Some have been curious about what the politics of this community would look like if broken down further; here's a shot at figuring it out. I've also included a few other questions that folks expressed curiosity about. Aside from one sensitive question, there's no option to keep your answers private, since in my opinion that would defeat the point - just don't answer if you have concerns - but there's also no overlap with the old survey, aside from asking you how you answered the original politics question. (This should help with interpreting those results even if the n for this is much lower than and somehow biased relative to the big survey.)
For entertainment purposes only, don't use the below space to discuss politics directly, &c. Early suggestions are likely to be incorporated, given what I assume to be the low quality of the first draft.
Edit: "left" and "right" operationalized for the questions they appear in; poor language cleared up in mental health question.
Edit 2: results here; see comment below for some preliminary thoughts. Because there were several unique regional responses, I did not publish responses that question.
Responses have petered out, so here is the data. I shouldn't really be spending time playing around with it until this week is over, but here are some things that struck me two days ago, when I had very nearly as many responses and a look in stata, although I didn't bother to write any exact numbers down.
1) Less Wrong thinks it's close to a random sample of the educated Western population, politics-wise: estimates of relative economic politics and discomfort with political violence were close to 50, with race/gender politics slightly more leftward at 60, and sds around .3. As much as people don't like the left-right spectrum, economic and social leftwardness covaried highly (cor~=.6) and each only just a bit with nonviolence. I take this as at least weak vindication of my contempt for the Political Compass, which groups racial and gender equality issues with those of political violence and dumb things like "do you like modern art???"
2) Because there were a number of unique responses to the region question, I haven't published it, but respondents were about 70% North American and 20% Western European.
3) Yeah, we're mostly firstborns and only children.
4) Most people claim to have changed their politics in the last five years. Some skepticism may be justified.
5) I don't think my categories were very good, in retrospect, but most of you already knew that.
6) There were a few gems in the free response section:
This question sucks
If the first line was longer
It would be haiku
There once was a survey anonymous
Which purported to mindkill a ton of us.
So we sang it a song
About being less wrong
Than those folks on that website eponymous.
); DROP TABLE survey_results; --
Four and five were confusing;
Ten through twelve rather pointless.
Your questionnaire sucks.
Whatever you like here.
Winter won't come
Your survey too US-centric
This haiku fails
(Vaniver's was also nice, but since he owned it publicly here, I'll leave publishing it to him.)