The next installment of the Polling Thread.

This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.

These are the rules:

  1. Each poll goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
  2. You must at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than you own. This ensures participation in all polls and also limits the total number of polls. You may of course vote without posting a poll.
  3. Your poll should include a 'don't know' option (to avoid conflict with 2). I don't know whether we need to add a troll catch option here but we will see.

If you don't know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.


This is a somewhat regular thread. If it is successful I may post again. Or you may. In that case do the following :

  • Use "Polling Thread" in the title.
  • Copy the rules.
  • Add the tag "poll".
  • Link to this Thread or a previous Thread.
  • Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be polls or similar'
  • Add a second top-level comment with an initial poll to start participation.
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17 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

In the LW Slack an online test by the Birkbeck University of London for prosopagnosia (face blindness) was posted and some took it. The Test says that 80% is population average and below 60% means possible face-blindness (and I guess 33% means random answers). The results posted in the LW slack show an average below 70% (for 10 values) and the hypothesis was offered that the LW populace in not neuro-typical in this regard. How about verifying this?

Take test test here.

My test result (give percentage points as reported by the test in range 0..100; use 80 if you absolutely don't want to do the test): [pollid:1088]

ADDED: This test takes about 20min according to its intro and some say that it takes longer (see below).

Warning: This test takes a lot of time, and you even don' have a feedback how far you are. I have no idea how long it really is, because I started doing it, first it was interesting, then it was just super long and boring but I felt like "okay, I have already spent much time here, and maybe the answer will be useful to someone", but then it was even longer and even more boring and at some moment I just got angry and quit. I have no idea whether I was already close to the end, or maybe not even in the middle.

You must at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than you own.

This rule should not apply to anything that takes more than 1 minute of user's time.

The test blurb estimates 20 minutes. How long it actually takes depends only on how long you spend making up your mind which face to click. I didn't take more than a few seconds on any of them, because if I don't recognise a face in that time, I don't recognise it and should just click my best guess and move on. I didn't time myself, but I believe I took rather less than 20 minutes. (89%, despite my subjective impression that faces with all the rest of the head cropped away look pretty much alike.)

My experience mirrors this. I felt like I was guessing hastily most of the time but in the end, by going with whichever face seemed more vaguely more familiar than the others, I ended up with an above-average score.

But Viliam is right that this poll should be excluded from the "vote all" rule (though that only applies if you post your own poll strictly). I added a warning to the poll nonetheless.

I got 65%, but don't have the karma to vote.

[-]gjm30

I am about to submit an (anon) 65% vote to make up for this.

[EDITED to add:] Now done. (Of course the reason for the two-phase approach, as opposed to just doing it, was to minimize the risk of two people doing it concurrently.)

For those reading only: The current state is 17 votes, median 67, mean 66.795. This is significantly below the population average. I wonder about the cause...

One person filled in a 0.51, but even corrected for that the mean is 69,76 (at 17 votes). My hypothesis would be that it has to do with the likely disproportionate percentage of users here that have Aspergers, something that is known to be associated with a poor ability to understand faces.

Wouldn't we see a bimodality if that was the case?

I was listening to creepy music when I took this & it was pretty unsettling when the distortion set in.

I got 89% but can't vote. (I'm a lurker here; more active on the LW Slack.)

Can't vote, not enough karma. Got 79%.

If you also want a datapoint on the time necessary to complete the test, I took 15 minutes. Most of the time when I didn't know the correct answer I simply guessed.

16 minutes here. Also guessed frequently.

I got 44. Six faces is too much.

Meta. Discussion goes here.

Interested to see one anonymous user posting 97%. Would be interested to know if they receive/d follow-up from the institute.

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