It's that time of year again.
If you are reading this post, and have not been sent here by some sort of conspiracy trying to throw off the survey results, then you are the target population for the Less Wrong Census/Survey. Please take it. Doesn't matter if you don't post much. Doesn't matter if you're a lurker. Take the survey.
This year's census contains a "main survey" that should take about ten or fifteen minutes, as well as a bunch of "extra credit questions". You may do the extra credit questions if you want. You may skip all the extra credit questions if you want. They're pretty long and not all of them are very interesting. But it is very important that you not put off doing the survey or not do the survey at all because you're intimidated by the extra credit questions.
It also contains a chance at winning a MONETARY REWARD at the bottom. You do not need to fill in all the extra credit questions to get the MONETARY REWARD, just make an honest stab at as much of the survey as you can.
Please make things easier for my computer and by extension me by reading all the instructions and by answering any text questions in the simplest and most obvious possible way. For example, if it asks you "What language do you speak?" please answer "English" instead of "I speak English" or "It's English" or "English since I live in Canada" or "English (US)" or anything else. This will help me sort responses quickly and easily. Likewise, if a question asks for a number, please answer with a number such as "4", rather than "four".
Last year there was some concern that the survey period was too short, or too uncertain. This year the survey will remain open until 23:59 PST December 31st 2013, so as long as you make time to take it sometime this year, you should be fine. Many people put it off last year and then forgot about it, so why not take it right now while you are reading this post?
Okay! Enough preliminaries! Time to take the...
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Thanks to everyone who suggested questions and ideas for the 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey. I regret I was unable to take all of your suggestions into account, because of some limitations in Google Docs, concern about survey length, and contradictions/duplications among suggestions. I think I got most of them in, and others can wait until next year.
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.
Notes taken while I answered.
We're Ashkenazi Jews, but AFAIK the last time any ancestor of mine practiced a religion was in my great-grandparents' generation. (And then only because I knew only one of them personallyh, so it's reasonable to assume at least one of the others could have been religious.) I get that every human is descended from religious ones, but conflating this datapoint with someone whose actual parents practiced a religion once seems wrong.
For some of these my confidence was so low that I didn't answer. For some questions, there are also semantic quibbles that would affect the answer:
Type of global catastrophic risk: although I chose the most probable, there wasn't a large difference in estimated probability for the top few leading dangers.
At first I thought "every few days". But then I realized these techniques almost never work out or are unsupported by evidence, and so it would be wrong to call them plausible-seeming. So I recalibrated and answered much more rarely.
Then I saw the next questions asked how often I tried the technique and how often it actually worked. But I already choose not to try them most of the time because I expect not to succeed. So I let my previous answer stand. I hope this was as intended.
CFAR bonus questions:
Are these questions claiming that I, DanArmak, am this kind of person who can change; or that everyone can change? The answers would be very different. I assumed the latter, but it would be nice to have confirmation.
Other nitpicks: a certain kind on which dimension? Some aspects of personality are much harder to change than others.
What is the measure of "true" change? By the means available to us today, we can't change into truly nonhuman intelligences, so does that mean our "kind" cannot be changed? And the answers to the questions will change over time as technology creates new more effective interventions.
And: does "basic things" mean "fundamental things" or "minor insignificant things"? Normally I would assume "fundamental things", but then it seems identical to the previous question.
On a personal note, this set of questions struck me as incompatible after answering the previous sets. They seem to deliberately probe my irrational biases and cached beliefs, and I felt I couldn't answer them while I was deliberately thinking reflectively and asking myself why I believed the answers I was giving.
The politics of immigration in Israel are totally different from those of the US (and I expect this holds for many other countries too in their different ways). I didn't answer because I was afraid of biasing the poll, and it would have been nice to get more guidance in the question.
I just realized that I parsed the quoted question wrong in the survey - I assumed that it meant the last time your immediate family practiced religion, not the most recent ancestral practice of religion.