Thanks for the analysis!
The median amount donated to bugs rights charities is listed as $157.5. That implies that half of survey respondents donated >$150 to bugs rights charities. Obviously this is kind of implausible. I assume the real number who donated to bugs rights charities is 4 people, since the donations sum to $1083.0 and the average amount donated is $270.75. This also goes for the other donation-related questions--just something to keep in mind.
Yes, this is one of those pieces of the relevant statistics that I did wrong. (Or at the very least, did inoptimally even if the actual series of operations taken is 'correct'.)
I'll fix it eventually, but it'll require a bit of rewriting code first.
So, would a promising machine intelligence safety outreach constitute preaching to OCD communities? ;)
No, in fact please don't even joke about this.
Proposal for the next year's survey: Skip the Basilisk section entirely. Instead, include something new and interesting, such as "Have you stopped beating your wife?".
I certainly don't plan on including it next year. I'm satisfied with the information from this years.
Phenomenal work. Thank you very much for producing this.
Two questions:
(1)
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.
Could you please explain this note?
(2)
By 'put up or shut up' are you demanding that MIRI publish their full technical research agenda? I refer to the fact that they are openly opaque about it in its full.
Phenomenal work. Thank you very much for producing this.
Thank you.
Could you please explain this note?
Sure. So let's say you wanted to brigade the survey and influence the results one way or the other for the income summation. You could put down that you believe in the Basilisk and you've donated a million dollars to MIRI. That's a bit of an extreme example though, we'd probably catch that.
Instead, let's say you put down that you donated fifty thousand dollars to MIRI. That's plausible enough that nobody can really say your anonymous persona didn't. Especially if you put in the work to make the rest plausible in terms of education, profession, etc.
By 'put up or shut up' are you demanding that MIRI publish their full technical research agenda? I refer to the fact that they are openly opaque about it in its full.
Nothing of the sort. I'm asking people who make claims like 'MIRI uses the Basilisk to make money' to validate them with something other than their raw plausibility.
Of course, if the idea of the Lizardman's constant becomes too well-known, trolls will start not falling for obvious lizardman questions.
If you'll notice, those weren't really obvious. You'd need to have done dedicated googling to verify Synthesis wasn't a thing.
But in general, yes.
Nothing here about the write-in blogs?
Siderea is a surprising inclusion. Her blog is insightful, I'll agree, but it doesn't seem to either have a particular rationality focus, nor does she seem to be connected to LessWrong socially. Is it just a case of "a bunch of people mentioned reading her" thing?
"Blindsight" seems maybe worth mentioning in the story section due to how often it's been discussed here, IMO.
Siderea was included because she was mentioned as part of a LiveJournal LW-disapora community. Which seemed interesting enough to try sniffing out.
To my memory none of the write in blogs were interesting, but I could take another look.
If we're going to talk about omissions, I didn't include UNSONG. To be fair, this was because I figured Scott already had readership statistics for UNSONG and it was a relatively new story at the time I was making the survey, so it didn't really 'fit'.
In retrospect, I'm sure Scott has the straightforward readership statistics, but being able to do a more in depth analysis of his demographics would have been nice.
[This was the 'troll' answer to catch out people who claim to read everything.]
How does that answer correlate with basilisk belief?
If you don't filter out anybody for being a troll:
sqlite> select count(StoriesRead6) from data where StoriesRead6 = "Whole Thing"; 7
sqlite> select count(StoriesRead6) from data where StoriesRead6 = "Whole Thing" and BasiliskCorrectness = "Yes"; 1
Probability that you 'believe' in the Basilisk given you said you read all of Sharon Mitchell's Synthesis is one in seven.
sqlite> select count(*) from data where BasiliskCorrectness="Yes"; 75
Probability that you said you read all of Sharon Mitchell's Synthesis given you 'believe' in the Basilisk is about 1.33%
I'm at the moment trying to look at the data and find it hard given that I don't have a good list of the questions.
I think it would be great if we have an additional spreadsheet that contains one column with the headers of the questions and one column with the content of the question.
The information about likert scale conversion could be added in a third column.
I don't know if you already have this and you're asking for a better list, but the printable version of the survey is here:
http://www.jdpressman.com/public/lwsurvey2016/lw_2016_survey_(2016_05_01).pdf
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It looks like the analysis didn't suppress responses that gave something other than 50 as an answer to the question about a coin flip. It probably should.
Oh, yes, sorry.