gwern comments on Writing Style and the Typical Mind Fallacy - Less Wrong

27 Post author: lukeprog 14 July 2013 04:47AM

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Comment author: Benito 14 July 2013 08:22:57AM 4 points [-]

This poll does not show how people from one category voted in another, which is precisely the relationship that Lukeprog was looking for.

Unless you can do that with the raw poll data, but that just confused me.

Comment author: gwern 15 July 2013 12:36:39AM *  6 points [-]

Unless you can do that with the raw poll data, but that just confused me.

Thankfully, the data is not quite that crippled! The data is reported in a... 'long' format, I think the term is, where each row is a single poll item response with a unique ID for the respondent. If you want to look at that sort of question, it's up to you to aggregate the data correctly (eg with grep). You can see this by looking at particular unique IDs, say that of Leonhart and anonymous respondent 11:

$ grep Leonhart poll.csv
"Leonhart","538","0","2013-07-14T21:05:29.027196"
"Leonhart","539","0","2013-07-14T21:05:29.118328"
"Leonhart","540","1","2013-07-14T21:05:29.292160"
"Leonhart","541","1","2013-07-14T21:05:29.244125"
"Leonhart","542","3","2013-07-14T21:05:29.178701"
$ grep \"11\" poll.csv
"11","538","0","2013-07-14T21:05:25.150240"
"11","539","2","2013-07-14T21:05:25.302881"
"11","540","0","2013-07-14T21:05:25.533486"
"11","541","1","2013-07-14T21:05:25.458408"
"11","542","2","2013-07-14T21:05:25.398273"

There's 5 entries for each, since there were 5 poll items, and and each poll item has its own unique ID as well. So if you wanted to know the relationship of an answer on poll item #538 and #541 based on how subjects answered #538, you'd get a list of everyone answered "0" in #538, and pull out their answer for #541 as well. That sort of thing.


(And now that I'm the topic, I wonder where my own writings fall, and how I would even know if I were insufficiently writing like Eliezer/Luke/Yvain.)

Comment author: spuckblase 16 July 2013 08:50:52AM 2 points [-]

I like the your non-fiction style a lot (don't know your fictional stuff). I often get the impression you're in total control of the material. Very thorough yet original, witty and humble. The exemplary research paper. Definitely more Luke than Yvain/Eliezer.