Grothor comments on 2014 Survey Results - Less Wrong

87 Post author: Yvain 05 January 2015 07:36PM

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Comment author: Vulture 04 January 2015 06:18:32AM *  5 points [-]

Yayy! I was having a shitty day, and seeing these results posted lifted my spirits. Thank you for that! Below are my assorted thoughts:

I'm a little disappointed that the correlation between height and P(supernatural)-and-similar didn't hold up this year, because it was really fun trying to come up with explanations for that that weren't prima facie moronic. Maybe that should have been a sign it wasn't a real thing.

The digit ratio thing is indeed delicious. I love that stuff. I'm surprised there wasn't a correlation to sexual orientation, though, since I seem to recall reading that that was relatively well-supported. Oh well.

WTF was going on with the computer games question? Could there have been some kind of widespread misunderstanding of the question? In any case, it's pretty clearly poorly-calibrated Georg, but the results from the other questions are horrendous enough on their own.

On that subject, I have to say that even more amusing than the people who gave 100% and got it wrong are the people who put down 0% and then got it right -- aka, really lucky guessers :P

Congrats to the Snicket fan!

This was a good survey and a good year. Cheers!

Comment author: Grothor 04 January 2015 11:15:01PM 9 points [-]

I remember answering the computer games question and at first feeling like I knew the answer. Then I realized the feeling I was having was that I had a better shot at the question than the average person that I knew, not that I knew the answer with high confidence. Once I mentally counted up all the games that I thought might be it, then considered all the games I probably hadn't even thought of (of which Minecraft was one), I realized I had no idea what the right answer was and put something like 5% confidence in The Sims 3 (which at least is a top ten game). But the point is that I think I almost didn't catch my mistake before it was too late, and this kind of error may be common.