The next installment of the Polling Thread.

This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.

These are the rules:

1. Each poll goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
2. You must at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than you own. This ensures participation in all polls and also limits the total number of polls. You may of course vote without posting a poll.
3. Your poll should include a 'don't know' option (to avoid conflict with 2). I don't know whether we need to add a troll catch option here but we will see.

If you don't know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.

This is a somewhat regular thread. If it is successful I may post again. Or you may. In that case do the following :

• Use "Polling Thread" in the title.
• Copy the rules.
• Add the tag "poll".
• Link to this Thread or a previous Thread.
• Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be polls or similar'
• Add a second top-level comment with an initial poll to start participation.

How much money would it take to engineer biological immortality for at least half of the world's population, within 20 years, with 99% confidence?

After some hiatus another installment of the Polling Thread.

This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.

Additionally this is your chance to learn to write polls. This installment is devoted to try out polls for the cautious and curious.

These are the rules:

1. Each poll goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
2. You must at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than you own. This ensures participation in all polls and also limits the total number of polls. You may of course vote without posting a poll.
3. Your poll should include a 'don't know' option (to avoid conflict with 2). I don't know whether we need to add a troll catch option here but we will see.

If you don't know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.

This is a somewhat regular thread. If it is successful I may post again. Or you may. In that case do the following :

• Use "Polling Thread" in the title.
• Copy the rules.
• Add the tag "poll".
• Link to this Thread or a previous Thread.
• Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be polls or similar'
• Add a second top-level comment with an initial poll to start participation.

Another installment of the Polling Thread.

This is a special installment: It's about getting feedback about you! 

It has been said Don't Be Afraid of Asking Personally Important Questions of Less Wrong. And there is a Curiosity checklist: Looking for feedback. We are in a Tell Culture. So why not learn something about yourself? For some people it is easy to sense how they are perceived. For some it is difficult. Even if you get feedback it is (luckily!) more often positive - but this sometimes leaves out murky key points. Giving constructive personal feedback is difficult. Lets try it.

The next installment of the Polling Thread.

This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.

These are the rules:

1. Each poll goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
2. You must at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than you own. This ensures participation in all polls and also limits the total number of polls. You may of course vote without posting a poll.
3. Your poll should include a 'don't know' option (to avoid conflict with 2). I don't know whether we need to add a troll catch option here but we will see.

If you don't know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.

This is a somewhat regular thread. If it is successful I may post again. Or you may. In that case do the following :

• Use "Polling Thread" in the title.
• Copy the rules.
• Add the tag "poll".
• Link to this Thread or a previous Thread.
• Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be polls or similar'
• Add a second top-level comment with an initial poll to start participation.

Vincent Müller and Nick Bostrom have just released a paper surveying the results of a poll of experts about future progress in artificial intelligence. The authors have also put up a companion site where visitors can take the poll and see the raw data. I just checked the site and so far only one individual has submitted a response.  This provides an opportunity for testing the views of LW members against those of experts.  So if you are willing to complete the questionnaire, please do so before reading the paper. (I have abstained from providing a link to the pdf to create a trivial inconvenience for those who cannot resist temptaion. Once you take the poll, you can easily find the paper by conducting a Google search with the keywords: bostrom muller future progress artificial intelligence.)

This is the third installment of the Polling Thread.

This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.

These are the rules:

1. Each poll goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
2. You must at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than you own. This ensures participation in all polls and also limits the total number of polls. You may of course vote without posting a poll.
3. Your poll should include a 'don't know' option (to avoid conflict with 2). I don't know whether we need to add a troll catch option here but we will see.

If you don't know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.

This is a somewhat regular thread. If it is successful I may post again. Or you may. In that case do the following :

• Use "Polling Thread" in the title.
• Copy the rules.
• Add the tag "poll".
• Link to this Thread or a previous Thread.
• Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be polls or similar'
• Add a second top-level comment with an initial poll to start participation.

This is the second installment of the Polling Thread.

This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.

There are some rules:

1. Each poll goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
2. You must at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than you own. This ensures participation in all polls and also limits the total number of polls. You may of course vote without posting a poll.
3. Your poll should include a 'don't know' option (to avoid conflict with 2). I don't know whether we need to add a troll catch option here but we will see.

If you don't know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.

This is not (yet?) a regular thread. If it is successful I may post again. Or you may. In that case do the following :

• Use "Polling Thread" in the title.
• Copy the rules.
• Add the tag "poll".
• Link to this Thread or a previous Thread.
• Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be polls or similar'
• Add a second top-level comment with an initial poll to start participation.

This is an experiment to use polls to tap into the crowd knowledge probably present on LW.

This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.

There are some rules:

1. Each poll goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
2. You must at least vote all polls that were posted earlier than you own. This ensures participation in all polls and also limits the total number of polls. You may of course vote without posting a poll.
3. Your poll should include a 'don't know' option (to avoid conflict with 2). I don't know whether we need to add a troll catch option here but we will see.

If you don't know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.

This being an experiment I do not announce it to be regular. If it is successful I may. Or you may. In that case I recommend the following to make this potentially more usable:

• Use "Polling Thread" in the title.
• Copy the rules.
• Add the tag "poll".
• Link to this Thread or a previous Thread.
• Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other to-level comments should be polls or similar'
• Add a second top-level comment with an initial poll to start participation.

EDIT: Added recommendations from KnaveOfAllTrades.

I have a confession to make: I have been not "publishing" my results to an experiment because the results were uninteresting. You may recall some time ago that I made a post asking people to take a survey so that I could look at a small variation of the typical "Wisdom of the Crowds" experiment where people make estimates on a value and the average of crowd's estimates is better than that of all or almost all of the individual estimates. Since LessWrong is full of people who like to do these kinds of things (thank you!), I got 177 responses - many more than I was hoping for!

I am now coming back to this since I happened upon an older post by Eliezer saying the following

When you hear that a classroom gave an average estimate of 871 beans for a jar that contained 850 beans, and that only one individual student did better than the crowd, the astounding notion is not that the crowd can be more accurate than the individual.  The astounding notion is that human beings are unbiased estimators of beans in a jar, having no significant directional error on the problem, yet with large variance.  It implies that we tend to get the answer wrong but there's no systematic reason why.  It requires that there be lots of errors that vary from individual to individual - and this is reliably true, enough so to keep most individuals from guessing the jar correctly. And yet there are no directional errors that everyone makes, or if there are, they cancel out very precisely in the average case, despite the large individual variations.  Which is just plain odd.  I find myself somewhat suspicious of the claim, and wonder whether other experiments that found less amazing accuracy were not as popularly reported.

(Emphasis added.) It turns out that I myself was sitting upon exactly such results.

The results are here. Sheet 1 shows raw data and Sheet 3 shows some values from those numbers. A few values that were clearly either jokes or mistakes (like not noticing the answer was in millions) were removed. In summary: (according to Wikipedia) 1000 million people in Africa (as of 2009) whereas the estimate from LessWrong was 781 million and the first transatlantic telephone call happened in 1926 whereas the average from the poll was 1899.

There! I've come clean!

I had deferred making this public because I thought the result that I was trying to test wasn't really being tested in this experiment, regardless of the results. The idea (see my original post linked about) was to see whether selecting between two choices would still let the crowd average out to the correct value (this two-option choice was meant to reflect the structure of some democracies). But how to interpret the results? It seemed that my selection of values is too important and that the average would change depending on what I picked even if everyone was to make an estimate, then look at the two options and choose the best one. So perhaps the only result of note here is that for the questions given, Less Wrong users were not particularly great at being a wise crowd.

The results for these have been stable for a while now; I'm posting them a bit late. 95 people took the survey after I modified it to add two questions. For the public version, I removed the pre-change data (10 data points).

One text response included identifying information, which I removed in the public version of the data. If you participated and there is any information you provided that you would like removed from the public version, PLEASE tell me as soon as possible and I will remove it.

P.S. To the person who predicted an 80-90% significant difference between different parts of California: I predict with at least 90% confidence that there will be no significant difference, because of the wide spread of locations and smallish sample size of this survey.

(The original post about the survey.)

EDIT: After some comments that it was unethical for me to post the data (in particular the text), I removed public access from the link provided earlier. Given my precommitment to post the data, I assumed it was clear enough to respondents that it would be public. I'm not convinced that this has hurt anyone, but given that others seem to disagree, it seemed prudent to remove it. Please feel free to continue this discussion; I'm interested in your thoughts.

At Reason Rally a couple of months ago, we noticed that a lot of atheists there seemed to be there for mutual support - because their own communities rejected atheists, because they felt outnumbered and threatened by their peers; the rally was a way for them to feel part of an in-group. Reason Rally is definitely an event that selects for people who feel excluded by their communities most of the time. But there may be a different concentration of people who have had this sort of experience on LessWrong, and we wondered what that concentration was.

Hence, this survey: LessWrong Members and their Local Communities.

If I get a decent sample size, I will post the data for all to enjoy.

EDIT: I added two questions about current and previous religious views to the poll. If you took it before 11:30PM EST 5/2, I'd appreciate it very much if you would take the time to retake it. :)

In another thread, we have been discussing how people (especially female people) have come to find out about LessWrong. Instead of just guessing, I figured I would make a poll.

I remember in recent history there was a thread on the subject, but the answers were mainly "I got here from HPMoR" or "I've been here since OB". However, the question I want answered is:

How did you find HPMoR or OB in the first place?

Were you referred by a friend? Were you searching the internet for keywords like "rationality"? Were you linked from some other site you read?

Please answer! Even if you are a lurker; ESPECIALLY if you are a female reader! (There is a question where you can say you are a lurker, if you like!)

Click here to take the poll!

ETA- female *reader* and female *people*

Many of you will be familiar with the "Wisdom of the Crowd" - a phenomenon where the average result of a large poll of people's estimates tends to be very accurate, even when most people make poor estimates. I've written a short poll to test a small variant of this setup which I would like to test. 

Please fill out this short poll.

Specifically, I want to see how the weighted average of the results performs when the question is posed as "is the value in question closer to A or B?" This change is inspired by your usual two-party election where people choose between two extreme values, when many voters have opinions in the middle of the two.

Thank you for helping!

I'm a little worried about anchoring in this survey. Suggestions for how to improve it would be appreciated.

I noticed enough comments about topic recently that I wanted to run a quick poll about topics and discussion categories on Less Wrong.

Since being told others opinions might cause an anchoring bias, please take the poll here before reading further:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVJSTBTdk92UjhTWWp6U1dYSDltclE6MQ

My personal opinion at the moment (last chance to avoid having me influence your poll results) is that I want to reduce the number of people who feel that articles posted on Less Wrong are off topic and limit topical complaints. I don't want to do this because I think the complainers are wrong, because if they don't want to see something, they are correct to indicate it. But I feel that there are ways of handling this at a higher level that might be more effective than just up or down voting based on topic alone, and I feel like it would help increase the quality of discussion here to have better topical division.

I think the biggest problem with the current system is this definition for Discussion.

"This part of the site is for the discussion of topics not yet ready or not suitable for normal top-level posts."

The fact that Discussion is "not yet ready or not suitable" indicates to me that as a category it's not cutting apart topics well. "I'm making a draft about SIA and SSA that I want to put in Main" and "Someone made a new scientific paper about the OPERA Neutrino anomaly again." and "Is Twilight Sparkle a Rationalist?" Don't seem to mesh well under the same general discussion category, even though I would probably read the community discussion on any of them.

That said, I am open to arguments to establish why the Status Quo is worthwhile as well. And maybe the poll will result in a bunch of people voting for only Main and Discussion.

Please feel free to discuss anything relating to topics or discussion categories or the poll below, and thank you for answering the poll!

Some have been curious about what the politics of this community would look like if broken down further; here's a shot at figuring it out. I've also included a few other questions that folks expressed curiosity about. Aside from one sensitive question, there's no option to keep your answers private, since in my opinion that would defeat the point - just don't answer if you have concerns - but there's also no overlap with the old survey, aside from asking you how you answered the original politics question. (This should help with interpreting those results even if the n for this is much lower than and somehow biased relative to the big survey.)

For entertainment purposes only, don't use the below space to discuss politics directly, &c. Early suggestions are likely to be incorporated, given what I assume to be the low quality of the first draft.

Edit: "left" and "right" operationalized for the questions they appear in; poor language cleared up in mental health question.

Edit 2: results here; see comment below for some preliminary thoughts. Because there were several unique regional responses, I did not publish responses that question.

Please take this easy one-question survey.  For Science! Survey link

At the end of June, I asked Less Wrong to vote for "What topic[s] would be best for an investigation and brief post?" in order to direct a search for topics to examine here. My thanks to everyone that participated (especially since the comments hint that the poll format was not well-liked). The most-wanted topics follow, and the complete list can be found on Google Docs -- maps and graphs related to the poll are also available on All Our Ideas. A score for a topic in the results below is an "estimated [percent] chance that it will win against a randomly chosen idea."

1. Systems theory -- 71.6
2. Leadership -- 70.7
3. Linguistics (general) -- 70.7
4. Finance -- 67.0
5. Bayesian approach to business -- 60.7
6. Lisp (Programming language) -- 59.7
7. Anthropology (general) -- 59.4
8. Sociology (general) -- 59.2
9. Political Science (general) -- 58.5
10. Historiography (the methods of history) -- 58.3
11. Logistics -- 56.8
12. Sociology of Political Organizations -- 56.0
13. Military Theory -- 52.1
14. Diplomacy -- 51.1

Systems theory, in first place, is a topic that I found while rummaging through online sources, including Wikipedia, for items to add to the poll; it's described there as the "study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems in all fields of research. [....] In this context the word systems is used to refer specifically to self-regulating systems, i.e. that are self-correcting through feedback." Leadership seems to fall into both the social and "being effective" categories of interest, but has only lightly been touched on in previous discussion here despite a lot of ink spilled on the topic elsewhere -- the top Google results for "leadership" on this site are currently Calcsam's post on community roles and a book review for the Arbinger Institute's Leadership and Self Deception. "To Lead, You Must Stand Up" also comes to mind.

How to Use It

The spreadsheet includes columns for "Currently Investigated By" and "Writeup URLs" -- feel free to add your name or writeup links. If you already know a thing or two about one of the above topics, share your knowledge in a comment below or in a discussion post as appropriate, similar to the earlier "What can you teach us?" If you want to survey what currently exists on a topic, grab a few books, investigate, and then let us know what you found. When a related post instead of just a comment is appropriate, I recommend the tag "topic_search" As mentioned previously, even investigations that end in a comment to this post that a topic isn't useful for LW is still itself useful for the search.

Followup to: Systematic Search for Useful Ideas

I've set up a pairwise poll for this question and additional suggestions are welcome. My original proposal was to examine topics that haven't already been covered here, but instead of that, I'd like to ask people to consider the existing level of discussion on a topic in evaluating what would be "best."

ETA: There are currently over 500 pairs. You don't have to go through all of them -- answer as many or as few as you like.

I recently heard about the upcoming event (or set of events) Slutwalk.  I realize that this is somewhat political and may have some mind-killing effects, but my main interest is in the Less Wrong reaction to the idea.  From the wikipedia page[1]:

The "Toronto Slut Walk" refers to a protest held on April 3, 2011 in Toronto. Protesters walked from Queen's Park (Toronto) to the Toronto Police Headquarters located on Central Street ^[1]. These protesters were dressed in revealing clothing and holding signs in order to reject the belief that female rape victims are "asking for it"^[2]. They marched in response to remarks made by a Toronto police officer and judge. Women are also organizing other "slut walks" around Canada and the United States^[3][4], including one scheduled for August 20th, 2011 in New York City^[5].

Before continuing to read, please answer the poll below as to how you feel about the idea of the "Slutwalk."

I have many friends who are involved with the Slutwalk and my first impression is that it is a good idea; that framing and terminology, if not a strong part of policy decisions, can have large effects on personal wellbeing.  Also that while dressing more modestly may have some effect on sexual assault, having an authority put any onus of a crime on a victim harshly reduces the disincentive for perpetrators.

On the other hand, I have been known to be clueless before in matters of activism, and I recall that Robin Hanson has made cutting remarks about protest being about attracting mates and making a show of identifying with groups, and this certainly seems like it could fit that description to a T.  So I am curious what others' reactions are.

This is a political issue, and we all know politics is the mind-killer, so I would mostly like to see what people think of this idea; specifically whether it is controversial, heavily supported, or heavily disapproved of.

I will attempt to reformat if I can figure out how to work the formatting.

EDIT: Rephrased poll options and removed references to clusters, at popular request.

References:

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Slutwalk

A second attempt.

Defintions:

universe: that which contains everything.

reality: the realm of natural phenomena.

scientific theory: a theory that identifies natural phenomena.

morality: the realm of normative rules.

normative theory: a theory that identifies normative rules.

identification: "this natural phenomenon has following properties" or "this normative rule says: ... "

What are you?

Please answer in the form of [ABC0]{4}, where 0 stands for no opinion. Feel free to add an explanation.

Example: B0BA stands for anti-realism, no opinion on values, weak ontological realism, scientific reductionism.

1A realism

Reality is external to the mind.

It is possible to evaluate which scientific theory is more correct.

1B anti-realism

Reality is external to the mind.

It is impossible to evaluate which scientific theory is more correct.

1C subjectivism

Reality is a product of the mind.

2A value realism

Morality is external to the mind.

It is possible to evaluate which normative theory is better.

2B value anti-realism

Morality is external to the mind.

It is impossible to evaluate which normative theory is better.

2C value relativism

Morality is a product of the mind.

3A strong ontological reductionism

Mental phenomena are reducible to reality and reality is reducible to mathematics.

Mathematics is the universe.

3B weak ontological reductionism

Mental phenomena are reducible to reality, but reality is not reducible to mathematics.

Reality (and mathematics) is the universe.

3C anti-reductionism

Mental phenomena are not reducible to reality and reality is not reducible to mathematics.

4A scientific reductionism

The entirety of scientific theories can be reduced to some axiomatic theories.

4B scientific anti-reductionism

The entirety of scientific theories cannot be reduced to some axiomatic theories.

New natural phenomena require new irreducible scientific theories.

Do you believe in consciousness?

If you do what exactly would you define it as?

and what evidence do you have for its existence?