Regarding karma? Because I'm not a big fan of karma whoring, and I don't want to feel like I'm just posting to get free upvotes. It feels unearned. I wanted to post to make an actual point, without feeling like I was going to get +50 votes just for breathing.

Did the survey. I'm not terribly interested in karma, but if you feel the need to upvote, then upvote away.

One answer I gave that may confuse - I put "atheist" down under "other" for my religion, because I do believe that a) atheism is properly defined as an active belief in the lack of god(s), b) I hold this belief, c) there can be no actual direct evidence for this belief, and d) being a belief about the nature of god(s)(or lack thereof) is sufficient to make something a religion.

(Oddly, I also put 5% down as my probability of there being a god, but this is mostly because the definition is a superset of the simulation hypothesis, and I don't regard a big computer as being a god in any sense we use the term to mean)

Did the entire survey in the nick of time.

I'm very thankful for the humiliating experience of racking my brain to come up with plausible sounding reasons for why the answers to the calibration questions should be one thing or another, trying to lower my certainties so that I felt that surely I couldn't be falling for that old overconfidence bias again, finishing the survey, and looking up the answers on wikipedia afterwards. Now that we have ten widely different questions I really can't rationalize setting Russia as the fourth most populated country with 55% subjective certainty.

At least I got the darn norse god right.

Next survey, I'd be interested in seeing statistics involving:

• Recreational drug use
• Quantified Self-related activities
• Social media use
• Self-perceived physical attractiveness on the 1-10 scale
• Self-perceived holistic attractiveness on the 1-10 scale
• Personal computer's operating system

Excellent write-up and I look forward to next year's.

I don't think that's quite right. Assigning blame isn't about being correct. It's about figuring out how to prevent the problem from being repeated. Once you know who is at fault and how, you know what to warn them not to do in order to keep it from being repeated.

And, as always, I vastly enjoy this first person perspective that makes the necessity of rationality so blatantly obvious. However, does a 80 percent certainty in "bonds go up" mean a 20 percent certainty in "bonds go down or stay the same"? Can there not be a pool of still undecided minutes left at the bottom of the anticipation barrel? I not, this mode of thinking clearly highlights one thing: If you are 95 percent certain that you turned of your oven, you are also 5 percent certain that you did not, which means that if you are bound for a vacation, 95 percent certainty in a turned off oven should probably be enough for you to check it again.

For purely practical reasons we count one human body as one "person." That makes sense for all sorts of legal and economic purposes. But it sure doesn't feel as if I have only one person in my head. It feels like a conversation between two friends.

Scott Adams

While I don't ever feel that way, I understand that many people have such internal verbal or non-verbal conversations with one or more other "selves". These are also common in fiction, probably in part as a literary device, but also probably as a reflection of the author's mind. Hmm, maybe it is worth a poll.

Same here. Anyone interested in an Umeå/Norrland meetup?

Agreed. I always feel profoundly relieved and even moderately triumphant.