2011 Survey Results

Political Views - less likely to be socialist, more likely to be libertarian

I looked at this one a little more closely, and this difference in political views is driven almost entirely by the "time in community" measure of strength of membership in the LW community; it's not even statistically significant with the other two. I'd guess that is because LW started out on Overcoming Bias, which is a relatively libertarian blog, so the old timers tend to share those views. We've also probably added more non-Americans over time, who are more likely to be socialist.

All of the other relationships in the above post hold up when we replace the original measure of membership strength with one that is only based on the two variables of karma & sequence reading, but this one does not.

Cryonics - lower

Cryonics Status - More likely to be signed up or to be considering it, less likely to be not planning to or to not have thought about it

So long-time participants were less likely to believe that cryonics would work for them but more likely to sign up for it? Interesting. This could be driven by any of: fluke, greater rationality, greater age&income, less akrasia, more willingness to take long-shot bets based on shutting up and multiplying.

One about nationality (and/or native language)? I guess that would be much more relevant than e.g. birth order.

Regarding #4, you could just write a % symbol to the right of each input box.

Publish draft questions in advance, so we can spot issues before the survey goes live.

We should ask if people participated in the previous surveys.

I'd love a specific question on moral realism instead of leaving it as part of the normative ethics question. I'd also like to know about psychiatric diagnoses (autism spectrum, ADHD, depression, whatever else seems relevant)-- perhaps automatically remove those answers from a spreadsheet for privacy reasons.

You are aware that if you ask people for their sex but not their gender, and say something like "we have more women now", you will be philosophized into a pulp, right?

Suggestion: "Which of the following did you change your mind about after reading the sequences? (check all that apply)"

• [] Religion
• [] Cryonics
• [] Politics
• [] Nothing
• [] et cetera.

Many other things could be listed here.

When asking for race/ethnicity, you should really drop the standard American classification into White - Hispanic - Black - Indian - Asian - Other. From a non-American perspective this looks weird, especially the "White Hispanic" category. A Spaniard is White Hispanic, or just White? If only White, how does the race change when one moves to another continent? And if White Hispanic, why not have also "Italic" or "Scandinavic" or "Arabic" or whatever other peninsula-ic races?

Since I believe the question was intended to determine the cultural background of LW readers, I am surprised that there was no question about country of origin, which would be more informative. There is certainly greater cultural difference between e.g. Turks (White, non-Hispanic I suppose) and White non-Hispanic Americans than between the latter and their Hispanic compatriots.

Also, making a statistic based on nationalities could help people determine whether there is a chance for a meetup in their country. And it would be nice to know whether LW has regular readers in Liechtenstein, of course.

Suggestion: add "cryocrastinating" as a cryonics option.

I think using your stipulative definition of "supernatural" was a bad move. I would be very surprised if I asked a theologian to define "supernatural" and they replied "ontologically basic mental entities". Even as a rational reconstruction of their reply, it would be quite a stretch. Using such specific definitions of contentious concepts isn't a good idea, if you want to know what proportion of Less Wrongers self-identify as atheist/agnostic/deist/theist/polytheist.

Yet another alternate, culture-neutral way of asking about politics:

Q: How involved are you in your region's politics compared to other people in your region?
A: [choose one]
() I'm among the most involved
() I'm more involved than average
() I'm about as involved as average
() I'm less involved than average
() I'm among the least involved

You should clarify in the antiagathics question that the person reaches the age of 1000 without the help of cryonics.

Replacing gender with sex seems like the wrong way to go to me. For example, note how Randall Munroe asked about sex, then regretted it.

Everyone who's suggesting changes: you are much more likely to get your way if you suggest a specific alternative. For example, instead of "handle politics better", something like "your politics question should have these five options: a, b, c, d, and e." Or instead of "use a more valid IQ measure", something more like "Here's a site with a quick and easy test that I think is valid"

Replace "gender" with "sex" to avoid complaints/philosophizing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

Otherwise agreed.

A series of four questions on each Meyers-Briggs indicator would be good, although I'm sure the data would be woefully unsurprising. Perhaps link to an online test if people don't know it already.

Very very clear instructions to use percent probabilities and not decimal probabilities

You can accomplish this by adding a percent sign in the survey itself, to the right of to every textbox entry field.

Edit: sorry, already suggested.

As per my previous comments on this, separate out normative ethics and meta-ethics.

And maybe be extra-clear on not answering the IQ question unless you have official results? Or is that a lost cause?

Very very clear instructions to use percent probabilities and not decimal probabilities

I would much rather see a choice of units.

That list is way, way to short. I entirely gave up on the survey partway through because an actual majority of the questions were inapplicable or downright offensive to my sensibilities, or just incomprehensible, or I couldn't answer them for some other reason.

Not that I can think of anything that WOULDN'T have that effect on me without being specifically tailored to me which sort of destroys the point of having a survey... Maybe I'm just incompatible with surveys in general.

On politics I would like a way to say, I don't identify with any political theory. To me this is like asking "what religion do you identify most with?" with options christianity, Islam, hinduism, other and the option to click no boxes. If, as an atheist with no religious ties you click other you're in with shintoists and satanists and other other unmentioned religions. If you don't answer you're just not giving an answer. You could just not want to say. In any case the question frames things so that you have to subscribe to a questionable framework to answer it all

Solutions:

Option like the morality one, perhaps, 0 identification options for "other" and "prefer not to say" retaining the ability to click no boxes, though there are probably other reasons to click no boxes. or, as someone suggested in the original thread another question to gage how much you identify with something. The current way If I had to pick an answer I could probably dredge up some preference for one or another theories, but I'd be in the same box as someone actively promoting and a part of what option they clicked. Boxes for strongly identify, identify and weakly identify maybe. Or something.

Got to go.

edit: Could someone kindly explain the downvotes? I'm guessing Too esoteric? Personally not bothered? bothered that I'm bothered?

edit2: just realised some line breaks in the comment box haven't translated to line breaks in the published comment. Is the post just hard to read?

It's also worrying, because it means we're not getting better on average.

It just means that we're at a specific point in memespace. The hypothesis that we are all rational enough to identify the right answers to all of these questions wouldn't explain the observed degree of variance.

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?

P(God) What is the probability that there is a god, defined as a supernatural (see above) intelligent entity who created the universe?

So deism (God creating the universe but not being involved in the universe once it began) could make p(God) > p(Supernatural).

Looking at the the data by individual instead of in aggregate, 82 people have p(God) > p(Supernatural); 223 have p(Supernatural) > p(God).

Yea, I noticed that too. They are so close together that I wrote it off as noise, though. Otherwise, it can be explained by religious people being irrational and unwilling to place god in the same category as ghosts and other "low status" beliefs. That doesn't indicate irrationality on the part of the rest of less wrong.

Could someone break down what is meant by "ontologically basic mental entities"? Especially, I'm not certain of the role of the word 'mental'..

It's barely above background noise, but my guess is when specifically asked about ontologically basic mental entities, people will say no (or huh?), but when asked about God a few will decline to define supernatural in that way or decline to insist on God as supernatural.

It's an odd result if you think everyone is being completely consistent about how they answer all the questions, but if you ask me, if they all were it would be an odd result in itself.

I think Yvain's stipulative definition of "supernatural" was a bad move. I would be very surprised if I asked a theologian to define "supernatural" and they replied "ontologically basic mental entity". Even as a rational reconstruction of their reply, it would be quite a stretch. Using such specific definitions of contentious concepts isn't a good idea, if you want to know what proportion of Less Wrongers are atheist/agnostic/deist/theist/polytheist.

The same issue applied to live-to-1000. If there is a global catastrophe anywhere in the next 1000 years, then living-to-1000 doesn't happen, so it's a heavy discount factor. If there is a FAI, it's also unclear whether original individuals remain and it makes sense to count their individual lifespans.

Good point, and I think it explains one of the funny results that I found in the data. There was a relationship between strength of membership in the LW community and the answers to a lot of the questions, but the anti-agathics question was the one case where there was a clear non-monotonic relationship. People with a moderate strength of membership (nonzero but small karma, read 25-50% of the sequences, or been in the LW community for 1-2 years) were the most likely to think that at least one currently living person will reach an age of 1,000 years; those with a stronger or weaker tie to LW gave lower estimates.

There was some suggestion of a similar pattern on the cryonics question, but it was only there for the sequence reading measure of strength of membership and not for the other two.

Do you think catastrophe is extremely probable, do you think frozen heads won't be useful to a Friendly AI's value, or is it a combination of both?

  (0.5 heads still around)*
      ((0.03 FAI first)*(0.5 humans useful to FAI) +
       (0.97 WBE first)*(0.4 don't die first)*
         ((.02 FAI before revival)*(0.5 humans useful to FAI) +
          (.1 revival with no catastrophe or FAI))))
  = .5*(0.03*0.5 + 0.97*0.4*(0.02*0.5 + 0.1))
  = 2.9%

Possibly less surprising given the extremely low average age... I agree it should be added as a question. Possibly along with an option for "none but want to have them someday" vs "none and don't want any"

By the way, I'm not only first-born, I'm the first grandchild on both sides.

So am I! I wonder if being the first-born is genetically heritable.

There was a poll about firstborns.

I'm a twin that's 2 minutes younger than first-born. Be careful how you ask about birth order.

It might be interesting to ask people whether they usually vote.

Only for those living in countries where voting is non-mandatory

Just you look at all that ugly anchoring at 2100...

2100 seems to be the Schelling point for "after I'm dead" answers.

Who answered 2010? Seriously?

I wonder how this would compare to the results for "pick a year at random."

Or we have family histories that give us good reason to think we'll outlive the mean, even without drastic increases in the pace of technology. That would describe me. Even without that just living to 25 increases your life expectancy by quite a bit as all those really low numbers play heck with an average.

Or we're overconfident in our life expectancy because of some cognitive bias.

I would interpret "the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it", "lifetime" would be the longest typical lifetime, rather than an actuarial average. So -- we know lots of people who live to 95, so that seems like it's within our possible lifetime. I certainly could live to 95, even if it's less than a 50/50 shot.

One other bit -- the average life expectancy is for the entire population, but the average life expectancy of white, college educated persons earning (or expected to earn) a first or second quintile income is quite a bit higher, and a very high proportion of LWers fall into that demographic. I took a quick actuarial survey a few months back that suggested my life expectancy given my family age/medical history, demographics, etc. was to reach 92 (I'm currently 43).

Is the mean age for everyone who answered the age question similar to that of those who answered both the age and singularity questions?

I think I remember estimating a bit lower than that for the singularity - but I wouldn't have estimated at all were it not for the question saying that not answering was going to be interpreted as believing it wouldn't happen at all.

Or show the questions in one order to a fourth of people, the other order to a fourth of people, one of the questions to another forth and the other question to the last fourth.

Keep in mind that many of these links were a long time ago. I came here from Overcoming Bias, but I came to Overcoming Bias from Hacker News.

I'm not sure why the long tail is worrisome. How can it be a bad thing for LW to be connected to people with a wide range of interests?

I'd almost rather see SAT scores at this point.

Or people only have old results from when they were kids, when being at all bright quickly gets you out of range.

Actually, how should one measure own IQ ? I wouldn't know a reasonable place where to start looking for it, as the internet is full of advertising for IQ measurements, i.e., lots of intentional misinformation. Especially avoiding anything restricted to a single location like USA - this makes SAT's useless, well, at least for me.

Anyone expecting otherwise was also being silly.

I'm also a bit surprised (I would have excepted high figures), but be careful to not misinterpret the data : it doesn't say that 70.7% of LWers believe in "anthropogenic global warming", but it does an average on probabilities. If you look at the quarters, even the 25% quarter is at p = 55% meaning that less than 25% of LWers give a lower than half probability.

It seems to indicate that almost all LWers believe in it being true (p>0.5 that it is true), but many of them do so with a low confidence. Either because they didn't study the field enough (and therefore, refuse to put too much strength in their belief) or because they consider the field too complicated/not well enough understood to be a too strong probability in it.

Perhaps they also want to signal a sentiment similar to that of Freeman Dyson:

I believe global warming is grossly exaggerated as a problem. It's a real problem, but it's nothing like as serious as people are led to believe. The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm. It distracts people's attention from much more serious problems.

It seems to be, possibly related to the Libertarian core cluster from OB. In my experience US Libertarians are especially likely to disbelieve in anthropogenic global warming, or to argue it's not anthropogenic, not potentially harmful, or at least not grounds for serious concern at a public policy level.

You mean, as opposed to that kind of proof where we end up with a Bayesian probability of exactly one? :)

Wouldn't it be (relatively) easy and useful to have a "stats" page in LW, with info like number of accounts, number of accounts with > 0 karma (total, monthly), number of comments/articles, ... ?

I think this is an underestimate if anything. People who skip the question might just not want to say and at least a few people who post didn't take the survey. I don't see how enough people could be motivated to put down a random score who don't post to make up for these possibilities.

I'd have preferred "at least 519."

Nevermind.

On the other hand, conjunctive bias exists. It's not hard to string together enough conjunctions that the probability of the statement should be in an extreme range.

Are the questions for the 2009 survey available somewhere?

You're okay. I asked the question about the number of responses then. When I asked the question, there were only 970 :)

What makes you think that sacrificing freedom will reduce this risk, rather than increase it?

If we have any sense of particular measures we can take that will significantly reduce that probability.

Percentage point difference in belief probability isn't all that meaningful. 50% to 51% is a lot smaller confidence difference than 98% to 99%.

69.4% probability means 3.27 odds; 41.2% probability means 1.70 odds.

That means that, in the aggregate, survey takers find (3.27/1.70) = 1.924 -> 0.944 more bits of evidence for life somewhere in the universe, compared to somewhere in the galaxy.

Is that unreasonably big or unreasonably small?

EDIT: Oops, I can't convert properly. That should be 2.27 odds and 0.70 odds, an odds ratio of 3.24, or 1.70 more bits.

You have to admit, that's pretty awful. There's only a 20% difference, is that so?

Fear not! The 28% difference in the average meaningless. The difference I see in that quote is (90-30), which isn't nearly so bad - and the "1" is also rather telling. More importantly by contrasting the averages with the medians and quartiles we can get something of a picture of what the data looks like. Enough to make a guess as to how it would change if we cut the noise by sampling only, say, those with >= 200 reported karma.

(Note: I am at least as shocked by the current downvote of this comment as gwern is by his "20%", and for rather similar reasons.)

Note that the top 25% put 99 or above for Universe. Of those, I would be surprised if there weren't a big chunk that put 100 (indicating 100 - epsilon, of course). This is not weighed in appropriately. Likewise for the bottom 25% for Galaxy.

Basically, "If you hugely truncate the outside edges, the average probabilities wind up too close together" should be entirely unsurprising.

I had the same reaction. The only defense I can imagine is that the second proposition is "in our galaxy" and not "in a random galaxy" - before looking, we should expect to find more other intelligent species in ours, which we know at least doesn't rule out the possibility :)

I tried to guess how many our-galaxy intelligent-life-expectation equivalents exist in our universe. I personally find 50 (the 25% quartile) laughably low.

1:50 and (100-99):(100-80) are fairly extreme - just not extreme enough.

There's only a 20% difference, is that so?

"20% difference" between what and what?

And the large increase in population seems to include a large portion of students... which my experience tells me often has a higher-than-average portion of socialist leanings.

The relative proportions of liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism haven't changed much, and I don't think we can say much about five new communists; by far the most significant change appears to be the doubled proportion of socialists. So this doesn't look like a general loss of metacontrarianism to me.

I'm not sure how to account for that change, though. The simplest explanation seems to be that LW's natural demographic turns out to include a bunch of left-contrarian groups once it's spread out sufficiently from OB's relatively libertarian cluster, but I'd also say that socialism's gotten significantly more mainstream-respectable in the last couple of years; I don't think that could fully account for the doubling, but it might play a role.

What were the labels in the 2009 surveys, exactly? I am a libertarian socialist, and in the 2011 survey I voted “socialism” because the examples made clear that the American (capitalist) meaning of libertarianism was intended, but if the options had been simply labelled “socialism”, “libertarianism” etc. with no example I would have voted the latter. If there are many other libertarian socialists around, this might explain much of the difference between the 2009 and 2011 results.

You have that backwards. If you're young and male, you should suspect that part of your confidence in global warming and lack of aliens is due to your demographics, and therefore update away from global warming and toward aliens.

If an interpretation wasn't given, then you were free to make up whatever meant something to you. To contrast with yours, i interpreted spiritualism in this sense to match "non-theistic spiritualism" eg nature-spirits, transcendental meditation, wish-magic and the like.

It seems to me that a reasonable improvement for the next survey would be to lower the ambiguity of these categories.

I think you are entitled to make up your own interpretation of a question like that :) Yours is a reasonable one IMO.

Which parts, specifically?

(it didn't have an effect like that on me, I didn't see that many surprising things)

I've re-opened the survey at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHlYUVBYU0Q5MjNpMzJ5TWJESWtPb1E6MQ , but please don't send in any more responses.

(To clarify the need for making this happen: it seems that since the survey was closed, it's no longer possible to find the survey questions anywhere.)

Last word of the post.

Could be fixed by adding 'of'

Of the other 72.3% of people who had to find Less Wrong the hard way,

or removing 'who'

The other 72.3% of people had to find Less Wrong the hard way.

Yeah, which is ‘the hard way’ supposed to be? :-)

The irony of this is that if, say, 83.5% of respondents instead thought UFAI was the most worrisome existential risk, that would likely be taken as evidence that the LW community was succumbing to groupthink.

The question IIRC wasn't about the most worrisome, but about the most likely -- it is not inconsistent to assign to uFAI (say) 1000 times the disutility of nuclear war but only 0.5 times its probability.

(ETA: I'm assuming worrisomeness is defined as the product of probability times disutility, or a monotonic function thereof.)

The sequences aren't necessarily claiming UFAI is the single most worrisome risk, just a seriously worrisome risk.

Don't forget - even if unfriendly AI wasn't a major existential risk, Friendly AI is still potentially the best way to combat other existential risks.

More that I think there's a significant chance that we're going to get blown up by nukes or a bioweapon before then.

For me the issue with "the most". Unfriendly AI is a worrisome existential risk, but it still relies on technological breakthrough that we don't clearly estimate. While "bioengineered pandemic" is something that in the short-term future may very well be possible.

That doesn't mean SIAI isn't doing an important job - Friendly AI is a hard task. If you start to try to solve a hard problem when you're about to die if you don't, well, it's too late. So it's great SIAI people are here to hack away the edges on the problem now.

The phrasing of the question was quite specific: "Which disaster do you think is most likely to wipe out greater than 90% of humanity before the year 2100?"

If I estimate a very small probability of either FAI or UFAI before 2100, then I'm not likely to choose UFAI as "most likely to wipe out 90% of humanity before 2100" if I think there's a solid chance for something else to do so.

Consider that I interpreted the singularity question to mean "if you think there is any real chance of a singularity, then in the case that the singularity happens, give the year by which you think it has 50% probability." and answered with 2350, while thinking that the singularity had less than a 50% probability of happening at all.

Yes, Yvain did say to leave it blank if you don't think there will be a singularity. Given the huge uncertainty involved in anyone's prediction of the singularity or any question related to it, I took "don't believe it will happen" to mean that my estimated chance was low enough to not be worth reasoning about the case where it does happen, rather than that my estimate was below 50%.

I'm curious as to how people interpreted this. Does the latter mean that one believes in the supernatural but without a god figure, e.g. buddism, new age? This question looked confusing to me at first glance.

I would have expected the opposite given Yvain's definition of "supernatural". The existence of an agent (or agents) that created the universe seems much more likely than the existence of ontologically basic mental entities. After all, one man's lead software designer of the simulation is another man's god.

People who believed in high existential risk were more likely to believe in global warming, more likely to believe they had a higher IQ than average, and more likely to believe in aliens (I found that same result last time, and it puzzled me then too.)

Why does it puzzle you?

I assume because higher existential risk would seem to generalize to lower chances of aliens existing (because they had the same or similar existential risk as us).

If I remember correctly, the terms were defined in the survey itself, such that "spiritual and atheist" was something like believing in ontologically basic mental entities but not believing in a God that met that description. I didn't find the question confusing, but I did find it only peripherally related to what most people mean by either term. That said, it is a standard LW unpacking of those terms.

More fundamentally than self-labelling, that's an utterly false dilemma. It helps show that the results weren't a totally random 'people on that site then': they show SOMETHING. But what they show must be much more open to debate. To 'rationalist', you can add 1) Has been exposed to LessWrong (sequences and community) 2) English-speaking (unless there were translations?) 3) Minded to take long online surveys: including at the least possibilities 3a) Egotistical enough to think that your survey results must be included 3b) Dedicated enough to the LessWrong community to wish to contribute 3c) Generally publically-minded 3d) Doesn't have enough to do 4) Likely to overestimate one's own IQ

It seems particularly odd to suggest these results are representative of rationalists while recognising both that the proportion of women has tripled since the last survey (and I don't think we're very close to working out what the true proportion is) and that men and women tend to have significantly different attitudes.

The 'direct line to prevailing rationalist opinion' is also straight after what I would guess is most skewed by point (1) above. I'd be shocked to see such high scores for Many Worlds, living in a simulation or cryonics amongst rationalists outside LessWrong.

Finally, could the last set of results itself have had an effect. The most likely effect would be in confirming the in-group opinions, leading to 'evaporative cooling' (if I may!). It seems less likely, but people could have directly calibrated too: I'd be interested in how much that page was accessed ahead of people taking this year's survey.

If 'rationalist' was used just to mean 'LessWrongian' then please ignore the above - and take Robert Lumley's advice!

What would you prefer? "Blacks" is the way I've seen it used in medical and psychological journal articles.

What is your area?

You have just made a falsifiable prediction! If socialism does not turn out to be negatively correlated with reading the sequences, will you rethink your political views?

Downvoted for implicit insult.

As someone who selected "socialist" (and yet has read the sequences) I want to remind you that that the example given in the survey for what "socialist" meant in the context of the survey was Sweden -- it wasn't Cuba, Venezuela, or Greece.

Somehow I don't think adding a smiley face to this post would have helped you get into the positives Bruno_Coelho.

Which in itself is very interesting.

Political identification, in an age when individuals have basically no impact on national politics, is more about aesthetics and signalling than anything else. Socialism is just so much more populist than libertarianism.