2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions

Bonus questions:

• Do you approve or disapprove of Eliezer's moderation of Roko's basilisk?
• How many times have you read or edited the LessWrong.com wiki in the last month?
• Drug use: caffeine, the amphetamine family (eg. Adderall or Ritalin), modafinil, nicotine (could be phrased to be either binary or weekly or monthly)
• Perhaps a question about whether one reads Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?
• Big Five personality test? Shortest, short, long.

Third, please suggest a decent, quick, and at least somewhat accurate Internet IQ test I can stick in a new section, Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions.

GJP had a quick IQ test as part of their surveys, but it's not public. http://iqtest.dk takes about 20-30 minutes but is normed very hard, so you certainly don't have to worry about IQ inflation...

You use the term "X-risk" when talking about anything that kills over 90% of the human population, regardless of whether civilization recovers or continues. "Global Catastrophic Risk" (GCR) would be a better term for the actual questions.

I continue to be surprised (I believe I commented on this last year) that under "Academic fields" pure mathematics is not listed on its own; it is also not clear to me that pure mathematics is a hard science; relatedly, are non-computer science engineering folk expected to write in answers?

There is no option for Associate's under degree earned, or even high school diploma. If we're not interested in the dropout rate that might be forgivable but at the least an Associate's or Trade degree is certainly not "none."

I'm fairly sure my family background qualifies as "nonreligious," this may be worth having as an option. (I don't even have weird religious uncles or anything like that.)

TYPO: Under "liberal," "moire redistribution."

• Last time some commenters went nuts when a noticeable portion of repliers picked the "Socialist" political choice. The description "for example Scandinavian countries" is kinda priming here, since some responders actually are from Scandinavian (or other Nordic) countries. So the question reads for me as "do you like the not that good but sorta working politics at where you live or the stuff the horrible American (and former Soviet Union and present North Korean for Communism) politicians are doing that you only hear about when it goes more or less horribly wrong in some way?"

The distinction between "liberal" and "socialist" is a bit confusing in any case. Without the "like this stuff in this country", I'd describe the Finnish political mainstream as "liberal" with sizable socialist contingent on the left and religious, populist and Swedish-speaking (don't ask) minority parties on the right. If seen as the Evil Political Enemies, the populist group kinda matches up with the conservative one in the query, but low taxes are the mainstream Coalition party's thing, while the religious party is mostly just traditional values and the populist party is traditional values and isolationism. I mostly identify the Coalition party with American liberals, actual social values wise.

• I'd like to actually see David Gerard's suggestion of asking about elementary quantum physics calculation skills in addition to asking for the opinion on many-worlds. Unfortunately I don't have elementary quantum physics calculation skills so I can't contribute a question.

• Also, maybe ask about anonymity:

o I post using my real life name.
o I post using a pseudonym, but my real life name is easily discoverable.
o My real life name isn't easily discoverable, but it wouldn't terribly inconvenience me if it were.
o Someone being able to connect my Less Wrong account to my real life identity would be very bad.

• Inspired by a recent question: "How would you describe Less Wrong to someone who has never heard of it in 140 characters or less?"

• "Political" should include an option for reactionaries OR socialist and liberal should be lumped together.
• "Religious Views" and "Family Religion" are poorly named: theism vs. atheism is more philosophical than religious.
• "Moral Views" will have people going argh because "Other" isn't an option. You do say "most identify with" but that still won't keep people from arghing.
• "SAT scores": you might want to ask for age when the test was taken. Some people take it in middle school and never take it again.
• If you have multiple LW accounts should you add up karma or just report your account with highest karma?

Current status of these suggestions:

• I will probably not be implementing any suggestion that requests a multi-checkbox style question, like:

"What activities do you enjoy? Check all that apply"

[] Fishing

[] Boating

[] Hiking

[] Climbing

The reason is that I haven't been able to figure out how to computer process these effectively; I end out with rows of boxes like "hiking,fishing" or "fishing,boating,climbing" and it's apparently beyond my limited skills to get SPSS to separate these out into separate chunks of information. I could do it like this:

Do you enjoy fishing?

[] Y

[] N

Do you enjoy boating?

[] Y

[] N

And so on, but the more options you want, the less happy I am doing this. Or, teach me a good way to solve this problem using Google Forms and SPSS.

• I am reluctant to change questions that have been on the survey since previous years. For example, Will's suggestion to change the Politics question is good, except that if we did it we would no longer be able to confidently say something like "Less Wrong has gotten more liberal since the last survey". I would rather just include a political compass in the Bonus Questions, plus maybe maybe a more complicated one-word political affiliation question.

• This is also part of my beef with "other", along with the fact that it's going to mean people who are 99% similar to one option but don't feel it perfectly describes them are instead going to pick something that gives us zero information. I very much agree with Vaniver here. I might or might not add it.

• I'm balancing ability to totally perfectly capture all answers with ability to let people who just want to take a basic survey do that without answering a thousand mostly-similar questions. So while I understand that it might be theoretically desirable to separate out for example race vs. ethnicity, or country of birth vs. country of residence, or asexual romantic relationships versus sexual romantic relationships, I'm reluctant to bloat any section too much more than it's already bloated - especially the one on sex. I can already see someone like that tabloid reporter from a while back going "And also, the latest Less Wrong survey included 256 questions about your sex life!"

• Can I get around the ethnicity problem by replacing "White (Non-Hispanic)" with "Latino"? It seems like it should work, but I'm suspicious because none of the US surveys I've encountered have ever done it.

• Kind of want to avoid beating a dead basilisk.

• IQ suggestions sound good.

• ACT suggestion sounds good.

• Most other bonus question suggestions sound good.

• Happy to include Big Five test, AQ test, etc in the Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions section.

• Will fix the Singularity question

• Will probably fix moral views question to mirror PhilPapers version, even though that screws up past-survey-comparison

• Will correct all typos

DEFINE !parse (var=!TOKENS(1) /nbval=!TOKENS(1))
COMPUTE !var=CONCAT(RTRIM(!var),';').
STRING #str(A8).
VECTOR !var (!nbval F8.0).
COMPUTE #beg=1.
LOOP #cnt=1 TO !nbval.
+COMPUTE #str=SUBSTR(!var,#beg).
+COMPUTE #end=INDEX(#str,';')-1.
+DO IF #end=-1.
+ BREAK.
+END IF.
+COMPUTE !var(#cnt)=NUMBER(SUBSTR(#str,1,#end),F8.0).
+COMPUTE #beg=#beg+#end+1.
END LOOP IF #end=-1.
EXECUTE.
!ENDDEFINE.

* Call the macro.
!parse var=c254 nbval=5.
!parse var=c256 nbval=5.

The race question doesn't make much sense for Europeans. I could answer White (non-Hispanic) even though the Hispanic category doesn't exist here. But what should Spaniards answer?

Here are some suggestions:

• "Relationship Style": needs a "No particular preference" option. It does have an "Uncertain" option, but that's not the same thing.
• "Work Status": needs options for "Self-employed" and "Independently Wealthy"; if "For Profit" covers those options, it needs to say as much.
• "Profession": the wording is weird. It says "In what academic field do you currently work or study?", but what if I have a run-of-the-mill, non-academic day job, like loading freight or writing software ?
• "Political": needs a "Don't know, don't care" option
• "Religion": it may be worthwhile to split this question into two: "How many gods do you believe in ?" and "How sure are you of your beliefs ?".
• "Meetups": it may be worthwhile to include an option for "No, but I totally would, if there was one near where I live"
• "P(Aliens)": I may be exposing my own ignorance here, but what does "observable universe" mean ? For example, if there are aliens on some planet that orbits a star 1000 light years away, and those aliens evolved intelligence 10 years ago, do they count ?
• "P(God)": what about gods who exist, yet did not create the universe ?
• "Privacy Checkbox": replace "ie" with "i.e."

I also second the suggestion to round karma to the nearest 10, or better yet 100.

Suggested questions:

"How many languages do you speak fluently ?"
"What is your primary spoken language ?"

I find it way US-centric and pigeon-holing of people, but those things are probably unfixable for anything that could be called a survey. If possible, make a narrow AI to interview subjects and compute amplitude distributions in personspace or something, it's the only way something like this could ever satisfy everyone.

What is the purpose of the survey? An explicit purpose would help with choosing questions.

However, I'm fine with "poking around to see what might be interesting", even if that would be unBayesian.

I think it might be interesting to measure altruism somehow.

Also, my political affiliation is "clueless pragmatist": I don't know how to run my country and haven't studied the question much, but I'm open to whatever works in practice. I assume this is too rare to get its own option in the politics section? Pretty sure I've met at least one other LWer who has a similar view.

The hispanic ethnicity is not generally considered to be tied to a specific race. In various forms I have seen and completed recently, race and hispanic ethnicity are two separate questions. This is more accurate because it does not exclude/ignore, e.g., black hispanics who may live in or descend from Caribbean or Central American nations.

The question about children should have an option "0, and unsure about having some in the future".

It would help to provide lists of "hard sciences" and "soft sciences" so that people know what they are selecting.

There is a typo in the Liberal answer for the Political question: "moire redistribution of wealth".

Some people may come from families of mixed religious background. This question should have either a multiple-answer option (more accurate) or specify that responders should choose based on some criteria (vague, open to interpretation).

For the IQ tests, two which came up in the comments after the last survey were iqtest.dk and sifter.org/iqtest. My scores on both tests were consistent. In a reply to the previously-linked comment, gwern linked his list of online IQ tests.

ACT scores have already been mentioned as an addition to the SAT scores. I think a category for GRE general scores would also be worthwhile; the GRE has higher resolution than the SAT or ACT at the high tail. Going further on these questions, splitting up the scores into the different subject areas (math/verbal) would be nice. Of course, the GRE scoring system has been recently changed, which would necessitate two possible response areas like the SAT question has now. (There are (questionably) accurate conversions between the different scoring systems which could be used for the survey analysis and comparisons.)

Another question which might be interesting: ask responders to take the AQ test. It's not long, and it provides an inexact but standardized measure which is correlated to Asperger's/high-functioning autism. Probably better than relying on self-diagnoses, which is common.

In the Less Wrong Use question, there is a typo: "but never a top-level psost".

Bonus questions:

• How many hours per week do you spend reading (anything at all, including for work and school, fiction and nonfiction, Less Wrong and other web sites).
• How many hours per week do you spend composing text (writing or typing for work or school, blog comments, emails, diaries, stories, math papers, or anything else).
• True Prisoner's Dilemma: Cooperator or defect?
• Are you confused by the subject of free will? (yes/somewhat/no)

I don't remember my SAT score, but I remember my ACT score. I plan on simply using the equivalent SAT score, if I should not, for some reason, please say so.

Significantly upvoted things from this thread that are missing:

"We should ask if people participated in the previous surveys." - Jack

"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." - Jack

"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." - lavalamp

"Suggestion: add "cryocrastinating" as a cryonics option." - lavalamp

"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." - prase

Do you use Spaced Repetition System learning (Anki, Supermemo etc)?

-Yes

-No

-I have never heard of Spaced Repetition System learning.

I strongly recommend having something about being bi/multi-racial.

You may want "other" included for political beliefs, possibly even including a text box. And I wouldn't mind "How sure are you about your political beliefs?"

I don't know how weird this is, but I'm not sure what my family actually believed. They sent me to Hebrew school, but they didn't talk about religion.

I'm interested in what LWers are doing or have done to improve their lives, and how it's working out for them, but perhaps this should be a separate post or a different survey.

If you plan to release the individual answers as you did last time, please keep in mind that karma alone is sufficient to identify a lot of people, so removing other identifying information makes more sense if you also round the karma (e.g. to nearest power of 10 or 5 or some other number).

You could do this when generating the xls file, or you could give karma ranges as options in the survey. If you do the former, some (small number of) people will lie about their karma to prevent you from identifying them.

P(Many Worlds) needs also to ask if the respondent actually knows and understands the equations for practical purposes (well enough to, e.g, solve Schrodinger's equation for a hydrogen atom), since Many Worlds consists of taking the equations seriously. I think it would be of interest to know how well the respondent understands the thing they are opining a probability of.

In the Country question, you should clarify whether you mean citizenship, or residence.

Bonus question suggestion: Torture, specks, or undecided?

Edited: to make the question in the exact way it should be asked:

In the context of Eliezer's "Torture vs Dust Specks" dilemma, do you choose:

o Torture

o Specks

o Undecided

Lord Anthony of the House Stark has developed a technology to create copies of people. He offers you to make 99999 copies of yourself, in exchange you and your copies will have to become his serfs and live the rest of your lives as medieval subsistence farmers. Assume that:

• Living as a subsistence farmer is less desirable than your current lifestyle, but not as much undesirable that you would wish to kill yourself.

• If you refuse his offer, your lifestyle is not going to be disrupted by extreme events such as catastrophes or technolgical singularities.

Questions:

1) Do you accept his offer?

2) Do you believe that accepting the offer is moral, immoral, or morally neutral?

(first appeared here)

Suggested question:

What fandoms or subcultures do you consider an important part of your identity? How important is each?

(example subcultures: Brony, goth, homestuck, juggalo, hippie, whovian(sp?), rationalist, harry potter, etc.) (identification: The HATE of the subulture is an important part of my identity ... kinda like the show I guess? ... spend a decent amount of time on related forums and provide some (fan) content ... It's my ENTIRE life!! ) ok I suck at coming up with good names for these levels or how to differentiate levels of obsession. Also this post is kinda spiraling down into rambling, but hopefully you get the idea of what info I'm after and can come up with a more formal and shorter way of expressing it.

3 text feild for subculture name and corsponding radio button for level of engagement for each should do.

Do you intend for your definition of 'Supernatural' to exclude e.g. Matrix Lords, or Mormon-style Gods who were once men and will raise other men to Godhood? Maybe so, in which case fair enough, but it feels weird that there's a whole class of Christian theists who'd have to give 0 for P(God).

Given that no label can completely describe a person's political views, with which of these labels do you MOST identify?

Under Political you really have to add a label for "Reactionary". Given how much the word "socialist" fucks Americans' brains up I'd also prefer if you used the phrase "Social democratic" to describe what you assign to Scandinavia-type politics.

Or alternatively remove the distinction between what you call "Socialist" and "Liberal", which seems to be only a manner of degree, and place them both under the "Progressive" label -- which makes a decent enough symmetry: three options for the standard historical right-left spectrum of Reactionary, Conservative, Progressive, and two corresponding to the remodellings of society represented by the more extreme opposite views of Libertarian-Communist.

Relationship Goals " ...and currently looking for more relationship partners" " ...and currently not looking for more relationship partners"

This has problems with connotations. "Currently not looking" doesn't necessarily mean that someone isn't open to having more partners, it might they're just not actively searching.

"How many children do you have" doesn't include options like "0, and I've not decided whether I want any" or "0, and though I would want to have some, it's extremely unlikely that I will ever have any." Frankly I don't see why you are confusing a question about what people have currently with what they want.

Also, it's an awkward question to ask if anyone has had a child who died. Do you mean all the children they've had, or the ones currently living?

The 'Relationship Status' question would usually have more options, if only for sensitivity reasons. Here's a standard one:

What is your current marital status?

• Single, never married
• Living together, not married
• Married
• Divorced
• Separated
• Widowed
• Prefer not to answer

Even though you're not forcing responses on these, having a 'Prefer not to answer' is useful for two main reasons. First, it distinguishes between skipping a question on purpose and accidentally. Second, you can't de-select a radio button, so it's useful to have if you accidentally click a different option.

The 'cohabitation' option is pretty new - it's become very popular in the US and apparently seems worth tracking. A lot of people who are cohabitating are uncomfortable answering 'single' or 'married', and will often choose pretty inconsistently between the two. Similarly, widowed people might not want to answer 'single'. It should be easy to group them on the back end if you don't care about the distinction.

~All questions should have some kind of "other/not sure" answer.

In what academic field do you currently work or study? If more than one, please choose most important.

Is this going to be asked only of people who selected "academic" for career or should language change to "In what academic field did/do you specialize"

How about a write-in “Do you have any comments on this survey?” question?

In the “Older Siblings” question, a twin counts as 0.5, right? ;-)

"Number of Partners" should probably either read "Number of current partners" or "Prefered number of partners" for clarity.

Standard complaints about politics: Can we not use the americanised version of "Liberal"? In most of the world "Liberal" means classical liberal. (You also made a small spelling mistake in this one). Equally, Communism is a type of Socialism, and socialists aren't all liberal. Why not just have separate axis for social and economic liberality? And what about prediction markets / reactionaries?

P(X-Risk) should perhaps be called P(Not X-Risk), or re-word the question to reverse it.

Children could be split into "how many now" and "how many desired". Bad people can give a lower answer to the second than the first.

Questions:

• 1 box or 2 box
• Income

The year of singularity question is unclear, and it also tries to make blank a meaningful response (which doesn't work so well because there are lots of reasons why people leave a question blank). It would be clearer to say something like: "By what year do you think the Singularity will occur? Answer such that there is a 50% chance of the Singularity happening by the year that you give and a 50% chance of it happening later or not at all. If you think that there is less than a 50% chance that the Singularity will ever happen, write "never"."

Unless you want the median time to be conditional on the Singularity occurring, in which case it would be good to make that explicit and have a separate P(Singularity) question.

I would be inclined to add in a "Anarchist" category for politics. And a surprising number of European parties are "Christian Democrat". They tend to be in favor of some level of wealth redistribution and of labor unions (unlike US conservatives), but socially conservative (unlike US liberals). Not sure if there's a general term for this; I've heard "religious left", but that seems open to alternate interpretations.

With which of these moral philosophies do you MOST identify?

• There is no such thing as "morality"

Can you please rephrase this to "moral skepticism"? Or is there some benefit to saying it in the way you have?

Note that moral skepticism does not necessarily equate to nihilism -- error theories, fictionist accounts and moral revisionism all talk about doing what others would call "the right thing", even though they are all moral skeptic theories.

Also, don't you think this section is a bit coarsely defined? I'd love to see a breakdown of moral skeptics categorized as revisionists, fictionists, etc. You can always include an "general moral skeptic" option for those people that stop thinking about metaethics once they decide moral skepticism is correct. Similarly, I'd love to see more finely grained options under consequentialism and the other broad categories of this section.

Political:

You have no option for "other". I think that if one wants to make a difference in the world, one should get involved in non-profit work, not spend a bunch of time researching candidates only to contribute an extraordinarily tiny fraction of the overall decision making power toward picking somebody that you can't be sure will do what they said they would and will most likely favor some totally unproven strategy for improving things anyway. What really clinches it for me is that I often have reasons to believe that the ideas being promoted are not worth my time. For instance, our school system is fundamentally broken in a way that no amount of tweaking can possibly fix, but I've never seen a school reform idea that addresses this. For another example: In a country where we've got so much technology that most of us are essentially carrying around tiny computers in our pockets, why do we see it as worthwhile to bicker over whether abortion should be legal when we could put all that time, money and energy into improving contraceptive technology? If we made unintended pregnancy unheard of, the abortion debate would be N/A.

Because I prefer to spend my time doing things that make more sense than this, I can't be bothered to research the different political orientations in order to choose one.

I need an "other" option if I am to answer the politics question.

[comment deleted]

How about some basic probability question, like the expected value of something, or something that requires you to use Bayes' theorem?

My wishlist:

1.) I second the call for a Big Five Personality test battery.

2.) I'd like a question asking what percentage of income do you donate to charity, if any, and which charities, if any?

3.) I'd like a clarification of what "spiritual" means.

4.) I'd like to see "consequentialism" expanded into utilitarianism and non-utilitarian consequentialism.

5.) I'd like to see dietary preferences (like along the lines of vegetarian/vegan) and/or questions about concern for nonhuman animal welfare.

Other questions:

What is your interest in joining a startup or being an entrepreneur?

What is your primary motive for your work: fame, money, recognition, helping the world, etc.?

How altruistic do you consider yourself (donate time, money, yearly, monthly, etc)?

How interested are you in meeting lesswrong readers or contributors?

This looks really fun! I can't wait to fill it out and see everyone's answers. I guess I am a person who likes internet quizzes after all.

Is there anything that seems unusual about LWers as seen at meetups and/or on the blog that hasn't been covered by existing questions?

Can you clarify what you mean by the "Number of Partner" question? I infer you mean number of current partners, but I'm not entirely sure.

For the "Profession" question, can you include a text-box for "other social science" and "other hard science"?

On the "Degree" question, include a High School/GED option.

What is the probability that supernatural events, defined as those involving ontologically basic mental entities, have occurred since the beginning of the universe?

What does "ontologically basic mental entities" mean?

In addition to asking about the rather tricky to define singularity, I'd like to see predictions for when a human level artificial general intelligence will first be made, if ever.

Under family religious views: Could you either allow us to select all that apply, or add something to the instructions about whether you want some sort of strange average, pick the best you can, or write in other? (Example: one christian parent of some sort and one atheist parent, what should I choose?)

Are ranges acceptable on some questions to reflect uncertainty, such as IQ?

Bonus questions ( or even main questions to add): Has reading something on less wrong caused you to change your mind? (Add qualifications here if desired, e.g. you updated your probability estimate by x, decided to collect more evidence then updated by x, etc.)

Additional question- more accurate location info than just country. (To keep anonymity, would it be possible to pull this column out of the rest of the resulting spreadsheet before it is distributed or looked at?)

Option 1- Iff you are from the USA, What state do you live in?

Option 2- Please enter either your 5 digit zip-code, or the nearest city (include state or country also)

I think this is a good question, because a previous questionnaire about people's specific location was how I saw that there were enough locals to start a meetup here.

Under "Part Five", you list SAT scoring, but not ACT scoring. I know far less people use the ACT, but if you're going to add in an option for SAT scores, I would also include a place for ACT scores.

Third, please suggest a decent, quick, and at least somewhat accurate Internet IQ test I can stick in a new section, Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions.

I think the primary free internet IQ test I've seen people use is this one, but as it's Raven's only it might introduce a skew. (I suspect many people here will do better on the related subtests of the WAIS-IV, for example.)

Ask about special diets or eating habits (e.g. paleo, atkins, vegan, vegetarian...etc)

The explanation "number of partners" question is problematic right now. It reads "0 for single, 1 for monogamous relationship, >1 for polyamorous relationship" which makes it sound like you must be monogamous if you happen to have 1 partner. I am polyamorous, have one partner and am looking for more.

In fact, I started wondering if it really meant "ideal number of partners", in which case I'd be tempted to put the name of a large cardinal.

I'd like to see finer-grained surveying of what fields people work in. Reading this post (esp. PZ Myers' take on WBE roadmap) made me update in the direction of cryonics and uploading not working, and also made me more worried about information cascades on LW in fields where users have little collective expertise.

(It might also be interesting to have another question along the lines of: how informed/accurate does the stuff you've read on LW regarding your field seem to be? What's something important going on in your field that LW should be discussing? Etc. Dunno if the first question is meaningful for most fields though; I'm just throwing this out there.)

I'd replace “Number of Partners”, “Relationship Goals” and “Relationship Status” with one “Relationship Status” with answers Single (but not looking), Single (and looking), In a committed monogamous relationship, In one or more open/polyamorous relationships (but not looking for more partners), In one or more open/polyamorous relationships (and looking for more partners), Engaged, and Married.

Relationship Style needs an option for Monogomish. I'm in a monogamous relationship, but we go to swinger events/clubs and sometimes play with others.

Religious Background; What is your family's religious background? What are people where the parents come from different religions supposed to answer? I don't see the advantage of forcing people to check exactly one box.

I find it also hard to say whether my family has a Christian background. Neither of my parents believe in god. They however do use the organisation. I think they married in an evangelic church. My father is now married to an another woman and that marriage is blessed by the catholic church. My father is also a member of the catholic church. He pays the corresponding taxes. He self labels as humanist. My parent allowed both my sister and myself to make our own decisions about religion. My sister is baptised but doesn't believe in god. I'm not baptised and self label as ignostic. In school I took evangelical religion lessons.

What kind of background I'm supposed to select? I find it also surprising that there no "atheist" choice.

As a last question - with people having worked through the other questions, and knowing the extent and details of their own answers - allow them to optionally provide their username.

How about a question about how people treat equations in articles? Is there anything between skip entirely and check carefully?

The political definitions are confusing and many would consider some of the distinctions wrong, clearly Americanized. American liberals are to the right of European conservatives, USSR was a socialism just a different kind, etc., etc.....

Find a non-political way of describing political preferences or, better yet, break it up into a political compass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass (test on http://politicalcompass.org/ to chart your location.)

1. Economic
2. Social

Apatheism should also be added to the list of choices for religion.

Might have a Revolution vs Refom politics question.

Profession question is IMO too focused on professions stereotypical to LW and also needs an Other Engineering option.

Politics question might need an option for anarchists, and an option for I Deny The Framework.

First off I think that at less wrong you could get better results by including an option on some question that says something to the effect of: those options are such a poor match if I picked one it would make the results worse/add more noise than signal/you would actually lose information if you interpreted it at face value.

With what race do you most identify? Why is this question about racial identification rather than ontological membership? If I'm white but I totally think black people are awesome the instructions tell me to put black which you probably don't want. Also (sort of) it would be nice to have an option not to racially identify.

With what gender do you primarily identify? This includes an option for other but no option for none. I wouldn't expect none to be much less common than other.

politics question should have an option or two options for politically averse/uninterested. The current setup unecessarrilly railroads people into appearing to have poltical identifications. The thing at the start of my post would be especially useful for this question.

The time in community asserts that the user is part of the less wrong community or requires the somewhat creative answer of 0. Add a do you consider yourself part of the lesswrong community or an instruction to put 0 if you don't consider yourself part of the lesswrong community.

How about a question about how much time/effort people put into politics? Into doing practical political work (volunteering, lobbying, holding office) as distinct from theory?

What is your position on the existence of an external reality independent from humans?

a) There is nothing outside me. I'm the only mind and the only entity in the universe.

b) It's not epistemically proper to assume a priori the existence of an external reality. We can hypothesize the existence of external entities as part of a model to explain our sensory experiences. It is not meaningful to discuss about the difference between entities that are part of the model (the "map") and entities that are part of an independent external reality (the "territory").

c) There exist an external reality independent from humans which determines our experiences. It's epistemically proper to assume this a priori rather than consider it an hypothesis. It's meaningful to discuss about the difference between between entities that are part of the model (the "map") and entities that are part of the independent external reality (the "territory").

d) Like c), but in addition to physical objects, the external reality also contains mathematical objects such as the natural numbers, Euclidean/Riemannian geometry, the Turing machine, etc.

Mostly a curiosity question: Are you primarily interested in demographic information? Insofar as you are (legitimately) concerned that the survey is too long, I would expect you to put the questions you are most interested in up front in the survey. And I was therefore surprised to see the demographic questions first.

Also: The 'Roman Catholic' religion option should probably be 'Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox'.

I agree with other posters that non-US-centric races would be a good idea. But let me actually follow the instructions in the above post and try to give an alternative. The questions are close to industry standard; the 'race' answer choices are a combination of American and British race categories with some influence from other countries.

Are you of Hispanic (Latin) descent?

• Yes
• No
• Prefer not to answer

Which of the following races / ethnic groups do you identify most closely with?

• Asian (East Asian)
• Asian (Indian subcontinent)
• Asian (Middle Eastern)
• Asian (Pacific Islander)
• Black
• Native American
• White/Caucasian
• Other
• Prefer not to answer

I was unsure whether to break out 'Black' into Caribbean and 'African origin' - that seems pretty provincially British.

EDIT: Changed the wording of 'Latin' so as not to confuse Europeans. Did it work?

What is the probability that significant global warming is occurring or will soon occur, and is primarily caused by human actions?

There's no reason to use a vague word like "significant". I think it would be best to use the formulations that the IPCC uses. There are two interesting issues:

1) Do people understand the current strength of evidence for climate change?

P(Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations)

Source: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/spms2.html

2) Future warming: P(Continued GHG emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would be larger than those observed during the 20th century) Source: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/spms3.html

If there's room for a third question I would also like:

3) P(Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were higher than during any other 50-year period the past 1300 years)

Source: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/spms1.html

How long, in approximate number of months, have you been in the Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong community

It could help to mention when OB/LW were first founded, so us old-timers wouldn't need to look it up.

"Which disaster do you think is most likely to wipe out greater than 90% of humanity before the year 2100?"

Should probably have a "none" option.

Under education: Include an option for significant education and training that did not result in a degree by an accredited institution.

Gender should also have a 'how strongly do you identify with this gender?' axis.

There are several more axes of relationship status to be considered.

A full section on specific educational background- math, physics, &tc. e.g. "Have you ever calculated a definite infinite integral?" "Have you ever used a Mollier Diagram"?

For every multiple choice question, without any exception, offer an "other" or "Other (please specify)".

Preferred relationship style currently lists

• prefer monogamous
• prefer polyamorous
• uncertain
• other

Is indifferent supposed to go under uncertain (as in "I'm uncertain if I have a preference") or other? I think it should just be added to the response list.

Typo: the first question of "Part Four: Views and Opinions" refers to the "US Labour Party".

The relationship goal question isn't specific enough. Considering that the male to female ratio is so off, we should also be asking how many people have given up on finding someone. "Not looking" doesn't indicate that at all as you can stop looking temporarily due to circumstance and there were so many on the last survey that I have to wonder if those guys have given up. There could be a lot of them.

Not sure how to phrase this, since people would react to this in multiple ways. Some will try to settle and have a relationship with people who are not compatible or they'll accept some kind of alternative arrangement. For instance, special friends, or resorting to poly due to inability to find someone who sufficiently satisfies their needs, resulting in needing multiple lovers to do the job (NOT saying this is the only reason someone might go poly or even a common one, I really have no idea.) Others might feel that even though they don't think it's likely that they'll find someone, they don't give up. Also, there's a difference between people who are not actively looking but would take it if they got a chance and people who are intentionally refraining due to unfavorable circumstances. Maybe this:

Relationship Goals

...and currently looking for more relationship partners.

...and currently refraining from adding relationship partners for reasons I expect to be temporary.

...and currently not active in seeking compatible relationship partners due to the difficulty of finding them.

...and currently not looking due to my existing relationship(s).

...and currently not looking for some other reason.

Suggested addition:

There is a free online version of the Myers-Briggs personality test that does not require an email address and even gives percentages at humanmetrics.com. Not saying this is scientific but I've used it to test predictions in the past and that has worked. That I've compared two different maps to a territory and gotten the same result with each seems like evidence they're detecting patterns of some kind and that's enough to make me think that the humanmetrics test was not completely botched.

I have posted a detailed prediction of LessWrong's Myers-Briggs results.

The Myers-Briggs is criticized for being imperfect due to people sometimes transcending a personality type dichotomy, though, from my view, developing multiple aspects of yourself is a sign that one has made progress in developing as a person. I don't see it as meaning that the test is flawed but that the idea that personality should never change is an incorrect assumption and that the Myers-Briggs therefore MIGHT have the unintended consequence of also being able to detect people who have reached an advanced level of personal development. Because I am curious about this, and because it will give us some data about the test itself, I am proposing these questions:

Have you gotten a score near the border between any of the letters? If so, which pairs?

Have you gotten a different result when taking the test multiple times? If so, which pairs were different?

Note: There can be more than one pair that switches! (This is rare, but I've seen it happen to a few people, including me.)

I'm not completely aware of the correct protocol here, but "with what gender do you primarily identify? ... M (transgender f -> m) ..." is not something I would expect a transgender person to say - if I'd made that much of an effort to be (fe)male, I'd want to be "(fe)male", not "(fe)male (transgender ...)".

Splitting out blog referrals from general referrals seems odd; is there a reason you cannot use "[ ] some blog, [ ]" and "[ ] other, [ ]".

I see no benefit to "revealed" in "What is the probability that any of humankind's revealed religions is more or less correct?".

Calibration IQ: "... is greater than the reported IQ..."

Extortion can be defined as special kind of trade offer that one party (Alice) would prefer to avoid, but once the offer is made, it is in Alice interest to accept it. For instance, Bob asks Alice to pay him money in order to prevent him from damaging her property. If Alice values her property more than the amount of money Bob demands, then it is in her interest to pay him.

It can be speculated that a decision theory that allows acausal trade could in principle also allow acausal extortion: Alice could predict at time t0 that if she doesn't perform a costly action, at some future time t1 Bob will inflict her a punishment that is more costly than that action, even after discounting. Alice could make this prediction even if Bob hasn't threatened her yet.

What is your opinion on acausal extortion?

a) The acausal trade scenario is theoretically incorrect, thus acausal extortion is also theoretically impossible.

b) Acausal trade is theoretically possible, but not pratically feasible, thus the same holds for acausal extortion.

c) Acausal trade is theoretically possible, but there are logical reasons that make acausal extortion impossible even in theory.

d) Acausal trade is practically feasible. Acausal extortion is theoretically possible, but there are practical reasons that make it unfeasible.

e) Acausal extortion is practically feasible and it is or will become a serious concern.

Alice an Bob are playing a variation of a one-shot Prisoner's dilemma. In this version of the game, instead of choosing their actions simultaneously, Alice moves first, and then Bob moves after he knows Alice move. However, Alice know Bob's thought processes well enough that she can predict his move ahead of time. Both Alice and Bob are rational utility maximizers.

There are two possible ways Alice and Bob can reason:

a) Alice predicts that Bob, being an utility maximizer, will always play Defect no matter what she plays. Hence she also playes Defect in order to minimize her loss. Bob sees that Alice played Defect and playes Defect since he can gain nothing by playing Cooperate. This results in the uncoperative outcome (D, D).

b) Alice reasons that the asymmetric outcomes (D, C) and (C, D) are impossible. (D, C) is impossible because, as stated above, once Alice played Defect, Bob has nothing to gain by playing Cooperate. (C, D) is impossible because Alice can predict Bob's move, hence she will never play Cooperate if she predicts that Bob will play Defect. Therefore, only the symmetric outcomes (C, C) and (D, D) remain. Since Alice prefers (C, C) to (D, D), she plays Cooperate. Bob, at this point, is bounded to also play Cooperate, because if he played Defect then Alice's prediction would be falsified, and this in inconsistent with the assumption that Alice can predict Bob's move. Therefore, the cooperative outcome (C, C), also known as acausal trade, results.

Questions:

1) Which analysis is correct?

2) Is this scenario just a theoretical curiosity that can never happen in real life because it is impossible to accurately predict the actions of any agent of any signficant complexity, or is this a scenario that is relevant (or will become relevant) to practical decision making?

When it comes to politics I don't think asking for labels is much help.

I would rather ask: Which country of the following list do you consider to be ruled best:

1) USA 2) Finland 3) Germany 4) France 5) Japan 6) Singapure 7) China 8) United Kingdom 9) Netherlands

Which do you consider to be ruled worst? If it's possible the survey taker could even order the countries into a list. The difference between US Republicans and US Democrats is very small. The difference between how different countries are governed is much stronger.

A few years ago I could have said that I supported US democrats but now they are for a president that has powers like killing his own citizens without a court trial. On the matter of social security Obama himself said that there isn't much difference between him and Romney. Both don't believe in persecuting high level figures on wall street.

• What's the point of the Chromosomes question? Once you know someone is a cis male or a trans female, does knowing that they have a Y chromosome tell you that much more?
• The “White (Hispanic)”--“White (non-Hispanic)” dichotomy is weird to non-Americans, and you may want to add an “Other” answer -- or what are (say) Arabs or Maori supposed to answer?
• I'd split the Children question into “how many children you have” (write-in) and “do you hope to have more children in the future” (with answers “yes, soon”, “yes, later on in my life”, “no” and “not sure”).
• If you don't want to add more options to “Political” (e.g. libertarian socialist), please add a “None of the above” answer. (Also, I'd say “most strongly identify or lean towards”.) BTW “liberal” and “libertarian” have other meanings (especially outside America), but that's not a big deal given you give examples.
• As IIRC was suggested after the last survey, you might link to a non-amateur Internet IQ test, if such a thing exists.
• Maybe ask both total karma and last-30-day karma?
• What counts as “intelligent life” in P(Aliens)? I'm assuming that octopus/crow/dolphin/bonobo-level intelligence doesn't count, and that humans right after the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution do.
• In P(Cryonics) you might want to replace “average” with “randomly chosen”, if you mean the average of the probabilities.
• “Singularity” is ambiguous -- do you mean P(singularity before the year X|singularity ever) = P(singularity after the year X|singularity ever), or P(singularity before the year X) = P(singularity after the year X or never)?

Income or at least income range should be a question. Any intellectual cluster eventually and inevitably gets challenged with the question “yeah, well if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich?”

Being able to say, “actually we’re doing pretty well for our demography.” Is one possible answer. If LW is doing poorly for its demography, that’s also worth knowing. Maybe people are in early phase startups and don’t have income yet, maybe they are in the peace corp. Either way, it seems like something the community would want to know.

May increase concerns on anonymity though…

Degree:

You have no option for 2 year degrees. I have one, so I need that option.

Work experience:

I'm an IT person but not a computer scientist. Maybe you don't see us other IT people as being "one of us" but if so, then the question needs an IT option.

I don't see a pattern behind the work experience question. This might be something that happened if the goal with this question changed between surveys but you wanted to keep the same options for the sake of being able to compare the two surveys. So, I won't suggest refocusing it to follow a clarified pattern but maybe a few other general categories (like "Other IT" for instance) can be added if there were enough responses from the last survey to justify it.

For the probability estimates, I think it would be valuable to also ask for a ballpark estimate of how much time the survey-taker has put into thinking about each probability. Some people might spend (or have already spent) significantly more time thinking about these probabilities than others; gathering this information could provide a useful dimension for analysis.

New questions: 'What is the likelihood that you will go into space?' 'What is the likelihood that someone you have physically touched will go into space?'

On the politics question about libertarianism, "distribution" should read "redistribution". Also, ideally the political questions would ask about regulation and/or spending rather than taxes.

P(What's the likelihood that regular condome use will prevent that you get HIV when you have regular sex with someone with HIV)

Studies that investigated the issue didn't found 100% protection. I think it's an interesting test for overconfidence.

From my libertarian perspective, the primary political issue isn't taxes and spending, but control.

Less taxes are an instance of less control, but not the only one, and it's probably a tenth as important as the harm done by the aggregate of controls. Money is a means to fulfill wants. Taxing away some of my money still allows me to prioritize my wants, and spend my money on my greatest wants. Making something illegal entirely takes away the option, imposing a much greater cost than taking away some percentage of my income.

Even in purely financial terms, controls set in place by the collaboration of rent seekers and central planners probably amount to a hidden tax which almost matches the aggregate level of taxation.

Redistribution involves control as well, and for me, basic principles of property. What if I'm against all the perverse incentives of the usual centrally planned redistributionist welfare state, but actually want more direct redistribution in the form of a guaranteed income? What if someone else is against the crony capitalist redistribution of central planning, but wants more social welfare redistribution?

Also, the socially permissive versus traditional values really doesn't tell me much about a person's politics. Probably some decent correlation, but it doesn't tell me what they wish to empower the government to do.

That's the relevant and specific question for politics.

What do you wish to empower the government to do?

• Libertarians - Enforce rights against encroachment by others. Enforce property rights.
• Conservatives - Enforce rights against encroachment by others. Enforce existing property rights. Enforce greater social good.
• Liberals - Enforce rights against encroachment by others. Enforce property rights. Enforce greater material equality. Enforce greater social good. Enforce greater individual good.
• Social Democrats - Like liberals, only more so.
• Communists - Enforce rights against encroachment by others. Enforce greater material equality. Enforce greater social good. Enforce greater individual good.

Everyone wants some basic personal rights to be protected, such as the right to life. The further rights enforced sometimes conflict with the previous, and override them.

Maybe an anarchist can find a way to rejigger this so that they can fit as well, but except for complete pacifists, I find anarchism incoherent, and can't do it myself.

EDIT: Really? Downvoted into oblivion? The OP asks for comments and critique. I critique the framing of the political question based on the inadequacies of the conceptual schema used, identify what I consider the relevant question for politics, and provide a consistent schema to categorize the different answers to that question given by different political outlooks.

Change 'race' to:
'social and biological ethnicity' or 'recent ancestral origins' where recent means the past two to four centuries.*

Offer more options - for example, 'humanity' or 'I do not identify with any ethnicity' or 'I do not notice pigmentation'; perhaps even 'I object to this question', as army1987 suggested.

If the lattermost option, I wager proffering a followup question ("Please elaborate") would elicit enlightening answers. (60% confidence: it might not be answered at all)

• Edited in recognition of sound objections.

When it comes to politics how about adding: P(It would be morally right if the US raises taxes)

To me the answer seems to be more valuable than the conversative/liberal labels.

My notes :

• (the word "race", using that word for humans is very offensive - technically speaking, there are races of dogs and cows, but not of humans (features in humans are much continuous and spread, while in domesticated animals they tend to be more discrete and clustered) - see below ) ;

• "number of partners" should be precised, I'm not sure it's clear how to compute it for all kind of relations ;

• "work status" : being employed or independent could be an interesting information too ;

• "degree" : the names of diploma is quite US-centric, why not just ask for number of years of university study (after end of high school) ?

• "political": that can easily lead to troll, but the labels you put don't match to the description in my opinion, for example Scandinavia is social democracy, not socialism, and communism doesn't mean "complete state control", but under theoretical communism, there is no state anymore; I would suggest leaving only the example, and removing the label.

• what is "religious background" and how is it different from "family religion" ? My family is atheist since generations (my grandparents were all atheists), but I'm in France, a traditionally catholic country, what should I answer ?

• SAT : too US centric, I don't think it should be included.