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Pfft comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Next survey, I'd be interested in seeing statistics involving:
Excellent write-up and I look forward to next year's.
I'd also like to see time spent per day meditating, or other form of mental training
How would you word the question?
While I don't remember the precise level, I would note that there are studies suggesting a rather surprisingly low level of correlation between self perceived attractiveness and attractiveness as perceived by others, and if we could induce a sufficient sample of participants to submit images of themselves to be rated by others (possibly in a context where they would not themselves find out the rating they received,) I think the comparison of those two values would be much more interesting than self-perceived attractiveness alone.
That's kind of the idea. I'm more interested in correlations involving self-perceived attractiveness, particularly the holistic one, than correlations involving measured physical attractiveness. It's a nice proxy for self-esteem.
Anonymity is a bit of a problem, though I suppose a pool of people that are as likely as your average human to know anyone who uses LW could be wrangled with some effort.
I'd be interested in seeing how the relationship among less wrong users between self perceived attractiveness and attractiveness as perceived by others compares to the relationship in the general population.
I'd like:
Oh, we are really self-serving elitist overconfident pricks, aren't we?
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?
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.
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.
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?
By what metric? Total time investment? Few people can give you an accurate answer to that question.
Asking good questions isn't easy.
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.
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!"
I agree, that would be nice question.
Quantified Self examples:
Social media example:
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?
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.
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...
That sounds like a good question. Hopefully we remember when the time comes up.
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.
The current survey (hell, the IQ section alone) gives them more ammunition than they could possibly expend, I feel.
If one is known for using drugs, then every unusual claim he makes is dismissed as a literal pipe dream. It is a huge blow to authority.
What the problem with someone external writing an article about how LW is a group who thinks they are high IQ?
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.
So? Fuck 'em.
Excellent in-group signalling but terrible public relations move.
We don't need or want to signal friendliness to absolutely everyone. We want to carefully choose what kind of filters and how many filters we apply to people who might be interested in our community. Every filter comes with a cost in that it reduces our growth, and must be justified through increasing the quality of our discussions. However, filter not at all, and you might as well just step out onto the street and talk to strangers.
Personally, I am all for filtering out the "punish for not putting modesty before facts" attitude. Both because I find it irritating, and because it drives away boastful awesome people, and I like substantiated boasting and the people who do it.
In other words, "Yeah, fuck 'em."
<shrug> So is admitting to being an atheist, for example. Optimizing for public relations is rarely a good move.
That's a lot more culture specific.
I would also say exactly the same thing with “recreational drug use” replacing “high IQ”.
True, though a notable difference is that recreational drug use is illegal in many jurisdictions.
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.
Mostly, of people who proclaim IQ of, say, 150 or higher, over 9 out of 10 times it's going to be because of some kind of issue such as narcissism.
The funniest aspect of self declared bayesianism is that "bayesians" never imagine that it could be applied to what they say (and go on fuming about punishments and status games and reflexes whenever it is).
Emphasis mine. Alternatively, those Bayesians with social graces aren't available, because they don't do anything ridiculous enough to remember.
Fair enough, albeit social graces in that case would imply good understanding of how other people process evidence, which would make self-labeling as "bayesian" seem very silly.
Imagine that 1% of the population have high IQs (and will claim so) and 10% of the population are narcissistic, and half of those like to claim they have high IQ. The Bayseian calculation would be P(high IQ|claim high IQ) = P(claim high IQ|high IQ) * P(high IQ) divided by P(claim high IQ|high IQ) * P(high IQ) + P(claim high IQ|narcissism) * P(narcissism) = (1.00 * 0.01) / (1.00 * 0.01 + 0.5 * 0.10) = 1/6.
You can quibble about the exact figures, but private_messaging is correct here. Because narcissism is relatively common, the claim of having high IQ is very weak evidence for having high IQ but very strong evidence for being narcissistic. (Although it's stronger evidence for high IQ in a community where high IQ is more common.)
Indeed, I think you're way overestimating P(claim high IQ|high IQ).
To clarify, it's still as strong of evidence of having high IQ as a statement can be, it is just not strong enough to overcome the low prior.
Then there's the issue that - I do not know about the US but it seems fairly uncommon to have taken a professionally administered IQ test here, whenever you are smart or not. It may be that LW has an unusually high percentage of people who took such a test.
If you replace "smart" with "used drugs recreationally" you might see my point?
Actually I don't think that rationality (as the CFAR mission) has much to do with using drugs recreationally it does have something to do with being smart. You could have a CFAR that experiments with various mind altering substances to see which of those improve rationality. That's not the CFAR that we have.
I did a lot of QS PR. That means having a 2 hour interview where the journalist might pick 30 seconds of phrases that come on TV. I wouldn't have had any issue in that context of playing into a nerd stereotype. On the other hand I wouldn't have said something that fits QS users into the stereotype of drug users.
Fair enough; drug use is a lot more public relations damaging than self-proclaimed high IQ.
Depends of how loudly you self-proclaim it. It's not as we had a mensa banner on the frontpage or something.
And the same goes for recreational drug-use, no? If it's just in the survey like IQ is and we don't have a banner proclaiming it, the argument that it might make us look bad doesn't hold any water.
It makes it easy to portray LW as a bunch of out-of-touch nerds?
"I'm part of a community, you live in a bubble, he's out of touch."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?".