the "unreasonable" extra credit questions.
Done.
Took it.
Done!
Entered.
Just took the survey. Out of curiosity, why is it ancient tradition to upvote for this?
During the part of the survey where you describe your gender and sexual orientation, I thought it might be a good idea to have another question asking to rate your libido on a numbered scale. Perhaps also another question asking your romantic disposition, as it is possible to be asexual but not aromantic.
I took the survey.
As per ancient tradition (apparently) - give me karma
Karma me!
Took the survey.
Took the survey; doing all the extra tests for the last few extra questions was fairly interesting, not having done many personality tests or taken online IQ tests before.
I took the survey.
I am curious to know whether CFAR questions #2 and #4 are supposed to have a "right" answer.
Survey taken while it was in stealth mode. Good to know it's officially out now!
A funny thing about the calibration question. Last year I gave myself (IIRC) a 35% probability of having the right answer within the interval asked, and got the answer right. This year I missed by two decades, at 55% confidence. Surprisingly that's actually progress - the Brier score tells me this year's is a better result than last year's.
Took it - I hadn't taken an IQ test before, and I found it interesting (and, for the final few questions, quite difficult).
Took survey, not yet contributed to the site, had lurked a lot over the past few months.
Took the survey. Somehow I've managed to lose a decent chunk of IQ over the past 15 years...
My first census at LW is done. I gave up on the questions requiring to answer other surveys before, apart from the political compass one which I already did. Looking forward for the results.
Done.
Took the survey, completed all applicable questions. I'm surprised at how many de-lurkers are a direct consequence of this survey. Welcome, everyone :)
Took it.
Took it. I think the example of 0.5 being interpreted as 0.5% and not as 50% anchored me a bit, but don't see a way to circumvent it.
Took it and laughed several times.
I finished the survey! Including the Unreasonably Long and Complicated part which i admit took even longer than i expected.
Ì took it. ALL of it.
Took the survey! :)
Thank you Yvain!
I answered every question, and enjoyed doing so. Thank you for putting this together. (c:
Done. All of it!
(Also, first LW comment: check.)
Took it!
I am impressed with Yvain's thoroughness overall in drafting this survey.
Took it and decided to de-lurk for the first time. (Hello!) I found the experience rather humbling.
I also de-lurked for the first time to take the survey!
I'm too intimidated to post anything else. :(
Easy and entertaining. Done!
Took it.
I managed to keep myself up after several days of sleep deprivation to complete all that I could but the very last part.
Done
Took the survey; Did everything but the IQ test. I recognized some of the questions, and I decided I didn't have an extra 40 minutes to spare.
<Invocation of ancient tradition>
Yay! Test taken including all extra questions
I took the first survey. Everything seemed great! Thanks a lot Yvain. Unfortunately, I couldn't do the last extra questions. Sorry :( The results should be interesting...
Hello all! Test taken, first post / de-lurking complete. I really enjoy the site and the discussions, and will contribute fairly soon...
The "income" question doesn't state pre- or post-tax — you should say you intend one or the other.
All done. Can I has points please?
I really enjoyed taking the survey. Akrasia! Hope we weren't testing the RNG site. Since it was down I used a more local randomizer.
Took it. The autism test makes it seem like it is easy for people to get more or less autistic with time. I would have scored much higher 10 years ago.
Took it.
Thanks for the test Yvain! I did all of it and wasted too much time in the surveys (didn't want to fill in with an existing one in case of calibration errors. In addition to everyone else's comments, I personally didn't find any of the quizzes problematic, got a similar Big Five score to usual, and actually got 10 points more in my IQ test than my self-reported IQ. Looking forward to the results!
Done
Survey: taken.
I took it and threw in on the ground!
Have been lurking for a few years now; did the survey and most of the extra questions.
I took the survey, and I answered the first extra credit question, but not the others. When I realized it would take THAT long (I hadn't yet scrolled down to reveal each Extra Credit Question was going to be as long as the first), I thought it would take too much time.
I took the survey, and I am posting for the first time. Thank you for such an intriguing community, everyone.
For the hospital question, although I felt very good about the answer from my own mathematics background, I decided to create a Perl script to check one trial, then ran the script in an environment a great many times to produce a distribution. Here is the single trial script. (You will spoil the answer by executing this script, obviously.)
Thanks for doing this once again Yvain.
Edit: survey taken.
Lurker for the past couple years, posting for the first time. I took it, including a good chunk of the extra credit questions.
Took it. All of it.
Took the poll. Thanks Yvain!
Why do I get the feeling that you will tease me about the discrepancy between my probability estimates on aliens in the milky way contra the rest of the universe?
Taken!
I took the survey too. I can haz karma plz? Kthxbye.
I was about to kick myself for not checking last year's answers to all the probability questions (I don't feel I've received much new information or insights that should cause me to change my mind, so I felt I should have averaged my current subjective estimate with last year's).
But then I found that my subjective estimates were remarkably stable! (with possible slight drift towards 50%). Not sure what to make of that. Was going to post answers here to illustrate but wasn't sure if that violated protocol because of anchoring. (People should really take the survey before reading any of the comments in any case).
P.S. I took the survey.
Does "your country" refer to the country you were born in, are a citizen of, or are currently residing in?
Also: Took it. Karma me gentlemen :D
Took the whole thing, waiting till I get a good night's sleep to do the IQ test and hit submit.
For those who couldn't select or copy the links like me, here they are to click on:
Political Compass: http://www.politicalcompass.org/
Big Five Personality Test: http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/
IQ Test: http://iqtest.dk/main.swf
Meyers Briggs: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp
Autism Test: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html
Took the survey. I've accidentally submitted unfinished one, before answering to all the questions I wanted to answer. Please ignore that submission.
I took the survey and answered everything through the political compass.
Took the survey and actually liked it :)
I took it, and answered many of the "extra credit" questions (though not all of them).
Done it all!
With all those personality tests and surveys it took me a bit more than an hour, but it was quite interesting (particularly CFAR questions) so I won't complain, much. :)
Obligatory "took the survey" post.
Done... I've been away from LW for a few months due to Other Life Stuff... but happy to fill in another survey.
Took the survey!
Longtime lurker that finally signed up in July. All questions except for the last ones with the tests. (did the IQ test though)
Took the survey.
Took it. Note for people on iOS device--iqtest.dk requires Flash, and doesn't tell you what's wrong if you load it on an iPhone /iPad/iPod.
Taken. Comments:
In the “More Children” question, I interpreted “planning” very broadly -- I definitely want to have children some day, but not in the next few years. And I'm assuming that finding a girlfriend (which I'm kinda working on) counts as the first step in the “plan”. ;-)
In the “Work Status” question, I interpreted “currently” broadly -- I graduated last month, and know I've been accepted for a PhD even though I'm not officially starting until later this month, so I didn't pick “Unemployed” even though I technically am right now, because that would only mean that you opened the survey in the wrong month.
As usually, in the “Political” question I'm nearly totally disregarding the labels and mostly disregarding the examples, focusing on the descriptions instead.
In the “Religious Views” question, what do apatheism and ignosticism (essentially fancy words for ‘don't care’ and ‘don't understand’ respectively) count as? I'm assuming as “Agnostic” (essentially a fancy word for ‘don't know’).
In “Moral Views”, I'm counting rule consequentialism as a form of consequentialism, rather than as a form of deontology.
iqtest.dk does count as a “respectable test”, right?
“you may do so using any resource EXCEPT the answers to previous Less Wrong surveys” -- I've already read them; how do I erase them from my memory? ;-) (especially for the IQ calibration question...)
I'm lumping into Many Worlds all interpretations not experimentally distinguishable from it even in principle. Is that right?
In the questions about aliens, I'm taking “intelligent” to mean ‘at least as intelligent as a typical human right after the Upper Paleolithic Revolution’; if octopuses/crows/dolphins/gorillas would also count as “intelligent”, my answers would be much closer to 100. (And if you're asking the question for Great Filter-related purposes, I think asking about “civilizations” --i.e. cultures at least as advanced as humans right after the agricultural revolution-- would be more interesting and my answers would be somewhat lower.)
In the question about cryonics, I'm assuming that reconstructions in which a Bayesian superintelligence guesses your brain state from all available evidence including your writings, pictures/videos/living people's memories of you, etc. (I can't remember what they are called) don't count. (Also, I'm interpreting “frozen today” as “staying frozen today”, rather than “getting frozen today” -- the preservation techniques were likely worse in the past than they are now, so the latter would be a higher number.)
In CFAR Question 4, is there a typo in Drug C? Otherwise it's completely obviously worse than B, and I can't see the point of including it unless it's to make sure we're paying attention.
In CFAR Questions 5-7, I think in metres, not feet, and I think that having to do mental conversions may have destroyed whatever anchoring effect I might have gotten from the random number (much like people tend to do better in the Cognitive Reflection Test when forced to activate their System 2 e.g. by taking the test in a language they're not fluent in).
My answer to the “Charity” question is a lower bound, though it's definitely within a factor of 2 of the true amount (unless you use a ridiculously broad definition for “charity”).
In the “SRS” question, does “do you use” mean ‘do you ever use’, or ‘do you currently use’? I used SRSs before but I haven't in months, though I'm very likely to use them again some day in the future. (Given that “Never heard of these” is listed separately, I'm guessing you mean ‘do you currently use’ and answering “No”.)
I'm assuming that searching for a LW wiki article for the purpose of linking to it in a comment and skimming it to make sure I got to the right one doesn't count as “read[ing] the LW wiki”.
My answers to “Hours Reading”, “Hours Writing” and “Hours Online” are very rough estimates. They could be off by a factor of 2.
I'd want the answer “Rarely / only tried a few times” for the “Smoking” question too. “No, I have never smoked” is not literally true so I answered “No, I used to but I quit”, but it's misleading because 1. I've never had a habit of smoking, and 2. it's not like I have committed to never smoke a single cigarette again.
I have solved the Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom before, but if I tried to do that now on my own I think I'm very likely (85%) to make some mistake on the first attempt. But if I guess the spirit of the question correctly, I ought to say “Yes”.
In “Number of Languages”, I'm counting as a “language” any dialect with its own ISO 639-1, 639-2, or 639-3 code (the way the Italian Wikipedia does), and as “fluent” any language in which I think I would qualify for the C1 or C2 level on the CEFRL. In my case, for a pair of definitions to yield a lower/higher number they'd have to be unreasonably narrow/broad IMO, but I wanted to point this out anyway.
In “Income”, I answered with the yearly grant I'm going to be given for my PhD -- my income for the past year was practically zero.
In “Anonymity”, following whoever it was who proposed that question, I'm taking “easy” to mean ‘trivial’, so I'm picking the third answer -- but I don't think it would be much harder for (say) EY to find out my full name than it was for me to find out what Roko's basilisk was about.
In “P(Space)”, I'm counting as “space” anywhere over 100 km above mean sea level (so Felix Baumgartner doesn't count); also, my answer is a Fermi estimate, and if I were to spend half an hour making it more precise it could change by as much as an order of magnitude.
I now have the whole set of Myers-Briggs letters. Something tells me this test is noisy.
You might want to look at North Americans and others separately for the redwood questions, to see if domain knowledge affects anchoring.
I took the survey and answered every question. Like many others here, I found that the iqtest.dk result was distinctly lower than any other estimate of my IQ I've had. I was miles out on the calibration date question. There was one probability question -- I forget which -- for which it was extremely not-obvious whether you were supposed to enter a percentage or a probability.
Taken it. Suggestion [if it's possible to change] - we should add the option to unanswer an answered question. Right now you can change your answer from A to B, but not from A to non-A and non-B.
I took the survey :) thanks for running it again!
Taken.
Just took my second survey. Been lurking a while now, this is my first comment.
I took all of it!
Took the survey.
Did anyone else find the IQ questions to be either boringly easy or impossibly hard? I don't think I answered anything that required more than 15s of thought.
Did it.
Took it.
Took all of them.
Took it, now give me karma.
I accidentally hit the enter key before I was done and my answers were submitted. I'm dumb.
Minor points on survey phrasing...
P(Global catastrophic risk) should be P(Not Global catastrophic risk)
You say in part 7 that research is allowed, but don't say that research is disallowed in part 8, calibration year.
In the true prisoner's dilemma article, it doesn't appear to give any information about the cognitive algorithms the opponent is running. For this reason I answered noncommittally, and I'm not sure how useful the question is for distinguishing people with CDTish versus TDTish intuitions.
Similarly in torture versus dust specks I answered not sure, not so much due to moral uncertainty but because the problem is underspecified. What's the baseline? Is everybody's life perfect except for the torture or dust specks specified, or is the distribution more like today's world with a broad range of experiences ranging from basically OK to torture?
I might have given an inflated answer for "Hours on the Internet", as I'm on the computer and the computer is on the Internet but it doesn't necessarily mean I'm actively using the Internet at all times.
In accordance with ancient tradition, I took the survey.
Took the survey.
Took the survey on my iPhone so could only fill out half the answers. Politics questions were hilarious. Official delurk.
Took the survey.
I took the survey, but, like others, I was unable to answer the American-style school questions.
I took the survey, and the extra credit, and the pretext to delurk.
Whew, that was long! (Not that I wasn't warned.)
Incidentally, communism as invented has little in common with communism as practiced in the Soviet Union. Whether the former is possible (for humans) is debatable.
I took the survey.
One thing I was unsure about: the appropriate answer to the question “Referrals: How did you find out about Less Wrong?”. I answered “Referred by a link on another blog”. But I actually investigated and discovered Less Wrong after seeing a bunch of links to it on Hacker News. Hacker News is really a link aggregation site or social news site, not a blog. But I thought that that answer was better than choosing “Other” and writing in “link from an aggregation site”.
I just found this site, but this was an interesting survey and between that and the intelligence of conversation about it in the comments convinced me to sign up and read more on here.
Also, I did most of the questions, but I'm on an iPad and the iq test didn't load for me, so I'll do it on a computer later.
I am continually amused by how much nuance the contrarians of LW want in these questions. Even I thought the simulation question was ill-posed & wanted a "mu" answer.
Politics is always nearly hopeless, short of asking people to write a 14-page essay on their particular chimera of left-libertarian whig marxism, or whatever.
On my chrome 22 in Ubuntu, the 'links' were neither links nor selectable (whenever I selected one, it would immediately unselect it), which made accessing any of those questions rather annoying. I ended up opening the survey in FireFox to get the links.
Took most of it. I pressed enter accidentally after the charity questions. I would like to fill out the remainder. Is there a way I can do that without messing up the data?
If you're using Chrome, the Big 5 site is much more tolerable if you open console and run this line of javascript:
That sets the background color to white for everything instead of their hideous color scheme.
Do casual sex partners count under the "Number of Current Partners" question?
The instructions tell me that higher numbers are for "polyamorous relationships" which makes it seem like a monogamous person who has multiple casual sex partners should answer 0 for that question.
DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!
Only cost me an hour of my time!
(Minus, of course, the two additional hours spent staring at a corner, crying and lamenting my various emotional insecurities brought up by the IQ and personality tests)
Took the survey. It was quite interesting! I'll be curious to see what the results look like . . . .
I took the survey
Survey: Completed, no problems. Dithered quite a bit when asked what my position was on the true Prisoners dilemma. And I keep consistently overshooting the estimation dates by 100 years (almost precisely, on the previous survey I overshot by 105 years, this time overshot by 120ish). I've started getting more involved in the community over the past 3 months.
Censused!
Took the IQ test. Humbling. Score 110.
IQ test in high school, 156. SAT 793/800 verbal, 783/800 math. Cal Tech. Yatta yatta. But that was many years ago. It's pretty obvious what happened. Timed test. I only finished, in the time, about 2/3 - 3/4 of the questions, maybe a bit more, I didn't keep count. (I skipped questions that weren't popping up right away, thinking I'd come back. Didn't have time.)
I'm 68 years old. I used to be able to hold a conversation on the phone and read a book at the same time, about something completely different. That disappeared when I was in my late 40s. The test requires, for the more difficult problems, testing many different hypotheses, if a clear pattern doesn't pop up immediately. It's almost certain that this takes more time for me now than when I was younger.
This almost certainly impacts my communication skills, for starters.
Taken, though I had to skip the IQ test because it wasn't screen reader accessible (flash, with some text labels but no accessible controls, not that flash in general is particularly accessible).
Took it.
It looks like I wasn't the only one who had difficulty selecting the links, and so had to type them in manually.
Yvain or a mod- Can we get all the links from the survey pasted into the body of the OP so that those of us who couldn't select them have an easier access mode than manual copying?
Took the vast majority. The OCEAN test seemed mostly wrong, the IQ seemed low (big shock, right? Shouldn't have raced through, I guess), and my Myers-Briggs was ENFJ, which is just bizarre.
Also, I've commented a few times, never posted.
I took it, but I skipped the IQ question, because the last time I took an IQ test I was, like, 12 years old.
Is there some reputable online IQ test that I can take today ?
i typed my age then hit return which submitted the form with only one answer. so then i filled it in again. you'll want to ignore that first entry. dinner arrived as i did that so that was a couple of hours ago now. age is 39 if that helps.
Did it.
The political question was dumb. why can't I pick "FAI" or "rational consequentialist".
I really liked the CFAR questions. MORE OF THOSE.
The political compass questions were very ADBOC and generally meaningless. Apparently I'm left libertarian, whatever that means.
The Big 5 test was suspect on some things. Am I really lowest quartile conscientiousness and agreeableness? I defy the data.
The iq test was fun and challenging. Got 133, which is also what I've gotten on previous iq tests.
The autism test was utterly without interpretation. What does 18 mean?
EDIT: sorry I'm being so negative, a good survey overall. Maybe this is where the low agreeableness comes from.
took it
Took the survey, plus the IQ test out of curiosity, I'd never had my IQ tested before.
Along similar reasoning, do we know how well the iqtest.dk test correlates with non-internet tests of IQ? Getting a number is cool, knowing it was generated by a process fundamentally different than rand(100,160) would be even better
Been there, done that survey...
I'm curious about the results.
I just took the survey, making this my first post that someone will read!
I took the survey! Karma, please!
Never done an IQ test before. I thought it was fun! Now I want to take one of the legitimate ones.
Took the survey. Was tired to take the IQ test. Thanks for the opportunity.
CFAR Question 1: not constructively.
CFAR Question 6: what kind of archaic unit is 'feet'? I was able to answer by remembering that 3 feet ~= 1 meter.
Income: before or after tax? I answered after taxes, which for me is 65% of the income before taxes.
I did everything except the IQ test. I took that test before and retook it until I figured out how to solve all the problems. I could not recall what I got on it the first time. Strangely in the survey I said staying anonymous is important to me and then I created an account with my real name.
Done and done.
I took it.
For the P(Warming) question, you might get people answering different versions of the question on this. For example, my personal evaluation of the probability of warming and that humans are a major cause is very, very high, but my evaluation of the probability that humans are the primary cause is much lower.
Survey taken.
I too have taken the survey, it's been some time since I commented.
Took the survey. Delurking for the first time. I'm planning on posting to the welcome thread in a few days, when I'm less busy. Did most of the test except the IQ test, since I didn't have another forty minutes to spare.
I appreciate the expansiveness of the sex and gender options. It's nice to see some recognition of the complexities.
I was surprised at my intensely introverted results, other big five tests usually put me between average and moderately introverted. Nothing else noticably unusual, though.
All done! Surprised since my IQ's apparently dropped roughly 20 points in the last 2 years. But everyone knows the internet is reliable when it comes to that. Eagerly awaiting results, when can we expect them to appear on the site?
Also, please do not upvote this comment, as I want my karma to reflect when I've thought something insightful, and only taking a survey to recieve it does not properly reflect this. "By ancient tradition" makes that the most cultish thing I've ever heard lesswrong.
... Maybe topped by "we're a cult" or something of that effect, but still.
Done with the entire thing. :)
Done. I think a lot of these questions are really fascinating, including user-submitted questions. I'm especially interested to see if we can do any better at avoiding anchoring than the general public.
After having read all of the Sequences, I suppose its time I actually registered. I did the survey. Here are the cogno-stats:
Big Five O80 C83 E79 A83 N9 IQ 122 Myers-Briggs E33 N88 T1 J33 Autism 15
I'm doing my PhD in the genetics of epilepsy (so a neurogenetics background is implied). Is anyone familiar with data on the reliability of the various cogno-metrics that are out there?
(Aside: political metrics L/R:-2.25 A/L:-3.54, pretty centrist on most issues, just make them based on actual data and I'll change my view in a femtosecond)
I took the IQ test in the extra questions section. I clicked "submit" long before the time ran out, even when I knew I was essentially guessing on some of the questions, because I had gotten sick of the damn thing. My score came back a 122, which pissed me off because I'm fairly sure my real IQ is higher than that.
Then I realized this may be a good metaphor for my life. In the future, when asked my IQ, I'll respond, "I don't know, but my lack-of-patience-adjusted IQ is about 120."
Survey completed!
Done! I only estimated my amount of time in the community, though, which may lead to an amusing disagreement with last year's survey.
In your base, answering your survey.
Notes (might not want to read unless you've already taken the survey):
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I wonder whether there are visible conversion effects on the redwood question for native metric users? Estimates slightly on the short side and neatly divisible by three because the quick and dirty meter -> feet conversion is multiplying by three?
I took the survey.
Guys, you are seriously need to start using metric system or at least include the necessary number in the meters. Going to Google twice in order to calculate the relevant numbers was... frustrating.
(By the way, I have never donated to any charity before, but I sworn in a grand manner that it will be in the list of the first five things I will do with my PayPal account when I get one)
Took it.
Done.
Done, except for the very last part and the IQ questions (I have never taken a proper test).
Done and done. And this makes for my very first comment. The first of many.
Survey taken: check! Account finally registered: check, please!
I was off by 50%ish on the two estimation questions, but I forgive myself Bayes' age since I really know nothing about history in "space-of-time" context. The redwood tree on the other hand was a geometry problem for me, more than anything else, and I misjudged its incline by half a degree.
I took most of the survey, except for the (aptly named) “Unreasonably Long and Complicated Questions” at the end.
Took it minus the three personality tests and minus the very last few questions. I still know my IQ from a former test and I had my NEO-FFI results already stored somewhere but couldn't find the right hard-drive quick enough. Autism... don't think I would score very high on that but my fallible intuition says lesswrong seems like quite the paradise for autistic personalities.
Sincerely curious about the results :)
I also guessed the size of the biggest redwood tree incredibly well :) By converting my guesstimate in meters to some form of archaic measurement only used by cavemen and Americans. What's up with that?
I answered everything but the personality test links, I will take them when I have more free time.
Next year the survey should include an option to explain why your IQ is actually higher than was measured.
Fear me for I answered all the questions and took all the auxillary tests!
Problem: You might want to specify "this year's survey" in the following line, otherwise people may think that having taken a previous year's survey means they do not need to take this year's survey to be counted:
Took the survey.
I hope this question isn't used the way I worry it will be used:
This question was easy for me to answer by pattern-matching to the Law of Small Numbers, as outlined in Thinking, Fast and Slow. If I hadn't read that, it's hard to say whether I would have reasoned it out correctly. So if many respondents answer this question correctly, I hope that the survey authors don't claim evidence that LW readers are better at statistical reasoning -- it'd be more accurate to say that LW readers are more likely to have seen this very particular question before.
(I could, naturally, be assuming too much about the intents of the survey authors.)
Am I the only person who answered "100" on the cryonics question because "revived at some point in the future" was indefinite enough that a Boltzmann brain-like scenario inevitably occurring eventually seemed reasonable?
Also, I did all the extra credit questions. At twos in the morning.
Completed every last question.
Also, I've noticed that on different IQ tests (real ones, not fake ones) my scores vary by as much as 40 points. Hmm.
Done. Finished most of it, stalled for days waiting for time to do the extra credit, noticed I was doing that, submitted. I'll look forward to the results.
Took it, lurker who just broke ones position on not posting on the net. Had to skip last questions and tests thou, going to try them next..
I Took the survey and all the extra questions. I could not answer the USA centric school test results, we have a similar system in my country but they cannot be easily converted to eachother.
I'm glad to finally have a BigFive and IQ test that people somewhat agree on using.
Did it a few days ago, only just noticed the karma.
EDIT:
What if you believed in, say, angels or ghosts that used powers from outside the matrix?
Done! Yay!
Completed. Huzzah! I feel like a participating member of the community.
I just took it but I'd like to make a few points:
Is it asking about the total number of babies born at the day or babies born at each hospital?
Please, use meters next time.
Took basically all of the survey except for the extra IQ tests. Thanks, Yvain! Looking forward to seeing the results.
I study computer engineering (which is about arranging transistors on silicon to make computer hardware). I checked "Computers (other academic, computer science)," rather than "Engineering," even though computer engineering is not computer science, because I thought that category was more specific than engineering, and less specific than the category including only computer science.
But this was kind of unclear.
On the question "Given that no label can completely describe a person's political views, with which of these labels do you MOST identify?"
I am probably halfway between liberal and libertarian. So I flipped a coin and picked liberal.
For the calibration IQ question, I could have given my probability that my real IQ was higher than the median IQ here. But then you wouldn't be able to check it against anything to determine my calibration, because I have never taken a real IQ test and left the field blank. Maybe you should put a different question instead of that calibration one?
For the Hours Writing question, it says schoolwork counts. Does code count, if written for schoolwork? I guessed no. Do answers to problems from textbooks that are kind of half-math, half-writing count? I guessed yes.
The "Anonymity" question should be broken into two. It doesn't give you an option for "It would be easy to find my real name, and I am unhappy about that."
I tried to take the IQ test, and had 35 seconds left, when Flash plugin in my browser crashed. I was about to take a screenshot and save my answers, and re-enter them after reloading the page, but the tab went dark. Retaking it would probably not give good results now.
Took the whole survey. My preferred political label of (Radical) Centrist survived all explicit radio buttons.
Done. I hope this data help LW/CFAR.
I did all of it yesterday minus the IQ test, BigFive and Autism due to lack of time and being too tired. Will take those three today.
Overall, the survey was more fun than I expected.
took
Any reason you removed the opinion on basilisk moderation question that was in the earlier one that initially went up? I'd have been interested in community opinion on that.