I used to believe that almost nobody was really interested in anything. This was because (a) I had never been really interested in anything and (b) "Passion" was a mandatory signal, required for getting into college. When I saw people who appeared to be genuinedly interested in things (sports, music, running the school newspaper, building robots, whatever), I assumed they were just better than me at sending the required signals. When I got to college and saw people who continued to appear interested in these things, even though extracurriculars were no longer valuable, I realized I had been wrong.

1. I put an estimate on one calibration question that I knew was wrong. In hindsight I shouldn't have done that. The mistake: I don't know what bone is the longest in the body, but I knew that. So I put down a random answer for that question. But then I felt like it would be cheating on the calibration to put 0% after an intentionally wrong answer, so I put a higher number that wasn't accurate. My mistake, but other people might have done something similar.

2. I want the political questions to measure the importance of an issue on next year's survey.

Took the survey.

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

It's a commonly cited figure that at least 90% of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable mental disorder, and here's a paper that claims the figure is as high as 98%. Of course there could be some tautology in the diagnostic methods, but suicidality itself isn't classified a mental disorder.

It seems to me that the distinction between "started work on degree X, but abandoned it" and "currently working towards degree X" is almost as large as that between either of those and "never attempted degree X". (Likewise for qualifications that aren't degrees.)

So if we really want more resolution than a single question will get us, it seems like we need three questions to capture all the information. If so, maybe they should be (1) highest degree attained, (2) highest degree attempted or in progress, (3) estimated probability of completing #2 if different from #1. So if you've abandoned a degree, you'd put 0 or something close to it for #3; if you're still working on it and fully expect to complete it, you'd put something close to 100% for #3; if you're struggling through a PhD and uncertain of the future, it might be more like 50%. This gets (aside from some unusual cases where someone has both abandoned a degree and started on a new one that they haven't finished yet) strictly more information than "highest attained; highest attempted; highest in progress" -- but at some cost in comprehensibility.

If having three questions is excessive but having two isn't, perhaps the following would be a good balance: (1) highest degree earned or in progress and confidently expected to be completed, (2) highest degree abandoned or in progress but quite likely not to be completed.

If only one question, I think asking for highest degree actually earned is the best option.

I agree with others that the post is very nice and clear, as most of your posts are. Upvoted for that. I just want to provide a perspective not often voiced here. My mind does not work the way yours does and I do not think I am a worse person than you because of that. I am not sure how common my thought process is on this forum.

Going section by section:

1. I do not "care about every single individual on this planet". I care about myself, my family, friends and some other people I know. I cannot bring myself to care (and I don't really want to) about a random person half-way around the world, except in the non-scalable general sense that "it is sad that bad stuff happens, be it to 1 person or to 1 billion people". I care about the humanity surviving and thriving, in the abstract, but I do not feel the connection between the current suffering and future thriving. (Actually, it's worse than that. I am not sure whether humanity existing, in Yvain's words, in a 10m x 10m x 10m box of computronium with billions of sims is much different from actually colonizing the observable universe (or the multiverse, as the case might be). But that's a different story, unrelated to the main point.)

2. No disagreement there, the stakes are high, though I would not say that a thriving community of 1000 is necessarily worse than a thriving community of 1 googoleplex, as long as their probability of long-term survival and thriving is the same.

3. I occasionally donate modest amounts to this cause or that, if I feel like it. I don't think I do what Alice, Bob or Christine did, and donate out of pressure or guilt.

4. I spend (or used to spend) a lot of time helping out strangers online with their math and physics questions. I find it more satisfying than caring for oiled birds or stray dogs. Like Daniel, I see the mountain ridges of bad education all around, of which the students asking for help on IRC are just tiny pebbles. Unlike Daniel, I do not feel that I "can't possibly do enough". I help people when I feel like it and I don't pretend that I am a better person because of it, even if they thank me profusely after finally understanding how free-body diagram works. I do wish someone more capable worked on improving the education system to work better than at 1% efficiency, and I have seen isolated cases of it, but I do not feel that it is my problem to deal with. Wrong skillset.

5. I have read a fair amount of EA propaganda, and I still do not feel that I "should care about people suffering far away", sorry. (Not really sorry, no.) It would be nice if fewer people died and suffered, sure. But "nice" is all it is. Call me heartless. I am happy that other people care, in case I am in the situation where I need their help. I am also happy that some people give money to those who care, for the same reason. I might even chip in, if it hits close to home.

6. I do not feel that I would be a better person if I donated more money or dedicated my life to solving one of the "biggest problems", as opposed to doing what I am good at, though I am happy that some people feel that way; humanity's strength is in its diversity.

7. Again, one of the main strengths of humankind is its diversity, and the Bell-curve outliers like "Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela" tend to have more effect than those of us within 1 standard deviation. Some people address "global poverty", others write poems, prove theorems, shoot the targets they are told to, or convince other people to do what they feel is right. No one knows which of these is more likely to result in the long-term prosperity of the human race. So it is best to diversify and hope that one of these outliers does not end up killing all of us, intentionally or accidentally.

8. I don't feel the weight of the world. Because it does not weigh on me.

Note: having reread what I wrote, I suspect that some people might find it kind of Objectivist. I actually tried reading Atlas Shrugged and quit after 100 pages or so, getting extremely annoyed by the author belaboring an obvious and trivial point over and over. So I only have a vague idea what the movement is all about. And I have no interest in finding out more, given that people who find this kind of writing insightful are not ones I want to associate with.

Now, does anyone know how much water is needed to manufacture a replacement faucet? (this is surprisingly difficult to estimate)

Seems like there's no level of achievement a woman could reach that he'd see as strong evidence of competence.

That seems wrong. Woman do get hired from time to time because an employer considers them to be competent and Azathoth doesn't object to that status quo.

Have you ever actually worked with people on a coding project?

Yep! I've been in the industry for fifteen years, and you've almost certainly benefited from stuff I've worked on. But you're acting hostile, so I don't care to give you any more stalker fodder.

As far as I can tell, some of the worst people I've worked with were ① the judgmental, arrogant, abusive assholes; and ② people who had been victims of said assholes, and so had taken a "heads down gotta look busy" attitude out of fear and shame, instead of a transparent, work-together attitude.

Or to put it another way, ① the people whom you can't ask questions of, because they will call you an idiot and a waste of time; and ② the people who have been called idiots and wastes of time so much that they don't ask questions when they should.

The technical incompetents are straightforward to filter out. Tests like FizzBuzz weed out the people who claim that they can code but actually cannot. It's the attitude incompetents, the collaboration incompetents, — the ones who harm other people's capability rather than amplifying it — that are more worth worrying about.

(Oh, and everyone's code has to be double-checked.)

Also, stop downvoting comments that you also respond to. That's logically inconsistent — downvoting means something doesn't belong on the site, not that you disagree with it. If it doesn't belong on the site, then responding to it and continuing the conversation also doesn't belong.