Shouldn't you ask when the respondent thinks the Singularity will occur before mentioning the year 2100, to avoid anchoring?
I hate cognitive biases. I read your comment right before I went to take the test. "Ha!" I thought to myself, "clearly members of Less Wrong wouldn't be as effected. Why even bother mentioning it?" And then I clicked on the link while I thought about the singularity. "Hmm, 2100 is a decent year maybe it'll be 20 years before that though..." And I filled in my race/education/sex. "Hmm maybe it would be after that though, due to...oh god, it's the anchoring effect! Quick think of other numbers! 2090! 2110! Damnit. 1776! Wait that won't work..."
And as I slowly worked my way down, by brain tried in vain to come up with alternate years. Until I finally reached the problem. "Is this really what I think, or am I just putting this answer because of that comment in the thread?" But it didn't matter. The numbers were in the box, and I couldn't convince myself to change them.
There it stood: 2100.
PS. Yvain, any chance you could look at the mean/median/mode/standard deviation of that problem before and after you changed the questions around? I'd be very interested in seeing how people were effected by anchoring.
After reading the feedback I've made the following changes (after the first 104 entries so that anyone who has access to the data can check if there are significant differences before and after these changes):
Should anyone retake the survey? I'd be willing to if you can cancel the my first version-- I'll give the same answers on the Newton question.
Not as good as if someone can find a satisfactory IQ test, but could you add an SAT option for intelligence measurement?
I used percents for all my probabilities, including the one which was .5.
On the "Political" question: I identify with none of those. I understand the question is about which I identify with most, but all of the options have views on both social permissivity and economic redistribution. I am socially permissive, but have no belief one way or the other on redistribution/taxes. I simply have insufficient knowledge of that area to make a judgment. Perhaps it would be better to have two different questions - one for each of social views and economic views?
For "Religious views": I am an atheist but would not self-identify as either "spiritual" or "not spiritual". If a person asked me which I was, I would ask them what they meant by spiritual. I answered "Atheist but not spiritual", on the very weak grounds that I suspect I do not satisfy most other people's conceptions of spirituality; but really, the word is very ill-defined.
Thanks, Yvain! For the next survey, please consider country of residence and first language as questions.
I've been lurking on here for a long time, and just now registered to get a free karma point for taking the survey.
I did take the survey, however I found something I was unsure of what to put down and had to type in an explanation/question about:
It was for the question: "By what year do you think the Singularity will occur? Answer such that you think there is an even chance of the Singularity falling before or after that year. If you don't think a Singularity will ever happen, leave blank."
If I think the singularity is slightly less than 50% likely overall, what should I have put? It seemed off to leave it blank and imply I believed "I don't think a Singularity will ever happen" because that statement seemed to convey a great deal more certainty than 50+epsilon%. However, if I actually believed there was a less than 50% chance of it happening, I'm not going to reach an even chance of happening or not happening on any particular year.
As a side note, after taking that test, I realized that I don't feel very confident on a substantial number of things.
For the gender question it may make sense to have a generic "other" option. The monogamous/polygamous question should also maybe have a no preference option also.
Edit: And finished.
I think it is generally good to avoid "other" options as much as possible.
There are a few biases related to filling questionnaires. For example, many psychological tests ask you the same question twice, in opposite direction. (Question #13 "Do you think Singularity will happen?" Question #74: "Do you think Singularity will never happen?") This is because some people use heuristics "when unsure, say yes" and some other people use heuristics "when unsure, say no". So when you get two "yes" answers or two "no" answers to opposite forms of the question, you know that the person did not really answer the question.
Another bias is that when given three choices "yes", "no" and "maybe", some people will mostly choose "yes" or "no" answers, while others will prefer "maybe" answers. It does not necesarily mean that they have different opinions on the subject. It may possibly mean that they both think "yes, with 80% certainty", but for one of them this means "yes", and for the other one this means "maybe". So instead of measuring their ...
There are a number of types of snowflakes.
If you decide in advance that you aren't going to listen to anyone who doesn't fit your categories, you might be missing something.
You can have:
a) a survey, where everyone's individual differences are rounded into a few given categories;
b) a collection of blog articles, where everyone describes themselves exactly as they desire; or
c) a kind of survey, where some participants send a blog article instead of data.
Both (a) and (b) are valid options, each of them serves a different purpose. I would prefer to avoid (c), because it tries to do both things at the same time, and accomplishes neither. An answer "other" sometimes means "no answer is even approximately correct", but sometimes is just means "I prefer to send you a blog article instead of survey data". The first objection is valid, and is IMHO equivalent to simply not answering that question. The second objection seems more like refusing the idea of statistics. Statistics does not mean that people who gave the same answer are all perfectly alike, but ignoring the minor differences allows us to see the forest instead of the trees.
I guess the "special snowflake bias" is officially called "narcissism of small differences". The psychological foundation is that we have a need of identity, which is threatened by similar things, not different ones. So when something is similar to us, but not the same, we exaggerate the difference and downplay the similarity. From outside view we are probably less different than from inside view.
Would it not be useful for the “Degree” question to distinguish between the two no-degree cases of current undergraduate students and not-trying?
Thanks for doing this, I just took it. With the gender question, in addition to the transgender questions, it's maximally inclusive to include a non-binary "genderqueer" option.
Took the survey and finally created an account on here.
Looking at the comments, it seems like I am not the only one who used the survey as an impetus to create an account or a first post. I would be interested to see if there was a significant increase in the number of new accounts while the survey is running (as opposed to the average number of new accounts when there is no current survey).
...Also I took the IQ test posted in the comments.. Yeah, it has me as a good 15 points lower than what I was tested as in school also.
Survey now completed.
EDIT:
if you take it and post that you took it here, I will upvote you, and I hope other people will upvote you too
Let the record reflect that this comment currently has a negative score! :-(
EDIT2: No longer the case, obviously! :-)
I took it.
I think some of the "pick one" options were too broadly grouped, though any multiple-choice is going to be. I'd have preferred a "no preference" for "relationship style", for example, and more political options. Also I'm not sure what counts as "participates actively" in other groups--I've been a member of transhumanism-related groups for over a decade, for example, but am mostly a lurker; I did not check the box.
I would have been interested in seeing a question about involvement in offline activities like local meetups, or participation in IRC/other LW venues.
Thanks for running the survey!
Done. Definitely went through the whole "check the publication date"--whoop of victory--worry I was underconfident routine. Except silently because there's a sleeping person less than a foot away.
I'm amazed at the range of possibilities I considered for some of those probabilities. I definitely do not have a solid grasp of reality.
Filled out the survey. The cryonics-question could use an option "I would be signed up if it was possible where I live."
Yvain, one very important question that I think you missed: Do you currently have an account on Lesswrong?
I personally don't, and glancing through the number of 'first post' comments here, I believe that the ratio of lurkers to active users may be significant. (This is a throwaway account, and I am making an exception this once because there would be no other way to get information from the lurkers.)
Issues with the survey:
EDIT: Overall, it's pretty good.
Took it.
My family is of mixed religious background, so I just arbitrarily used my mother's religious background for those questions. You might want to make the answer choices a little more flexible.
I know "male, female, FTM, MTF, other" is a standard gender/sex question, but I don't know why. A problem is that it implies that "FTM" is a distinct category from, rather than a subset of, "male" (ditto for female). This would be better if other questions had answers that were subsets of other answers, but you seem to try hard not to do that. This could be fixed by phrasing it as "cis male", but then you'd get people complaining about "cis" and "trans" not being a perfect dichotomy and complaining about the confusing word and so on. This could also be fixed by splitting the question into "gender (male/female/other)" and "Are you trans? (yes/no)", but then you'd get other complaints.
I wouldn't have been too far off on the Newton question if I had been able to remember the mapping between century numbering and year numbering. I ended up two centuries off. Fortunately I took that into account when calibrating.
Also, for the record: I'm not "considering cryonics". I'm cryocrastinating. Cryonics is obviously the best choice, and I should be signing up for it in the next five seconds. I will probably die while not signed up for cryonics, and that will be death by stupidity, and you will all get to point and laugh at my corpse.
What kind of person asks about a baby's junk?
Most of them, by implication if nothing else. The minute they can't do so subtly, things get nasty.
As for me, I was surprised it asked about my racial background and my family's religion but not what country I grew up in or live in.
I completed the survey. Thanks, Yvain, for doing it!
The option "Atheist but spiritual" gave me a pause. What does it actually mean?
"Atheist" refers to the lack of a belief in gods. "Spiritual" includes all sorts of other supernatural notions, like ghosts, non-physical minds, souls, magic, animistic spirits, mystical energies, etc. Also, "spiritual" can refer to a way of looking at the world exemplified by religions that some atheists consider a vital part of the human experience.
This is great! I hope there's a big response.
It seems likely you're going to get skewed answers for the IQ question. Mostly it's the really intelligent and the below average who get (professional) IQ tests - average people seem less likely to get them.
I predict high average IQ, but low response rate on the IQ question, which will give bad results. Can you tell us how many people respond to that question this time? (no. of responses isn't registered on the previous survey)
I think it would be more informative to ask people to take one specific online test, now, and report their score. With everyone taking the same test, even if it's miscalibrated, people could at least see how they compare to other LWers. Asking people to remember a score they were given years ago is just going to produce a ridiculous amount of bias.
I think it would be more informative to ask people to take one specific online test, now, and report their score.
Are there any free, non-spam-causlng, online IQ tests that produce reasonable results (i.e. correlate strongly to standard IQ tests)?
Here's one that closely imitates Raven's Progressive Matrices and claims to have been calibrated with a sample of 250,000 people: http://www.iqtest.dk/
Here's another one: http://sifter.org/iqtest/ . I can't find any mention of where the questions came from or how it's calibrated, but it's shorter and doesn't require Flash.
Neither one asks for an e-mail address or any identifying information. They might be too easy for some on LW, but harder ones tend to cost money. As Viliam_Bur pointed out, any free online test's validity is questionable, but the first one is basically a direct copy of a "real" test, and neither one has any apparent ulterior motive. Anecdotally, they were both within 10 points of each other and my "real" score.
Yes - I'm quoting an IQ test I did as a kid which had a suspiciously high score, I'm pretty confident I'd get a much less spectacular score if I did one today.
Awesome. Definitely don't do another one then. (Unless you need to diagnose something of course!)
(how many people have strong feelings on Three Worlds Collide these days?)
(Of course to actually get the answer, you would presumably have to...take a survey. :-) )
Thanks for putting this together, Yvain! Recommendation to the Powers That Be: promote this to the main page so that more people notice it.
I'm not sure what it is about a survey that gets me to stop lurking at a community and actually create an account, but there you have it. Maybe it's just the chance to tell my 'story' anonymously.
I took it a few hours ago, and only just then realized that I apparently can get karma from saying so.
Posted. It wasn't clear whether the IQ calibration question was whether your IQ would be higher than the reported IQ of respondents or the actual IQ of respondents, and also whether that included respondents that didn't answer the IQ question.
Everyone should take the survey before reading any more comments, in case they contain anchors etc.
I took the survey. My estimates will be very poorly calibrated (I haven't done much in the way of calibration/estimation exercises) but I'm hoping they'll at least be good enough for wisdom-of-the-crowds purposes and more useful than just leaving blank.
Minor quibble: shouldn't "p(xrisk)" be "p(NOT xrisk)"? Just worried about people in a hurry not reading the question properly.
I took the survey, I found the "Moral Views" question very hard to answer to, folding "moral views" in one of 4 broad categories is surhuman effort for me ;) but I did my best.
Also, not wanting to enter a political debate here and now, but your definition of "communism" seems a strawman to me.
I've encountered people online who would want an "Other" option for the Gender question.
Also, my only possible answer to "Relationship Style" is "I don't know."
Edit: Survey filled, though. Left Relationship Style blank.
Just took it.
About the probability questions: I thought you were supposed to answer them instantly for your intuitive stance at the moment, without additional research, though I see some of responders apparently did research. Perhaps it should be better specified what is meant.
I just took it. My issue, which I haven't seen mentioned yet, is with the use of "agnostic" as a midpoint on the scale between theism and atheism. I realize that's a common colloquial use now but I don't get how it's a meaningful category -- unless it's meant to refer to negative atheism, and the "atheism" answers refer to positive atheism? And in the historical use of "agnostic" I think it's a separate category altogether that could overlap with both atheism and theism.
Overall I found the questions very interesting though, and I'm curious to see the results.
Filled out the survey. Neat!
I didn't know those versions of morality. There wasn't an option for "don't know" but I guess leaving it blank is the same thing.
To modify an example from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: a Good Samaritan is widely agreed to be a good person, but the reasons vary:
The cryonics question is broken! I couldn't answer it without suspecting it would be misleading. My p would be incredibly low but only because my p for the human species surviving is low. This is a technically correct way to answer the question but I am not at all confident that everyone else would answer literally, including the obvious consideration "if everyone else is dead, yeah, you die too". Or, even if everyone did, I am not confident that the appropriate math would be done on a per-participant level in the results for the p(cryo) to be meaningful.
I took the survey. I'd really have liked an "other/no affiliation" option on the politics question, though, or a finer-grained scale. I suppose I could just have left it blank, but that seems not to transmit the right information.
Took it.
(Regarding the phrase "ontologically basic mental entity"; in my head, I always hear it in the voice of Raz from Psychonauts.)
Took the survey.
Thought you might have included an option for "reactionary" on the political orientation question. The distinction between reactionary, and libertarian or conservative is substantial even given the fact that the match isn't supposed to be perfect.
The global warming question might be more discriminating if the question were whether someone thinks that the mainstream view on AGW is scientifically valid within reason. The question as it stands is vague, hinging on the interpretation of "significant".
Otherwise a good survey!
Just took the survey. It was odd how only the word "Other" was translated into the Norwegian "Andre"... and everything else was in English.
Liberal, for example the US Democratic Party or the UK Labour Party: socially permissive, more taxes, more redistribution of wealth
Socialist, for example Scandinavian countries: socially permissive, high taxes, major redistribution of wealth
Only an American could have written something like that... Political "ideologies" apparently do not translate between countries in any way. It's like asking Muslims if they feel closer to Catholics or Lutherans.
The test has also a problem with extremely low "probability" events like "God existing". There's really no meaningful number between a vague "theoretically possibly just extremely unlikely" (and number of 0s you put there doesn't really mean anything) and "literally impossible 0%" here.
I took the survey. Sorry I asked you to keep my data private, but I precommitted to doing so in order to improve the quality of my responses.
Good idea, and a good set of questions. However, while I might say I'm fairly knowledgeable about a few topics anywhere else, the feeling of going far out of my depth is one I associate strongly with LW. As an example, I would expect the list of those who could hold a heavy AI discussion with LW's resident experts to be about 5 people.
Also, "exists" when referring to the entire observable universe, makes me a bit tense. In our past light cone? In our future light cone? In a spacelike interval? It makes a big difference.
I think the phrasing there will probably cause weird effects. For example, it seems most LWers have only vague ideas of biology and medicine, and I can talk confidently with a biology researcher or physician of average ability, so I felt happy checking that box. If everyone reasons like me, we’ll see lots of checks in that box, not because people here are expert in biology and medicine, but because we aren’t.
The "Anti-Agathics" question is ambiguous:
What is the probability that any person living at this moment will reach an age of one thousand years?
Two possible meanings (which, at least for me, would result in very different numbers):
Given a randomly selected person living at this moment, what is the probability that they will reach an age of one thousand years?
What is the probability that at least one person living at this moment will reach an age of one thousand years?
I took the survey. If it is not too late to receive Karma for taking the survey, I would not mind.
I took the survey.
Like several other people, I was a bit bothered by the P(God) type questions. For some of those, my belief depends on an argument for the impossibility of, say, God, rather than on any particular evidence. In that case, am I supposed to take into account my uncertainty as to the validity of my argument? Or just put 0?
I took the survey and really enjoyed it. Thanks! It was mostly clear but I'm not gonna lie -- had to look up the morality definitions (except consequentialism). Perhaps a very brief definition would help.
Took it!
For the probability questions, I think it might have been useful for people to be able to specify confidence in their estimate. An estimate of X% from someone who is familiar with almost all of the relevant arguments and evidence is different from an estimate of X% by someone with only a cursory understanding of the issue. Then we can target the subjects people are most uncertain about to produce the most informative discussions.
One problem with the political question: Socialism is not what they have in Scandinavia. That would be social democracy (technically a form of government that's supposed to evolve towards full socialism, but they don't seem to have done that). It's unclear what option one is supposed to choose to mean "What they have in Scandinavia" rather than actual socialism.
political words like "socialism" mean very different things in different places, so a description like "what they have in Scandinavia" is supposed to pin down the extension enough for you to work out the intension.
Filled out. For the probability questions that I thought were very close to 0 (or 100) I thought about how many times in a row I would have to see a fair coin land heads to have a similar level of credence, and then translated that into percentages. A fun exercise.
Also, my calibration was a little off on the last question.
I have a feeling that some people might answer some of the "what is P(...)?" with a probability rather than a percentage (i.e. 0.5 when they actually mean 50%). (I almost did it myself)
(EDIT: However, some people (such as myself) also used 0.5 to mean 0.5%, so an automatic conversion is probably impossible.)
This survey is now closed. I'll have data eventually.
The answer to my question from November 12 was 970 people.
Alright, I finally made an account. Thanks for the push, though this had little to do with why I've joined. I liked the probability parts of the survey, though I know I need to improve my estimates. Political section might be better done with a full-fledged Question section just devoted to it. Perhaps a later survey? I can't wait to see the results.
Took it. Though I had a hard time answering what religion my family would abide to, my dad is an agnostic I think, but I'm not even sure what my mother believes in . . . No one I know very well practice religion (not just believing) either so it has never been a big part of my life, might be because I'm from Sweden.
I took it as well. One comment: my mother and father adhere(d) to different flavours of Christianity in different degrees. This made it somewhat hard to answer that question fully (I went with my father because he cares most, but my mother's views probably had more influence on me.)
Moral views should probably be two questions-- one about the existence of moral facts and one about favorite normative theory (with "None" "Other" or "Particularist" as a fourth option).
Took it. It's been awhile since my last IQ test so I did not answer that one, and I don't think I'm gonna be in the top 50% at all.
Taken. Moral views question gave me a bit of trouble, I didn't agree with any of them. Another option like 'There is morality, but I don't define it in any of the ways above' would be nice.
In general I thought the categories covered things pretty well.
I filled out the survey, but I left a number of questions blank, on the basis that I don't feel qualified to answer them. I would have left the year of singularity question blank too, but it said that doing that meant I thought it definitely wouldn't happen.
I took the survey. I would trust my probabilities for aliens, espers, and time travelers as far as I can throw them. I don't really think any number I could give would be reasonable except in the weak sense of not committing the conjunction fallacy.
I second the anchoring effect in the Singularity question. Based on previous comments I had written before, I would have expected a far more distant year than the one I gave in the survey. Oops.
Also, I missed the Principia question by ten years, and gave myself 80% confidence. I don't know if that was good or bad. How would I go about estimating what my confidence should have been?
I was disappointed that mathematics fell under the "hard sciences", but I suppose we can't all have our own category.
For the Existential Risk question, I would have liked to see an option for societal collapse. It wouldn't have been my number one option, but I think the prospect of multiple stressors in conjunction, such as international economic and food crises, leading to a breakdown of modern civilization is more likely than a number of other options already on the list.
Perhaps future surveys should have exhaust valves channeling people's need to express themselves:
1) In any number of words, what is your theory of gender? (essay section)
2) On unsophisticated government forms that only have the options "male" and "female", which do you select? (multiple choice, two options)
3) Sex with people who gave the same answer to 2), yay or boo? (multiple choice, two options)
4) Sex with people who gave a different answer to 2), yay or boo? (multiple choice, two options)
5) In any number of words, what are your political views? (essay section)
6) Which nine of the following ten political terms most poorly describe that position (multiple choice, ten options).
etc.
Another lurker who took the survey. I suppose I should go find the newbie thread and introduce myself.
I was extra wrong on Principia. Almost disturbing to think how recent it was...
I took your survey. There may be small errors in a couple of my answers. I can hardly wait to see your explanation of what you are doing with those "calibration questions" like "what is your estimate of the probability that your answer to Newton's Principia publication date is within 15 years of the correct answer"?
Also if there is some sort of sampling theory surveying practice FAQ that explains the use of such questions I would be interested in reading it.
I've taken the survey, and have the uncomfortable feeling that the odds I gave for several interrelated propositions were mutually inconsistent.
I took the survey and could feel my affective heuristics generating random near-the-ballpark numbers.
Given I am a mathematician and have no idea how to actually compute any of those probabilities (or what that would even formally mean, say in a probability measure space), I let those numbers stand without further scrutiny.
After lurking on LessWrong for several months, I just made an account today and took the survey. :) I'm curious to see the results.
I took the survey.
The political section is begging for a one line write in, seriously. Please consider adding on in addition to the pick one option poll. I'm not having warm fuzzies for any of the groups and had to bite my tongue and pick one I really really dislike, just because the alternatives are so much worse and one of the alternatives, while probably quite popular a choice, will be misinterpreted if I chose it.
From your perspective, that makes sense. From my perspective - I don't intend to ever look at this data. I'm going to import it into SPSS, have it crunch numbers for me, and come out with some result like "Less Wrong users are 65% libertarian" or like "Men are more likely to be socialist than women."
If you put "other" - and this applies to any of the questions, not just this one - you're pretty much wasting your vote unless someone else is going to sift through the data and be interested that this particular anonymous line of the spreadsheet believes in strong environmental protection but an otherwise free market.
Looking at the answers, I really shouldn't have allowed write-ins for any questions - I was kind of surprised how many people can't settle on a specific gender, even though the aim of the question was more to figure out how many men versus women are on here than to judge how people feel about society (I considered saying "sex" instead, but that has its own pitfalls and wouldn't have let me get the transgender info as easily. I'll do it that way next time.)
I was particularly harsh on the politics question because I know how strong the temptation is. I think next survey I'll give every question an "other" check box, but it will literally just be a check box and there will be no room to write anything in.
I was kind of surprised how many people can't settle on a specific gender
You could cut the gordian knot by borrowing Randall Munroe and Relsqui's solution for the xkcd color survey, which was to ask about chromosomal sex:
Do you have a Y chromosome?
[Don't Know] [Yes] [No]
If unsure, select "Yes" if you are physically male and "No" if you are physically female. If you have had SRS, please respond for your sex at birth. This question is relevant to the genetics of colorblindness.
Technically, isn't it the number of X chromosomes that matters to colorblindness? It's just that people with Y chromosomes almost always have one X chromosome, and people without them almost always have two.
You have some reason to believe that Klinefelte's syndrome (XXY) is less common among xkcd readers than among the general population?
Re the politics question, I'm not a communist but I don't think any sane modern communists would use the soviet union as an example of communist government. They officially claimed the government was a transitional stage towards self governing collective utopia.
I'm very happy that this survey is being retaken! Looking forward to seeing the results.
Taken. My two cents as everyone's:
Under academic field, there were specific fields for statistics and "other hard sciences" but not a specific field for abstract mathematics, which I was surprised by.
agree with others that the political categories were too linear and a libertarian socialist option would have been nice.
My estimate for Newton's Principia was off by 27 years... so my confidence was a bit high but not too much.
I took the survey and was annoyed to realize that I didn't have a strong enough background to have informed answers to several questions.
Taken. Thanks Yvain, I appreciate this effort!
Nitpick: why no "Other" categories for Participation and Expertise?
I took the survey, but unfortunately, when I saw "If you don't know enough about the proposition to have an opinion, please leave the box blank", I left all of the probability boxes blank afterwards because I just didn't feel like I could give an answer I would be happy with, even for some of the questions that could be described as clear-cut. Maybe next survey I'll be able to provide more useful details.
I don't really understand why divorced would be separate from single and looking (or single and not looking, if the marriage was especially traumatizing). Also, one could be married and looking if one is polyamorous.
From what I have observed, a more informative question if one wanted to meaningfully sort participants here would be:
Do you have children?
a) No, and I do not expect to in future.
b) No, but I might like to in future.
c) Yes.
There's no option for public sector (government) for Work Status. Non-profit may be misleading if it contains that as well.
Took they survey. Interested in the results. Interestingly enough, I have had an account for a month or two now, but have not posted anything until now. Thanks for putting this together Yvain.
I've taken the survey, and realised that I really need to practise making probability estimates.
Survey taken.
I had fun doing the background research to be able to give a number to the P(Aliens) questions. :) The topic has, of course, come up many times, but never before for me in association with a community where the social norms favored a careful, quantitative answer.
When answering the Newton question, I was surprised at the shape of my probability distribution for the answer. It definitely wasn't a gaussian, a uniform distribution, or other form that I've worked with. This was simply due to the knowledge I started with, which was vague proposit...
I took it, but I would never post a content-free comment just for the sake of a few karma!
The results should be fun to see, so thanks for taking the time to do this.
I didn't like the ethics question, because it could be interpreted as asking about one's theoretical position on metaethics, or about one's actual values, and the two can diverge. Specifically: I bet there are quite a lot of people on LW for whom something like the following is true: "I don't believe that moral judgements have actual truth values separate from the values of the people or institutions that make them. But I do have values, and I do make moral judgements, and the way I do so is: [...]".
In the singularity year question, I interpreted that to mean “50% that a singularity occurs before YYYY, 50% that either it occurs later or it never occurs at all; leave blank if you think it's less than 50% that it ever occurs”, even though, taken literally, the first part of the question suggests “50% that the singularity occurs before YYYY, given that it ever occurs”. Given that my probability that no singularity will ever occur is non-negligible, these interpretations would result in very different answers.
Thanks for putting together the survey. It prompted me to do a couple things, including start posting here.
I was about 100 years off with Newton. Dang it!
Troshen
I took the survey.
I didn't like it because some of the questions offered too narrow a range of answers for my taste. Example: I consider the "many worlds" hypothesis to be objectively meaningless (because there's no possible experiment that can test it). The same goes for "this universe is a simulation."
As for the "singularity", I see it as nearly meaningless too. Every definition of it I've seen amounts to a horizon, beyond which the future (or some aspects of it) will be unimaginable -- but from how far past? Like a physical horizon, if such a "limit of vision" exists it must recede as you approach it. Even a cliff can be looked over.
The comparative karma of my comments to the surrounding comments also seems to matter to me. Specifically if am arguing with someone who is saying something transparently logically absurd and their comments are higher than mine it invokes both disgust and contempt.
Took it. It might be worth differentiating between people who identify with a particular political group and people who just happen to skew a little more in one direction than another.
Some of my probabilities might be a bit off, too, as I'm not entirely sure about factoring x-risks into the lifespan questions. A better way of specifying various very small probabilities would also be appreciated.
I'm fairly sure there is no cryonics available in my area - perhaps this could be added as an option in future surveys?
I felt I didn't have a strong basis to answer many of the P(x) questions, but I answered some as best I could, and left others blank. I also wasn't sure whether being a regular poster on an atheism forum would count as being an active member of a community - I selected "no".
Thanks for the survey, and I look forward to the results!
"P(many worlds)" is the same as for any other interpretation that makes the same predictions. Depending on how you understand "more or less correct" I'd approach 100%.
Since it's unclear what's meant by the survey question, I didn't answer.
I disliked the moral philosophy question. I felt comfortable putting down "consequentialist," but I can see how someone might feel none of the answers suited them well. I would have made the fourth option simply "other," and maybe added a moral realism vs. anti-realism question.
See the Phil Papers survey. On the normative ethics question, "other" beat out the three "standard" moral philosophies, and there's no indication that everyone in that category is a moral anti-realist.
Also, for the Newton question:
My answer:...
Filled out the survey; the calibration questions really forced me to explore my reasoning behind some of my immediate intuitions.
Oh and by the way, second post ever!
(back to lurking)
Hmm. For the anti-agathics question I'm wondering if I should be taking into account the probability of x-risk between now and 3011. The question looks like it's about our technical ability to solve aging, which means I should answer with P(someone lives to 1000 | no XK-class end-of-the-world scenario between then and now)? (Though of course that conditional is not what was written.)
ETA: in other words, see wedrifid's comment just above.
Came out of activity hibernation to take this. Thanks for seeing a thing that needed doing and choosing to do it!
Problems with the gender field have already been discussed; the sexuality question has some of the same issues. "Gay" and "straight" don't really make sense for people with nonbinary gender, and many people interpret "bisexual" as referring to "both" genders (male and female), as opposed to a more inclusive "queer" or "pansexual." I do honestly appreciate how much effort you've put into making the survey as inclusive as it already is, though.
One more long time lurker (over RSS) who just created an account to take the survey and comment. Probably my favorite survey I've ever taken, I'll direct a few friends to it as well and try to get them to start reading the site.
I just noticed this:
Like the last survey, if you take it and post that you took it here, I will upvote you, and I hope other people will upvote you too.
I suppose that means you'd like to know that I took it about two weeks ago. Sorry for not mentioning that earlier!
Took the survey; lurk lots and should probably get more involved. First steps can be going to the London meetup. +-10 on publishing yeah, but overestimated my uncertainty to be safe.
Just finished the survey. I'm very much an LW lurker, who apparently succumbs to some type of self-confidence bias. Though I know nothing of probability theory (thus why a lot of the questions were left blank), I gave myself a 10% chance for the publishing-question. (Was that a randomized question?) After a bit of consideration, I said [YEAR]—it was first published in [YEAR + 37]. I wasn't too far off.
Maybe that same bias is what deters me from ever actually posting anything.
I took the survey! I also assumed the probabilities were meant to be first-glance intuitive. I wish I'd known people were actually doing research, for I would have done the calculations!
I took the survey, but didn't read anything after "Click Here to take the survey" in this post until afterwards.
So my apologies for being extremely program-hostile in my answers (explicitly saying "epsilon" instead of 0, for instance, and giving a range for IQ since I had multiple tests). Perhaps I should retake it and ask you to throw out the original.
I did have one other large problem. I wasn't really clear on the religion question. When you say "more or less right" are you talking about cosmology, moral philosophy, histo...
Took the survey. My probabilities sometimes contradict each other because I tried to take the outside view into account, and found no consistent way to do so before giving up.
I did get Newton almost exactly right.
I just finished the survey. I had given myself a 15% probability of being correct on the Newton question, and was off by significantly over 15 years. However, I should have calibrated that as 30%, as I knew the century but had no idea when in the century he published the book.
I just took the survey. I was pretty sure I remembered the decade of Newton's book, but I was gambling on the century and I lost.
I think quibbles over definitions and wording of most of the probability questions would change my answers by up to a couple of orders of magnitude.
Lastly, I really wanted some way to specify that I thought several xrisks were much more likely than the rest (for example, [nuclear weapons, engineered pandemic] >> others).
Done. Seemed like a pretty good survey overall. Like others, I was confused by some questions though. Didn't know how to answer family religion, especially since I wasn't sure how far back I was supposed to look. Also, how exactly would it be determined when the singularity occurs? The moment human-level ai is reached? Seems to me that it would be more of a gradual (though still relatively sudden, all things considered) process.
The probability questions were interesting. I guess the questions about Newton and IQ relative to the average were there to accou...
I assumed that was more based on cultural norms than LW norms. Generally people don't discuss their IQs in polite company (or potentially-high-variance-IQ company, maybe), especially high IQs, because of the risk of being seen as bragging about something that other people may not view as high-status. In discussions outside LW I've heard people be somewhat condescending toward people who even admit to having gotten their IQs tested, as it's often associated with intellectual pretension. (And, in turn, being seen as claiming high status in a way that actually marks one as low-status is associated with social unawareness.)
Survey taken. Made me put hard numbers on fuzzy feelings, which is good.
I wonder how my answers compare to those I gave last time... is there any way to check?
Median date of singularity: if I think there's a >50% chance of (total) human extinction before this event, I can't provide an answer.
(If, for whatever reason, i have <50% chance of Singularity, I can't answer).
Og take survey. Og deny validity of single-factor, linearly ranked intelligence measurement, though. Og increasingly fond of Dr. Gould.
I just finished the survey. My estimate for the Calibration Year was 200 years wrong. How embarrassing, I need to learn the basics.
I think there is a difference between "I have looked over all the evidence intensely and find the evidence and counter-evidence to weigh precisely in balance such that my estimate of the probability of event X is 50%" and "I don't know anything about X, so I will default to 50% even if it isn't reasonable".
It's the difference between "I know fair coins produce heads 50% of the time" and "what's a fair coin?". I wanted the second option when talking about many worlds -- I just haven't read the sequence on quantum mechanics yet, and I haven't read anything outside the sequences on quantum mechanics either. I just have an educated layman's understanding.
First thing I did upon completing the survey: looked up Principia Mathematica and gave a little whoop of self-congratulation.
Surveys always need more respondents. When Wikipedia or Reddit want to publicize things, we/they use a bar at the top of the page. Can we do that? (It doesn't have to be as obnoxious as the donation fundraiser ones WP uses!)
Grargh argh grr! The first thing I did afterwards was go to Wikipedia and see when [the thing identified] was actually [verbed], and I was off by a hundred or so years. Blech.
Anyways, survey taken.
I took the survey. I left most of the probability estimation questions blank because I feel very uncertain about any number I imagine entering.
I took the survey and I agree with some other comments about the difficulty of assigning probabilities to distant events. I decided to just round to either 0 or 1% for a few things. I hope "0" won't be interpreted as literally zero.
Something bugs me about the IQ question. It's easy to call sour grapes on those complaining about that metric but it seems like such a poor proxy for what matters, namely, making awesome stuff happen. Not denying a correlation, just that I think we can do much better. Even income in dollars might be a better proxy despite the obvious problems with that.
I took the survey. Got Newton wrong by over 50 years. At least my confidence was appropriately low.
I would suggest requesting probabilities in a simple, exception-less way. Why not just ask for a number from 0 to 1? "Use percentages, but don't put down the percentage sign, unless you're going below 1%, then put the percentage sign so I know it's not a mistake" looks to me like asking for trouble.
I took it too. Disturbs me how much my alien probability changed when framed as 'in universe' vs 'in galaxy'.
Took the survey and was quite unsure how to answer the god questions... If we took it, for example, that there's 30% chance of universe being simulated then the same probability should be assigned to P(God) too and to P(one of the religions is correct) as well.
I started trying to fill this out, but more than half I either don't know/remember, am to unsure about the supposed meaning of the question and would require clarification, or can't answer meaningfully because the USA centric assumptions of the question.
Survey complete. Had to answer "there's no such thing as morality" because I can't imagine a configuration of quarks that would make any of the other choices true. What would it even mean at a low level for one normative theory to be "correct?"
I took the survey. Props to Yvain for putting in the effort on this (again).
(I really ought to take a legitimate IQ test one of these days.)
Survey = taken.
For the newton question, I got the thousands, tens and ones place correct, but flubbed the hundreds place. 60% confidence. Not sure if I should feel bad about that.
I may have just taken it twice... hitting enter seems to submit the form immediately. How inconvenient! I felt funny putting in "0"s and "100"s instead of 0+epsilon etc.
Done. Was out by only 17 years on the Principia Mathematica.
Some of the questions made me feel a bit stupid, which is probably a good thing now and then. Had to answer Deist/etc. for the religious identity question, because there wasn't an option for epistemic untheist with Christian ethical heuristics and an admittedly indefensible level of wishful thinking. But "etc." will do :)
Here's hoping we all live to 2100 and find out whether we were right about that stuff.
I think the probability of 90% die-off by 2100 attributable to a single cause is ...
Great, now I'm not sure if I'm horribly under-confident or freakishly lucky... (re: Newton)
The cryonics question could use a "cryocrastinating" option... I have filled out papers and not sent them anywhere...
In the ethics field an option should allow for: i don't know enough of these to make a decision. I did not actually know half of the options given by their terms.
The greatest risk question would benefit from a write-in option. I consider economic/political collapse a greater risk than those listed.
I took the survey. Thanksgiving break at the family house gives me plenty of time to relax and catch up on all of the reading here that I have been avoiding since I started college.
Thanks for conducting this new survey, Yvain. I eagerly await the results.
Slightly off-topic, it would be interesting to see how members of this community respond to the PhilPapers survey. (You must be registered to take the survey.) My own responses can be found here.
For those of us still in high school, should we put "general" or the major we expect to take in college?
Took the test. I assigned 70-80% to "God creating the universe", as I strongly (80%) suspect that it's a simulation, it's being more or less actively controlled and manipulated by some outside entity/entities, and even if said entity is one of many and has comparatively little power over its native environment - even to the point of resembling a human scientist - it's pretty much pointless for us to call it anything but a god.
Took the survey, even though I've mostly only lurked.
I don't know what an "ontologically basic mental entity" is. Also, I only left the Singularity question blank because I think it's overall probability of happening is less that 50%.
Wow, I was off on Newton by just 3 years. My other probabilities were sadly lacking in quantifiable justification... at least you finally got me to register ;)
The political question ought to have a “libertarian socialism” answer (green/southwestern quadrant in The Political Compass; extreme version described in An Anarchist FAQ). I answered “Socialist, for example Scandinavian countries” because it was the least unsatisfactory one. (Or at least there should be a “None of the above” answer.)
ETA: BTW, that's probably the most common understanding of the word libertarian outside the US.
I just put together a discussion post about thinking about the probability of living in a simulation, but I'm not sure if I should ask people to fill out the survey (if they were planning to) before they read the post.
I took the survey late last night after first noticing the posting here. Unfortunately, I was so tired that I forgot the instruction to use double digit answers and remembered it a few minutes after hitting the "Submit" button. (Here come the down votes.) If Yvain can identify my submission, put a "0" before all single digit answers. If not, contact me privately and I'll provide some help identifying it. I lurk and never comment here because frankly you are all more intelligent than I am. But I do want to improve my rational thinking skills so here I am.
I took the survey a few days ago, and in retrospect my answers of 0 for probabilities were overconfident and the result of me being too lazy to think hard.
I missed Newton by a horrendous ~25 years. If the publishing year of "On the Origin of Species" had been asked instead, I would have known the exact date. Occasionally I even celebrate it a little... jeez, exactly 3 more weeks until the day Darwin's explanation destroyed the single "good" argument religions ever had. A very fitting occasion to grab a beer and stick it to the invisible man.
Also, I was glad the input fields were large enough to accommodate enough zeroes regarding the superstition and religion questions. I also left out ...
"fixed". I'm genuinely sorry for being inconsiderate, I'm young and still have a tendency to use provocative language if I feel emotionally stimulated.
On a lighter note... I'm curious how some of you may have estimated a very low probability of say... the likelihood that one religion is a very good approximation to the truth. I doubt that there really is any way in which someone could give a sensible estimate, unless one were to put years of work into it to weigh all the (non)evidence meticulously (and as we know religions tend to dress their stories in a LOT of colorful detail, because hearing details makes things appear more true, since they assist our human imagination).
How could one of us, in a practical way, come up with a roughly realistic number? I used something like 0,0000000000000000001% probability because that's what it -feels- like to me. I can only imagine how unlikely it would be, by comparing it to something very unlikely... like winning the lottery twice in a row. Which still doesn't feel as surprising as discovering that our world is formed out of the body of a slayed giant. But then again my feeling of surprise upon winning the lottery (I'm not actually playing) is of course in no way directly proportional to the actual odds of winning either. What kind of thought process went through your head when you had to answer this question? (I'm asking everyone in general, not just Alicorn).
Hopefully this new survey will reveal more diversity and will be taken by more than ~160 users.
Thanks for doing this.
With respect to P(Warming), I took this to mean the probability that significant anthrogenic climate change is occurring or will occur.
I took it again after the changes. Please delete the old one (I used the same karma each time, so it should be easily identified).
Would be nice if we could assign probabilities to the "morality" question instead of having to put ourselves firmly in one camp.
I took the survey, sometime last week I think. EDIT: I think I may also have messed up the "two-digit probabilities" formatting requirement. I can't recall specifically any answer that might have violated it, but I also don't recall paying attention to that requirement while answering the survey.
Just took the survey. I got a little behind on my rss feeds, sorry! Thanks for keeping it open!
Just took it, but I think I might have given an overelaborate answer for "Religious Background," in order to give more information than "Family Religion" provided.
Because so many people are talking about the Newton question, I'm curious, how many people got closer than 7 years? That's how far I was. Also, I put 93% confidence within 15 years.
Oops
Gah! A single data point tells you very little about over-/underconfidence! Please, please stop acting like getting a 60% certain thing wrong (or 20% certain thing right) is a mistake.
A die has an 18% chance of rolling a 6. And that still happens. A die has a 66% chance of rolling a number larger than 2, and that sometimes doesn't happen. There is nothing unusual about these things, and the same applies for these estimation-with-confidence exercises!
(This isn't directed at you specifically, but there have been a few instances of this in this thread, and your comment was the "final straw")
I don't mean to be pedantic, but I have seen numerous people make this mistake on Lesswrong, so I am pointing it out:
1 die
2 or more dice
I don't know how to interpret the Anti-Agathics question. If you lived to 100 and were cryopreserved and then revived 900 years later only to die a minute after you revived, would that count?
If there's any status in comparing excessive underconfidence, I think I take the cake - one year off with 20% confidence in the interval. Good survey.
Anyone want to make a guess with confidence intervals how many people have taken the survey at this point? (noon GMT on 12 November)
I'm not sure asking for IQ without further qualification is a good idea, what with different IQ tests generating results with different standard deviations. Maybe after asking for IQ also ask what test it was from, and/or have a field for specifying the standard deviation directly?
Cooool... My karma has more than doubled since I took the survey.
ETA: I assign 50% probability to this comment having a score of -5 or less 24 hours from now. (It's at -2 right now.)
The final straw was noticing a comment referring to "the most recent survey I know of" and realizing it was from May 2009. I think it is well past time for another survey, so here is one now.
I've tried to keep the structure of the last survey intact so it will be easy to compare results and see changes over time, but there were a few problems with the last survey that required changes, and a few questions from the last survey that just didn't apply as much anymore (how many people have strong feelings on Three Worlds Collide these days?)
Please try to give serious answers that are easy to process by computer (see the introduction). And please let me know as soon as possible if there are any security problems (people other than me who can access the data) or any absolutely awful questions.
I will probably run the survey for about a month unless new people stop responding well before that. Like the last survey, I'll try to calculate some results myself and release the raw data (minus the people who want to keep theirs private) for anyone else who wants to examine it.
Like the last survey, if you take it and post that you took it here, I will upvote you, and I hope other people will upvote you too.
