2013 Survey Results

74 Post author: Yvain 19 January 2014 02:51AM

Thanks to everyone who took the 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey. Extra thanks to Ozy, who helped me out with the data processing and statistics work, and to everyone who suggested questions.

This year's results are below. Some of them may make more sense in the context of the original survey questions, which can be seen here. Please do not try to take the survey as it is over and your results will not be counted.

Part I. Population

1636 people answered the survey.

Compare this to 1195 people last year, and 1090 people the year before that. It would seem the site is growing, but we do have to consider that each survey lasted a different amount of time; for example, last survey lasted 23 days, but this survey lasted 40.

However, almost everyone who takes the survey takes it in the first few weeks it is available. 1506 of the respondents answered within the first 23 days, proving that even if the survey ran the same length as last year's, there would still have been growth.
As we will see lower down, growth is smooth across all categories of users (lurkers, commenters, posters) EXCEPT people who have posted to Main, the number of which remains nearly the same from year to year.

We continue to have very high turnover - only 40% of respondents this year say they also took the survey last year.

II. Categorical Data

SEX:
Female: 161, 9.8%
Male: 1453, 88.8%
Other: 1, 0.1%
Did not answer: 21, 1.3%

[[Ozy is disappointed that we've lost 50% of our intersex readers.]]

GENDER:
F (cisgender): 140, 8.6%
F (transgender MtF): 20, 1.2%
M (cisgender): 1401, 85.6%
M (transgender FtM): 5, 0.3%
Other: 49, 3%
Did not answer: 21, 1.3%

SEXUAL ORIENTATION:
Asexual: 47, 2.9%
Bisexual: 188, 12.2%
Heterosexual: 1287, 78.7%
Homosexual: 45, 2.8%
Other: 39, 2.4%
Did not answer: 19, 1.2%

RELATIONSHIP STYLE:
Prefer monogamous: 829, 50.7%
Prefer polyamorous: 234, 14.3%
Other: 32, 2.0%
Uncertain/no preference: 520, 31.8%
Did not answer: 21, 1.3%

NUMBER OF CURRENT PARTNERS:
0: 797, 48.7%
1: 728, 44.5%
2: 66, 4.0%
3: 21, 1.3%
4: 1, .1%
6: 3, .2%
Did not answer: 20, 1.2%

RELATIONSHIP STATUS:
Married: 304, 18.6%
Relationship: 473, 28.9%
Single: 840, 51.3%

RELATIONSHIP GOALS:
Looking for more relationship partners: 617, 37.7%
Not looking for more relationship partners: 993, 60.7%
Did not answer: 26, 1.6%

HAVE YOU DATED SOMEONE YOU MET THROUGH THE LESS WRONG COMMUNITY?
Yes: 53, 3.3%
I didn't meet them through the community but they're part of the community now: 66, 4.0%
No: 1482, 90.5%
Did not answer: 35, 2.1%

COUNTRY:
United States: 895, 54.7%
United Kingdom: 144, 8.8%
Canada: 107, 6.5%
Australia: 69, 4.2%
Germany: 68, 4.2%
Finland: 35, 2.1%
Russia: 22, 1.3%
New Zealand: 20, 1.2%
Israel: 17, 1.0%
France: 16, 1.0%
Poland: 16, 1.0%

LESS WRONGERS PER CAPITA:
Finland: 1/154,685.
New Zealand: 1/221,650.
Canada: 1/325,981.
Australia: 1/328,659.
United States: 1/350,726
United Kingdom: 1/439,097
Israel: 1/465,176.
Germany: 1/1,204,264.
Poland: 1/2,408,750.
France: 1/4,106,250.
Russia: 1/6,522,727

RACE:
Asian (East Asian): 60, 3.7%
Asian (Indian subcontinent): 37, 2.3%
Black: 11, .7%
Middle Eastern: 9, .6%
White (Hispanic): 73, 4.5%
White (non-Hispanic): 1373, 83.9%
Other: 51, 3.1%
Did not answer: 22, 1.3%

WORK STATUS:
Academics (teaching): 77, 4.7%
For-profit work: 552, 33.7%
Government work: 55, 3.4%
Independently wealthy: 14, .9%
Non-profit work: 46, 2.8%
Self-employed: 103, 6.3%
Student: 661, 40.4%
Unemployed: 105, 6.4%
Did not answer: 23, 1.4%

PROFESSION:
Art: 27, 1.7%
Biology: 26, 1.6%
Business: 44, 2.7%
Computers (AI): 47, 2.9%
Computers (other academic computer science): 107, 6.5%
Computers (practical): 505, 30.9%
Engineering: 128, 7.8%
Finance/economics: 92, 5.6%
Law: 36, 2.2%
Mathematics: 139, 8.5%
Medicine: 31, 1.9%
Neuroscience: 13, .8%
Philosophy: 41, 2.5%
Physics: 92, 5.6%
Psychology: 34, 2.1%
Statistics: 23, 1.4%
Other hard science: 31, 1.9%
Other social science: 43, 2.6%
Other: 139, 8.5%
Did not answer: 38, 2.3%

DEGREE:
None: 84, 5.1%
High school: 444, 27.1%
2 year degree: 68, 4.2%
Bachelor's: 554, 33.9%
Master's: 323, 19.7%
MD/JD/other professional degree: 31, 2.0%
PhD.: 90, 5.5%
Other: 22, 1.3%
Did not answer: 19, 1.2%

POLITICAL:
Communist: 11, .7%
Conservative: 64, 3.9%
Liberal: 580, 35.5%
Libertarian: 437, 26.7%
Socialist: 502, 30.7%
Did not answer: 42, 2.6%

COMPLEX POLITICAL WITH WRITE-IN:
Anarchist: 52, 3.2%
Conservative: 16, 1.0%
Futarchist: 42, 2.6%
Left-libertarian: 142, 8.7%
Liberal: 5
Moderate: 53, 3.2%
Pragmatist: 110, 6.7%
Progressive: 206, 12.6%
Reactionary: 40, 2.4%
Social democrat: 154, 9.5%
Socialist: 135, 8.2%
Did not answer: 26.2%

[[All answers with more than 1% of the Less Wrong population included. Other answers which made Ozy giggle included "are any of you kings?! why do you CARE?!", "Exclusionary: you are entitled to an opinion on nuclear power when you know how much of your power is nuclear", "having-well-founded-opinions-is-really-hard-ist", "kleptocrat", "pirate", and "SPECIAL FUCKING SNOWFLAKE."]]

AMERICAN PARTY AFFILIATION:
Democratic Party: 226, 13.8%
Libertarian Party: 31, 1.9%
Republican Party: 58, 3.5%
Other third party: 19, 1.2%
Not registered: 447, 27.3%
Did not answer or non-American: 856, 52.3%

VOTING:
Yes: 936, 57.2%
No: 450, 27.5%
My country doesn't hold elections: 2, 0.1%
Did not answer: 249, 15.2%

RELIGIOUS VIEWS:
Agnostic: 165, 10.1%
Atheist and not spiritual: 1163, 71.1%
Atheist but spiritual: 132, 8.1%
Deist/pantheist/etc.: 36, 2.2%
Lukewarm theist: 53, 3.2%
Committed theist 64, 3.9%

RELIGIOUS DENOMINATION (IF THEIST):
Buddhist: 22, 1.3%
Christian (Catholic): 44, 2.7%
Christian (Protestant): 56, 3.4%
Jewish: 31, 1.9%
Mixed/Other: 21, 1.3%
Unitarian Universalist or similar: 25, 1.5%

[[This includes all religions with more than 1% of Less Wrongers. Minority religions include Dzogchen, Daoism, various sorts of Paganism, Simulationist, a very confused secular humanist, Kopmist, Discordian, and a Cultus Deorum Romanum practitioner whom Ozy wants to be friends with.]]

FAMILY RELIGION:
Agnostic: 129, 11.6%
Atheist and not spiritual: 225, 13.8%
Atheist but spiritual: 73, 4.5%
Committed theist: 423, 25.9%
Deist/pantheist, etc.: 42, 2.6%
Lukewarm theist: 563, 34.4%
Mixed/other: 97, 5.9%
Did not answer: 24, 1.5%

RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND:
Bahai: 3, 0.2%
Buddhist: 13, .8%
Christian (Catholic): 418, 25.6%
Christian (Mormon): 38, 2.3%
Christian (Protestant): 631, 38.4%
Christian (Quaker): 7, 0.4%
Christian (Unitarian Universalist or similar): 32, 2.0%
Christian (other non-Protestant): 99, 6.1%
Christian (unknown): 3, 0.2%
Eckankar: 1, 0.1%
Hindu: 29, 1.8%
Jewish: 136, 8.3%
Muslim: 12, 0.7%
Native American Spiritualist: 1, 0.1%
Mixed/Other: 85, 5.3%
Sikhism: 1, 0.1%
Traditional Chinese: 11, .7%
Wiccan: 1, 0.1%
None: 8, 0.4%
Did not answer: 107, 6.7%

MORAL VIEWS:
Accept/lean towards consequentialism: 1049, 64.1%
Accept/lean towards deontology: 77, 4.7%
Accept/lean towards virtue ethics: 197, 12.0%
Other/no answer: 276, 16.9%
Did not answer: 37, 2.3%

CHILDREN
0: 1414, 86.4%
1: 77, 4.7%
2: 90, 5.5%
3: 25, 1.5%
4: 7, 0.4%
5: 1, 0.1%
6: 2, 0.1%
Did not answer: 20, 1.2%

MORE CHILDREN:
Have no children, don't want any: 506, 31.3%
Have no children, uncertain if want them: 472, 29.2%
Have no children, want children: 431, 26.7%
Have no children, didn't answer: 5, 0.3%
Have children, don't want more: 124, 7.6%
Have children, uncertain if want more: 25, 1.5%
Have children, want more: 53, 3.2%

HANDEDNESS:
Right: 1256, 76.6%
Left: 145, 9.5%
Ambidextrous: 36, 2.2%
Not sure: 7, 0.4%
Did not answer: 182, 11.1%

LESS WRONG USE:
Lurker (no account): 584, 35.7%
Lurker (account) 221, 13.5%
Poster (comment, no post): 495, 30.3%
Poster (Discussion, not Main): 221, 12.9%
Poster (Main): 103, 6.3%

SEQUENCES:
Never knew they existed: 119, 7.3%
Knew they existed, didn't look at them: 48, 2.9%
~25% of the Sequences: 200, 12.2%
~50% of the Sequences: 271, 16.6%
~75% of the Sequences: 225, 13.8%
All the Sequences: 419, 25.6%
Did not answer: 24, 1.5%

MEETUPS:
No: 1134, 69.3%
Yes, once or a few times: 307, 18.8%
Yes, regularly: 159, 9.7%

HPMOR:
No: 272, 16.6%
Started it, haven't finished: 255, 15.6%
Yes, all of it: 912, 55.7%

CFAR WORKSHOP ATTENDANCE:
Yes, a full workshop: 105, 6.4%
A class but not a full-day workshop: 40, 2.4%
No: 1446, 88.3%
Did not answer: 46, 2.8%

PHYSICAL INTERACTION WITH LW COMMUNITY:
Yes, all the time: 94, 5.7%
Yes, sometimes: 179, 10.9%
No: 1316, 80.4%
Did not answer: 48, 2.9%

VEGETARIAN:
No: 1201, 73.4%
Yes: 213, 13.0%
Did not answer: 223, 13.6%

SPACED REPETITION:
Never heard of them: 363, 22.2%
No,  but I've heard of them: 495, 30.2%
Yes, in the past: 328, 20%
Yes, currently: 219, 13.4%
Did not answer: 232, 14.2%

HAVE YOU TAKEN PREVIOUS INCARNATIONS OF THE LESS WRONG SURVEY?
Yes: 638, 39.0%
No: 784, 47.9%
Did not answer: 215, 13.1%

PRIMARY LANGUAGE:
English: 1009, 67.8%
German: 58, 3.6%
Finnish: 29, 1.8%
Russian: 25, 1.6%
French: 17, 1.0%
Dutch: 16, 1.0%
Did not answer: 15.2%

[[This includes all answers that more than 1% of respondents chose. Other languages include Urdu, both Czech and Slovakian, Latvian, and Love.]]

ENTREPRENEUR:
I don't want to start my own business: 617, 37.7%
I am considering starting my own business: 474, 29.0%
I plan to start my own business: 113, 6.9%
I've already started my own business: 156, 9.5%
Did not answer: 277, 16.9%

EFFECTIVE ALTRUIST:
Yes: 468, 28.6%
No: 883, 53.9%
Did not answer: 286, 17.5%

WHO ARE YOU LIVING WITH?
Alone: 348, 21.3%
With family: 420, 25.7%
With partner/spouse: 400, 24.4%
With roommates: 450, 27.5%
Did not answer: 19, 1.3%

DO YOU GIVE BLOOD?
No: 646, 39.5%
No, only because I'm not allowed: 157, 9.6%
Yes, 609, 37.2%
Did not answer: 225, 13.7%

GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISK:
Pandemic (bioengineered): 374, 22.8%
Environmental collapse including global warming: 251, 15.3%
Unfriendly AI: 233, 14.2%
Nuclear war: 210, 12.8%
Pandemic (natural) 145, 8.8%
Economic/political collapse: 175, 1, 10.7%
Asteroid strike: 65, 3.9%
Nanotech/grey goo: 57, 3.5%
Didn't answer: 99, 6.0%

CRYONICS STATUS:
Never thought about it / don't understand it: 69, 4.2%
No, and don't want to: 414, 25.3%
No, still considering: 636, 38.9%
No, would like to: 265, 16.2%
No, would like to, but it's unavailable: 119, 7.3%
Yes: 66, 4.0%
Didn't answer: 68, 4.2%

NEWCOMB'S PROBLEM:
Don't understand/prefer not to answer: 92, 5.6%
Not sure: 103, 6.3%
One box: 1036, 63.3%
Two box: 119, 7.3%
Did not answer: 287, 17.5%

GENOMICS:
Yes: 177, 10.8%
No: 1219, 74.5%
Did not answer: 241, 14.7%

REFERRAL TYPE:
Been here since it started in the Overcoming Bias days: 285, 17.4%
Referred by a friend: 241, 14.7%
Referred by a search engine: 148, 9.0%
Referred by HPMOR: 400, 24.4%
Referred by a link on another blog: 373, 22.8%
Referred by a school course: 1, .1%
Other: 160, 9.8%
Did not answer: 29, 1.9%

REFERRAL SOURCE:
Common Sense Atheism: 33
Slate Star Codex: 20
Hacker News: 18
Reddit: 18
TVTropes: 13
Y Combinator: 11
Gwern: 9
RationalWiki: 8
Marginal Revolution: 7
Unequally Yoked: 6
Armed and Dangerous: 5
Shtetl Optimized: 5
Econlog: 4
StumbleUpon: 4
Yudkowsky.net: 4
Accelerating Future: 3
Stares at the World: 3
xkcd: 3
David Brin: 2
Freethoughtblogs: 2
Felicifia: 2
Givewell: 2
hatrack.com: 2
HPMOR: 2
Patri Friedman: 2
Popehat: 2
Overcoming Bias: 2
Scientiststhesis: 2
Scott Young: 2
Stardestroyer.net: 2
TalkOrigins: 2
Tumblr: 2

[[This includes all sources with  more than one referral; needless to say there was a long tail]]

III. Numeric Data

(in the form mean + stdev (1st quartile, 2nd quartile, 3rd quartile) [n = number responding]))

Age: 27.4 + 8.5 (22, 25, 31) [n = 1558]
Height: 176.6 cm + 16.6 (173, 178, 183) [n = 1267]

Karma Score: 504 + 2085 (0, 0, 100) [n = 1438]
Time in community: 2.62 years + 1.84 (1, 2, 4) [n = 1443]
Time on LW: 13.25 minutes/day + 20.97 (2, 10, 15) [n = 1457]

IQ: 138.2 + 13.6 (130, 138, 145) [n = 506]
SAT out of 1600: 1474 + 114 (1410, 1490, 1560) [n = 411]
SAT out of 2400: 2207 + 161 (2130, 2240, 2330) [n = 333]
ACT out of 36: 32.8 + 2.5 (32, 33, 35) [n = 265]

P(Aliens in observable universe): 74.3 + 32.7 (60, 90, 99) [n = 1496]
P(Aliens in Milky Way): 44.9 + 38.2 (5, 40, 85) [n = 1482]
P(Supernatural): 7.7 + 22 (0E-9, .000055, 1) [n = 1484]
P(God): 9.1 + 22.9 (0E-11, .01, 3) [n = 1490]
P(Religion): 5.6 + 19.6 (0E-11, 0E-11, .5) [n = 1497]
P(Cryonics): 22.8 + 28 (2, 10, 33) [n = 1500]  
P(AntiAgathics): 27.6 + 31.2 (2, 10, 50) [n = 1493]
P(Simulation): 24.1 + 28.9 (1, 10, 50) [n = 1400]
P(ManyWorlds): 50 + 29.8 (25, 50, 75) [n = 1373]
P(Warming): 80.7 + 25.2 (75, 90, 98) [n = 1509]
P(Global catastrophic risk): 72.9 + 25.41 (60, 80, 95) [n = 1502]
Singularity year: 1.67E +11 + 4.089E+12 (2060, 2090, 2150) [n = 1195]

[[Of course, this question was hopelessly screwed up by people who insisted on filling the whole answer field with 9s, or other such nonsense. I went back and eliminated all outliers - answers with more than 4 digits or answers in the past - which changed the results to: 2150 + 226 (2060, 2089, 2150)]]

Yearly Income: $73,226 +423,310 (10,000, 37,000, 80,000) [n = 910]
Yearly Charity: $1181.16 + 6037.77 (0, 50, 400) [n = 1231]
Yearly Charity to MIRI/CFAR: $307.18 + 4205.37 (0, 0, 0) [n = 1191]
Yearly Charity to X-risk (excluding MIRI or CFAR): $6.34 + 55.89 (0, 0, 0) [n = 1150]

Number of Languages: 1.49 + .8 (1, 1, 2) [n = 1345]
Older Siblings: 0.5 + 0.9 (0, 0, 1) [n = 1366]
Time Online/Week: 42.7 hours + 24.8 (25, 40, 60) [n = 1292]
Time Watching TV/Week: 4.2 hours + 5.7 (0, 2, 5) [n = 1316]

[[The next nine questions ask respondents to rate how favorable they are to the political idea or movement above on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being "not at all favorable" and 5 being "very favorable". You can see the exact wordings of the questions on the survey.]]

Abortion: 4.4 + 1 (4, 5, 5) [n = 1350]
Immigration: 4.1 + 1 (3, 4, 5) [n = 1322]
Basic Income: 3.8 + 1.2 (3, 4, 5) [n = 1289]
Taxes: 3.1 + 1.3 (2, 3, 4) [n = 1296]
Feminism: 3.8 + 1.2 (3, 4, 5) [n = 1329]
Social Justice: 3.6 + 1.3 (3, 4, 5) [n = 1263]
Minimum Wage: 3.2 + 1.4 (2, 3, 4) [n = 1290]
Great Stagnation: 2.3 + 1 (2, 2, 3) [n = 1273]
Human Biodiversity: 2.7 + 1.2 (2, 3, 4) [n = 1305]

IV. Bivariate Correlations

Ozy ran bivariate correlations between all the numerical data and recorded all correlations that were significant at the .001 level in order to maximize the chance that these are genuine results. The format is variable/variable: Pearson correlation (n). Yvain is not hugely on board with the idea of running correlations between everything and seeing what sticks, but will grudgingly publish the results because of the very high bar for significance (p < .001 on ~800 correlations suggests < 1 spurious result) and because he doesn't want to have to do it himself.

Less Political:
SAT score (1600)/SAT score (2400): .835 (56)
Charity/MIRI and CFAR donations: .730 (1193)
SAT score out of 2400/ACT score: .673 (111)
SAT score out of 1600/ACT score: .544 (102)
Number of children/age: .507 (1607)
P(Cryonics)/P(AntiAgathics): .489 (1515)
SAT score out of 1600/IQ: .369 (173)
MIRI and CFAR donations/XRisk donations: .284 (1178)
Number of children/ACT score: -.279 (269)
Income/charity: .269 (884)
Charity/Xrisk charity: .262 (1161)
P(Cryonics)/P(Simulation): .256 (1419)
P(AntiAgathics)/P(Simulation): .253 (1418)
Number of current partners/age: .238 (1607) 
Number of children/SAT score (2400): -.223 (345)
Number of current partners/number of children: .205 (1612)
SAT score out of 1600/age: -.194 (422)
Charity/age: .175 (1259)
Time on Less Wrong/IQ: -.164 (492)
P(Warming)/P(GlobalCatastrophicRisk): .156 (1522)
Number of current partners/IQ: .155 (521)
P(Simulation)/age: -.153 (1420)
Immigration/P(ManyWorlds): .150 (1195)
Income/age: .150 (930)
P(Cryonics)/age: -.148 (1521)
Income/children: .145 (931)
P(God)/P(Simulation): .142 (1409)
Number of children/P(Aliens): .140 (1523)
P(AntiAgathics)/Hours Online: .138 (1277)
Number of current partners/karma score: .137 (1470)
Abortion/P(ManyWorlds): .122 (1215)
Feminism/Xrisk charity donations: -.122 (1104)
P(AntiAgathics)/P(ManyWorlds) .118 (1381)
P(Cryonics)/P(ManyWorlds): .117 (1387)
Karma score/Great Stagnation: .114 (1202)
Hours online/P(simulation): .114 (1199)
P(Cryonics)/Hours Online: .113 (1279)
P(AntiAgathics)/Great Stagnation: -.111 (1259)
Basic income/hours online: .111 (1200)
P(GlobalCatastrophicRisk)/Great Stagnation: -.110 (1270)
Age/X risk charity donations: .109 (1176)
P(AntiAgathics)/P(GlobalCatastrophicRisk): -.109 (1513)
Time on Less Wrong/age: -.108 (1491)
P(AntiAgathics)/Human Biodiversity: .104 (1286)
Immigration/Hours Online: .104 (1226)
P(Simulation)/P(GlobalCatastrophicRisk): -.103 (1421)
P(Supernatural)/height: -.101 (1232)
P(GlobalCatastrophicRisk)/height: .101 (1249)
Number of children/hours online: -.099 (1321)
P(AntiAgathics)/age: -.097 (1514)
Karma score/time on LW: .096 (1404)

This year for the first time P(Aliens) and P(Aliens2) are entirely uncorrelated with each other. Time in Community, Time on LW, and IQ are not correlated with anything particularly interesting, suggesting all three fail to change people's views.

Results we find amusing: high-IQ and high-karma people have more romantic partners, suggesting that those are attractive traits. There is definitely a Cryonics/Antiagathics/Simulation/Many Worlds cluster of weird beliefs, which younger people and people who spend more time online are slightly more likely to have - weirdly, that cluster seems slightly less likely to believe in global catastrophic risk. Older people and people with more children have more romantic partners (it'd be interesting to see if that holds true for the polyamorous). People who believe in anti-agathics and global catastrophic risk are less likely to believe in a great stagnation (presumably because both of the above rely on inventions). People who spend more time on Less Wrong have lower IQs. Height is, bizarrely, correlated with belief in the supernatural and global catastrophic risk.

All political viewpoints are correlated with each other in pretty much exactly the way one would expect. They are also correlated with one's level of belief in God, the supernatural, and religion. There are minor correlations with some of the beliefs and number of partners (presumably because polyamory), number of children, and number of languages spoken. We are doing terribly at avoiding Blue/Green politics, people.

More Political:
P(Supernatural)/P(God): .736 (1496)
P(Supernatural)/P(Religion): .667 (1492)
Minimum wage/taxes: .649 (1299)
P(God)/P(Religion): .631 (1496)
Feminism/social justice: .619 (1293)
Social justice/minimum wage: .508 (1262)
P(Supernatural)/abortion: -.469 (1309)
Taxes/basic income: .463 (1285)
P(God)/abortion: -.461 (1310)
Social justice/taxes: .456 (1267)
P(Religion)/abortion: -.413
Basic income/minimum wage: .392 (1283)
Feminism/taxes: .391 (1318)
Feminism/minimum wage: .391 (1312)
Feminism/human biodiversity: -.365 (1331)
Immigration/feminism: .355 (1336)
P(Warming)/taxes: .340 (1292)
Basic income/social justice: .311 (1270)
Immigration/social justice: .307 (1275)
P(Warming)/feminism: .294 (1323)
Immigration/human biodiversity: -.292 (1313)
P(Warming)/basic income: .290 (1287)
Social justice/human biodiversity: -.289 (1281)
Basic income/feminism: .284 (1313)
Human biodiversity/minimum wage: -.273 (1293)
P(Warming)/social justice: .271 (1261)
P(Warming)/minimum wage: .262 (1284)
Human biodiversity/taxes: -.251 (1270).
Abortion/feminism: .239 (1356)
Abortion/social justice: .220 (1292)
P(Warming)/immigration: .215 (1315)
Abortion/immigration: .211 (1353)
P(Warming)/abortion: .192 (1340)
Immigration/taxes: .186 (1322)
Basic income/taxes: .174 (1249)
Abortion/taxes: .170 (1328)
Abortion/minimum wage: .169 (1317)
P(warming)/human biodiversity: -.168 (1301)
Abortion/basic income: .168 (1314)
Immigration/Great Stagnation: -.163 (1281)
P(God)/feminism: -.159 (1294)
P(Supernatural)/feminism: -.158 (1292)
Human biodiversity/Great Stagnation: .152 (1287)
Social justice/Great Stagnation: -.135 (1242)
Number of languages/taxes: -.133 (1242)
P(God)/P(Warming): -.132 (1491)
P(Supernatural)/immigration: -.131 (1284)
P(Religion)immigration: -.129 (1296)
P(God)/immigration: -.127 (1286)
P(Supernatural)/P(Warming): -.125 (1487)
P(Supernatural)/social justice: -.125 (1227)
P(God)/taxes: -.145
Minimum wage/Great Stagnation: -124 (1269)
Immigration/minimum wage: .122 (1308)
Great Stagnation/taxes: -.121 (1270)
P(Religion)/P(Warming): -.113 (1505)
P(Supernatural)/taxes: -.113 (1265)
Feminism/Great Stagnation: -.112 (1295)
Number of children/abortion: -.112 (1386)
P(Religion)/basic income: -.108 (1296)
Number of current partners/feminism: .108 (1364)
Basic income/human biodiversity: -.106 (1301)
P(God)/Basic Income: -.105 (1255)
Number of current partners/basic income: .105 (1320)
Human biodiversity/number of languages: .103 (1253)
Number of children/basic income: -.099 (1322)
Number of children/P(Warming): -.091 (1535)

V. Hypothesis Testing

A. Do people in the effective altruism movement donate more money to charity? Do they donate a higher percent of their income to charity? Are they just generally more altruistic people?

1265 people told us how much they give to charity; of those, 450 gave nothing. On average, effective altruists (n = 412) donated $2503 to charity, and other people (n = 853) donated $523  - obviously a significant result. Effective altruists gave on average $800 to MIRI or CFAR, whereas others gave $53. Effective altruists gave on average $16 to other x-risk related charities; others gave only $2.

In order to calculate percent donated I divided charity donations by income in the 947  people helpful enough to give me both numbers. Of those 947, 602 donated nothing to charity, and so had a percent donated of 0. At the other extreme, three  people donated 50% of their (substantial) incomes to charity, and 55 people donated at least 10%. I don't want to draw any conclusions about the community from this because the people who provided both their income numbers and their charity numbers are a highly self-selected sample.

303 effective altruists donated, on average, 3.5% of their income to charity, compared to 645 others who donated, on average, 1% of their income to charity. A small but significant (p < .001) victory for the effective altruism movement.

But are they more compassionate people in general? After throwing out the people who said they wanted to give blood but couldn't for one or another reason, I got 1255 survey respondents giving me an unambiguous answer (yes or no) about whether they'd ever given blood. I found that 51% of effective altruists had given blood compared to 47% of others - a difference which did not reach statistical significance.

Finally, at the end of the survey I had a question offering respondents a chance to cooperate (raising the value of a potential monetary prize to be given out by raffle to a random respondent) or defect (decreasing the value of the prize, but increasing their own chance of winning the raffle). 73% of effective altruists cooperated compared to 70% of others - an insignificant difference.

Conclusion: effective altruists give more money to charity, both absolutely and as a percent of income, but are no more likely (or perhaps only slightly more likely) to be compassionate in other ways.

B. Can we finally resolve this IQ controversy that comes up every year?

The story so far - our first survey in 2009 found an average IQ of 146. Everyone said this was stupid, no community could possibly have that high an average IQ, it was just people lying and/or reporting results from horrible Internet IQ tests.
Although IQ fell somewhat the next few years - to 140 in 2011 and 139 in 2012 - people continued to complain. So in 2012 we started asking for SAT and ACT scores, which are known to correlate well with IQ and are much harder to get wrong. These scores confirmed the 139 IQ result on the 2012 test. But people still objected that something must be up.

This year our IQ has fallen further to 138 (no Flynn Effect for us!) but for the first time we asked people to describe the IQ test they used to get the number. So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests - ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source. I counted a source as reputable either if it name-dropped a specific scientifically validated IQ test (like WAIS or Raven's Progressive Matrices), if it was performed by a reputable institution (a school, a hospital, or a psychologist), or if it was a Mensa exam proctored by a Mensa official.

This subgroup of 101 people with very reputable IQ tests had an average IQ of 139 - exactly the same as the average among survey respondents as a whole.

I don't know for sure that Mensa is on the level, so I tried again deleting everyone who took a Mensa test - leaving just the people who could name-drop a well-known test or who knew it was administered by a psychologist in an official setting. This caused a precipitous drop all the way down to 138.

The IQ numbers have time and time again answered every challenge raised against them and should be presumed accurate.

C. Can we predict who does or doesn't cooperate on prisoner's dilemmas?

As mentioned above, I included a prisoner's dilemma type question in the survey, offering people the chance to make a little money by screwing all the other survey respondents over.

Tendency to cooperate on the prisoner's dilemma was most highly correlated with items in the general leftist political cluster identified by Ozy above. It was most notable for support for feminism, with which it had a correlation of .15, significant at the p < .01 level, and minimum wage, with which it had a correlation of .09, also significant at p < .01. It was also significantly correlated with belief that other people would cooperate on the same question.

I compared two possible explanations for this result. First, leftists are starry-eyed idealists who believe everyone can just get along - therefore, they expected other people to cooperate more, which made them want to cooperate more. Or, second, most Less Wrongers are white, male, and upper class, meaning that support for leftist values - which often favor nonwhites, women, and the lower class - is itself a symbol of self-sacrifce and altruism which one would expect to correlate with a question testing self-sacrifice and altruism.

I tested the "starry-eyed idealist" hypothesis by checking whether leftists were more likely to believe other people would cooperate. They were not - the correlation was not significant at any level.

I tested the "self-sacrifice" hypothesis by testing whether the feminism correlation went away in women. For women, supporting feminism is presumably not a sign of willingness to self-sacrifice to help an out-group, so we would expect the correlation to disappear.

In the all-female sample, the correlation between feminism and PD cooperation shrunk from .15 to a puny .04, whereas the correlation between the minimum wage and PD was previously .09 and stayed exactly the same at .09. This provides some small level of support for the hypothesis that the leftist correlation with PD cooperation represents a willingness to self-sacrifice in a population who are not themselves helped by leftist values.

(on the other hand, neither leftists nor cooperators were more likely to give money to charity, so if this is true it's a very selective form of self-sacrifice)

VI. Monetary Prize

1389 people answered the prize question at the bottom. 71.6% of these [n = 995] cooperated; 28.4% [n = 394] defected.
The prize goes to a person whose two word phrase begins with "eponymous". If this person posts below (or PMs or emails me) the second word in their phrase, I will give them $60 * 71.6%, or about $43. I can pay to a PayPal account, a charity of their choice that takes online donations, or a snail-mail address via check.

VII. Calibration Questions

The population of Europe, according to designated arbiter Wikipedia, is 739 million people.

People were really really bad at giving their answers in millions. I got numbers anywhere from 3 (really? three million people in Europe?) to 3 billion (3 million billion people = 3 quadrillion). I assume some people thought they were answering in billions, others in thousands, and other people thought they were giving a straight answer in number of individuals.

My original plan was to just adjust these to make them fit, but this quickly encountered some pitfalls. Suppose someone wrote 1 million (as one person did). Could I fairly guess they meant 100 million, even though there's really no way to guess that from the text itself? 1 billion? Maybe they just thought there were really one million people in Europe?

If I was too aggressive correcting these, everyone would get close to the right answer not because they were smart, but because I had corrected their answers. If I wasn't aggressive enough, I would end up with some guy who answered 3 quadrillion Europeans totally distorting the mean.

I ended up deleting 40 answers that suggested there were less than ten million or more than eight billion Europeans, on the grounds that people probably weren't really that far off so it was probably some kind of data entry error, and correcting everyone who entered a reasonable answer in individuals to answer in millions as the question asked.

The remaining 1457 people who can either follow simple directions or at least fail to follow them in a predictable way estimated an average European population in millions of 601 + 35.6 (380, 500, 750).

Respondents were told to aim for within 10% of the real value, which means they wanted between 665 million and 812 million. 18.7% of people [n = 272] got within that window.

I divided people up into calibration brackets of [0,5], [6,15], [16, 25] and so on. The following are what percent of people in each bracket were right.

[0,5]: 7.7%
[6,15]: 12.4%
[16,25]: 15.1%
[26,35]: 18.4%
[36,45]: 20.6%
[46,55]: 15.4%
[56,65]: 16.5%
[66,75]: 21.2%
[76,85]: 36.4%
[86,95]: 48.6%
[96,100]: 100%

Among people who should know better (those who have read all or most of the Sequences and have > 500 karma, a group of 162 people)

[0,5]: 0
[6,15]: 17.4%
[16,25]: 25.6%
[26,35]: 16.7%
[36,45]: 26.7%
[46,55]: 25%
[56,65]: 0%
[66,75]: 8.3%
[76,85]: 40%
[86,95]: 66.6%
[96,100]: 66.6%

Clearly, the people who should know better don't.

This graph represents your performance relative to ideal performance. Dipping below the blue ideal line represents overconfidence; rising above it represents underconfidence. With few exceptions you were very overconfident. Note that there were so few "elite" LWers at certain levels that the graph becomes very noisy and probably isn't representing much; that huge drop at 60 represents like two or three people. The orange "typical LWer" line is much more robust.

There is one other question that gets at the same idea of overconfidence. 651 people were willing to give valid 90% confidence interval on what percent of people would cooperate (this is my fault; I only added this question about halfway through the survey once I realized it would be interesting to investigate). I deleted four for giving extremely high outliers like 9999% which threw off the results, leaving 647 valid answers. The average confidence interval was [28.3, 72.0], which just BARELY contains the correct answer of 71.6%. Of the 647 of you, only 346 (53.5%) gave 90% confidence intervals that included the correct answer!

Last year I complained about horrible performance on calibration questions, but we all decided it was probably just a fluke caused by a particularly weird question. This year's results suggest that was no fluke and that we haven't even learned to overcome the one bias that we can measure super-well and which is most easily trained away. Disappointment!

VIII. Public Data

There's still a lot more to be done with this survey. User:Unnamed has promised to analyze the "Extra Credit: CFAR Questions" section (not included in this post), but so far no one has looked at the "Extra Credit: Questions From Sarah" section, which I didn't really know what to do with. And of course this is most complete survey yet for seeking classic findings like "People who disagree with me about politics are stupid and evil".

1480 people - over 90% of the total - kindly allowed me to make their survey data public. I have included all their information except the timestamp (which would make tracking pretty easy) including their secret passphrases (by far the most interesting part of this exercise was seeing what unusual two word phrases people could come up with on short notice).

Comments (558)

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 19 January 2014 12:47:42AM 19 points [-]

The second word in the winning secret phrase is pony (chosen because you can't spell the former without the latter); I'll accept the prize money via PayPal to main att zackmdavis daht net.

(As I recall, I chose to Defect after looking at the output of one call to Python's random.random() and seeing a high number, probably point-eight-something. But I shouldn't get credit for following my proposed procedure (which turned out to be wrong anyway) because I don't remember deciding beforehand that I was definitely using a "result > 0.8 means Defect" convention (when "result < 0.2 means Defect" is just as natural). I think I would have chosen Cooperate if the random number had come up less than 0.8, but I haven't actually observed the nearby possible world where it did, so it's at least possible that I was rationalizing.)

(Also, I'm sorry for being bad at reading; I don't actually think there are seven hundred trillion people in Europe.)

Comment author: simplicio 20 January 2014 02:18:35PM 7 points [-]

When I heard about Yvain's PD contest, I flipped a coin. I vowed that if it came up heads, I would Paypal the winner $200 (on top of their winnings), and if it came up tails I would ask them for the prize money they won.

It came up tails. YOUR MOVE.

(No, not really. But somebody here SHOULD have made such a commitment.)

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 21 January 2014 04:47:53AM 11 points [-]

Hey, it's not too late: if you should have made such a commitment, then the mere fact that you didn't actually do so shouldn't stop you now. Go ahead, flip a coin; if it comes up heads, you pay me $200; if it comes up tails, I'll ask Yvain to give you the $42.96.

Comment author: simplicio 21 January 2014 03:02:23PM 5 points [-]

Em, I don't actually like those odds all that much, thanks!

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 January 2014 03:52:19PM 8 points [-]

...I don't think this is a very wise offer to make on the Internet unless the "coin" is somewhere you can both see it.

Comment author: MTGandP 19 January 2014 12:49:56AM *  5 points [-]

The links to the public data given at the end appear to be broken. They give internal links to Less Wrong instead of redirecting to Slate Star Codex. These links should work:

sav xls csv

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 19 January 2014 01:52:36AM 2 points [-]

Fixed.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 19 January 2014 02:06:08AM 8 points [-]

Nice work Yvain and Ozy, and well done to Zack for winning the MONETARY REWARD.

I continue to be bad at estimating but well calibrated.

(Also, I'm sure that this doesn't harm the data to any significant degree but I appear to appear twice in the data, both rows 548 and 552 in the xls file, with row 548 being more complete.)

Comment author: jamesf 19 January 2014 03:32:04AM 41 points [-]

Next survey, I'd be interested in seeing statistics involving:

  • Recreational drug use
  • Quantified Self-related activities
  • Social media use
  • Self-perceived physical attractiveness on the 1-10 scale
  • Self-perceived holistic attractiveness on the 1-10 scale
  • Personal computer's operating system

Excellent write-up and I look forward to next year's.

Comment author: shokwave 19 January 2014 10:20:51AM 2 points [-]
  • Are you Ask or Guess culture?
Comment author: ChristianKl 19 January 2014 03:55:48PM *  10 points [-]

I'm not culture.

In some social circles I might behave in one way, in others another way. In different situations I act differently depending on how strongly I want to communicate a demand.

Comment author: shokwave 20 January 2014 01:05:24PM 5 points [-]

Good point. It might not even make sense to ask "Which culture of social interaction do you feel most at home with, Ask or Guess?".

Comment author: Acidmind 19 January 2014 11:04:04AM 10 points [-]

I'd like:

  • Estimated average self-perceived physical attractiveness in the community
  • Estimated average self-perceived holistic attractiveness in the community

Oh, we are really self-serving elitist overconfident pricks, aren't we?

Comment author: Creutzer 19 January 2014 11:11:25AM 3 points [-]

How do you expect anybody to be able to answer that and what does it even mean? First, what community, exactly? Second, average - over what?

Comment author: jkaufman 19 January 2014 03:44:35PM 2 points [-]

I think Acidmind means we should ask people their self-perceived attractiveness, and then ask them to estimate the average that will be given by all people taking the survey.

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 January 2014 03:55:13PM 2 points [-]

I think he means the people who take the survey.

If you ask in the survey for the self-perceived physical attractiveness you can ask in the same survey for the estimated average of all survey takers.

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 January 2014 04:08:27PM 2 points [-]

Quantified Self-related activities

I thought quite a bit about this and couldn't decide on many good questions.

The Anki question is sort of a result of this desire.

I thought of asking about pedometer usage such as Fitbit/Nike Plus etc but I'm not sure if the amount of people is enough to warrant the question.

Which specific questions would you want?

Social media use

By what metric? Total time investment? Few people can give you an accurate answer to that question.

Asking good questions isn't easy.

Self-perceived physical attractiveness on the 1-10 scale

I personally don't think that term is very meaningful. I do have hotornot pictures that scored a 9, but what does that mean? The last time I used tinder I click through a lot of female images and very few liked me back. But I haven't yet isolated factors or know about average success rates for guy's using Tinder.

Recreational drug use

There interested in not gathering data that would cause someone to admit criminal behavior. A person might be findable if you know there stances on a few questions. There also the issue of possible outsiders being able to say: "30% of LW participants are criminals!"

Personal computer's operating system

I agree, that would be nice question.

Comment author: jamesf 19 January 2014 05:17:56PM *  3 points [-]

Quantified Self examples:

  • Have you attempted and stuck with the recording of personal data for >1 month for any reason? (Y/N)
  • If so, did you find it useful? (Y/N)

Social media example:

  • How many hours per week do you think you spend on social media?

Asking about self-perceived attractiveness tells us little about how attractive a person is, but quite a bit about how they see themselves, and I want to learn how that's correlated with answers to all these other questions.

Maybe the recreational drug use question(s) could be stripped from the public data?

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 January 2014 06:17:16PM 1 point [-]

Have you attempted and stuck with the recording of personal data for >1 month for any reason? (Y/N)

Having a calendar with time of when you do what actions is recording of personal data and for most people for timeframes longer than a month.

Anyone who uses Anki gets automated backround data recording of how many minutes per day he uses Anki.

Comment author: jamesf 19 January 2014 06:42:51PM 2 points [-]

I might be willing to call either of those self-quantifying activities. Definitely the first one, if you actually put most activities you do on there rather than just the ones that aren't habit or important enough to definitely not forget. I think the question could be modified to capture the intent. Let's see...

Have you ever made an effort to record personal data for future analysis and stuck with it for >1 month? (Y/N)

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 January 2014 07:02:58PM 1 point [-]

That sounds like a good question. Hopefully we remember when the time comes up.

Comment author: shokwave 20 January 2014 01:23:43PM *  0 points [-]

There interested in not gathering data that would cause someone to admit criminal behavior.

As far as I'm aware - and correct me if I'm wrong - drug use is not a crime (and by extension admitting past drug use isn't either). Possession, operating a vehicle under the influence, etc, are all crimes, but actually having used drugs isn't a criminal act.

There also the issue of possible outsiders being able to say: "30% of LW participants are criminals!"

The current survey (hell, the IQ section alone) gives them more ammunition than they could possibly expend, I feel.

Comment author: ChristianKl 20 January 2014 01:38:02PM 2 points [-]

The current survey (hell, the IQ section alone)

What the problem with someone external writing an article about how LW is a group who thinks they are high IQ?

Comment author: lmm 20 January 2014 08:54:33PM 1 point [-]

It makes it easy to portray LW as a bunch of out-of-touch nerds?

Comment author: blacktrance 20 January 2014 09:00:53PM 13 points [-]

"I'm part of a community, you live in a bubble, he's out of touch."

Comment author: ChristianKl 20 January 2014 11:12:48PM 1 point [-]

How does having a high IQ means someone is out-of-touch?

Yes, people can argue that LW is a bunch of nerds, but I don't think that's much of a problem. If we get a newsarticles about how smart nerds think that unfriendly AI is a big risk for humanity, I don't think the fact that those smart nerds think that they are high IQ is a problem.

It's different for arguing criminality or for arguing being delusional because of drug use.

Comment author: Nornagest 20 January 2014 11:34:33PM *  5 points [-]

There is a stereotype -- at least in the United States -- of nerds believing that high intelligence entitles them to claim insight and moral purity beyond their actual abilities, and implicitly of their inevitable downfall and the triumph of good old-fashioned common sense. We risk pattern-matching to this stereotype in any case, thanks to bandying about unusual ethical considerations in academic language, but talking up our own intelligence doesn't help at all.

It isn't having high IQ, in other words, so much as talking about it.

Comment author: ChristianKl 20 January 2014 11:47:22PM *  5 points [-]

We risk pattern-matching to this stereotype in any case

I can't see how you could structure LW in a way that someone who wants to talk about LW as a bunch of nerds can't do so. You don't need a statistic about the average IQ of LW to do so. Gathering the IQ data doesn't bring up anything that wasn't there before.

The basilisk episode is a lot more useful if you want to argue that LW is a group of out of touch nerds. See rationalwiki.

Comment author: shokwave 21 January 2014 04:25:00AM 2 points [-]

The same problem you presumably have with someone external writing an article about how LW is a group of criminals: it makes us look bad.

You might not agree with self-proclaimed high IQ being a social negative, but most of the world does.

Comment author: Emile 21 January 2014 12:05:47PM 0 points [-]

Depends of how loudly you self-proclaim it. It's not as we had a mensa banner on the frontpage or something.

Comment author: ChristianKl 21 January 2014 12:50:13PM 5 points [-]

I don't think the goal of LW is to be socially approval for the average person.

On the one hand it's to grow people who might want to participate in LW. The fact that LW has many smart people in it, could draw the right people into LW.

On the other hand it's to further the agenda of CFAR, MIRI and FHI. I don't think the world listens less to a programmer who wants to warn about the dangers of UFAI when the programmer proclaims that he's smart.

It's very hard for me to see a media article that wouldn't describe CFAR as a bunch of people who think they are smart. If you write the advancement of rationality on your bannar, that something that everyone is to assume anyway. Having polled IQ data doesn't do further damage.

Comment author: nshepperd 20 January 2014 11:40:49PM 0 points [-]

How do you use a drug without possessing it at some point? Isn't admitting use of drugs a fortiori an admission of possession of drugs?

Comment author: Bayeslisk 19 January 2014 04:06:21AM *  7 points [-]

I don't know if this is the LW hug or something but I'm having trouble downloading the xls. Also, will update with what the crap my passphrase actually means, because it's in Lojban and mildly entertaining IIRC.

EDIT: Felt like looking at some other entertaining passphrases. Included with comment.

sruta'ulor maftitnab {mine! scarf-fox magic-cakes!(probably that kind)}

Afgani-san Azerbai-chan {there... are no words}

DEFECTORS RULE

do mlatu {a fellow lojbanist!}

lalxu daplu {and another?}

telephone fonxa {and another! please get in contact with me. please.}

xagfu'a rodo {indeed! but where are all you people coming from, and why don't I know you?}

zifre dunda {OH COME ON WHERE ARE YOU PEOPLE]

eponymous hahanicetry_CHEATER {clever.}

fart butt {I am twelve...}

FROGPENIS SPOOBOMB {... and so is a lot of LW.}

goat felching {good heavens}

I don't want the prize! Pick someone else please!

I dont care about the MONETARY REWARD but you shoudl know that

Irefuse myprize

No thanks

not interested

{a lot of refusers!}

I'm gay

john lampkin (note: this is not my name)

lookatme iwonmoney {nice try guy}

mencius suckedmoziwasbetter

mimsy borogoves {repeated!}

TWO WORD {repeated, and try harder next time}

octothorpe interrobang

SOYUZ NERUSHIMIY {ONWARD, COMRADE(note: person is apparently a social democrat.)}

TERRORISTS WIN

thisissuspiciouslylike askingforourpasswordmethodologies {I should think not.}

zoodlybop zimzamzoom {OH MY GODS BILL COSBY IS A LESSWRONGER.}

AND THAT'S ALL, FOLKS.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 19 January 2014 06:30:48AM 4 points [-]

SOYUZ NERUSHIMIY

Actual translation: INDESTRUCTIBLE UNION

(It's from the national anthem of the U.S.S.R.)

Comment author: Bayeslisk 19 January 2014 05:03:32PM 0 points [-]

I know that. I was commenting that the LWer was apparently not a Communist as one might expect, which I found slightly funny.

Comment author: philh 19 January 2014 11:50:13AM *  1 point [-]

The following passphrases were repeated (two occurances each, the only entry that occured more than twice was the blank one):

Bagel bites

EFFulgent shackles

Kissing bobbies

mimsy borogoves

SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE

If we go case-insensitive, there was also 'No thanks' and 'no thanks'; and 'TWO WORD' and 'Two Word'.

(The first three of those came next to each other, so they were probably just multiple entries.)

Comment author: FourFire 19 January 2014 01:30:11PM 2 points [-]

It is a datapoint that only one person apparently took up the offer of SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE

Comment author: Bayeslisk 19 January 2014 05:02:27PM 0 points [-]

I agree. This was clearly the object of furious guessing and second-guessing. :V

Comment author: Error 21 January 2014 03:28:06PM 0 points [-]

Possibly two; there's no guarantee the person who originally suggested it actually used it.

I, on the other hand, am one of those two. The humor appealed to me.

Comment author: Bayeslisk 19 January 2014 05:02:42PM 0 points [-]

Yes, and this was why I did not include them.

Comment author: sanxiyn 20 January 2014 02:19:28PM 0 points [-]

You missed lalxu daplu.

Comment author: Bayeslisk 20 January 2014 07:40:07PM 0 points [-]

So I did! Edited.

Comment author: shminux 19 January 2014 04:15:24AM 14 points [-]

Yvain is not hugely on board with the idea of running correlations between everything and seeing what sticks, but will grudgingly publish the results because of the very high bar for significance (p < .001 on ~800 correlations suggests < 1 spurious result) and because he doesn't want to have to do it himself.

The standard way to fix this is to run them on half the data only and then test their predictive power on the other half. This eliminates almost all spurious correlations.

Comment author: Nominull 19 January 2014 04:59:15AM 10 points [-]

Does that actually work better than just setting a higher bar for significance? My gut says that data is data and chopping it up cleverly can't work magic.

Comment author: Dan_Weinand 19 January 2014 05:53:07AM 9 points [-]

Cross validation is actually hugely useful for predictive models. For a simple correlation like this, it's less of a big deal. But if you are fitting a local linearly weighted regression line for instance, chopping the data up is absolutely standard operating procedure.

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 January 2014 04:04:10PM *  0 points [-]

Does that actually work better than just setting a higher bar for significance? My gut says that data is data and chopping it up cleverly can't work magic.

How do you decide for how high to hang your bar for significance? It very hard to estimate how high you have to hang it depending on how you go fishing in your data. The advantage of the two step procedure is that you are completely free to fish how you want in the first step. There are even cases where you might want a three step procedure.

Comment author: Kawoomba 19 January 2014 08:48:10AM *  7 points [-]

Alternatively, Bonferroni correction.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 19 January 2014 09:51:25AM *  8 points [-]

That's roughly what Yvain did, by taking into consideration the number of correlations tested when setting the significance level.

Comment author: Vaniver 19 January 2014 04:30:14AM *  14 points [-]

Thanks for doing this!

Results from previous years: 2009 2011 2012

Comment author: gwern 19 January 2014 04:36:15AM 13 points [-]

REFERRAL SOURCE:...Gwern: 9

Hah, my score almost doubled from last year.

Comment author: redlizard 19 January 2014 04:38:44AM *  9 points [-]

Passphrase: eponymous haha_nice_try_CHEATER

Well played :)

Comment author: RRand 19 January 2014 06:08:08AM 7 points [-]

True, though they forgot to change the "You may make my anonymous survey data public (recommended)" to "You may make my ultimately highly unanonymous survey data public (not as highly recommended)".

Comment author: lmm 20 January 2014 09:01:13PM 1 point [-]

It'd be easy enough to claim the prize anonymously, no?

Comment author: Vaniver 19 January 2014 05:07:37AM 5 points [-]

So, I was going through the xls, and saw the "passphrase" column. "Wait, what? Won't the winner's passphrase be in here?"


Not sure if this is typos or hitting the wrong entry field, but two talented individuals managed to get 1750 and 2190 out of 1600 on the SAT.


I was curious about the breakdown of romance (whether or not you met your partner through LW) and sexuality. For "men" and "women," I just used sex- any blanks or others are excluded. Numbers are Yes/No/I didn't meet them through community but they're part of the community now:

Gay men: 2/36/3

Lesbian women: 0/2/0

Bi men: 4/111/9

Bi women: 12/32/7

Straight men: 29/1031/26

Straight women: 1/55/10

I'm not quite sure how seriously to take these numbers, though. If 29 straight guys found a partner through the LW community, and a total of 14 straight and bi women found partners through the community, we need to have men to be about twice as likely to take the survey as women. (Possible, especially if women are more likely to go to meetups and less likely to post, but I don't feel like looking that up for the group as a whole.)

But the results are clear: the yes/no ratio was way higher for bi women than anyone else. Bi women still win the yes+didn't/no ratio with .6, but straight women are next with .2, followed by gay men at .14 and bi men at .12.

So, uh, advertise LW to all the bi women you know?

Comment author: somervta 19 January 2014 05:14:01AM 2 points [-]

So, I was going through the xls, and saw the "passphrase" column. "Wait, what? Won't the winner's passphrase be in here?"

In a manner of speaking: eponymous hahanicetry_CHEATER

Comment author: Vaniver 19 January 2014 06:17:28AM *  3 points [-]

I know, that's why I mentioned it- I decided not to quote it to leave it as a surprise for people who decided to then go check. But I had missed that someone else posted it.

Comment author: Omegaile 20 January 2014 03:17:03AM 5 points [-]

You know, it would be interesting if Yvain had put something else there just to see how many people would try to cheat.

Comment author: Nornagest 19 January 2014 05:44:22AM 3 points [-]

I'm not quite sure how seriously to take these numbers, though. If 29 straight guys found a partner through the LW community, and a total of 14 straight and bi women found partners through the community, we need to have men to be about twice as likely to take the survey as women.

That seems fairly plausible to me, actually. My impression of the community is that the physical side of it is less gender-skewed than the online side, although both are mostly male.

There's also polyamory to take into account.

Comment author: Vaniver 19 January 2014 06:20:48AM 0 points [-]

There's also polyamory to take into account.

True; didn't think to check that. Probably explains some of the effect.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 19 January 2014 05:24:32AM 0 points [-]

I wonder if I can claim credit for either of the Freethought Blogs referrals.

(I'm an ex-FTBer. I think Zinnia Jones is the only other current or former FTBer involved in LessWrong.)

Comment author: RobbBB 19 January 2014 06:03:04AM *  3 points [-]

Could be. Looking at the data, a person who's been here for 3 years wrote in 'Freethought Blogs', one who's been here for 1.5 years wrote in 'either FreethoughtBlogs or Atheist Ethicist', and one who's been here 0 years wrote in 'Brute Reason on Freethought Blogs'.

There have been more recent LW-relevant FtB posts by Richard Carrier, Kate Donovan, and Miri Mogilevsky of the aforementioned Brute Reason. Miri and Kate also have permanent blogroll links to LW.

Comment author: palladias 19 January 2014 08:31:33PM 4 points [-]

Totally caper every year when I see what my referral numbers are.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 19 January 2014 05:56:30AM *  12 points [-]

Other answers which made Ozy giggle [...] "pirate,"

Not necessarily a joke.

Comment author: Creutzer 19 January 2014 09:43:51AM *  5 points [-]

The link contains a typo, it links to a non-existing article on the/a Pirate part instead of the Pirate Party.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 19 January 2014 12:18:38PM 3 points [-]

Fixed, thanks.

Comment author: Vaniver 19 January 2014 06:15:13AM *  23 points [-]

Repeating complaints from last year:

So in 2012 we started asking for SAT and ACT scores, which are known to correlate well with IQ and are much harder to get wrong. These scores confirmed the 139 IQ result on the 2012 test.

The 2012 estimate from SATs was about 128, since the 1994 renorming destroyed the old relationship between the SAT and IQ. Our average SAT (on 1600) was again about 1470, which again maps to less than 130, but not by much. (And, again, self-reported average probably overestimates actual population average.)

Last year I complained about horrible performance on calibration questions, but we all decided it was probably just a fluke caused by a particularly weird question. This year's results suggest that was no fluke and that we haven't even learned to overcome the one bias that we can measure super-well and which is most easily trained away. Disappointment!

I still think you're asking this question in a way that's particularly hard for people to get right. (The issue isn't the fact you ask about, but what sort of answers you look for.)

You've clearly got an error in your calibration chart; you can't have 2 out of 3 elite LWers be right in the [95,100] category but 100% of typical LWers are right in that category. Or are you not including the elite LWers in typical LWers? Regardless, the person who gave a calibration of 99% and the two people who gave calibrations of 100% aren't elite LWers (karmas of 0, 0, and 4; two 25% of the sequences and one 50%).

With few exceptions you were very overconfident.

The calibration chart doesn't make clear the impact of frequency. If most people are providing probabilities of 20%, and they're about 20% right, then most people are getting it right- and the 2-3 people who provided a probability of 60% don't matter.

There are a handful of ways to depict this. One I haven't seen before, which is probably ugly, is to scale the width of the points by the frequency. Instead, here's a flat graph of the proportion of survey respondents who gave each calibration bracket:

Significant is that if you add together the 10, 20, and 30 brackets (the ones around the correct baseline probability of ~20% of getting it right) you get 50% for typical LWers and 60% for elite LWers; so most people were fairly close to correctly calibrated, and the people who thought they had more skill on the whole dramatically overestimated how much more skill they had.

(I put down 70% probability, but was answering the wrong question; I got the population of the EU almost exactly right, which I knew from GDP and per-capita comparisons to the US. Oops.)

Comment author: private_messaging 19 January 2014 02:24:50PM 1 point [-]

The 2012 estimate from SATs was about 128, since the 1994 renorming destroyed the old relationship between the SAT and IQ. Our average SAT (on 1600) was again about 1470, which again maps to less than 130, but not by much. (And, again, self-reported average probably overestimates actual population average.)

It's very interesting that the same mistake was boldly made again this year... I guess this mistake is sort of self reinforcing due to the uncannily perfect equality between mean IQ and what's incorrectly estimated from the SAT scores.

Comment author: Vaniver 19 January 2014 09:16:43PM 5 points [-]

Actually, I just ran the numbers on the SAT2400 and they're closer; the average percentile predicted from that is 99th, which corresponds to about 135.

Comment author: private_messaging 19 January 2014 11:10:39PM *  2 points [-]

For non-Americans, what's the difference between SAT 2400 and SAT 1600 ?

Averaging sat scores is a little iffy because, given a cut-off, they won't have Gaussian distribution. Also, given imperfect correlation it is unclear how one should convert the scores. If I pick someone with SAT in top 1% I shouldn't expect IQ in the top 1% because of regression towards the mean. (Granted I can expect both scores to be closer if I were picking by some third factor influencing both).

It'd be interesting to compare frequency of advanced degrees with the scores, for people old enough to have advanced degrees.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 20 January 2014 12:06:31AM *  2 points [-]

Also, given imperfect correlation it is unclear how one should convert the scores. If I pick someone with SAT in top 1% I shouldn't expect IQ in the top 1% because of regression towards the mean.

The correlation is the slope of the regression line in coordinates normalised to unit standard deviations. Assuming (for mere convenience) a bivariate normal distribution, let F be the cumulative distribution function of the unit normal distribution, with inverse invF. If someone is at the 1-p level of the SAT distribution (in the example p=0.01) then the level to guess they are at in the IQ distribution (or anything else correlated with SAT) is q = F(c invF(p)). For p=0.01, here are a few illustrative values:

c   0.0000 0.1000 0.2000 0.3000 0.4000 0.5000 0.6000 0.7000 0.8000 0.9000 1.0000
q   0.5000 0.4080 0.3209 0.2426 0.1760 0.1224 0.0814 0.0517 0.0314 0.0181 0.0100

The standard deviation of the IQ value, conditional on the SAT value, is the unconditional standard deviation multiplied by c' = sqrt(1-c^2). The q values for 1 standard deviation above and below are therefore given by qlo = F(-c' + c invF(p)) and qhi = F(c' + c invF(p)).

qlo 0.1587 0.1098 0.0742 0.0493 0.0324 0.0212 0.0141 0.0096 0.0069 0.0057 0.0100
qhi 0.8413 0.7771 0.6966 0.6010 0.4944 0.3832 0.2757 0.1803 0.1036 0.0487 0.0100
Comment author: Prismattic 20 January 2014 12:18:45AM 4 points [-]

The SAT used to have only two sections, with a maximum of 800 points each, for a total of 1600 (the worst possible score, IIRC, was 200 on each for 400). At some point after I graduated high school, they added a 3rd 800 point section (I think it might be an essay), so the maximum score went from 1600 to 2400.

Comment author: Fermatastheorem 21 January 2014 04:32:15AM 2 points [-]

Yes, it's a timed essay.

Comment author: Yvain 20 January 2014 02:41:20AM 1 point [-]

One reason SAT1600 and SAT2400 scores may differ is that some of the SAT1600 scores might in fact have come from before the 1994 renorming. Have you tried doing pre-1994 and post-1994 scores separately (guessing when someone took the SAT based on age?)

Comment author: Vaniver 20 January 2014 04:52:47AM *  1 point [-]

SAT1600 scores by age:

Average SAT for LWers 30 and under (217 total): 1491. (27 1600s.)

Average SAT for LWers 31 to 35 (74 total): 1462.7 (9 1600s.)

Average SAT for LWers 36 and older (81 total): 1437. (One 1600, by someone who's 56.)

I'm pretty sure the 36 and above are all the older SAT, suspect the middle group contains both, and pretty confident the younger group is mostly the newer SAT. The strong majority comes from the post 1995 test, and the scores don't seem to have changed by all that much in nominal terms.

Comment author: private_messaging 20 January 2014 11:12:33AM 1 point [-]

Which creates another question, why do the SAT 2400 and SAT 1600 differ so much?

Comment author: Yvain 21 January 2014 03:02:46AM 2 points [-]

According to Vaniver's data downthread, SAT taken only from LWers older than 36 (taking the old SAT) predicts 140 IQ.

I can't calculate the IQ of LWers younger than 36 because I can't find a site I trust to predict IQ from new SAT. The only ones I get give absurd results like average SAT 1491 implies average IQ 151.

Comment author: RRand 19 January 2014 06:30:48AM *  8 points [-]

There's something strange about the analysis posted.

How is it that 100% of the general population with high (>96%) confidence got the correct answer, but only 66% of a subset of that population? Looking at the provided data, it looks like 3 out of 4 people (none with high Karma scores) who gave the highest confidence were right.

(Predictably, the remaining person with high confidence answered 500 million, which is almost the exact population of the European Union (or, in the popular parlance "Europe"). I almost made the same mistake, before realizing that a) "Europe" might be intended to include Russia, or part of Russia, plus other non-EU states and b) I don't know the population of those countries, and can't cover both bases. So in response, I kept the number and decreased my confidence value. Regrettably, 500 million can signify both tremendous confidence and very little confidence, which makes it hard to do an analysis of this effect.)

Comment author: jkaufman 19 January 2014 03:52:10PM 0 points [-]

How is it that 100% of the general population with high (>96%) confidence got the correct answer, but only 66% of a subset of that population?

What if it was divided into (typical-lw) (elite-lw) not (typical-lw (elite-lw))? That is, disjoint sets not subsets.

Comment author: Yvain 19 January 2014 04:08:09PM 0 points [-]

I think it's more likely that I accidentally did 95-100 inclusive for one and 95-100 exclusive for the other.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 19 January 2014 09:17:42AM *  0 points [-]

NUMBER OF CURRENT PARTNERS:

0: 797, 48.7%

1: 728, 44.5%

2: 66, 4.0%

3: 21, 1.3%

4: 1, .1%

6: 3, .2

Why is there no data for respondents who stated they had 5 partners?

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 19 January 2014 09:43:26AM 6 points [-]

I should have looked at the data set. The answer is that zero people reported having 5 partners.

Comment author: gwern 20 January 2014 01:40:05AM 0 points [-]

Presumably for the same reason there is no data on people with 7, 8, 9, 10...n partners: no one claimed to have them. Since there was only 1 person who claimed 4 partners, and 3 people who claimed 6, perfectly plausible that there simply was no such respondent.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 20 January 2014 11:05:28AM 0 points [-]

"Five partners" was one of the options that respondents could pick. My assumption was that the survey results listed the number of respondents that picked each option, even if this number was zero.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 19 January 2014 09:58:42AM 3 points [-]

I would like to see how percent of positive karma, rather than total karma, correlates with the other survey responses. I find the former a more informative measure than the latter.

Comment author: gjm 19 January 2014 10:52:03AM 3 points [-]

I agree that it would be interesting but I suspect that just as "total karma" is a combination of "comment quality" and "time on LW" (where for most purposes the former is more interesting, but the latter makes a big difference), so "percent positive karma" is a combination of "comment quality" and "what sort of discussions one frequents", where again the former is more interesting but the latter makes a big difference.

Comment author: shokwave 19 January 2014 10:18:05AM *  1 point [-]

P(Supernatural): 7.7 + 22 (0E-9, .000055, 1) [n = 1484]

P(God): 9.1 + 22.9 (0E-11, .01, 3) [n = 1490]

P(Religion): 5.6 + 19.6 (0E-11, 0E-11, .5) [n = 1497]

I'm extremely surprised and confused. Is there an explanation for how these probabilities are so high?

Comment author: gjm 19 January 2014 10:50:15AM 10 points [-]

Well, we apparently have 3.9% of "committed theists", 3.2% of "lukewarm theists", and 2.2% of "deists, pantheists, etc.". If these groups put Pr(God) at 90%, 60%, 40% respectively (these numbers are derived from a sophisticated scientific process of rectal extraction) then they contribute 6.3% of the overall Pr(God) requiring an average Pr(God) of about 3.1% from the rest of the LW population. If enough respondents defined "God" broadly enough, that doesn't seem altogether crazy.

If those groups put Pr(religion) at 90%, 30%, 10% then they contribute about 4.7% to the overall Pr(religion) suggesting ~1% for the rest of the population. Again, that doesn't seem crazy.

So the real question is more or less equivalent to: How come there are so many committed theists on LW? Which we can frame two ways: (1) How come LW isn't more effective in helping people recognize that their religion is wrong? or (2) How come LW isn't more effective in driving religious people away? To which I would say (1) recognizing that your religion is wrong is really hard and (2) I hope LW is very ineffective in driving religious people away.

(For those who expect meta-level opinions on these topics to be perturbed by object-level opinions and wish to discount or adjust: I am an atheist; I don't remember what probabilities I gave but they would be smaller than any I have mentioned above.)

Comment author: RobbBB 20 January 2014 01:06:09AM 1 point [-]

When it comes to a hypothesis as extreme as 'an irreducible/magical mind like the one described in various religions created our universe', I'd say that if 3% credence isn't crazy, 9% isn't either. I took shokwave to be implying that a reasonable probability would be orders of magnitude smaller, not 2/3 smaller.

Comment author: gjm 20 January 2014 01:36:45AM 3 points [-]

The reason why I think ~3% for some kind of God and ~1% for some kind of religion aren't crazy numbers (although, I repeat, my own estimates of the probabilities are much lower) is that there is a credible argument to be made that if something is seriously believed by a large number of very clever and well informed people then you shouldn't assign it a very low probability. I don't think this argument is actually correct, but it's got some plausibility to it and I've seen versions of it taken very seriously by big-name LW participants. Accordingly, I think it would be unsurprising and not-crazy if, say, 10% of LW allowed a 10% probability for God's existence on the basis that maybe something like 10% of (e.g.) first-rate scientists or philosophers believe in God.

Comment author: Jiro 20 January 2014 03:35:35PM 0 points [-]

Personally I would discount "believed by a large number of clever people" if there are memetic effects. There are traits of beliefs that are well-known to increase the number of believers for reasons unrelated to their truth. For any belief that has such traits, whether it's shooting unbelievers, teaching them to your children before they reach the age when they are likely to think rationally, or sending out missionaries, the large number of people who believe it is not much use in assessing its truth.

I would also discount anything which fits into certain patterns known to take advantage of flaws in human thought processes, particularly conspiracy theories.

Comment author: simplicio 20 January 2014 04:04:57PM 4 points [-]

There are just too many ways to fool oneself here. I could talk for quite a while about "memetic effects" that make e.g. atheism appeal to (a certain group of) people independent of its truth. Typically one only notices these "memetic effects" in ideas one already disagrees with.

I think for standard outside view reasons, it's better to have an exceptionless norm that anything believed by billions of people is worth taking seriously for at least 5 minutes.

Comment author: Jiro 20 January 2014 08:00:04PM 2 points [-]

I think that it's fairly obvious that there wouldn't be even the relatively small percentage of seriously Christian scientists there are today if it had not been for centuries of proselytization, conversion by the sword, teaching Christianity to children from when they could talk, crusades, etc. I think it's also fairly obvious that this is not true of the percentage of scientists who are atheists. I also think it's obvious that it's not true for the percentage of scientists who think that, for instance, there are an infinite number of twin primes.

Typically one only notices these "memetic effects" in ideas one already disagrees with.

Really? I haven't heard anyone say "nobody would think there are infinitely many twin primes if they hadn't been taught that as a 4 year old and forced to verbally affirm the infinity of twin primes every Sunday for the next few decades". It just is not something that is said, or can sensibly be said, for any idea that one disagrees with.

Comment author: simplicio 20 January 2014 11:29:14PM 2 points [-]

Your choice of twin primes as an example is kind of odd; implicitly, we are discussing the cluster of ideas that are controversial in some ideological sense.

To be clear, I agree that ideas often spread for reasons other than their truth. I agree that because of this, if you are careful, you can use the history of religion as ancillary evidence against theism.

But in general, you have to be really, really careful not to use "memetic effects" as just another excuse to stop listening to people (LessWrong's main danger is that it is full of such excuses). Sometimes true ideas spread for bad reasons. Sometimes what looks like a bad reason appears so because of your own ideology.

I'm not saying become a theist, or read huge treatises on theology. I'm saying give theism the 5 minutes of serious consideration (e.g., listening to a smart proponent) owed a belief held by a very large fraction of the planet.

Comment author: gjm 20 January 2014 04:36:58PM 0 points [-]

This sort of thing is exactly why I don't think the argument in question is correct and why I'm comfortable with my own Pr(God) being orders of magnitude smaller than the fraction of theists in the educated population.

However, simplicio is right that by taking this sort of view one becomes more vulnerable to closed-mindedness. The price of being more confident when right is being less persuadable when wrong. I think simplicio's second paragraph has it pretty much exactly right: in cases where you're disagreeing starkly with a lot of smart people, don't adjust your probabilities, adjust your behaviour and give the improbable hypothesis more consideration and more time than your current estimate of its probability would justify on its own.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 19 January 2014 10:37:09AM 8 points [-]

Some thoughts on the correlations:

At first I saw that IQ seems to correlate with less children (a not uncommon observation):

Number of children/ACT score: -.279 (269)

Number of children/SAT score (2400): -.223 (345)

But then I noticed that number of children obviously correlate with age and age with IQ (somewhat):

Number of children/age: .507 (1607)

SAT score out of 1600/age: -.194 (422)

So it may be that older people just have lower IQ (Flynn effect).


Something to think about:

Time on Less Wrong/IQ: -.164 (492)

This can be read as smarter people stay shorter on LW. It seems to imply that over time LW will degrade in smarts. But it could also just mean that smarter people just turn over faster (thus also entering faster).

On the other hand most human endeavors tend toward the mean over time.


Time on Less Wrong/age: -.108 (1491)

Older people (like me ahem) either take longer to notice LW or the community is spreading from younger to older people slowly.


This made me laugh:

Number of current partners/karma score: .137 (1470)

Guess who does the voting :-)

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 January 2014 03:35:26PM 5 points [-]

So it may be that older people just have lower IQ (Flynn effect).

In the data set older people have a significantly higher IQ than younger people. The effect however disappears if you start to control for whether someone lives in the US.

US LW users are on average more intelligent and older.

Comment author: Omegaile 19 January 2014 06:31:47PM 3 points [-]

Time on Less Wrong/IQ: -.164 (492)

Wait, this means that reading less wrong makes you dumber!

Hmmm, there was something about correlation and causation... but I don't remember it well. I must be spending too much time on less wrong.

Comment author: Vaniver 19 January 2014 08:53:00PM 2 points [-]

So it may be that older people just have lower IQ (Flynn effect).

The 1600 SAT was renormed in 1994, and scores afterwards are much higher (and not directly comparable) to scores before. As well, depending on how the 'null' is interpreted, the youngest are unlikely to have a SAT score out of 1600, because it switched to 2400 in 2005. The line between having a score out of 1600 or not is probably at about 22 years old.

Comment author: gjm 19 January 2014 10:57:03AM 2 points [-]

The correlations with number of partners seem like they confound two very different questions: "in a relationship or not?" and "poly or not, and if so how poly?". This makes correlations with things like IQ and age less interesting. It seems like it would be more informative to look at the variables "n >= 1" and "value of n, conditional on n >= 1".

(Too lazy to redo those analyses myself right now, and probably ever. Sorry. If someone else does I'll be interested in the results, though.)

Comment author: philh 19 January 2014 12:46:53PM 2 points [-]
Comment author: William_Quixote 19 January 2014 12:47:34PM 5 points [-]

GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISK: Pandemic (bioengineered): 374, 22.8% Environmental collapse including global warming: 251, 15.3% Unfriendly AI: 233, 14.2% Nuclear war: 210, 12.8% Pandemic (natural) 145, 8.8% Economic/political collapse: 175, 1, 10.7% Asteroid strike: 65, 3.9% Nanotech/grey goo: 57, 3.5% Didn't answer: 99, 6.0%

For the second year in a row Pandemic is the leading cat risk. If you include natural and designed it has twice the support of the next highest cat risk.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 19 January 2014 06:00:36PM 3 points [-]

For the second year in a row Pandemic is the leading cat risk.

That's because cats never build research stations.

Comment author: Xodarap 19 January 2014 12:58:23PM 4 points [-]

I found that 51% of effective altruists had given blood compared to 47% of others - a difference which did not reach statistical significance.

I gave blood before I was an EA but stopped because I didn't think it was effective. Does being veg*n correlate with calling oneself an EA? That seems like a more effective intervention.

Comment author: David_Gerard 19 January 2014 01:06:13PM *  -1 points [-]

The term refers to a specific subculture that calls itself "Effective Altruism".

Comment author: Xodarap 19 January 2014 11:10:42PM 0 points [-]

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you're saying? I'm aware of what "EA" stands for, if that's the confusion.

Comment author: owencb 20 January 2014 09:50:59AM 0 points [-]

The question does ask whether people have ever given blood, though. You could consider people only among a sufficiently old cohort (so that they would have had a chance to give blood before they would likely have identified as EA), and see if there's any correlation.

Comment author: MondSemmel 19 January 2014 12:59:07PM *  12 points [-]

Thanks for taking the time to conduct and then analyze this survey!

What surprised me:

  • Average IQ seemed insane to me. Thanks for dealing extensively with that objection.
  • Time online per week seems plausible from personal experience, but I didn't expect the average to be so high.
  • The overconfidence data hurts, but as someone pointed out in the comments, it's hard to ask a question which isn't misunderstood.

What disappointed me:

  • Even I was disappointed by the correlations between P(significant man-made global warming) vs. e.g. taxation/feminism/etc. Most other correlations were between values, but this one was between one's values and an empirical question. Truly Blue/Green. On the topic of politics in general, see below.
  • People, use spaced repetition! It's been studied academically and been shown to work brilliantly; it's really easy to incorporate in your daily life in comparison to most other LW material etc... Well, I'm comparatively disappointed with these numbers, though I assume they are still far higher than in most other communities.

And a comment at the end:

"We are doing terribly at avoiding Blue/Green politics, people."

Given that LW explicitly tries to exclude politics from discussion (and for reasons I find compelling), what makes you expect differently?

Incorporating LW debiasing techniques into daily life will necessarily be significantly harder than just reading the Sequences, and even those have only been read by a relatively small proportion of posters...

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 19 January 2014 03:56:32PM *  15 points [-]

Average IQ seemed insane to me.

To me it has always sounded right. I'm MENSA-level (at least according to the test the local MENSA association gave me) and LessWrong is the first forum I ever encountered where I've considered myself below-average -- where I've found not just one or two but several people who can think faster and deeper than me.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 20 January 2014 10:12:59AM 3 points [-]

Same for me.

Comment author: Sophronius 20 January 2014 10:55:49AM *  7 points [-]

Average IQ seemed insane to me. Thanks for dealing extensively with that objection.

With only 500 people responding to the IQ question, it is entirely possible that this is simply a selection effect. I.e. only people with high IQ test themselves or report their score while lower IQ people keep quiet.

Even I was disappointed by the correlations between P(significant man-made global warming) vs. e.g. taxation/feminism/etc. Most other correlations were between values, but this one was between one's values and an empirical question. Truly Blue/Green.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with this. You are assuming that feminism is purely a matter of personal preference, incorrectly I feel. If you reduce feminism to simply asking "should women have the right to vote" then you should in fact find a correlation between that and "is there such a thing as global warming", because the correct answer in each case is yes.

Not saying I am necessarily in favour of modern day feminism, but it does bother me that people simply assume that social issues are independent of fact. This sounds like "everyone is entitled to their opinion" nonsense to me.

What I find more surprising is that there is no correlation between IQ and political beliefs whatsoever. I suspect that this is simply because the significance level is too strict to find anything.

Given that LW explicitly tries to exclude politics from discussion (and for reasons I find compelling), what makes you expect differently?

With this, on the other hand, I agree completely.

Comment author: Beluga 19 January 2014 01:22:53PM *  11 points [-]

Not sure how much sense it makes to take the arithmetic mean of probabilities when the odds vary over many orders of magnitude. If the average is, say, 30%, then it hardly matters whether someone answers 1% or .000001%. Also, it hardly matters whether someone answers 99% or 99.99999%.

I guess the natural way to deal with this would be to average (i.e., take the arithmetic mean of) the order of magnitude of the odds (i.e., log[p/(1-p)], p someone's answer). Using this method, it would make a difference whether someone is "pretty certain" or "extremely certain" that a certain statement is true or false.

Does anyone know what the standard way for dealing with this issue is?

Comment author: Manfred 19 January 2014 11:17:30PM *  4 points [-]

Yeah, log odds sounds like a good way to do it. Aggregating estimates is hard because peoples' estimates aren't independent, but averaging log odds will at least do better than averaging probabilities.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 January 2014 03:42:55AM 2 points [-]

Use medians and percentiles instead of means and standard deviations.

Comment author: XiXiDu 19 January 2014 01:33:48PM *  5 points [-]

Unfriendly AI: 233, 14.2%

Nanotech/grey goo: 57, 3.5%

Could someone who voted for unfriendly AI explain how nanotech or biotech isn't much more of a risk than unfriendly AI (I'll assume MIRI's definition here)?

I ask this question because it seems to me that even given a technological singularity there should be enough time for "unfriendly humans" to use precursors to fully fledged artificial general intelligence (e.g. advanced tool AI) in order to solve nanotechnology or advanced biotech. Technologies which themselves will enable unfriendly humans to cause a number of catastrophic risks (e.g. pandemics, nanotech wars, perfect global surveillance (an eternal tyranny) etc.).

Unfriendly AI, as imagined by MIRI, seems to be the end product of a developmental process that provides humans ample opportunity to wreck havoc.

I just don't see any good reason to believe that the tools and precursors to artificial general intelligence are not themselves disruptive technologies.

And in case you believe advanced nanotechnology to be infeasible, but unfriendly AI to be an existential risk, what concrete scenarios do you imagine on how such an AI could cause human extinction without nanotech?

Comment author: gjm 19 January 2014 02:07:29PM 3 points [-]

Presumably many people fear a very rapid "hard takeoff" where the time from "interesting slightly-smarter-than-human AI experiment" to "full-blown technological singularity underway" is measured in at days (or less) rather than months or years.

Comment author: XiXiDu 19 January 2014 03:45:45PM *  1 point [-]

The AI risk scenario that Eliezer Yudkowsky relatively often uses is that of the AI solving the protein folding problem.

If you believe a "hard takeoff" to be probable, what reason is there to believe that the distance between a.) an AI capable of cracking that specific problem and b.) an AI triggering an intelligence explosion is too short for humans to do something similarly catastrophic as what the AI would have done with the resulting technological breakthrough?

In other words, does the protein folding problem require AI to reach a level of sophistication that would allow humans, or the AI itself, within days or months, to reach the stages where it undergoes an intelligence explosion? How so?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 19 January 2014 04:55:43PM 1 point [-]

Is this question equivalent to "Is the protein-folding problem equivalently hard to the build-a-smarter-intelligence-than-I-am problem?" ? It seems like it ought to be, but I'm genuinely unsure, as the wording of your question kind of confuses me.

If so, my answer would be that it depends on how intelligent I am, since I expect the second problem to get more difficult as I get more intelligent. If we're talking about the actual me... yeah, I don't have higher confidence either way.

Comment author: XiXiDu 19 January 2014 06:17:46PM *  1 point [-]

Is this question equivalent to "Is the protein-folding problem equivalently hard to the build-a-smarter-intelligence-than-I-am problem?" ?

It is mostly equivalent. Is it easier to design an AI that can solve one specific hard problem than an AI that can solve all hard problems?

Expecting that only a fully-fledged artificial general intelligence is able to solve the protein-folding problem seems to be equivalent to believing the conjunction "an universal problem solver can solve the protein-folding problem" AND "an universal problem solver is easier to solve than the protein-folding problem". Are there good reasons to believe this?

ETA: My perception is that people who believe unfriendly AI to come sooner than nanotechnology believe that it is easier to devise a computer algorithm to devise a computer algorithm to predict protein structures from their sequences rather than to directly devise a computer algorithm to predict protein structures from their sequences. This seems counter-intuitive.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 19 January 2014 08:23:40PM 1 point [-]

it is easier to devise a computer algorithm to devise a computer algorithm to predict protein structures from their sequences rather than to directly devise a computer algorithm to predict protein structures from their sequences. This seems counter-intuitive.

Ah, this helps, thanks.

For my own part, the idea that we might build tools better at algorithm-development than our own brains are doesn't seem counterintuitive at all... we build a lot of tools that are better than our own brains at a lot of things. Neither does it seem implausible that there exist problems that are solvable by algorithm-development, but whose solution requires algorithms that our brains aren't good enough algorithm-developers to develop algorithms to solve.

So it seems reasonable enough that there are problems which we'll solve faster by developing algorithm-developers to solve them for us, than by trying to solve the problem itself.

Whether protein-folding is one of those problems, I have absolutely no idea. But it sounds like your position isn't unique to protein-folding.

Comment author: XiXiDu 20 January 2014 10:18:53AM *  -1 points [-]

For my own part, the idea that we might build tools better at algorithm-development than our own brains are doesn't seem counterintuitive at all...

So you believe that many mathematical problems are too hard for humans to solve but that humans can solve all of mathematics?

I already asked Timothy Gowers a similar question and I really don't understand how people can believe this.

In order to create an artificial mathematician it is first necssary to discover, prove and encode the mathematics of discovering and proving non-arbitrary mathematics (i.e. to encode a formalization of the natural language goal “be as good as humans at mathematics”). This seems much more difficult than solving any single problem. And that's just mathematics...

Neither does it seem implausible that there exist problems that are solvable by algorithm-development, but whose solution requires algorithms that our brains aren't good enough algorithm-developers to develop algorithms to solve.

I do not disagree with this in theory. After all, evolution is an example of this. But it was not computationally simple for evolution to do so and it did do so by a bottom-up approach, piece by piece.

So it seems reasonable enough that there are problems which we'll solve faster by developing algorithm-developers to solve them for us, than by trying to solve the problem itself.

To paraphrase your sentence: It seems reasonable that we can design an algorithm that can design algorithms that we are unable to design.

This can only be true in the sense that this algorithm-design-algorithm would run faster on other computational substrates than human brains. I agree that this is possible. But are relevant algorithms in a class for which a speed advantage would be substantial?

Again, in theory, all of this is fine. But how do you know that general algorithm design can be captured by an algorithm that a.) is simpler than most specific algorithms b.) whose execution is faster than that of evolution c.) which can locate useful algorithms within the infinite space of programs and d.) that humans will discover this algorithm?

Some people here seem to be highly confident about this. How?

ETA: Maybe this post better highlights the problems I see.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 January 2014 02:50:30PM 0 points [-]

So you believe that many mathematical problems are too hard for humans to solve but that humans can solve all of mathematics?

All of mathematics? Dunno. I'm not even sure what that phrase refers to. But sure, there exist mathematical problems that humans can't solve unaided, but which can be solved by tools we create.

I really don't understand how people can believe this. In order to create an artificial mathematician it is first necssary to discover, prove and encode the mathematics of discovering and proving non-arbitrary mathematics (i.e. to encode a formalization of the natural language goal “be as good as humans at mathematics”). This seems much more difficult than solving any single problem.

In other words: you believe that if we take all possible mathematical problems and sort them by difficulty-to-humans, that one will turn out to be the most difficult?

I don't mean to put words in your mouth here, I just want to make sure I understood you.

If so... why do you believe that?

To paraphrase your sentence: It seems reasonable that we can design an algorithm that can design algorithms that we are unable to design.

Yes, that's a fair paraphrase.

This can only be true in the sense that this algorithm-design-algorithm would run faster on other computational substrates than human brains. I agree that this is possible. But are relevant algorithms in a class for which a speed advantage would be substantial?

Nah, I'm not talking about speed.

But how do you know that general algorithm design can be captured by an algorithm that a.) is simpler than most specific algorithms

Can you clarify what you mean by "simpler" here? If you mean in some objective sense, like how many bits would be required to specify it in a maximally compressed form or some such thing, I don't claim that. If you mean easier for humans to develop... well, of course I don't know that, but it seems more plausible to me than the idea that human brains happen to be the optimal machine for developing algorithms.

b.) whose execution is faster than that of evolution

We have thus far done pretty good at this; evolution is slow. I don't expect that to change.

c.) which can locate useful algorithms within the infinite space of programs

Well, this is part of the problem specification. A tool for generating useless algorithms would be much easier to build.

d.) that humans will discover this algorithm?

(shrug) Perhaps we won't. Perhaps we won't solve protein-folding, either.

Some people here seem to be highly confident about this. How?

Can you quantify "highly confident" here?

For example, what confidence do you consider appropriate for the idea that there exists at least one useful algorithm A, and at least one artificial algorithm-developer AD, such that it's easier for humans to develop AD than to develop A, and it's easier for AD to develop A than it is for humans to develop A?

Comment author: XiXiDu 20 January 2014 04:35:38PM 1 point [-]

In other words: you believe that if we take all possible mathematical problems and sort them by difficulty-to-humans, that one will turn out to be the most difficult?

If you want an artificial agent to solve problems for you then you need to somehow constrain it, since there are an infinite number of problems. In this sense it is easier to specify an AI to solve a single problem, such as the protein-folding problem, rather than all problems (whatever that means, supposedly "general intelligence").

The problem here is that goals and capabilities are not orthogonal. It is more difficult to design an AI that can play all possible games, and then tell it to play a certain game, than designing an AI to play a certain game in the first place.

Can you clarify what you mean by "simpler" here?

The information theoretic complexity of the code of a general problem solver constrained to solve a specific problem should be larger than the constrain itself. I assume here that the constrain is most of the work in getting an algorithm to do useful work. Which I like to exemplify by the difference between playing chess and doing mathematics. Both are rigorously defined activities, one of which has a clear and simple terminal goal, the other being infinite and thus hard to constrain.

For example, what confidence do you consider appropriate for the idea that there exists at least one useful algorithm A, and at least one artificial algorithm-developer AD, such that it's easier for humans to develop AD than to develop A, and it's easier for AD to develop A than it is for humans to develop A?

The more general the artificial algorithm-developer is, the less confident I am that it is easier to create than the specific algorithm itself.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 January 2014 08:48:02PM 1 point [-]

I agree that specialized tools to perform particular tasks are easier to design than general-purpose tools. It follows that if I understand a problem well enough to know what tasks must be performed in order to solve that problem, it should be easier to solve that problem by designing specialized tools to perform those tasks, than by designing a general-purpose problem solver.

I agree that the complexity of a general problem solver should be larger than that of whatever constrains it to work on a specific task.

I agree that for a randomly selected algorithm A2, and a randomly selected artificial algorithm-developer AD2, the more general AD2 is the more likely it is that A2 is easier to develop than AD2.

Comment author: gjm 19 January 2014 05:13:47PM -1 points [-]

I have no strong opinion on whether a "hard takeoff" is probable. (Because I haven't thought about it a lot, not because I think the evidence is exquisitely balanced.) I don't see any particular reason to think that protein folding is the only possible route to a "hard takeoff".

What is alleged to make for an intelligence explosion is having a somewhat-superhuman AI that's able to modify itself or make new AIs reasonably quickly. A solution to the protein folding problem might offer one way to make new AIs much more capable than oneself, I suppose, but it's hardly the only way one can envisage.

Comment author: KnaveOfAllTrades 19 January 2014 02:15:31PM *  4 points [-]

I think a large part of that may simply be LW'ers being more familiar with UFAI and therefore knowing more details that make it seem like a credible threat / availability heuristic. So for example I would expect e.g. Eliezer's estimate of the gap between the two to be less than the LW average. (Edit: Actually, I don't mean that his estimate of the gap would be lower, but something more like it would seem like less of a non-question to him and he would take nanotech a lot more seriously, even if he did still come down firmly on the side of UFAI being a bigger concern.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 January 2014 03:48:15AM -2 points [-]

How is grey goo realistically a threat, especially without a uFAI guiding it? Remember: grey goo has to out-compete the existing biosphere. This seems hard.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 20 January 2014 07:08:10AM 3 points [-]

Gray goo designs don't need to be built up with miniscule steps, each of which makes evolutionary sense, like the evolved biosphere was. This might open up designs that are feasible to invent, very difficult to evolve naturally, and sufficiently different from anything in the natural biosphere to do serious damage even without a billion years of evolutionary optimization.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 January 2014 08:32:54AM 1 point [-]

So far in the history of technology, deliberate design over a period of years has proven consistently less clever (in the sense of "efficiently capturing available mass-energy as living bodies") than evolution operating over aeons.

Comment author: Locaha 20 January 2014 09:06:59AM 1 point [-]

I'll have to disagree here. Evolution operating over aeons never got to jet engines and nuclear weapons. Maybe it needs more time?

Comment author: [deleted] 20 January 2014 04:20:35PM 3 points [-]

Category error: neither jet engines nor nuclear weapons capture available/free mass-energy as living (ie: self-reproducing) bodies. Evolution never got to those because it simply doesn't care about them: nuclear bombs can't have grandchildren.

Comment author: Locaha 20 January 2014 05:07:20PM 1 point [-]

You can use both jet engines and nuclear weapons to increase your relative fitness.

There are no living nuclear reactors, either, despite the vast potential of energy.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 January 2014 10:03:09PM 0 points [-]

You can use both jet engines and nuclear weapons to increase your relative fitness.

Which living beings created by evolution have done -- also known as us!

Comment author: Locaha 21 January 2014 07:16:39AM 1 point [-]

This would be stretching the definition of evolution beyond its breaking point.

Comment author: Nornagest 20 January 2014 10:44:26PM 3 points [-]

There are organisms that use gamma radiation as an energy source. If we lived in an environment richer in naturally occurring radioisotopes, I think I'd expect to see more of this sort of thing -- maybe not up to the point of criticality, but maybe so.

Not much point in speculating, really; living on a planet that's better than four billion years old and of middling metallicity puts something of a damper on the basic biological potential of that pathway.

Comment author: Locaha 21 January 2014 07:14:52AM 1 point [-]

Not much point in speculating, really; living on a planet that's better than four billion years old and of middling metallicity puts something of a damper on the basic biological potential of that pathway.

And yet humanity did it, on a much smaller time scale. This is what I'm saying, we are better than evolution at some stuff.

Comment author: CCC 21 January 2014 08:33:23AM *  2 points [-]

Evolution has got as far as basic jet engines; see the octopus for an example.

Interestingly, this page provides some interesting data; it seems that a squid's jet is significantly less energy-efficient than a fish's tail for propulsion. This implies that that's perhaps why we see so little jet propulsion in the oceans...

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 20 January 2014 06:07:04PM 3 points [-]

And so far the more clever biosphere design is getting its thermodynamical shit handed to it everywhere the hairless apes go and decide to start building and burning stuff.

If a wish to a genie went really wrong and switched the terminal goals of every human on earth into destroying the earth's biosphere in the most thorough and efficient way possible, the biosphere would be toast, much cleverer than the humans or not. If the wish gave you a billion AGI robots with the that terminal goal, any humans getting in their way would be dead and the biosphere would be toast again. But if the robots were really small and maybe not that smart, then we'd be entirely okay, right?

Comment author: [deleted] 20 January 2014 10:02:10PM 1 point [-]

Think about it: it's the intelligence that makes things dangerous. Try and engineer a nanoscale robot that's going to be able to unintelligently disassemble all living matter without getting eaten by a bacterium. Unintelligently, mind you: no invoking superintelligence as your fallback explanation.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 21 January 2014 03:32:14AM 1 point [-]

Humans aren't superintelligent, and are still able to design macroscale technology that can wipe out biospheres and that can be deployed and propagated with less intelligence than it took to design. I'm not taking the bet that you can't shrink down the scale of the technology and the amount of intelligence needed to deploy it while keeping around the at least human level designer. That sounds too much like the "I can't think of a way to do this right now, so it's obviously impossible" play.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 January 2014 07:42:43AM *  1 point [-]

In addition, to my best knowledge, trained scientists believe it impossible to turn the sky green and have all humans sprout spider legs. Mostly, they believe these things are impossible because they're impossible, not because scientists merely lack the leap of superintelligence or superdetermination necessary to kick logic out and do the impossible.

Comment author: CCC 21 January 2014 09:49:54AM 3 points [-]

If I wanted to turn the sky green for some reason (and had an infinite budget to work with), then one way to do it would be to release a fine, translucent green powder in the upper atmosphere in large quantities. (This might cause problems when it began to drift down far enough that it can be breathed in, of course). Alternatively, I could encase the planet Earth in a solid shell of green glass.

Comment author: CCC 21 January 2014 09:52:30AM 0 points [-]

Make it out of antimatter? Say, a nanoscale amount of anticarbon - just an unintelligent lump?

Dump enough of those on any (matter) biosphere and all the living matter will be very thoroughly disassembled.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 January 2014 12:30:14PM 2 points [-]

That's not a nanoscale robot, is it? It's antimatter: it annihilates matter, because that's what physics says it does. You're walking around the problem I handed you and just solving the "destroy lots of stuff" problem. Yes, it's easy to destroy lots of stuff: we knew that already. And yet if I ask you to invent grey goo in specific, you don't seem able to come up with a feasible design.

Comment author: MugaSofer 21 January 2014 12:51:22PM 0 points [-]

So far in the history of technology, deliberate design over a period of years has proven consistently less clever (in the sense of "efficiently capturing available mass-energy as living bodies")

... because we don't know how to build "living bodies". That's a rather unfair comparison, regardless of whether your point is valid.

Although, of course, we built factory farms for that exact purpose, which are indeed more efficient at that task.

And there's genetic engineering, which can leapfrog over millions of years of evolution by nicking (simple, at our current tech level) adaptations from other organisms - whereas evolution would have to recreate them from scratch. I reflexively avoid anti-GM stuff due to overexposure when I was younger, but I wouldn't be surprised if a GM organism could outcompete a wild one, were a mad scientist to choose that as a goal rather than a disaster to be elaborately defended against. (Herbicide-resistant plants, for a start.)

So I suppose it isn't even very good at biasing the results, since it can still fail - depending, of course, on how true of a scotsman you are, because those do take advantage of prexisting adaptations - and artificially induced ones, in the case of farm animals.

(Should this matter? Discuss.)

Comment author: XiXiDu 20 January 2014 09:33:02AM 0 points [-]

How is grey goo realistically a threat, especially without a uFAI guiding it?

Is grey goo the only extinction type scenario possible if humans solve advanced nanotechnology? And do you really need an AI whose distance from an intelligence explosion is under 5 years in order to guide something like grey goo?

But yes, this is an answer to my original question. Thanks.

Comment author: Kawoomba 20 January 2014 09:57:52AM *  1 point [-]

grey goo has to out-compete the existing biosphere. This seems hard.

Really? Von Neumann machines (the universal assembler self-replicating variety, not the computer architecture) versus regular ol' mitosis, and you think mitosis would win out?

I've only ever heard "building self-replicating machinery on a nano-scale is really hard" as the main argument against the immediacy of that particular x-risk, never "even if there were self-replicators on a nano-scale, they would have a hard time out-competing the existing biosphere". Can you elaborate?

Comment author: Vaniver 20 January 2014 06:16:01PM *  3 points [-]

As one of my physics professors put it, "We already have grey goo. They're called bacteria."

The intuition behind the grey goo risk appears to be "as soon as someone makes a machine that can make itself, the world is a huge lump of matter and energy just waiting to be converted into copies of that machine." That is, of course, not true- matter and energy and prized and fought over, and any new contender is going to have to join the fight.

That's not to say it's impossible for an artificial self-replicating nanobot to beat the self-replicating nanobots which have evolved naturally, just that it's hard. For example, it's not clear to me what part of "regular ol' mitosis" you think is regular, and easy to improve upon. Is it that the second copy is built internally, preventing it from attack and corruption?

Comment author: Kawoomba 20 January 2014 06:50:39PM *  2 points [-]

Bacteria et al. are only the locally optimal solution after a long series of selection steps, each of which generally needed to be an improvement upon the previous step, i.e. the result of a greedy algorithm. There are few problems in which you'd expect a greedy algorithm to end up anywhere but in a very local optimum:

DNA is a hilariously inefficient way of storing partly superfluous data (all of which must undergo each mitosis), informational density could be an order/orders of magnitude higher with minor modifications, and the safety redundancies are precarious at best, compared to e.g. Hamming code. A few researchers in a poorly funded government lab can come up with deadlier viruses in a few years (remember the recent controversy) than what nature engineered in millenia. That's not to say that compared to our current macroscopic technology the informational feats of biological data transmission, duplication etc. aren't impressive, but that's only because we've not yet achieved molecular manufacturing (a necessity for a Grey Goo scenario). (We could go into more details on gross biological inefficiencies if you'd like.)

Would you expect some antibodies and phagocytosis to defeat an intelligently engineered self-replicating nanobot the size of a virus (but which doesn't depend on live cells and without the telltale flaws and tradeoffs of Pandemic-reminiscent"can't kill the host cell too quickly" etc.)?

To me it seems like saying "if you drowned the world in acid, the biosphere could well win the fight in a semi-recognizable form and claim the negentropy for themselves" (yes, cells can survive in extremely adverse environments and survive in some sort of niche, but I wouldn't exactly call such a pseudo-equilibrium winning, and self-replicators wouldn't exactly wait for its carbon food source to evolutionary adapt).

Comment author: Vaniver 20 January 2014 07:36:13PM 1 point [-]

A few researchers in a poorly funded government lab can come up with deadlier viruses in a few years (remember the recent controversy) than what nature engineered in millenia.

Killing one human is easier than converting the entire biosphere.

Would you expect some antibodies and phagocytosis to defeat an intelligently engineered self-replicating nanobot the size of a virus (but which doesn't depend on live cells and without the telltale flaws and tradeoffs of Pandemic-reminiscent"can't kill the host cell too quickly" etc.)?

Well, that depends on what I think the engineering constraints are. It could be that in order to be the size of a virus, self-assembly has to be outsourced. It could be that in order to be resistant to phagocytosis, it needs exotic materials which limit its growth rate and maximal growth.

To me it seems like saying "if you drowned the world in acid, the biosphere could well win the fight in a semi-recognizable form and claim the negentropy for themselves"

It's more "in order to drown the world in acid, you need to generate a lot of acid, and that's actually pretty hard."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 January 2014 03:52:25AM 0 points [-]

A few researchers in a poorly funded government lab can come up with deadlier viruses in a few years (remember the recent controversy) than what nature engineered in millenia.

Yes, and you may have noticed that bioengineered pandemic was voted top threat.

Comment author: dspeyer 20 January 2014 05:03:30AM 5 points [-]

Two reasons: uFAI is deadlier than nano/biotech and easier to cause by accident.

If you build an AGI and botch friendliness, the world is in big trouble. If you build a nanite and botch friendliness, you have a worthless nanite. If you botch growth-control, it's still probably not going to eat more than your lab before it runs into micronutrient deficiencies. And if you somehow do build grey goo, people have a chance to call ahead of it and somehow block its spread. What makes uFAI so dangerous is that it can outthink any responders. Grey goo doesn't do that.

Comment author: XiXiDu 20 January 2014 09:37:30AM *  1 point [-]

This seems like a consistent answer to my original question. Thank you.

If you botch growth-control, it's still probably not going to eat more than your lab before it runs into micronutrient deficiencies.

You on the one hand believe that grey goo is not going to eat more than your lab before running out of steam and on the other hand believe that AI in conjunction with nanotechnology will not run out of steam, or only after humanity's demise.

And if you somehow do build grey goo, people have a chance to call ahead of it and somehow block its spread.

You further believe that AI can't be stopped but grey goo can.

Comment author: RobbBB 20 January 2014 11:24:42AM 3 points [-]

If I understand Eliezer's view, it's that we can't be extremely confident of whether artificial superintelligence or perilously advanced nanotechnology will come first, but (a) there aren't many obvious research projects likely to improve our chances against grey goo, whereas (b) there are numerous obvious research projects likely to improve our changes against unFriendly AI, and (c) inventing Friendly AI would solve both the grey goo problem and the uFAI problem.

Cheer up, the main threat from nanotech may be from brute-forced AI going FOOM and killing everyone long before nanotech is sophisticated enough to reproduce in open-air environments.

The question is what to do about nanotech disaster. As near as I can figure out, the main path into [safety] would be a sufficiently fast upload of humans followed by running them at a high enough speed to solve FAI before everything goes blooey.

But that's already assuming pretty sophisticated nanotech. I'm not sure what to do about moderately strong nanotech. I've never really heard of anything good to do about nanotech. It's one reason I'm not sending attention there.

Comment author: Kawoomba 20 January 2014 12:05:36PM *  2 points [-]

Considering ... please wait ... tttrrrrrr ... prima facie, Grey Goo scenarios may seem more likely simply because they make better "Great Filter" candidates; whereas a near-arbitrary Foomy would spread out in all directions at relativistic speeds, with self-replicators no overarching agenty will would accelerate them out across space (the insulation layer with the sparse materials).

So if we approached x-risks through the prism of their consequences (extinction, hence no discernible aliens) and then reasoned our way back to our present predicament, we would note that within AI-power-hierachies (AGI and up) there are few distinct long-term dan-ranks (most such ranks would only be intermediary steps while the AI falls "upwards"), whereas it is much more conceivable that there are self-replicators which can e.g. transform enough carbon into carbon copies (of themselves) to render a planet uninhabitable, but which lack the oomph (and the agency) to do the same to their light cone.

Then I thought that Grey Goo may yet be more of a setback, a restart, not the ultimate planetary tombstone. Once everything got transformed into resident von Neumann machines, evolution amongst those copies would probably occur at some point, until eventually there may be new macroorganisms organized from self-replicating building blocks, which may again show significant agency and turn their gaze towards the stars.

Then again (round and round it goes), Grey Goo would still remain the better transient Great Filter candidate (and thus more likely than uFAI when viewed through the Great Filter spectroscope), simply because of the time scales involved. Assuming the Great Filter is in fact an actual absence of highly evolved civilizations in our neighborhood (as opposed to just hiding or other shenanigans), Grey Goo biosphere-resets may stall the Kardashev climb sufficiently to explain us not having witnessed other civs yet. Also, Grey Goo transformations may burn up all the local negentropy (nanobots don't work for free), precluding future evolution.

Anyways, I agree that FAI would be the most realistic long-term guardian against accidental nanogoo (ironically, also uFAI).

Comment author: RobbBB 20 January 2014 11:47:13PM *  4 points [-]

My own suspicion is that the bulk of the Great Filter is behind us. We've awoken into a fairly old universe. (Young in terms of total lifespan, but old in terms of maximally life-sustaining years.) If intelligent agents evolve easily but die out fast, we should expect to see a young universe.

We can also consider the possibility of stronger anthropic effects. Suppose intelligent species always succeed in building AGIs that propagate outward at approximately the speed of light, converting all life-sustaining energy into objects or agents outside our anthropic reference class. Then any particular intelligent species Z will observe a Fermi paradox no matter how common or rare intelligent species are, because if any other high-technology species had arisen first in Z's past light cone it would have prevented the existence of anything Z-like. (However, species in this scenario will observe much younger universes the smaller a Past Filter there is.)

So grey goo creates an actual Future Filter by killing their creators, but hyper-efficient hungry AGI creates an anthropic illusion of a Future Filter by devouring everything in their observable universe except the creator species. (And possibly devouring the creator species too; that's unclear. Evolved alien values are less likely to eat the universe than artificial unFriendly-relative-to-alien-values values are, but perhaps not dramatically less likely; and unFriendly-relative-to-creator AI is almost certainly more common than Friendly-relative-to-creator AI.)

Once everything got transformed into resident von Neumann machines, evolution amongst those copies would probably occur at some point, until eventually there may be new macroorganisms organized from self-replicating building blocks, which may again show significant agency and turn their gaze towards the stars.

Probably won't happen before the heat death of the universe. The scariest thing about nanodevices is that they don't evolve. A universe ruled by nanodevices is plausibly even worse (relative to human values) than one ruled by uFAI like Clippy, because it's vastly less interesting.

(Not because paperclips are better than nanites, but because there's at least one sophisticated mind to be found.)

Comment author: MugaSofer 21 January 2014 12:58:24PM -1 points [-]

perfect global surveillance (an eternal tyranny)

Oooh, that would nicely solve the problem of the other impending apocalypses, wouldn't it?

Comment author: asuffield 19 January 2014 01:49:42PM 0 points [-]

I'd like to advance an alternative hypothesis for the effective altruism/charitable donations data:

  • People who donate more money to charity spend more time thinking about how effectively that money is used, and hence are more interested in effective altruism
  • People who have more money donate more money

Aside from reversing the suggested causality (which we obviously can't test from this survey), the difference is pretty narrow, I don't really know enough about statistics to analyse how well the data supports one hypothesis over the other, and while I would be interested in knowing the answer, I'm not sufficiently interested to go and learn how to do that kind of analysis (if it's even possible from this data, which I'm unsure of). Is anybody able to come up with something?

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 January 2014 03:30:11PM 3 points [-]

It seems like the effect of effective altruism on charity donations is relatively independent from income.

If I do a straight linear model with predicts charity donation from effective altruism, the effect is 1851 +- 416 $. If I add income into the model the effect shrinks to 1751+-392.

Furthermore being a effective altruist doesn't have a significant effect on income (I tried a few different ways to control it).

Comment author: jkaufman 19 January 2014 02:13:55PM 10 points [-]

Hypothesis: the predictions on the population of Europe are bimodal, split between people thinking of geographical Europe (739M) vs people thinking of the EU (508M). I'm going to go check the data and report back.

Comment author: William_Quixote 19 January 2014 03:21:07PM 3 points [-]

As one datapoint I went with Europe as EU so it's plausible others did too

Comment author: XiXiDu 19 January 2014 03:27:12PM 2 points [-]

As one datapoint I went with Europe as EU so it's plausible others did too

Same here.

Comment author: ahbwramc 20 January 2014 03:34:47AM 2 points [-]

Me too, at least sort of - I just had a number stored in my brain that I associated with "Europe." Turned out it was EU only, although I didn't have any confusion about the question - I thought I was answering for all of Europe.

Comment author: Nornagest 20 January 2014 03:48:31AM 0 points [-]

I also interpreted Europe as EU, although I was about 20% off that as well.

Comment author: jkaufman 19 January 2014 03:30:58PM 7 points [-]

I've cleaned up the data and put it here.

Here's a "sideways cumulative density function", showing all guesses from lowest to highest:

There were a lot of guesses of "500" but that might just be because 500 is a nice round number. There were more people guessing within 50 of 508M (165) than in the 100-wide regions immediately above or below (126 within 50 of 408, 88 within 50 of 608) and more people guessing within 50 of 739 (107) than in the 100-wide regions immediately above or below (91 within 50 of 639, 85 within 50 of 839).

Here's a histogram that shows this, but in order to actually see a dip between the 508ish numbers and 739ish numbers the bucketing needs to group those into separate categories with another category in between, so I don't trust this very much:

If someone knows how to make an actual probability density function chart that would be better, because it wouldn't be sensitive to these arbitrary divisions on where to place the histogram boundaries.

Comment author: VincentYu 19 January 2014 09:47:05PM *  15 points [-]

Here is a kernel density estimate of the "true" distribution, with bootstrapped pointwise 95% confidence bands from 999 resamples:

It looks plausibly bimodal, though one might want to construct a suitable hypothesis test for unimodality versus multimodality. Unfortunately, as you noted, we cannot distinguish between the hypothesis that the bimodality is due to rounding (at 500 M) versus the hypothesis that the bimodality is due to ambiguity between Europe and the EU. This holds even if a hypothesis test rejects a unimodal model, but if anyone is still interested in testing for unimodality, I suggest considering Efron and Tibshirani's approach using the bootstrap.

Edit: Updated the plot. I switched from adaptive bandwidth to fixed bandwidth (because it seems to achieve higher efficiency), so parts of what I wrote below are no longer relevant—I've put these parts in square brackets.

Plot notes: [The adaptive bandwidth was achieved with Mathematica's built-in "Adaptive" option for SmoothKernelDistribution, which is horribly documented; I think it uses the same algorithm as 'akj' in R's quantreg package.] A Gaussian kernel was used with the bandwidth set according to Silverman's rule-of-thumb [and the sensitivity ('alpha' in akj's documentation) set to 0.5]. The bootstrap confidence intervals are "biased and unaccelerated" because I don't (yet) understand how bias-corrected and accelerated bootstrap confidence intervals work. Tick marks on the x-axis represent the actual data with a slight jitter added to each point.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 19 January 2014 04:00:52PM *  2 points [-]

The misinterpretation of the survey's meaning of "Europe" as "EU" is itself a failure as significant as wrongly estimating its population... so it's not as if it excuses people who got it wrong and yet neither sought for clarification, nor took the possibility of misinterpretation into account when giving their confidence ratios...

Comment author: Aleksander 19 January 2014 04:28:57PM 7 points [-]

You might as well ask, "Who is the president of America?" and then follow up with, "Ha ha got you! America is a continent, you meant USA."

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 19 January 2014 04:35:39PM *  3 points [-]

I don't think you're making the argument that Yvain deliberately wanted to trick people into giving a wrong answer -- so I really don't see your analogy as illuminating anything.

It was a question. People answered it wrongly whether by making a wrong estimation of the answer, or by making a wrong estimation of the meaning of the question. Both are failures -- and why should we consider the latter failure as any less significant than the former?

EDIT TO ADD: Mind you, reading the excel of the answers it seems I'm among the people who gave an answer in individuals when the question was asking number in millions. So it's not as if I didn't also have a failure in answering -- and yet I do consider that one a less significant failure. Perhaps I'm just being hypocritical in this though.

Comment author: KnaveOfAllTrades 19 January 2014 08:28:40PM *  0 points [-]

Perhaps I'm just being hypocritical in this though.

Confirm. ;) (Nope, I didn't misinterpret it as EU.)

Even if people recognized the ambiguity, it's not obvious that one should go for an intermediate answer rather than putting all one's eggs in one basket by guessing which was meant. If I were taking the survey and saw that ambiguity, I'd probably be confused for a bit, then realize I was taking longer than I'd semi-committed to taking, answer make a snap judgement, and move on.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 January 2014 04:40:13PM 0 points [-]

The continent is basically never called just “America” in modern English (except in the phrases “North America” and “South America”), it's “the Americas”.

Comment author: William_Quixote 19 January 2014 09:13:27PM 6 points [-]

Its also not obvious that people who went with the EU interpretation were incorrect. Language is contextual, if we were to parse the Times, Guardian, BBC, etc over the past year and see how the word "Europe" is actually used, it might be the land mass, or it might be the EU. Certainly one usage will have been more common than the other, but its not obvious to me which one it will have been.

That said, if I had noticed the ambiguity and not auto parsed it as EU, I probably would have expected the typical American to use Europe as land mass and since I think Yvain is American that's what I should have gone with.

On the other other hand, the goal of the question is to gauge numerical calibration, not to gauge language parsing. If someone thought they were answering about the EU, and picked a 90% confidence interval that did in fact include the population of the EU that gives different information about the quantity we are trying to measure then if someone thinks Europe means the continent including Russia and picks a 90% confidence interval that does not include the population of the landmass. Remember this is not a quiz in school to see if someone gets "the right answer" this is a tool that's intended to measure something.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 January 2014 03:57:43AM 3 points [-]

Yvain explicitly said "Wikipedia's Europe page".

Comment author: simplicio 20 January 2014 01:56:56PM 2 points [-]

Which users could not double-check because they might see the population numbers.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 January 2014 03:59:37AM 6 points [-]

But they should expect the Wikipedia page to refer to the continent.

Comment author: jkaufman 19 January 2014 04:12:22PM 23 points [-]

The IQ numbers have time and time again answered every challenge raised against them and should be presumed accurate.

What if the people who have taken IQ tests are on average smarter than the people who haven't? My impression is that people mostly take IQ tests when they're somewhat extreme: either low and trying to qualify for assistive services or high and trying to get "gifted" treatment. If we figure lesswrong draws mostly from the high end, then we should expect the IQ among test-takers to be higher than what we would get if we tested random people who had not previously been tested.

The IQ Question read: "Please give the score you got on your most recent PROFESSIONAL, SCIENTIFIC IQ test - no Internet tests, please! All tests should have the standard average of 100 and stdev of 15."

Among the subset of people making their data public (n=1480), 32% (472) put an answer here. Those 472 reports average 138, in line with past numbers. But 32% is low enough that we're pretty vulnerable to selection bias.

(I've never taken an IQ test, and left this question blank.)

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 19 January 2014 05:06:20PM 2 points [-]

But 32% is low enough that we're pretty vulnerable to selection bias

The large majority of LessWrongers in the USA have however also provided their SAT scores, and those are also very high values (from what little I know of SATs)...

Comment author: Vaniver 19 January 2014 08:45:42PM *  10 points [-]

The large majority of LessWrongers in the USA have however also provided their SAT scores, and those are also very high values (from what little I know of SATs)...

The reported SAT numbers are very high, but the reported IQ scores are extremely high. The mean reported SAT score, if received on the modern 1600 test, corresponds to an IQ in the upper 120s, not the upper 130s. The mean reported SAT2400 score was 2207, which corresponds to 99th but not 99.5th percentile. 99th percentile is an IQ of 135, which suggests that the self-reports may not be that off compared to the SAT self-reports.

Comment author: jaime2000 20 January 2014 07:55:39PM *  1 point [-]

The Wikipedia article states that those are percentiles of test-takers, not the population as a whole. What percentage of seniors take the SAT? I tried googling, but I could not find the figure.

My first thought is that most people who don't take the SAT don't intend to go to college and are likely to be below the mean reported SAT score, but then I realized that a non-negligible subset of those people must have taken only the ACT as their admission exam.

Comment author: Vaniver 20 January 2014 08:01:39PM 3 points [-]

I don't have solid numbers myself, but percentile of test-takers should underestimate percentile of population. However, there is regression to the mean to take into account, as well as that many people take the SAT multiple times and report the most favorable score, both of which suggest that score on test should overestimate IQ, and I'm fudging it by treating those two as if they cancel out.

Comment author: VincentYu 20 January 2014 03:01:31PM *  28 points [-]

What if the people who have taken IQ tests are on average smarter than the people who haven't? My impression is that people mostly take IQ tests when they're somewhat extreme: either low and trying to qualify for assistive services or high and trying to get "gifted" treatment. If we figure lesswrong draws mostly from the high end, then we should expect the IQ among test-takers to be higher than what we would get if we tested random people who had not previously been tested.

This sounds plausible, but from looking at the data, I don't think this is happening in our sample. In particular, if this were the case, then we would expect the SAT scores of those who did not submit IQ data to be different from those who did submit IQ data. I ran an Anderson–Darling test on each of the following pairs of distributions:

  • SAT out of 2400 for those who submitted IQ data (n = 89) vs SAT out of 2400 for those who did not submit IQ data (n = 230)
  • SAT out of 1600 for those who submitted IQ data (n = 155) vs SAT out of 1600 for those who did not submit IQ data (n = 217)

The p-values came out as 0.477 and 0.436 respectively, which means that the Anderson–Darling test was unable to distinguish between the two distributions in each pair at any significance.

As I did for my last plot, I've once again computed for each distribution a kernel density estimate with bootstrapped confidence bands from 999 resamples. From visual inspection, I tend to agree that there is no clear difference between the distributions. The plots should be self-explanatory:

(More details about these plots are available in my previous comment.)

Edit: Updated plots. The kernel density estimates are now fixed-bandwidth using the Sheather–Jones method for bandwidth selection. The density near the right edge is bias-corrected using an ad hoc fix described by whuber on stats.SE.

Comment author: jkaufman 20 January 2014 10:53:41PM 4 points [-]

Thanks for digging into this! Looks like the selection bias isn't significant.

Comment author: notsonewuser 19 January 2014 06:32:29PM 17 points [-]

Yvain - Next year, please include a question asking if the person taking the survey uses PredictionBook. I'd be curious to see if these people are better calibrated.

Comment author: AlexMennen 19 January 2014 06:51:55PM *  9 points [-]

On average, effective altruists (n = 412) donated $2503 to charity, and other people (n = 853) donated $523 - obviously a significant result.

There could be some measurement bias here. I was on the fence about whether I should identify myself as an effective altruist, but I had just been reminded of the fact that I hadn't donated any money to charity in the last year, and decided that I probably shouldn't be identifying as an effective altruist myself despite having philosophical agreements with the movement.

1265 people told us how much they give to charity; of those, 450 gave nothing. ... In order to calculate percent donated I divided charity donations by income in the 947 people helpful enough to give me both numbers. Of those 947, 602 donated nothing to charity, and so had a percent donated of 0.

This is blasphemy against Saint Boole.

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 January 2014 10:40:02PM 1 point [-]

What the best way to import the data into R without having to run as.numeric(as.character(...)) on all the numeric variables like the probabilities?

Comment author: adamzerner 20 January 2014 12:06:32AM 0 points [-]

I would be interested to see Eliezer's responses.

Comment author: adamzerner 20 January 2014 12:07:20AM 0 points [-]

We should have an answer wiki with ideas for next survey.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 20 January 2014 10:22:11AM *  1 point [-]

Formatting: I find the reports a bit difficult to scan, because each line contains two numbers (absolute numbers, relative percents), which are not vertically aligned. An absolute value of one line may be just below the value of another line, and the numbers may similar, which makes it difficult to e.g. quickly find a highest value in the set.

I think this could be significantly improved with a trivial change: write the numbers at the beginning of the line, that will make them better aligned. For even better legibility, insert a separator (wider than just a comma) between absolute and relative numbers.

Now:

Yes, all the time: 94, 5.7%
Yes, sometimes: 179, 10.9%
No: 1316, 80.4%
Did not answer: 48, 2.9%

Proposed:

94 = 5.7% - Yes, all the time
179 = 10.9% - Yes, sometimes
1316 = 80.4% - No
48 = 2.9% - Did not answer

For example in the original version it is easy to see something like "94.5, 179, 80.4, 48.2" when reading carelessly.

Comment author: Kawoomba 20 January 2014 10:56:21AM 5 points [-]

The IQ numbers have time and time again answered every challenge raised against them and should be presumed accurate.

N.B.: Average IQ drops to 135 when only considering tests administered at an adult age -- those "IQ 172 at age 7" entries shouldn't be taken as authoritative for adult IQ.

Comment author: Coscott 20 January 2014 06:35:36PM 4 points [-]

It looks like lots of people put themselves as atheist, but still answered the religion question as Unitarian Universalist, in spite of the fact that the question said to answer your religion only if you are theist.

I was looking forward to data on how many LW people are UU, but I have no way of predicting how many people followed the rules as written for the question, and how many people followed the rules as (I think they were) intended.

We should make sure to word that question differently next year, so that people who identify as atheist and religious know to answer the question.

Comment author: Coscott 20 January 2014 06:47:13PM 2 points [-]

It looks like Judaism and Buddhism might have had a similar problem.

Comment author: hairyfigment 21 January 2014 03:40:12AM -1 points [-]

This is why (ISTR) I treated 'some religion is more or less right' as a broader category than theism.

Comment author: Taurus_Londono 20 January 2014 08:00:44PM *  -1 points [-]

"So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests - ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source."

I am a member of this population, and I lied. Although I have taken variants of the aforementioned tests, I have never done so in an academic or professional context (ie; Raven's via iqtest.dk). I suspect that I am not the only one.

"People were really really bad at giving their answers in millions. I got numbers anywhere from 3 (really? three million people in Europe?) to 3 billion (3 million billion people = 3 quadrillion)."

Two-thirds have a college degree and roughly one third are European citizens. Does this bode well for the affirmation about self-reported IQ?

"...so it was probably some kind of data entry error..." "Computers (practical): 505, 30.9%"

If people lie about IQ, why not just check Wikipedia and cheat on the Europe question? I lied about IQ, but I did not cheat for the Europe question. I suspect that I am not alone.

IQ is arguably as direct a challenge to self-appraisal as you can put to anyone who would self-select for an LW survey. Because mean for HBD was 2.7, many of the respondents may feel that IQ does not fall into predictable heritability patterns by adulthood (say, 27.4 years old). Could it be intertwined with self-attribution bias and social identity within a community devoted to rational thinking? Perhaps they don't realize that rational decision-making =/= improved performance on Raven's Progressive Matrices.

If I was a member of a health club for 2.62 years, ipso facto, would I be inclined to self-report as physically fit/strong/healthy (especially if I thought I had control over said variable, and that it wasn't largely the result of inheritance and environmental factors in a seemingly distant childhood)?

Self-reported IQ data via an online survey: robust? C'mon, you're smarter than that...

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 21 January 2014 09:37:23AM *  7 points [-]

I am a member of this population, and I lied.

Helpful for letting us know there are bad people out there that will seek to sabotage the value of a survey even without any concrete benefit to themselves other than the LOLZ of the matter. But I think we are already aware of the existence of bad people.

As for your "I suspect that I am not alone", I ADBOC (agree denotationaly but object connotationaly). Villains exist, but I suspect villains are rarer than they believe themselves to be, since in order to excuse their actions they need imagine the whole world populated with villains (while denying that it's an act of villainy they describe).

"Two-thirds have a college degree and roughly one third are European citizens. Does this bode well for the affirmation about self-reported IQ?"

Well, I'm also a European (with a Master's Degree in Computer Science ) who didn't give my number in millions, and I could have my MENSA-acceptance letter scanned and posted if anyone disbelieves me on my provided IQ.

So bollocks on that. You are implying that people like me are liars just because we are careless readers or careless typists. Lying is a whole different thing than mere carelessness.

Comment author: bendini 20 January 2014 09:19:33PM 1 point [-]

The "did not answer" option seems to be distorting the perception of the results. Perhaps structuring the presentation of the data with those percentages removed would be more straightforward to visualise.

PRIMARY LANGUAGE: English: 1009, 67.8% German: 58, 3.6% Finnish: 29, 1.8% Russian: 25, 1.6% French: 17, 1.0% Dutch: 16, 1.0% Did not answer: 15.2%

Percentages including the non respondents is misleading, at first glance you could be mistaken for thinking there is a significant population of Non-English speakers as less than 70% of people who completed the survey answered English.

Non-respondents removed:

English: 1009, 87% German: 58, 5% Finnish: 29, 3% Russian: 25, 2% French: 17, 2% Dutch: 16, 1% 15.2% of the sample did not answer

This seems like it would be a better representation of the data which could be applied to the other questions.

Comment author: Brillyant 20 January 2014 10:17:10PM 3 points [-]

Things that stuck out to me:

HPMOR: - Yes, all of it: 912, 55.7% REFERRAL TYPE: Referred by HPMOR: 400, 24.4%

EY's Harry Potter fanfic is more popular around here than I'd thought.

PHYSICAL INTERACTION WITH LW COMMUNITY: Yes, all the time: 94, 5.7% Yes, sometimes: 179, 10.9%

CFAR WORKSHOP ATTENDANCE: Yes, a full workshop: 105, 6.4% A class but not a full-day workshop: 40, 2.4%

LESS WRONG USE: Poster (Discussion, not Main): 221, 12.9% Poster (Main): 103, 6.3%

~6% at the maximum "buy-in" levels on these 3 items. My guess is they are all made up of a similiar group of people?

I'd be curious to know of 6.3% aho have published articles in Main (and, to a lesser extent, of the 12.9% who have published in Discussion), how many unique user are there?