Bonus questions:
Third, please suggest a decent, quick, and at least somewhat accurate Internet IQ test I can stick in a new section, Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions.
GJP had a quick IQ test as part of their surveys, but it's not public. http://iqtest.dk takes about 20-30 minutes but is normed very hard, so you certainly don't have to worry about IQ inflation...
Blur the "modafinil" question to "modafinil, armodafinil, or adrafinil", since the modafinil question is theoretically incriminating, so people are more likely to lie (or use the survey results to say bad things about us), but the blurred one isn't because adrafinil is unscheduled.
Respondents are instructed to flip a coin; if heads answer yes, if tails answer truthfully. The overall difference from 50% is the real overall percentage while giving every yes answer deniability. I forget what this is called but it's common on touchy topics.
You use the term "X-risk" when talking about anything that kills over 90% of the human population, regardless of whether civilization recovers or continues. "Global Catastrophic Risk" (GCR) would be a better term for the actual questions.
I continue to be surprised (I believe I commented on this last year) that under "Academic fields" pure mathematics is not listed on its own; it is also not clear to me that pure mathematics is a hard science; relatedly, are non-computer science engineering folk expected to write in answers?
There is no option for Associate's under degree earned, or even high school diploma. If we're not interested in the dropout rate that might be forgivable but at the least an Associate's or Trade degree is certainly not "none."
I'm fairly sure my family background qualifies as "nonreligious," this may be worth having as an option. (I don't even have weird religious uncles or anything like that.)
TYPO: Under "liberal," "moire redistribution."
The distinction between "liberal" and "socialist" is a bit confusing in any case. Without the "like this stuff in this country", I'd describe the Finnish political mainstream as "liberal" with sizable socialist contingent on the left and religious, populist and Swedish-speaking (don't ask) minority parties on the right. If seen as the Evil Political Enemies, the populist group kinda matches up with the conservative one in the query, but low taxes are the mainstream Coalition party's thing, while the religious party is mostly just tradition...
Really? People call themselves "reactionaries"? That always seemed to me a label that people applied to others.
That's so queer.
Reactionary is not seen as a coherent set of views that anyone professes, but only a boo word from leftists which has generally been superseded by "racist, sexist, homophobe".
The same critique could be made of conservatism. If we accept that term, reactionary seems to be acceptable as well:
A reactionary is an individual that holds political viewpoints which cause them to seek to return to a previous state (the status quo ante) in a society. Reactionaries are considered to be one end of a political spectrum whose opposite pole is perceived radicalism, though reactionary ideologies may be themselves radical. While it has not been generally considered positive to be regarded as a reactionary it has been adopted as a self-description by some such as H. L. Mencken,[1] Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie[2] and John Lukacs.[3]
In other words reactionary is the right wing person who looks around the society he inhabits and does not see much worth preserving but seeks to revive older institutions. Julian the Apostate seems a good example.
...A member of the Constantinian dynasty, he was made Caesar over the western provinces, by Constantius II in 355, where he campaigned successfu
Current status of these suggestions:
"What activities do you enjoy? Check all that apply"
[] Fishing
[] Boating
[] Hiking
[] Climbing
The reason is that I haven't been able to figure out how to computer process these effectively; I end out with rows of boxes like "hiking,fishing" or "fishing,boating,climbing" and it's apparently beyond my limited skills to get SPSS to separate these out into separate chunks of information. I could do it like this:
Do you enjoy fishing?
[] Y
[] N
Do you enjoy boating?
[] Y
[] N
And so on, but the more options you want, the less happy I am doing this. Or, teach me a good way to solve this problem using Google Forms and SPSS.
I am reluctant to change questions that have been on the survey since previous years. For example, Will's suggestion to change the Politics question is good, except that if we did it we would no longer be able to confidently say something like "Less Wrong has gotten more liberal since the last survey". I would rather just include a political compass in the Bonus Questions, plus maybe maybe a more
Kind of want to avoid beating a dead basilisk.
If you don't beat it, someone else will, as XiXi, RationalWiki, and that newspaper demonstrate; and by omitting a question on it, we lose the ability to be able to point out that the overwhelming majority (or whatever it turns out to be) disagreed with that moderation decision. This would be one of the few questions which is genuinely useful, as opposed to interesting.
Not at all. I expect it to be linkable in comments or rebuttals, or simply edited in, as I have in fact already done twice: http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=LessWrong&diff=prev&oldid=1035808 and http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=LessWrong&diff=prev&oldid=1035812
Given how people have been describing the basilisk to me in IRC and private messages as being a' fascinating secret' and 'attracting people with mystique' and 'laugh at how they circumvented the censorship', I think more people know about it than one would expect (and that by now, it is more well known than it ever would've been otherwise).
But even if all that was wrong, that is easily addressed with the usual options like 'Other' or 'No opinion' or 'Don't care'.
Not every exposure is created equally. Exposing people to the idea in a way where they don't take it seriously doesn't do much harm.
Not every exposure is equal, but you've done nothing to show that censorship - in the hopes that it will result in mockery - will cut the risk by so many orders that it will more than counterbalance the orders more exposure and also pay for all the reputational damage.
In hindsight, clouds may have silver linings - but only an idiot tries to set up a mine in the sky.
The race question doesn't make much sense for Europeans. I could answer White (non-Hispanic) even though the Hispanic category doesn't exist here. But what should Spaniards answer?
Here are some suggestions:
I find it way US-centric and pigeon-holing of people, but those things are probably unfixable for anything that could be called a survey. If possible, make a narrow AI to interview subjects and compute amplitude distributions in personspace or something, it's the only way something like this could ever satisfy everyone.
What is the purpose of the survey? An explicit purpose would help with choosing questions.
However, I'm fine with "poking around to see what might be interesting", even if that would be unBayesian.
I think it might be interesting to measure altruism somehow.
Also, my political affiliation is "clueless pragmatist": I don't know how to run my country and haven't studied the question much, but I'm open to whatever works in practice. I assume this is too rare to get its own option in the politics section? Pretty sure I've met at least one other LWer who has a similar view.
The hispanic ethnicity is not generally considered to be tied to a specific race. In various forms I have seen and completed recently, race and hispanic ethnicity are two separate questions. This is more accurate because it does not exclude/ignore, e.g., black hispanics who may live in or descend from Caribbean or Central American nations.
The question about children should have an option "0, and unsure about having some in the future".
It would help to provide lists of "hard sciences" and "soft sciences" so that people know what they are selecting.
There is a typo in the Liberal answer for the Political question: "moire redistribution of wealth".
Some people may come from families of mixed religious background. This question should have either a multiple-answer option (more accurate) or specify that responders should choose based on some criteria (vague, open to interpretation).
For the IQ tests, two which came up in the comments after the last survey were iqtest.dk and sifter.org/iqtest. My scores on both tests were consistent. In a reply to the previously-linked comment, gwern linked his list of online IQ tests.
ACT scores have already been ment...
Bonus questions:
I don't remember my SAT score, but I remember my ACT score. I plan on simply using the equivalent SAT score, if I should not, for some reason, please say so.
Significantly upvoted things from this thread that are missing:
"We should ask if people participated in the previous surveys." - Jack
"I'd love a specific question on moral realism instead of leaving it as part of the normative ethics question. I'd also like to know about psychiatric diagnoses (autism spectrum, ADHD, depression, whatever else seems relevant)-- perhaps automatically remove those answers from a spreadsheet for privacy reasons." - Jack
"Suggestion: "Which of the following did you change your mind about after reading the sequences? (check all that apply)" [] Religion [] Cryonics [] Politics [] Nothing [] et cetera. Many other things could be listed here." - lavalamp
"Suggestion: add "cryocrastinating" as a cryonics option." - lavalamp
"When asking for race/ethnicity, you should really drop the standard American classification into White - Hispanic - Black - Indian - Asian - Other. From a non-American perspective this looks weird, especially the "Whit...
Do you use Spaced Repetition System learning (Anki, Supermemo etc)?
-Yes
-No
-I have never heard of Spaced Repetition System learning.
I strongly recommend having something about being bi/multi-racial.
You may want "other" included for political beliefs, possibly even including a text box. And I wouldn't mind "How sure are you about your political beliefs?"
I don't know how weird this is, but I'm not sure what my family actually believed. They sent me to Hebrew school, but they didn't talk about religion.
I'm interested in what LWers are doing or have done to improve their lives, and how it's working out for them, but perhaps this should be a separate post or a different survey.
If you plan to release the individual answers as you did last time, please keep in mind that karma alone is sufficient to identify a lot of people, so removing other identifying information makes more sense if you also round the karma (e.g. to nearest power of 10 or 5 or some other number).
You could do this when generating the xls file, or you could give karma ranges as options in the survey. If you do the former, some (small number of) people will lie about their karma to prevent you from identifying them.
I'm just a bit touchy about privacy-related procedures.)
If you're touchy about privacy issues, the way to express that is NOT to out someone's anonymous survey answers. That is anti-social behavior, and implies that you are only interested in your OWN privacy while not at all valuing the privacy of others.
If you wanted to show how easy it was to find out someone's identity from the survey answers, the better course of action would have been to put in a comment something like "in fact, from last year's survey I was able to figure out the identity of at least one person using karma score as the main indicator", and then to PM Yvain personally with the information, since he could tighten security unilaterally. It is NOT acceptable to post publicly the identity of the person whose identity you discovered.
I suggest you retract your comment, and ask a mod to delete it-- especially if you are as touchy about privacy procedures as you claim to be.
P(Many Worlds) needs also to ask if the respondent actually knows and understands the equations for practical purposes (well enough to, e.g, solve Schrodinger's equation for a hydrogen atom), since Many Worlds consists of taking the equations seriously. I think it would be of interest to know how well the respondent understands the thing they are opining a probability of.
In the Country question, you should clarify whether you mean citizenship, or residence.
Bonus question suggestion: Torture, specks, or undecided?
Edited: to make the question in the exact way it should be asked:
In the context of Eliezer's "Torture vs Dust Specks" dilemma, do you choose:
o Torture
o Specks
o Undecided
Lord Anthony of the House Stark has developed a technology to create copies of people. He offers you to make 99999 copies of yourself, in exchange you and your copies will have to become his serfs and live the rest of your lives as medieval subsistence farmers. Assume that:
Living as a subsistence farmer is less desirable than your current lifestyle, but not as much undesirable that you would wish to kill yourself.
If you refuse his offer, your lifestyle is not going to be disrupted by extreme events such as catastrophes or technolgical singularities.
Suggested question:
What fandoms or subcultures do you consider an important part of your identity? How important is each?
(example subcultures: Brony, goth, homestuck, juggalo, hippie, whovian(sp?), rationalist, harry potter, etc.) (identification: The HATE of the subulture is an important part of my identity ... kinda like the show I guess? ... spend a decent amount of time on related forums and provide some (fan) content ... It's my ENTIRE life!! ) ok I suck at coming up with good names for these levels or how to differentiate levels of obsession. Also t...
Do you intend for your definition of 'Supernatural' to exclude e.g. Matrix Lords, or Mormon-style Gods who were once men and will raise other men to Godhood? Maybe so, in which case fair enough, but it feels weird that there's a whole class of Christian theists who'd have to give 0 for P(God).
Given that no label can completely describe a person's political views, with which of these labels do you MOST identify?
Under Political you really have to add a label for "Reactionary". Given how much the word "socialist" fucks Americans' brains up I'd also prefer if you used the phrase "Social democratic" to describe what you assign to Scandinavia-type politics.
Or alternatively remove the distinction between what you call "Socialist" and "Liberal", which seems to be only a manner of degree, and place th...
The 'Relationship Status' question would usually have more options, if only for sensitivity reasons. Here's a standard one:
What is your current marital status?
Even though you're not forcing responses on these, having a 'Prefer not to answer' is useful for two main reasons. First, it distinguishes between skipping a question on purpose and accidentally. Second, you can't de-select a radio button, so it's useful to have if you accidentally click a...
If you're going with the "married, divorced..." etc. set of choices, I don't think "single" should be in there - rather it should be just "never married". Otherwise people who are in a relationship but not married or cohabiting will be unable to answer anything.
In what academic field do you currently work or study? If more than one, please choose most important.
Is this going to be asked only of people who selected "academic" for career or should language change to "In what academic field did/do you specialize"
"Number of Partners" should probably either read "Number of current partners" or "Prefered number of partners" for clarity.
Standard complaints about politics: Can we not use the americanised version of "Liberal"? In most of the world "Liberal" means classical liberal. (You also made a small spelling mistake in this one). Equally, Communism is a type of Socialism, and socialists aren't all liberal. Why not just have separate axis for social and economic liberality? And what about prediction markets / reactio...
The year of singularity question is unclear, and it also tries to make blank a meaningful response (which doesn't work so well because there are lots of reasons why people leave a question blank). It would be clearer to say something like: "By what year do you think the Singularity will occur? Answer such that there is a 50% chance of the Singularity happening by the year that you give and a 50% chance of it happening later or not at all. If you think that there is less than a 50% chance that the Singularity will ever happen, write "never"...
I would be inclined to add in a "Anarchist" category for politics. And a surprising number of European parties are "Christian Democrat". They tend to be in favor of some level of wealth redistribution and of labor unions (unlike US conservatives), but socially conservative (unlike US liberals). Not sure if there's a general term for this; I've heard "religious left", but that seems open to alternate interpretations.
With which of these moral philosophies do you MOST identify?
- There is no such thing as "morality"
Can you please rephrase this to "moral skepticism"? Or is there some benefit to saying it in the way you have?
Note that moral skepticism does not necessarily equate to nihilism -- error theories, fictionist accounts and moral revisionism all talk about doing what others would call "the right thing", even though they are all moral skeptic theories.
Also, don't you think this section is a bit coarsely defined? I'd love to see a b...
Political:
You have no option for "other". I think that if one wants to make a difference in the world, one should get involved in non-profit work, not spend a bunch of time researching candidates only to contribute an extraordinarily tiny fraction of the overall decision making power toward picking somebody that you can't be sure will do what they said they would and will most likely favor some totally unproven strategy for improving things anyway. What really clinches it for me is that I often have reasons to believe that the ideas being promo...
If we made unintended pregnancy unheard of, the abortion debate would be N/A.
This is not true, even ignoring the problems with making unintended pregnancy unheard of solely by improving contraceptive technology. There would still be cases of unwanted unpredictable fetal disability, conditions like preeclampsia, ectopic pregnancy, selective abortion in cases where there are many fetuses, and people changing their minds or experiencing a sudden change in pregnancy-relevant circumstances (spousal death, financial catastrophe, etc.).
How about some basic probability question, like the expected value of something, or something that requires you to use Bayes' theorem?
My wishlist:
1.) I second the call for a Big Five Personality test battery.
2.) I'd like a question asking what percentage of income do you donate to charity, if any, and which charities, if any?
3.) I'd like a clarification of what "spiritual" means.
4.) I'd like to see "consequentialism" expanded into utilitarianism and non-utilitarian consequentialism.
5.) I'd like to see dietary preferences (like along the lines of vegetarian/vegan) and/or questions about concern for nonhuman animal welfare.
Other questions:
What is your interest in joining a startup or being an entrepreneur?
What is your primary motive for your work: fame, money, recognition, helping the world, etc.?
How altruistic do you consider yourself (donate time, money, yearly, monthly, etc)?
How interested are you in meeting lesswrong readers or contributors?
This looks really fun! I can't wait to fill it out and see everyone's answers. I guess I am a person who likes internet quizzes after all.
Is there anything that seems unusual about LWers as seen at meetups and/or on the blog that hasn't been covered by existing questions?
Can you clarify what you mean by the "Number of Partner" question? I infer you mean number of current partners, but I'm not entirely sure.
For the "Profession" question, can you include a text-box for "other social science" and "other hard science"?
On the "Degree" question, include a High School/GED option.
What is the probability that supernatural events, defined as those involving ontologically basic mental entities, have occurred since the beginning of the universe?
What does "ontologically basic mental entities" mean?
In addition to asking about the rather tricky to define singularity, I'd like to see predictions for when a human level artificial general intelligence will first be made, if ever.
Under family religious views: Could you either allow us to select all that apply, or add something to the instructions about whether you want some sort of strange average, pick the best you can, or write in other? (Example: one christian parent of some sort and one atheist parent, what should I choose?)
Are ranges acceptable on some questions to reflect uncertainty, such as IQ?
Bonus questions ( or even main questions to add): Has reading something on less wrong caused you to change your mind? (Add qualifications here if desired, e.g. you updated your probability estimate by x, decided to collect more evidence then updated by x, etc.)
Additional question- more accurate location info than just country. (To keep anonymity, would it be possible to pull this column out of the rest of the resulting spreadsheet before it is distributed or looked at?)
Option 1- Iff you are from the USA, What state do you live in?
Option 2- Please enter either your 5 digit zip-code, or the nearest city (include state or country also)
I think this is a good question, because a previous questionnaire about people's specific location was how I saw that there were enough locals to start a meetup here.
Under "Part Five", you list SAT scoring, but not ACT scoring. I know far less people use the ACT, but if you're going to add in an option for SAT scores, I would also include a place for ACT scores.
Third, please suggest a decent, quick, and at least somewhat accurate Internet IQ test I can stick in a new section, Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions.
I think the primary free internet IQ test I've seen people use is this one, but as it's Raven's only it might introduce a skew. (I suspect many people here will do better on the related subtests of the WAIS-IV, for example.)
Ask about special diets or eating habits (e.g. paleo, atkins, vegan, vegetarian...etc)
The explanation "number of partners" question is problematic right now. It reads "0 for single, 1 for monogamous relationship, >1 for polyamorous relationship" which makes it sound like you must be monogamous if you happen to have 1 partner. I am polyamorous, have one partner and am looking for more.
In fact, I started wondering if it really meant "ideal number of partners", in which case I'd be tempted to put the name of a large cardinal.
I'd like to see finer-grained surveying of what fields people work in. Reading this post (esp. PZ Myers' take on WBE roadmap) made me update in the direction of cryonics and uploading not working, and also made me more worried about information cascades on LW in fields where users have little collective expertise.
(It might also be interesting to have another question along the lines of: how informed/accurate does the stuff you've read on LW regarding your field seem to be? What's something important going on in your field that LW should be discussing? E...
I'd replace “Number of Partners”, “Relationship Goals” and “Relationship Status” with one “Relationship Status” with answers Single (but not looking), Single (and looking), In a committed monogamous relationship, In one or more open/polyamorous relationships (but not looking for more partners), In one or more open/polyamorous relationships (and looking for more partners), Engaged, and Married.
Relationship Style needs an option for Monogomish. I'm in a monogamous relationship, but we go to swinger events/clubs and sometimes play with others.
Religious Background; What is your family's religious background? What are people where the parents come from different religions supposed to answer? I don't see the advantage of forcing people to check exactly one box.
I find it also hard to say whether my family has a Christian background. Neither of my parents believe in god. They however do use the organisation. I think they married in an evangelic church. My father is now married to an another woman and that marriage is blessed by the catholic church. My father is also a member of the catholic church....
As a last question - with people having worked through the other questions, and knowing the extent and details of their own answers - allow them to optionally provide their username.
How about a question about how people treat equations in articles? Is there anything between skip entirely and check carefully?
The political definitions are confusing and many would consider some of the distinctions wrong, clearly Americanized. American liberals are to the right of European conservatives, USSR was a socialism just a different kind, etc., etc.....
Find a non-political way of describing political preferences or, better yet, break it up into a political compass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass (test on http://politicalcompass.org/ to chart your location.)
Apatheism should also be added to the list of choices for religion.
Might have a Revolution vs Refom politics question.
Profession question is IMO too focused on professions stereotypical to LW and also needs an Other Engineering option.
Politics question might need an option for anarchists, and an option for I Deny The Framework.
First off I think that at less wrong you could get better results by including an option on some question that says something to the effect of: those options are such a poor match if I picked one it would make the results worse/add more noise than signal/you would actually lose information if you interpreted it at face value.
With what race do you most identify? Why is this question about racial identification rather than ontological membership? If I'm white but I totally think black people are awesome the instructions tell me to put black which you probabl...
How about a question about how much time/effort people put into politics? Into doing practical political work (volunteering, lobbying, holding office) as distinct from theory?
What is your position on the existence of an external reality independent from humans?
a) There is nothing outside me. I'm the only mind and the only entity in the universe.
b) It's not epistemically proper to assume a priori the existence of an external reality. We can hypothesize the existence of external entities as part of a model to explain our sensory experiences. It is not meaningful to discuss about the difference between entities that are part of the model (the "map") and entities that are part of an independent external reality (the "...
Mostly a curiosity question: Are you primarily interested in demographic information? Insofar as you are (legitimately) concerned that the survey is too long, I would expect you to put the questions you are most interested in up front in the survey. And I was therefore surprised to see the demographic questions first.
Also: The 'Roman Catholic' religion option should probably be 'Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox'.
I agree with other posters that non-US-centric races would be a good idea. But let me actually follow the instructions in the above post and try to give an alternative. The questions are close to industry standard; the 'race' answer choices are a combination of American and British race categories with some influence from other countries.
Are you of Hispanic (Latin) descent?
Which of the following races / ethnic groups do you identify most closely with?
What is the probability that significant global warming is occurring or will soon occur, and is primarily caused by human actions?
There's no reason to use a vague word like "significant". I think it would be best to use the formulations that the IPCC uses. There are two interesting issues:
1) Do people understand the current strength of evidence for climate change?
P(Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations)
Source: http://www.ipcc...
How long, in approximate number of months, have you been in the Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong community
It could help to mention when OB/LW were first founded, so us old-timers wouldn't need to look it up.
"Which disaster do you think is most likely to wipe out greater than 90% of humanity before the year 2100?"
Should probably have a "none" option.
Under education: Include an option for significant education and training that did not result in a degree by an accredited institution.
Gender should also have a 'how strongly do you identify with this gender?' axis.
There are several more axes of relationship status to be considered.
A full section on specific educational background- math, physics, &tc. e.g. "Have you ever calculated a definite infinite integral?" "Have you ever used a Mollier Diagram"?
For every multiple choice question, without any exception, offer an "other" or "Other (please specify)".
Preferred relationship style currently lists
Is indifferent supposed to go under uncertain (as in "I'm uncertain if I have a preference") or other? I think it should just be added to the response list.
The relationship goal question isn't specific enough. Considering that the male to female ratio is so off, we should also be asking how many people have given up on finding someone. "Not looking" doesn't indicate that at all as you can stop looking temporarily due to circumstance and there were so many on the last survey that I have to wonder if those guys have given up. There could be a lot of them.
Not sure how to phrase this, since people would react to this in multiple ways. Some will try to settle and have a relationship with people who...
Suggested addition:
There is a free online version of the Myers-Briggs personality test that does not require an email address and even gives percentages at humanmetrics.com. Not saying this is scientific but I've used it to test predictions in the past and that has worked. That I've compared two different maps to a territory and gotten the same result with each seems like evidence they're detecting patterns of some kind and that's enough to make me think that the humanmetrics test was not completely botched.
I have posted a detailed prediction of LessWron...
I'm not completely aware of the correct protocol here, but "with what gender do you primarily identify? ... M (transgender f -> m) ..." is not something I would expect a transgender person to say - if I'd made that much of an effort to be (fe)male, I'd want to be "(fe)male", not "(fe)male (transgender ...)".
Splitting out blog referrals from general referrals seems odd; is there a reason you cannot use "[ ] some blog, [ ]" and "[ ] other, [ ]".
I see no benefit to "revealed" in "Wh...
Extortion can be defined as special kind of trade offer that one party (Alice) would prefer to avoid, but once the offer is made, it is in Alice interest to accept it. For instance, Bob asks Alice to pay him money in order to prevent him from damaging her property. If Alice values her property more than the amount of money Bob demands, then it is in her interest to pay him.
It can be speculated that a decision theory that allows acausal trade could in principle also allow acausal extortion: Alice could predict at time t0 that if she doesn't perform a costly...
Alice an Bob are playing a variation of a one-shot Prisoner's dilemma. In this version of the game, instead of choosing their actions simultaneously, Alice moves first, and then Bob moves after he knows Alice move. However, Alice know Bob's thought processes well enough that she can predict his move ahead of time. Both Alice and Bob are rational utility maximizers.
There are two possible ways Alice and Bob can reason:
a) Alice predicts that Bob, being an utility maximizer, will always play Defect no matter what she plays. Hence she also playes Defect in orde...
When it comes to politics I don't think asking for labels is much help.
I would rather ask: Which country of the following list do you consider to be ruled best:
1) USA 2) Finland 3) Germany 4) France 5) Japan 6) Singapure 7) China 8) United Kingdom 9) Netherlands
Which do you consider to be ruled worst? If it's possible the survey taker could even order the countries into a list. The difference between US Republicans and US Democrats is very small. The difference between how different countries are governed is much stronger.
A few years ago I could have sa...
I would rather ask: Which country of the following list do you consider to be ruled best:
I have adequate knowledge about how well Finland is ruled, some minor knowledge about how the USA is ruled, and basically no useful knowledge about how well any of those other countries are ruled (besides the fact that none of them is a third world hellhole, so none of them is probably ruled terribly badly). So I couldn't answer this question, and I wouldn't be surprised if nobody on this site was familiar enough with the governance of all those nations to be able to give a meaningful answer.
Related to your example: The Art of Governing without Government
Belgium "had no government" for 535 days. Lots of people use the same words to describe the situation in Belgium.
The odd thing about this period of no government was that Belgium’s government was very busy. For example, the non-government nationalized one of the country’s largest banks. Less importantly, your humble blogger had numerous meetings that were attended by representatives of Belgium’s non-government.
How is this possible?
The answer, of course, is that Belgium’s government functions fine – fine enough to bail out a huge bank! – without significant input from elected officials. If elected officials are around to validate the decisions of the permanent government, that’s great. If not, the government gets on just fine.
Call it the art of governing without government.
Moldbuggian models of politics FTW.
Income or at least income range should be a question. Any intellectual cluster eventually and inevitably gets challenged with the question “yeah, well if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich?”
Being able to say, “actually we’re doing pretty well for our demography.” Is one possible answer. If LW is doing poorly for its demography, that’s also worth knowing. Maybe people are in early phase startups and don’t have income yet, maybe they are in the peace corp. Either way, it seems like something the community would want to know.
May increase concerns on anonymity though…
Work experience:
I'm an IT person but not a computer scientist. Maybe you don't see us other IT people as being "one of us" but if so, then the question needs an IT option.
I don't see a pattern behind the work experience question. This might be something that happened if the goal with this question changed between surveys but you wanted to keep the same options for the sake of being able to compare the two surveys. So, I won't suggest refocusing it to follow a clarified pattern but maybe a few other general categories (like "Other IT" for instance) can be added if there were enough responses from the last survey to justify it.
For the probability estimates, I think it would be valuable to also ask for a ballpark estimate of how much time the survey-taker has put into thinking about each probability. Some people might spend (or have already spent) significantly more time thinking about these probabilities than others; gathering this information could provide a useful dimension for analysis.
New questions: 'What is the likelihood that you will go into space?' 'What is the likelihood that someone you have physically touched will go into space?'
On the politics question about libertarianism, "distribution" should read "redistribution". Also, ideally the political questions would ask about regulation and/or spending rather than taxes.
P(What's the likelihood that regular condome use will prevent that you get HIV when you have regular sex with someone with HIV)
Studies that investigated the issue didn't found 100% protection. I think it's an interesting test for overconfidence.
From my libertarian perspective, the primary political issue isn't taxes and spending, but control.
Less taxes are an instance of less control, but not the only one, and it's probably a tenth as important as the harm done by the aggregate of controls. Money is a means to fulfill wants. Taxing away some of my money still allows me to prioritize my wants, and spend my money on my greatest wants. Making something illegal entirely takes away the option, imposing a much greater cost than taking away some percentage of my income.
Even in purely financial terms, c...
Current status of these suggestions:
"What activities do you enjoy? Check all that apply"
[] Fishing
[] Boating
[] Hiking
[] Climbing
The reason is that I haven't been able to figure out how to computer process these effectively; I end out with rows of boxes like "hiking,fishing" or "fishing,boating,climbing" and it's apparently beyond my limited skills to get SPSS to separate these out into separate chunks of information. I could do it like this:
Do you enjoy fishing?
[] Y
[] N
Do you enjoy boating?
[] Y
[] N
And so on, but the more options you want, the less happy I am doing this. Or, teach me a good way to solve this problem using Google Forms and SPSS.
I am reluctant to change questions that have been on the survey since previous years. For example, Will's suggestion to change the Politics question is good, except that if we did it we would no longer be able to confidently say something like "Less Wrong has gotten more liberal since the last survey". I would rather just include a political compass in the Bonus Questions, plus maybe maybe a more complicated one-word political affiliation question.
This is also part of my beef with "other", along with the fact that it's going to mean people who are 99% similar to one option but don't feel it perfectly describes them are instead going to pick something that gives us zero information. I very much agree with Vaniver here. I might or might not add it.
I'm balancing ability to totally perfectly capture all answers with ability to let people who just want to take a basic survey do that without answering a thousand mostly-similar questions. So while I understand that it might be theoretically desirable to separate out for example race vs. ethnicity, or country of birth vs. country of residence, or asexual romantic relationships versus sexual romantic relationships, I'm reluctant to bloat any section too much more than it's already bloated - especially the one on sex. I can already see someone like that tabloid reporter from a while back going "And also, the latest Less Wrong survey included 256 questions about your sex life!"
Can I get around the ethnicity problem by replacing "White (Non-Hispanic)" with "Latino"? It seems like it should work, but I'm suspicious because none of the US surveys I've encountered have ever done it.
Kind of want to avoid beating a dead basilisk.
IQ suggestions sound good.
ACT suggestion sounds good.
Most other bonus question suggestions sound good.
Happy to include Big Five test, AQ test, etc in the Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions section.
Will fix the Singularity question
Will probably fix moral views question to mirror PhilPapers version, even though that screws up past-survey-comparison
Will correct all typos
Political question solution:
Add an "other" option, then make a copy of the political question for THIS survey only, minus the "other" option, and ask "What would you have selected if "other" was not present?"
You can compare the results of the second question to past surveys and the first question to future surveys and therefore have a sense of whether LessWrong has moved in a particular direction.
Or, alternately, add a question below the political question saying:
"If you'd had an "other" option on the politics question, would you have used it?"
The first draft of the 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey is complete (see 2011 here). I will link it below if you promise not to try to take the survey because it's not done yet and this is just an example!
2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey Draft
I want three things from you.
First, please critique this draft. Tell me if any questions are unclear, misleading, offensive, confusing, or stupid. Tell me if the survey is so unbearably long that you would never possibly take it. Tell me if anything needs to be rephrased.
Second, I am willing to include any question you want in the Super Extra Bonus Questions section, as long as it is not offensive, super-long-and-involved, or really dumb. Please post any questions you want there. Please be specific - not "Ask something about abortion" but give the exact question you want me to ask as well as all answer choices.
Try not to add more than five or so questions per person, unless you're sure yours are really interesting. Please also don't add any questions that aren't very easily sort-able by a computer program like SPSS unless you can commit to sorting the answers yourself.
Third, please suggest a decent, quick, and at least somewhat accurate Internet IQ test I can stick in a new section, Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions.
I will probably post the survey to Main and officially open it for responses sometime early next week.