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Done, except the digit ratio thing. I still picked a public key and a private key, so that if I get near a scanner or photocopier before November 14 I will submit an otherwise empty survey response with my digit ratios and the same public key and private key as today. Is that OK?
In Political, going only by the descriptions after the colons it looks like Liberal is halfway between Social democratic and Libertarian, and I picked it based on those, but... note that Moldbug also is socially permissive in most all the senses I care about (besides the post I linked, he also supports gay rights) and yet his position doesn't resemble that of the US Democratic Party or the UK Labour Party.
In Less Wrong Use, I rounded my top-level posts down to zero.
In Time on LW and Hours Online, thanks to LeechBlock, I didn't have to pull numbers out of my ass! Likewise for Meditate thanks to Beeminder. OTOH, I answered Books by counting the books I can remember reading and dividing by an anally extracted estimate of the fraction of books I read that I remember.
In the second part of the Calibration questions, does “correct” imply ‘correctly spelled’? My answers are P(correct and correctly spelled) + P(recognizable as the correct answer but misspelled)/2.
In the Mental Health section I took “believe” to mean ‘P > 50%’. Had it said ‘suspect’ instead, I might have answered a couple questions differently.
In the Voting question, I totally wish there were separate answers for ‘Yes, and I would do it again’ and ‘Yes, but I regret that’.
In the Vegetarian question I interpreted “flexitarian” narrowly and answered No, but I do eat much less meat than the average person.
I answered that I'm cis by default, but I would freak out if I woke up in a woman's body. But then again, I also would freak out if I woke up bald, or four inches taller. What I mean by saying that I'm cis by default is that posts like this one almost completely fail to resonate with me.
In Paleo Diet I interpreted “paleo principles” narrowly to only include meta-level principles so I picked the last answer, but if you count object-level principles such as not drinking a can of soda a day, I should have picked the second answer instead.
In Food Substitutes I wished there was an answer for ‘Neither Soylent nor MealSquares ship to my country’.
I'm surprised that in the BSRI male students and female students score so similarly. Did the researchers decide which answers would be masculine or feminine a priori, rather than a posteriori?
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(This is Dan from CFAR again)
We have a fair amount of data on the experiences of people who have been to CFAR workshops.
First, systematic quantitative data. We send out a feedback survey a few days after the workshop which includes the question "0 to 10, are you glad you came?" The average response to that question is 9.3. We also sent out a survey earlier this year to 20 randomly selected alumni who had attended workshops in the previous 3-18 months, and asked them the same question. 18 of the 20 filled out the survey, and their average response to that question was 9.6.
Less systematically but in more fleshed out detail, there are several reviews that people who have attended a CFAR workshop have posted to their blogs (A, B+pt2, C +pt2) or to LW (1, 2, 3). Ben Kuhn's (also linked above under "C") seems particularly relevant here, becaue he went into the workshop assigning a 50% probability to the hypothesis that "The workshop is a standard derpy self-improvement technique: really good at making people feel like they’re getting better at things, but has no actual effect."
In-person conversations that I've had with alumni (including some interviews that I've done with alumni about the impact that the workshop had on their life) have tended to paint a similar picture to these reviews, from a broader set of people, but it's harder for me to share those data.
We don't have as much data on the experiences of people who have been to test sessions or shorter events. I suspect that most people who come to shorter events have a positive experience, and that there's a modest benefit on average, but that it's less uniformly positive. Partly that's because there's a bunch of stuff that happens with a full workshop that doesn't fit in a briefer event - more time for conversations between participants to digest the material, more time for one-on-one conversations with CFAR staff to sort through things, followups after the workshop to work with someone on implementing things in your daily life, etc. The full workshop is also more practiced and polished (it has been through many more iterations) - much moreso than a test session; one-day events are in between (the ones advertised as alpha tests of a new thing are closer to the test session end of the spectrum).
I've seen CFAR talk about this before, and I don't view it as strong evidence that CFAR is valuable.
For these ratings to be meaningful, I'd like to see something like a control workshop where CFAR asks people to pay $3900 and then teaches them a bunch of techniques that are known to be useless but still sound cool, and then ask them to rate their experience. Obviously this is both unethical and impractical, so I don't suggest actually doing this. Perhaps "derpy self-improvement" workshops can serve as a control?