A big thank you to the 1090 people who took the second Less Wrong Census/Survey.

Does this mean there are 1090 people who post on Less Wrong? Not necessarily. 165 people said they had zero karma, and 406 people skipped the karma question - I assume a good number of the skippers were people with zero karma or without accounts. So we can only prove that 519 people post on Less Wrong. Which is still a lot of people.

I apologize for failing to ask who had or did not have an LW account. Because there are a number of these failures, I'm putting them all in a comment to this post so they don't clutter the survey results. Please talk about changes you want for next year's survey there.

Of our 1090 respondents, 972 (89%) were male, 92 (8.4%) female, 7 (.6%) transexual, and 19 gave various other answers or objected to the question. As abysmally male-dominated as these results are, the percent of women has tripled since the last survey in mid-2009.

We're also a little more diverse than we were in 2009; our percent non-whites has risen from 6% to just below 10%. Along with 944 whites (86%) we include 38 Hispanics (3.5%), 31 East Asians (2.8%), 26 Indian Asians (2.4%) and 4 blacks (.4%).

Age ranged from a supposed minimum of 1 (they start making rationalists early these days?) to a more plausible minimum of 14, to a maximum of 77. The mean age was 27.18 years. Quartiles (25%, 50%, 75%) were 21, 25, and 30. 90% of us are under 38, 95% of us are under 45, but there are still eleven Less Wrongers over the age of 60. The average Less Wronger has aged about one week since spring 2009 - so clearly all those anti-agathics we're taking are working!

In order of frequency, we include 366 computer scientists (32.6%), 174 people in the hard sciences (16%) 80 people in finance (7.3%), 63 people in the social sciences (5.8%), 43 people involved in AI (3.9%), 39 philosophers (3.6%), 15 mathematicians (1.5%), 14 statisticians (1.3%), 15 people involved in law (1.5%) and 5 people in medicine (.5%).

48 of us (4.4%) teach in academia, 470 (43.1%) are students, 417 (38.3%) do for-profit work, 34 (3.1%) do non-profit work, 41 (3.8%) work for the government, and 72 (6.6%) are unemployed.

418 people (38.3%) have yet to receive any degrees, 400 (36.7%) have a Bachelor's or equivalent, 175 (16.1%) have a Master's or equivalent, 65 people (6%) have a Ph.D, and 19 people (1.7%) have a professional degree such as an MD or JD.

345 people (31.7%) are single and looking, 250 (22.9%) are single but not looking, 286 (26.2%) are in a relationship, and 201 (18.4%) are married. There are striking differences across men and women: women are more likely to be in a relationship and less likely to be single and looking (33% men vs. 19% women). All of these numbers look a lot like the ones from 2009.

27 people (2.5%) are asexual, 119 (10.9%) are bisexual, 24 (2.2%) are homosexual, and 902 (82.8%) are heterosexual.

625 people (57.3%) described themselves as monogamous, 145 (13.3%) as polyamorous, and 298 (27.3%) didn't really know. These numbers were similar between men and women.

The most popular political view, at least according to the much-maligned categories on the survey, was liberalism, with 376 adherents and 34.5% of the vote. Libertarianism followed at 352 (32.3%), then socialism at 290 (26.6%), conservativism at 30 (2.8%) and communism at 5 (.5%).

680 people (62.4%) were consequentialist, 152 (13.9%) virtue ethicist, 49 (4.5%) deontologist, and 145 (13.3%) did not believe in morality.

801 people (73.5%) were atheist and not spiritual, 108 (9.9%) were atheist and spiritual, 97 (8.9%) were agnostic, 30 (2.8%) were deist or pantheist or something along those lines, and 39 people (3.5%) described themselves as theists (20 committed plus 19 lukewarm)

425 people (38.1%) grew up in some flavor of nontheist family, compared to 297 (27.2%) in committed theist families and 356 in lukewarm theist families (32.7%). Common family religious backgrounds included Protestantism with 451 people (41.4%), Catholicism with 289 (26.5%) Jews with 102 (9.4%), Hindus with 20 (1.8%), Mormons with 17 (1.6%) and traditional Chinese religion with 13 (1.2%)

There was much derision on the last survey over the average IQ supposedly being 146. Clearly Less Wrong has been dumbed down since then, since the average IQ has fallen all the way down to 140. Numbers ranged from 110 all the way up to 204 (for reference, Marilyn vos Savant, who holds the Guinness World Record for highest adult IQ ever recorded, has an IQ of 185).

89 people (8.2%) have never looked at the Sequences; a further 234 (32.5%) have only given them a quick glance. 170 people have read about 25% of the sequences, 169 (15.5%) about 50%, 167 (15.3%) about 75%, and 253 people (23.2%) said they've read almost all of them. This last number is actually lower than the 302 people who have been here since the Overcoming Bias days when the Sequences were still being written (27.7% of us).

The other 72.3% of people who had to find Less Wrong the hard way. 121 people (11.1%) were referred by a friend, 259 people (23.8%) were referred by blogs, 196 people (18%) were referred by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, 96 people (8.8%) were referred by a search engine, and only one person (.1%) was referred by a class in school.

Of the 259 people referred by blogs, 134 told me which blog referred them. There was a very long tail here, with most blogs only referring one or two people, but the overwhelming winner was Common Sense Atheism, which is responsible for 18 current Less Wrong readers. Other important blogs and sites include Hacker News (11 people), Marginal Revolution (6 people), TV Tropes (5 people), and a three way tie for fifth between Reddit, SebastianMarshall.com, and You Are Not So Smart (3 people).

Of those people who chose to list their karma, the mean value was 658 and the median was 40 (these numbers are pretty meaningless, because some people with zero karma put that down and other people did not).

Of those people willing to admit the time they spent on Less Wrong, after eliminating one outlier (sorry, but you don't spend 40579 minutes daily on LW; even I don't spend that long) the mean was 21 minutes and the median was 15 minutes. There were at least a dozen people in the two to three hour range, and the winner (well, except the 40579 guy) was someone who says he spends five hours a day.

I'm going to give all the probabilities in the form [mean, (25%-quartile, 50%-quartile/median, 75%-quartile)]. There may have been some problems here revolving around people who gave numbers like .01: I didn't know whether they meant 1% or .01%. Excel helpfully rounded all numbers down to two decimal places for me, and after a while I decided not to make it stop: unless I wanted to do geometric means, I can't do justice to really small grades in probability.

The Many Worlds hypothesis is true: 56.5, (30, 65, 80)
There is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe: 69.4, (50, 90, 99)
There is intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy: 41.2, (1, 30, 80)
The supernatural (ontologically basic mental entities) exists: 5.38, (0, 0, 1)
God (a supernatural creator of the universe) exists: 5.64, (0, 0, 1)
Some revealed religion is true: 3.40, (0, 0, .15)
Average person cryonically frozen today will be successfully revived: 21.1, (1, 10, 30)
Someone now living will reach age 1000: 23.6, (1, 10, 30)
We are living in a simulation: 19, (.23, 5, 33)
Significant anthropogenic global warming is occurring: 70.7, (55, 85, 95)
Humanity will make it to 2100 without a catastrophe killing >90% of us: 67.6, (50, 80, 90)

There were a few significant demographics differences here. Women tended to be more skeptical of the extreme transhumanist claims like cryonics and antiagathics (for example, men thought the current generation had a 24.7% chance of seeing someone live to 1000 years; women thought there was only a 9.2% chance). Older people were less likely to believe in transhumanist claims, a little less likely to believe in anthropogenic global warming, and more likely to believe in aliens living in our galaxy. Community veterans were more likely to believe in Many Worlds, less likely to believe in God, and - surprisingly - less likely to believe in cryonics (significant at 5% level; could be a fluke). People who believed in high existential risk were more likely to believe in global warming, more likely to believe they had a higher IQ than average, and more likely to believe in aliens (I found that same result last time, and it puzzled me then too.)

Intriguingly, even though the sample size increased by more than 6 times, most of these results are within one to two percent of the numbers on the 2009 survey, so this supports taking them as a direct line to prevailing rationalist opinion rather than the contingent opinions of one random group.

Of possible existential risks, the most feared was a bioengineered pandemic, which got 194 votes (17.8%) - a natural pandemic got 89 (8.2%), making pandemics the overwhelming leader. Unfriendly AI followed with 180 votes (16.5%), then nuclear war with 151 (13.9%), ecological collapse with 145 votes (12.3%), economic/political collapse with 134 votes (12.3%), and asteroids and nanotech bringing up the rear with 46 votes each (4.2%).

The mean for the Singularity question is useless because of the very high numbers some people put in, but the median was 2080 (quartiles 2050, 2080, 2150). The Singularity has gotten later since 2009: the median guess then was 2067. There was some discussion about whether people might have been anchored by the previous mention of 2100 in the x-risk question. I changed the order after 104 responses to prevent this; a t-test found no significant difference between the responses before and after the change (in fact, the trend was in the wrong direction).

Only 49 people (4.5%) have never considered cryonics or don't know what it is. 388 (35.6%) of the remainder reject it, 583 (53.5%) are considering it, and 47 (4.3%) are already signed up for it. That's more than double the percent signed up in 2009.

231 people (23.4% of respondents) have attended a Less Wrong meetup.

The average person was 37.6% sure their IQ would be above average - underconfident! Imagine that! (quartiles were 10, 40, 60). The mean was 54.5% for people whose IQs really were above average, and 29.7% for people whose IQs really were below average. There was a correlation of .479 (significant at less than 1% level) between IQ and confidence in high IQ.

Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica in 1687. Although people guessed dates as early as 1250 and as late as 1960, the mean was...1687 (quartiles were 1650, 1680, 1720). This marks the second consecutive year that the average answer to these difficult historical questions has been exactly right (to be fair, last time it was the median that was exactly right and the mean was all of eight months off). Let no one ever say that the wisdom of crowds is not a powerful tool.

The average person was 34.3% confident in their answer, but 41.9% of people got the question right (again with the underconfidence!). There was a highly significant correlation of r = -.24 between confidence and number of years error.

This graph may take some work to read. The x-axis is confidence. The y-axis is what percent of people were correct at that confidence level. The red line you recognize as perfect calibration. The thick green line is your results from the Newton problem. The black line is results from the general population I got from a different calibration experiment tested on 50 random trivia questions; take the intercomparability of the two with a grain of salt.

As you can see, Less Wrong does significantly better than the general population. However, there are a few areas of failure. First is that, as usual, people who put zero and one hundred percent had nonzero chances of getting the question right or wrong: 16.7% of people who put "0" were right, and 28.6% of people who put "100" were wrong (interestingly, people who put 100 did worse than the average of everyone else in the 90-99 bracket, of whom only 12.2% erred). Second of all, the line is pretty horizontal from zero to fifty or so. People who thought they had a >50% chance of being right had excellent calibration, but people who gave themselves a low chance of being right were poorly calibrated. In particular, I was surprised to see so many people put numbers like "0". If you're pretty sure Newton lived after the birth of Christ, but before the present day, that alone gives you a 1% chance of randomly picking the correct 20-year interval.

160 people wanted their responses kept private. They have been removed. The rest have been sorted by age to remove any information about the time they took the survey. I've converted what's left to a .xls file, and you can download it here.

2011 Survey Results
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[-]Jack560

People who believed in high existential risk were ... more likely to believe in aliens (I found that same result last time, and it puzzled me then too.)

Aliens existing but not yet colonizing multiple systems or broadcasting heavily is the the response consistent with the belief that a Great Filter lies in front of us.

Strength of membership in the LW community was related to responses for most of the questions. There were 3 questions related to strength of membership: karma, sequence reading, and time in the community, and since they were all correlated with each other and showed similar patterns I standardized them and averaged them together into a single measure. Then I checked if this measure of strength in membership in the LW community was related to answers on each of the other questions, for the 822 respondents (described in this comment) who answered at least one of the probability questions and used percentages rather than decimals (since I didn't want to take the time to recode the answers which were given as decimals).

All effects described below have p < .01 (I also indicate when there is a nonsignificant trend with p<.2). On questions with categories I wasn't that rigorous - if there was a significant effect overall I just eyeballed the differences and reported which categories have the clearest difference (and I skipped some of the background questions which had tons of different categories and are hard to interpret).

Compared to those with a less strong membership in the LW... (read more)

Political Views - less likely to be socialist, more likely to be libertarian

I looked at this one a little more closely, and this difference in political views is driven almost entirely by the "time in community" measure of strength of membership in the LW community; it's not even statistically significant with the other two. I'd guess that is because LW started out on Overcoming Bias, which is a relatively libertarian blog, so the old timers tend to share those views. We've also probably added more non-Americans over time, who are more likely to be socialist.

All of the other relationships in the above post hold up when we replace the original measure of membership strength with one that is only based on the two variables of karma & sequence reading, but this one does not.

8Normal_Anomaly
So long-time participants were less likely to believe that cryonics would work for them but more likely to sign up for it? Interesting. This could be driven by any of: fluke, greater rationality, greater age&income, less akrasia, more willingness to take long-shot bets based on shutting up and multiplying.
5Unnamed
I looked into this a little more, and it looks like those who are strongly tied to the LW community are less likely to give high answers to p(cryonics) (p>50%), but not any more or less likely to give low answers (p<10%). That reduction in high answers could be a sign of greater rationality - less affect heuristic driven irrational exuberance about the prospects for cryonics - or just more knowledge about the topic. But I'm surprised that there's no change in the frequency of low answers. There is a similar pattern in the relationship between cryonics status and p(cryonics). Those who are signed up for cryonics don't give a higher p(cryonics) on average than those who are not signed up, but they are less likely to give a probability under 10%. The group with the highest average p(cryonics) is those who aren't signed up but are considering it, and that's the group that's most likely to give a probability over 50%. Here are the results for p(cryonics) broken down by cryonics status, showing what percent of each group gave p(cryonics)<.1, what percent gave p(cryonics)>.5, and what the average p(cryonics) is for each group. (I'm expressing p(cryonics) here as probabilities from 0-1 because I think it's easier to follow that way, since I'm giving the percent of people in each group.) Never thought about it / don't understand (n=26): 58% give p<.1, 8% give p>.5, mean p=.17 No, and not planning to (n=289): 60% give p<.1, 6% give p>.5, mean p=.14 No, but considering it (n=444): 38% give p < .1, 18% give p>.5, mean p=.27 Yes - signed up or just finishing up paperwork (n=36): 39% give p<.1, 8% give p>.5, mean p=.21 Overall: 47% give p<.1, 13% give p>.5, mean p=.22
4ewbrownv
The existential risk questions are a confounding factor here - if you think p(cryonics works) 80%, but p(xrisk ends civilization) 50%, that pulls down your p(successful revival) considerably.
3Unnamed
I wondered about that, but p(cryonics) and p(xrisk) are actually uncorrelated, and the pattern of results for p(cryonics) remains the same when controlling statistically for p(xrisk).
1Randolf
I think the main reason for this is that these persons have simply spent more time thinking about cyronics compared to other people. By spending time on this forum they have had a good chance of running into a discussion which has inspired them to read about it and sign up. Or perhaps people who are interested in cyronics are also interested in other topics LW has to offer, and hence stay in this place. In either case, it follows that they are probably also more knowledgeable about cyronics and hence understand what cyrotechnology can realistically offer currently or in the near future. In addition, these long-time guys might be more open to things such as cyronics in the ethical way.
6gwern
I don't think this is obvious at all. If you had asked me before in advance which of the following 4 possible sign-pairs would be true with increasing time spent thinking about cryonics: 1. less credence, less sign-ups 2. less credence, more sign-ups 3. more credence, more sign-ups 4. more credence, less sign-ups I would have said 'obviously #3, since everyone starts from "that won't ever work" and move up from there, and then one is that much more likely to sign up' The actual outcome, #2, would be the one I would expect least. (Hence, I am strongly suspicious of anyone claiming to expect or predict it as suffering from hindsight bias.)
5CarlShulman
It is noted above that those with strong community attachment think that there is more risk of catastrophe. If human civilization collapses or is destroyed, then cryonics patients and facilities will also be destroyed.
0brianm
I would expect the result to be a more accurate estimation of the success, combined with more sign-ups . 2 is an example of this if, in fact, the more accurate assessment is lower than the assessment of someone with a different level of information. I don't it's true that everyone starts from "that won't ever work" - we know some people think it might work, and we may be inclined to some wishful thinking or susceptability to hype to inflate our likelihood above the conclusion we'd reach if we invest the time to consider the issue in more depth, It's also worth noting that we're not comparing the general public to those who've seriously considered signing up, but the lesswrong population, who are probably a lot more exposed to the idea of cryonics. I'd agree that it's not what I would have predicted in advance (having no more expectation for the likelihood assigned to go up as down with more research), but it would be predictable for someone proceeding from the premise that the lesswrong community overestimates the likelihood of cryonics success compared to those who have done more research.
0[anonymous]
Yeah, I think you have a point. However, maybe the following explanation would be better: Currently cyronics aren't likely to work. People who sign up into cyronics do research on the subject before or after singing up, and hence become aware that cyronics aren't likely to work.

Running list of changes for next year's survey:

  1. Ask who's a poster versus a lurker!
  2. A non-write-in "Other" for most questions
  3. Replace "gender" with "sex" to avoid complaints/philosophizing.
  4. Very very clear instructions to use percent probabilities and not decimal probabilities
  5. Singularity year question should have explicit instructions for people who don't believe in singularity
  6. Separate out "relationship status" and "looking for new relationships" questions to account for polys
  7. Clarify that research is allowed on the probability questions
  8. Clarify possible destruction of humanity in cryonics/antiagathics questions.
  9. What does it mean for aliens to "exist in the universe"? Light cone?
  10. Make sure people write down "0" if they have 0 karma.
  11. Add "want to sign up, but not available" as cryonics option.
  12. Birth order.
  13. Have children?
  14. Country of origin?
  15. Consider asking about SAT scores for Americans to have something to correlate IQs with.
  16. Consider changing morality to PhilPapers version.

One about nationality (and/or native language)? I guess that would be much more relevant than e.g. birth order.

Regarding #4, you could just write a % symbol to the right of each input box.

BTW, I'd also disallow 0 and 100, and give the option of giving log-odds instead of probability (and maybe encourage to do that for probabilities 99%). Someone's “epsilon” might be 10^-4 whereas someone else's might be 10^-30.

7brilee
I second that. See my post at http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8lr/logodds_or_logits/ for a concise summary. Getting the LW survey to use log-odds would go a long way towards getting LW to start using log-odds in normal conversation.
5Luke_A_Somers
People will mess up the log-odds, though. Non-log odds seem safer. Two fields instead of one, but it seems cleaner than any of the other alternatives.
5A1987dM
The point is not having to type lots of zeros (or of nines) with extreme probabilities (so that people won't weasel out and use ‘epsilon’); having to type 1:999999999999999 is no improvement over having to type 0.000000000000001.
2Kaj_Sotala
Is such precision meaningful? At least for me personally, 0.1% is about as low as I can meaningfully go - I can't really discriminate between me having an estimate of 0.1%, 0.001%, or 0.0000000000001%.

I expect this is incorrect.

Specifically, I would guess that you can distinguish the strength of your belief that a lottery ticket you might purchase will win the jackpot from one in a thousand (a.k.a. 0.1%). Am I mistaken?

3MBlume
That's a very special case -- in the case of the lottery, it is actually possible-in-principle to enumerate BIG_NUMBER equally likely mutually-exclusive outcomes. Same with getting the works of shakespeare out of your random number generator. The things under discussion don't have that quality.
2A1987dM
I agree in principle, but on the other hand the questions on the survey are nowhere as easy as "what's the probability of winning such-and-such lottery".
2Kaj_Sotala
You're right, good point.
0Emile
Just type 1:1e15 (or 1e-15 if you don't want odd ratios).
2[anonymous]
I'd force log odds, as they are the more natural representation and much less susceptible to irrational certainty and nonsense answers. Someone has to actually try and comprehend what they are doing to troll logits; -INF seems a lot more out to lunch than p = 0. I'd also like someone to go thru the math to figure out how to correctly take the mean of probability estimates. I see no obvious reason why you can simply average [0, 1] probability. The correct method would probably involve cooking up a hypothetical bayesian judge that takes everyones estimates as evidence. Edit: since logits can be a bit unintuitive, I'd give a few calibration examples like odds of rolling a 6 on a die, odds of winning some lottery, fair odds, odds of surviving a car crash, etc.
2A1987dM
Personally, for probabilities roughly between 20% and 80% I find probabilities (or non-log odds) easier than understand than log-odds. Yeah. One of the reason why I proposed this is the median answer of 0 in several probability questions. (I'd also require a rationale in order to enter probabilities more extreme than 1%/99%.) I'd go with the average of log-odds, but this requires all of them to be finite...
0dlthomas
Weighting, in part, by the calibration questions?
2[anonymous]
I dunno how you would weight it. I think you'd want to have a maxentropy 'fair' judge at least for comparison. Calibration questions are probably the least controversial way of weighting. Compare to, say, trying to weight using karma. This might be an interesting thing to develop. A voting system backed up by solid bayes-math could be useful for more than just LW surveys.
0dlthomas
It might be interesting to see what results are produced by several weighting approaches.
1[anonymous]
yeah. that's what I was getting at with the maxentropy judge. On further thought, I really should look into figuring this out. Maybe I'll do some work on it and post a discussion post. This could be a great group rationality tool.
[-]Larks290

Publish draft questions in advance, so we can spot issues before the survey goes live.

[-]Jack240

We should ask if people participated in the previous surveys.

[-]Jack220

I'd love a specific question on moral realism instead of leaving it as part of the normative ethics question. I'd also like to know about psychiatric diagnoses (autism spectrum, ADHD, depression, whatever else seems relevant)-- perhaps automatically remove those answers from a spreadsheet for privacy reasons.

I don't care about moral realism, but psychiatric diagnoses (and whether they're self-diagnosed or formally diagnosed) would be interesting.

You are aware that if you ask people for their sex but not their gender, and say something like "we have more women now", you will be philosophized into a pulp, right?

6wedrifid
Only if people here are less interested in applying probability theory than they are in philosophizing about gender... Oh.
4FiftyTwo
Why not ask for both?
4Emile
Because the two are so highly correlated that having both would give us almost no extra information. One goal of the survey should be to maximize the useful-info-extracted / time-spent-on-it ratio, hence also the avoidance of write-ins for many questions (which make people spend more time on the survey, to get results that are less exploitable) (a write-in for gender works because people are less likely to write a manifesto for that than for politics).
2MixedNuts
Because having a "gender" question causes complaints and philosophizing, which Yvain wants to avoid.
0ShardPhoenix
How about, "It's highly likely that we have more women now"?

Suggestion: "Which of the following did you change your mind about after reading the sequences? (check all that apply)"

  • [] Religion
  • [] Cryonics
  • [] Politics
  • [] Nothing
  • [] et cetera.

Many other things could be listed here.

2TheOtherDave
I'm curious, what would you do with the results of such a question? For my part, I suspect I would merely stare at them and be unsure what to make of a statistical result that aggregates "No, I already held the belief that the sequences attempted to convince me of" with "No, I held a contrary belief and the sequences failed to convince me otherwise." (That it also aggregates "Yes, I held a contrary belief and the sequences convinced me otherwise." and "Yes, I initially held the belief that the sequences attempted to convince me of, and the sequences convinced me otherwise" is less of a concern, since I expect the latter group to be pretty small.)
3lavalamp
Originally I was going to suggest asking, "what were your religious beliefs before reading the sequences?"-- and then I succumbed to the programmer's urge to solve the general problem. However, I guess measuring how effective the sequences are at causing people to change their mind is something that a LW survey can't do, anyway (you'd need to also ask people who read the sequences but didn't stick around to accurately answer that). Mainly I was curious how many deconversions the sequences caused or hastened.
0taryneast
Ok, so use radio-buttons: "believed before, still believe" "believed before, changed my mind now" "didn't believe before, changed my mind now" "never believed, still don't"
1TheOtherDave
...and "believed something before, believe something different now"
1Alejandro1
I think the question is too vague as formulated. Does any probability update, no matter how small, count as changing your mind? But if you ask for precise probability changes, then the answers will likely be nonsense because most people (even most LWers, I'd guess) don't keep track of numeric probabilities, just think "oh, this argument makes X a bit more believable" and such.
[-]prase110

When asking for race/ethnicity, you should really drop the standard American classification into White - Hispanic - Black - Indian - Asian - Other. From a non-American perspective this looks weird, especially the "White Hispanic" category. A Spaniard is White Hispanic, or just White? If only White, how does the race change when one moves to another continent? And if White Hispanic, why not have also "Italic" or "Scandinavic" or "Arabic" or whatever other peninsula-ic races?

Since I believe the question was intended to determine the cultural background of LW readers, I am surprised that there was no question about country of origin, which would be more informative. There is certainly greater cultural difference between e.g. Turks (White, non-Hispanic I suppose) and White non-Hispanic Americans than between the latter and their Hispanic compatriots.

Also, making a statistic based on nationalities could help people determine whether there is a chance for a meetup in their country. And it would be nice to know whether LW has regular readers in Liechtenstein, of course.

6[anonymous]
I was also...well, not surprised per se, but certainly annoyed to see that "Native American" in any form wasn't even an option. One could construe that as revealing, I suppose. I don't know how relevant the question actually is, but if we want to track ancestry and racial, ethnic or cultural group affiliation, the folowing scheme is pretty hard to mess up: Country of origin: Country of residence: Primary Language: Native Language (if different): Heritage language (if different): Note: A heritage language is one spoken by your family or identity group. Heritage group: Diaspora: Means your primary heritage and identity group moved to the country you live in within historical or living memory, as colonists, slaves, workers or settlers. European diaspora ("white" North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc) African diaspora ("black" in the US, West Indian, more recent African emigrant groups; also North African diaspora) Asian diaspora (includes, Turkic, Arab, Persian, Central and South Asian, Siberian native) Indigenous: Means your primary heritage and identity group was resident to the following location prior to 1400, OR prior to the arrival of the majority culture in antiquity (for example: Ainu, Basque, Taiwanese native, etc): -Africa -Asia -Europe -North America (between Panama and Canada, also includes Greenland and the Carribean) -Oceania (including Australia) -South America Mixed: Select two or more: European Diaspora African Diaspora Asian Diaspora African Indigenous American Indigenous Asian Indigenous European Indigenous Oceania Indigenous What the US census calls "Non-white Hispanic" would be marked as "Mixed" > "European Diaspora" + "American Indigenous" with Spanish as either a Native or Heritage language. Someone who identifies as (say) Mexican-derived but doesn't speak Spanish at all would be impossible to tell from someone who was Euro-American and Cherokee who doesn't speak Cherokee, but no system is perfect...
4wedrifid
Put two spaces after a line if you want a linebreak.
6[anonymous]
Most LessWrong posters and readers are American, perhaps even the vast majority (I am not). Hispanic Americans differ from white Americans differ from black Americans culturally and socio-economically not just on average but in systemic ways regardless if the person in question defines himself as Irish American, Kenyan American, white American or just plain American. From the US we have robust sociological data that allows us to compare LWers based on this information. The same is true of race in Latin America, parts of Africa and more recently Western Europe. Nationality is not the same thing as racial or even ethnic identity in multicultural societies. Considering every now and then people bring up a desire to lower barriers to entry for "minorities" (whatever that means in a global forum), such stats are useful for those who argue on such issues and also for ascertaining certain biases. Adding a nationality and/or citizenship question would probably be useful though.
2prase
I have not said that it is. I was objecting to arbitrariness of "Hispanic race": I believe that the difference between Hispanic White Americans and non-Hispanic White Americans is not significantly higher than the difference between both two groups and non-Americans, and that the number of non-Americans among LW users would be higher than 3.8% reported for the Hispanics. I am not sure what exact sociological data we may extract from the survey, but in any case, the comparison to standard American sociological datasets will be problematic because the LW data are contaminated by presence of non-Americans and there is no way to say how much, because people were not asked about that.
-1[anonymous]
I didn't meant to imply you did, I just wanted to emphasise that data is gained by the racial breakdown. Especially in the American context, race sits at the strange junction of appearance, class, heritage, ethnicity, religion and subculture. And its hard to capture it by any of these metrics. Once we have data on how many are American (and this is something we really should have) this will be easier to say.
3[anonymous]
Because we don't have as much useful sociological data on this. Obviously we can start collecting data on any of the proposed categories, but if we're the only ones, it won't much help us figure out how LW differs from what one might expect of a group that fits its demographic profile. Much of the difference in the example of Turks is captured by the Muslim family background question.
0prase
Much, but not most. Religion is easy to ascertain, but there are other cultural differences which are more difficult to classify, but still are signigicant *. Substitute Turks with Egyptian Christians and the example will still work. (And not because of theological differences between Coptic and Protestant Christianity.) *) Among the culturally determined attributes are: political opinion, musical taste and general aesthetic preferences, favourite food, familiarity with different literature and films, ways of relaxation, knowledge of geography and history, language(s), moral code. Most of these things are independent of religion or only very indirectly influenced by it.
3NancyLebovitz
Offer a text field for race. You'll get some distances, not to mention "human" or "other", but you could always use that to find out whether having a contrary streak about race/ethnicity correlates with anything. If you want people to estimate whether a meetup could be worth it, I recommend location rather than nationality-- some nations are big enough that just knowing nationality isn't useful.

Suggestion: add "cryocrastinating" as a cryonics option.

9Jayson_Virissimo
I think using your stipulative definition of "supernatural" was a bad move. I would be very surprised if I asked a theologian to define "supernatural" and they replied "ontologically basic mental entities". Even as a rational reconstruction of their reply, it would be quite a stretch. Using such specific definitions of contentious concepts isn't a good idea, if you want to know what proportion of Less Wrongers self-identify as atheist/agnostic/deist/theist/polytheist.
1TheOtherDave
OTOH, using a vague definition isn't a good idea either, if you want to know something about what Less Wrongers believe about the world. I had no problem with the question as worded; it was polling about LWers confidence in a specific belief, using terms from the LW Sequences. That the particular belief is irrelevant to what people who self-identify as various groups consider important about that identification is important to remember, but not in and of itself a problem with the question. But, yeah... if we want to know what proportion of LWers self-identify as (e.g.) atheist, that question won't tell us.
7selylindi
Yet another alternate, culture-neutral way of asking about politics: Q: How involved are you in your region's politics compared to other people in your region? A: [choose one] () I'm among the most involved () I'm more involved than average () I'm about as involved as average () I'm less involved than average () I'm among the least involved
5FiftyTwo
Requires people to self assess next to a cultural baseline, and self assessments of this sort are notoriously inaccurate. (I predict everyone will think they have above-average involvement).
4Prismattic
Within a US-specific context, I would eschew these comparisons to a notional average and use the following levels of participation: 0 = indifferent to politics and ignorant of current events 1 = attentive to current events, but does not vote 2 = votes in presidential elections, but irregularly otherwise 3 = always votes 4 = always votes and contributes to political causes 5 = always votes, contributes, and engages in political activism during election seasons 6 = always votes, contributes, and engages in political activism both during and between election seasons 7 = runs for public office I suspect that the average US citizen of voting age is a 2, but I don't have data to back that up, and I am not motivated to research it. I am a 4, so I do indeed think that I am above average. Those categories could probably be modified pretty easily to match a parliamentary system by leaving out the reference to presidential elections and just having "votes irregularly" and "always votes" Editing to add -- for mandatory voting jurisdictions, include a caveat that "spoiled ballot = did not vote"
4TheOtherDave
Personally, I'm not sure I necessarily consider the person who runs for public office to be at a higher level of participation than the person who works for them.
2Nornagest
I agree denotationally with that estimate, but I think you're putting too much emphasis on voting in at least the 0-4 range. Elections (in the US) only come up once or exceptionally twice a year, after all. If you're looking for an estimate of politics' significance to a person's overall life, I think you'd be better off measuring degree of engagement with current events and involvement in political groups -- the latter meaning not only directed activism, but also political blogs, non-activist societies with a partisan slant, and the like. For example: do you now, or have you ever, owned a political bumper sticker?
0TimS
Maybe: "How frequently do you visit websites/read media that have an explicit political slant?"
2A1987dM
There might be people who don't always (or even usually) vote yet they contribute to political causes/engage in political activism, for certain values of “political” at least.
0thomblake
I had not before encountered this form of protest. If I were living in a place with mandatory voting and anonymous ballots, I would almost surely write my name on the ballot to spoil it.
2wedrifid
I do and I do. :)
0A1987dM
I have never actually spoiled a ballot in a municipality-or-higher-level election (though voting for a list with hardly any chance whatsoever of passing the election threshold has a very similar effect), but in high school I did vote for Homer Simpson as a students' representative, and there were lots of similarly hilarious votes, including (IIRC) ones for God, Osama bin Laden, and Silvio Berlusconi.
2wedrifid
I'd actually have guessed an average of below average.
2thomblake
Bad prediction. While it's hard to say since so few people around here actually vote, my involvement in politics is close enough to 0 that I'd be very surprised if I was more involved than average.
2DanArmak
I have exactly zero involvement and so I'd never think that.
2NancyLebovitz
I think I have average or below-average involvement. Maybe it would be better to ask about the hours/year spent on politics.
0FiftyTwo
For comparison what would you say the average persons level of involvement in politics consists of? (To avoid contamination, don't research or overthink the question just give us the average you were comparing yourself to). Edit: The intuitive average other commenters compared themselves to would also be of interest.
0NancyLebovitz
Good question. I don't know what the average person's involvement is, and I seem to know a lot of people (at least online) who are very politically involved, so I may be misestimating whether my political activity is above or below average.
0FiftyTwo
On posting this I made the prediction that the average assumed by most lesswrong commenters would be above the actual average level of participation. I hypothesise this is because most LW commenters come from relatively educated or affluent social groups, where political participation is quite high. Whereas there are large portions of the population who do not participate at all in politics (in the US and UK a significant percentage don't even vote in the 4-yearly national elections). Because of this I would be very sceptical of self reported participation levels, and would agree a quantifiable measure would be better.
6CharlesR
You should clarify in the antiagathics question that the person reaches the age of 1000 without the help of cryonics.
5Pfft
Replacing gender with sex seems like the wrong way to go to me. For example, note how Randall Munroe asked about sex, then regretted it.
0jefftk
I don't think I'd describe that post as regretting asking "do you have a Y chromosome". He's apologizing for asking for data for one purpose (checking with colorblindness) and then using it for another (color names if you're a guy/girl).
4Scott Alexander
Everyone who's suggesting changes: you are much more likely to get your way if you suggest a specific alternative. For example, instead of "handle politics better", something like "your politics question should have these five options: a, b, c, d, and e." Or instead of "use a more valid IQ measure", something more like "Here's a site with a quick and easy test that I think is valid"
3ChrisHallquist
In that case: use the exact ethics questions from the PhilPapers Survey (http://philpapers.org/surveys/), probably minus lean/accept distinction and the endless drop-down menu for "other."
1ChrisHallquist
For IQ: maybe you could nudge people to greater honesty by splitting up the question: (1) have you ever taken an IQ test with [whatever features were specified on this year's survey], yes or no? (2) if yes, what was your score?
1twanvl
Also, "ever" might be a bit too long. IQs and IQ tests can change over time, so maybe you should ask "have you taken an IQ test [with constraints] in the last 10 years?"
3[anonymous]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex Otherwise agreed.
[-][anonymous]100

Strongly disagree with previous self here. I do not think replacing "gender" with "sex" avoids complaints or "philosophizing", and "philosophizing" in context feels like a shorthand/epithet for "making this more complex than prevailing, mainstream views on gender."

For a start, it seems like even "sex" in the sense used here is getting at a mainly-social phenomenon: that of sex assigned at birth. This is a judgement call by the doctors and parents. The biological correlates used to make that decision are just weighed in aggregate; some people are always going to throw an exception. If you're not asking about the size of gametes and their delivery mechanism, the hormonal makeup of the person, their reproductive anatomy where applicable, or their secondary sexual characteristics, then "sex" is really just asking the "gender" question but hazily referring to biological characteristics instead.

Ultimately, gender is what you're really asking for. Using "sex" as a synonym blurs the data into unintelligibility for some LWers; pragmatically, it also amounts to a tacit "screw you" to trans p... (read more)

2RobertLumley
A series of four questions on each Meyers-Briggs indicator would be good, although I'm sure the data would be woefully unsurprising. Perhaps link to an online test if people don't know it already.
0DanArmak
You can accomplish this by adding a percent sign in the survey itself, to the right of to every textbox entry field. Edit: sorry, already suggested.
0ChrisHallquist
As per my previous comments on this, separate out normative ethics and meta-ethics. And maybe be extra-clear on not answering the IQ question unless you have official results? Or is that a lost cause?
0dlthomas
I would much rather see a choice of units.
-3Armok_GoB
That list is way, way to short. I entirely gave up on the survey partway through because an actual majority of the questions were inapplicable or downright offensive to my sensibilities, or just incomprehensible, or I couldn't answer them for some other reason. Not that I can think of anything that WOULDN'T have that effect on me without being specifically tailored to me which sort of destroys the point of having a survey... Maybe I'm just incompatible with surveys in general.
1NancyLebovitz
Would you be willing to write a discussion post about the questions you want to answer?
-5Armok_GoB
-5duckduckMOO