2017 LessWrong Survey

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29 2017 LessWrong Survey

13th Sep 2017

1 min read

29

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

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Requesting Questions For A 2017 LessWrong Survey

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2020 LessWrong Demographics Survey

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[-]pepe_prime7y130

[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.

[-]pepe_prime7y330

I have taken the survey.

[-]Elo7y320

I took the survey. Towards a better future!

[-]enye-word7y300

I have also taken this survey.

[-]Screwtape7y300

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.

0namespace7y

There wasn't. There was one on the 2014 survey. It's one of the missing items I decided to add back in.

[-]Lark7y290

Done!

[-]g_pepper7y290

I have taken the survey.

[-][anonymous]7y290

I took the survey!

[-]RowanE7y290

I have taken the survey.

[-]namespace7y290

I have taken the survey.

[-]gbear6057y290

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

5namespace7y

Every question is optional besides the first two.

[-]Adam Zerner7y290

Taken!

[-]NancyLebovitz7y290

I have taken the survey.

[-]Zvi7y280

I have taken the survey.

[-]Bitnotri7y280

Taken

[-]SoerenE7y280

I have taken the survey.

[-]JenniferRM7y280

I took the survey and upvoted every comment already here.

[-]maxjmartin7y280

Survey completed

[-]LawrenceC7y280

I took the survey!

[-]RainbowSpacedancer7y270

I have taken the survey.

[-]DragonGod7y260

I took the survey, phew that was long. I added a public key for what it's worth.

[-]Regex7y250

I have taken the survey... away from everyone.

No one can have it.

It lives under my bed now.

[-]richard_reitz7y250

I have taken the survey.

[-]moridinamael7y250

It is done.

[-]Gyrodiot7y250

I have taken the survey. Cannot remember my old public key, shrug

[-]eukaryote7y240

I have taken the survey, please shower me in karma.

[-]gjm7y240

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.

[-]Artaxerxes7y240

I did it!

[-]J Thomas Moros7y230

I have completed the survey and upvoted everyone else on this thread

[-][anonymous]7y230

I have taken the survey!

[-]blob7y220

I've taken the survey.

[-]iceman7y150

Survey taken!

[-]scarcegreengrass7y110

I took the survey. It's probably my favorite survey of each year :) Thanks.

[-]fortyeridania7y110

Done.

[-]EricHerboso7y110

I have taken the survey.

9tenthkrige7y

I have also taken the survey.

9Viliam7y

Done.

7plethora7y

I have taken the survey.

7jkadlubo7y

I've taken the survey. Possibly my first activity here this year

5marchdown7y

Survey taken.

5alexey7y

I've taken the survey.

5kvas_it7y

I took the survey. It was long but fun. Thanks for the work you've put into designing it and processing the results.

[-]Aharon7y100

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.

[-]gjm7y80

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... (read more)

1namespace7y

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

0gjm7y

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 forum was that X was running the show, would you be likely to check it out for that reason?" on the grounds that that was the most non-bonkers interpretation I could give the question. If it was meant to be more like "If X was running the show, and the forum had no other merits, would X's leadership be enough to make you use it and stick around despite its lack of other merits?" then my answer, at least, will not be informative. I suspect I'm not alone :-).

[-]Dagon7y60

Took most of the survey, but seem to have submitted early somehow.

[-][anonymous]7y50

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.

[-]gbear6057y50

For being diagnosed with depression, do you include only major depressive disorder or do you also include persistent depressive disorder and adjustment disorder?

0namespace7y

Any form.

[-]Thomas7y30

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!

0namespace7y

I think I'm going to need some more information. Can't fix a bug I can't reproduce.

0Thomas7y

My country isn't from the list of the default choices. So I type it and pressed Enter. It's all I remember.

2namespace7y

This issue should be fixed now, thanks for your report.

0namespace7y

That helps, thank you.

[-]morganism7y20

can't access "font fort" with noScript on. It needs to be expressed in the link html, so i can whitelist it.

2Said Achmiz7y

Hi, could you elaborate on what you mean by "It needs to be expressed in the link html"?

[-]namespace7y20

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... (read more)

[-][anonymous]5y10

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

4Raemon5y

While this is getting discussed – an issue I've been running into is that there's lots of different sub-communities that have surveys, and it's pretty annoying to have to do multiple surveys (for SSC, for LW, for EA, and potential others) It'd be nice if everyone doing surveys managed to coordinate in such a way that they got to share a lot of baseline demographic questions, and then ask more specific questions relating to their sub-community.

2habryka5y

There haven't been any further, but I would be open to helping run one.

2Elo5y

Nope, hasn't been done.

[-]berekuk7y10

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?

0[anonymous]7y

I've now written that post: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ph4/howto_screw_up_the_lesswrong_survey_and_bring/

0namespace7y

Right sorry, I got distracted by life a bit there. I'll write up a post explaining what happened to the LW Survey soon and where I'm planning to go from here.

[-]efenj7y10

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... (read more)

2namespace7y

1. Yes. 2. Total, I would think.

1efenj7y

Thanks for the very fast reply! I interpreted 2 correctly (in line with your reading), for 1, the "you would likely leave" part misled me.

[-]MaryCh7y00

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.

2gjm7y

I think it's mostly just curiosity. There are some things that make useful responses to common criticisms of the community. "You think you're so smart, but you really aren't!" (People reporting "proper" IQ scores and SAT results here consistently come out a couple of standard deviations above average.) "LW is a hive of racist sexist neoreactionary scum and villainy!" (LW consistently comes out more liberal and more feminist than the population as a whole. It has a lot of gay people and a lot of trans people. On the other hand, it doesn't have a lot of women or black people and some specific ideas neoreactionaries like are more popular here than in the world at large.) "You're a bunch of borderline autistics!" (Er, um, yeah, that one seems not to be too far from the truth.)

1Elo7y

Without explaining - the demographic is useful to know. I think it's good to ask the question - if the question yielded x results what would we do with that information? For gender specifically non-binary gender is about 10x more common on lesswrong than in the American population. That's worth knowing.

0MaryCh7y

But why is it worth knowing?

0Elo7y

For that subset of the demographic there may be use in posts on relevant topics. Just as we have higher (double) depression rates than the normal population, and a post on depression may be relevant to them.

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