It's interesting therefore that most anti-abortion folk are not too enthusiastic about contraception. It's almost as if they might be optimizing for something other than minimizing abortions, such as the promulgation of a particular moral order of society — one based on sin, guilt, and redemption — as against other ones such as harm minimization. If there is no harm, there need be no guilt and thus no redemption; harm reduction as a policy amounts to immanentization of the Eschaton.
Alright. I sometimes forget how irrational people can be. I have a question though: if unintended pregnancy were unheard of and people only considered abortions on rare occasions, do you think there would be as many people fighting about abortion?
(The people who do care about harm reduction could do this despite them.)
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.