Why would the universe be particularly likely to run an SQL statement in a form question about whether the universe is a simulation? All you have to do is think the attack and

NO CARRIER

Answered. WRT Type of Global Catastrophic Risk, I answered conditioned on greater than 90% of humanity being wiped out before 2100, which I assume is what you meant. If it wasn't, well, I ruined everything, then.

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?

Thirded. I was momentarily stumped by that question, not being sure whether a simulator living in a universe with different natural laws than our own counted as "supernatural". I ended up deciding no. The simulator's universe might be a different kind of natural, but not "supernatural". Still, including a clarification in the question would have reduced errors due to misunderstanding, not to mention saved us time. The survey is already quite long as it is.

I didn't express how serious I think the down-arrow problem is, though perhaps my computer habits are unusual enough that no one else had it.

I think it led to at least ten wrong answers, and some of them showed up on the second pass when I was correcting the first batch.

Did anyone else notice this problem?

I did the survey.

I felt that I had to leave blank some of the questions that ask for a probability number, because no answer that complies with the instructions would be right. For instance, I consider the "Many Worlds" hypothesis to be effectively meaningless, since while it does describe a set of plausible alleged facts, there is, as far as I know, no possible experiment that could falsify it. ("Supernatural" is also effectively meaningless, but for a different reason: vagueness. "Magic", to me, describes only situations where Clarke's Third Law applies. And so forth.)

I would like to participate in a deeper discussion of the idea of the Singularity, but don't know if that's welcome on LW. I want to attack the idea on several levels: (1) the definition of it, which may be too vague to be falsifiable; (2) the definition of intelligence -- I don't think we're talking about a mere chess-playing computer, but it's not clear to me whether Minsky's criteria are sufficient; (3) if those first two points are somehow nailed down, then I'm not at all sure that a machine intelligence is desirable, and certainly I'd hesitate to connect one to hardware with enough abilities that the revolution in "I, Robot" becomes possible; and (4) if such a change does happen, I would prefer, and I think most people would insist, that it happen relatively slowly to give everyone then alive time to cope with the change, thus making it not really a singularity in the mathematical sense.

(I do like the transhumanist notion that humans should feel free to modify our own hardware individually, but I don't see that as necessarily connected with a Singularity, and I don't use the jargon of transhumanism for the same reason I avoid the jargon of anarchism when talking politics -- it scares people needlessly.)

I left both MIRI questions blank because I don't know who or what MIRI is.

Re. The Great Stagnation: This theory asserts that we are in an economic stall, if you will, because of a lack of innovation, and is set against the assertion of a "Great Divergence" in which rising income inequality and globalization are to blame for the stall. I didn't answer because I consider both views to be baloney -- we are in an economic stall because of unnecessary and crony-driven overregulation, much of it done in the name of the misguided green and "social justice" movements.

I didn't do the finger length questions; not sure what "the bottom crease" is, or maybe I don't have them. (Do you mean the crease at the base of the fingers, or one farther down on the hand?)

Re. feminism, I answered based on what I believe the current use of the term is, which is not at all like the definition on Wikipedia. Wikipedia calls it more or less pro-equality and I support that, but the current usage is more like "social justice" and that whole concept is complete hooey.

I wish there were an LW-related forum/location where politics are allowed (but easy for those not so inclined to ignore). I would use it, not so much for election-type stuff but for tossing out beliefs/theories on controversies (including some things relevant to a lot of the community, such as the Singularity) and seeing what bounces back.

I wouldn't want to do it if I thought it would generate ill will, but there are certainly lots of folk here whose perspectives would be useful, and who, even if they disagree, would not immediately reach for the slogans of demonization that I hear so much in the outside world.

Apologies if even this post turns out to be so contentious that I shouldn't have said it here.

I've found 'telling' to be invaluable in most intimate relationships, particularly because of whatever it is that results in 'many minds', e.g. expressing all of the conflicting feelings one has to better explain why one can't ask some particular thing.

I use the tell culture with close friends, the ask culture with acquaintances and guess culture with everyone else, including family. Not on purpose - perhaps this isn't the best way of interacting with people.

I tried the tell culture when trying to get out of aversive conversations with my parents to disastrous effect. I do think that it is unfair, and a common failure mode, to use the guess culture and then get angry if the other person doesn't read you correctly.

Refusing to assign numerical probabilities because you don't have a rigorous way to derive them is like refusing to choose whether or not to buy things because you don't have a rigorous way to decide how much they're worth to you.

Explicitly assigning a probability isn't always (perhaps isn't usually) worth the trouble it takes, and rushing to assign numerical probabilities can certainly lead you astray -- but that doesn't mean it can't be done or that it shouldn't be done (carefully!) in cases where making a good decision matters most.

When you haven't taken the trouble to decide a numerical probability, then indeed vague expressions are all you've got, but unless you have a big repertoire of carefully graded vague expressions (which would, in fact, not be so very different from assigning probabilities) you'll find that sometimes there are two propositions for both of which you'd say "it could be true, but I doubt it" -- but you definitely find one more credible than the other. If you can make that distinction mentally, why shouldn't you make it verbally?