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.
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.
Dear Diary, Today I found a girlfriend. I will now commence Phase 2 of my master plan to reproduce.