[Survey Taken Thread]
By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.
Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.
I have taken the survey. I don't remember there being a public key question at the end of the last one though, which is a shame since that obviously means I don't remember what mine was last time.
I took the survey. I feel like the questions that ask for numeric answers about the probability of AI risk should have been optional because I have very weak fews about them
I either have taken the survey in the last couple of hours, or have begun taking it and hereby commit to submitting a completed survey in the next couple of hours.
(Expressed in this form so as not to leak information about which survey is whose.)
[EDITED to add:] This is just to confirm that I have in fact completed the survey. I have also upvoted all the other taken-the-survey comments currently present.
Thanks for your work in creating the survey, and for LesserWrong. I shared the link to the survey in our meet-up group, and hope many people will contribute.
A few comments:
Q10: misspelling: "monogomous" should be "monogamous"
Q27: not clear what "as a community initiative" means. My actual impression is that LW2.0 is a project a few people are working on, but that most of "the community" has little visibility of it or input into it.
Q31: really needs an "insufficient data for meaningful answer" option.
Q32: fails to distinguish between "this is an incredibly important goal" and "this is the only goal that matters". If I became 100% convinced th...
Re: The SAT question. The SAT's actually reverted back to a score out of 1600. Slight nitpick, given that you mention that the current status quo is out of 2400.
For being diagnosed with depression, do you include only major depressive disorder or do you also include persistent depressive disorder and adjustment disorder?
Previous session is set to be finished.
Your browser reports that it was used previously to answer this survey. We are resetting the session so that you can start from the beginning.
Click here to start the survey.
I have just pressed Enter after my country's name. Fix this!
can't access "font fort" with noScript on. It needs to be expressed in the link html, so i can whitelist it.
In addition to the email listed at the end of the survey, you can report bugs by replying to this post and I'll keep a log of their resolution:
Wed Sep 13 00:00:55 PDT 2017: Fixed bug where yourmorals.org survey links took user away from survey page instead of opening in new tab. (If this issue resurfaces please let me know.)
I'm also going to go through and fix the same issue in as many other survey links as I can. In the meantime work around by right clicking to open.
Wed Sep 13 21:50:11 PDT 2017: Fixed bug where enter key on text forms would throw out your...
So, what happened?
This post is hidden from Main and the survey "is expired and no longer available", even though the post mentions that it should run for 10 more days. I wanted to share it with Russian LW community, will it be back in some form later?
Firstly, thank you for the survey and for the option of exporting one's answers!
Questions that I found ambiguous or without a clear, correct answer (for future reference, since changing the survey midway is a terrible idea):
- Is it fundamentally important to you that the 'rationality movement' ever produces a measurable increase in general sanity? (i.e, if you were shown conclusive proof it will not you would likely leave)?
What do you answer if you believe that it is fundamentally important, and worth trying, but still unlikely to succeed (i.e. we're p...
Thank you for compiling another survey!
And on a completely unrelated note, what is it that we actually want to know about ourselves as LW? Surely it can't be the gender ratio. It's not like we don't already know not to post "traditionally feminine" stuff or something. It seems to me that surveys aren't done to achieve some further goal, although the results, of course, are of some curiosity. Sorry if this is counterproductive, I am genuinely interested in the above question.
Thanks for your feedback. While I agree with you at many (even most) points, there are several considerations to keep in mind:
It is not possible for me to change the questions at this point in time, There are nearly 200 responses at this point and it would be completely unfair of me to force everyone to retake the survey so I can fix most of the offered feedback. As a consequence I can only take these as potential improvements for the next survey.
The questions in the AI Progress section are ripped directly from an associated study, I have no control over their content or methodology besides replicating them as accurately and faithfully as I can.
Some simplification of scenarios is necessary to make them fit into a <150 question survey. There are also real limits to how much effort I can expect from people in terms of engaging with a scenario and that is why certain things such as the probability that a genetic treatment will be safe aren't included. Many things could use a probability but if I asked for one every time people would probably get frustrated with the survey and give up.
In the future we're looking at changing platforms so that the survey can be offered in a 'module' format which allows it to be taken in chunks over a much longer period of time with more detail in individual sections.
Quite often it is useful for a survey to explicitly not include a neutral option. Picking between two things is mentally difficult and a neutral option offers a path of least resistance which people are more likely to click than put in the effort even if that doesn't represent their true opinion.
At analysis time I have access to a respondents previous answers.
Our survey software prevents me from doing certain things which would be desirable.
Responding to certain specific questions:
Q33: Yes, CafeChesscourt. The question is "given nothing but the appearance of this forum" (CafeChesscourt put approximately zero effort into software, making it a useful control about how important software is to a forums success), would you use it if one of these "celebrity users" listed below were someone that ran it and used it regularly? The purpose of this question is to gauge how useful it is to get people who are popular to endorse a discussion forum. And while you might think it's bonkers to choose a forum that way, empirically many people will show up to places that are often reviled like Tumblr if the right person asks them to.
Q33ff: I agree that is an assumption many people are making in regards to this issue, that assumption is not there in the question however as its purpose was me teasing at the idea that perhaps focusing on technical excellence is the wrong metric.
Q36: I believe this is a limitation of the software, though I'll go ahead and double check since letting people write stuff in wouldn't materially effect the survey results.
Q52: Depression does go away more often than the others. But more importantly on the 2016 survey we had somewhat horrifying rates of depression. It was difficult to distinguish if this was because everybody gets depression at least once and then 'gets over it' or because that many LessWrongers are actually depressed. This question lets us tell the difference.
Q67: Yes. As you can tell this is a hard question to ask people but I think it's important enough to be worth asking even if imperfectly. In a future survey Calculus could probably be changed to "Calculus or 'higher maths'". The painting/etc option is meant to apply to visual arts. In the future it would probably be better to more accurately specify. In the grand scheme of things it will probably not spoil this years survey results to have the occasional musician pick it under the impression it counts. (I should also add music, thanks for the tip.)
Update (Fri Sep 15 13:46:59 PDT 2017): The issue in question 36 turned out to be fixable, thanks for the help!
For the avoidance of doubt, I appreciate your "several considerations" and in particular was not suggesting that you should hack the questions about mid-survey. And, er, I realise that I just posted a bunch of criticism without adding: thank you very much for doing the survey; I think it will be interesting and useful; the fact that I have some quibbles doesn't make that any less true. So please consider that added :-).
As a single data point, on Q33 I attempted to answer as if the question meant something like "If all you knew about a new fo...
The 2017 LessWrong Survey is here! This year we're interested in community response to the LessWrong 2.0 initiative. I've also gone through and fixed as many bugs as I could find reported on the last survey, and reintroduced items that were missing from the 2016 edition. Furthermore new items have been introduced in multiple sections and some cut in others to make room. You can now export your survey results after finishing by choosing the 'print my results' option on the page displayed after submission. The survey will run from today until the 15th of October.
You can take the survey below, thanks for your time. (It's back in single page format, please allow some seconds for it to load):
Click here to take the survey