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)
Filled in, but did not do digit lengths because I have no access to a printer or scanner in the near future.
Did the survey!
Did the survey. Also, now I know my digit ratio!
I completed the survey, huzzah!
Done. Too bad the basilisk question wasn't on it; I hope that will one day be possible.
There is no disagreement that only a small percentage of LWers believe in it (just as there's no disagreement that only a small % of scientologists are even aware of the more arcane aspects of their "religion"). But yeah if you had a survey the actual % may be worth listing on RW.
Survey complete! I'd have answered the digit ratio question, but I don't have a ruler of all things at home. Ooh, now to go check my answers for the calibration questions.
Taken! The way you were being so apologetic about the length, I thought it would be much more grueling - I found it quick and fun! :)
Except for the digit lengths, survey taken!
Done - and mildly disappointed that we won't be measuring the prevalence of transponyism this year.
Does this post appear on LW's Main or Discussion pages for anyone else? I only found it via an offsite reference. Edit: Nevermind, I had my Main set to 'Promoted' instead of 'New'.
Taken the survey (would have loved to do digit ratio, but too difficult to get access to the equipment needed).
I am somewhat disappointed to be asked about favorability with a movement without allowing me to distinguish between the ideals of that movement and the movement as it exists (see: feminism and social justice, which, as phenomenon in reality appear to be ways to generate indignation on tumblr -- I love equality but do not use tumblr and I don't see any purpose in being indignant on the internet).
Also, as regards a "Great Stagnation": Strongly Doubt is not the opposite of Strongly Believe. So I have strong doubts where the balance of my estimation is that Cowen is incorrect -- my radio button does not exist, it is too far to one end of the spectrum, despite not being a hyper-radicalized opinion.
There's the movement as it exists, and there's one facet of the movement as it exists. For example (and not to push any particular point of view here, it's just an example), I'm involved in the feminist movement. But I spend no time on Tumblr. Sometimes I read things that reference Tumblr, and my impression is that to get involved on Tumblr would be a colossal waste of time, so I don't do it. (Once in a while somebody links to something on Tumblr, basically saying "Look at this thing that I saw on Tumblr.", and I look at that one thing, but I never feel the urge to do more.)
I also make it a point not to get indignant on the Internet, even when discussing feminism. (Occasionally I get indignant in face-to-face contact, but I have time to edit myself on the Internet.) Most of the feminism that I do on the Internet is arranging face-to-face meetings of feminists, so there's not much to get indignant about. But occasionally I expand my focus to commenting on posts where a discussion, or even an argument, is taking place. The last time that I did that, one person private-messaged me to call me "diplomatic" and another person agreed that I was right after all; both of them had gotten indignant before this, but I hadn't. (To be honest, this foray was more successful than usual, but the usual is neutral, not disastrous.)
So I do not use Tumblr, and I very rarely get indignant on the Internet, but here I am, in the feminist movement as it exists.
I think you should average over your meta-uncertainty and answer according to your overall probability.
You may have misunderstood me.
I have high levels of doubt but some certainty. Let's say I'm 80% unsure but have information that leads me to be 20% sure (or, in other words, the probability I would assign to my analysis being correct is only a bit better than guessing). So I'd want something maybe 1/5th away from "Strongly Doubt". But I am not 1/5th closer to "Strongly Believe". I am 1/5 closer to "Strongly Disbelieve" or "Strongly Disagree", perhaps.
Sorry, I hadn't noticed that the leftmost option was labeled “Strongly doubt” -- I think I must have seen the “Strongly d” part plus the “Strongly believe” label on the rightmost option and my brain must've autocompleted the former to “Strongly disbelieve”.
I would have picked the third radio button rather than the fourth if I had noticed that in time.
I completed the survey (and learned surprising things about my digit ratio)
I accidentally pressed enter and the form was sent away - half-filled.
This is stupid. I sent another form with only the second half of the survey filled out. Dividing line is the population question, which I incorrectly answered with Rot13(Ehffvn).
You might want to rot13 that.
Thanks.
Done.
Didn't have a scanner, so I traced my hand on a piece of paper with a pencil and measured that. Not sure I got enough accuracy to take seriously. Oh, well.
I'm confident you didn't.
Given the ambiguity of the directions, you're probably as close as anyone else.
Done! The length is fine; the questions are interesting and fun to consider.
EDIT: removed concerns about "cryivf" if. "srzhe" nf ynetrfg obar (znff if. yratgu); gur cryivf nccneragyl vfa'g n "fvatyr obar".
You should probably Rot13 this. I scanned the comments before I did the survey, and I couldn't remember why I was so confident in the correct answer, but I was.
Took the survey. I always feel like I did the last one only recently.
Some US states do not have partisan voter registration, so choosing "no party" does not necessarily mean someone would not register by party if that option were available.
Took the survey.
I'm done, but my ruler isn't good enough that I'm super confident in my digit ratios; I would have preferred one less significant digit (no pun intended, but I'll take it anyway).
Did it! I'm shocked that my digit ratio is so high. Like, I figured that it was pretty high, being a bisexual genderfluid "man" (assigned at birth, that is), but I didn't expect it to be greater than 1. Also, it was much shorter than I expected.
I finished the survey.
Is Anti-Agathics a strict superset of Cryonics? That is to say, would someone becoming cryonically frozen and then restored, and then living for 1000 years from that date, count as a success for the anti-agathics question?
I didn't interpret it that way, but then again, I'm not signed up for cryonics.
Whether or not you believe cryonics is plausible, counting cryonics-time-capsule as a means of anti-agathics would bound your anti-agathics probability from below. And the question was unclear.
Definitely had a thought on this order; I went with "don't die at any point and still reach age 1000", though I also don't really consider solutions that involve abandoning bodies counting.
I haven't put too much thought into the plausibility of effective anti-agathics anyway, so I just left that one blank and moved on.
I thought of this last year after I completed the survey, and rated anti-agathics less probable than cryonics. This year I decided cryonics counted, and rated anti-agathics 5% higher than cryonics. But it would be nice for the question to be clearer.
I'm missing something here, I filled in the public and private and keys, but saw no game theory problem. Are we being given equal chances of the monetary reward?
Anyway, fun survey.
Presumably. The idea is to incentivize participation in the more difficult digit-ratio section. (Although, of course, that does create a game-theory problem...)
I did the survey. (Comments on specific aspects appear as replies.)
So I filled out the whole survey, and then I got to the part about the digit ratio, and I thought, OK, I'll do this! But I can't do it now (no photocopier at home, can't trust a measurement to 3 digits if I'm not doing it the same way as others). And I can't keep my answers up until I can do it (no battery in computer, must be turned off to transport, Lazarus plug-in has been problematic). So I put in a public and private key but no data. I will gladly supply the data to you tomorrow, using those keys to identify my survey.
It's time to decouple sexual orientation from gender identity! If my gender is neither male nor female, but I'm primarily attracted to one of those, then I'm neither homosexual nor heterosexual (nor bisexual nor asexual). But neither am I some nebulous other; if only I had a binary gender identity, then suddenly I would have a binary sexual orientation too! Of course, some people identify specifically as homosexual or heterosexual (and some people even have prima-facie contradictory identifications such as both male and lesbian), and you could ask about that if you like, but you should also ask the more fundamental question of which genders one is attracted to.
I don't fit in well with any of the 5 answers to the Political question, and there was no Other, but skipping it also didn't seem right. (Several questions have explicit cases when they are to be skipped, but this was not one of them.) I eventually picked 1 of the 2 that seemed less wrong than the other 3; I would have preferred to pick some sort of non-moderated mixture of those 2. (Actually, that is how I usually describe my politics when asked for a response in the form of a political party: somewhere between the ___ Party and the ___ Party, only more extreme.)
The Complex Affiliation was not a problem. (Actually, I was still torn between 2 answers, but this time I would have been happy with either of them!)
The questions Family Religion and Religious Background seem to parallel the questions Religious Views and Religious Denomination, but they are phrased differently. The first is my family when I was growing up, while the second is simply my family. So as it happened, I was not thinking of the same families when answering them! Perhaps I should have paid more attention the name of the question Religious Background, which I really only noticed just now when I wanted to identify it for this comment. You did not in fact get information about my religious background in my answer to that question; you got information about the religious background of my spouse of less than 2 years (and my stepchild).
I'd be much more comfortable answering the probability sections if I knew what epsilon is. I usually say 0% when the value is less than 0.5% and 100% when the value is greater than 99.5%, rounding to the nearest whole percentage, on the grounds that the whole point of using percentages is to avoid explicit fractions (common or decimal). But then you ruin this by explicitly mentioning 0.5% and 99.99% as possible answers. If you had put a hard limit on the number of digits allowed, then I could have used that. In the end, since I saw no consistent guidance, I fell back on my usual practice. The result is that I had a lot of 0s and 100s; hopefully that won't mess up your algorithms.
ETA: It is probably relevant here that I am a naturally lazy person.
Epsilon is a minuscule amount. It's vanishingly small, but it's still there.
Even though percentages are typically used for cases where precision is less important, I'd say that in this context it would be better to err on the side of precision.
I hope that you'll publish the answers to the calibration questions, after the survey closes, of course.
Some countries hold elections but not major national ones; and sometimes a country has elections, but most people in them still can't vote. (Examples are Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, respectively.)
My public key is the same as my user name. Should it have been anonymous? (My private key was randomized and only identifies me if you know what format I use for general-purpose random strings.)
Assuming Yvain does the same thing as last year, both the public and private key will be released as part of the survey dataset if you checked the 'release my survey data' box.
Faith in Humanity moment: LW will not submit garbage poll responses using other LW-users as public keys.
Carrier has arrived ... what? huh? Where am ... oh right, yea, did the survey.
I hope you don't count fanfiction as "books", because otherwise my response is off by at least two bullet points.
Completed. Very excited to see the digit ratio data.
I'll be interested to compare the results to the 2014 Effective Altruists Survey from earlier this year. Peter Hurford will be presenting its results soon, and I believe he's cross-tabulating them with those on the 2013 LW Census (including figures like the gender ratio and how much people donate).
Also: I've now taken the survey. There were some interesting questions there.
I did the survey.
For those that have mentioned a lack of a ruler, I used this one online: http://iruler.net/.
Might be worth it to link in the survey, if it's still editable.
First thing I thought was ‘I'm not sure it's accurately calibrated’, but since we're measuring ratios it doesn't matter.
Done. The basilisk question was really interesting.
Welp, gotta go and destroy all humans now...
I don't think I saw such a question? Spooky.
I suspect it was a joke, but god only knows wrt that clusterflip...
About two hours ago, I submitted an incomplete census return -- it looks as if some keystroke produces an immediate submission, at least on my browser. I'll be submitting a complete one later today. Yvain, if you want to suppress the incomplete one and need help in identifying it then I can help. I was partway through the calibration questions when I accidentally submitted.
(I see TrE had the same problem.)
[EDITED to add: Complete return now submitted.]
The question called P(Global Catastrophic Risk) should really be called something more like P(not Global Catastrophic Risk). (Or else the question itself should be inverted, but that would be a Bad Idea since some people have now filled in the survey.)
Answered all I could except the digit one because of no access to scanner. Looking forward to the results!
Is it deliberate that the size of the MONETARY REWARD is not stated anywhere?
I am curious what kind of analysis you plan to run on the calibration questions. Obvious things to do:
For each user, compute the correlation between their probabilities and the 0-1 vector of right and wrong answers. Then display the correlations in some way (a histogram?).
For each question, compute the mean (or median) of the probability for the correct answers and for the wrong answers, and see how separated they are.
But neither of those feels like a really satisfactory measure of calibration.
At the very least, I suspect one of the analyses will be 'bucketize corresponding to certainty, then plot "what % of responses in bucket were right?"' - something that was done last year (see 2013 LessWrong Survey Results)
Last year it was broken down into "elite" and "typical" LW-er groups, which presumably would tell you if hanging out here made you better at overconfidence, or something similar in that general vicinity.
I filled in the survey! Like many people I didn't have a ruler to use for the digit ratio question.
I would have given a response for digit ratio if I'd known about the steps to take the measurement before opening the survey, or if it were at the top of the survey, or if I could answer on a separate form after submitting the main survey. I didn't answer because I was afraid that if I took the time to do so, the survey form, or my https connection to it, or something else would time out, and I would lose all the answers I had entered.
It's a Google-forms survey. I'm pretty sure they don't do that. Can't blame you for being cautious, though.
Survey done, awesome as usual, Yvain. Can't wait for the results.
Took the survey.
And yeah you should warn about the material needed for the digit ratio question in advance, so people don't start the survey if they aren't in the right conditions for it.
Took the survey. Skipped the digit ratio - I could have done it but didn't feel like walking to the copier or finding a ruler.
Next year I want to see an independent measure of conscientiousness, and compare this between people who bother to answer the digit ratio question and those who don't...
Took the survey. My first one. Thanks for putting it together Yvain/Dan.
Done, though sadly without the digit ratio due to lack of equipment. I'm a newbie and I just thought that was really cool.
Done
Submitted. (Yvain, if you're reading this, you might want to see my note about an accidental incomplete submission.)
Completed.
Can anyone explain the Bem Sex Roles thing and why its relevant? I scored slightly more masculine and less feminine then average which confused me slightly. Its all self reporting though so I'm not sure how much it will express m nature vs what I value (like to think about myself)
The entire community is extremely insular and is weighed down with it's own established ideas. Most of the writers speak with total conviction, absolutely convinced of their own conclusions, despite the entire point of the endeavor being the pursuit of ever increasing amounts of correctness, thus making them 'less wrong'.
It consists mostly of extremely narrow demographics, cutting it's objectivity off at the knees by creating a culture that is perfect for serving as echo chambers despite their criticism of one another. It has also engaged in censorship of ideas, something that CANNOT be allowed in a group that is trying to further rational thought.
Aside from that there is also the personality cult surrounding Eliezer Yudkowsky. Objectivity is impossible if people weight the merit of your arguments by your popularity, which is inevitable in such a situation.
Completed!
Survey finished- erred on the side of not screwing up Yvain's numbers where possible, but I'm curious what the ideal way to mark down Religious Background for results of families that divorced over religious disagreement is. Also had a really strong desire (thwarted, but present) to put a SQL injection into the question about whether the universe is a simulation, which is a bad idea no matter what the answer turns out to be or whether I could conceivably affect the simulation. It's like a pascal's wager mixed with a Russian roulette, only the gun is fully loaded. Either I screw up the numbers, I tank the survey, or I crash the simulation. Dear brain, we were reading about akrasia just recently, were you paying attention?
Why would the universe be particularly likely to run an SQL statement in a form question about whether the universe is a simulation? All you have to do is think the attack and
NO CARRIER
Took the survey. However, my answer for the probability of MWI is "Since MWI makes the same predictions as the standard interpretation, asking for the probability of MWI is meaningless. It is like asking "this glass is 50% full of water. What is the probability that it is half empty? What is the probability that it is half full?" I put 0 for the MWI question, but I'm not sure what you want for that.
For some of the other probability questions, my answer is "I don't have enough information to come up with a good estimate, and I also don't have enough information to come up with a probability that takes into account my inability to come up with a good estimate". Again, I put 0.
Also, after the test, I'm starting to get worried how you anonymize the questions. Releasing the data without a name attached is not anonymization, if the answers people give are enough to identify them.
I was especially bothered by the MWI question because it asked whether it was "more or less" correct. Of course it's more or less correct since its math works! But since I assumed the question was intended to find out whether or not I thought favorably of the theory, I just skipped it.
Both are 100%. Duh.
Likewise, I interpreted MWI to include any interpretation that makes the same predictions as it. I still gave an answer less than 100% because I wouldn't completely rule out all objective collapse theories just yet.
Finished.
I put an estimate on one calibration question that I knew was wrong. In hindsight I shouldn't have done that. The mistake: I don't know what bone is the longest in the body, but I knew that. So I put down a random answer for that question. But then I felt like it would be cheating on the calibration to put 0% after an intentionally wrong answer, so I put a higher number that wasn't accurate. My mistake, but other people might have done something similar.
I want the political questions to measure the importance of an issue on next year's survey.
If you put down a random answer and know you did, then it seems like the correct estimate for your calibration would be 1 over the size of the sample space. Google tells me there are 206 bones in the adult human body, but a lot them are mirrored left to right, so maybe you'd be looking at something just south of 1%?
Probably higher, though, if you filtered out the many small bones in e.g. the fingers and toes, or the vertebrae.
You're assuming the answer I wrote down was an accurate name of a bone.
The question was about the largest bone, not the longest bone.
Tomayto, tomahto. Comes out to the same. Which is good, since the question would be ambiguous otherwise.
Wasn't sure whether to round to 100 or to 99. After all, we could all have been lied to.
Survey complete!
I'm kind of surprised at how much better I feel like I've gotten about reasoning about these really fuzzy estimates. One of my big goals last year was "get better at reasoning about really fuzzy things" and I feel like I've actually made big progress on that?
I'm really excited to see what the survey results look like this year. I'm hoping we've gotten better at overconfidence!
The gender default thing took me by surprise. I'm guessing that a lot of people answer yes to having a strong gender identity?
This has seen a lot of discussion over at Slate Star Codex. Judging from the anecdotes I've seen in the comments there, there doesn't seem to be an obviously dominant answer, although of course there are self-selection issues in that context; I'll be interested to see what the survey turns up.
I definitely don't have a strong identity in this sense; like, I suspect I'd be pretty okay if an alien teenager swooped by and pushed the "swap sex!" button on me, and the result was substantially functional and not horrible to the eye. Like, obviously I'd be upset about having been abused by an outside force, but I don't think the result itself is inherently distasteful or anything like that.
I'm really curious to see how this and related stuff (male/female traits, fingers) relate.
Answered. WRT Type of Global Catastrophic Risk, I answered conditioned on greater than 90% of humanity being wiped out before 2100, which I assume is what you meant. If it wasn't, well, I ruined everything, then.
Done! Wish I had had a scanner handy going in, I'm curious about the digit ratio.
Done. Fairly high confidence that I'm still the lone Filipino LessWronger.
Done.
I'm a bit confused about the accuracy of my BSRI because my true answer was frequently 'only towards my SO', such that my score would be drastically different were I single.
Same here. And in some cases it was ‘except towards my parents’ or ‘only when I'm very tired’. I still tried to take some kind of weighed average.
Tooken. My scanner was being evil today so I only had low-res overview scans, and could only get to within a tenth of a centimeter, but I think my results are dramatic enough that it's not wildly incorrect to use my guess? Drop me if I'm wrong, I should be easy to pick out of the crowd via karma.
Done.
I think it is somewhat unrealistic to expect individual digit ratios to be accurate to three significant figures (although I understand that two significant figures might be too crude a measure to show effects of smaller size). One can hope that the errors are symmetric and it doesn't matter.
I don't think it's going to matter very much. 3 digits after the dot, with the understanding that the third digit is probably not very good, but the second probably is pretty good.
Suppose the actual length of a person's index finger is 80.5 mm and the actual length of his/her ring finger is 83.5 mm. Then the 2D:4D ratio is 0.964. A measurement error of 0.5 mm is very easy to make, e.g. due to inaccuracy of a photocopier, inaccuracy of a ruler, inexactness of where a finger joins the hand (and even if it wasn't a vague concept it would still be a problem to pinpoint the precise location of it with a great accuracy) and even differences in muscle tension in fingers at the particular moment of placing a hand in a photocopier. If a person measures his/her index finger as being 80 mm long (0.5 mm shorter) and her/his ring finger as being 84 mm long (0.5 mm longer), then they would obtain 2D:4D ratio of 0.952. Whereas if the length of the index finger is measured to be 81 mm, and the length of the ring finger is 83 mm, then 2D:4D ratio is 0.976. Therefore, the first digit after the decimal point does not vary that much (in the vast majority of all cases it is 9), the third one is basically noise, and even the second one is not that reliable (in an individual case). However, that might still be enough to notice some interesting correlations and if the errors are symmetric it might not even matter that much when all data will be aggregated.
For me its not even the second digit. Even left and right hand differ significantly. Copire doesn't make things really better (OK, the copier quality was low, much too dark).
Taken!
Survey taken!
Took the survey, except for the digit ratio part.
Took it.
EDIT: I was surprised to find the BEM test in it. I took it some time ago and it resulted in 65-70% F and 50-60% M (as far as I can see largely because of my strong and caring relationship to my children).
I didn't determine my digit-ratio during the test but did right now. I arrive at totally different values (between 0.91 and 1.05) depending and hand and exact points and the copier print reading gives still different values. My best guess is that it is somewhere around 0.96.
Taken! Thanks as always for running it
Survey done, except for the digits ratio question!
Survey done, including digit ratio. And I learned something new.
But not particularly confident in the accuracy of my measurement.
I have taken the survey, and to signal my cooperation I have upvoted every existing top-level comment here. Do unto others...
I completed most things except for the digit ratio. Thanks for putting this together, the results are always very interesting to see. Now to see how many of the trivia I got right.
Did the survey! I think i gave highly contradictory answers.
Did the survey!
Did it, that was fun! Can't wait for the results.
I exist in a quantifiable way! (I took the survey)
Survey surveilled!
Nope. You've been surveilled, by the survey.
I think you've been surveyed, rather. (Although undoubtedly surveilled as well, given the current political climate...)
Done, except the digit ratio thing.
Finished the survey. Didn't answer the SSC question even though I read it regularly because I plan to take the edited version when it's posted there, and I also didn't answer the digit ratio question.
Completed.
Taken. Wasn't bothered by the length -- could be even longer next time.
I took the survey.
Took the survey.
Most comments show exactly one downvote without a clear pattern why. I'd guess that a single person downvoted all these short comments. Can it be that this user doesn't know the custom of upvoting survey-takers?
ADDED 2014-10-25T16:20 UTC: The single downvotes disappeared.
ADDED 2014-10-26T21:10 UTC: The single downvotes reappeared again (at least for a lot of high scoring comments).
Doesn't know? Of course said user knows. Do you think there's someone going "Um, lots of upvotes here? I have no idea why, so I better downvote each one."? It's someone who doesn't agree / care for the custom. Probably some crooked man, and not of the Scottish General variety (generally, no true Scottish General).
Edit: Don't know who, if it's considered against any unwritten rules, it should be easy to find out who it was.
This sentence is utterly impenetrable to me, and googling turns up nothing relevant. My curiosity is piqued - would you mind explaining a bit?
Sorry, it was through no fault of your own. The "crooked man" (stand-in for villain) reminded me of the "There Was a Crooked Man" nursery rhyme. The (short) wiki article should explain the rest.
Other than the riff on the No True Scotsman, since indeed the kind of people downvoting others generally consider themselves to be the "true LessWrongers", or so I'd surmise. It was just a throwaway thought, thanks for inquiring :-).
Or disagrees with it.
Same happened last year.
I took the survey! This is my third survey.
I did the survey in all its parts, and upvoted every top level comment to promote LW's census partecipation.
It was fun and not particularly long, although I miss the 'global prisoner dilemma' of the last survey.
I took it. If it's anything like last year, officially 2/5 of my karma will be from surveys.
Just completed my first survey!
Done!
I did the survey! This is the second time I've completed an iteration of this survey, but this year was the first time I answered all the questions. I also did all the extra credit except for the digit ratio question.
Quick question: I assume the P(God) question excludes simulators, basement universes created in particle accelerators ect? I know it says supernatural, but since a parent universe would not necessarly obey the same laws of physics as the daughter universe, this could be counted as supernatural.
Last year the question defined supernatural via basic ontological entities with excludes many simulators, this year there no fixed definition and you are up to interpret is as you like.
It said God as an example of supernatural, again making me chuckle as I had to put essentially "committed theist, odds of (defined differently than I do) god and stated superset, 0"
In-group fuzzes acquired, for science!
I took it. A bit sad that it's shorter than the last one.
Given the decision on a cap in length I think it might be worthwhile to do a second LW Lifestyle and Values survey in addition to the census. At best with half a year of distance to the census.
Survey completed. Account created to get starting karma and increase likelihood/amount of future participation.
I'd like to note that the current formulation of sex/gender/sexual orientation questions forced me to misrepresent myself because the technically correct answers seemed to cause an even greater misrepresentation. I would like extra options to the "sex assigned at birth" question, perhaps "male, now transitioned to female/other" and vice versa, to account for other-gendered transitioners; but I'll be the first to admit that this probably isn't a major issue.
All done.
Hmm, I did worse on those calibration questions than I would've expected.
Most people do worse at calibration than they expect, but you can improve with practice. http://predictionbook.com/
"Social democrat" and "liberal" have been given almost identical descriptions. Don't know if that's deliberate.
Agreed. I actually looked up tax & spending for UK vs. Scandinavian countries, and they aren't that different. It may not be a good distinction.
But IIRC the way the tax money is spent is very different in the US vs in Scandinavia (and I'd guess the UK is somewhere in between): in the former it's mostly spent on means-tested transfer payments and in the latter is most spent on in-kind services, such as healthcare and education, that anyone can (in principle) avail of.
Taken. Looking forward to seeing the results!
I took the survey. Out of curiosity (too late to change now) what should I have answered if I'm not my father's first child, but I'm the first child he had with my mom? (There are kids from my dad's first marriage, but I didn't grow up with them).
I went with "no older siblings" since I assumed this was a question about socialization (or maybe even about uterine environment) but not siring. But I'd like to know for next year.
I would also like to know for next year. I have four older siblings on my father's side, and two on my mother's, and only spent any home time with one (from my mother's side). So, I answered 6 for older, but depending on whether this was a socialization or uterine environment question, the best answer might have been either 1 or 2 for older.
Done, except the digit ratio thing. I still picked a public key and a private key, so that if I get near a scanner or photocopier before November 14 I will submit an otherwise empty survey response with my digit ratios and the same public key and private key as today. Is that OK?
In Political, going only by the descriptions after the colons it looks like Liberal is halfway between Social democratic and Libertarian, and I picked it based on those, but... note that Moldbug also is socially permissive in most all the senses I care about (besides the post I linked, he also supports gay rights) and yet his position doesn't resemble that of the US Democratic Party or the UK Labour Party.
In Less Wrong Use, I rounded my top-level posts down to zero.
In Time on LW and Hours Online, thanks to LeechBlock, I didn't have to pull numbers out of my ass! Likewise for Meditate thanks to Beeminder. OTOH, I answered Books by counting the books I can remember reading and dividing by an anally extracted estimate of the fraction of books I read that I remember.
In the second part of the Calibration questions, does “correct” imply ‘correctly spelled’? My answers are P(correct and correctly spelled) + P(recognizable as the correct answer but misspelled)/2.
In the Mental Health section I took “believe” to mean ‘P > 50%’. Had it said ‘suspect’ instead, I might have answered a couple questions differently.
In the Voting question, I totally wish there were separate answers for ‘Yes, and I would do it again’ and ‘Yes, but I regret that’.
In the Vegetarian question I interpreted “flexitarian” narrowly and answered No, but I do eat much less meat than the average person.
I answered that I'm cis by default, but I would freak out if I woke up in a woman's body. But then again, I also would freak out if I woke up bald, or four inches taller. What I mean by saying that I'm cis by default is that posts like this one almost completely fail to resonate with me.
In Paleo Diet I interpreted “paleo principles” narrowly to only include meta-level principles so I picked the last answer, but if you count object-level principles such as not drinking a can of soda a day, I should have picked the second answer instead.
In Food Substitutes I wished there was an answer for ‘Neither Soylent nor MealSquares ship to my country’.
I'm surprised that in the BSRI male students and female students score so similarly. Did the researchers decide which answers would be masculine or feminine a priori, rather than a posteriori?
I think it's totally reasonable to consider that freaky for reasons other than that you now have to live as a woman. I think the spirit of the question was more, "If you were a woman but had the same personality, would you be okay with that?"
"Social democrat" and "liberal" have been given almost identical descriptions. Don't know if that's deliberate.
Duplicate comment, probably should be deleted.
Took the survey! Now to upvote everyone who took it.
Just took it.
Survey complete!
Submitted.
Something that just occurred to me (separate from my took-it comment): Scott, do you take your own survey?
I took the survey. Started on the BSRI but abandoned it because I found the process of giving vague answers to vague questions distressing.
Completed!
Did it just now. Lone portuguese (from Portugal) here with high certainty.
Surveyed!
Thank you for continuing to run it.
Took the survey. I think I've mentioned this last year: I'd like more clarity about the distinction between a "supernatural" God and living in a simulation.
Seconded.
Thanks, I did the survey. I had been lurking some multiple months in irc and reading bits of sequences and now made an account after the survey.
I would be interested to work with the organizers to include an actual IQ testlet in a future survey.
Surveyed --- I feel somewhat unconfident about my calibration.
Did it, including the digit ratio.
I may have found a problem-- if I didn't click on the background after answering a radio button question, then using the down arrow marked a lower radio button. I think I cleared up all the resulting errors, but it took two passes, and I may not have caught all the errors.
I didn't express how serious I think the down-arrow problem is, though perhaps my computer habits are unusual enough that no one else had it.
I think it led to at least ten wrong answers, and some of them showed up on the second pass when I was correcting the first batch.
Did anyone else notice this problem?
I usually scroll using the PageDown key and/or the scrollwheel on my mouse (I mean, the side bar on my touchpad, but I'm too used to using the word “mouse” to refer to any pointing device).
I was hyper-aware of this problem, since it's happened to me on internet surveys in this past, so I nervously clicked on the background at least once before scrolling down each time. If there was some way to know that this wouldn't happen it would be a bit of a weight off my mind :p
Done.
Distinguishing Liberal/Social Democratic seems silly, as the difference between Neoreactionary and Conservative is much greater yet they aren't on the poll, and in previous years they were about as common as self-aware Communists.
Also note that the majority of people who pick "Conservative" on LessWrong are probably going to be Neoreactionary in their preferences and one of the more important markers of that group is strongly dissaproving of right wing people who think they can change things by voting and a loathing for the useless and actually harmfull nature of US Republicans.
I took the survey.
Done, except for the digit ratio, because I do not have access to a photocopier or scanner.
Took the survey!
Done did the survey!
I have submitted the survey, AND for the first time realized I'm not sure the example lifespan in the anti-agathics question should be understood as continuous. And I learned about natural law!
Done.
I tried doing it on my phone earlier, but was having "issues" and decided to wait until I could do so on a laptop. In the mean time, I read the digit ratio comments and decided to try and measure mine.
I measured wrong, and the ruler (which is no more precise than half centimeters) did not come with me to my current location. *is sad*
Submitted, answering almost all questions.
The hardest question was choosing a single favorite LW post.
Also, I wasn't sure if Worm should count as more than one book. (It didn't end up mattering.)
A scanner + Photoshop makes it significantly easier to measure digit ratios.
Was that question not there yesterday?
DONE.
Hopefully, i'll be able to change a few of my answers regarding the LW meetup frequency by next year. And the answers regarding donations should change drastically within 3 years.
Was pretty happy that I knew a bunch of the answers wrt the calibration section. :)
Now hand over them Karma points.
Maybe next time add schizoid personality disorder to the "I think I might have this psych disorder" list.
I answered every question except the last one (I don't have a scanner set up).
Did the survey!
Completed. I'll be fascinated to see how digit length correlates to gender default. It would imply some very interesting things about sexuality.
I completed the survey. (Did not do the digit ratio questions due to lack of available precise tools.)
I did everything but finger length. I am shame.
y'all a bunch of paranoid delusional mentally-disabled freaks who can't get laid
Did the survey.
Done!
Survey completed in full, reporting in for karma as per ancient tradition.
Thanks to Scott and Dan for all the work they put into this!
I have filled in the survey (I wouldn't have minded if it was longer!)