DaFranker comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong

80 Post author: Yvain 07 December 2012 09:04PM

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Comment author: gwern 29 November 2012 05:53:17PM 10 points [-]

The 2011 survey ran 33 days and collected 1090 responses. This year's survey ran 23 days and collected 1195 responses.

Why did you close it early? That seems entirely unnecessary.

One friend didn't see the survey because she hangs out on the #lesswrong channel more than the main site.

I put a link and exhortation prominently in the #lesswrong topic from the day the survey opened to the day it closed.

M (trans f->m): 3, 0.3% / F (trans m->f): 16, 1.3%

3 vs 16 seems like quite a difference, even allowing for the small sample size. Is this consistent with the larger population?

Prefer polyamorous: 155, 13.1%...NUMBER OF CURRENT PARTNERS:... [>1 partners = 4.5%]

So ~3x more people prefer polyamory than are actually engaged in it...

Referred by HPMOR: 262, 22.1%

Impressive.

gwern.net: 5 people

Woot! And I'm not even trying or linking LW especially often.

(I am also pleased by the nicotine and modafinil results, although you dropped a number in 'Never: 76.5%')

TROLL TOLL POLICY: Disapprove: 194, 16.4% Approve: 178, 15%

So more people are against than for. Not exactly a mandate for its use.

Are people who understand quantum mechanics are more likely to believe in Many Worlds? We perform a t-test, checking whether one's probability of the MWI being true depends on whether or not one can solve the Schrodinger Equation. People who could solve the equation had on average a 54.3% probability of MWI, compared to 51.3% in those who could not. The p-value is 0.26; there is a 26% probability this occurs by chance. Therefore, we fail to establish that people's probability of MWI varies with understanding of quantum mechanics.

Sounds like you did a two-tailed test. shminux's hypothesis, which he has stated several times IIRC, is that people who can solve it will not be taken in by Eliezer's MWI flim-flam, as it were, and would be less likely to accept MWI. So you should've been running a one-tailed t-test to reject the hypothesis that the can-solvers are less MWI'd. The p-value would then be something like 0.13 by symmetry.

Comment author: DaFranker 29 November 2012 09:03:06PM *  1 point [-]

3 vs 16 seems like quite a difference, even allowing for the small sample size. Is this consistent with the larger population?

Might be close enough to assume it's due to the small sample:

Recent statistics from the Netherlands indicate that about 1 in 12,000 natal males undergo sex-reassignment and about 1 in 34,000 natal females. Source: Transgender Issues: A Fact Sheet

No idea how reliable those numbers are, nor how they compare with elsewhere in the world. The main website that hosts that PDF should have more complete data that could be cross-referenced, if someone wants to take the time to do that.

Comment author: thomblake 29 November 2012 10:15:32PM 1 point [-]

Interesting. Going to the source of some of those numbers, it doesn't look like there was clear specification of what they meant by "sexual orientation", so that line of the chart is actually entirely meaningless to me. Anyone have a good guess as to how people would have answered?

Comment author: DaFranker 29 November 2012 10:26:46PM *  1 point [-]

AFAICT It seems to be answered in terms of the sex of their partners post-transition, i.e. a hetero MTF would prefer sexually-male partners.

The fact that the 59% stat for history of rape is symmetrical for MTF and FTM really bugs me, though. It seems to imply weird causal arrows pointing in completely opposite directions depending on whether you were originally male or female, based on my prior knowledge.

Which seems very scary, because it could also imply that MTFs are a dozen decibels more likely to be targets of rape than average females. Now I wonder if that has been taken into account when looking at the mental health stats.

Comment author: thomblake 30 November 2012 02:41:23PM 1 point [-]

Yeah, somewhere in there are some pretty disturbing violent crime stats. A notable proportion of violent crime in one country was towards trans people.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 November 2012 06:32:07PM 1 point [-]

Overview for the United States

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