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2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
11/26: The survey is now closed. Please do not take the survey. Your results will not be counted.
It's that time of year again.
If you are reading this post, and have not been sent here by some sort of conspiracy trying to throw off the survey results, then you are the target population for the Less Wrong Census/Survey. Please take it. Doesn't matter if you don't post much. Doesn't matter if you're a lurker. Take the survey.
This year's census contains a "main survey" that should take about ten or fifteen minutes, as well as a bunch of "extra credit questions". You may do the extra credit questions if you want. You may skip all the extra credit questions if you want. They're pretty long and not all of them are very interesting. But it is very important that you not put off doing the survey or not do the survey at all because you're intimidated by the extra credit questions.
The survey will probably remain open for a month or so, but once again do not delay taking the survey just for the sake of the extra credit questions.
Please make things easier for my computer and by extension me by reading all the instructions and by answering any text questions in the most obvious possible way. For example, if it asks you "What language do you speak?" please answer "English" instead of "I speak English" or "It's English" or "English since I live in Canada" or "English (US)" or anything else. This will help me sort responses quickly and easily. Likewise, if a question asks for a number, please answer with a number such as "4", rather than "four".
Okay! Enough nitpicky rules! Time to take the...
Thanks to everyone who suggested questions and ideas for the 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey. I regret I was unable to take all of your suggestions into account, because some of them were contradictory, others were vague, and others would have required me to provide two dozen answers and a thesis paper worth of explanatory text for every question anyone might conceivably misunderstand. But I did make about twenty changes based on the feedback, and *most* of the suggested questions have found their way into the text.
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.
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2011 Survey Results
A big thank you to the 1090 people who took the second Less Wrong Census/Survey.
Does this mean there are 1090 people who post on Less Wrong? Not necessarily. 165 people said they had zero karma, and 406 people skipped the karma question - I assume a good number of the skippers were people with zero karma or without accounts. So we can only prove that 519 people post on Less Wrong. Which is still a lot of people.
I apologize for failing to ask who had or did not have an LW account. Because there are a number of these failures, I'm putting them all in a comment to this post so they don't clutter the survey results. Please talk about changes you want for next year's survey there.
Of our 1090 respondents, 972 (89%) were male, 92 (8.4%) female, 7 (.6%) transexual, and 19 gave various other answers or objected to the question. As abysmally male-dominated as these results are, the percent of women has tripled since the last survey in mid-2009.
Poll results: LW probably doesn't cause akrasia
Test of: Decision Fatigue, Rationality, and Akrasia.
Shortly before the Summit, Alexandros posted a short discussion post wondering whether rationality training might cause akrasia by prompting folks to make more decisions using deliberate, conscious, "system II" reasoning (instead of rapid, automatic, "system I" heuristics) and, thereby, causing decision fatigue.
This conjecture sounded interesting to me, and I'd wondered similar things myself, so I put up a poll to gather data.
2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
The final straw was noticing a comment referring to "the most recent survey I know of" and realizing it was from May 2009. I think it is well past time for another survey, so here is one now.
I've tried to keep the structure of the last survey intact so it will be easy to compare results and see changes over time, but there were a few problems with the last survey that required changes, and a few questions from the last survey that just didn't apply as much anymore (how many people have strong feelings on Three Worlds Collide these days?)
Please try to give serious answers that are easy to process by computer (see the introduction). And please let me know as soon as possible if there are any security problems (people other than me who can access the data) or any absolutely awful questions.
I will probably run the survey for about a month unless new people stop responding well before that. Like the last survey, I'll try to calculate some results myself and release the raw data (minus the people who want to keep theirs private) for anyone else who wants to examine it.
Like the last survey, if you take it and post that you took it here, I will upvote you, and I hope other people will upvote you too.
Amanda Knox: post mortem
Continuing my interest in tracking real-world predictions, I notice that the recent acquittal of Knox & Sollecito offers an interesting opportunity - specifically, many LessWrongers gave probabilities for guilt back in 2009 in komponisto’s 2 articles:
- “You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event”
- “The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom”
Both were interesting exercises, and it’s time to do a followup. Specifically, there are at least 3 new pieces of evidence to consider:
- the failure of any damning or especially relevant evidence to surface in the ~2 years since (see also: the hope function)
- the independent experts’ report on the DNA evidence
- the freeing of Knox & Sollecito, and continued imprisonment of Rudy Guede (with reduced sentence)
Point 2 particularly struck me (the press attributes much of the acquittal to the expert report, an acquittal I had not expected to succeed), but other people may find the other 2 points or unmentioned news more weighty.
You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event
As many of you probably know, in an Italian court early last weekend, two young students, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted of killing another young student, Meredith Kercher, in a horrific way in November of 2007. (A third person, Rudy Guede, was convicted earlier.)
If you aren't familiar with the case, don't go reading about it just yet. Hang on for just a moment.
If you are familiar, that's fine too. This post is addressed to readers of all levels of acquaintance with the story.
What everyone should know right away is that the verdict has been extremely controversial. Strong feelings have emerged, even involving national tensions (Knox is American, Sollecito Italian, and Kercher British, and the crime and trial took place in Italy). The circumstances of the crime involve sex. In short, the potential for serious rationality failures in coming to an opinion on a case like this is enormous.
Now, as it happens, I myself have an opinion. A rather strong one, in fact. Strong enough that I caught myself thinking that this case -- given all the controversy surrounding it -- might serve as a decent litmus test in judging the rationality skills of other people. Like religion, or evolution -- except less clichéd (and cached) and more down-and-dirty.
Of course, thoughts like that can be dangerous, as I quickly recognized. The danger of in-group affective spirals looms large. So before writing up that Less Wrong post adding my-opinion-on-the-guilt-or-innocence-of-Amanda-Knox-and-Raffaele-Sollecito to the List of Things Every Rational Person Must Believe, I decided it might be useful to find out what conclusion(s) other aspiring rationalists would (or have) come to (without knowing my opinion).
So that's what this post is: a survey/experiment, with fairly specific yet flexible instructions (which differ slightly depending on how much you know about the case already).
Fighting Akrasia: Survey Design Help Request
Follow-up to: Fighting Akrasia: Finding the Source
In the last post in this series I posted a link to a Google Docs survey to try to gather some data on what techniques, if any, work for people in conquering akrasia, but we haven't gotten very much information so far: the response pool is fairly homogeneous in terms of age, sex, and personality type. In part this is because we need to get more responses outside of the LW readership, but probably also because I'm not asking the right questions. So, my challenge this weekend is to come up with some good revisions for the survey.
In order to maximize comment usefulness, please suggest one revision per top level comment and then any discussion of that revision can take place in the replies.
In the interest of keeping the comments on topic, I request a moratorium on discussions of whether or not akrasia exists and whether or not we can or should do something about it in the comments on this article. It's not that I want to exclude or silence opinions contrary to what I'm trying to accomplish: it's just that I would like to keep this article on the topic of revising the akrasia fighting survey. By all means, if my posting about akrasia really bothers you, write up an article explaining why I'm wrong and we'll discuss the issue more there.
Thanks!
Fighting Akrasia: Finding the Source
Followup to: Fighting Akrasia: Incentivising Action
Influenced by: Generalizing From One Example
Previously I looked at how we might fight akrasia by creating incentives for actions. Based on the comments to the previous article and Yvain's now classic post Generalizing From One Example, I want to take a deeper look at the source of akrasia and the techniques used to fight it.
I feel foolish for not looking at this closer first, but let's begin by asking what akrasia is and what causes it. As commonly used, akrasia is the weakness-of-will we feel when we desire to do something but find ourselves doing something else. So why do we experience akrasia? Or, more to the point, why to we feel a desire to take actions contrary the actions we desire most, as indicated by our actions? Or, if it helps, flip that question and ask why are the actions we take not always the ones we feel the greatest desire for?
First, we don't know the fine details of how the human brain makes decisions. We know what it feels like to come to a decision about an action (or anything else), but how the algorithm feels from the inside is not a reliable way to figure out how the decision was actually made. But because most people can relate to a feeling of akrasia, this suggests that there is some disconnect between how the brain decides what actions are most desirable and what actions we believe are most desirable. The hypothesis that I consider most likely is that the ability to form beliefs about desirable actions evolved well after the ability to make decisions about what actions are most desirable, and the decision-making part of the brain only bothers to consult the belief-about-desirability-of-actions part of the brain when there is a reason to do so from evolution's point of view.1 As a result we end up with a brain that only does what we think we really want when evolutionarily prudent, hence we experience akrasia whenever our brain doesn't consider it appropriate to consult what we experience as desirable.
This suggests two main ways of overcoming akrasia assuming my hypothesis (or something close to it) is correct: make the actions we believe to be desirable also desirable to the decision-making part of the brain or make the decision-making part of the brain consult the belief-about-desirability-of-actions part of the brain when we want it to. Most techniques fall into the former category since this is by far the easier strategy, but however a technique works, an overriding theme of the akrasia-related articles and comments on Less Wrong is that no technique yet found seems to work for all people.
Essay-Question Poll: Voting
There has been a considerable amount of discussion scattered around Less Wrong about voting, what software features having to do with voting should be added or subtracted, what purpose voting should serve, etc. It seems as though it would be useful to have conveniently consolidated information on how people are actually voting, so we know what habits that we want to encourage or discourage are actually in use and how prevalently.
1. About what percentage of comments do you vote on at all? What percentage of top-level posts?
2. Do you use the boo vote or the anti-kibitzer extensions? Why or why not?
3. What karma threshold do you use to filter what you see, if any?
4. When you vote on a post, or read it and decide not to vote on it, what features of the post are you occurrently conscious of that influence your decision either way? (Submitter, current post score, length, style, topic, spelling, whatever.) What about comments?
Survey Results
Followup to: Excuse Me, Would You Like to Take a Survey?, Return of the Survey
Thank you to everyone who took the Less Wrong survey. I've calculated some results out on SPSS, and I've uploaded the data for anyone who wants it. I removed twelve people who wanted to remain private, removed a few people's karma upon request, and re-sorted the results so you can't figure out that the first person on the spreadsheet was the first person to post "I took it" on the comments thread and so on. Warning: you will probably not get exactly the same results as me, because a lot of people gave poor, barely comprehensible write in answers, which I tried to round off to the nearest bin.
Download the spreadsheet (right now it's in .xls format)
I am not a statistician, although I occasionally have to use statistics for various things, and I will gladly accept corrections for anything I've done wrong. Any Bayesian purists may wish to avert their eyes, as the whole analysis is frequentist. What can I say? I get SPSS software and training free and I don't like rejecting free stuff. The write-up below is missing answers to a few questions that I couldn't figure out how to analyze properly; anyone who cares about them enough can look at the raw data and try it themselves. Results under the cut.
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