Muflax offers his feedback on some of the survey questions:
- Treat the three digit number that you just wrote down as a length, in feet. Is the height of the tallest redwood tree in the world more or less than the number that you wrote down?: Feet! Fuck you, barbarians. I refuse to answer.
- What is your best guess about the height of the tallest redwood tree in the world (in feet)?: Why not beard-seconds? Seriously, fuck you.
- ...Height: 185cm (oh, now you can use sane units, you stupid imperialist pig-dogs)
Welcome! A year ago I was in your exact same position, having just created an account in order to take the survey and get free karma. Hope you continue posting!
Survey: done. Learned about deontology/virtue ethics: done.
Thanks LW. First time poster. 8 month lurker.
Took it. Yvain is a gentleman and a scholar for putting so much time and effort into this.
Just a few comments:
It could be a little clearer that the Calibration IQ question in Section 8 should only be answered by those people who reported an IQ in Section 5.
A GRE score question (as I requested in what is currently the fifth-most-upvoted top-level comment in the survey critiques thread) would have been nice. It was cool to see the Political Compass, AQ test, and iqtest.dk on there, though.
Commenting here because this is the highest voted comment mentioning the Big Five.
The Big Five personality test linked to in the survey is an online implementation of the Big Five Inventory (BFI). It was used in two studies: Srivastava et al. (2003) and Gosling et al. (2004.
The most recent canonical citation of the BFI is John et al. (2008). The BFI is very widely used in the literature, so descriptive statistics (i.e., mean and SD) for different populations are available from many studies.
The percentiles from the online test were approximated under a Gaussian assumption (scores on Big Five inventories are typically not well-approximated by Gaussians, so the percentile rankings are bound to be off). Everyone was normed to the same distribution (i.e., age, gender, etc. do not affect the results; only the 44 questions on the BFI do). The exact mean and SD used by the test to calculate percentile rankings are as follows (converted to the usual 5-point Likert scale):
In order to compare LW's results to norms in the literature, we need to convert the percen...
Took the survey, and a lot of the extra credit. I need a karma infusion, stat!
I assumed it was okay to use a pen and paper for the CFAR questions. For a few of the questions, I found it helpful to write down the given information and some rough calculations.
Also, on the probability estimates, I pretty much tried to translate my gut feelings about things into a number. (Contrary to the sequence posts that explicitly advise us against doing that.) I haven't worked to get a rigorous probability estimates for most (if any) of the questions posed. I imagine a lot of people are in the same position, and the conclusions drawn from the data should take this into account.
Also, on the probability estimates, I pretty much tried to translate my gut feelings about things into a number. (Contrary to the sequence posts that explicitly advise us against doing that.) I haven't worked to get a rigorous probability estimates for most (if any) of the questions posed.
Me too. In particular, in the ones about aliens, any calculation with reasonable (IMO) inputs would yield a number practically indistinguishable from 1, so I trusted my gut feelings instead as they would also consider confidence levels outside the argument.
Done. I did all of the extra credit except the Myers-Briggs. The IQ test was the most interesting but three or four questions towards the ends were frustratingly difficult and refused to yield their secrets to me; even now I can feel lingering annoyance at the fact that I eventually gave up on them instead of wrestling with them for longer. Oh well.
Took it!
Did any one else have trouble copy-pasting the links?
I normally score insanely high on Openness to experience (says she of the massive amounts of really weird hobbies), but for this test, I scored really low on Openness. Must be feeling particularly close-minded today. Weird.
In Google Chrome on the Mac, the URL text would simply not stay selected. The moment I let go of the mouse after drag-selecting, the text would un-select, and the question's text field would be focused.
I took it, on a Saturday night, and scored 7 on Extroversion. Pardon me while I step out to go to a party.
Took the survey. Does the "Do you intend to have children" question refer to the immediate future, or in your lifetime?
Took the survey. Does the god question include simulators? I answered under the assumption that it did not.
Done.
Pretense for posting here:
How are the redwood tree questions relevant, don't they mostly test trivia knowledge?
Took the survey; doing all the extra tests for the last few extra questions was fairly interesting, not having done many personality tests or taken online IQ tests before.
Two questions, as I take the survey:
Just took the survey. Out of curiosity, why is it ancient tradition to upvote for this?
During the part of the survey where you describe your gender and sexual orientation, I thought it might be a good idea to have another question asking to rate your libido on a numbered scale. Perhaps also another question asking your romantic disposition, as it is possible to be asexual but not aromantic.
Out of curiosity, why is it ancient tradition to upvote for this?
The underlying reasons are set forth in the Sequences, as you'd expect. :)
Took it, did most of the extra credit questions. I think that a mixture of already being familiar with the test, and being used to consciously correcting for some bias about self perception may have thrown off my personality stuff.
Well... that was a tense couple of hours (damn long survey) I answered every question except for the last.
Took it. Nothing like a census/survey to make you feel like part of a community.
FYI
Advisory: RANDOM.ORG will be temporarily unavailable on Sunday 2012-11-04 due to a system upgrade.
Also, in retrospect, I misremembered my own age. It's been ... a busy year.
I took the survey.
I am curious to know whether CFAR questions #2 and #4 are supposed to have a "right" answer.
I'm the CFAR person who is responsible for those questions, and I'll explain them and report on the results after the survey is closed. Until then... no comment.
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Sbe nalbar ng nyy, gur dhrfgvba unf na hanzovthbhf evtug nafjre, naq vg vf: Lbh fubhyq gryy gur cngvrag nobhg qehtf N naq O naq yrg gurz qrpvqr ubj gb znxr gur genqrbss orgjrra zbarl naq cnva/gvzr/vapbairavrapr. Hasbeghangryl guvf jnfa'g bar bs gur bcgvbaf.
Survey taken while it was in stealth mode. Good to know it's officially out now!
A funny thing about the calibration question. Last year I gave myself (IIRC) a 35% probability of having the right answer within the interval asked, and got the answer right. This year I missed by two decades, at 55% confidence. Surprisingly that's actually progress - the Brier score tells me this year's is a better result than last year's.
Took it.
My browser was unable to copy/past most of the links which led to less than initially intended participation on my part. For instance, I took the big 5 quiz because the address was easy to glance at and type into another tab but didn't take other surveys/tests in the bonus question sections because i didn't feel like tabbing back and forth to get the web address correct.
My first census at LW is done. I gave up on the questions requiring to answer other surveys before, apart from the political compass one which I already did. Looking forward for the results.
I took the survey. I did Political Compass for the first time, and I found its questions and results rather baffling. Political Compass themselves admit it is culturally biased and mainly for western democracies.
Took it - I hadn't taken an IQ test before, and I found it interesting (and, for the final few questions, quite difficult).
Back in grade school, I took several real-life IQ tests and usually scored in the high 130's to low 140's. I'd heard of Raven's Progressive Matrices, but this was the first time I'd taken that type of test. It was quite humbling. I got 122 on iqtest.dk. From what I've heard in #lesswrong, most people score low on this test.
I opened the test again in a different browser, VPN'd from a different country. It gave the same questions. That means your subsequent tests aren't valid. You already knew many of the answers. Worse, you knew which questions had stumped you before. You were probably thinking about those questions before you started the test a second or third time.
It suffers the usual problems of tests, among which are that test-taking is itself a skill.
That said, I don't think re-taking the test produces a valid result - a lot of the time I spent on the test was figuring out the rules of the puzzles as much as solving them. The problematic nature of the initial result is a reflection of the weakness of the test, as you noted, but re-taking the test simply introduces a new suite of problems.
I took the survey. Skipped out at the "unreasonably long" section. Will it handle things properly if I return to it another day?
Note, if you ask me question that I can look up in two seconds flat, and the next question is "without checking sources, assess the probability of the last answer being correct" then I'm not sure you're going to get the results you're looking for. I consider the Internet as part of my partly trustable memory that I reference when I want to achieve success in the world I.e. all the time - but its not clear that's a commonly held opinion.
I managed to keep myself up after several days of sleep deprivation to complete all that I could but the very last part.
Took it. I think the example of 0.5 being interpreted as 0.5% and not as 50% anchored me a bit, but don't see a way to circumvent it.
The "income" question doesn't state pre- or post-tax — you should say you intend one or the other.
Took it and decided to de-lurk for the first time. (Hello!) I found the experience rather humbling.
I finished the survey! Including the Unreasonably Long and Complicated part which i admit took even longer than i expected.
Took the survey, completed all applicable questions. I'm surprised at how many de-lurkers are a direct consequence of this survey. Welcome, everyone :)
I really enjoyed taking the survey. Akrasia! Hope we weren't testing the RNG site. Since it was down I used a more local randomizer.
I took the first survey. Everything seemed great! Thanks a lot Yvain. Unfortunately, I couldn't do the last extra questions. Sorry :( The results should be interesting...
Hello all! Test taken, first post / de-lurking complete. I really enjoy the site and the discussions, and will contribute fairly soon...
Why do I get the feeling that you will tease me about the discrepancy between my probability estimates on aliens in the milky way contra the rest of the universe?
That's actually probably my favorite single question: when I first took the survey I went 'universe: dunno, maybe 60%, Milky Way: eh, 30%.....wait a second aren't there more than 2 galaxies‽'
I was about to kick myself for not checking last year's answers to all the probability questions (I don't feel I've received much new information or insights that should cause me to change my mind, so I felt I should have averaged my current subjective estimate with last year's).
But then I found that my subjective estimates were remarkably stable! (with possible slight drift towards 50%). Not sure what to make of that. Was going to post answers here to illustrate but wasn't sure if that violated protocol because of anchoring. (People should really take the survey before reading any of the comments in any case).
P.S. I took the survey.
Took the survey; Did everything but the IQ test. I recognized some of the questions, and I decided I didn't have an extra 40 minutes to spare.
Took it. Note for people on iOS device--iqtest.dk requires Flash, and doesn't tell you what's wrong if you load it on an iPhone /iPad/iPod.
Thanks for the test Yvain! I did all of it and wasted too much time in the surveys (didn't want to fill in with an existing one in case of calibration errors. In addition to everyone else's comments, I personally didn't find any of the quizzes problematic, got a similar Big Five score to usual, and actually got 10 points more in my IQ test than my self-reported IQ. Looking forward to the results!
Does "your country" refer to the country you were born in, are a citizen of, or are currently residing in?
Also: Took it. Karma me gentlemen :D
Took it. The autism test makes it seem like it is easy for people to get more or less autistic with time. I would have scored much higher 10 years ago.
Took the survey. I've accidentally submitted unfinished one, before answering to all the questions I wanted to answer. Please ignore that submission.
I took the survey, and I answered the first extra credit question, but not the others. When I realized it would take THAT long (I hadn't yet scrolled down to reveal each Extra Credit Question was going to be as long as the first), I thought it would take too much time.
Did it.
The political question was dumb. why can't I pick "FAI" or "rational consequentialist".
I really liked the CFAR questions. MORE OF THOSE.
The political compass questions were very ADBOC and generally meaningless. Apparently I'm left libertarian, whatever that means.
The Big 5 test was suspect on some things. Am I really lowest quartile conscientiousness and agreeableness? I defy the data.
The iq test was fun and challenging. Got 133, which is also what I've gotten on previous iq tests.
The autism test was utterly without interpretation. What does 18 mean?
EDIT: sorry I'm being so negative, a good survey overall. Maybe this is where the low agreeableness comes from.
Longtime lurker that finally signed up in July. All questions except for the last ones with the tests. (did the IQ test though)
Taken. Comments:
In the “More Children” question, I interpreted “planning” very broadly -- I definitely want to have children some day, but not in the next few years. And I'm assuming that finding a girlfriend (which I'm kinda working on) counts as the first step in the “plan”. ;-)
In the “Work Status” question, I interpreted “currently” broadly -- I graduated last month, and know I've been accepted for a PhD even though I'm not officially starting until later this month, so I didn't pick “Unemployed” even though I technically am right now, because that would only mean that you opened the survey in the wrong month.
As usually, in the “Political” question I'm nearly totally disregarding the labels and mostly disregarding the examples, focusing on the descriptions instead.
In the “Religious Views” question, what do apatheism and ignosticism (essentially fancy words for ‘don't care’ and ‘don't understand’ respectively) count as? I'm assuming as “Agnostic” (essentially a fancy word for ‘don't know’).
In “Moral Views”, I'm counting rule consequentialism as a form of consequentialism, rather than as a form of deontology.
iqtest.dk does count as a “respectable test”, right?
“you may do so using...
In the “More Children” question, I interpreted “planning” very broadly -- I definitely want to have children some day, but not in the next few years. And I'm assuming that finding a girlfriend (which I'm kinda working on) counts as the first step in the “plan”. ;-)
Dear Diary, Today I found a girlfriend. I will now commence Phase 2 of my master plan to reproduce.
I took the survey, and I am posting for the first time. Thank you for such an intriguing community, everyone.
For the hospital question, although I felt very good about the answer from my own mathematics background, I decided to create a Perl script to check one trial, then ran the script in an environment a great many times to produce a distribution. Here is the single trial script. (You will spoil the answer by executing this script, obviously.)
Minor points on survey phrasing...
P(Global catastrophic risk) should be P(Not Global catastrophic risk)
You say in part 7 that research is allowed, but don't say that research is disallowed in part 8, calibration year.
In the true prisoner's dilemma article, it doesn't appear to give any information about the cognitive algorithms the opponent is running. For this reason I answered noncommittally, and I'm not sure how useful the question is for distinguishing people with CDTish versus TDTish intuitions.
Similarly in torture versus dust specks I answered not sure, not so much due to moral uncertainty but because the problem is underspecified. What's the baseline? Is everybody's life perfect except for the torture or dust specks specified, or is the distribution more like today's world with a broad range of experiences ranging from basically OK to torture?
I might have given an inflated answer for "Hours on the Internet", as I'm on the computer and the computer is on the Internet but it doesn't necessarily mean I'm actively using the Internet at all times.
I now have the whole set of Myers-Briggs letters. Something tells me this test is noisy.
You might want to look at North Americans and others separately for the redwood questions, to see if domain knowledge affects anchoring.
Done it all!
With all those personality tests and surveys it took me a bit more than an hour, but it was quite interesting (particularly CFAR questions) so I won't complain, much. :)
Do casual sex partners count under the "Number of Current Partners" question?
The instructions tell me that higher numbers are for "polyamorous relationships" which makes it seem like a monogamous person who has multiple casual sex partners should answer 0 for that question.
Took the whole thing, waiting till I get a good night's sleep to do the IQ test and hit submit.
For those who couldn't select or copy the links like me, here they are to click on:
Political Compass: http://www.politicalcompass.org/
Big Five Personality Test: http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/
IQ Test: http://iqtest.dk/main.swf
Meyers Briggs: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp
Autism Test: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html
Taken it. Suggestion [if it's possible to change] - we should add the option to unanswer an answered question. Right now you can change your answer from A to B, but not from A to non-A and non-B.
Done... I've been away from LW for a few months due to Other Life Stuff... but happy to fill in another survey.
Lurker for the past couple years, posting for the first time. I took it, including a good chunk of the extra credit questions.
I just found this site, but this was an interesting survey and between that and the intelligence of conversation about it in the comments convinced me to sign up and read more on here.
Also, I did most of the questions, but I'm on an iPad and the iq test didn't load for me, so I'll do it on a computer later.
I am continually amused by how much nuance the contrarians of LW want in these questions. Even I thought the simulation question was ill-posed & wanted a "mu" answer.
Politics is always nearly hopeless, short of asking people to write a 14-page essay on their particular chimera of left-libertarian whig marxism, or whatever.
I took it, but I skipped the IQ question, because the last time I took an IQ test I was, like, 12 years old.
Is there some reputable online IQ test that I can take today ?
On my chrome 22 in Ubuntu, the 'links' were neither links nor selectable (whenever I selected one, it would immediately unselect it), which made accessing any of those questions rather annoying. I ended up opening the survey in FireFox to get the links.
Took the survey. It was quite interesting! I'll be curious to see what the results look like . . . .
Took the survey on my iPhone so could only fill out half the answers. Politics questions were hilarious. Official delurk.
I took the survey and answered every question. Like many others here, I found that the iqtest.dk result was distinctly lower than any other estimate of my IQ I've had. I was miles out on the calibration date question. There was one probability question -- I forget which -- for which it was extremely not-obvious whether you were supposed to enter a percentage or a probability.
Whew, that was long! (Not that I wasn't warned.)
Incidentally, communism as invented has little in common with communism as practiced in the Soviet Union. Whether the former is possible (for humans) is debatable.
Took the survey.
Did anyone else find the IQ questions to be either boringly easy or impossibly hard? I don't think I answered anything that required more than 15s of thought.
DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!DONE!
Only cost me an hour of my time!
(Minus, of course, the two additional hours spent staring at a corner, crying and lamenting my various emotional insecurities brought up by the IQ and personality tests)
Odd, I thought you meant you only spent 20 minutes crying....
I love how well sarcasm works on the internet!
Survey: Completed, no problems. Dithered quite a bit when asked what my position was on the true Prisoners dilemma. And I keep consistently overshooting the estimation dates by 100 years (almost precisely, on the previous survey I overshot by 105 years, this time overshot by 120ish). I've started getting more involved in the community over the past 3 months.
It looks like I wasn't the only one who had difficulty selecting the links, and so had to type them in manually.
Yvain or a mod- Can we get all the links from the survey pasted into the body of the OP so that those of us who couldn't select them have an easier access mode than manual copying?
Took most of it. I pressed enter accidentally after the charity questions. I would like to fill out the remainder. Is there a way I can do that without messing up the data?
Took the IQ test. Humbling. Score 110.
IQ test in high school, 156. SAT 793/800 verbal, 783/800 math. Cal Tech. Yatta yatta. But that was many years ago. It's pretty obvious what happened. Timed test. I only finished, in the time, about 2/3 - 3/4 of the questions, maybe a bit more, I didn't keep count. (I skipped questions that weren't popping up right away, thinking I'd come back. Didn't have time.)
I'm 68 years old. I used to be able to hold a conversation on the phone and read a book at the same time, about something completely different. That disappeared when I was in my late 40s. The test requires, for the more difficult problems, testing many different hypotheses, if a clear pattern doesn't pop up immediately. It's almost certain that this takes more time for me now than when I was younger.
This almost certainly impacts my communication skills, for starters.
Took the vast majority. The OCEAN test seemed mostly wrong, the IQ seemed low (big shock, right? Shouldn't have raced through, I guess), and my Myers-Briggs was ENFJ, which is just bizarre.
Also, I've commented a few times, never posted.
I took the survey.
One thing I was unsure about: the appropriate answer to the question “Referrals: How did you find out about Less Wrong?”. I answered “Referred by a link on another blog”. But I actually investigated and discovered Less Wrong after seeing a bunch of links to it on Hacker News. Hacker News is really a link aggregation site or social news site, not a blog. But I thought that that answer was better than choosing “Other” and writing in “link from an aggregation site”.
CFAR Question 1: not constructively.
CFAR Question 6: what kind of archaic unit is 'feet'? I was able to answer by remembering that 3 feet ~= 1 meter.
Income: before or after tax? I answered after taxes, which for me is 65% of the income before taxes.
I took the survey, but, like others, I was unable to answer the American-style school questions.
I took the IQ test in the extra questions section. I clicked "submit" long before the time ran out, even when I knew I was essentially guessing on some of the questions, because I had gotten sick of the damn thing. My score came back a 122, which pissed me off because I'm fairly sure my real IQ is higher than that.
Then I realized this may be a good metaphor for my life. In the future, when asked my IQ, I'll respond, "I don't know, but my lack-of-patience-adjusted IQ is about 120."
i typed my age then hit return which submitted the form with only one answer. so then i filled it in again. you'll want to ignore that first entry. dinner arrived as i did that so that was a couple of hours ago now. age is 39 if that helps.
I wonder whether there are visible conversion effects on the redwood question for native metric users? Estimates slightly on the short side and neatly divisible by three because the quick and dirty meter -> feet conversion is multiplying by three?
I took the survey.
Guys, you are seriously need to start using metric system or at least include the necessary number in the meters. Going to Google twice in order to calculate the relevant numbers was... frustrating.
(By the way, I have never donated to any charity before, but I sworn in a grand manner that it will be in the list of the first five things I will do with my PayPal account when I get one)
Taken, though I had to skip the IQ test because it wasn't screen reader accessible (flash, with some text labels but no accessible controls, not that flash in general is particularly accessible).
Problem: You might want to specify "this year's survey" in the following line, otherwise people may think that having taken a previous year's survey means they do not need to take this year's survey to be counted:
Everyone who took the survey before, your responses are still saved and you don't have to take it again.
Took the survey, plus the IQ test out of curiosity, I'd never had my IQ tested before.
Along similar reasoning, do we know how well the iqtest.dk test correlates with non-internet tests of IQ? Getting a number is cool, knowing it was generated by a process fundamentally different than rand(100,160) would be even better
Took the survey. Delurking for the first time. I'm planning on posting to the welcome thread in a few days, when I'm less busy. Did most of the test except the IQ test, since I didn't have another forty minutes to spare.
I appreciate the expansiveness of the sex and gender options. It's nice to see some recognition of the complexities.
I was surprised at my intensely introverted results, other big five tests usually put me between average and moderately introverted. Nothing else noticably unusual, though.
I did everything except the IQ test. I took that test before and retook it until I figured out how to solve all the problems. I could not recall what I got on it the first time. Strangely in the survey I said staying anonymous is important to me and then I created an account with my real name.
I took the survey! Karma, please!
Never done an IQ test before. I thought it was fun! Now I want to take one of the legitimate ones.
After having read all of the Sequences, I suppose its time I actually registered. I did the survey. Here are the cogno-stats:
Big Five O80 C83 E79 A83 N9 IQ 122 Myers-Briggs E33 N88 T1 J33 Autism 15
I'm doing my PhD in the genetics of epilepsy (so a neurogenetics background is implied). Is anyone familiar with data on the reliability of the various cogno-metrics that are out there?
(Aside: political metrics L/R:-2.25 A/L:-3.54, pretty centrist on most issues, just make them based on actual data and I'll change my view in a femtosecond)
I study computer engineering (which is about arranging transistors on silicon to make computer hardware). I checked "Computers (other academic, computer science)," rather than "Engineering," even though computer engineering is not computer science, because I thought that category was more specific than engineering, and less specific than the category including only computer science.
But this was kind of unclear.
On the question "Given that no label can completely describe a person's political views, with which of these labels do you MOST identify?"
I am probably halfway between liberal and libertarian. So I flipped a coin and picked liberal.
For the calibration IQ question, I could have given my probability that my real IQ was higher than the median IQ here. But then you wouldn't be able to check it against anything to determine my calibration, because I have never taken a real IQ test and left the field blank. Maybe you should put a different question instead of that calibration one?
For the Hours Writing question, it says schoolwork counts. Does code count, if written for schoolwork? I guessed no. Do answers to problems from textbooks that are kind of hal...
The "Anonymity" question should be broken into two. It doesn't give you an option for "It would be easy to find my real name, and I am unhappy about that."
Yes. In my case, the best answer would be: “It would be non-trivial but still relatively easy for someone who doesn't know me in meatspace to find out my full name and my Facebook profile from what I write on LW, but I can't think of why anyone could be bothered to do that and even if it happened it wouldn't bother me in the slightest. It would bother me if certain people who do know me in meatspace read some of the things I write on LW knowing army1987 is me, and it would be nearly obvious for anyone who knows me in meatspace that army1987 is me, but I think it's pretty unlikely for one of those people to stumble upon LW so I'm not too worried.”
Am I the only person who answered "100" on the cryonics question because "revived at some point in the future" was indefinite enough that a Boltzmann brain-like scenario inevitably occurring eventually seemed reasonable?
Also, I did all the extra credit questions. At twos in the morning.
I assumed it was supposed to mean ‘revived in a way that wouldn't have been possible if the patient hadn't been cryopreserved’.
Completed every last question.
Also, I've noticed that on different IQ tests (real ones, not fake ones) my scores vary by as much as 40 points. Hmm.
Done. I think a lot of these questions are really fascinating, including user-submitted questions. I'm especially interested to see if we can do any better at avoiding anchoring than the general public.
I took it.
For the P(Warming) question, you might get people answering different versions of the question on this. For example, my personal evaluation of the probability of warming and that humans are a major cause is very, very high, but my evaluation of the probability that humans are the primary cause is much lower.
In your base, answering your survey.
Notes (might not want to read unless you've already taken the survey):
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All done! Surprised since my IQ's apparently dropped roughly 20 points in the last 2 years. But everyone knows the internet is reliable when it comes to that. Eagerly awaiting results, when can we expect them to appear on the site?
Also, please do not upvote this comment, as I want my karma to reflect when I've thought something insightful, and only taking a survey to recieve it does not properly reflect this. "By ancient tradition" makes that the most cultish thing I've ever heard lesswrong.
... Maybe topped by "we're a cult" or something of that effect, but still.
Also, please do not upvote this comment, as I want my karma to reflect when I've thought something insightful, and only taking a survey to recieve it does not properly reflect this. "By ancient tradition" makes that the most cultish thing I've ever heard lesswrong.
Upvoted specifically for the second paragraph, specifically because it was insightful.
Took it minus the three personality tests and minus the very last few questions. I still know my IQ from a former test and I had my NEO-FFI results already stored somewhere but couldn't find the right hard-drive quick enough. Autism... don't think I would score very high on that but my fallible intuition says lesswrong seems like quite the paradise for autistic personalities.
Sincerely curious about the results :)
I also guessed the size of the biggest redwood tree incredibly well :) By converting my guesstimate in meters to some form of archaic measurement only used by cavemen and Americans. What's up with that?
Next year the survey should include an option to explain why your IQ is actually higher than was measured.
Done! I only estimated my amount of time in the community, though, which may lead to an amusing disagreement with last year's survey.
Took the survey.
I hope this question isn't used the way I worry it will be used:
CFAR Question 3
A certain town is served by two hospitals. In the larger hospital, about 45 babies are born each day. In the smaller one, about 15 babies are born each day. Although the overall proportion of girls is about 50%, the actual proportion at either hospital may be greater or less on any day. At the end of a year, which hospital will have the greater number of days on which more than 60% of the babies born were girls?
This question was easy for me to answer by pattern-matching to the Law of Small Numbers, as outlined in Thinking, Fast and Slow. If I hadn't read that, it's hard to say whether I would have reasoned it out correctly. So if many respondents answer this question correctly, I hope that the survey authors don't claim evidence that LW readers are better at statistical reasoning -- it'd be more accurate to say that LW readers are more likely to have seen this very particular question before.
(I could, naturally, be assuming too much about the intents of the survey authors.)
For another intuitive answer, try lower values of 15, like 1.
The Python code works better, on my machine, if I add the line "from random import randint" at the top.
If you can answer correctly more statistical questions, how is that not being 'better at statistical reasoning'?
Those are related abilities, but there's being able to answer specific questions and then there's being able to apply what you've learned more generally. For me, this particular question triggered more "aha! I've seen this one before!" than it triggered statistical thought. A correct answer to the question might give you a smidgen of information on whether the answerer can reason about statistics, but it probably gives you a lot more information about whether the answerer has seen the question before.
One superficial example of dealing with this problem is how, in my college discrete math class, the professor gave us a problem involving placing pigeons in holes, with the solution having nothing to do with the pigeonhole principle. Even better than obfuscating a problem, of course, is stating a novel one that exercises the skills you're testing for.
Took the whole survey. My preferred political label of (Radical) Centrist survived all explicit radio buttons.
Survey taken: check! Account finally registered: check, please!
I was off by 50%ish on the two estimation questions, but I forgive myself Bayes' age since I really know nothing about history in "space-of-time" context. The redwood tree on the other hand was a geometry problem for me, more than anything else, and I misjudged its incline by half a degree.
I answered everything but the personality test links, I will take them when I have more free time.
I took most of the survey, except for the (aptly named) “Unreasonably Long and Complicated Questions” at the end.
I Took the survey and all the extra questions. I could not answer the USA centric school test results, we have a similar system in my country but they cannot be easily converted to eachother.
I'm glad to finally have a BigFive and IQ test that people somewhat agree on using.
I just took it but I'd like to make a few points:
At the end of a year, which hospital will have the greater number of days on which more than 60% of the babies born were girls?
Is it asking about the total number of babies born at the day or babies born at each hospital?
Redwood question.
Please, use meters next time.
Redwood question.
Please, use meters next time.
Better still, ask a question for which everyone in the world would natively use the same units.
Took basically all of the survey except for the extra IQ tests. Thanks, Yvain! Looking forward to seeing the results.
I took the survey, and did all of the extra credit work too!
That IQ test seemed really silly, but I've never taken one before, so who knows?
Just taken - my first LessWrong census!
Interesting questions, though as a committed Bayesian I was very embarrassed that I couldn't even remember which century he was born! Guessed at about 20% chance of my estimate being within 20 years of the true date which it wasn't. So I was wrong, but at least right that I was wrong. I suppose that is "less wrong"?
Done. Finished most of it, stalled for days waiting for time to do the extra credit, noticed I was doing that, submitted. I'll look forward to the results.
Took it, lurker who just broke ones position on not posting on the net. Had to skip last questions and tests thou, going to try them next..
Did it a few days ago, only just noticed the karma.
EDIT:
P(Supernatural) What is the probability that supernatural events, defined as those involving ontologically basic mental entities, have occurred since the beginning of the universe?
What if you believed in, say, angels or ghosts that used powers from outside the matrix?
On "having" children: should we be counting that as birth, raising, what you think of as "yours," something else? I am thinking of sperm donors, surrogate mothers, children given up for adoption, and adoptive parents. If I am the biological parent of X offspring and raise Y of them, should I be reporting X or X-Y? And if I have step/adopted/foster children, +Z? "Raise" might be bad too, as there are people who have (biological or not) children they think of as "theirs" without custody or visitation.
The count might be fuzzier than intended. I would expect upward bias.
Done, except for the unreasonably long extra credit section, mostly due to not having time to take the tests now and not knowing when I could possibly manage to do it in the future.
Good work Yvain, it's been a pleasure to take the survey, and it will be a plesure to see the results.
I wonder if I am the only one who thought that this "Get a random three digit number (000-999) from goo.gl/x45un" question was in fact a hidden rationality test, sort of "are you irrational enough to follow a shortened url that can lead everywhere, including a potentially dangerous or at least annoying website" and skipped it.
My prior for Yvain to be a good guy was high enough for me to take the risk (though I had briefly the same thought of yours).
Been a lurker for a relatively short time, took the survey.
I had some concerns over the extra credit questions and one thing in particular that prompted me to respond. I agree it seems there was meant to be no right answer to a couple of the questions, and the babies in the hospital was at least a clear statistical problem. I also had an admittedly whimsical objection to the lack of details on one question, thanks to the level of specificity seen in riddles, puzzles, and so on here, and maybe due to a programmer background thinking of pointers and assignments. The first CFAR question should have specified to start something like there are three people in a room. Then it's clear there's not a person looking at himself in a mirror, or more than three people with some having the same first name, or creatively a statue or painting, with one human looking at the artwork which is facing another human. (Would be a good one with Lisa implying the Mona Lisa, but connotations of names shouldn't be relevant)
However, what I was really curious about was the redwood question. Surprisingly, I knew the answer pretty much exactly and later noticed the complaints about using feet as a unit...
If the right thing to do is the consequentialist thing to do, and an outcome turns out bad, but it was still the best choice with the information one knew at the time, would that be consequentialism or virtue ethics?
edit: Ok, I completed the survey and just guessed. Would still like to know the answer though.
I did all of it yesterday minus the IQ test, BigFive and Autism due to lack of time and being too tired. Will take those three today.
Overall, the survey was more fun than I expected.
Any reason you removed the opinion on basilisk moderation question that was in the earlier one that initially went up? I'd have been interested in community opinion on that.
Took it.
I wish there were more questions! Non-jokingly, I wish there were more questions about FAI, MWI, and other complex content things. I want more people to pick my brain and tell me if I'm consistent.
Nice job writing the survey - fun times. I kind of want to hand it out to my non-LW friends, but I don't want to corrupt the data.
I liked this survey, but there was one minor annoyance: the "when will the Singularity happen?" question. "Singularity" in which sense? I decided to run with the weak version of the "event horizon" (Vernor Vinge) claim, but the question could have been clearer.
Took it.
Glad the religion question specified revealed religion. Lao-Zhuang Daoism is objectively true, but not revealed (and only true because it makes no assertions).
Answered everything, including the extra credit questions, except for the official IQ question and the question concerning income (I'm a student in highschool and I don't have paid work, although I do volunteer).
I also hope that the what the quiz means by "progressive" is also what I mean by "progressive".
Anyhow, excited to see the results!
Taken, de lurked, most everything done because I was bored and curious. I hadn't felt like registering an account for a while because I don't know if I have much to add, but I figured.... you know, fuck it. I ought to have stuff to ask and I can always get another account if this one embarrasses me in the future.
V pna'g ernyyl qrpvqr onfrq ba gur vasbezngvba, ohg V jbhyq or yvxryl cvpx qeht N vs gur cngvrag jnf na rzcyblrr orvat cnvq nalguvat pybfr gb zvavzhz jntr. Vs bayl unys bs gur gjragl urnqnpurf ner zvffrq jbexqnlf gurer fgvyy jbhyq or uhaqerqf bs qbyynef bs ybfg jntrf vs zl ebhtu pnyphyngvbaf jrer frafvoyr. V jnf jnl bss ba gur gerr dhrfgvba. JUL V gubhtug gerrf pbhyq tebj rvtug uhaqerq srrg be zber, onssyrf zr, abj gung V guvax nobhg vg. Vg jnf whfg n pnpurq "snpg" V "yrnearq" va zl puvyqubbq, naq V unir ab vqrn jurer.
The political compass survey just made me think how little I've actually thought about politics. I kept saying "What? I don't know!" so I skipped that one.
One thing concerns me.... How the hell does IQ drop 20 points over four years without my having a concussion or stroke or something? I have at times subjected myself to gnarly sleep deprivation. Maybe my ADD is worse. Maybe the higher score reflects verbal aptitude. (And if so, should that count towards "true iq"?) Can anyone tell me what seems to them the most likely?
Definitely have a lot of research to do
Finally:
Hi everybody! =]
Took it.
Doing the Political Compass survey reminded me of what an awful survey it is. Most of the questions cannot be given a truthful "agree or disagree" answer without serious qualification, so the only way to take the survey is to figure out for each question which side will you be interpreted as cheering/booing the most with each answer, and choose which side to cheer/boo.
Took the entire survey and all extra credit questions in one go; minus ACT, SAT2400 and Respectable(tm) IQ scores since I don't have them, and </=140 character LW description because I was starting to get tired after the 40 min. IQ test.
So much fun! I'm very curious to see the results.
Taken.
As last year, I would prefer different wording on the P(religion) question. "More or less" is so vague as to allow for a lot of very different answers depending on how I interpret it, and I didn't even properly consider the "revealed" distinction noted in a comment here.
I appreciate the update on the singularity estimate for those of us whose P(singularity) is between epsilon and 50+epsilon.
I still wonder if we can tease out the differences between current logistical/political problems and the actual effectiveness of the science on the cryonics question. Once again I gave an extremely low probability even though I would give a reasonable (10-30%) probability that the science itself is sound or will be at some point in the near future. Or perhaps it is your intention to let a segment of the population here fall into a conjunctiveness trap?
On the CFAR migraine treatment question I thought as follows:
Gur pbeerpg nafjre jbhyq qrcraq ba jung lbh xarj nobhg gur crefba. Sbe nalbar noyr gb cebprff naq haqrefgnaq gur hgvyvgl genqrbssf naq jub jnf fhssvpvragyl ybj vapbzr gung O pbhyq pbaprvinoyl or n orggre pubvfr, V jbhyq tvir gurz obgu bcgvba N naq O naq rkcyn...
I was 26 years off on Bayes' birth and 21 feet off on the tallest redwood.
Also the first time I took the IQ test I accidentally hit the back button on my mouse, and didn't remember how much time I was supposed to have left, so I just went through everything and submitted right away. I'm not sure how much I would have gotten out of the last 5-10 minutes or whatever but it made me feel bad.
I felt like the Big 5 test rated me lower on Openness and Conscientiousness than I remember from tests in the past, but those are from long long ago. The Myers-Briggs rated me as more F and J than I expected (or less T and P) and I think the question framing is maybe bad for someone who lives in faulty emotional hardware in a mathematical universe.
I reproduced my results from all of the tests verbatim, regardless of whether I agreed with them; I noticed at least one comment of someone who did not, and I'm wondering how common people's responses to disagreement with personality tests was.
This survey is now closed. I am working on analysis and will have the results in a while. Please do not take it.
Also, you may now begin speculating with 95% confidence intervals on how many people took the survey this year.
Re: cryonics, assume the following:
1) Any Agent that reconstructs my mind from a plasticized or frozen brain is very smart and well-informed. It is working its way through a whole warehouse of similar 21st century brains, and can reconstruct vast swathes of my mind with generic any-human or any-human-who-grew-up-watching-Sesame-Street boilerplate. This gets boring after the first few hundred.
2) I'm of no practical use in the post-Singularity world, with my obsolete work skills and mismatching social and moral behavior.
3) Frozen-brain reconstruction starts late enough that nobody remains alive who knows and loves me personally.
In this scenario, I expect the compressed mind reconstructions are just stored in an archive for research/entertainment purposes. Why bother ever running the reconstruction long enough for it to subjectively "wake up"?
I think that we need to let go of the idea of immortality as a continuation of our present self. The most we can hope for is that far in the future, some hyper-intelligent Agent has our memories. And probably the memories of thousands of other dead people as well.
Cryonics is most like writing a really detailed autobiography for future people to read after we're dead. This still seems worthwhile to me, but it's not the same thing as there being a living Charlie Davies in the 23rd century.
I took the survey.
I took it and did all the extra credit questions except one because it would not be accurate for me.
I took it. No SAT scores or classical IQ scores, didn't take Myer-Briggs (because it's stupid) or Autism (because freakin' hell, amateur psychology diagnosis on the 'net).
Took the survey, did most of the extra questions. IQ 122 apparently. I'm sceptical of what that actually means but it sounds quite good so next time someone asks me, that's what I'll say :)
Didn't do Myers-Briggs because I'm pretty sure it's bullshit.
Not too surprised to find that my political views are measurably left libertarian. Wasn't happy with a lot of the political policy questions though - most of them were phrased in a way that I wanted to answer "it depends" or "yes, BUT...", or even "mu".
One suggestion: since IQ seems to be a big part in this survey and in LW, why not have an IQ test made for LW?
Making an IQ test is non-trival even before getting into the question of getting a good population to norm it against.
One cool thing we could do to check the accuracy of the Big Five scores, Conscientiousness specifically, for each user is their item non-response rate, per http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/11/hedengrens_dog.html / http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6776620/Papers/The%20dog%20that%20didnt%20bark%2011-8-2012.pdf
If it checks out, that'd give a way to infer Conscientiousness scores of the respondents who didn't report their Big Five.
What would we do with this Conscientiousness data per survey respondent? Dunno. Off the top of my head, we could construct a baseball-like index of 'most under-valued LWers by comparing their IQ and Conscientiousness against their self-reported salary & age' :)
EDIT: The technique seems to completely fail when I try it on the survey: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/7xl5
Kudos to the one who formulated the questions. I found them unusually easy to answer, at large.
I'm only puzzled at the lack of an umbrella option for the humanities in the question on profession. Were they meant to fall into the category of social sciences?
Took the survey + all the extra questions. I just noticed this thread today. In my opinion, it is underadvertised.
Concerning the IQ test, I've seen this one before and I know it's not reliable, because it is not based on a statistic and there's no reason to believe it's reliable in the first place. There are only two culture-fair free online IQ tests: JCTI and CFNSE. I am extremely curious to see the average score for LW.
Here's how to make sense out of your IQ score: http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx
Took the survey, but I didn't have time to finish most of the extra credit questions. I liked how the survey really made me think over a lot of my positions more critically than I otherwise would have. It will be interesting to see if I change much next year.
I've been a bit confused by the relationships question. I'm currently seeing three people romantically on a semi-regular basis, so I put in 3, but I wouldn't say any of those relations qualify as "relationships", so I selected 'single'. I hope that's the preferred method.
Deeply amused by the section "Alternative Alternative Politics: Okay fine, knock yourself out identifying with as tiny and finely-grained a subcategory as you want" still missing my desired response. :-) (I put Other:Authoritarian as distinct from Totalitarian. My view of these is that the former concerns the power of the ruling body to hypothetically put its fingers in any given pie, while the latter concerns the propensity of the ruling body to have its fingers in a great many pies.)
The doctor recommending medicine one threw me. Why not offer more than one, explain that one gives the best bang for the buck, but also let them decide whether the $350 for 30 headaches is still worth it despite being an increased cost per headache prevented. I can easily imagine a rational scenario where 20 less headaches is still worth increased payment per headache prevented, especially if it costs you wages at your theoretical low-income job..
Sbe PSNE dhrfgvba sbhe, V'z fgnyyrq orpnhfr vg frrzf gb zr gung zl nafjre fubhyq qrcraq ba ubj ybj vapbzr gur cngvrag vf. Vs gur cngvrag vf rzcyblrq ng nyy, gur qvssrerapr bs fvkgl ubhef bs urnqnpurf vf cebonoyl jbegu zber guna n qvssrerapr bs gjb uhaqerq svsgl qbyynef. Vs gur cngvrag vf harzcyblrq, vg znl abg or.
On "dust specks", I think there are trivial dis-utilities whose infinite sum has an asymptote that is finite and small, and thus I disagree with the LW consensus on this.
I'm completely baffled by questions 26, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 on the iq test. (http://iqtest.dk) I think I must be missing something. Can anyone explain what the answers are and why?
Did the entire thing weeks ago. Only commenting to log my prediction, I have high confidence that V nz gur bayl Svyvcvab ba YrffJebat.
On the CFAR question number 4, about the three drugs prescribed to a low income patient.
V pubfr N, gur guerr uhaqerq svsgl qbyyne qeht gung gbbx vg sebz bar uhaqerq vapvqragf/zbagu gb guvegl/zbagu. Zl ernfbavat jnf gung vs gur crefba fcrag unys bs gur fvkgl ubhef gurl fnir jbexvat ng n zvavzhz jntr wbo, gurl jvyy unir erphcrengrq gur gjb uhaqerq qbyynef rkgen gurl fcraq naq unq gvzr yrsg bire. Nyfb, jbexvat n zvavzhz jntr wbo vf yvxryl zber cyrnfnag guna ynlvat va cnva, gubhtu guvf qbrf qrcraq ba jurgure gur crefba pna svaq n wbo.
I just took it but I'd like to make a few points:
At the end of a year, which hospital will have the greater number of days on which more than 60% of the babies born were girls?
Total number of babies born at the day or babies born at each hospital?
Redwood question Please, use meters next time.
Annd, I got a ENTJ at the personality test, it should've been an INTJ, just because I enjoy something doesn't mean I'm good at it.
11/26: The survey is now closed. Please do not take the survey. Your results will not be counted.
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.
The survey will probably remain open for a month or so, but once again do not delay taking the survey just for the sake of the extra credit questions.
Please make things easier for my computer and by extension me by reading all the instructions and by answering any text questions in the 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".
Okay! Enough nitpicky rules! Time to take the...
Thanks to everyone who suggested questions and ideas for the 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey. I regret I was unable to take all of your suggestions into account, because some of them were contradictory, others were vague, and others would have required me to provide two dozen answers and a thesis paper worth of explanatory text for every question anyone might conceivably misunderstand. But I did make about twenty changes based on the feedback, and *most* of the suggested questions have found their way into the text.
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.