Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be polls' or similar.
Threaded comments:
What does "troll catch option" mean? And when you said 3 was to avoid conflict with 1, do you mean avoid conflict with 2?
"Troll catch" is the the black swan/strange/fun/unusual option you add to give trolls something to feed on and thus avoid polluting the poll with. The example is slashdot where you can vote without even being registered and you usually see an option like "I don't X you insensitive clod".
I corrected the numbering (was due to reordering the rules).
What is your opinion on the variability hypothesis that males generally have a larger biological variance than women in most traits, and that in particular this applies to intelligence, and explains in part why there is a gender imbalance in the sciences? [pollid:584]
If I am reading the less wrong comment formatting page correctly, using poll:probability (with brackets) will force responses to be between 0 and 1, to avoid this. (And Upvotes to whoever put strict input limits on a free text field! As a person who handles raw data, I often don't see this, and it should be encouraged when performed.)
Other: it's a huge mish-mash of interactions between different things in biology (hard-wired impulses that are different between sexes, AND the fact that male have only one X chromosome leaving to more recessive stuff), cultural stereotypes, game theory, patterns of social interaction - even if I had a clear model of the network of the causal relationships between all those factors, I still would find it hard to say whether under that model "variance in intelligence is caused by biology" would count as true or not.
I'd rather you answer these each on their own rather than trying to derive (if it's even possible) some from the others, so that the results aren't contaminated in that way by the order in which I've asked them.
Probabilities for this are from 0 to 1; 0=zero chance, 1=certain.
P('Qualia of purple' is a coherent and meaningful and non-epiphenomenal concept | 'Qualia of consciousness' is a coherent and meaningful and non-epiphenomenal concept) [pollid:742]
Likelihood of same event, but conditioning on negation:
P('Qualia of purple' is a coherent and meaningful a...
The observation that many people claim that god exists, is positive evidence that god exists, i.e. P(God exists|Many people claim god exists, other background information) > P(God exists|Not many people claim god exists, other background information).
[pollid:738]
Given all other information, what is the likelihood ratio of the observation that many people claim that god exists, with respect to the hypothesis that god exists? I.e. what is the ratio: P(Many people claim god exists|God exists, other observations) / P(Many people claim god exists|God does n...
Sorry I made a mistake, I'll repost the poll.
Polls are almost useless for researching anything but the opinions of the population that takes the poll.
[pollid:591]
All the information you can gain from them factors through "the opinions of the population that takes the poll".
Well, people are more likely to believe in pixies in worlds with pixies than in worlds without pixies. It's just that your prior is so low that even the posterior will be negligible.
Learning people's beliefs about Jesus is informative about Jesus, it's just you already know that a lot of people believe in Jesus so there's very little new information.
I got the idea for this from two recent comments: Team Red/Team Blue and my feedback for ialdabaoth) so I will start with a poll for the former:
[pollid:583]
I hesitate to ask this clarification because I don't want debate to take over the thread -- feel free to ignore this if it seems likely to have a poor cost-benefit ratio.
It is my impression that team red seems to allow for qualitative variance among males in mating behavior ("alphas" v "betas", dominance v. prestige behavior, etc.) but expects that all women dance to basically the same biological piper. My own experience suggests that some women behave just as team red predicts, and some women do not. This leaves me a bit puzzled how to answer this question. On the one hand, team red is probably describing something real. On the other hand, I think there is qualitative variance in women's mating instincts (not sure if I would go so far as to say "individualism"), and that men who do not follow team red's advice can still succeed with the "right" women.
Is that answer you would consider "parts of both"? In my personal behavior, I'm clearly on Team Blue....
Within the Redpill ideology, the female equivalent of alpha/beta is slut/prude. They claim that just like women have short term relationships with "alphas" and settle down with "betas", men don't mind having flings with "sluts" but would rather marry a sexually inexperienced woman. Conversely, they claim that while "betas" give out attention indiscriminately and fail to acquire sex (the "friend zone"), sluts give out sex indiscriminately but in the end fail to acquire commitment.
(The above does not reflect my own views and I personally think that the language they use is in very poor taste. I also think idea as a whole is wrong about gender and human instincts, but bears just enough superficial similarity to how some humans behave under some conditions to be compelling to some people. )
in my experience
Sure, it's quite possible that people have a stable preference for dominant/submissive behavior in social interactions. I think that's a fairly uncontroversial thing to posit.
The problem with the Blue team is that it ignores the underlying mechanisms
That's probably because the "Blue" side is not actually a monolithic, self-aware school of thought. "Blue" is an exonym created by Red to describe the amalgam of conventional wisdom and pop-feminism to which they construct themselves as opposing (analogous to how "Cathedral" is not a monolithic, self aware group, but an exonym created by reactionaries). In reality, pop-feminism and conventional wisdom doesn't often bother delving into evo-psych and thinking about sexual strategy...so the seeming lack of specificity inherent in "click" is not in opposition to anyone, but simply the result of not having adopted a position on the matter.
The problem with the Red team is that it treats individuals as fungible: provide the right signals and it doesn't matter who your partner is
Well, personally I think the additional, and more pressing problem with Red is that it is factually ...
FWIW, reading that first link has made me less sympathetic to Team Red. I'm assuming you consider that blog to be a strong exemplar for the team or you wouldn't have chosen it; to me it reads as dripping with contempt for women and makes me take the idea that Team Red is engaged in dispassionate analysis less seriously.
On point 1, to clarify -- my experience (and no, I'm not literally talking just about my own relationships) is that we're talking about about at least a substantial minority, not rare exceptions. I also don't think the behaviors in question are scalar; it doesn't make sense to talk about them "on average" unless you're making a fairly uninteresting point about the modal woman, where then non-modal women are qualitatively different.
On point 2, again, the reason women are thought to vary less than men is that they have two copies of the x chromosome. It's a principle roughly similar to the difference between rolling 2d6 and 1d12; you expect a lower standard deviation in the former. And again, there's no reason for this to predict that women would be homogenous in their mating strategies.
Point 3 is basically assuming the conclusion.
Point 4. Not in this case.
Point 5. The comment you link to contains numerous inaccuracies about US divorce law, as is pointed out in that thread. Aside from that, what Lumifer said.
Taken literally, it is seen as pedantic, much like the guy who insists that every statement of the form "men are stronger than women" be followed by the suffix "on average". Of course in a planet of 3 billion women there are going to be some exceptions; that's not an interesting observation.
One thing I've noticed is that, whereas zero-article plurals in English are usually taken to only refer to central elements of a category (“ducks lay eggs” even though male ones don't) in descriptive statements, they often aren't in normative statements (say “ducks aren't allowed here”). Therefore, claims like “women are X; therefore, women shouldn't be allowed to do Y”, insofar as “women are X” would normally be taken to refer to typical women and “women shouldn't be allowed to do Y” would normally be taken to refer to all women, sound a lot like fallacies of equivocation to me.
Come to think of it, "Red/Blue makes no sense at all" is not even a valid answer to the question. The question did not ask whether it made sense.
There's such a thing as a question that rests on invalid assumptions — the classic example being "Have you stopped beating your wife?" when addressed to someone who never did (or never married a woman). As in that case, questions can be used to sneak in connotations — the classic example is asked by a politician to his rival in a public debate, for the purpose of planting suspicion. The sage Hofstadter writes that "mu"#.22Unasking.22_the_question) is the answer to this question.
It sure looks like the categories being presented here introduce a lot of assumptions and connotations, though they are obvious enough that I would not use the word "sneak".
Here are some analogous questions to illustrate the problem. In each case I take the question to be of the "radio button" format — an answer is a choice of exactly one of the presented options.
"Are you a Baptized Fooist, or hell-bound?" This question assumes that people naturally split into Fooists and those who are going to hell. Eve...
Come to think of it, "Red/Blue makes no sense at all" is not even a valid answer to the question. The question did not ask whether it made sense.
"Red/Blue makes no sense at all" means "I reject the framework within which you are asking this question".
This is an experiment to use polls to tap into the crowd knowledge probably present on LW.
This is your chance to ask your multiple choice question you always wanted to throw in. Get qualified numeric feedback to your comments. Post fun polls.
There are some rules:
If you don't know how to make a poll in a comment look at the Poll Markup Help.
This being an experiment I do not announce it to be regular. If it is successful I may. Or you may. In that case I recommend the following to make this potentially more usable:
EDIT: Added recommendations from KnaveOfAllTrades.