I'm a little unclear on how to proceed. I didn't establish a "save", so I can't really resume the survey. Does that mean I should start a new survey and pick up where I left off, or ... ?

Was taking it, and it crashed with a "This webpage is not available" error.

I'd like to make a miniature announcement so there isn't any confusion:

Most of the time when somebody writes in a suggestion for improving the questions I don't reply to it, I just silently upvote the post and write down the question in a list of things to do for the next survey. But I am reading them, and I plan to go through and read them again before I wrap up the final survey analysis.

Great survey!

However, when you save your progress and are asked to save a password, there's no indication that it will be sent to you in an email or saved at all in recoverable form. I used my least-secure password generation algorithm anyway, but: Do you think you could add a note to the effect that users should not use passwords that they use elsewhere?

Error
We are sorry but your session has expired.
Either you have been inactive for too long, you have cookies disabled for your browser, or there were problems with your connection.
Please contact namespace ( root@localhost ) for further assistance.

If you have to leave the computer in the middle of the survey, the software will punish you by throwing away your already completed answers. Really sucks after having completed about 100 of them. :(

What the hell was the purpose of checking whether someone was "inactive for too long"? So what, they were inactive, now they are active again, what's the big deal? Sometimes real life intervenes.

(Problems with connections happen too; I have a crappy wi-fi connection that I often have to restart several times a day. But that wasn't the case now. Also, why can't the software deal with disabled cookies? Calling root@localhost and waiting for an explanation...)

EDIT: If you happen to find yourself in a similar situation, use the e-mail mentioned in the article. As long as you remember enough data to uniquely identify your half-written response, the situation can be fixed.

The questions on donating to charity only relate to donating money to charity. Some people who have sufficient free time but little disposable income donate time to charities instead. I have seen reports that donating time over money is more common amongst students and people of low income, who seem to be a smaller proportion of the LW diaspora, but it may be interesting to compare donated time vs money on future surveys.

In my experience donating one's time is also seen as being extra keen on that cause, presumably because it requires more effort, and there are certain causes that consider time more valuable than funds (eg local environmental causes, where hiring sufficient people to remove invasive weeds from a local swamp is more expensive than holding a big weeding exercise on a Saturday afternoon).

If you throw out the data, I request you keep the thrown-out data somewhere else so I can see how people responded to the issue.

"In general I planned to handle the "within 10 cm" thing during analysis. Try to fermi estimate the value and give your closest answer, then the probability you got it right. We can look at how close your confidence was to a sane range of values for the answer."

But unless I'm misunderstanding you, the size of the unspoken "sane range" is the entire determinant of how you should calibrate yourself.

Suppose you ask me when Genghis Khan was born, and all I know is "sometime between 1100 and 1200, with certainty". Suppose I choose 1150. If you require the exact year, then I'm only right if it was exactly 1150, and since it could be any of 100 years my probability is 1%. If you require within five years, then I'm right if it was any time between 1145 and 1155, so my probability is 10%. If you require within fifty years, then my probability is effectively 100%. All of those are potential "sane ranges", but depending on which one you the correctly calibrated estimate could be anywhere from 1% to 100%.

Unless I am very confused, you might want to change the questions and hand-throw-out all the answers you received before now, since I don't think they're meaningful (except if interpreted as probability of being exactly right).

(Actually, it might be interesting to see how many people figure this out, in a train wreck sort of way.)

PS: I admit this is totally 100% my fault for not getting around to looking at it the five times you asked me to before this.

Since you are such a huge part of the diaspora community I would be delighted if you could share the survey to both your readers and your friends.

We will get that suggestion sorted asap.

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.