army1987 comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong

88 Post author: Yvain 26 October 2014 06:05PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 24 October 2014 02:54:26PM 43 points [-]

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?

Comment author: MTGandP 24 October 2014 05:27:38PM 6 points [-]

I answered that I'm cis by default, but I would freak out if I woke up in a woman's body.

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?"

Comment author: 27chaos 28 October 2014 09:51:12PM -1 points [-]

If you were a woman but had the same personality,

This seems like a contradiction to me.

Comment author: DanielFilan 25 October 2014 10:14:21PM 5 points [-]

In Food Substitutes I wished there was an answer for ‘Neither Soylent nor MealSquares ship to my country’.

You can make your own soylent. I do so, and it's pretty tasty. http://diy.soylent.me/

Comment author: jdgalt 26 October 2014 07:49:33PM 0 points [-]

I see liberal vs. libertarian as a two dimensional thing as depicted <a href="http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/quiz.php">here</a>.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 October 2014 12:39:19PM *  2 points [-]

I'm familiar with a similar thing from Political Compass. Going from the descriptions after the colons only, Yvain divided the upper half plane into "Communist" and "Conservative" and the lower half plane into "Social democratic", "Liberal" and "Libertarian".

Comment author: RichardKennaway 05 November 2014 01:52:15PM 3 points [-]

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?

Wikipedia describes its origin. The items on the test are based on the opinions of 100 Stanford undergraduates in the 1970s about what traits of behaviour and personality in each sex are socially desirable, and the norming of the test was done with a total of about 1500 Stanford undergraduates.

Here is a review article about the BSRI from 2001.

Comment author: Lumifer 05 November 2014 04:36:23PM 5 points [-]

The items on the test are based on the opinions of 100 Stanford undergraduates in the 1970s about what traits of behaviour and personality in each sex are socially desirable

LOL. Oh, boy...

Comment author: TobyBartels 06 November 2014 08:06:06PM 4 points [-]

Cue the jokes about the 1970s … but the fact that they were all Stanford undergrads (very W.E.I.R.D.) is probably even more significant.