Survey Results: 10 Fun Questions for LWers

[-]gjm5y220

I think that as well as noting the means and medians of the questions about "how much karma" and "how many dollars", it's worth pointing out explicitly that in both cases the modal value was zero. I think the zeros reflect, at least for some of the people saying zero, positions that are somewhat different in kind from the non-zeros. (A rejection of the very idea that you decide whether a post is worth reading by looking at its score; the opinion that there's no need at all for the book.)

That won't always be true; someone who would pay $3 for the book will probably have answered zero. Still, the fraction of zeros seems like a relevant statistic here in both those cases.

[-]SarahNibs5y80

A rejection of the very idea that you decide whether a post is worth reading by looking at its score

Look at that, exactly the reason I picked 0.

[-]Viliam5y170

Bimodal slack -- my guess is this is mostly about being a student vs having a job.

[-]Ben Pace5y30

Interesting hypothesis, will keep it in mind.

[-]Bucky5y130

There was a strong correlation between what people believed about CivIn and what people believed about the community, a correlation of 0.62. It's basically a measure of the strength of the typical mind fallacy around here.

I don’t think that this necessarily represents typical minding so much as correct interpretation of limited evidence.

I have very good evidence of what I believe. I have limited evidence of what other people believe. I know that they may be different from me but I don’t necessarily know whether they will believe more or less. So using my own level of belief as a guide seems correct rather than representing that I believe that everyone will believe the same.

If I had been asked to give a distribution guess for the community belief level and it had a very sharp peak at my own belief level then that would better represent the typical mind fallacy. (The Bayesian truth serum papers used distributions for the community prediction.)

(Of note: of the 73 respondents who had different own and community guesses, only 57% managed to guess a more popular value of actual community belief than if they had just used their own belief level as a prediction)

[-]Ben Pace5y20

Yeah, that seems right.

[-]Ben Pace5y90

I wondered whether the bimodal slack curve was about "People who knew the term Slack" and "People who didn't", so I checked the correlation of whether the person said they used the term often in conversation. The correlation was very weak, 0.1, so this wasn't a key factor. People really just have quite different feelings about their slack. That's so cool.

[-]johnswentworth5y80

But it's weirdly bimodal, and I didn't have a theory that predicted that.

I had a comment a year ago which would predict this. The idea is that we generate value from slack by using that slack to take unreliable/high-noise opportunities. But as long as the noise in those high-noise opportunities is independent, we should usually be able to take advantage of N^2 opportunities using N units of slack (because noise in a sum scales with the square root of the number of things summed, roughly speaking). In other words, slack has increasing marginal returns: the tenth unit of slack is far more valuable than the second unit.

That suggests that individual people should either:

specialize in having lots of slack and using lots unreliable opportunities (so they can accept N^2 unreliability trade-offs with only N units of slack), or
specialize in having little slack and making everything in their life highly reliable (because a relatively large amount of slack would need to be set aside for just one high-noise opportunity).

[-]Rana Dexsin5y80

I did roll a four-sided die for the first question, in fact. (Well, to be more precise, I rolled a six-sided die after precommitting to myself that I would continue rolling until the answer was in [1, 4].) Now I'm glad I did.

[-]Vanessa Kosoy5y30

Same! (Except that I used the google random number generator)

[-]gilch5y30

For the record, I also thought of that. But I didn't actually do it. I thought the answer to the question would be more informative if people didn't randomize.

[-]Rana Dexsin5y10

Maybe, but I think any change to the result caused by people randomizing is inherently part of the actual result here. But then, any change to the result caused by people thinking they shouldn't randomize because it would hamper the result is also part of the result.

[-]Ben Pace5y30

Aww thanks!!

[-]Dagon5y70

Well, that's good to know. If we want it to sell at more than that, we need to make it more attractive for y'all...

Or recognize that LW readers involved enough to respond to a "fun survey" are NOT the audience likely to buy a book filled with concepts they've already read and discussed. This book could be massively successful to more casual readers or interested non-LW readers, even if core readers (and contributors) don't buy it.

[-]Ben Pace5y50

True!

[-]romeostevensit5y40

Simulacra levels (and that false consciousness can occur at any/multiple levels) help a lot with understanding why it feels like everyone is lying most of the time. It would have been highly helpful to a younger version of myself, along with someone explicitly admitting that a bunch of the signaling game is either bullshit (read: helps people coordinate to defect together a la kakonomics) or actual scary levels of delusion due to the emotional pain of helplessness along with explaining that admitting as such is low status/a losing move most of the time, thus selecting for it.