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Nanashi comments on Some secondary statistics from the results of LW Survey - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: Nanashi 12 February 2015 04:46PM

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Comment author: Nanashi 13 February 2015 11:28:15AM 1 point [-]

Updated to include US-only data.

Comment author: gjm 13 February 2015 12:58:58PM 2 points [-]

It's interesting how much smaller the difference in salary between all-LW and US-LW looks when you look at data broken down by salary brackets than when you don't. Not very surprising in retrospect, but still interesting.

There are some interesting effects in the charitable contribution figures. For instance, in the first row we see that US-LW contributions in this bracket are way lower than US-general, US-LW income is about the same as US-general, but US-LW contributions/income are bigger than US-general contributions/income. The 100k-200k bracket shows a similar oddity: very similar contributions, very similar incomes, but much larger contributions/income.

My guess is that the contributions/income figures are averages of ratios rather than ratios of averages, so that if you have one person with an income of $1 giving $100 away then that's going to pull your average way up. I guess there are quite a lot of low-income high-relative-giving LW folks and that they explain the low-end figures, and that at the high end there are maybe one or two high-relative-giving LW folks to explain the high-end figures.

Comment author: Nanashi 13 February 2015 02:26:48PM 1 point [-]

Agggh! I'm glad you pointed out that incongruency. When I was reformatting the graph, I only copied in half of the US Mean Contribuions so the first 4 rows of that were incorrect. The graph has been updated. The numbers are in fact a ratio of averages. LW mean contribution is calculated as follows: (Total Contributions of Subgroup)/(Total Income of Subgroup).

However, I am not seeing where you're getting that US-LW income is about the same as US-General; for 0-25k the USA-LW mean income is $11k, the USA-General is $15k.

Comment author: gjm 13 February 2015 08:30:36PM 2 points [-]

I am not seeing where you're getting [...]

Sheer hallucination, I think. Sorry.