Return of the Survey

I took the survey. I will now take this opportunity to criticize it.

Severely missing items:

• "Moral Views" should have had links to definitions; especially of "Eliezer's interpretation".
• "Charity" should have had a "No opinion/I have no information on the matter" choice.
• "Cryonics" should have had a "I have not yet considered the matter / No opinion" choice.

Minor missing items:

• "Political Views" should have been split into questions on the particular attributes listed, for those of us who don't bother to figure out which label applies to us.
• "Time in Community" should have listed how many months ago LW and OB were created, for convenience.

Clarify your taxonomy:

• If our universe is a simulation, does the containing universe have any significance to the Supernatural and God questions?
• If our universe is a simulation, not of some other universe, but constructed from scratch, is the designer of it God in the sense of "Probability: God"? Does it matter whether this entity has edited the state of the simulation since the beginning of its time?
• If our universe is a simulation which was designed to include ontologically basic mental entities, even though the universe in which it is simulated does not, does that count towards "Probability: Supernatural"?

Edit: Somebody took my shiny new karma point. That was not very nice of them, since it was explicitly offered as reciprocation for survey participation.

Edit 2: It is back, or has been replaced by someone else. Thanks!

Edit 3: ...I'm off to cognitive-dissonance myself into believing that I just like taking surveys.

Anyone who takes this survey and doesn't post is probably trying to signal that they don't care about karma. Anyone who does post is probably a karmawhore. So if you don't take the survey, you are probably trying to signal that you don't care about karma and you don't care about signaling that you don't care about karma. It appears that no matter what you do on this survey, you are probably trying to signal to the community that you are valuable to the community.

And, yes, I took the survey.

Took it, and I was way off on the calibration question. I gave fairly low confidence, but if you'd asked for an entire confidence distribution I'd probably have give something pretty foolish...

I took it. And I decided I valued the karma point more than keeping possible anonymity. (Actually the karma point minus the probablity that someone would vote this down for being self-serving.)

Ok done... and registered for my first point (if you don't mind!). Enjoyed the probability questions.

Issues I had were,

• inadequate categorisation of political views.
• inadequate categorisation for morality. I don't think many people here would answer deontologist, I don't know what Eliezers consequentialism is, so its basically a choice of consequentialism or other.

Most of the caterogies are well established and main stream umbrella terms that assume a good corelation between category and view set. Actually I think they should be avoided as associating with them comes down to tacitly agreeing with more than one proposition. So more single proposition (for/against) questions would be better ...

• for question about charity. You should reread the options, its like asking for 1-10, but listing only 3,4.5 and 9 bananas.
• existential risk. Would say nuclear war/climate change are the most likely, but not the most likely to wipe out 90%+ of the population, needless to say my answer cannot represent this.

Overall I thought it was good stuff.

I took the survey and am suddenly having a memory-blank as to whether I remembered to comply with stating probabilities as percentages or not. I hope I did.

I've probably missed something important. Please explain to me, how else can you obtain probabilities other than gathering statistics?

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I dunnit.

Unless perhaps you need to spend a lot of time determining your opinions on controversial issues, in which case it will be time well spent!

I know what my opinions on these issues, but apparently I don't practice translating them into actual probabilities enough. I wonder, should we always keep a number in the back of our mind?

Funny, 'karmawhore' was the 1st term that leapt to my mind, too. And yes, I did take the survey and am one....

Unless perhaps you need to spend a lot of time determining your opinions on controversial issues, in which case it will be time well spent!

Hal will disagree I'm sure.

I didn't take the survey, but I would have done if I hadn't been away on holiday for the entire time it was up. May I suggest that future such surveys remain open for a little longer?

The questions about longevity was a bit confusing. You asked what the chance of somebody currently living would live past 1000 is, but it's not clear whether a person who gets lives for some time less than 1000 years, then gets frozen and lives longer has lived past 1000 years or not.

I did it. Where's my cookie?

I took your survey, it was interesting. I'm still a little skeptical that my thoughts on various propositions take the form of probabilities in the first place. It seems absolutist to say there's zero chance of supernatural beings, but "ontologically basic mental entities" fit so poorly into my worldview that you might as well have said "What is the probability that you are wrong about everything?" So, I said zero, although I wouldn't ascribe such absolute confidence to myself if asked in some other way, I think. Similarly, your questions about God again pointed to this 'basic mental entity' idea, so I said zero again, although I'm sort of up in the air about the existence of beings beyond the scope of physical reality. It could all be a simulation, after all, and not necessarily of the same kind of universe as the simulator's.

After you collect and release the survey data, and we all have time to stare at belief-spreads, will you do a re-survey to see if beliefs converge somewhat once we know one another's impressions?

What does Electrical Engineering count as, under Professional Field?

EDIT: And why is not possible to select both student and for-profit work? I work as a programmer and study as an electrical engineer.

Yes, I'm a karmawhore too :-)

I took the survey! And I'm eagerly awaiting your upmod so my karma will return to an even number!

Unless perhaps you need to spend a lot of time determining your opinions on controversial issues, in which case it will be time well spent!

I'm skeptical about the "time well spent" part. You can probably guess which survey is mine now.

Done it. I was surprised how many questions I had difficulty nailing down a probability for.

I took the survey.

For the politics questions, it would have been nice to have been able to select answers to economic/social questions separately, rather than being forced to select a package deal. I wanted to select republican-style taxes paired with libertarian-style social freedoms, but that wasn't an option.

(Before you blame me for not mentioning this sooner, the politics question was phrased differently on the sample survey.)

A few of these needed more caveats. Since I gave an answer less than 50 on "Existential RIsk", I thought it was necessary to add a "conditioned on humanity living that long" rider to the Singularity question, etc.

Of course, I should have said so last week.

I took the survey. I was off by a century on the calibration question but I gave it a low confidence.

I had to put my ignorance out there, so i didn't tick the private box.

That was the hardest survey I have ever taken.

I assume that in the political views question, under the liberal option, it should say "UK Labour Party" rather than "UK Tories"

There are little checkmarks under the headings for section 2 and 3 - do those mean anything?

estimate the probability that the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics is more or less correct.

• This doesn't make any sense to me. MWI is an interpretation of QM - it's just a piece of poetry that you put next to the maths to make yourself feel good. It doesn't make any predictions that are not made by the maths, so it can't be correct or incorrect. It can just be "a pleasing piece of poetry" or "a displeasing piece of poetry".

Yes?

Survey completed. I've just checked the answer to the calibration question, and I'm glad I gave myself a low confidence score...

The aliens question was interesting to think about.

I realized that if I put anything other than zero for 'probability of aliens existing within our galaxy', then it seems like it would make little sense to put anything other than 100 for 'observable universe', given how many galaxies there are! Unless our galaxy is somehow special...

I took the survey, and am not all that interested in the Karma point... I just wanted to brag that I wasn't far off on the calibration. I gave a pretty low confidence level, however.

...though in thinking about it now, my confidence distribution is spread pretty far towards the earlier side of things. I would not have been surprised to find that my guess was half or an entire century later than it actually was, but I would have been extremely surprised if my guess was 30 years earlier than the actual date.

Maybe that's not too surprising, that I feel more confident estimating more recent historical events than those farther back.

I took the survey, very interesting questions. I guess I should be happy my answer to the calibration question was within his lifetime...

I didn't check the section boxes.

The natural log of my probability of the correct answer (is there a term for that? LN score?) on the calibration question was -0.073. How did you guys do?

By the way, your LN score on this post is equal to the natural log of your probability of the fact that I took the survey.