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.

Click here to take the survey

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.

2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
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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.

5FiftyTwo
Also possibly better to ask if before when for the same reason. And differentiate between blank = 'it will not occur' and 'no opinion.'
1Dorikka
If the survey is still going on, might want to remove your mention of the year 2100 as well, also to avoid anchoring.
0Incorrect
It's not.

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):

  • Added an "other" option in gender
  • Moved "date of singularity" above question mentioning 2100 to avoid anchoring. Really I should also move the Newton question for the same reason, but I'm not going to.
  • changed wording of anti-agathics question to "at least one person"
  • added a "don't know / no preference" to relationship style
  • clarified to answer probability as percent and not decimal; I'll go back and fix anyone who got this wrong, though. If you seriously mean a very low percent, like ".05%", please end with a percent mark so I know not to change it. Otherwise, leave the percent mark out.
  • Added a "government work" option.
  • Deleted "divorced". Divorced people can just put "single"
  • Added "economic/political collapse" to xrisk
  • Added "other" to xrisk
  • Added a question "Have you ever been to a Less Wrong meetup?" Please do NOT retake the survey to answer this question. I'l
... (read more)

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.

3dbaupp
Could you also add an ATAR/UAI, A-levels, Abitur and IB option? (It might be better to add a box asking for marks/certificate received upon leaving high school and the name of the program; with sufficient respondents there may be enough data to say meaningful things)

Some of us are still in high school.

1RobertLumley
I'd also be willing (I'd probably rather) retake the quiz. But there is a problem with calibration at that point, with the question about Newton.
4SilasBarta
Also, do I understand you correctly that the beings (conceivably) running the universe as a simulation do not count as supernatural/gods for purposes of the supernatural/gods questions?
4Jayson_Virissimo
Yeah, I thought the theism question was the worst of all. Have you ever met a theist that answered "ontologically basic mind-stuff" when asked what God is? Me neither. Other than that, thanks Yvain!
2feanor1600
I assumed when taking the survey that those running the simulation are outside our universe and so ontologically basic.
4Luke_A_Somers
Those people outside the simulation could exist with or without ontologically basic mental features. The questions are totally orthogonal.
-1taw
Is there even theoretical way of distinguishing these two cases? I'd assume the only possible answer is "they" do.
3RobinZ
I think the percentage of LW meetup attendees is positively correlated with how quickly people take the poll, unfortunately.
2thomblake
I feel like several of the single-punch questions should be multi-punch. Both "profession" and "Work status" gave me pause. Also, I had to figure out what the right thing to fill in for "family religion" was, since we had several. And there are several extremely common moral views not represented in your list of moral theories. One of the more popular is "All moral theories have some grain of truth, and we should use a combination along with our intuition". For questions like this, you might use as your model the Philpapers survey, though I also worry that this question might not make a lot of sense to most people without at least rough definitions alongside the answer choices.
0Armok_GoB
About the politics question: What if you come from a place/subculture where none of those even exist and have barely even heard of them?
0SilasBarta
About the government work issue, if I work for an aerospace company that gets all of its business from the government, does that count as "for profit" or "government work" for purposes of the question?
0Kaj_Sotala
I believe that would usually be considered "for profit".
0[anonymous]
I changed my estimated probabilities to reflect percentages, but didn't mark them with a percent sign because the version of the survey I took explicitly said not to. It's mostly irrelevant anyway, these probabilities weren't even accurate to two orders of magnitude.
[-]hamnox230

Took the survey.

I think I failed it.

9Insert_Idionym_Here
I missed newton by over 150 years. Pray for a curve.
[-]rntz230

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.

7Cthulhoo
I second rntz remarks, I had very similar issues with both questions. As a side note I would have been also interested in knowing how many people here are from non-english speaking countries (or at least outside the US). Anyways, this is a very interesting project, I'll be looking forward for the results!
5CharlesR
I chose not to answer the politics question for the simple reason that I didn't want to do something that could hijack my thinking.
3selylindi
If there is a political self-description category in future surveys, another option possibly worth adding is "anarchist". Yeah, it's rare, but the closest option available was "socialist", which is still very dissimilar. Incidentally, for those who are interested in political categorizations that might translate better across countries (and who have an OkCupid account), check out the Political Objectives test. A caveat is that, as the test itself notes, it is still specific to the countries and centuries that constitute the modern world, as "The assumption behind this test is that the three most important objectives of all-issues political movements in the modern era have been Equality and Liberty and Stability."
0thomblake
Interesting. I wonder if this might be framing too much - it seems like if someone accepted this, then a political movement that valued only two of those might a priori be classified as not "all-issues".

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.

[-][anonymous]210

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.

5Solvent
I think that there need to be two separate questions here. Probability of Singularity, and year it happens if it does. For instance, I'd guess about 70% chance of a singularity at all, but if it happens, 2040 would be about my expected date. You can't describe these two statements in just one number.
4A1987dM
Same here. But I voted 2150 because I think it's 50% that it happens before 2150, 20% that it happens later, and 30% that it never happens.
1Solvent
Oooh, good answer. I hadn't thought of that method.
1bogdanb
I interpreted this as “there is an even chance of the Singularity falling before or after, [assuming it does]”. That is, if you think the probability that the Singularity will happen is something low like 1%, you should answer a year such that the probability it happens by that year is 0.5%. The only way you can’t answer it is if you’re sure it won’t ever happen. (For example, if I thought a Singularity is very [...] very hard to achieve, I might answer 5000 AD or 500000 AD, depending on how many “very” there are, even though I might put a very low probability on our civilization actually surving that long.)
0robertzk
Given the expected date would be skewed to infinity by a non-zero estimate of the Singularity not occurring, you can probably put your estimate of the year X so that P( S <= X | C ) = 0.5, where S is the statistic "Year singularity will occur" and C is the event "Singularity will occur".

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.