The Less Wrong General Census is unofficially here! You can take it at this link.
Update: The census is closed, thank you all for taking it! I plan to have the data out sometime in January.
The oft-interrupted annual tradition of the Less Wrong Census is once more upon us!
If you are reading this post and identify as a LessWronger, then you are the target audience. If you are reading this post and don't identify as a LessWronger, you just read posts here or maybe go to house parties full of rationalists or possibly read rationalist fanfiction and like talking about it on the internet, or you're not a rationalist you're just, idk, adjacent, then you're also the target audience.
If you want to just spend five minutes answering the basic demographics questions before leaving the rest blank and hitting submit, that's totally fine. The survey is structured so the fastest and most generally applicable questions are (generally speaking) towards the start. At any point you can scroll to the bottom and hit Submit, though you won't be able to add more answers once you do. It is about 2/3rds the size of last year's survey if that helps.
The survey shall remain open from now until at least January 1st, 2025. I plan to close it sometime on Jan 2nd.
I don't work for LessWrong, but I do work on improving rationalist meetups around the world. Once the survey is closed, I plan to play around with the data and write up an analysis post like this one sometime in late January.
Remember, you can take the survey at this link.
Update: Survey is closed, and I plan to have the data out in mid to late January.
Ancient tradition is that if you take the survey you can comment here saying you took the survey, and people upvote you for karma.
I have just noticed something that I think has been kinda unsatisfactory about the probability questions since for ever.
There's a question about the probability of "supernatural events (including God, ghosts, magic, etc.)" having occurred since the beginning of the universe. There's another question about the probability of there being a god.
I notice an inclination to make sure that the first probability is >= the second, for the obvious reason. But, depending on how the first question is interpreted, that may be wrong.
If the existence of a god is considered a "supernatural event since the beginning of the universe" then obviously that's the case. But note that one thing a fair number of people have believed is that a god created the universe and then, so to speak, stepped away and let it run itself. (It would be hard to distinguish such a universe from a purely natural one, but perhaps you could identify some features of the universe that such a being would be more or less likely to build in.) In that case, you could have a universe that (1) created by a god in which (2) no supernatural events have ever occurred or will ever occur.
The unsatisfactory thing, to be clear, is the ambiguity.
For future years, it might be worth considering either (1) replacing "God" with something like "acts of God" or "divine interventions" in the first question, or (2) adding an explicit clarification that the mere existence of a god should be considered a "supernatural event" in the relevant sense even if what that god did was to make a universe that runs naturally, or (3) tweaking the second question to explicitly exclude "deistic" gods.