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...
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.
Third time starting the survey, first time finishing it!
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)
Not sure if your're countersignaling, but if you aren't, why mention it?
Regarding karma? Because I'm not a big fan of karma whoring, and I don't want to feel like I'm just posting to get free upvotes. It feels unearned. I wanted to post to make an actual point, without feeling like I was going to get +50 votes just for breathing.
I'd consider partaking in the survey worthy of positive reinforcement, but I'd agree that the average karma award a bit out of proportion. Regardless I think it's a rather interesting phenomena to dislike getting karma.
Also I realized that my previous comment may have been unintentionally hostile. I mean, suppose that you indeed did countersignal, then my comment could be interpreted as a challenge to your genuinity. I hope it's clear that I intend to be game theoretically nice, but I'm really uncertain how to accomplish that in a such situation.
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.
The social usage of "race" is pretty clear: it is a set of people which look similar (and where the skin color is a very important characteristic in deciding on the degree of similarity).
No, it is a set of people who have similar ancestry and thus presumable similar features and behaviors (the latter is the part where it shades into non-genetics since it is a combination of nature and nurture). For example, no one considers dark skinned Indians to be "Black".
I've also seen it used to refer to tribes since these tend to overlap the above definition.
No, I don't think that quite captures it either. Under your definition, families would be races, but that doesn't accord with the typical "social usage of 'race'".
About six months ago, a woman surprised me in a conversation by describing her (very) visibly South Asian boyfriend as "black".
I'm sceptical that "no one considers dark skinned Indians to be 'Black'"; I can readily find examples of people categorizing South Asians as black until as recently as 20-30 years ago. It's no longer common (hence my surprise when someone does it) but it's not an utterly unfamiliar usage, either.
I notice that all of the concrete examples I can think of are British. Presumably this is a usage difference between Britain and the US. (That the operationalization of "black" varies across time & place is interesting.)
Are you sure doctors (of the medical kind) agree?
EDIT: Brief googling couldn't confirm either of the statements marked by “IIUC”, so take them with a huge grain of salt. Also, “no”, “no-one” etc. in the penultimate paragraph aren't meant 100% literally -- no doubt some people say and do lots of weird stuff.
Assume for the sake of argument that in Northern Ireland certain medically relevant alleles are much more common among Protestants than among Catholics or vice versa (not terribly unlikely, given that IIUC Protestants are mainly of Anglo-Saxon ancestry and Catholics are mainly of Gaelic ancestry). Would that make Protestatism and Catholicism not social constructs?
Or, the fact that people with different ancestries have different genotypes and phenotypes is not a social construct, but that's just the motte. The fact that you write on the census which of those groups you're in, they tend to live on different neighbourhoods, not interbreed, have distinctive cultures, have quotas in universities, etc., is the bailey.
(Here in Italy, IIUC the alleles for blond hair mostly originate from Germanic immigrants in the middle ages, and probably correlate with all kinds of other genes; but blonds and brunets freely interbreed, there's no such thing as a blond church or Germanic-Italian music or a blond school or Germanic-Italian studies departments, no-one is ever accused of acting brunet, no-one refrains from going to a festival because it's a brunet people thing, there's no blog titled Stuff Brunet People Like, IIRC we aren't asked for our hair colour on the census, and it wouldn't occur to anyone to figure out the percentage of blonds in a university.)
So I'd say we have two correlated but distinct concepts, race2 which is a social construct, and race1 which isn't except insofar as race2 reduces intermarriages which would otherwise dilute race1 over time to some extent.
If we're taking about the usage of the word "race" then there are many possible meanings. Generally speaking, the proper usage depends on the context and on the aims of the speaker.
Certainly, some people use the word "race" to refer to social constructs -- but that's not the issue. The issue is whether race is a valid biological construct -- and many people say no.
It seems to me there's not just one issue here; the conversation has drifted from one to another in a rather ad hoc way. Whether race is a valid biological construct is different from the issue raised above ("Are you sure doctors (of the medical kind) agree [that race is a social construct]?"), which itself doesn't, to my eye, address Elund's original comment ("Race is a social construct anyway").
Let's cut to the chase. The issue is whether there are genetically similar populations with some phenotype features which are important and significantly different from other populations. IQ is the classic example. We are talking here in purely biological terms.
There are certainly populations with higher within-population genetic similarity than between-population genetic similarity, and which differ significantly in IQ and other important phenotypic features. It presumably follows because of reductionism that most of those phenotypic differences, including those in IQ, are mostly biological; big differences in IQ are probably manifestations of differences in brains, and brains are biology. (I'm assuming the referents of "We are talking here in purely biological terms" are differences in IQ and other phenotypic features...?)
(Seems to me this issue too is pretty distant from the remark that kicked things off. It's hard for me to avoid the impression that "cut to the chase" really means "ride a personal hobby-horse" here.)
Well, speaking empirically, the phrase "race is a social construct" is pretty often followed by "therefore all races are the same in all important ways". "Social construct" implies an arbitrary choice -- our society decided to split humanity into races this way, but another society might do it in an entirely different way and all such ways are equally valid, which is to say, there are no underlying "real" differences.
It's not that it is a personal hobby-horse, it's just that I have some experience in watching similar conversations develop.
I'm now more sure you're riding a hobby-horse. I'd better explain why.
Me too. Which is probably why I had a hunch that, from the start, you pattern matched Elund to the kind of person who says things like "all races are the same in all important ways" — because you'd observed such people before — in spite of Elund not having said that. That hunch now seems to be confirmed.
That pattern matching would make sense to me if, say, in the context of an argument about race & IQ, Elund had started insisting "race is socially constructed so racial IQ differences can't exist haha I win!" as a desperate gimmick to shut down the argument. But the context wasn't a fraught debate like that; Elund's "Race is a social construct anyway" was an aside to explain why they were content with someone treating "mixed race" or "Hispanic" as racial categories, which doesn't sound like a mind-killed person invoking "uh uh uh it's a social construct!" to evade an argument.
So the way you responded to Elund (asking a pointed but not especially relevant question about what doctors think; intimating that Elund was doing an intellectually dishonest post-modernist two-step; asking a question which falsely implied Elund said race wasn't a useful concept; and dragging IQ (hitherto unmentioned) into the conversation) didn't seem consistent with a dispassionate correction. It looked a lot more like taking a hobby-horse out for a canter. Reviewing the argument, I'm not sure I could come up with any empirical question about race where the two of you would disagree on the answer!
Supposing someone wanted to split humanity into arbitrary races based on actual genetics (which is not how the concept of race originally started because genetics wasn't known at the time), it would make sense for most races to be African, since Africa has far more human genetic diversity than all the other continents combined do. The reason races are delineated the way they are now is due to social reasons. (It could possibly make sense when you consider the phenotype though, but due to the outgroup homogeneity bias, I have some doubts.)
Still, regardless of where you set the boundaries between races, there will be average biological differences between them (provided you don't do something biologically ridiculous like classifying whites and Asians as the same race but then classifying their half-white/half-Asian children as a different race).
Race2 is not a valid biological construct. Certain people by “race” mean that, and call race1 other words e.g. “ancestry”.
Sure, there also are people who say that race1 is not a valid biological construct. Bu then again, there also are people who say that Elvis is not dead.
The former are perfectly capable of getting those of a different opinion into a lot of trouble. The latter aren't.
Unfortunately, the former are more likely to get taken seriously than the latter.
I expect that doctors (of the medical kind) would agree as much or more than the average person. Most of the 'Doctor' role is oriented toward enforcing (or following) social norms. They also have relatively little professional incentive to have beliefs about race that match reality (and more than enough compartmentalisation capability to ignore the occasional diagnostic relevance of race). Further, since the medical profession relies on far more arbitrary social constructs than race (for example: Most of the DSM) I'm not sure whether their considering something a social construct should be considered a criticism.
I'd be much more interested what doctors (of the scientific kind, preferably of a relevant field) say.
I think that would depend on the context and on how the question is phrased. Professionally, doctors know quite well that race matters -- e.g. some blood tests have different acceptable ranges depending on your race, the prenatal testing of pregnant women depends on their ancestry, etc.
I think academia is much more politically correct than the medical profession.
You could be right. Now I'm more curious.
There's a pretty big gap between what doctors tell the public and what they tell each other.
There's a nation wide, low profile, supposedly secure internet forum in Finland for doctors only. Identities are checked by a reliable system involving official registries. For some reason it's used mostly by senior doctors, many in higher positions, who happen to know each other, didn't grow with the internet and seem to have discussions with no regard to public image whatsover. Political mind kill seems to stand strong there, and some opinions regarding culture, nationality, race, religion and so on are interesting to say the least from the perspective of political correctness. Even the N-word and the R-word seem to be used quite liberally. Needless to say the same people are masters of PR at their day job.
Note that if it is a site for doctors from Finland then the 'N-word' use is still shocking but far less shocking than if it were in the United States. "Bad words" are actually an example of pure social constructs and second-hand arbitrary negative associations can be expected to be weaker than first hand arbitrary negative associations. (And if it were a forum in China it would mean even less.)
You're probably right. In Finland the word can't be used in casual conversations with people you don't know well unless you want to be pigeonholed forever and using it publicly could definitely end a career. Many of our social norms seem to be borrowed from other cultures because of our desperate need to fit in to ensure survival.
Does Finland have a political correctness problem? The Swedish minority is perfectly fine, and the Russians come and (having bought everything in sight) go. Are there a lot of third-world immigrants?
Well, Finland is next to Sweden which is notorious for taking political correctness to totalitarian levels.
Sweden has a very strong element of conformism in its national culture.
There's definitely a political correctness problem concerning topics like income differences (they're pretty much the lowest anywhere in the first world), third-world immigrants and islam but YMMV. I'm not an expert on history or politics and tend to interact with the world from my comfortable bubble of a strict information diet especially as of late, but as far as I've gathered people are quite patriotic because of our short history as an independent nation. Both Sweden and Russia have historically been an obstacle in that regard and the more nationalist oriented people hold grudges on one level or another because of this reason.
The Finnish-Swedish minority tend to be privileged both in heritage and education and both learning the Swedish language and using it in service professions have been compulsory in Finland for quite some time. For example the Finnish-Swedish have their own quota in med school with easier entrance requirements because of less competition. Naturally this makes less well off people envious. There's significantly more racism against the Russians than the Swedish since Russia is still viewed as a military threat, and polls show this fear is increasing because of late developments in Ukraine and other flexing of Russia's military muscles.
The worst political correctness problems concern third world immigrants and refugees in my opinion, and anyone who brings up problems raised by some of them is very easily labeled a racist and politically crucified. There are problems like letting people in without being able to check their real age i.e. adults pretending to be children, not being able to drive them away when they commit multiple serious crimes, people living on government subsidies with no intention to work ever in their lives etc.
My point is that the human population doesn't divide neatly into discrete categories called "races". There are of course genetic differences, but human variation is a continuum. The way people decide boundaries between races is an arbitrary social one.
Beware The Fallacy Of The <Kinda Brownish>.
You're ignoring the part where I said human variation is a continuum. The fallacy of grey is where people deny the existence of the continuum.
Also, I did mention evidence about people's varying definitions of the "white race" to illustrate how people do in fact use arbitrary social reasons to decide the boundaries between races.
Sorites paradox. Heaps exist regardless.
So, let me repeat. Are you sure doctors (of the medical kind) agree?
It depends on how much they've thought about it. For instance, consider the "white race". A neo-Nazi on Stormfront would likely say that "white" refers only to people of 100% European ancestry, excluding Jews. On the other extreme, some people use it interchangeably with "Caucasian", which, according to its dictionary definition, refers to people of European, North African, Middle Eastern, or Indian ancestry.
Maybe the problem is with terminology. Let's taboo "race" and talk about "gene pools" or "genetic clusters". Will you still say that these are not useful concepts?
I never said race wasn't a useful concept. I specifically said in my earlier post: .
I think my initial post that started this discussion may have been a source of misunderstanding. When I called race a social construct, I wasn't trying to say that race is a useless concept, but instead indicate that it could be useful as a cultural/identity concept. Initially when I talked about "mixed race" and "Hispanic" not technically being races, I was defining race according to the mainstream definition that treats race as a genetically distinct group of people, since that is my default. However, during the part where I talked about how Hispanics are often treated as if they were a race, I was undergoing a shift toward thinking about race as a cultural identity regardless of genetics, which then led me to the statement that race is a social construct. I meant it in a similar way to what people mean when they say that gender is a social construct. When people say that, they're not implying that gender is a useless concept, but that it is a personal subjective choice of identity. Significantly, I then spent the rest of my post talking about race as a personal choice of identity.
The idea that gender is a social construct is a pretty uncontroversial one, as far as I can tell. People seem to be somewhat less likely to say the same thing about race though, probably because "race" as a cultural term doesn't have a satisfactory parallel term to refer to biology the way "gender" has "sex". It didn't matter for me in practice though. I thought of race as a social construct regardless of whether it was approached from a biological or cultural perspective, which is why I didn't feel a need to distinguish between the two in my statement. However, subsequent comments drawing attention to its biological validity (e.g. would doctors agree?) pushed me to address my point underlying my passive implication that the biological aspect is also a social construct, which then skews the discussion in a way that buries much of my original meaning. The social construction of race as a biological concept is not itself adequate to explain why I would support including non-genetic race answers to a race question, but the social construction of race as a subjective personal identity is.
Earlier I was wondering why my comments were getting downvoted. What could possibly be so controversial about the idea that human genetic variation is a continuum, or that linguistic terms are socially constructed? Now I can see that if these are interpreted as if they are supposed to be arguments in support of including non-genetic answers to a race question or a lack of average differences between races, they might seem like bad arguments, but I wasn’t intending them to support those premises, and I didn’t think that people would think I was intending them to.
Part of the reason is that if you restrict to the population of the United States they are (more-or-less) a separate genetic cluster. (Yes, that cluster doen't perfectly correspond to the official definition of Hispanic but a better term doesn't exist).
Only because anyone who dares to point out the obvious truth that it isn't gets called a "sexist transphobe" and unfit for polite society.
Well, I wasn't restricting to the population of the United States. Anyway, race is still a socially constructed identity. This is apparent with mixed-race people who often identify with one race more than another based on how they were raised, how they look, how other people identify them, and whether they act more like a stereotypical member of one of their races than another. The race they identify most with might not be the one that makes up the largest proportion in their ancestry.
My understanding is that gender is specifically used to refer to the socially constructed identities. Biological sex differences get lumped under sex rather than gender, which is why people can believe in the social construct of gender while also believing that biology contributes in some degree to stereotypical gender roles. I'm not an expert on gender though, so I should probably leave it to someone else to debate you on this point.
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 :|
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.
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.
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. :-)
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! Even the digit ration thing! I hope enough people did that for it to be useful.
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.
I agree.
IIRC I gave the same answer for both for exactly this reason, but I might remember wrong and have just considered it.
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.
Done. Thank you for running these.
I took the survey. I won't give it back, either.
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.
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.
Yes, the key thing being perspective. Simple angling is fine, because we just care about ratios, but the closer your hand is to the lens the more angling will distort the measurement through perspective.
Maybe there should be an ‘extended family’ option.
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.
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’.
True, but from the definitions I found on this site, those aren't quite the same.
"None" is presumably included in "Other", though next year it should probably be a separate option.
That looks like an oxymoron to me.
It looks that way to you because you either don't know what libertarianism is or don't know what communism and socialism are (or both).
Of course, that's too snarky. But people (particularly in the USA, less so in Europe) often don't understand the breadth of these positions. In the 19th century (defining people by the words they used to describe themselves), most libertarians were socialists, and many socialists were libertarians. While the main branches of both movements have grown apart, there are still people who identify as both.
Anyway, you should look it up.
Too snarky is OK. The problem is that it's wrong :-P
In the XIX century libertarians didn't exist. Do you mean the anarcho-socialist cluster -- Kropotkin, Bakunin, anarcho-syndicalists and such? Yes, they tried to meld individual freedom with collectivism and were popular for a while. But I would argue that their basic approach was incoherent and they pretty clearly have failed. While both contemporary communistm/socialism and libertarianism might point to them as historical predecessors, I doubt either would be willing to embrace them fully.
I'm talking about the people who called themselves libertarians in the 19th century. The libertarian socialists of today are their intellectual descendents. They exist, and they invented the word ‘libertarian’ (in a political context), and there is no use pretending that they aren't real or that it makes no sense to apply that word to them.
OK, I take back my original comment. While I still don't think "libertarian communism/socialism" is a coherent framework or a meaningful expression nowadays, clearly some people prefer that name for their own political philosophy and that's fine. I guess "anarchists" has the wrong connotations ;-)
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.
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.)
I did the survey. Gadzooks!
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.
That depends on the domain of x. That and the universal quantifier over its domain are typically omitted when they are clear from the context.
Yes, if we're talking only about positive numbers, then ‘If x² = 9, then x = 3’ is true.
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.
Took the survey.
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.
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 contention that "'computer games', as defined by Wikipedia" is "PC games" is, of course, true.
However, did you deliberately intend that people who knew with high confidence Tetris was (by far) the best-selling game played on computers (as computers are defined by Wikipedia) would get caught by not knowing that Wikipedia redirects "computer game" to "PC game" rather than to "video game"?
The question in the survey is:
"computer game" != "PC game"
"computer game" == "PC game"
"video game" != "PC game"