2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
It's that time of year again.
If you are reading this post and self-identify as a LWer, then you are the target population for the Less Wrong Census/Survey. Please take it. Doesn't matter if you don't post much. Doesn't matter if you're a lurker. Take the survey.
This year's census contains a "main survey" that should take about ten or fifteen minutes, as well as a bunch of "extra credit questions". You may do the extra credit questions if you want. You may skip all the extra credit questions if you want. They're pretty long and not all of them are very interesting. But it is very important that you not put off doing the survey or not do the survey at all because you're intimidated by the extra credit questions.
It also contains a chance at winning a MONETARY REWARD at the bottom. You do not need to fill in all the extra credit questions to get the MONETARY REWARD, just make an honest stab at as much of the survey as you can.
Please make things easier for my computer and by extension me by reading all the instructions and by answering any text questions in the simplest and most obvious possible way. For example, if it asks you "What language do you speak?" please answer "English" instead of "I speak English" or "It's English" or "English since I live in Canada" or "English (US)" or anything else. This will help me sort responses quickly and easily. Likewise, if a question asks for a number, please answer with a number such as "4", rather than "four".
The planned closing date for the survey is Friday, November 14. Instead of putting the survey off and then forgetting to do it, why not fill it out right now?
Okay! Enough preliminaries! Time to take the...
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[EDIT: SURVEY CLOSED, DO NOT TAKE!]
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Thanks to everyone who suggested questions and ideas for the 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey. I regret I was unable to take all of your suggestions into account, because of some limitations in Google Docs, concern about survey length, and contradictions/duplications among suggestions. The current survey is a mess and requires serious shortening and possibly a hard and fast rule that it will never get longer than it is right now.
By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.
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Comments (724)
I took the survey.
I took the survey, it was a good thing....
I have taken the survey, including all questions.
I did the survey (while I was still a lurker).
I did the survey.
I took the survey.
Did anyone else fall on the borderline for some of these questions? I was in a weird space for the one about whether you ever had a relationship with someone else from LW (they introduced me to LW).
I was slightly late, unfortunately, but filled out the whole thing anyway.
Took the survey - now going to give some people karma
I took the survey. I was reminded by Brienne's post today at Facebook. Thanks for running the survey.
Survey Complete!
Did the whole thing!
Taken survey.
Did the entire survey in the nick of time.
I'm very thankful for the humiliating experience of racking my brain to come up with plausible sounding reasons for why the answers to the calibration questions should be one thing or another, trying to lower my certainties so that I felt that surely I couldn't be falling for that old overconfidence bias again, finishing the survey, and looking up the answers on wikipedia afterwards. Now that we have ten widely different questions I really can't rationalize setting Russia as the fourth most populated country with 55% subjective certainty.
At least I got the darn norse god right.
Taken. Thanks go out to Brienne for posting about it on FB!
I did the survey! I decided to say I didn't believe in god, even though I think there's a high probability of the universe being a simulation, because I don't count a simulation as supernatural. Supernatural is something that requires the universe to be non-reductionist, in my opinion.
Done.
Completed. I'm concerned that the "mixed" options for religious background are concealing meaningful demographic information. For instance, my parents are of Christian and Jewish parentage, so I chose the "mixed" option because I do not consider my cultural heritage to be predominantly Jewish or Christian. A person with Hindu and Muslim parents would have the same answer, but a very different cultural background. Perhaps in future it might be better to use a "check all that apply" format?
Taken.
Also found that my finger lengths are symmetrical across both hands to the limit of my ability to measure with a ruler. (Calipers might reveal differences, but I don't have access to those.) I did suspect this level of symmetry, but I didn't know until I measured them, so thanks!
Survey completed. Some of the questions are ambiguous.
"How many children do you have?" I find this question problematic each year. Biological offspring? Custodial children?
"What is your approximate annual income in US dollars?" Personal income? Household income?
"Gender Default" I wanted something like a Likert scale here. I would not say I would feel "wrong," "creeped out," or "freaked out" by switching genders, but I would even less say that I "identify with their birth gender only because they see no reason to go through the hassle and social stigma of transitioning," which also seems qualitatively different than "a man who would be happy as either a man or a woman, but since they're a man, they stay a man." The question sets us a dichotomy that may not be so much false as a mild category error, sort of like "which one of you is the fork?"
I did the thing!
I have taken the survey, and can't wait to see the results on the calibration questions. Post-hoc self-assessment suggests I have a long way to go...
I took the survey, now give me my ~40 upvotes.
(is the free karma just an incentive to take the survey? or do 45 people really think that commenting that you took the survey is a valuable contribution to the discussion?)
I took the survey.
I failed to ask for this when the request for comments came up, but it would have been nice to get questions about people's awareness/participation in the LWSH. Oh well, maybe next year.
I did the digit ratio question, but I am not sure if my datapoint is useful -- I have arthritis in my fingers and I'm not sure if that warps the result.
On November 2, I wrote: "Partial success. I meant to fill in the survey completely, but my internet froze at calibration question 5. In an attempt to revive it, I pressed Enter, which resulted in submission of the incomplete survey. Now what ?" I received recommendation to take the survey again and report the unfinished one as something to be discarded. So now I finally took the full survey. To avoid duplicity, please discard an old incomplete survey finished at calibration question 5, from someone who lives in Slovakia, attended 2013 "full" minicamp and reported that time carma of cca 174.
Btw., the definition of feminism "...establishing, and defending equal political, economic, cultural, and social rights for women" makes it a movement I endorse, but I am not sure the definition accurately describes what happened to it.
First-time taker! Shorter than I expected. Hope I did the digity thing right...
Third time starting the survey, first time finishing it!
Hey, this year I was able to answer some of the calibration questions! Three yays for norse mythology.
Also apparently I'm a weird person.
Man, I'm late this year. Taken. To save my index finger, just upvoted everyone who took it in November :)
Next time, the "supernatural" question really needs to just link to the Sequence post defining the word.
I've read the sequences. I still don't think the concept is clearly defined.
I think the intuitive surface reading of that post (supernatural objects are black boxes; they have state, but are denied to have internal structure that implements the state) at least makes it clear that simulators are not "supernatural" under this definition. Which is the actual query people were blocking on. But evidently many people read the post differently.
Amen. Maybe we should just use a different wording. Thinking a thing is supernatural seems incompatible with believing it exists in most common uses (though yes, we all can contrive counterexample)
I took the survey and answered every question. As usual, I found my ability to correctly answer the calibration questions comically bad . . . but hopefully well calibrated.
Took the survey, and it made me realize I'd never bothered to register an account here before now. The situation has been corrected.
yay - done.
Done, but I'm afraid the fingertip measurements were not very precise
From what people have said, it seems that after the survey was posted a new question was added about our favorite LW post. Were there any others?
(Posted as a top-level comment at the request of TobyBartels)
Done.
How real is the research on digit ratio? (On bogus statistics-based research see, for example: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble).
In any case, can you please explain how you plan to use digit ratio data?
Took the survey. As usual, immense props to Yvain for the dedication and work he puts into this.
Did the survey. I'm not terribly interested in karma, but if you feel the need to upvote, then upvote away.
One answer I gave that may confuse - I put "atheist" down under "other" for my religion, because I do believe that a) atheism is properly defined as an active belief in the lack of god(s), b) I hold this belief, c) there can be no actual direct evidence for this belief, and d) being a belief about the nature of god(s)(or lack thereof) is sufficient to make something a religion.
(Oddly, I also put 5% down as my probability of there being a god, but this is mostly because the definition is a superset of the simulation hypothesis, and I don't regard a big computer as being a god in any sense we use the term to mean)
Also, I didn't have a digit ratio precise enough to put down, but it seems to be almost exactly 1, possibly slightly higher. (I am unambiguously male, which makes me wonder if my methodology is bad)
I, too, took the survey. (And promptly forgot to claim my karma; oh well.)
Took the survey! Glad to help out.
I took the survey.
Done. Foof that was long...
Completed. Look forward to the results.
And... done. I would like to point out that X-Risk question may be confusing when skimming. P(X-Risk) looks as if it were asking for probability of catastrophe coming to pass, but the explanations spells out that the probability of humanity successfully avoiding catastrophe should be entered.
Survey taken. I agree with others' points re: the potential inaccuracy of the BSRI, although I also presume that if most other people are considering the fact that their interactions with partners / lovers is dramatically different than those with strangers / colleagues, much of the error in the test will be filtered out. For future tests, it may be helpful to put a qualification on the LW part of the test, asking people to self-identify whether they were taking an average of all interactions, or mostly using those with SOs, etc.
For the first time I did it!
And want to thank the person who included "homemaker" in occupations list.
I identify with being "mixed race" far more than any individual race (which feels distinct to me from "other", but it was still the only choice for me).
I learned/confirmed non-zero answers about myself for questions I hadn't previously/strongly considered. This could be considered a "bonus" for taking the survey.
(Finished.)
Not technically a race, but then again neither is "Hispanic", which keeps getting treated as if it was a race. Race is a social construct anyway, so might as well.
I'm a bit surprised "mixed race" didn't occur to me as an option to suggest. It is true that I don't emotionally identify with either of my races, but I don't emotionally identify with "mixed race" either, probably because I wasn't raised in a community of mixed-race individuals and don't know that many mixed-race people. I feel like there isn't really a unique shared culture to unite us. Upon reflection, I've decided that if "mixed race" became available as an option on a future LW survey, I would continue to pick "other", because I really do identify with the human race more than anything else. The word "identify" is key though. If it simply asked what race I am, I would defer to the general consensus for how people should be classified, because I'd assume that's how the survey-writers want us to answer.
In the social milieu where I live, ‘Hispanic’ is definitely a race. And for that matter, Arabs and South Asians aren't White either. If someone has in mind a classification of human beings in which these are technically not the case, then that's fine, but they should come up with another word for it. The term ‘race’ is highly politically charged, and they will never be understood if they use it in a technical way that conflicts with its social usage.
Done.
Also, concerning the psychological states. I was diagnosed with a certain something, but the results were largely inconclusive. Chose "was diagnosed".
I also filled in the survey! Hurrah for laboureous data gathering.
Done :)
EDIT: and +1 to everyone. It took me more doing that than the survey :|
Did the survey. Seemed shorter than last year but I haven't gone back to double check how long last year's was.
In regards to the question on what sort of job you have, I selected 'other' because I work in a factory. I considered selecting 'business' since the factory is owned by a for-profit business, but given that many of the other options were professional positions where one might also be an employee of a business, and because my job is a labor union job rather than a professional position, I took the 'business' option to be more along the lines of e.g. owning a business. I might suggest adding other options like 'manufacturing labor' or the like in the future, if you get enough similar responses to warrant adding those sort of options.
Partial success. I meant to fill in the survey completely, but my internet froze at calibration question 5. In an attempt to revive it, I pressed Enter, which resulted in submission of the incomplete survey. Now what ?
Take it again, and report here (which you pretty much already did) that there is an incomplete survey submitted just before or just after calibration question 5, and it should not be counted.
ETA: Not that I know what you're officially supposed to do, but that's what many people so far did do.
taken ^_^
Did the survey. It felt much shorter this year.
Took the survey. Did not read the comments first. Here are my observations after filling it out and reading the comments:
Problems encountered:
Criticism of questions:
I realize after the fact that when answering “how many books have you read”, I counted only things which are books in the sense of "the kind of thing that has an ISBN", excluding book-length self-published-on-the-internet documents, and also thought only of new books as opposed to rereads. I request that future versions of this question clarify what counts as a book and whether rereading counts.
"Hours Online": what counts as "on the Internet" in today's world is unclear. If I'm writing a book in Google Docs, does that count? If I'm focused on a problem, but I have an IRC channel open in the corner of my screen, does that count? If I'm walking down the street and my phone notifies me of a post which I immediately read, does that count?
Generally: there is a spectrum of plausible interpretations from "performing any activity which requires a functioning Internet connection" (broad definition) to "aimless web surfing" (narrow definition).
"Moral Views" could benefit from links to definitions.
I used the statistic for my “Everything” block set on LeechBlock, which amounts to interpreting “the Internet” as “the WWW”, but I now realize that maybe time spent reading/writing e-mails and/or on the Facebook Messenger app on my phone should also count.
FINISHED. ALL OF IT. \m/ Literally superhuman.
TIL I'm undifferentiated according to the BSRI... huh.
Karma for all, per tradition. <3
- a long time lurker
P.S. You can trashcan the premature submission that answers Part 8's first question with 23200. While revising my predicted date of the singularity, I brushed my keypad's enter (next to the 3) by mistake. ಠ_ಠ
Nice choice of username. :-)
Took the survey! Even the digit ration thing! I hope enough people did that for it to be useful.
For the future, in the case of multiple choice questions it might be nice to have an "unselect" option. (Some of the questions say "if you don't know leave blank" or similar and then if you accidentally click an option you are forced to choose something)
Took the survey. I almost missed it since I don't really read Main these days.
Are options 3/4 on the BSRI backwards? To me "occasionally" is rarer than "sometimes".
I think so too. I found that part odd.
Did it, as every year. Thanks for your work.
I think the question on P(God) is a lot more difficult to answer than the surveyors realize. We're all cognizant of the possibility of the known universe being a simulation, a machine constructed by some intelligent entity in a higher level universe*. Some of us consider the probability of the scenario Simulation to be high, if not absolute for reasons I wont go into here.
Many of us are define "natural" as "happened in reality", thus they define "supernatural" as "did not happen". Those may rightfully assign literal 0 to P(God), that is a statement as sure as the axioms of the logic you formulate it in. The rest of us, though, those of us who believe that all words should by virtue of their existence have a use, have to think a bit more. If "Supernatural" means anything, I'd be surprised if anyone here bears a definition that does not render Simulation equivalent to the scenario God as God was defined in the survey.
To me, "Supernatural", if you're going to use it, could only mean "so mysterious as to be beyond being reasoned about or modelled". The work of the simulator's hand would definitely qualify as such, and so too would the simulator itself. Lo, a supernatural creator. God is reality.
Supernatural under a definition which implies it cannot exist still has a use. The word is a useful label to talk about people's beliefs; of course it's possible to believe in things which cannot exist.
FWIW, this line of reasoning comes up pretty regularly (especially in response to that survey question), so if the surveyors fail to realize the associated difficulties, it's not through failure to have it pointed out. I suspect they realize it just fine.
For my own part, I just skip questions that I don't know how to answer and move on.
Incidentally, LW has a preferred local understanding of "supernatural," which derives from this post. That's not to say everyone here thinks it's a good definition -- I don't, for example -- but it's probably the best Schelling point to use when a shared understanding is important.
Continuing to complain about it may still have an effect though. I personally think they should post the definition they're using for "supernatural" in the description for the question, maybe right below their current description.
Ah. Hardly incidental. I wish I'd known about that. I hold that the definition (if it belongs to anyone at all) belongs to those who self-identify as believers in the supernatural, this form feels far more like what I'd expect to find in their heads. Great clumbering atomic concepts that can't be broken down to the stuff of ordinary reasoning.
(nods)
For my own part, I try to avoid using words whose definitions are saliently ambiguous, and when I am listening to others do so I try as well as I can to understand what they mean to convey by using the phrase, and otherwise try to avoid getting too tangled up in questions of what ambiguous phrases really mean.
When it comes to "supernatural"... the people I listen to who (claim to) believe in the supernatural mostly just seem to be referring to events that aren't explicable by or are inconsistent with modern scientific consensus beliefs. That is, it seems to be an epistemological category, not an ontological one.
And while it's certainly possible to get into a whole discussion of whether any given event falls in that category or not, on a broader level it doesn't matter much to the broader question of whether such events can occur. I mean, of course such events occur with regularity, since the modern scientific consensus at any given moment is always an incomplete (and to a lesser extent outright inaccurate) and evolving model of reality. I agree with that much completely.
They don't, as far as I can tell, have any consistent beliefs one way or the other about whether ontologically basic mental entities are at the core of those events. For example, I have several friends who (claim to) believe that the spirits of dead people can manifest themselves physically in various contexts, but they have no more of a notion of whether those spirits are ontologically basic mental entities than I have of the mineral composition of Ceres.
Of course, there's also a subset of those folks who argue that since scientific consensus is incomplete/inaccurate, they're allowed to hold on to whatever explanations they're most comfortable/familiar with, which frequently includes traditional occult legends and memes from various cultures. But that's a fallacy of reasoning that seems entirely orthogonal to the question of what they mean by "supernatural."
I somehow doubt that if it was suddenly discovered that cigarette smoking was good for your health, many people would refer to that as supernatural, even though that would be inconsistent with modern scientific consensus beliefs.
Done!
I really like the calibration questions and would like to see more of them.
Where were the questions on things like Newcomb's paradox?
I'd like the option to enter (rough) confidence intervals, and I'd think they'd be useful for analysis.
Why not expand the survey? People could always leave stuff out that they don't want to answer.
Uh, did the survey a few days ago. Bit late to the punch, I suppose.
I took the whole thing! That's two years in a row.
Done. Though I feel guilty about skipping a few of the more involved questions.
Done, and I did many (but not all) of the extra credit questions.
Took the survey. Thanks for the karma, everyone.
Finished the survey! I'm curious to see what the results will be. Finding my digit ratio was interesting. I expected crazier questions.
When I first saw that there was going to be a digit ratio question, my first thought was that the survey was going to ask us to estimate our digit ratios, estimate our confidence in our estimates, and then measure the true ratios to see how far off we were. :P
Mission Accomplished.
I definitely want to see the results! For reference, 2013: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jj0/2013_survey_results/
I wonder if we could get a chart with the data matched up over time? Chart community changes over time?
Did the survey. Mischief managed.
Took the survey!
Also, a frequent lurker who has finally made an account!
I completed the survey.
Without an accompanying glossary, my formulation consistently lurked in the critical analysis of the question. At one point I laughed under my breath pondering which resource would rusticate alternative interpretations. A modern Attorney, or Socrates himself!
Taken, in full
Bravo! At this point, having actually gone through the steps of scanning the outline of one's own hand and recording the digit ratios is a heroic feat. You have gone beyond expectations, achieving what many of us could not.
I took the survey.
Took the survey. Anyone else concerned that "largest bone in the body" isn't very well-defined? Largest by volume, longest measurement, ... ?
It has been reported here that largest volume, longest length, and largest mass all give the same result.
That still doesn't help for the purposes of calibration, when you have uncertainty over whether these are all the same.
Good point.
Did the survey!
Minor quibble:
Seems like bad wording - what if you're in exactly one polyamorous relationship? Your partner could be seeing other people, and even if you're not seeing anyone else you wouldn't call it monogamous.
I did it, I did it, I did it, yay!
Took the survey a few days ago, and forgot to even comment! Thanks Yvain and looking forward to seeing what comes out of it
Took the survey! Some very interesting questions; I look forward to the analysis.
Survey complete!
I always look forward to seeing the results of these.
I took the survey. I won't give it back, either.
Done. Thank you for running these.
I took the survey.
The only part I wasn't sure about how to answer was the P(God) and P(supernatural) part. I put a very low probability on P(supernatural) because it sounded like it was talking about supernatural things happening "since the beginning of the universe" which I took as meaning "after the big bang." But for P(God) I put 50% because, hey, who knows, maybe there was a clockmaker God who set up the big bang?
If one were to interpret these survey responses in a certain way, though, they could seem illogical because one might think that P(supernatural) (which includes God in addition to many other possibilities) would strictly have to have a higher probability than the more-specific P(God). But like I said, I took P(supernatural) as referring to stuff after the big bang, whereas I took P(God) as including any time even before the big bang.
My house is currently: me, wife, daughter, sister, another sister, mother, father. I put "with partner and/or children", but that doesn't seem like a good fit.
This makes me feel like I should have an IQ number to put here? Is that a thing people usually have?
I used a picture of my hand. We're just going for ratios, so that should be fine, and it's a lot easier.
Only if you're sure your hand is perpendicular to the line of sight of your camera (and not too close to it), otherwise you might get foreshortening effects.
Maybe there should be an ‘extended family’ option.
My only two comments are one I made on that post inviting lurkers to post and this one, but I did take last years survey for what it's worth. Though I don't recall my answers to last year's survey, I suspect they line up pretty well with this year's. I wonder if there's any potential in the data to track how respondents answers change over time.
Took it.
This is my second year taking the survey. I wish I remembered what my answers were last year so I could see how I've changed.
Did the survey.
I started reading the articles only recently and just registered the account now.
The political ideology question seems to equate libertarian with libertarian capitalist, and communist with totalitarian There's no option for libertarian communism/socialism.
Also, the moral philosophy question seems to assume one believes moral questions have truth values. "None" isn't given as a choice.
The first option reads "Moral statements don't express propositions and can neither be true nor false." I'm curious what else you wanted. The second clause without the first?
There were ‘left-libertarian’ and ‘anarchist’.
"None" is presumably included in "Other", though next year it should probably be a separate option.
That looks like an oxymoron to me.
I did the survey. Gadzooks!
I was oh-so-tempted to enter “Over 9000!” in there.
As of this moment, you have exactly 10000. Good job! (Thanks in part to whoever downvoted your comment here.)
Took the survey.
Completed survey less annoying question that required using an annoying scanner that makes annoying noises (I am feeling annoyed). Almost skipped it, but realized that the attitudes of ex-website-regulars might be of interest.
I'm a bit unhappy about the options for metaethical positions. I object to the identification of non-cognitivism with emotivism, because if non-cognitivism is defined as the position that moral statements don't have truth-values, then I'm a non-cognitivist, but I still hold that there are logical relationships between moral statements, and between moral and factual statements.
I suggested the metaethics question, and I'm sorry for any inadequacies in my descriptions. I used emotivism as the example for non-cognitivism because it's the form of it with which I'm most familiar, and because it would've been difficult to come up with a general example that would encompass all forms of non-cognitivism.
It was similarly difficult to come up with a general example for constructivism - my example is along the lines of Hobbesian constructivism, with which other constructivists may disagree.
I was mostly irked that "the position from the Sequences" wasn't an option (although I quite understand why you'd want to avoid parochial signalling), as neither your definition of subjectivist nor substantive realist seemed to capture it adequately. I eventually opted for the latter.
The formulation of the question didn't quite make it clear that emotivism was just intended as an example for one possible non-cognitivist position. That's what I objected to. As an example, it's fine of course - it is, after all, the most well-known such position.
Can you expand on that? How do you have logical relationships among statements that don't have truth-values?
If I think about it in abstract mathematical terms, just as a distance is a relationship between things (positions) that are not distances, one might set up a system in which implication is a truth-valued relationship between things that are not truth values, but I've never heard of such a system.
You can define a notion of logical consequence that isn't preservation of truth and is therefore applicable to sentences that have no truth-values. For example, define a state as some sort of thing, define what it means for a sentence to be accepted in a state, and then define consequence as preservation of acceptance. But you still can't identify acceptance with truth because you'll have a separate notion of the truth which, in turn, is used in the definition of acceptance. It's just that this notion of truth is only defined for some sentences of the language. (As a very simple case, say a state is a set of worlds, and a non-modal sentence φ is accepted in a state s iff φ is true in all worlds w in s.)
Mark Schröder and Seth Yalcin are two people on the philosophical side who defend modal expressivism with a semantics of that sort. On the more logico-linguistic side, there's lots of Dutch people, for example Frank Veltman and Jeroen Groenendijk.
This depends on how you think about things (and what you count as a truth value), but arguably, ‘x = 3’ and ‘x² = 9’ do not have truth values, but ‘if x = 3, then x² = 9’ does.
I would say that "x=3" has a function from values of x to truth values, as does "if x = 3, then x² = 9" (a constant function to the value "true").
Sure, that's one way to look at it. And a function from values of x to truth values is not itself a truth value. You may say that a constant function from values of x to the value True is not itself a truth value either, but it's much closer (after all, you know which one it would be if it were one), so it's a minor shift to your way of looking at it to get what I said.
Now consider ‘If x² = 9, then x = 3’. A lot of people would naturally want to label that False (at least if they remember about negative numbers). As a function from values of x to truth values, this is not constant (and in fact it assigns True to every real value of x except one), so this is not even the same way of looking at things as in my previous paragraph. But it's common.
So if you want implication between non-truth-values to be a truth value consistently, then this is how I would do it.
I completed the survey.
Yvain, in the "Referrals" section I feel the wording is a little ambiguous in what you should do if you were referred by Overcoming Bias but you've not "Been here since it was started in the Overcoming Bias days". I think you should answer "Referred by a link on another blog or website" on the first one and write "Overcoming Bias" in the second question despite the "other than Overcoming Bias" in it. But I'm not completely confident that this is what you would expect, or if other people would read it the same way.
Count me surveyed.
Took the survey! A few things:
I'm afraid my answer to the singularity start date is going to get thrown out, because I peg it to have started in the past with the start of the limited liability corporation. I know this is non-standard and weird, but it is genuine.
I'm a little disappointed that more of the suggestions from last year's results weren't included. This survey was nowhere near too long and I think that more optional questions (that don't involve outside tests) would add value.
Still frustrated with 'highest degree completed' not being 'highest degree completed or in progress.'
Don't reuse your password from last year! The public ones were all published! And try harder to make your's unique - last year there were a couple duplicates. If you put 'SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE', you're doing it wrong.
Do you really mean that the advent of the LLC marks the Singularity? I would have thought UFAI; the Singularity implies (to me) a level of incomprehensibility (by those before it) that I don't think is really true.
I see the advent of modern corporations as the start of independent agents competing for resources and striving for their own goals. It also is when we started seeing the exponential growth that defines our current age, and while there were many other factors that played into this growth, it's a convenient marker. The standard thought is that the singularity is the moment when the speed of exponential growth outpaces the human ability to process that information in real time. I think that definition is too human-centric, and I'd rather refer to the phenomenon of exponential growth as a longer continuous process.
So the formation of LLCs was the start of the Singularity, and we haven't seen the end yet. Like I said, non-standard and weird.
The ritual has been completed. I await my karmic reword, as per tradition.
There was a lot of good variance in the calibration questions (for me), so nice job thinking of them! Gur ivqrb tnzr dhrfgvba va cnegvphyne fhecevfrq zr jura V ybbxrq hc gur nafjre, nf rira nf n uhtr Zvarpensg sna V unqa'g ernyvmrq vg orng bhg frpbaq cynpr ol 3 zvyyvba.
Also, in a fit of needless cleverness, I made my public key decryptable (by my private key) into a plaintext message that works as an extra layer of identification in the case that I win the money.
Took the survey - looking forward to the results!
I have taken the survey, including the digit ratio question.
Since there was a box to be included in the SSC survey, I just a little bit disappointed there wasn't a question for favourite SSC post to go with the favourite LessWrong post question.
Hello, I'm decloaking from lurker status to say that I took the survey.
Calibration question for the Religious Denomination and P(Religion) questions:
Do the terms "believe" and "correct", respectively, in these questions refer strictly to the supernatural elements of a religion (accuracy of creation story, reification of pantheon, etc.)? Or more broadly over its entire catechism?
In other words, if a virtue ethicist were to feel that Floobian morality is pretty darn sound, but not truly believe that Floob herself literally sang the cosmos into existence... would you call that person a Floobist? Or does a point of disagreement constitute disbelief / incorrectness?
Given the recent example of the Pope coming out in favor of science's version of the origins of everything, I think this is a relevant distinction to draw.
I typed “Please taboo “correct”” into the P(Religion) question.
Here are the answers to the calibration questions if anyone is curious (rot13):
Q: What is the largest single bone in the human body?
A: Gur srzhe (be guvtuobar) vf gur ybatrfg, urnivrfg, naq zbfg ibyhzvabhf obar va gur uhzna obql. Vg znxrf hc 26% bs na vaqvivqhny'f urvtug ba vgf bja. Gur gvovn (be fuvaobar) vf gur frpbaq ybatrfg, naq V pbhyqa'g svaq vasbezngvba ba gur frpbaq urnivrfg. Hapyrne vs gur cryivf pbhagf, orpnhfr gur cryivf vf znqr bs frireny obarf shfrq gbtrgure.
Q: In what US state was Barack Obama born?
A: Unjnvv. Gurer jnf na bqq pbafcvenpl gurbel gung Bonzn jnf npghnyyl obea va Xraln naq gung uvf Unjnvvna ovegu pregvsvpngr jnf snxrq.
Q: The Battle of Trafalgar was fought off the coast of which country?
A: Fcnva. Gur 1805 Onggyr bs Gensnytne jnf sbhtug whfg bss gur pbnfg bs Pncr Gensnytne, Fcnva. Gur Oevgvfu fbhaqyl qrsrngrq n pbzovarq Serapu naq Fcnavfu anil, ybfvat abg n fvatyr fuvc gb gurve 22. Vg jnf gur zbfg qrpvfvir aniny ivpgbel bs gur Ancbyrbavp Jnef.
Q: Who is the one-eyed chief god of Norse mythology, sometimes called "the All-Father"?
A: Bqva. Bqva vf gur Nyysngure bs gur Abefr Tbqf, naq gur ehyre bs Nftneq (juvpu pbagnvaf Inyunyyn). Ur tbhtrq bhg bar bs uvf rlrf va beqre gb qevax sebz gur Jryy bs Jvfqbz naq va qbvat fb tnva xabjyrqtr bs nyy guvatf.
Q: What is the last name of the famous scientist who received the Nobel Prize in 1932, which the prize committee described as being "for the creation of quantum mechanics"?
A: Urvfraoret. Jreare Urvfraoret jba gur 1932 Abory Cevmr va culfvpf sbe 'gur perngvba bs dhnaghz zrpunavpf', juvpu jnf npghnyyl njneqrq gb uvz va 1933 (gur Abory pbzzvggrr sryg gung ab 1932 cncref qrfreirq gur cevmr naq fb njneqrq gur 1932 njneq va 1933). Fbzr pbagebirefl rkvfgf nf gb jul Znk Obea qvq abg funer gur cevmr.
Q: What is the densest planet in the solar system?
A: Rnegu vf gur qrafrfg cynarg va gur fbyne flfgrz, jvgu n qrafvgl bs 5.51t/pz^3. Vg vf sbyybjrq ol Zrephel (5.43t/pz^3), Irahf (5.20t/pz^3), naq Znef (3.94t/pz^3). Fnghea vf gur yrnfg qrafr, ng 0.68t/pz^3 (vg pbhyq sybng va jngre).
Q: What famous Biblical figure had two wives named Rachel and Leah?
A: Wnpbo. Wnpbo gevrq gb zneel gur snezre tvey Enpury, ohg ba gur jrqqvat qnl Enpury'f sngure fjvgpurq ure jvgu ure fvfgre Yrnu naq Wnpbo vanqiregragyl zneevrq gur jebat tvey. Gur sngure nterrq gb yrg uvz zneel Enpury nf jryy vs Wnpbo jbexrq sbe uvz sbe na nqqvgvbany 7 lrnef, juvpu ur qvq. Wnpbo jrag ba gb sbhaq gur 12 gevorf bs Vfenry, znxvat uvz gur sngure bs gur Vfenryvgrf.
Q: What organelle, believed to be descended from ancient symbiotic intracellular bacteria, is sometimes called "the powerhouse of the cell"?
A: Zvgbpubaqevba (be zvgbpubaqevn). Gurfr cebqhpr raretl sbe gur pryy va gur sbez bs NGC naq ner gurbevmrq gb unir bapr orra vaqrcraqrag onpgrevn gung zretrq jvgu bgure pryyf va n flzovbgvp eryngvbafuvc. Guvf gurbel vf pnyyrq flzovbtravfvf.
Q: The three most populous countries in the world are China, India, and the United States. Which country is number four?
A: Vaqbarfvn, jvgu 252 zvyyvba crbcyr. Sbyybjrq ol Oenmvy (203 zvyyvba), Cnxvfgna (188 zvyyvba), naq Avtrevn (178 zvyyvba).
Q: What is the best-selling computer game of all time?
A: Zvarpensg, juvpu unf fbyq 17 zvyyvba pbcvrf. Jbeyq bs Jnepensg, Qvnoyb VVV, Unys-Yvsr 2, Fgnepensg, naq Gur Fvzf 3 unir nyy fbyq bire 10 zvyyvba pbcvrf.
Since Minesweeper comes with Windows, it easily beats Minecraft for "best selling game".
Nobody actually buys Minesweeper, so I don't think it counts as a bestselling game.
Having said this, the claims about the bestselling game of all time upthread sound wrong to me. The first game that came to mind, Wikipedia says this about it:
which handily beats Minecraft.
I stated that all disputes would be resolved by Wikipedia, and here is Wikipedia's verdict on the matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games
The question in the survey is:
"computer game" != "PC game"
Why not this list?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games
Well the question did say computer game ...
Which is different from PC games.
I suppose it comes down to whether Yvain was looking for the best selling video game of all time, or the best selling PC game of all time. 'Computer game' is a little ambiguous.
Ng nal engr, vg'f rvgure Grgevf be Zvarpensg qrcraqvat ba lbhe zrgevp. uggc://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Yvfgbsorfg-fryyvativqrbtnzrf
I was confused too. Not only by "did he mean video game?", but also "how does he define sales?".
I picked Super Mario Bros and called it a day.
Ner lbh fher nobhg guvf? Fbzr Tbbtyvat tvirf n znff nebhaq 260-300t sbe na nqhyg srzhe, pbzcnerq gb 1xt sbe n fxhyy, nygubhtu tenagrq abar bs gur uvgf V svaq frrz greevoyl fpubyneyl.
Did the survey. Thank you once again, Yvain.
Survey done!
Did the survey. I don't know what cisgender means, but I assume that's me, as I'm definitely not transgender...
It means experiencing little or no conflict between the gender you're generally treated as, the anatomy of your body, and the gender you regard yourself as.
"Gender normative" is another phrase that sometimes gets used. (More often, no phrase at all gets used and it's treated as an unmarked case... most people understand "male" to mean cis-male, for example.)
It is perhaps worth noting that the term is treated as a tribal signifier on much of the Internet... people who describe themselves as "cisgender" are seen as expressing social alignment with transgender people, which is seen as a "left" position when viewed in U.S. left-right partisan terms.
The reasoning here is that being an unmarked case is a form of social power, so by explicitly marking what would otherwise be an unmarked case, the speaker is... well, I'm not sure what, exactly. Calling attention to that power, I guess. Which in this context is understood as aligning with the relatively powerless, though in other contexts (e.g., white people describing themselves as "white") the reverse is true.
Trans people are oppressed by having the existence of transgenderism denied, so by calling yourself cisgender, you are acknowledging the existence of transgenderism and countering that oppression. But Black people are oppressed by having the existence of race affirmed and exaggerated, so by calling yourself White, you are emphasizing race and exacerbating that oppression.
From what I've seen on the SJ side, they've done a lot to make white into a marked state (in other words, white people being referred to as white) rather than whiteness being an implied default.
Yeah, "cis-" (on this side of) is the opposite of "trans-" (across or on the other side of). So if you're currently the same sex as the one you were born as, you're cisgnder.
I took the survey.
Did the survey (a couple days ago).
I wasn't here for the last survey- are the results predominantly discussed here and on Yvain's blog?
Yes, Yvain will write a post about the results here once it is finished. I think historically that has been around the start of the new year.
Was anybody else disappointed that the Sex Role Inventory wasn't nearly as raunchy as the name suggested?
I was pretty happy about that, actually.
Done! Ahhh, another year another survey. I feel like I did one just a few months ago. I wish I knew my previous answers about gods, aliens, cryonics, and simulators.
Glad to do the survey, and appreciate that LW takes the views of readers seriously, that's great!
Did the survey! ...And now to upvote everything.
Took the survey! That last one was a hard because I didn't have a ruler :( Also, out of curiosity - has anyone ever had the same Public and Private key before?
Did it! Even the digit ratio question! (which is why I am taking it relatively late)
Unsurprisingly, my digit ratio is pretty feminine (0.969 averaged over both hands).
Did the survey, except digit ratio due to lack of precision measuring devices.
As for feedback, I had some trouble interpreting a few of the questions. There were some times when you defined terms like human biodiversity, and I agreed with some of the claims in the definition but not others, but since I had no real way to weight the claims by importance it was difficult for me to turn my conclusions into a single confidence measurement. I also had no idea weather the best-selling computer game question was supposed to account for inflation or general growth of the videogame market, nor whether we were measuring in terms of copies sold or revenue earned or something else entirely, nor whether console games or games that "sell" for 0$ counted. I ended up copping out by listing a game that is technically included in a bit of software I knew sold very well for its time (and not for free), but the software was not sold as a computer game.
Also, a weird thing happened with the calibration questions When I was very unsure which of a large number of possible answers was correct, and especially if I wasn't even sure how many possible answers there were, I found myself wanting to write an answer that was obviously impossible (like writing "Mars" for Obama's birth state) and putting a 0 for the calibration. I didn't actually do this, but it sure was tempting.
Survey completed, besides the digit ratio.
Survey taken!
Concerning the mental health questions, how do you weight self diagnosed and diagnosed by psychiatrist? Do you think, given the Less Wrong demographic self diagnosis is less or more reliable (intuitively I would tend to more). How should cases like myself answer - diagnosed with asperger by psychiatrist1, two years later diagnosed with ADHD but not asperger by psychiatrist2, several month later diagnosed as neither asperger nor ADHD by psychiatrist3?
FWIW, I said I "strongly disagree" with Feminism and Social Justice, even though I find their Wikipedia descriptions generally agreeable. I think in the future, it would be good to split those questions into pairs: a) "Do you agree with the stated mission goals of X ?", and b). "Do you agree with the actions of people who identify as X ?"
If we're going to bother to ask (b) at all, it's probably best to frame it in a way that doesn't make "some but not all of them" the obvious answer.
For example, perhaps you could identify some groups you consider definitive of Feminism and Social Justice, and we could ask "How often do you agree with $group?" (IIRC, on their own blog Yvain often uses something called jezebel as a metric for what feminists believe.)
I took the survey. Finding a ruler with the correct precision was difficult so I skipped the digit question. Anyone in the Bay Area with the requisite equipment?
Survey complete.
Taken.
Did that too.
I took the survey. Though I can’t remember my SAT score, which I know I put on the last survey – I wish I had saved my answers last year.
You are probably one of the few people who can identify an exact year when you forgot your SAT scores.
Hopefully roryokane will remember this year … it may come up on a survey later!
I'm new to LW and have been lurking and catching up for a while, but I answered the survey anyway. Working on gathering more ground so I'll be able to increase my interactions soon enough.
Nine of the questions ask which of various options you "identify with": country, race, gender, political category, moral philosophy, political category (subdivided), effective altruism, gender again, and meta-ethics. I am unclear about this concept, and for the purpose of making a choice, mentally replaced it by respectively "reside in long-term", "are", "are", "believe", etc. Would such rephrasings have changed anyone's answers to any of the questions?
"Identify with" reminds me of the Discworld's Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson, who is a six-foot-six human who "identifies as" a dwarf, and who is accepted as such by the dwarves, even though everyone, including him, knows he's human. I don't know Terry Pratchett's thinking behind the character, but Carrot strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum of the concept.
In short, Carrot's genetics play only a minor part in his sense of identity; he is genetically human but culturally dwarf, and thus in most situations he counts as both.
FYI I don't think your view matches Pratchett's intention (which of course doesn't make you wrong). At one point Vimes (I think) asks Carrot about this, and Carrot replies that having dwarves for parents has never been a dwarfish definition of being a dwarf.
Ultimately the sensitivity of these question comes from the fear of hidden inferences--the concern that when you say Carrot is not a dwarf, you're implying that it's wrong for him to observe dwarfish customs. I suppose you have the equal and opposite worry, that once we start calling Carrot a dwarf we'll build him a house with four-foot ceilings?
Another job for taboo.
"Identifying with" something or "Identifying As" something has an explicit meaning to me, which is that it is something I would call myself. Some of this may come from training and industry I'm in, but it's what you think of yourself as.
For instance, someone who doodles occasionally may or may not identify "as an artist", but anyone who paints professionally almost certainly identifies as an artist. Someone who paints regularly as a hobby probably identifies as an artist; the doodler may be more idle about it and not really think of it as being an essential quality of self: It is something that person does, not something that person is.
From such lines of thinking come statements such as, "Ich bin ein Berliner." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner
There are probably plenty of people who paint walls who don't identify as artists.
And, despite this entire comments section, there are some LessWrongers who don't identify as pedants!
:P
Parallel examples:
Almost everyone below a certain age plays video/computer games, but only a small subset of those people would self-identify as "gamers."
You exercise, but do you think of yourself as an "athlete"? You lift weights, but do you think of yourself as a "weightlifter"?
You are married, but is "spouse" a core part of your identity? You have reproduced, but is "parent" part of your core identity?
The spouse enters.
It better be.
The spouse exits.
:-D
I see, I think. It does not seem to be something that I do. For example, I play taiko regularly as a hobby, but if someone asked, "but do you identify as a taiko player", my reaction would be "wuh?"
Going off on a tangent, how fixed or malleable is this mental experience? Has anyone who does "identify with" this or that tried as a meditative exercise, experimentally identifying with other things instead?
I don't think it's a reductio. Actually, I think it's almost the opposite; one of Pratchett's usual schticks is drawing up exaggerated social and political concepts that look absurd on their faces but later turn out to make internal sense. Looked at in that light, it's pretty clear what's going on: Carrot isn't phenotypically a dwarf, but he's culturally a dwarf, and he's accepted as such by Pratchett's dwarves because, to them, dwarvishness is less about being short and beardy and more about the culture. Wearing mail to dinner, being intimately familiar with mine engineering, baking bread that doubles as an assault weapon, et cetera. I don't know for sure, but I suspect the situation Pratchett had in mind was something like being adopted into a religious group normally associated with another ethnicity: his dwarves very often play on religious and traditional themes.
As Pratchett's developed Discworld's dwarvish culture more, this has started to make less sense, but the series isn't particularly good at long-term thematic continuity.
Done.
Completed the survey.
Two issues: I put a very low donation to charity, even though I consider working for the FHI to be a donation in kind.
Second, I messed up the probabilities, sorry, because I could not give any answer to P(simulation) and P(MWI) other than "NAN" (not a number). I can explain that stance in detail if you want.
Survey completed! Making a note here: Huge success!
Took the survey. I loved the calibration questions; it takes ~20 times more effort to come up with the confidence level than the answer, and I always feel I learn about myself. I've messed with some calibration question games before and was downright astonished at how well calibrated I was (the irony is not lost on me); but the questions were all in A-vs-B format rather than free form. The A-vs-B format is much easier to appear to be well calibrated.
Once you choose your answer, you can still calibrate yourself in A vs B form: ask if your answer is correct (A) or incorrect (B).
done. I always like doing these. how will the SSC version be different?
Done.
Competed the survey. Thanks for doing this, the results are always interesting.
What definition of the Singularity did you use for the question about when you think the Singularity is likely?
I think I used the one about the future becoming incomprehensible.
I'm pretty sure you could get an incomprehensible future by increasing everyone's IQ by 40 points (I know, it's a vague concept) and this might be easier than AI.
I did the survey! I don't have sufficiently convenient access to a photocopier or scanner to be induced to do the digit ratio thing though.
Done, without finger question.