satt comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (640)

Sort By: Popular

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: satt 01 December 2012 02:34:46PM *  3 points [-]

That's only weak evidence about the correlation between non-consequentialism and dust specking. If we had 670 consequentialists, 50 deontologists, 180 virtue ethicists, and 200 others, and 40% of each chose dust specks, we'd get numbers like yours even though there wouldn't be a correlation.

I did a crosstab, which should be more informative:

 | Torturevs.DustSpecks
----------------+------------------+------+---------+--------+------
MoralViews | don't understand | dust | torture | unsure | <NA>
----------------+------------------+------+---------+--------+------
consequential | 10 | 228 | 188 | 134 | 109
deontology | 1 | 24 | 3 | 8 | 6
other/none | 6 | 68 | 38 | 33 | 47
virtue | 1 | 75 | 12 | 28 | 36
<NA> | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 8

I get different totals for the number of speckers (397) and non-consequentialists (386), though. Maybe my copy of the data's messed up? (Gnumeric complains the XLS might be corrupt.)

Anyway, I do see a correlation between specks & moral paradigm. My dust speck percentages:

  • 41% for consequentialism (N = 560)
  • 67% for deontology (N = 36)
  • 47% for other/none (N = 145)
  • 65% for virtue ethics (N = 116)

leaving out people who didn't answer. Consequentialists chose dust specks at a lower rate than each other group (which chi-squared tests confirm is statistically significant). But 41% of our consequentialists did still choose dust specks.

[Edit: "indentation is preserved", my arse. I am not a Markdown fan.]