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2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
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.
It also contains a chance at winning a MONETARY REWARD at the bottom. You do not need to fill in all the extra credit questions to get the MONETARY REWARD, just make an honest stab at as much of the survey as you can.
Please make things easier for my computer and by extension me by reading all the instructions and by answering any text questions in the simplest and 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".
Last year there was some concern that the survey period was too short, or too uncertain. This year the survey will remain open until 23:59 PST December 31st 2013, so as long as you make time to take it sometime this year, you should be fine. Many people put it off last year and then forgot about it, so why not take it right now while you are reading this post?
Okay! Enough preliminaries! Time to take the...
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Thanks to everyone who suggested questions and ideas for the 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey. I regret I was unable to take all of your suggestions into account, because of some limitations in Google Docs, concern about survey length, and contradictions/duplications among suggestions. I think I got most of them in, and others can wait until next year.
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 (616)
Surveyed.
I have taken the survey (and answered, to a good approximation, all the questions).
Note that if you take the survey and comment here immediately after, Yvain can probably identify which survey is yours. If this possibility troubles you, you may wish to delay. On the other hand, empirically it seems that earlier comments get more karma.
I conjecture that more than 5% of entrants will experience a substantial temptation to give SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE as their passphrase at the end. The purpose of this paragraph is to remark that (1) if you, the reader, are so tempted then that is evidence that I am right, and (2) if so then giving in to the temptation is probably a bad idea.
Then one just has to post as early as possible, and then take the survey at one's leisure :P
I was temped, but didn't for the obvious reasons.
Is the karma related to actually taking it? Or should I post "took the survey" now, and then take it later to preserve my privacy?
If you don't mind lying about something trivial for karma+privacy, that seems like a fine idea.
I have taken the survey and done exactly this. I have also chosen COOPERATE. I figure doing so is cooperating in two ways; assuming a large number of people give SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE, Yvain will either discard those tickets or split the prize between them. If it is split, then the squeamish people are cooperating with each other by making it more likely that all of us will receive something, albeit a smaller amount. If the tickets are discarded, then we are cooperating with non-squeamish people. Gifting them, really; they are more likely to win a prize because we have opted out, and it will be marginally larger because I chose COOPERATE.
Of course this procedure is probably defection against Yvain, who will have to deal with his system being subverted. Oops.
My guess is that if lots of people give the same passphrase and one of them wins the draw, Yvain will simply hold another draw among the people who claim to have won.
Also, for the sums we're talking about I bet your utility is close enough to linear that the difference between (say) "certainly $5" and "$60 with probability 1/12" is very small. (Perhaps it feels larger on account of some cognitive bias, though introspecting I think the two really feel basically equivalent to me.)
Hrm. Damn, that would be a sane solution and obviates both my mucking about and your own.
My net utility for winning is as close to zero as makes no difference; I make enough that it's unimportant, so the marginal value of the money is probably worth less than the time it would take to arrange the exchange. My utility for playing amusing games with systems of this sort is rather higher, however.
I have never posted on LW before, but this seems like a fine first time to do so.
I am really very curious to see the results of the real world cooperate/defect choice at the bottom of the test.
Surveyed.
Nice to see the reactionaries got their bone thrown to them on the politics section.
dude, no "jewish" religious background? seems like a serious omission unless my priors are all screwed up.
I'm sorry. I'm not sure how that happened. Must have accidentally gotten deleted when I was adding in the Eastern Orthodox stuff. The question has been fixed and "Jewish" is now an option.
Sorry I blew the conspiracy :-p
I assume having written in "Jewish" under "Other" will properly place my response in the correct bucket?
For the Prize Question, you should use a random number generator and cooperate with probability 0.8. Why? Suppose that the fraction of survey-takers that cooperate is p. Then the value of the prize will be proportional to p and there will be p + 4(1 - p) raffle entries. The expected value of Cooperating is p/(p + 4(1-p)) and the expected value of Defecting is 4(1-p)/(p + 4(1-p)). In equilibrium, these must be the same: if one choice were more profitable than the other, then people would switch until this was no longer the case. Thus p = 4(1 - p) and thus p = 4/5.
Addendum 29 November: Actually, this is wrong; see ensuing discussion.
The expected value of defecting is 4p/(p + 4(1-p), to within one part in the number of survey takers. Whether or not you defect makes no difference as to the proportion of people who defect.
The solution is to determine how likely it is that a random participant is going to defect, conditional on your choice of cooperate or defect. If you're playing with a total of N copies of yourself, you cooperate and get the maximal payout ($60/N). If you're playing against cooperate bots, you defect and get $60*4N/(N-1).
We can generalize this to partial levels. If you play with D defectors and C cooperators whose opinion you can't change, and X people who will cooperate when you cooperate (and defect when you defect), then the payouts are as thus:
C: (C + X)/(C + D + X) D: 4(C /(C + D + X)
You can solve for the break even point by setting C + X = 4 * C
So the answer is that you should defect, unless you think that for every person who is going to cooperate no matter what, there are at least three people who are thinking with similar enough reasoning to come up with the same answer you come up with (regardless of what answer that is).
Unless you're using timeless decision theory, if I understand TDT correctly (which I very well might not). In that case, the calculations by Zack show the amount of causal entanglement for which cooperation is a good choice. That is, P(others cooperate | I cooperate) and P(others defect | I defect) should be more than 0.8 for cooperation to be a good idea.
I do not think my decisions have that level of causal entanglement with other humans, so I defected.
Though, I just realized, I should have been basing my decision on my entanglement with lesswrong survey takers, which is probably substantially higher. Oh well.
Nevermind, you already covered this, though in a different fashion.
Yeah, and the math is a little different, three entangled decision makers for each cooperate-bot you can defect against (the number of defectors don't matter, surprisingly). You get three extra chances to get the money generously donated to the pool by the cooperate bots by defecting, compared to causing a certain number of people to help you make the pool even larger.
I think that way to get maximum reward is doing the survey (at least) four times and always answering cooperate.
I can't wait to see the Cooperate/Defect ratio. I, for one, chose to cooperate.
I took the survey.
However, this question confused me:
(emphasis mine)
The wording confused me; I almost put "6 years" instead of "6" because of it.
Also, I was sorely tempted to respond that I do not read instructions and am going to ruin everything, and then answer the rest of that section, including the test question, correctly. I successfully resisted that temptation, of which fact I am proud.
This.
Surveyed. Put a humorous pair of Lojban lujvo as a passphrase. I cooperated, knowing that regardless, I was unlikely to win no matter what strategy I pursued, and that priming myself by forcing myself to cooperate now would possibly make me unknowingly want to cooperate in the future to my benefit.
Taken, answering all of the questions I was capable of answering. I will be very interested to see the results on some of the new questions. (The shifts on existing questions could also be interesting, but I don't expect much to change.)
Finally decided to register for an account here. That reward structure will be fun to watch.
Surveyed. Left several questions blank.
Incidentally, while I answered the "akrasia" questions about mental illnesses, therapy, etc. as best I could, it's perhaps worth noting that most of my answers related to a period of my life after suffering traumatic brain injury that significantly impaired my cognitive function, and therefore might be skewing the results... or maybe not, depending on what the questions were trying to get at
Taken, Answering all questions. I answered the last question (Co-operate or Defect) only after coming back and reading the comments, but I think I forgot to put in my passphrase so it doesn't really matter.
Surveyed.
Survey Taken.
Oh wow, you really cut down on the extra credit questions this time- no links to external tests! Not sure if I like that or not; in particular, now we only have one IQ source to look at. But oh well.
(I took the survey.)
I found myself geuinely confused by the question "You are a certain kind of person, and there's not much that can be done either way to really change that" - not by the general vagueness of the statement (which I assume is all part of the fun) but by a very specific issue, the word "you". Is it "you" as in me? Or "you" as in "one", i.e. a hypothetical person essentially referring to everyone? I interpreted it the first way then changed my mind after reading the subsequent questions which seemed to be more clearly using it the second way.
I answered that section quickly and on the basis of intuition in the hope that those questions were chosen because there is some interesting cognitive bias affecting the answers that I was unaware of. :D
(Dan from CFAR here) - That question (and the 3 similar ones) came from a standard psychology scale. I think the question is intentionally ambiguous between "you in particular" and "people in general" - the longer version of the scale includes some questions that are explicitly about each, and some others that are vaguely in the middle. They're meant to capture people's relatively intuitive impressions.
You can find more information about the questions by googling, although (as with the calibration question) it's better if that information doesn't show up in the recent comments feed, since scales like this one are often less valid measures for people who know what they're intended to measure.
Took the survey.
I'm interested in seeing what sort of interventions ended up working for people with akrasia.
Did the survey.
Done. I'm glad there was nothing about Schrodinger this time around.
Are you planning to do any analysis on what traits are associated with defection? That could get ugly fast.
(I took the survey)
Well, remember that that's a zero sum game within the community since it's coming out of Yvain's pocket. I was going to reflexivly cooperate, then I remembered that I was cooperating in transfering money from someone who was nice enough to create this survey, to people who were only nice enough to answer.
This was my initial thought, too. But then it occurred to me that Yvain wants to incentivize people to take the survey, and more people will be so incentivized if the reward is larger. Thus, I can acausally help Yvain achieve his goal by cooperating.
This will only influence people who know something about how the reward works before they decide to take the survey, but it still seemed worth it, so I cooperated.
Cooperating for reasons other than "I expect cooperating to make other people cooperate" gives people a reason to defect and make the total (and your expected) reward lower.
I've done the math elsewhere in this thread, and if at least a third of all respondents decide to cooperate no matter what, the optimal solution is to just defect and take their money.
Yes. And I did cooperate because I expected that it would make other people cooperate (acausally). I was explaining why I wanted more people to cooperate, even though it would mean that Yvain would lose more money.
Good. Then a defector has been enticed to take the survey.
I took the survey. My apologies for not doing so in every previous year I've been here, and for not finding time for the extra questions this year.
The race question should probably use checkboxes (2^N answers) rather than radio boxes (N answers). Biracial people aren't that uncommon.
Living "with family" is slightly ambiguous; I almost selected it instead of "with partner/spouse" since our kids are living with us, but I suspected that wasn't the intended meaning.
Same with the diagnoses question. But I don't think that Yvain's software deals well with checkboxes. They seem to have much more radiobuttons this year.
Took the survey and cooperated.
I took the survey. Thanks for putting this together, Yvain!
I chose DEFECT: CFAR/MIRI can keep their money. Furthermore, if I win I precommit to refusing payment and donating $120 * (1 - X) to MIRI, where X is the proportion of people who answer COOPERATE. I humbly suggest that others do the same.
Survey taken. The very last question made me laugh out loud. It also proved to me that this is truly my type of community.
Congratulations for putting the dilemma to test. That was the hardest survey I've taken since the 2012 one.
Survey Taken
Took the survey.
It seems that I only comment here when I take the survey and remain a lurker otherwise.
(Survey taken)
Surveyed.
Also, spoiler: the reward is too small and unlikely for me to bother thinking through the ethics of defecting; in particular, I'm fairly insensitive to the multiplier for defecting at this price point. (Morality through indecisiveness?)
I finished and had fun even if parts of it made me feel dumb (I never thought about that calibration question before and am pretty sure I got it wildly wrong). The monetary reward at the end looks interesting but even in the unlikely case that I won I might have too much trouble claiming any kind of prize right now...
Surveyed. Thank you.
I meant to skip some of the extra credit questions (the ones about the changeability of personality in particular), but wound up stuck answering one of them by software glitch on my computer (I couldn't uncheck it entirely, but at least tried to keep it from being noise).
Taken for the first time. 'Twas fun.
Taken the survey. Thanks for doing this, Yvain.
Surveyed. Is it okay to answer commited theist/pastafarian? :)
Answered them all as best I could :^)
I left the 'Singularity' question blank because it was I'll-defined - I treated it like a question specifically on the IE, but anyhu, my Priors on that are totally wacky. I expect it to happen, but I have no knowledge of the time at all really.
Took the survey. Note: "average" is not a very precise term. For one, "average person" is probably a mediocre stand-in for "typical person" (since there isn't actually a commonly accepted way to take averages of people). Furthermore, questions like "How long, in approximate number of minutes, do you spend on Less Wrong in the average day?" are actually highly ambiguous. The arithmetic mean of times that I spend on Less Wrong over days is substantially different from the median time.
No, I don't read instructions and am going to ruin the survey results for everyone.
snicker
Also, wow, the population of Europe is wildly lower than I thought it was, it's outside my 90% range...
Random math: one way of deciding whether or not to cooperate in the reward question is plot reward versus percentage-UDT-users in the LW community (under the assumption that everyone in that set will do the same thing you do, and everyone else splits 50-50). If that percentage is larger than about 65% (which I'm 70% sure it is), cooperating is superior to defection, but defection actually has the higher maximum expected value - if the entire community chooses randomly, anyway.
...
blink blink
Aw, darn it, I should've flipped a coin...
Edit: No, wait, nevermind, that would halve my expected reward.
taken!
Surveyed.
Surveyed.
The occupation thing could have been a checkbox, for us who are e.g. both students and doing for-profit work.
The income question could have used a clarification of whether it was pre- or post-tax. (I assumed pre-.)
Seconded on "occupation should be checkboxes" thing.
Taken.
Taken. It was relatively quick; the questions were easy. Thanks for improving the survey!
Two notes: The question about mental illness has no "None" answers; thus you cannot distinguish between people who had none, and people who didn't answer the question. The question about income did not make clear whether it's pre-tax or post-tax.
Several of these questions are poorly phrased. For instance, the supernatural and god questions, as phrased, imply that the god chance should be less than the chance of supernatural anything existing. However, I think (and would like to be able to express) that there is a very small (0), chance of ghosts or wizards, but only a small (1) chance of there being some sort of intelligent being which created the universe-for instance, the simulation hypothesis, which I would consider a subset of the god hypothesis.
Cooperator here.
Surveyed. I liked the game.
If there are any naturalistic neopagans reading this, I'm curious how they answered the religion questions.
Notes taken while I answered.
We're Ashkenazi Jews, but AFAIK the last time any ancestor of mine practiced a religion was in my great-grandparents' generation. (And then only because I knew only one of them personallyh, so it's reasonable to assume at least one of the others could have been religious.) I get that every human is descended from religious ones, but conflating this datapoint with someone whose actual parents practiced a religion once seems wrong.
For some of these my confidence was so low that I didn't answer. For some questions, there are also semantic quibbles that would affect the answer:
Type of global catastrophic risk: although I chose the most probable, there wasn't a large difference in estimated probability for the top few leading dangers.
At first I thought "every few days". But then I realized these techniques almost never work out or are unsupported by evidence, and so it would be wrong to call them plausible-seeming. So I recalibrated and answered much more rarely.
Then I saw the next questions asked how often I tried the technique and how often it actually worked. But I already choose not to try them most of the time because I expect not to succeed. So I let my previous answer stand. I hope this was as intended.
CFAR bonus questions:
Are these questions claiming that I, DanArmak, am this kind of person who can change; or that everyone can change? The answers would be very different. I assumed the latter, but it would be nice to have confirmation.
Other nitpicks: a certain kind on which dimension? Some aspects of personality are much harder to change than others.
What is the measure of "true" change? By the means available to us today, we can't change into truly nonhuman intelligences, so does that mean our "kind" cannot be changed? And the answers to the questions will change over time as technology creates new more effective interventions.
And: does "basic things" mean "fundamental things" or "minor insignificant things"? Normally I would assume "fundamental things", but then it seems identical to the previous question.
On a personal note, this set of questions struck me as incompatible after answering the previous sets. They seem to deliberately probe my irrational biases and cached beliefs, and I felt I couldn't answer them while I was deliberately thinking reflectively and asking myself why I believed the answers I was giving.
The politics of immigration in Israel are totally different from those of the US (and I expect this holds for many other countries too in their different ways). I didn't answer because I was afraid of biasing the poll, and it would have been nice to get more guidance in the question.
Likewise here, the last time my family practiced a religion was when my grandparents were children (my family is also Ashkenazi Jewish). I wasn't raised religious at all, but there was certainly a good deal of cultural effect.
How about "events that the average human observer would use the word 'supernatural' to describe, even given some knowledge about their nature (regardless of whether that knowledge would be available to the average human observer)"?
So a ghost that is a spirit is supernatural while a ghost that is a hallucination is not, even if an average human observer would be unable to tell them apart.
How about messages from outside the simulation? The simulation itself may be running in an orderly material universe (we could call this "exonatural"), and may run according to fixed orderly rules most of the time ("usually endonatural"), but still allow the simulators to tweak it. As an analogy, consider what happens in Conway's Life when you pause it and draw or erase a glider.
We can discuss it and maybe agree on an interesting meaning that we could ask people about. The problem is that I don't think all participants in this poll interpreted the question in the same way.
As for your example, it doesn't illuminate a general rule for me. If supernatural things can actually happen, what is the definition of "supernatural"?
I endorse you still putting your background as Ashkenazi Jewish, as this gives interesting ethnic information beyond that in the race question.
I took the survey.
I think most of my answers were the same as last year, although I think my estimates have improved a little, and my hours of internet have gone down, both of which I like.
Many of the questions are considerably cleaned up -- much thanks to Yvain and everyone else who helped. It's very good it has sensible responses for gender. And IIRC, the "family's religious background" was tidied up a bit. I wonder if anyone can answer "atheist" as religious background? I hesitated over the response, since the last religious observance I know of for sure was G being brought up catholic, but I honestly think living in a protestant (or at least, anglican) culture is a bigger influence on my parents cultural background, so I answered like that.
I have no idea what's going to happen in the raffle. I answered "cooperate" because I want to encourage cooperating in as many situations as possible, and don't really care about a slightly-increased chance of < $60.
I could and did answer atheist as background. My parents are both inspoken* nonbelievers, though they attended a Unitarian Universalist church for two years when their kids (me included) were young, for the express purpose (explained well after the fact) of exposing us to religion and allowing us to make our own choices.
*The opposite of outspoken.
I took the survey - extra credit and everything!
taken. I did the whole thing! it actually wasn't that long.
Took the survey. Surprisingly short.
Took it.
Could you add a question asking how many of their donations people gave to non-x-risk EA charities? The EA movement would appreciate the information!
Made an account here to comment that I filled out the survey, and to make future participation more likely.
Survey taken.
Survey completed in full. Begging for karma as per ancient custom.
I choose DEFECT because presumably the money is coming out of CFAR's pocket and I assume they can use the money better than whichever random person wins the raffle. If I win, I commit to requesting it be given as an anonymous donation to CFAR.
EDIT: Having been persuaded my Yvain and Vaniver, I reverse my position and intend to spend the prize on myself. Unfortunately I've already defected and now it's too late to not be an asshole! Sorry about that. Only the slightly higher chance of winning can soothe my feelings of guilt.
I think the money is coming out of Yvain's pocket, actually.
I cooperated, and I precommit to waiving my prize if I win.
The money is coming out of my pocket, it is not funging against any other charitable donations, and I am in favor of someone claiming the prize and using it to buy something nice that they like.
Huh, I put svir uhaqerq zvyyvba sbe Rhebcr'f cbchyngvba. Turns out I was thinking of the Rhebcrna Havba, (svir uhaqerq naq frira zvyyvba) engure guna Rhebcr vgfrys, which is substantially higher.
Did the same mistake :/
Please rot13 this (and spell out the numbers)!
ETA I have not yet taken the survey yet - skimmed through it yesterday - but when I do, I'll skip the calibration question.
Oops, sorry! Fixed.
I wish you hadn't posted that-- I read the comments before taking the survey.
Sorry, I thought it would be buried near the bottom ;c
I took the survey. Also just realised that my choice of pass phrase was really silly... I was trying to make it easy for myself to remember what the second word would be, but failed to observe that the first word could become public and therefore it would be sensible to choose something that wouldn't be obvious to just about anybody from knowing the first word! Ah well, in the unlikely event that I win the draw, whoever gets in first can have the prize, I guess...
Took the survey. Can't wait for the results.
If possible, I'm interested in how unique the passwords were.
Second that :)
I used a random password generator (set to 'readable', because the survey asked for 'words' or some such). Why would you do anything else?
I was sorely tempted to use "squeamish ossifrage". But with more than a thousand regulars, many of whom are interested in computing trivia, I figure it's likely that someone else thought that would be clever.
Survey taken.
I have taken the survey, also the extra part. Although I was never tested for IQ in professional way and since it was a question in the non-extra part, I assume that most LW readers were. Interesting observation (if true). Maybe it is a nationally dependent thing? This ad-hoc hypothesis can be validated by the survey if only enough people from enough countries take it
I surveyed.
COMPLAIN! I have one partner but I'm definitely not monogamous. Sorry :)
I guess that's why there were separate questions asking whether you prefer monogamy or whatever else, and how many partners you happen to have.
I took it.
Took the survey.
Survey taken.
I found the Europe question awesome because I, incredibly luckily, had checked Europe's total population for a Fermi estimate just yesterday, so I got to feel like a high accuracy, highly calibrated badass. Of course, that also means it's not good data for things that I learned greater than ~1 day ago.
Surveyed.
The IQ question should, like with the SAT/ACT, make it clear you should leave it blank if you've not been tested. And the same with the follow-up in calibration.
Second time taking the survey. I think a lot of my answers to the probability questions have changed in the last year — I think I've discovered more about myself and my beliefs since the first survey.
I took the survey.
I was within a factor of 2 on the Europe question, which is pretty good, I think.
As a general rule I "cooperate" on prisoner's dilemmas where the prize is of a trivial size, regardless of my opinion about the incentives and people involved. An interesting experiment might be to take people familiar with the prisoner's dilemma, flip the "cooperate" and "defect" incentives, and see if it makes a difference.
I completed the survey.
I took the survey.
Not taken, and will not be taken as long as it demands that I log in with Google (or Facebook, or anything else other than maybe a local Less Wrong account).
I didn't have this problem, maybe because I was already logged into Google; probably docs.google.com is doing some automatic behavior because it sees you have an expired cookie. You should be able to avoid this with an incognito window or whatever your browser's equivalent is.
You're right; my error. Sorry.
Survey taken, all of it!
Thanks Yvain, for all the time and work you put every year into this. Can't wait to see the results!
I'm doing the survey while I should be in a lecture, and I just reached the akrasia questions.
I took the survey as well
Survey taken. Nearly all questions answered, except for the Akrasia ones, since I haven't implemented many formal practices to fight akrasia.
Did the survey. Thanks, Yvain.
Suggestion: If you are upvoting people who took the survey, sort comments by "New" first so that late takers get their upvote.
Took it.
It is done.
Short comments:
This is ambiguous! While strictly speaking "Europe" defaults to "the continent of Europe" spanning to the Ural, in common parlance "Europe" is used interchangeably with "European Union", similar to how you interpret "American student" in your very survey, a totum pro parte. Stahp with the totums pro parte for calibration questions, I beseech thee! (Of course I wouldn't have minded had I not given the correct answer for the European Union...)
Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?
I took the survey! Great set of questions. I felt like it was rather well designed,
Surveyed. Having everyone participate in a Prisoner's Dillema is extremely ingenious.
Edit: Hey, guys, stop upvoting this! You have already falsified my answer to survey's karma question by an order of magnitude!
Edit much later: The lesswrong community is now proved evil.
Edit much more later: Bwahaha, I expected that... Thanks for the karma and stuff...
Surveyed.
Minor nitpick: I think it is better to clarify definition of Europe in calibration question. Because if you go to Wikipedia to check which definition of Europe survey authors had in mind, you will immediately see Europe population on the same page.
I interpreted that as "Include uncertainty about Wikipedia's definition of Europe."
Survey complete.
Cool. Survey taken.
Survey taken, answered all questions I could. This excluded the IQ question set. I've never taken an IQ test. I've never been offered an IQ test, nor considered taking one. Is that strange? The survey seemed pretty confident that I'd have measured my IQ.
I've never taken an IQ test either.
However in the US the usual standardized tests (SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT) are highly correlated with IQ and going by percentiles you can get a reasonable IQ estimate easily enough.
This is no longer true for high IQs, and most of the conversion tables are only for the old SAT. A 1600 just ain't what it used to be.
Measuring high IQs is difficult in general, but a rough estimate on the basis of, say, SAT scores is better than no data at all.
I haven't taken any official IQ test nor have I taken any standardized tests. The only sort of official intelligence test I took was the ASVAB, though I forgot what my score was. I did score high enough to take the DLAB though (I was originally tasked to be a Turkish linguist in the Air Force).
A previous incarnation of the test just asked what your IQ was. We got both people who had taken official tests responding, and people who were just estimating their IQ. The second group is really noisy, and made it difficult to meaningfully talk about the IQ of LWers.
I suggested the current question as a way to get high-quality information out of survey-takers, but I also wanted a question where people estimated their IQ (maybe as two questions, for the lower and upper bound of a 50% CI) so that we could still get the low-quality information.
I took the survey.
I realized while answering one of the questions that the comments that I make for free karma are one of my main interactions with the LW website.
Taken the survey!
I took the survey. I didn't really know how to answer the "relationship" part since I'm not really poly right now, but have a number of "friends with benefits". So I answered it zero.
First survey and comment, and I liked it too! (Including the bonuses, especially the reward question :)
Surveyed.
I've taken the survey.
By the way, nice game at the end. I didn't do the math but it seemed evident that defecting was the logical choice (and by reading the comments below I was right). I cooperated anyway, it just felt right. So, defectors, I probably just made one of you a few hundredths of a cent richer! Lucky you! ;-)
Ok, went and took the survey.
And I only lied about one question!
I completed every question on the survey that I could.
I took the survey.
Surveyed, requesting free internet points.
I worry that I harmed the results by mentioning that I have meditated for cognitive benefit reasons, without a way to note that it wasn't to deal with Akrasia. I wanted to answer truthfully, but at the same time the truthful answer was misleading.
If you didn't record yourself as having akrasia, this seems like it's still useful information. It can be interesting to compare "these are the things akratics try for cognitive self-improvement" and "these are the things non-akratics try for cognitive self-improvement," and the survey didn't specify to skip that section if you don't consider yourself as having serious akrasia.
If you do consider yourself as having had serious akrasia, and meditated for unrelated reasons, then I'm not sure what I would respond there, although it seems like you might have some information about whether or not meditation helps with akrasia.
Surveyed.
I'm disappointed to see that most of my suggestions weren't used.
I'm sorry. I couldn't put in checkboxes where you can choose as many as you want, because my software can't process them effectively. And I am reluctant to take suggestions about clarifying or adding more options to different questions as past experience has told me that no matter how fine the gradations are people always ask to have them finer. I took your suggestion about better divisions of Christianity and I thank you for making it.
Survey taken. Defected since I'm neutral as to whether the money goes to Yvain or a random survey-taker, but would prefer the money going to me over either of those two.
Answered the entire survey (except questions for U.S. residents). I can't see why Newcomb's problem is a problem. Getting $1,001,000 by two-boxing is an outcome that just never happens, given Omega's perfect prediction abilities. You should one-box.
What's the method for submitting proposals for next surveys?
If one outcome never happens (i.e. it is known that it will not happen in the future), then saying what you "should" do is a type error. There is only what you will do. One-boxing becomes a description, not a prescription.
One-boxing is not necessarily what you will do. You can still judge incorrectly, and choose to two-box, and end up with $1,000. That's something you can still choose to do, but not what you should do.
I asked a question about this in a previous open thread but no one responded.
The conditions of the problem state that Omega is a failproof predictor. If that's the case, the paradox vanishes. Attempts to second-guess Omega's choices only make sense if there's a reason to doubt Omega's powers.
I've taken the survey.
done
Taken!
I took the survey. Thanks for running it.
Should Muslim be divided into types?
I'm not sure what supernatural means for the more arcane simulation possibilities. I consider it likely that if we're simulated, it's from a universe with different physics.
I would rather see checkboxes for global catastrope, since it's hard to judge likelihood and I think the more interesting question is whether a person thinks any global catastrophe is likely.
Would it be worth having a text box for questions people would like to see on a future survey? I'm guessing that you wouldn't need to tabulate it,-- if you posted all the questions, I bet people here would identify the similar questions and sort them into topics.
I'm curious: why? (Not necessarily disagreeing, just wondering.)
Because the simulations we make have simpler physics than we do.
Sensible.
On the face of it, I would expect that if a physics P1 is the result of some agent A that lives under some other physics P2 constructing a simplified physics for simulation purposes, it would have characteristically different properties from a physics P3 that is not the result of such a process. Put differently... if our physics is P1, it should be more likely to be easily understood by A's cognitive processes than if it's P3.
That said, I don't understand the general constraints on either physicses or cognitive processes well enough to even begin to theorize about what specific properties I would expect to differentially find in P1 and P3.
Still, I wonder whether someone a lot smarter and better informed than me could use that as a starting point for trying to answer that question.
So far no one of several hundred people has identified Muslim, so I think finer gradations there would be overkill.
I can't do checkboxes.
I ask every year what questions people want in a future survey on this site. That way the good ones can get updated and people can hold discussions about them.
I took the whole survey.
Survey taken, can't wait to see the results :-)
Took the survey.
I'm a European, and the thought that geographical Europe might be meant didn't even occur to me,since in most of my daily interactions (media consumed, small talk, etc.), "Europe" is used interchangeably with "European Union". Teaches me to read such survey questions more thoroughly.
I want to congratulate you on how well you integrated the many suggestions you got, I see many improvements compared to the 2012 (for example, the introductory text convinced me to take the survey right away, when I was one of those who put it off last year).
Taken. Quite tickled by the prize question.
Survey taken. I defected, because I am normally a staunch advocate of cooperation and the stakes were low enough that it seemed like a fun opportunity to go against my usual inclinations. If I had read the comments first, I would likely have been convinced by some of the cooperation arguments advanced here.
Taken.
Took the survey.
Entered.
Thanks for running these, I took it. :) Love the prize question.
...I'm way off on the population of Europe, as I expected.
Surveyed. Looking forward to the data and analysis, as per every year.
Taken.
I'm confused by the CFAR questions, in particular the last four. Are they using you as 'the person filling out this survey' or the general you as in a person? "You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are" sounds like the general you. "You are a certain kind of person, and there's not much that can be done either way to really change that" sounds like the specific you.
Help?
I'm seconding the request for next year to include a Monogamish option. I'm in a basically monogamous relationship, but we both sometimes sleep with friends.
(also I took the survey)
took the survey, enjoyed the PD
Done. There were a few questions that were iffy, but overall I think this year's survey was a significant improvement from previous versions. Thanks Yvain for doing this.
I have taken the survey. Thank you Yvain for running it.
Took the survey. I was unusually confident of an incorrect number for the population of Europe because I looked it up recently, but remembered it wrong.
Guess I learned something, in that I should adjust down my confidence in recalled figures after a few weeks.
Surveyed.
Took the survey. I definitely did have an IQ test when I was a kid, but I don't think anyone ever told me the results and if they did I sure don't remember it.
Also, as a scientist I counted my various research techniques as new methods that help make my beliefs more accurate, which means I put something like 2/day for trying them and 1/week for them working. In hindsight I'm guessing this interpretation is not what you meant, and that science in general might count as ONE method altogether.
Took survey. Reminded me that I've never had an IQ test; is it worthwhile?
Surveyed. Amused at the final part. I hope we can look forward to more such fun in the future surveys!
Took the survey. Cooperated.
I should mention that I've taken the survey.
I defected, because I'm indifferent to whether the prize-giver or prize-winner has 60 * X dollars, unless the prize-winner is me.
I cooperated, because I'm more or less indifferent to monetary prizes of less than twenty dollars or so, and more substantial prizes imply widespread cooperation. I view it as unlikely that I can get away with putting myself into a separate reference class, so I might as well contribute to that.
Hmm, come to think of it, deciding the size of the cash prize (for it being interesting) is probably worth more to me as well. I'll just have to settle for boring old cash.
Didn't take the survey. There were enough question I was vaguely uncomfortable with answering that I chose not to. I may change my mind later; however, I already read the comments, including some which give information on the probability calibration question.
I took the survey.