Requesting Questions For A 2017 LessWrong Survey

I and some other rationalists have been thinking about cryonics a lot recently and how we might improve the strength of cryonics offerings and the rate of adoption. After some consideration, we came up with a couple suggestions for changes to the survey that we think would be helpful and interesting.

1. A question along the lines of "What impact do you believe money and attention put towards life extension or other technologies such as cryonics has on the world as a whole?" Answers:

   • Very positive
   • Positive
   • Neutral
   • Negative
   • Very Negative

   The purpose of this question is to evaluate whether the community feels that resources put toward the benefit of individuals through life extension and cryonics has a positive or negative impact on the world. For example, people who expect to live longer may have more of a long term orientation, leading them to do more to improve the future.

2. Add to the question about being signed up for cryonics an option along the lines of "No, I would like to sign up but can't due to opposition I would face from family or friends". We hear this is one of the reasons people don't sign up for cryonics. It would be great to get some numbers on this, and it doesn't add an extra question, just an extra option for that question.

On average how many days do you eat meat per week? (Y/N)

Did you eat meat yesterday? (Y/N)

Having the two questions is interesting because in aggregate it allows us to test people's abilities to estimate their average meet consumption.

Perhaps a question like "At what age did you first encounter or begin to develop Rationality?"

I currently think it's very likely the thought patterns that make one a useful programmer are in place sometime in grade school. Given the overlap between rationalists and programmers, I'm curious if something similar is going on. I managed to run a small test by handing HP:MoR to a bunch of kids in one of the local library programs and the ones who were already growing into a geeky/intellectual cluster took to it pretty well.

If we want to do outreach, knowing whether we're convincing people with different kinds of minds to think rationally or just finding people who already sort of think like this sounds useful. Knowing the age at which say, HP:MoR or the sequences could be understood means we have more data whether introducing college students, high school students, or grade school students to them is going to be interesting or boring to them. I don't think we can necessarily get that answer from just asking what age people started developing this mindset, nor do I think their answers will be without error bars since we may be talking about childhood memories. Also, I'm genuinely curious- are the stories of developing this strain of thought in the single digit ages weird exceptions or the typical origin story of a rationalist?

Apologies if that kind of question has already been explored.

I would like to see an (optional) personality test section - email me at jsinick@gmail.com if you're interested in the possibility, as I have some detailed thoughts.

I'd be interested in a question about aerobic fitness. My impression is that most rationalists severely underrate aerobic physical activity compared against anaerobic, which is surprising because anaerobic doesn't help cardiovascular capacity much. Presumably given the interest in cryonics and whatnot here, rationalists are interested in living longer. Cardiovascular capacity (VO2max, typically) is strongly correlated with longevity, and it's easy to see the direction of causation.

Possible question: "Over the past month, have you typically met the US federal guidelines for aerobic physical activity? This means at least 150 minutes (2 hours and 30 minutes) a week of moderate-intensity, or 75 minutes (1 hour and 15 minutes) a week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity, or an equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity aerobic activity. See health.gov for more information."

There's a lot of data on this question, so it will be easy to compare LessWrongers against other groups.

I like the framework through which you're approaching this (i.e. managing complexity)

Something I notice that I wish I had was access to my answers to past year's surveys, to track how my answers have evolved over time. The effort for facilitating that is probably nontrivial, but something you could do to start enabling backwards compatibility for that is including some kind of identifying tag that you're likely to remember in the future but is untraceable (or, leaves it to individuals to decide how to tradeoff "I will easily remember this next year" vs "this can't be used to identify me"

Questions that might be good are "CFAR followup" type questions, like "Have you tried a new thing in the past week/month? When's the last time you made a major career change on purpose?"

Just please make sure that the more important and shorter questions are first, that you can skip any question, and that you can submit a half completed questionnaire.

(I hate it when I spend 30 minutes filling out some questionnaire, only to find out that there are long nebulous questions at the end, I already don't have more free time, and there is no option to skip those questions, so I just have to throw all my work away.)

Here is another question that would be very interesting, IMO:

“For what value of X would you be indifferent about the choice between A) creating a utopia that lasts for one-hundred years and whose X inhabitants are all extremely happy, cultured, intelligent, fair, just, benevolent, etc. and lead rich, meaningful lives, and B) preventing one average human from being horribly tortured for one month?"

I think it's great that you're doing this survey!

I would like to suggest two possible questions about acausal thinking/superrationality:

1)

Newcomb’s problem: one box or two boxes?

• Accept: two boxes
• Lean toward: two boxes
• Accept: one box
• Lean toward: one box
• Other

(This is the formulation used in the famous PhilPapers survey.)

2)

Would you cooperate or defect against other community members in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma?

• Definitely cooperate
• Leaning toward: cooperate
• Leaning toward: defect
• Definitely defect
• Other

I think that these questions are not only interesting in and of itself, but that they are also highly important for further research I'd like to conduct. (I can go into more detail if necessary.)

"Is it useful to identify oneself as an aspiring rationalist?"

Two possible calibration questions:

How many people who answered this survey are from the US?
How many people who answered this survey are female?

Which of the following substances do you take on a regular or semi-regular basis? (multiple options possible, more frequently than once a month)

Soylent (purchased or DIY)
Mealsquares
Whey protein (or some other form of concentrated protein)
Fish oil
Vitamin D (in tablet form)
Melatonin
Creatine
Magnesium
Sugary drinks (any sugar-based carbonated drinks, cordial or flavoured water drink)
Diet or "sugar-free" drinks
chocolate
caffeine (coffee, tea, tablets)
nicotene
meat
I decline to answer some of these
I answered all of these correctly

Suggestion: Since the future of intelligent software is a big interest in the community, i'd be curious to get more resolution on people's worldviews. We could try to get numbers for opinions like:

'I don't have much to say about this topic right now.' <- for people who are interested in non-machine-intelligence parts of LW

'There's a probability of __ that Bostrom-style superintelligent software will dominate the history of the 2017 to 2100 CE period.'

Same as the above, but for 2200 to 3000 CE.

'There's a probability of __ that whole brain emulation will dominate the history of the 2017 to 2100 CE period.'

Same as the above, but for 2200 to 3000 CE.

etc

I'd also be curious to see data on worldviews about the future impact of:

Slightly more traditional forms of automation, computing, and software (such as workforce automation, future financial software, etc).

Biotech and genetic engineering

Decentralized manufacturing and nanoscale technologies

The space industry

Weapons of mass destruction

Novel political systems.

This is a lot of questions, so feel free to trim or select as desired.

Suggestion: A question that distinguishes between average and total utilitarianism (i dont remember seeing this previously). This is a little arcane for people who aren't interested in consequentialism & utilitarianism, and that's fine. But within utilitarianism, i'd be interested to know more about this split. It has a bearing on whole brain emulation.

(Just in case i'm using the wrong terminology, let me clarify: I'm referring to whether or not you differentiate between a universe with 10 billion humans at X quality of life or a universe with 20 billion humans at the same X quality of life. I think most people prefer the 20 billion, but some people might lean towards the 10 billion as a matter of degree or in less theoretical contexts.)

I'd like to see some changes to the CFAR-related questions; I've sent a PM with details.

"Do you have mnemonics pegs for the numbers of 1 to 100?"