Psh, of course rationalists think Twilight Sparkle is the best pony.

Geeks and goths, man.

I think it's "Pinkie".

I don't know if it's specifically addressed anywhere in the Terms of Use, but free use of polls can have some very hurtful results; it might be helpful to somewhere post a guide to what type of polls are appropriate and tolerated.

What? About the same as the what you could write in comments already but prettier.

"Don't be an asshole" covers it. If you need a guide to tell you that, a guide will not help you.

This is an especially good point because you're currently able to change the question after the results are in, allowing you to prank the poll takers by making their answers seem to support anything you feel like.

Can you be more specific about what you mean?

The FAI hidden deep in the poll code logic refuses to run stupid and trollish polls.

What about fuligin?

Won't you also ask about my favourite colour?

Either the first or the second depending on how busy I am.

Please don't do that.

Vote up for NO.

Vote up for YES.

Karma balance.

The solution on Mathematics Stack Exchange

It correctly interpreted ۲ as 2. :)

After my vote:

" Mean 43.5 Median 75.0 Total votes 2"

Well this is mathematically impossible... My guess is the median isn't properly calculated for even numbers of votes.

seconded

This doesn't look right: http://screencast.com/t/qpRGihBG

The raw data says there are 13 votes for "0" and 20 votes for "1".

Confirmed. The issue is in an interaction between the polling code and Reddit's custom ORM which causes vote-totals to be cached, but not persisted to the database correctly. I have a fix, which I'm testing now. All polls created before the fix is applied will be affected; it'll be possible to restore them, but it'd take some work which isn't a priority for me.

Here's a screenshot of that with my poll:

I still have access to the raw poll data.

This is a problem. Ideally there would be a separate button next to the "vote" button (a forum that I read has that feature, with the button labeled "View Results (Null Vote)"). Second-best would be to allow people to submit a blank vote (which is not as good, since it's not obvious to people that they have that option), but it currently does not work that way (even though the OP seems to say that it does).

Gray is darker than grey.

The bug concerning reporting of results is still present: currently the counts for the four categories are displayed as 9, 0, 0, 0, with a total of 39. According to the downloaded data, the counts are 28, 4, 1, 6 = 39.

Should I do a weighted sum over descendant entities I deem fractionally me, or just over entities I deem "me"?

How to aggregate across the distribution of possibilities? Average? Median? Most likely range?

I'm 33, so it wouldn't take too much life extension to get me to 133, but a fair amount... I'd rate the probabilities as roughly 40%, 30%, 10%, 20%. So, each of the three answers is different.

After one month and 118 responses, I'm considering this poll closed. The results are:

1) 17%
2) 21%
3) 20%
4) 24%
5) 18%

A chi-squared test says that these results do not differ significantly from uniform random responding, with a p-value of 0.78.

The main reason why I ran this poll was because I thought it might have implications for the trickier poll above. It is interesting the option #4 was the most common response in this poll, that poll, and the gamefaqs poll which that poll was based on. #4 may seem especially random, and some respondents in the other polls may have just been trying to answer at random. But this poll ended up not providing much information about that; to test it we'd need a larger sample size, and preferably a poll where respondents did not use external sources of randomness.

I think this would be even more interesting as "pick at random, without an external source of randomness". Sure you can get random numbers from random.org, your computer or the seconds on your watch (a nice idee), but those just blur the effect of mind-generated random numbers.

For convenience: http://www.random.org/ or in Bash, echo $(($RANDOM % 5 + 1))

Question: what's a reasonable prior over the probability distribution of poll answers? Because I downloaded the raw data, and it says:

1. 15
2. 22
3. 21
4. 24
5. 18

...and I'm not sure what would constitute reasonable priors for the uniform distribution hypothesis versus the "aversion toward First Answer" hypothesis versus the "aversion toward First Answer and Fifth Answer" hypothesis.

I used random.org to generate my answer.

But, when I submitted it, I got the following:

First Answer 0 (0%)
Second Answer 0 (0%)
Third Answer 0 (0%)
Fourth Answer 1 (2%)
Fifth Answer 0 (0%)
Total 58 (100%)

The raw data contained all the 58 rows, however. Seems like there might be a bug in the result-rendering code.

I rolled 1d6, intending to reroll any 6s.

To anyone thinking this is not random, with 42 votes in:

• The p-value is 0.895 (this is the probability of seeing at least this much non-randomness, assuming a uniform distribution)

• The entropy is 2.302bits instead of log(5) = 2.322bits, for 0.02bits KL-distance (this is the number of bits you lose for encoding one of these votes as if it was random)

If you think you see a pattern here, you should either see a doctor or a statistician.

Is (the seconds' figure in my watch) mod 5 random enough?

Ha. I fail at random. In my defence, the universe is probably deterministic anyway.

Some people don't pick very good schelling points.

I love this poll

After one month and 120 responses, I'm considering this poll closed. The results are:

1) The third one: 21%
2) The fifth one: 15%
3) The second one: 14%
4) The first one: 32%
5) The fourth one: 18%

A chi-squared test says that these results are non-uniform, with a p-value of 0.02.

The correct answer, #5 "the fourth one", was chosen by 18% of respondents. The most common answer was #4, "the first one".

This poll idea was taken from a gamefaqs poll which was linked on LW last year. The results of that poll (which had a much larger sample size) were:

1) The third one: 17%
2) The first one: 24%
3) The last one: 21%
4) The second one: 26%
5) The fourth one: 11%

My hypothesis about that poll was:

The first option is most salient, by virtue of being first. Level 0 players will tend to choose option 1. Level 1 players will realize that this is what level 0 players will do, so they will tend to choose option 2 ("the first one"). Level 2 players will realize that this is what level 1 players will do, so they will tend to choose option 4 ("the second one"). Level 3 players will realize that this is what level 2 players will do, so they will tend to choose option 5 ("the fourth one"). Apparently there are lots of level 1 & 2 players, but very few level 3 players.

That hypothesis predicts that the most common responses on the LW poll would be the level 1 response, #4 "the first one", and the level 2 response, #5 "the fourth one". The data provide partial confirmation of this hypothesis; in terms of levels the most common responses to the LW poll were:

32% Level 1 (#4 "the first one")
21% Level 0 (#1 "the third one")
18% Level 2 (#5 "the fourth one")
15% Level 3 (#2 "the fifth one")
14% Level 4 (#3 "the second one")

And for the gamefaqs poll:
26% Level 2 (#4 "the second one")
24% Level 1 (#2 "the first one")
21% Level 4 (#3 "the last one")
17% Level 0 (#1 "the third one")
11% Level 3 (#5 "the fourth one")

The poll seems designed for very short answers.

Feature, not bug.

The results so far (only showing answers with > 1 responder):

11 "0.0"
8 "-1.0"
7 "2147483647.0"
5 "3.0"
4 "42.0"
4 "1e+19"
3 "9.0"
3 "8.0"
3 "1.0"
2 "666.0"
2 "32767.0"
2 "24.0"
2 "2.0"
2 "1e+17"

To regenerate this, run grep -v "#" poll.csv | awk -F , '{ print $3 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr.

I'm not surprised by the number of votes for 2^31-1. It was the first number to pop into my head when I saw the poll.

According to my I Ching calculator, beyond 4 is a suffusion of yellow.

This appears not to be a valid response. Curious.

Median 17.0

....

It does not seem to accept 'inf' or 'infinite'.

The largest number is about 45,000,000,000, although mathematicians suspect that there may be even larger numbers. (45,000,000,001?)

According to the poll, my understanding of what qualifies as an integer is very, very wrong. 1e+19=the universal integer limit. NO EXCEPTIONS!

NaN

Doesn't accept "⌊∞⌋".

I'll just leave Mr. Show's "highest number" sketch here.