Disclaimer: English is not my mother's tongue so I am prone to make mistakes. Please correct and forgive me if I do.
In the recent LessWrong survey 1090 people responded. Sadly, information about the place of residence was not asked for but could have been very useful to people willing to plan a meetup. Since a similar questionaire in German was quite successful with 24 respondents I now translated the form to english and ask you to provide the information.
I ask you only to provide your country and general area of residence via postal code. The form is hosted at Google Docs and the spreadsheet will be published in a few days to ensure anonymity for the first few respondents. The data can not be traced back to specific individuals and would be useless in most cases.
Have fun and please provide feedback in the comments.
...Like people are supposed to know what it is. "Your country's two-letter domain name, such as 'us' for the USA and 'gr' for Greece" would have been clearer, if not as precise.
Corrected. Upvoted the comment since it is a useful contribution: The two-letter domain codes are an implementation of ISO 3166-1.
Note, there's also already the Where are we? page/thread.
Though it is not anonymous and somewhat harder to parse.
When you get 1000 responses, then you should be impressed. (I don't think you will get so many, the Discussion section is read a lot less than the Main. Unfortunately, posting this in the Main section would probably not be received with approval.)
Anyway, thanks for doing this.
I actually read discussion more. If I want to read something technical, which is what most of main is, I read the sequences, since I haven't finished them yet. But I'm sure you're right, the majority probably read main more.
I am impressed that I got so many responses in such short time. If one of the moderators thinks this post is more appropriate for main they can move it there.
Edit: So far we have 50 respondents. That is 5% of your mark. Edit2: Change in personal pronoun.
Mrerererer.
EDIT: I get variable amounts of negative karma for complaining about pronouns, but this one got pretty downvoted pretty fast. Is it something about "mrerererer" as an expression of displeasure in particular? Do I need to expressly state in so many words that I'm complaining about pronouns, even though Metus figured it out right away?
Note a downvoter, but on a note of inferential distance -- prior to the edit, I would have had no idea that "Mrerererer" was a vocalization of displeasure.
It sounds like a suggestion for a new pronoun, even better than all existing pronouns. :D
We can rebuild mrererererer. We have the technology.... Better, stronger, faster.
( In case that didn't make sense )
Upvoted. Please call me out if you ever see me doing it. I try to use Spivak pronouns in any instance where it is not really important whether or not the reader will judge me for using them (ie. not on a term paper) but I rarely think of it.
But I think it would have helped if you were more specific. I wouldn't have understood that you were complaining about pronouns. I may not have understood that "Mrerererer" was a complaint, and not an attempt to mimic the noise my dog makes when he's sucking on his chew toy. ;-)
I thought of it as a sex-generic "he" but if you think it is more appropriate I can change it to "he or she" (or "it".) Do you want me to?
"They" can be used as a neutral third-person pronoun.
Which seems like the most generic and easy-to-implement solution.
Thank you, good suggestion.
Yes please. Although I don't think we have any moderators who prefer "it", we might one day acquire some (e.g. Clippy could be given mod powers, in theory).
24 respondents so far, I am impressed. Here is the link to the spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArVL5H0yXwKFdHJSSEV4Zy0zcXZBeVJyeGtKd0ZncHc