Politics

The LessWrong survey has a very involved section dedicated to politics. In previous analysis the benefits of this weren't fully realized. In the 2016 analysis we can look at not just the political affiliation of a respondent, but what beliefs are associated with a certain affiliation. The charts below summarize most of the results.

Miscellaneous Politics

There were also some other questions in this section which aren't covered by the above charts.

Calibration And Probability Questions

Calibration Questions

I just couldn't analyze these, sorry guys. I put many hours into trying to get them into a decent format I could even read and that sucked up an incredible amount of time. It's why this part of the survey took so long to get out. Thankfully another LessWrong user, Houshalter, has kindly done their own analysis.

All my calibration questions were meant to satisfy a few essential properties:

1. They should be 'self contained'. I.E, something you can reasonably answer or at least try to answer with a 5th grade science education and normal life experience.
2. They should, at least to a certain extent, be Fermi Estimable.
3. They should progressively scale in difficulty so you can see whether somebody understands basic probability or not. (eg. In an 'or' question do they put a probability of less than 50% of being right?)

At least one person requested a workbook, so I might write more in the future. I'll obviously write more for the survey.

Probability Questions

Question	Mean	Median	Mode	Stdev
Please give the obvious answer to this question, so I can automatically throw away all surveys that don't follow the rules: What is the probability of a fair coin coming up heads?	49.821	50.0	50.0	3.033
What is the probability that the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is more or less correct?	44.599	50.0	50.0	29.193
What is the probability that non-human, non-Earthly intelligent life exists in the observable universe?	75.727	90.0	99.0	31.893
...in the Milky Way galaxy?	45.966	50.0	10.0	38.395
What is the probability that supernatural events (including God, ghosts, magic, etc) have occurred since the beginning of the universe?	13.575	1.0	1.0	27.576
What is the probability that there is a god, defined as a supernatural intelligent entity who created the universe?	15.474	1.0	1.0	27.891
What is the probability that any of humankind's revealed religions is more or less correct?	10.624	0.5	1.0	26.257
What is the probability that an average person cryonically frozen today will be successfully restored to life at some future time, conditional on no global catastrophe destroying civilization before then?	21.225	10.0	5.0	26.782
What is the probability that at least one person living at this moment will reach an age of one thousand years, conditional on no global catastrophe destroying civilization in that time?	25.263	10.0	1.0	30.510
What is the probability that our universe is a simulation?	25.256	10.0	50.0	28.404
What is the probability that significant global warming is occurring or will soon occur, and is primarily caused by human actions?	83.307	90.0	90.0	23.167
What is the probability that the human race will make it to 2100 without any catastrophe that wipes out more than 90% of humanity?	76.310	80.0	80.0	22.933

 

Probability questions is probably the area of the survey I put the least effort into. My plan for next year is to overhaul these sections entirely and try including some Tetlock-esque forecasting questions, a link to some advice on how to make good predictions, etc.

Futurology

This section got a bit of a facelift this year. Including new cryonics questions, genetic engineering, and technological unemployment in addition to the previous years.

Cryonics

Interestingly enough, of those who think it will work with enough confidence to say 'yes', only 14 are actually signed up for cryonics.

sqlite> select count(*) from data where CryonicsNow="Yes" and Cryonics="Yes - signed up or just finishing up paperwork";

14

sqlite> select count(*) from data where CryonicsNow="Yes" and (Cryonics="Yes - signed up or just finishing up paperwork" OR Cryonics="No - would like to sign up but unavailable in my area" OR "No - would like to sign up but haven't gotten around to it" OR "No - would like to sign up but can't afford it");

34

LessWrongers seem to be very bullish on the underlying physics of cryonics even if they're not as enthusiastic about current methods in use.

The Brain Preservation Foundation also did an analysis of cryonics responses to the LessWrong Survey.

Singularity

Obviously it's a bit hard to see without filtering out the uber-large answers, but the median doesn't seem to have changed much from the 2014 survey.

Genetic Engineering

Well that's fairly overwhelming.

I find it amusing how the strict "No" group shrinks considerably after this question.

 

This question is too important to just not have an answer to so I'll do it manually. Unfortunately I can't easily remove the 'excluded' entries so that we're dealing with the exact same distribution but only 13 or so responses are filtered out anyway.

sqlite> select count(*) from data where GeneticImprovement="Yes";

1100

>>> 1100 + 176 + 262 + 84
1622
>>> 1100 / 1622
0.6781750924784217

67.8% are willing to genetically engineer their children for improvements.

These numbers go about how you would expect, with people being progressively less interested the more 'shallow' a genetic change is seen as.

---

All three of these seem largely consistent with peoples personal preferences about modification. Were I inclined I could do a deeper analysis that actually takes survey respondents row by row and looks at correlation between preference for ones own children and preference for others.

Technological Unemployment

We can use this as an overall measure of worry about technological unemployment, which would seem to be high among the LW demographic.

Interesting question that would be fun to take a look at in comparison to the estimates for the singularity.

Fairly overwhelming consensus, but with a significant minority of people who have a dissenting opinion.

The plurality of worries are about elites who refuse to share their wealth.

Existential Risk

Significantly more people worried about Nuclear War than last year. Effect of new respondents, or geopolitical situation? Who knows.

Charity And Effective Altruism

Charitable Giving

This table is interesting given the recent debates about how much money certain causes are 'taking up' in Effective Altruism.

Effective Altruism

The distribution given by the 2014 survey results does not sum to one, so it's difficult to determine if Effective Altruism's membership actually went up or not but if we take the numbers at face value it experienced an 11.13% increase in membership.

Same issue as last, taking the numbers at face value community participation went up by 5.727%

Wowza!

Effective Altruist Anxiety

---

There's an ongoing debate in Effective Altruism about what kind of rhetorical strategy is best for getting people on board and whether Effective Altruism is causing people significant moral anxiety.

It certainly appears to be. But is moral anxiety effective? Let's look:

Sample Size: 244
Average amount of money donated by people anxious about EA who aren't EAs: 257.5409836065574

Sample Size: 679
Average amount of money donated by people who aren't anxious about EA who aren't EAs: 479.7501384388807

Sample Size: 249 Average amount of money donated by EAs anxious about EA: 1841.5292369477913

Sample Size: 314
Average amount of money donated by EAs not anxious about EA: 1837.8248407643312

It seems fairly conclusive that anxiety is not a good way to get people to donate more than they already are, but is it a good way to get people to become Effective Altruists?

Sample Size: 1685
P(Effective Altruist): 0.3940652818991098
P(EA Anxiety): 0.29554896142433235
P(Effective Altruist | EA Anxiety): 0.5

Maybe. There is of course an argument to be made that sufficient good done by causing people anxiety outweighs feeding into peoples scrupulosity, but it can be discussed after I get through explaining it on the phone to wealthy PR-conscious donors and telling the local all-kill shelter where I want my shipment of dead kittens.

EA appears to be doing a pretty good job of getting people to like them.

Interesting Tables

Charity Donations By Political Affilation

Affiliation	Income	Charity Contributions	% Income Donated To Charity	Total Survey Charity %	Sample Size
Anarchist	1677900.0	72386.0	4.314%	3.004%	50
Communist	298700.0	19190.0	6.425%	0.796%	13
Conservative	1963000.04	62945.04	3.207%	2.612%	38
Futarchist	1497494.1099999999	166254.0	11.102%	6.899%	31
Left-Libertarian	9681635.613839999	416084.0	4.298%	17.266%	245
Libertarian	11698523.0	214101.0	1.83%	8.885%	190
Moderate	3225475.0	90518.0	2.806%	3.756%	67
Neoreactionary	1383976.0	30890.0	2.232%	1.282%	28
Objectivist	399000.0	1310.0	0.328%	0.054%	10
Other	3150618.0	85272.0	2.707%	3.539%	132
Pragmatist	5087007.609999999	266836.0	5.245%	11.073%	131
Progressive	8455500.440000001	368742.78	4.361%	15.302%	217
Social Democrat	8000266.54	218052.5	2.726%	9.049%	237
Socialist	2621693.66	78484.0	2.994%	3.257%	126

Number Of Effective Altruists In The Diaspora Communities

Community	Count	% In Community	Sample Size
LessWrong	136	38.418%	354
LessWrong Meetups	109	50.463%	216
LessWrong Facebook Group	83	48.256%	172
LessWrong Slack	22	39.286%	56
SlateStarCodex	343	40.98%	837
Rationalist Tumblr	175	49.716%	352
Rationalist Facebook	89	58.94%	151
Rationalist Twitter	24	40.0%	60
Effective Altruism Hub	86	86.869%	99
Good Judgement(TM) Open	23	74.194%	31
PredictionBook	31	51.667%	60
Hacker News	91	35.968%	253
#lesswrong on freenode	19	24.675%	77
#slatestarcodex on freenode	9	24.324%	37
#chapelperilous on freenode	2	18.182%	11
/r/rational	117	42.545%	275
/r/HPMOR	110	47.414%	232
/r/SlateStarCodex	93	37.959%	245
One or more private 'rationalist' groups	91	47.15%	193

Effective Altruist Donations By Political Affiliation

Affiliation	EA Income	EA Charity	Sample Size
Anarchist	761000.0	57500.0	18
Futarchist	559850.0	114830.0	15
Left-Libertarian	5332856.0	361975.0	112
Libertarian	2725390.0	114732.0	53
Moderate	583247.0	56495.0	22
Other	1428978.0	69950.0	49
Pragmatist	1442211.0	43780.0	43
Progressive	4004097.0	304337.78	107
Social Democrat	3423487.45	149199.0	93
Socialist	678360.0	34751.0	41

Previously: 2011; 2012-2013; 2013-2014; 2014-2015

"When I was one-and-twenty / I heard a wise man say, / 'Give crowns and pounds and guineas / But not your heart away; / Give pearls away and rubies / But keep your fancy free.' / But I was one-and-twenty, / No use to talk to me."

My past year of completed writings, sorted by topic:

Genetics:

• Embryo selection for intelligence cost-benefit analysis
  • meta-analysis of intelligence GCTAs, limits set by measurement error, current polygenic scores, possible gains with current IVF procedures, the benefits of selection on multiple complex traits, the possible annual value in the USA of selection & value of larger GWASes, societal consequences of various embryo selection scenarios, embryo count versus polygenic scores as limiting factors, comparison with iterated embryo selection, limits to total gains from iterated embryo selection etc.
• Wikipedia article on Genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA)

AI:

• Computational Complexity vs the Singularity
• Adding metadata to an RNN for mimicking individual author style
• Armstrong’s AI control problem: Reinforce.js demo

Biology:

• vitamin D & metformin for life-extension: cost-benefit analysis

Statistics:

• Candy Japan new packaging decision analysis
• “The Power of Twins: Revisiting Student’s Scottish Milk Experiment Example”
• Genius Revisited: Critiquing the Value of High IQ Elementary Schools
• Inferring mean ethnic IQs from very high IQ samples like TIP/SMPY

Cryptography:

• shell scripts for easy cryptographic timestamping

Misc:

• Newton’s comet apocalypse system

gwern.net itself has remained largely stable (some CSS fixes and image size changes); I continue to use Patreon and send out my newsletters.

A person at our local LW meetup (not active at LW.com) tested various Soylent alternatives that are available in Europe and wrote a post about them:

______________________

Over the course of the last three months, I've sampled parts of the
european Soylent alternatives to determine which ones would work for me
longterm.

- The prices are always for the standard option and might differ for
e.g. High Protein versions.
- The prices are always for the amount where you get the cheapest
marginal price (usually around a one month supply, i.e. 90 meals)
- Changing your diet to Soylent alternatives quickly leads to increased
flatulence for some time - I'd recommend a slow adoption.
- You can pay for all of them with Bitcoin.
- The list is sorted by overall awesomeness.

So here's my list of reviews:

Joylent:

Taste: 7/10
Texture: 7/10
Price: 5eu / day
Vegan option: Yes
Overall awesomeness: 8/10

This one is probably the european standard for nutritionally complete
meal replacements.

The texture is nice, the taste is somewhat sweet, the flavors aren't
very intensive.
They have an ok amount of different flavors but I reduced my orders to
Mango (+some Chocolate).

They offer a morning version with caffeine and a sports version with
more calories/protein.

They also offer Twennybars (similar to a cereal bar but each offers 1/5
of your daily needs), which everyone who tasted them really liked.
They're nice for those lazy times where you just don't feel like pouring
the powder, adding water and shaking before you get your meal.
They do cost 10eu per day, though.

I also like the general style. Every interaction with them was friendly,
fun and uncomplicated.


Veetal:

Taste: 8/10
Texture: 7/10
Price: 8.70 / day
Vegan option: Yes
Overall awesomeness: 8/10

This seems to be the "natural" option, apparently they add all those
healthy ingredients.

The texture is nice, the taste is sweeter than most, but not very sweet.
They don't offer flavors but the "base taste" is fine, it also works
well with some cocoa powder.

It's my favorite breakfast now and I had it ~54 of the last 60 days.
Would have been first place if not for the relatively high price.


Mana:

Taste: 6/10
Texture: 7/10
Price: 6.57 / day
Vegan option: Only Vegan
Overall awesomeness: 7/10

Mana is one of the very few choices that don't taste sweet but salty.
Among all the ones I've tried, it tastes the most similar to a classic meal.
It has a somewhat oily aftertaste that was a bit unpleasent in the
beginning but is fine now that I got used to it.

They ship the oil in small bottles seperate from the rest which you pour
into your shaker with the powder. This adds about 100% more complexity
to preparing a meal.

The packages feel somewhat recycled/biodegradable which I don't like so
much but which isn't actually a problem.

It still made it to the list of meals I want to consume on a regular
basis because it tastes so different from the others (and probably has a
different nutritional profile?).


Nano:

Taste: 7/10
Texture: 7/10
Price: 1.33eu / meal
*I couldn't figure out whether they calculate with 3 or 5 meals per day
** Price is for an order of 666 meals. I guess 222 meals for 1.5eu /meal
is the more reasonable order
Vegan option: Only Vegan
Overall awesomeness: 7/10

Has a relatively sweet taste. Only comes in the standard vanilla-ish flavor.

They offer a Veggie hot meal which is the only one besides Mana that
doesn't taste sweet. It tastes very much like a vegetable soup but was a
bit too spicy for me. (It's also a bit more expensive)

Nano has a very future-y feel about it that I like. It comes in one meal
packages which I don't like too much but that's personal preference.


Queal:

Taste: 7/10
Texture: 6/10
Price: 6.5 / day
Vegan option: No
Overall awesomeness: 7/10

Is generally similar to Joylent (especially in flavor) but seems
strictly inferior (their flavors sound more fun - but don't actually
taste better).


Nutrilent:

Taste: 6/10
Texture: 7/10
Price: 5 / day
Vegan option: No
Overall awesomeness: 6/10

Taste and flavor are also similar to Joylent but it tastes a little
worse. It comes in one meal packages which I don't fancy.


Jake:

Taste: 6/10
Texture: 7/10
Price: 7.46 / day
Vegan option: Only Vegan
Overall awesomeness: 6/10

Has a silky taste/texture (I didn't even know that was a thing before I
tried it). Only has one flavor (vanilla) which is okayish.
Also offers a light and sports option.


Huel:

Taste: 1/10
Texture: 6/10
Price: 6.70 / day
Vegan option: Only Vegan
Overall awesomeness: 4/10

The taste was unanimously rated as awful by every single person to whom
I gave it for trying. The Vanilla flavored version was a bit less awful
then the unflavored version but still...
The worst packaging - it's in huge bags that make it hard to pour and
are generally inconvenient to handle.

Apart from that, it's ok, I guess?


Ambronite:

Taste: ?
Texture: ?
Price: 30 / day
Vegan option: Only Vegan
Overall awesomeness: ?

Price was prohibitive for testing - they advertise it as being very
healthy and natural and stuff.


Fruiticio:

Taste: ?
Texture: ?
Price: 5.76 / day
Vegan option: No
Overall awesomeness: ?

They offer a variety for women and one for men. I didn't see any way for
me to find out which of those I was supposed to order. I had to give up
the ordering process at that point. (I guess you'd have to ask your
doctor which one is for you?)



Conclusion:
Meal replacements are awesome, especially when you don't have much time
to make or eat a "proper" meal.
I generally don't feel full after drinking them but also stop being hungry.
I assume they're healthier than the average European diet.
The texture and flavor do get a bit dull after a while if I only use
meal replacements.

On my usual day I eat one serving of Joylent, Veetal and Mana at the
moment (and have one or two "non-replaced" meals).

 

“In 2015, there were roughly 214 million malaria cases and an estimated 438 000 malaria deaths.”  While we don’t know how many humans malaria has killed, an estimate of half of everyone who has ever died isn’t absurd.  Because few people in rich countries get malaria, pharmaceutical companies put relatively few resources into combating it.   

 

The best way to eliminate malaria is probably to use gene drives to completely eradicate the species of mosquitoes that bite humans, but until recently rich countries haven’t been motivated to such xenocide.  The Zika virus, which is in mosquitoes in the United States, provides effective altruists with an opportunity to advocate for exterminating all species of mosquitoes that spread disease to humans because the horrifying and disgusting pictures of babies with Zika might make the American public receptive to our arguments.  A leading short-term goal of effective altruists, I propose, should be advocating for mosquito eradication in the short window before rich people get acclimated to pictures of Zika babies.   

 

Personally, I have (unsuccessfully) pitched articles on mosquito eradication to two magazines and (with a bit more success) emailed someone who knows someone who knows someone in the Trump campaign to attempt to get the candidate to come out in favor of mosquito eradication.  What have you done?   Given the enormous harm mosquitoes inflict on mankind, doing just a little (such as writing a blog post) could have a high expected payoff.

 

According to Louie Helm eradicating a species of mosquitoes could be done for as little as a few million dollar.

I don't have a few million dollar lying around so I can't spend my own money to do it. On the other hand, I think that on average every German citizen would be quite willing to pay 1€ per year to rid Germany of mosquitoes that bite humans.

That means it's a problem of public action. The German government should spend 80 million Euro to rid Germany of Mosquitos. That's an order of magnitude higher than the numbers quoted by Louie Helm).

The same goes basically for every country or state with mosquitos.

How could we get a government to do this without spending too much money ourselves? The straight forward way is writing a petition. We could host a website and simultaneously post a petition to every relevant parliament on earth.

How do we get attention for the petition? Facebook. People don't like Mosquitos and should be willing to file an internet petition to get rid of them. I would believe this to spread virally. The idea seems interesting enough to get journalists to write articles about it. 

Bonus points:

After we have eradicated human biting mosquitoes from our homelands it's quite straightforward to export the technology to Africa. 

Does anyone see any issues with that plan?

2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis

Overview

• Results and Dataset
• Meta
• Demographics
• LessWrong Usage and Experience
• LessWrong Criticism and Successorship
• Diaspora Community Analysis
• Mental Health Section
• Basilisk Section/Analysis
• Blogs and Media analysis (You are here)
• Politics
• Calibration Question And Probability Question Analysis
• Charity And Effective Altruism Analysis

---

Mental Health

We decided to move the Mental Health section up closer in the survey this year so that the data could inform accessibility decisions.

LessWrong Mental Health As Compared To Base Rates In The General Population

Condition	Base Rate	LessWrong Rate	LessWrong Self dx Rate	Combined LW Rate	Base/LW Rate Spread	Relative Risk
Depression	17%	25.37%	27.04%	52.41%	+8.37	1.492
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder	2.3%	2.7%	5.6%	8.3%	+0.4	1.173
Autism Spectrum Disorder	1.47%	8.2%	12.9%	21.1%	+6.73	5.578
Attention Deficit Disorder	5%	13.6%	10.4%	24%	+8.6	2.719
Bipolar Disorder	3%	2.2%	2.8%	5%	-0.8	0.733
Anxiety Disorder(s)	29%	13.7%	17.4%	31.1%	-15.3	0.472
Borderline Personality Disorder	5.9%	0.6%	1.2%	1.8%	-5.3	0.101
Schizophrenia	1.1%	0.8%	0.4%	1.2%	-0.3	0.727
Substance Use Disorder	10.6%	1.3%	3.6%	4.9%	-9.3	0.122

Base rates are taken from Wikipedia, US rates were favored over global rates where immediately available.

Accessibility Suggestions

So of the conditions we asked about, LessWrongers are at significant extra risk for three of them: Autism, ADHD, Depression.

LessWrong probably doesn't need to concern itself with being more accessible to those with autism as it likely already is. Depression is a complicated disorder with no clear interventions that can be easily implemented as site or community policy. It might be helpful to encourage looking more at positive trends in addition to negative ones, but the community already seems to do a fairly good job of this. (We could definitely use some more of it though.)

Attention Deficit Disorder - Public Service Announcement

That leaves ADHD, which we might be able to do something about, starting with this:

A lot of LessWrong stuff ends up falling into the same genre as productivity advice or 'self help'. If you have trouble with getting yourself to work, find yourself reading these things and completely unable to implement them, it's entirely possible that you have a mental health condition which impacts your executive function.

The best overview I've been able to find on ADD is this talk from Russell Barkely.

30 Essential Ideas For Parents

Ironically enough, this is a long talk, over four hours in total. Barkely is an entertaining speaker and the talk is absolutely fascinating. If you're even mildly interested in the subject I wholeheartedly recommend it. Many people who have ADHD just assume that they're lazy, or not trying hard enough, or just haven't found the 'magic bullet' yet. It never even occurs to them that they might have it because they assume that adult ADHD looks like childhood ADHD, or that ADHD is a thing that psychiatrists made up so they can give children powerful stimulants.

ADD is real, if you're in the demographic that takes this survey there's a decent enough chance you have it.

Attention Deficit Disorder - Accessibility

So with that in mind, is there anything else we can do?

Yes, write better.

Scott Alexander has written a blog post with writing advice for non-fiction, and the interesting thing about it is just how much of the advice is what I would tell you to do if your audience has ADD.

• Reward the reader quickly and often. If your prose isn't rewarding to read it won't be read.

• Make sure the overall article has good sectioning and indexing, people might be only looking for a particular thing and they won't want to wade through everything else to get it. Sectioning also gives the impression of progress and reduces eye strain.

• Use good data visualization to compress information, take away mental effort where possible. Take for example the condition table above. It saves space and provides additional context. Instead of a long vertical wall of text with sections for each condition, it removes:

  • The extraneous information of how many people said they did not have a condition.

  • The space that would be used by creating a section for each condition. In fact the specific improvement of the table is that it takes extra advantage of space in the horizontal plane as well as the vertical plane.

  And instead of just presenting the raw data, it also adds:

  • The normal rate of incidence for each condition, so that the reader understands the extent to which rates are abnormal or unexpected.

  • Easy comparison between the clinically diagnosed, self diagnosed, and combined rates of the condition in the LW demographic. This preserves the value of the original raw data presentation while also easing the mental arithmetic of how many people claim to have a condition.

  • Percentage spread between the clinically diagnosed and the base rate, which saves the effort of figuring out the difference between the two values.

  • Relative risk between the clinically diagnosed and the base rate, which saves the effort of figuring out how much more or less likely a LessWronger is to have a given condition.

  Add all that together and you've created a compelling presentation that significantly improves on the 'naive' raw data presentation.

• Use visuals in general, they help draw and maintain interest.

None of these are solely for the benefit of people with ADD. ADD is an exaggerated profile of normal human behavior. Following this kind of advice makes your article more accessible to everybody, which should be more than enough incentive if you intend to have an audience.¹

Roko's Basilisk

This year we finally added a Basilisk question! In fact, it kind of turned into a whole Basilisk section. A fairly common question about this years survey is why the Basilisk section is so large. The basic reason is that asking only one or two questions about it would leave the results open to rampant speculation in one direction or another. By making the section comprehensive and covering every base, we've pretty much gotten about as complete of data as we'd want on the Basilisk phenomena.

Basilisk Knowledge
Do you know what Roko's Basilisk thought experiment is?

Yes: 1521 73.2%
No but I've heard of it: 158 7.6%
No: 398 19.2%

Basilisk Etiology
Where did you read Roko's argument for the Basilisk?

Roko's post on LessWrong: 323 20.2%
Reddit: 171 10.7%
XKCD: 61 3.8%
LessWrong Wiki: 234 14.6%
A news article: 71 4.4%
Word of mouth: 222 13.9%
RationalWiki: 314 19.6%
Other: 194 12.1%

Basilisk Correctness
Do you think Roko's argument for the Basilisk is correct?

Yes: 75 5.1%
Yes but I don't think it's logical conclusions apply for other reasons: 339 23.1%
No: 1055 71.8%

Basilisks And Lizardmen

One of the biggest mistakes I made with this years survey was not including "Do you believe Barack Obama is a hippopotamus?" as a control question in this section.² Five percent is just outside of the infamous lizardman constant. This was the biggest survey surprise for me. I thought there was no way that 'yes' could go above a couple of percentage points. As far as I can tell this result is not caused by brigading but I've by no means investigated the matter so thoroughly that I would rule it out.

Higher?

Of course, we also shouldn't forget to investigate the hypothesis that the number might be higher than 5%. After all, somebody who thinks the Basilisk is correct could skip the questions entirely so they don't face potential stigma. So how many people skipped the questions but filled out the rest of the survey?

Eight people refused to answer whether they'd heard of Roko's Basilisk but went on to answer the depression question immediately after the Basilisk section. This gives us a decent proxy for how many people skipped the section and took the rest of the survey. So if we're pessimistic the number is a little higher, but it pays to keep in mind that there are other reasons to want to skip this section. (It is also possible that people took the survey up until they got to the Basilisk section and then quit so they didn't have to answer it, but this seems unlikely.)

Of course this assumes people are being strictly truthful with their survey answers. It's also plausible that people who think the Basilisk is correct said they'd never heard of it and then went on with the rest of the survey. So the number could in theory be quite large. My hunch is that it's not. I personally know quite a few LessWrongers and I'm fairly sure none of them would tell me that the Basilisk is 'correct'. (In fact I'm fairly sure they'd all be offended at me even asking the question.) Since 5% is one in twenty I'd think I'd know at least one or two people who thought the Basilisk was correct by now.

Lower?

One partial explanation for the surprisingly high rate here is that ten percent of the people who said yes by their own admission didn't know what they were saying yes to. Eight people said they've heard of the Basilisk but don't know what it is, and that it's correct. The lizardman constant also plausibly explains a significant portion of the yes responses, but that explanation relies on you already having a prior belief that the rate should be low.

---

Basilisk-Like Danger
Do you think Basilisk-like thought experiments are dangerous?

Yes, I think they're dangerous for decision theory reasons: 63 4.2%
Yes I think they're dangerous for social reasons (eg. A cult might use them): 194 12.8%
Yes I think they're dangerous for decision theory and social reasons: 136 9%
Yes I think they're socially dangerous because they make everybody involved look foolish: 253 16.7%
Yes I think they're dangerous for other reasons: 54 3.6%
No: 809 53.4%

Most people don't think Basilisk-Like thought experiments are dangerous at all. Of those that think they are, most of them think they're socially dangerous as opposed to a raw decision theory threat. The 4.2% number for pure decision theory threat is interesting because it lines up with the 5% number in the previous question for Basilisk Correctness.

P(Decision Theory Danger | Basilisk Belief) = 26.6%
P(Decision Theory And Social Danger | Basilisk Belief) = 21.3%

So of the people who say the Basilisk is correct, only half of them believe it is a decision theory based danger at all. (In theory this could be because they believe the Basilisk is a good thing and therefore not dangerous, but I refuse to lose that much faith in humanity.³)

Basilisk Anxiety
Have you ever felt any sort of anxiety about the Basilisk?

Yes: 142 8.8%
Yes but only because I worry about everything: 189 11.8%
No: 1275 79.4%

20.6% of respondents have felt some kind of Basilisk Anxiety. It should be noted that the exact wording of the question permits any anxiety, even for a second. And as we'll see in the next question that nuance is very important.

Degree Of Basilisk Worry
What is the longest span of time you've spent worrying about the Basilisk?

I haven't: 714 47%
A few seconds: 237 15.6%
A minute: 298 19.6%
An hour: 176 11.6%
A day: 40 2.6%
Two days: 16 1.05%
Three days: 12 0.79%
A week: 12 0.79%
A month: 5 0.32%
One to three months: 2 0.13%
Three to six months: 0 0.0%
Six to nine months: 0 0.0%
Nine months to a year: 1 0.06%
Over a year: 1 0.06%
Years: 4 0.26%

These numbers provide some pretty sobering context for the previous ones. Of all the people who worried about the Basilisk, 93.8% didn't worry about it for more than an hour. The next 3.65% didn't worry about it for more than a day or two. The next 1.9% didn't worry about it for more than a month and the last .7% or so have worried about it for longer.

Current Basilisk Worry
Are you currently worrying about the Basilisk?

Yes: 29 1.8%
Yes but only because I worry about everything: 60 3.7%
No: 1522 94.5%

Also encouraging. We should expect a small number of people to be worried at this question just because the section is basically the word "Basilisk" and "worry" repeated over and over so it's probably a bit scary to some people. But these numbers are much lower than the "Have you ever worried" ones and back up the previous inference that Basilisk anxiety is mostly a transitory phenomena.

One article on the Basilisk asked the question of whether or not it was just a "referendum on autism". It's a good question and now I have an answer for you, as per the table below:

Mental Health Conditions Versus Basilisk Worry

Condition	Worried	Worried But They Worry About Everything	Combined Worry
Baseline (in the respondent population)	8.8%	11.8%	20.6%
ASD	7.3%	17.3%	24.7%
OCD	10.0%	32.5%	42.5%
AnxietyDisorder	6.9%	20.3%	27.3%
Schizophrenia	0.0%	16.7%	16.7%

 

The short answer: Autism raises your chances of Basilisk anxiety, but anxiety disorders and OCD especially raise them much more. Interestingly enough, schizophrenia seems to bring the chances down. This might just be an effect of small sample size, but my expectation was the opposite. (People who are really obsessed with Roko's Basilisk seem to present with schizophrenic symptoms at any rate.)

Before we move on, there's one last elephant in the room to contend with. The philosophical theory underlying the Basilisk is the CEV conception of friendly AI primarily espoused by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Which has led many critics to speculate on all kinds of relationships between Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Basilisk. Which of course obviously would extend to Eliezer Yudkowsky's Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a project to develop 'Friendly Artificial Intelligence' which does not implement a naive goal function that eats everything else humans actually care about once it's given sufficient optimization power.

The general thrust of these accusations is that MIRI, intentionally or not, profits from belief in the Basilisk. I think MIRI gets picked on enough, so I'm not thrilled about adding another log to the hefty pile of criticism they deal with. However this is a serious accusation which is plausible enough to be in the public interest for me to look at.

 

Percentage Of People Who Donate To MIRI Versus Basilisk Belief

Belief	Percentage
Believe It's Incorrect	5.2%
Believe It's Structurally Correct	5.6%
Believe It's Correct	12.0%

Basilisk belief does appear to make you twice as likely to donate to MIRI. It's important to note from the perspective of earlier investigation that thinking it is "structurally correct" appears to make you about as likely as if you don't think it's correct, implying that both of these options mean about the same thing.

 

Sum Money Donated To MIRI Versus Basilisk Belief

Belief	Mean	Median	Mode	Stdev	Total Donated
Believe It's Incorrect	1365.590	100.0	100.0	4825.293	75107.5
Believe It's Structurally Correct	2644.736	110.0	20.0	9147.299	50250.0
Believe It's Correct	740.555	300.0	300.0	1152.541	6665.0

Take these numbers with a grain of salt, it only takes one troll to plausibly lie about their income to ruin it for everybody else.

Interestingly enough, if you sum all three total donated counts and divide by a hundred, you find that five percent of the sum is about what was donated by the Basilisk group. ($6601 to be exact) So even though the modal and median donations of Basilisk believers are higher, they donate about as much as would be naively expected by assuming donations among groups are equal.⁴

 

Percentage Of People Who Donate To MIRI Versus Basilisk Worry

Anxiety	Percentage
Never Worried	4.3%
Worried But They Worry About Everything	11.1%
Worried	11.3%

In contrast to the correctness question, merely having worried about the Basilisk at any point in time doubles your chances of donating to MIRI. My suspicion is that these people are not, as a general rule, donating because of the Basilisk per se. If you're the sort of person who is even capable of worrying about the Basilisk in principle, you're probably the kind of person who is likely to worry about AI risk in general and donate to MIRI on that basis. This hypothesis is probably unfalsifiable with the survey information I have, because Basilisk-risk is a subset of AI risk. This means that anytime somebody indicates on the survey that they're worried about AI risk this could be because they're worried about the Basilisk or because they're worried about more general AI risk.

 

Sum Money Donated To MIRI Versus Basilisk Worry

Anxiety	Mean	Median	Mode	Stdev	Total Donated
Never Worried	1033.936	100.0	100.0	3493.373	56866.5
Worried But They Worry About Everything	227.047	75.0	300.0	438.861	4768.0
Worried	4539.25	90.0	10.0	11442.675	72628.0
Combined Worry					77396.0

Take these numbers with a grain of salt, it only takes one troll to plausibly lie about their income to ruin it for everybody else.

This particular analysis is probably the strongest evidence in the set for the hypothesis that MIRI profits (though not necessarily through any involvement on their part) from the Basilisk. People who worried from an unendorsed perspective donate less on average than everybody else. The modal donation among people who've worried about the Basilisk is ten dollars, which seems like a surefire way to torture if we're going with the hypothesis that these are people who believe the Basilisk is a real thing and they're concerned about it. So this implies that they don't, which supports my earlier hypothesis that people who are capable of feeling anxiety about the Basilisk are the core demographic to donate to MIRI anyway.

Of course, donors don't need to believe in the Basilisk for MIRI to profit from it. If exposing people to the concept of the Basilisk makes them twice as likely to donate but they don't end up actually believing the argument that would arguably be the ideal outcome for MIRI from an Evil Plot perspective. (Since after all, pursuing a strategy which involves Basilisk belief would actually incentivize torture from the perspective of the acausal game theories MIRI bases its FAI on, which would be bad.)

But frankly this is veering into very speculative territory. I don't think there's an evil plot, nor am I convinced that MIRI is profiting from Basilisk belief in a way that outweighs the resulting lost donations and damage to their cause.⁵ If anybody would like to assert otherwise I invite them to 'put up or shut up' with hard evidence. The world has enough criticism based on idle speculation and you're peeing in the pool.

Blogs and Media

Since this was the LessWrong diaspora survey, I felt it would be in order to reach out a bit to ask not just where the community is at but what it's reading. I went around to various people I knew and asked them about blogs for this section. However the picks were largely based on my mental 'map' of the blogs that are commonly read/linked in the community with a handful of suggestions thrown in. The same method was used for stories.

Blogs Read

LessWrong
Regular Reader: 239 13.4%
Sometimes: 642 36.1%
Rarely: 537 30.2%
Almost Never: 272 15.3%
Never: 70 3.9%
Never Heard Of It: 14 0.7%

SlateStarCodex (Scott Alexander)
Regular Reader: 1137 63.7%
Sometimes: 264 14.7%
Rarely: 90 5%
Almost Never: 61 3.4%
Never: 51 2.8%
Never Heard Of It: 181 10.1%

[These two results together pretty much confirm the results I talked about in part two of the survey analysis. A supermajority of respondents are 'regular readers' of SlateStarCodex. By contrast LessWrong itself doesn't even have a quarter of SlateStarCodexes readership.]

Overcoming Bias (Robin Hanson)
Regular Reader: 206 11.751%
Sometimes: 365 20.821%
Rarely: 391 22.305%
Almost Never: 385 21.962%
Never: 239 13.634%
Never Heard Of It: 167 9.527%

Minding Our Way (Nate Soares)
Regular Reader: 151 8.718%
Sometimes: 134 7.737%
Rarely: 139 8.025%
Almost Never: 175 10.104%
Never: 214 12.356%
Never Heard Of It: 919 53.06%

Agenty Duck (Brienne Yudkowsky)
Regular Reader: 55 3.181%
Sometimes: 132 7.634%
Rarely: 144 8.329%
Almost Never: 213 12.319%
Never: 254 14.691%
Never Heard Of It: 931 53.846%

Eliezer Yudkowsky's Facebook Page
Regular Reader: 325 18.561%
Sometimes: 316 18.047%
Rarely: 231 13.192%
Almost Never: 267 15.248%
Never: 361 20.617%
Never Heard Of It: 251 14.335%

Luke Muehlhauser (Eponymous)
Regular Reader: 59 3.426%
Sometimes: 106 6.156%
Rarely: 179 10.395%
Almost Never: 231 13.415%
Never: 312 18.118%
Never Heard Of It: 835 48.49%

Gwern.net (Gwern Branwen)
Regular Reader: 118 6.782%
Sometimes: 281 16.149%
Rarely: 292 16.782%
Almost Never: 224 12.874%
Never: 230 13.218%
Never Heard Of It: 595 34.195%

Siderea (Sibylla Bostoniensis)
Regular Reader: 29 1.682%
Sometimes: 49 2.842%
Rarely: 59 3.422%
Almost Never: 104 6.032%
Never: 183 10.615%
Never Heard Of It: 1300 75.406%

Ribbon Farm (Venkatesh Rao)
Regular Reader: 64 3.734%
Sometimes: 123 7.176%
Rarely: 111 6.476%
Almost Never: 150 8.751%
Never: 150 8.751%
Never Heard Of It: 1116 65.111%

Bayesed And Confused (Michael Rupert)
Regular Reader: 2 0.117%
Sometimes: 10 0.587%
Rarely: 24 1.408%
Almost Never: 68 3.988%
Never: 167 9.795%
Never Heard Of It: 1434 84.106%

[This was the 'troll' answer to catch out people who claim to read everything.]

The Unit Of Caring (Anonymous)
Regular Reader: 281 16.452%
Sometimes: 132 7.728%
Rarely: 126 7.377%
Almost Never: 178 10.422%
Never: 216 12.646%
Never Heard Of It: 775 45.375%

GiveWell Blog (Multiple Authors)
Regular Reader: 75 4.438%
Sometimes: 197 11.657%
Rarely: 243 14.379%
Almost Never: 280 16.568%
Never: 412 24.379%
Never Heard Of It: 482 28.521%

Thing Of Things (Ozy Frantz)
Regular Reader: 363 21.166%
Sometimes: 201 11.72%
Rarely: 143 8.338%
Almost Never: 171 9.971%
Never: 176 10.262%
Never Heard Of It: 661 38.542%

The Last Psychiatrist (Anonymous)
Regular Reader: 103 6.023%
Sometimes: 94 5.497%
Rarely: 164 9.591%
Almost Never: 221 12.924%
Never: 302 17.661%
Never Heard Of It: 826 48.304%

Hotel Concierge (Anonymous)
Regular Reader: 29 1.711%
Sometimes: 35 2.065%
Rarely: 49 2.891%
Almost Never: 88 5.192%
Never: 179 10.56%
Never Heard Of It: 1315 77.581%

The View From Hell (Sister Y)
Regular Reader: 34 1.998%
Sometimes: 39 2.291%
Rarely: 75 4.407%
Almost Never: 137 8.049%
Never: 250 14.689%
Never Heard Of It: 1167 68.566%

Xenosystems (Nick Land)
Regular Reader: 51 3.012%
Sometimes: 32 1.89%
Rarely: 64 3.78%
Almost Never: 175 10.337%
Never: 364 21.5%
Never Heard Of It: 1007 59.48%

I tried my best to have representation from multiple sections of the diaspora, if you look at the different blogs you can probably guess which blogs represent which section.

Stories Read

Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Whole Thing: 1103 61.931%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 145 8.141%
Partially And Abandoned: 231 12.97%
Never: 221 12.409%
Never Heard Of It: 81 4.548%

Significant Digits (Alexander D)
Whole Thing: 123 7.114%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 105 6.073%
Partially And Abandoned: 91 5.263%
Never: 333 19.26%
Never Heard Of It: 1077 62.29%

Three Worlds Collide (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Whole Thing: 889 51.239%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 35 2.017%
Partially And Abandoned: 36 2.075%
Never: 286 16.484%
Never Heard Of It: 489 28.184%

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (Nick Bostrom)
Whole Thing: 728 41.935%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 31 1.786%
Partially And Abandoned: 15 0.864%
Never: 205 11.809%
Never Heard Of It: 757 43.606%

The World of Null-A (A. E. van Vogt)
Whole Thing: 92 5.34%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 18 1.045%
Partially And Abandoned: 25 1.451%
Never: 429 24.898%
Never Heard Of It: 1159 67.266%

[Wow, I never would have expected this many people to have read this. I mostly included it on a lark because of its historical significance.]

Synthesis (Sharon Mitchell)
Whole Thing: 6 0.353%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 2 0.118%
Partially And Abandoned: 8 0.47%
Never: 217 12.75%
Never Heard Of It: 1469 86.31%

[This was the 'troll' option to catch people who just say they've read everything.]

Worm (Wildbow)
Whole Thing: 501 28.843%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 168 9.672%
Partially And Abandoned: 184 10.593%
Never: 430 24.755%
Never Heard Of It: 454 26.137%

Pact (Wildbow)
Whole Thing: 138 7.991%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 59 3.416%
Partially And Abandoned: 148 8.57%
Never: 501 29.01%
Never Heard Of It: 881 51.013%

Twig (Wildbow)
Whole Thing: 55 3.192%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 132 7.661%
Partially And Abandoned: 65 3.772%
Never: 560 32.501%
Never Heard Of It: 911 52.873%

Ra (Sam Hughes)
Whole Thing: 269 15.558%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 80 4.627%
Partially And Abandoned: 95 5.495%
Never: 314 18.161%
Never Heard Of It: 971 56.16%

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Optimal (Iceman)
Whole Thing: 424 24.495%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 16 0.924%
Partially And Abandoned: 65 3.755%
Never: 559 32.293%
Never Heard Of It: 667 38.533%

Friendship Is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens (Chatoyance)
Whole Thing: 217 12.705%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 16 0.937%
Partially And Abandoned: 24 1.405%
Never: 411 24.063%
Never Heard Of It: 1040 60.89%

Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
Whole Thing: 1177 67.219%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 22 1.256%
Partially And Abandoned: 43 2.456%
Never: 395 22.559%
Never Heard Of It: 114 6.511%

[This is the most read story according to survey respondents, beating HPMOR by 5%.]

The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
Whole Thing: 440 25.346%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 37 2.131%
Partially And Abandoned: 55 3.168%
Never: 577 33.237%
Never Heard Of It: 627 36.118%

Consider Phlebas (Iain Banks)
Whole Thing: 302 17.507%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 52 3.014%
Partially And Abandoned: 47 2.725%
Never: 439 25.449%
Never Heard Of It: 885 51.304%

The Metamorphosis Of Prime Intellect (Roger Williams)
Whole Thing: 226 13.232%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 10 0.585%
Partially And Abandoned: 24 1.405%
Never: 322 18.852%
Never Heard Of It: 1126 65.925%

Accelerando (Charles Stross)
Whole Thing: 293 17.045%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 46 2.676%
Partially And Abandoned: 66 3.839%
Never: 425 24.724%
Never Heard Of It: 889 51.716%

A Fire Upon The Deep (Vernor Vinge)
Whole Thing: 343 19.769%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 31 1.787%
Partially And Abandoned: 41 2.363%
Never: 508 29.28%
Never Heard Of It: 812 46.801%

I also did a k-means cluster analysis of the data to try and determine demographics and the ultimate conclusion I drew from it is that I need to do more analysis. Which I would do, except that the initial analysis was a whole bunch of work and jumping further down the rabbit hole in the hopes I reach an oasis probably isn't in the best interests of myself or my readers.

Footnotes

2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis

Overview

• Results and Dataset
• Meta
• Demographics (You are here)
• LessWrong Usage and Experience
• LessWrong Criticism and Successorship
• Diaspora Community Analysis
• What it all means for LW 2.0
• Mental Health Section
• Basilisk Section/Analysis
• Blogs and Media analysis
• Politics
• Calibration Question And Probability Question Analysis
• Charity And Effective Altruism Analysis

---

Survey Meta

Introduction

Hello everybody, this is part one in a series of posts analyzing the 2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey. The survey ran from March 24th to May 1st and had 3083 respondents.

Almost two thousand eight hundred and fifty hours were spent surveying this year and you've all waited nearly two months from the first survey response to the results writeup. While the results have been available for over a week, they haven't seen widespread dissemination in large part because they lacked a succinct summary of their contents.

When we started the survey in march I posted this graph showing the dropoff in question responses over time:

So it seems only reasonable to post the same graph with this years survey data:

(I should note that this analysis counts certain things as questions that the other chart does not, so it says there are many more questions than the previous survey when in reality where are about as many as last year.)

2016 Diaspora Survey Stats

Survey hours spent in total: 2849.818888888889

Average number of minutes spent on survey: 102.14404619673437

Median number of minutes spent on survey: 39.775

Mode minutes spent on survey: 20.266666666666666

The takeaway here seems to be that some people take a long time with the survey, raising the average. However, most people's survey time is somewhere below the forty five minute mark. LessWrong does a very long survey, and I wanted to make sure that investment was rewarded with a deep detailed analysis. Weighing in at over four thousand lines of python code, I hope the analysis I've put together is worth the wait.

Credits

I'd like to thank people who contributed to the analysis effort:

Bartosz Wroblewski

Kuudes on #lesswrong

Obormot on #lesswrong

Two anonymous contributors

And anybody else who I may have forgotten. Thanks again to Scott Alexander, who wrote the majority of the survey and ran it in 2014, and who has also been generous enough to license his part of the survey under a creative commons license along with mine.

---

Demographics

Age

The 2014 survey gave these numbers for age:

Age: 27.67 + 8.679 (22, 26, 31) [1490]

In 2016 the numbers were:

Mean: 28.108772669759592
Median: 26.0
Mode: 23.0

Most LWers are in their early to mid twenties, with some older LWers bringing up the average. The average is close enough to the former figure that we can probably say the LW demographic is in their 20's or 30's as a general rule.

Sex and Gender

In 2014 our gender ratio looked like this:

Female: 179, 11.9%
Male: 1311, 87.2%

In 2016 the proportion of women in the community went up by over four percent:

Male: 2021 83.5%
Female: 393 16.2%

One hypothesis on why this happened is that the 2016 survey focused on the diaspora rather than just LW. Diaspora communities plausibly have marginally higher rates of female membership. If I had more time I would write an analysis investigating the demographics of each diaspora community, but to answer this particular question I think a couple of SQL queries are illustrative:

(Note: ActiveMemberships one and two are 'LessWrong' and 'LessWrong Meetups' respectively.)
sqlite> select count(birthsex) from data where (ActiveMemberships_1 = "Yes" OR ActiveMemberships_2 = "Yes") AND birthsex="Male";
425
sqlite> select count(birthsex) from data where (ActiveMemberships_1 = "Yes" OR ActiveMemberships_2 = "Yes") AND birthsex="Female";
66
>>> 66 / (425 + 66)
0.13441955193482688

Well, maybe. Of course, before we wring our hands too much on this question it pays to remember that assigned sex at birth isn't the whole story. The gender question in 2014 had these results:

F (cisgender): 150, 10.0%
F (transgender MtF): 24, 1.6%
M (cisgender): 1245, 82.8%
M (transgender FtM): 5, 0.3%
Other: 64, 4.3%

In 2016:

F (cisgender): 321 13.3%
F (transgender MtF): 65 2.7%
M (cisgender): 1829 76%
M (transgender FtM): 23 1%
Other: 156 6.48%

Some things to note here. 16.2% of respondents were assigned female at birth but only 13.3% still identify as women. 1% are transmen, but where did the other 1.9% go? Presumably into the 'Other' field. Let's find out.

sqlite> select count(birthsex) from data where birthsex = "Female" AND gender = "Other";
57
sqlite> select count(*) from data;
3083
>>> 57 / 3083
0.018488485241647746

Seems to be the case. In general the proportion of men is down 6.1% from 2014. We also gained 1.1% transwomen and .7% transmen in 2016. Moving away from binary genders, this surveys nonbinary gender count gained in proportion by nearly 2.2%. This means that over one in twenty LWers identified as a nonbinary gender, making it a larger demographic than binary transgender LWers! As exciting as that may sound to some ears the numbers tell one story and the write ins tell quite another.

It pays to keep in mind that nonbinary genders are a common troll option for people who want to write in criticism of the question. A quick look at the write ins accompanying the other option indicates that this is what many people used it for, but by no means all. At 156 responses, that's small enough to be worth doing a quick manual tally.

"Other" Genders, Sample Size: 156

Classification	Count
Agender	35
Esoteric	6
Female	6
Male	21
Male-To-Female	1
Nonbinary	55
Objection on Basis Gender Doesn't Exist	6
Objection on Basis Gender Is Binary	7
in Process of Transitioning	2
Refusal	7
Undecided	10

So depending on your comfort zone as to what constitutes a countable gender, there are 90 to 96 valid 'other' answers in the survey dataset. (Labeled dataset)

>>> 90 / 3083
0.029192345118391177

With some cleanup the number trails behind the binary transgender one by the greater part of a percentage point, but only by. I bet that if you went through and did the same sort of tally on the 2014 survey results you'd find that the proportion of valid nonbinary gender write ins has gone up between then and now.

Some interesting 'esoteric' answers: Attack Helocopter, Blackstar, Elizer, spiderman, Agenderfluid

For the rest of this section I'm going to just focus on differences between the 2016 and 2014 surveys.

2014 Demographics Versus 2016 Demographics

Country

United States: -1.000% 1298 53.700%
United Kingdom: -0.100% 183 7.600%
Canada: +0.100% 144 6.000%
Australia: +0.300% 141 5.800%
Germany: -0.600% 85 3.500%
Russia: +0.700% 57 2.400%
Finland: -0.300% 25 1.000%
New Zealand: -0.200% 26 1.100%
India: -0.100% 24 1.000%
Brazil: -0.300% 16 0.700%
France: +0.400% 34 1.400%
Israel: +0.200% 29 1.200%
Other: 354 14.646%

[Summing these all up to one shows that nearly 1% of change is unaccounted for. My hypothesis is that this 1% went into the other countries not in the list, this can't be easily confirmed because the 2014 analysis does not list the other country percentage.]

Race

Asian (East Asian): -0.600% 80 3.300%
Asian (Indian subcontinent): +0.300% 60 2.500%
Middle Eastern: 0.000% 14 0.600%
Black: -0.300% 12 0.500%
White (non-Hispanic): -0.300% 2059 85.800%
Hispanic: +0.300% 57 2.400%
Other: +1.200% 108 4.500%

Sexual Orientation

Heterosexual: -5.000% 1640 70.400%
Homosexual: +1.300% 103 4.400%
Bisexual: +4.000% 428 18.400%
Other: +3.880% 144 6.180%

[LessWrong got 5.3% more gay, 9.1% if you're more loose with the definition. Before we start any wild speculation, the 2014 question included asexuality as an option and it got 3.9% of the responses, we spun this off into a separate question on the 2016 survey which should explain a significant portion of the change.]

Are you asexual?

Yes: 171 0.074
No: 2129 0.926

[Scott said in 2014 that he'd probably 'vastly undercounted' our asexual readers, a near doubling in our count would seem to support this.]

Relationship Style

Prefer monogomous: -0.900% 1190 50.900%
Prefer polyamorous: +3.100% 426 18.200%
Uncertain/no preference: -2.100% 673 28.800%
Other: +0.426% 45 1.926%

[Polyamorous gained three points, presumably the drop in uncertain people went into that bin.]

Number of Partners

0: -2.300% 1094 46.800%
1: -0.400% 1039 44.400%
2: +1.200% 107 4.600%
3: +0.900% 46 2.000%
4: +0.100% 15 0.600%
5: +0.200% 8 0.300%
Lots and lots: +1.000% 29 1.200%

Relationship Goals

...and seeking more relationship partners: +0.200% 577 24.800%
...and possibly open to more relationship partners: -0.300% 716 30.800%
...and currently not looking for more relationship partners: +1.300% 1034 44.400%

Are you married?

Yes: 443 0.19
No: 1885 0.81

[This question appeared in a different form on the previous survey. Marriage went up by .8% from last year.]

Who do you currently live with most of the time?

Alone: -2.200% 487 20.800%
With parents and/or guardians: +0.100% 476 20.300%
With partner and/or children: +2.100% 687 29.400%
With roommates: -2.000% 619 26.500%

[This would seem to line up with the result that single LWers went down by 2.3%]

How many children do you have?

Sum: 598 or greater
0: +5.400% 2042 87.000%
1: +0.500% 115 4.900%
2: +0.100% 124 5.300%
3: +0.900% 48 2.000%
4: -0.100% 7 0.300%
5: +0.100% 6 0.300%
6: 0.000% 2 0.100%
Lots and lots: 0.000% 3 0.100%

[Interestingly enough, childless LWers went up by 5.4%. This would seem incongruous with the previous results. Not sure how to investigate though.]

Are you planning on having more children?

Yes: -5.400% 720 30.700%
Uncertain: +3.900% 755 32.200%
No: +2.800% 869 37.100%

[This is an interesting result, either nearly 4% of LWers are suddenly less enthusiastic about having kids, or new entrants to the survey are less likely and less sure if they want to. Possibly both.]

Work Status

Student: -5.402% 968 31.398%
Academics: +0.949% 205 6.649%
Self-employed: +4.223% 309 10.023%
Independently wealthy: +0.762% 42 1.362%
Non-profit work: +1.030% 152 4.930%
For-profit work: -1.756% 954 30.944%
Government work: +0.479% 135 4.379%
Homemaker: +1.024% 47 1.524%
Unemployed: +0.495% 228 7.395%

[Most interesting result here is that 5.4% of LWers are no longer students or new survey entrants aren't.]

Profession

Art: +0.800% 51 2.300%
Biology: +0.300% 49 2.200%
Business: -0.800% 72 3.200%
Computers (AI): +0.700% 79 3.500%
Computers (other academic, computer science): -0.100% 156 7.000%
Computers (practical): -1.200% 681 30.500%
Engineering: +0.600% 150 6.700%
Finance / Economics: +0.500% 116 5.200%
Law: -0.300% 50 2.200%
Mathematics: -1.500% 147 6.600%
Medicine: +0.100% 49 2.200%
Neuroscience: +0.100% 28 1.300%
Philosophy: 0.000% 54 2.400%
Physics: -0.200% 91 4.100%
Psychology: 0.000% 48 2.100%
Other: +2.199% 277 12.399%
Other "hard science": -0.500% 26 1.200%
Other "social science": -0.200% 48 2.100%

[The largest profession growth for LWers in 2016 was art, that or this is a consequence of new survey entrants.]

What is your highest education credential earned?

None: -0.700% 96 4.200%
High School: +3.600% 617 26.700%
2 year degree: +0.200% 105 4.500%
Bachelor's: -1.600% 815 35.300%
Master's: -0.500% 415 18.000%
JD/MD/other professional degree: 0.000% 66 2.900%
PhD: -0.700% 145 6.300%
Other: +0.288% 39 1.688%

[Hm, the academic credentials of LWers seems to have gone down some since the last survey. As usual this may also be the result of new survey entrants.]

---

Footnotes

1. The 2850 hour estimate of survey hours is very naive. It measures the time between starting and turning in the survey, a person didn't necessarily sit there during all that time. For example this could easily be including people who spent multiple days doing other things before finally finishing their survey.

2. The apache helicopter image is licensed under the Open Government License, which requires attribution. That particular edit was done by Wubbles on the LW Slack.

3. The first published draft of this post made a basic stats error calculating the proportion of women in active memberships one and two, dividing the number of women by the number of men rather than the number of women by the number of men and women.

on the 22 August 2015, I wrote an apps list of useful apps, in the comments were a number of suggestions which I immediately tried.  This is an update.  Original can be found at this link:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mnm/a_list_of_apps_that_are_useful_to_me_and_other/

I rewrite the whole list below.  

But first - my recommended list in short:

• Get an external battery block (and own more than enough spare power cables)
• Wunderlist
• Ingress
• How are you feeling?
• Alarm clock plus
• Twilight
• Business calendar
• Clipper
• Rain alarm
• Data monitor
• Rescuetime
• Powercalc
• Es File viewer
• WheresmyDroid?
• Google Docs/sheets etc.
• (possibly pushbullet and DTG GTD but I have not had them for long enough)

New:

Timestamp Widget. - on clicking to open it - it logs a timestamp.  Can include notes too.

Wunderlist - Recommend it - for shared shopping lists, or any kind of list of things to do.  It's not perfect but it works.

T2 mood tracker - as a second backup to my other mood tracker.  This one takes more effort to do so I only enter the data every few days.  YMMV it might be useful to you.

HOVBX - an overlay for google hangouts that sits on top of the call buttons so you don't accidentally call people (useful for groups who butt-dial each other)

Fleksy - A different keyboard - it seems faster but I am used to swiftkey so I don't use this one.

Tagtime - useful to try.  reminds you hourly or so to tag what you are currently working on.  I used it for a while to help keep me on track.  I noticed I was significantly off track and eventually stopped using it because I felt bad about it.  I feel like I spend more time on-task now but because I want to.  This was a step in the journey of deciding to do that.

Alarm clock plus - it's the best alarm clock app.  I don't use alarms often but this one does everything.

Squats/Push ups/sit ups/pull ups - Rittr labs - good at a simple exercise routine.  Just tells you what to do.  designed to get you from zero to "up to N" of an exercise (250 or 100) so gives you instruction on how many to do each day.  Worth trying.  Didn't work for me, but for other reasons about my lifestyle.

Twilight - mentioned above, replaces night mode and does what f.lux with a PC (filters to be less blue at night)

World clock - started talking to people in different time zones and this was handy.

CPU-Z - lists out all the phone's sensors and tells you their outputs.  cool for looking at gyroscopes/accelerometers.

Coffee meets bagel - dating app.  One profile per day, accept/reject.  Has a different feel to tinder

Bumble - US only; Like Tinder but the girl has to message you first or the connection disappears.

Business Calendar - Best calendar I have found so far

Clipper - Clipboard app for holding the last 20 or so things you have copied.  Also for showing you what's currently on the "copy" 

Pixlr - photo editor.  It's a good one, don't use it often

Rain Alarm - Very good app.  Tells you if it's raining anywhere nearby.  Can be enough to tell you "I should walk home sooner" but also just interesting to have a bit more awareness of your environment.

Audio Scope - Cool science app for viewing the audio scope

Spectrum analyze - Cool science app for viewing the audio spectrum

Frequensee - Fun science app for viewing audio spectrum data

PitchLab lite - Neat for understanding pitch when singing or listening to musical notes.  Another science-visualisation app

Spectralview analyser - another spectrum analyser

Pulsepoint AED - Initiative to gather a public map of all AED's worldwide.  To help; get the app and check the details of nearby AED's

FBreader - Ebook reader.  Pretty good, can control brightness and font size.

KIK - Social app like whatsapp/viber etc.  Don't use it yet, got it on a recommendation.

Wildwilderness - Reporting app for if you see suspicious wildlife trade going on anywhere in the world.  Can report anonymously, any details help.  

DGT GTD - Newly suggested by LW, have not tried to use it yet

Pushbullet - Syncs phone notifications with your PC so you can access things via PC.

---

I have noticed I often wish "Damn I wish someone had made an app for that" and when I search for it I can't find it.  Then I outsource the search to facebook or other people; and they can usually say - yes, its called X.  Which I can put down to an inability to know how to search for an app on my part; more than anything else.

With that in mind; I wanted to solve the problem of finding apps for other people.

The following is a list of apps that I find useful (and use often) for productive reasons:

---

The environment

This list is long.  The most valuable ones are the top section that I use regularly.  

Other things to mention:

Internal storage - I have a large internal memory card because I knew I would need lots of space.  So I played the "out of sight out of mind game" and tried to give myself as much space as possible by buying a large internal card.  The future of phones is to not use a microSD card and just use internal storage.  I was taking 1000 photos a month, and since having storage troubles and my phone slowing down I don't take nearly even 1 photo a day.  I would like to change that and will probably make it a future bug of mine to solve.

Battery - I use anker external battery blocks to save myself the trouble of worrying about batteries.  If prepared I leave my house with 2 days of phone charge (of 100% use).  I used to count "wins" of days I beat my phone battery (stay awake longer than it) but they are few and far between.  Also I doubled my external battery power and it sits at two days not one (28000mA + 2*460ma spare phone batteries) This is still true but those batteries don't do what they used to.  Anker have excellent service and refunded the battery that did not stay strong.  I would recommend to all phone users to have a power block.  Phones just are not made with enough battery.

Phone - I have a Samsung S4 (android Running KitKat) because it has a few features I found useful that were not found in many other phones - Cheap, Removable battery, external storage card, replaceable case. I am now on lolipop, and have made use of the external antenna port for a particularly bad low-signal location.

Screen cover - I am using the one that came with the phone still Still

I carry a spare phone case, in the beginning I used to go through one each month; now I have a harder case than before it hasn't broken. I change phone case colours for aesthetics every few months.

I also have swapped out the plastic frame that holds the phone case on as these broke, it was a few dollars on ebay and I needed a teeny screwdriver but other than that it works great now!

MicroUSB cables - I went through a lot of effort to sort this out, it's still not sorted, but its "okay for now".  The advice I have - buy several good cables (read online reviews about it), test them wherever possible, and realise that they die.  Also carry a spare or two.  I have now spent far too much time on this problem.  I am at the end of my phone's life and the MicroUSB port is dying, I have replaced it with a new one which is also not great, and I now leave my phone plugged into it's microUSB cable.  I now use Anker brand cabled which are excellent, but my phone still kills one every few weeks.  The whole idea of the MicroUSB plug is awful.  They don't work very well at all.

Restart - I restart my phone probably most days when it gets slow.  It's got programming bugs, but this solution works for now.

The overlays

These sit on my screen all the time.

Data monitor - Gives an overview of bits per second upload or download. updated every second. ✓

CpuTemp - Gives an overlay of the current core temperature.  My phone is always hot, I run it hard with bluetooth, GPS and wifi blaring all the time.  I also have a lot of active apps. ✓

M̶i̶n̶d̶f̶u̶l̶n̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶-̶ ̶M̶y̶ ̶p̶h̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶m̶e̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶l̶f̶ ̶h̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶m̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶h̶e̶c̶k̶,̶ ̶"̶A̶m̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶-̶v̶a̶l̶u̶e̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶?̶"̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶i̶m̶e̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶p̶s̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶d̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶c̶r̶a̶p̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶.̶ Wow that didn't last.  It was so annoying that I stopped using it.

Facebook chat heads - I often have them open, they have memory leaks and start slowing down my phone after a while, I close and reopen them when I care enough.✓ memory leaks improved but are still there.

 

The normals:

Facebook - communicate with people.  I do this a lot.✓

Inkpad - its a note-taking app, but not an exceptionally great one; open to a better suggestion.✓

Ingress - it makes me walk; it gave me friends; it put me in a community.  Downside is that it takes up more time than you want to give it.  It's a mobile GPS game.  Join the Resistance. Highly recommend

Maps (google maps) - I use this most days; mostly for traffic assistance to places that I know how to get to.✓

Camera - I take about 1000 photos a month.  Generic phone-app one. I take significantly less photos now, my phone slowed down so the activation energy for *open the camera* is higher.  I plan to try to fix this soon

Assistive light - Generic torch app (widget) I use this daily.✓

 

Hello - SMS app.  I don't like it but its marginally better than the native one.✓

S̶u̶n̶r̶i̶s̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶e̶n̶d̶a̶r̶ ̶-̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶a̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶e̶n̶d̶a̶r̶;̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶e̶n̶d̶a̶r̶.̶ ̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶b̶a̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶u̶n̶d̶.̶ ̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶"̶f̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ ̶s̶y̶n̶c̶"̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶h̶e̶l̶p̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶e̶n̶t̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶r̶a̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶l̶i̶f̶e̶.̶

Business Calendar - works better, has a better interface than Sunrise.

Phone, address book, chrome browser.✓  I use tab sync, and recommend it for all your chrome-enabled devices.

GPS logger - I have a log of my current gps location every 5 minutes.  If google tracks me I might as well track myself.  I don't use this data yet but its free for me to track; so if I can find a use for the historic data that will be a win. I don't make use of this data and can access my google data just fine so I might stop tracking this.

 

Quantified apps:

Fit - google fit; here for multiple redundancy✓

S Health - Samsung health - here for multiple redundancy✓

Fitbit - I wear a flex step tracker every day, and input my weight daily manually through this app✓

Basis - I wear a B1 watch, and track my sleep like a hawk.✓

Rescuetime - I track my hours on technology and wish it would give a better breakdown. (I also paid for their premium service)✓

Voice recorder - generic phone app; I record around 1-2 hours of things I do per week.  Would like to increase that. I now use this for one hour a month or less.

Narrative - I recently acquired a life-logging device called a narrative, and don't really know how to best use the data it gives.  But its a start. I tried using the device but it has poor battery life.  I also received negative feedback when wearing it in casual settings.  This increases the activation energy to using it.  I also can't seem to wear it at the right height and would regularly take photos of the tops of people's heads.  I would come home with a photo a minute for a day (and have the battery die on it a few times) and have one use-able photo in the lot.  significantly lower than I was expecting.

How are you feeling? - Mood tracking app - this one is broken but the best one I have found, it doesn't seem to open itself after a phone restart; so it won't remind you to enter in a current mood.  I use a widget so that I can enter in the mood quickly.  The best parts of this app are the way it lets you zoom out, and having a 10 point scale.  I used to write a quick sentence about what I was feeling, but that took too much time so I stopped doing it. Highly recommend I use this every day.

Stopwatch - "hybrid stopwatch" - about once a week I time something and my phone didn't have a native one.  This app is good at being a stopwatch.✓

Callinspector - tracks ingoing or outgoing calls and gives summaries of things like, who you most frequently call, how much data you use, etc.  can also set data limits. I dont do anything with this data so I think I will stop using it and save my phone's battery life.

 

Misc

Powercalc - the best calculator app I could find ✓

N̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶e̶ ̶-̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶s̶a̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶(̶i̶t̶ ̶d̶i̶m̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶e̶e̶n̶)̶,̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶t̶e̶n̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶.̶ ̶ ̶I̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶d̶i̶m̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶l̶u̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶e̶m̶i̶t̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶e̶e̶n̶;̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶n̶e̶g̶a̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶s̶l̶e̶e̶p̶ ̶e̶f̶f̶e̶c̶t̶s̶ ̶s̶o̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶p̶u̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶r̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶i̶t̶.̶ ̶

Advanced signal status - about once a month I am in a place with low phone signal - this one makes me feel better about knowing more details of what that means.✓

Ebay - To be able to buy those $5 solutions to problems on the spot is probably worth more than $5 of "impulse purchases" that they might be classified as.✓

C̶a̶l̶ ̶-̶ ̶a̶n̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶e̶n̶d̶a̶r̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶i̶m̶e̶s̶ ̶c̶a̶t̶c̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶m̶i̶s̶s̶e̶s̶.̶ Nope just using business calendar now.

ES file explorer - for searching the guts of my phone for files that are annoying to find.  Not as used or as useful as I thought it would be but still useful.✓

Maps.Me - I went on an exploring adventure to places without signal; so I needed an offline mapping system.  This map saved my life.✓ Have not used this since then, but I will not delete it.

Wikipedia - information lookup✓

Youtube - don't use it often, but its there.✓

How are you feeling? (again) - I have this in multiple places to make it as easy as possible for me to enter in this data✓

Play store - Makes it easy to find.✓

Gallery - I take a lot of photos, but this is the native gallery and I could use a better app.✓

 

Social

In no particular order;

F̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ ̶g̶r̶o̶u̶p̶s̶ was so annoying I got rid of it, Yahoo Mail, Skype, Facebook Messenger chat heads, Whatsapp, meetup, google+, Hangouts, Slack, Viber, OKcupid, Gmail, Tinder, Chatango, CoffeeMeetsBagel, Signal.  Of which I use very little.

They do social things.  

I don't really use:  Viber, OKC, Gmail, Tinder, Chatango, CMB, Signal, whatsapp, G+.

I use: Slack, Facebook messenger, yahoo mail  every day.

Not used:

(ticks here mean they are still in this category and are not used)

Trello✓

Workflowy✓

pocketbook✓

snapchat Deleted.

AnkiDroid - Anki memoriser app for a phone. ✓

MyFitnessPal - looks like a really good app, have not used it ✓

Fitocracy - looked good✓

I got these apps for a reason; but don't use them.

 

Not on my front pages:

These I don't use as often; or have not moved to my front pages (skipping the ones I didn't install or don't use)

S memo - samsung note taking thing, I rarely use, but do use once a month or so.✓

Drive, Docs, Sheets - The google package.  Its terrible to interact with documents on your phone, but I still sometimes access things from my phone.✓Useful for viewing, not effective for editing.

bubble - I don't think I have ever used this Deleted

Compass pro - gives extra details about direction. I never use it.Deleted

 

(ingress apps) Glypher, Agentstats, integrated timer, cram, notify Don't use them, but still there

TripView (public transport app for my city) Deleted

Convertpad - converts numbers to other numbers. Sometimes quicker than a google search.✓

ABC Iview - National TV broadcasting channel app.  Every program on this channel is uploaded to this app, I have used it once to watch a documentary since I got the app. Deleted

AnkiDroid - I don't need to memorise information in the way it is intended to be used; so I don't use it. Cram is also a flashcard app but I don't use it. Not used

First aid - I know my first aid but I have it anyway for the marginal loss of 50mb of space. Still haven't used it once.

Triangle scanner - I can scan details from NFC chips sometimes. Still haven't used it once.

MX player - does videos better than native apps. Rarely used

Zarchiver - Iunno.  Does something.  Rarely used

Pandora - Never used Deleted

Soundcloud - used once every two months, some of my friends post music online.  Deleted - They have a web interface.

Barcode scanner - never used

Diskusage - Very useful.  Visualises where data is being taken up on your phone, helps when trying to free up space.✓

Swiftkey - Better than native keyboards.  Gives more freedom, I wanted a keyboard with black background and pale keys, swiftkey has it.✓

Google calendar - don't use it, but its there to try to use.✓

Sleepbot - doesn't seem to work with my phone, also I track with other methods, and I forget to turn it on; so its entirely not useful in my life for sleep tracking. Deleted

My service provider's app.

AdobeAcrobat - use often; not via the icon though. ✓

Wheresmydroid? - seems good to have; never used.  My phone is attached to me too well for me to lose it often.  I have it open most of the waking day maybe. ✓ I actually set this up and tested if it worked.  It doesn't work from install, needs an account (which I now have) make sure you actually have an account

Uber - I don't use ubers. Deleted

Terminal emulator, AIDE, PdDroid party, Processing Android, An editor for processing, processing reference, learn C++ - programming apps for my phone, I don't use them, and I don't program much. Deleted some to make space on my phone.

Airbnb - Have not used yet, done a few searches for estimating prices of things. Deleted - Web interface better.

Heart rate - measures your heart rate using the camera/flash.  Neat, not useful other than showing off to people how its possible to do. ✓

Basis - (B1 app), - has less info available than their new app. ✓

BPM counter - Neat if you care about what a "BPM" is for music.  Don't use often. ✓

Sketch guru - fun to play with, draws things. ✓

DJ studio 5 - I did a dj thing for a friend once, used my phone.  was good. ✓

Facebook calendar Sync - as the name says. ✓

Dual N-back - I Don't use it.  I don't think it has value giving properties. Deleted

Awesome calendar - I don't use but it comes with good reccomendations. Deleted Use Business Calendar now.

Battery monitor 3 - Makes a graph of temperature and frequency of the cores.  Useful to see a few times.  Eventually its a bell curve. ✓

urbanspoon - local food places app. ✓use google mostly now.

Gumtree - Australian Ebay (also ebay owns it now) ✓

Printer app to go with my printer ✓

Car Roadside assistance app to go with my insurance ✓

Virgin air entertainment app - you can use your phone while on the plane and download entertainment from their in-flight system. ✓

---

Two things now;

What am I missing? Was this useful?  Ask me to elaborate on any app and why I used it.  If I get time I will do that anyway. 

P.S. this took 1.5 hours to review and rewrite.

P.P.S - I was intending to make, keep and maintain a list of useful apps, that is not what this document is.  If there are enough suggestions that it's time to make and keep a list; I will do that.

My table of contents links to my other writings

For some time now, "Promoted" has been reserved for articles written by MIRI staff, mostly about MIRI activities.  Which, I suppose, would be reasonable, if this were MIRI's blog.  But it isn't.  MIRI has its own blog.  It seems to me inconvenient both to readers of LessWrong, and to readers of MIRI's blog, to split MIRI's material up between the two.

People visiting lesswrong land on "Promoted", see a bunch of MIRI blogs, mostly written by people who don't read LessWrong themselves much anymore, and get a mistaken impression of what people talk about on LessWrong.  Also, LessWrong looks like a dying site, since often months pass between new posts.

I suggest the default landing page be "New", not "Promoted".