Aspergers Poll Results: LW is nerdier than the Math Olympiad?

The bigger response bias problem comes from the fact that the survey was presented as a survey about Asperger's, which means that people who are on the autism spectrum probably tended to be more interested in it and more likely to respond to the survey. For instance, a survey about sexual orientation at Cognitive Daily found that rates of homosexuality increased from about 5% of respondents when the sexuality question was tacked on to an unrelated survey to about 15% when the poll was advertised as being about sexual orientation.

Perhaps LW should develop a convention for having surveys where the purpose of the survey isn't explained until after people have taken it.

It's a convenience sample!

LW would have roughly 25 times the baseline AS rate.

The Less Wrong mean average AQ test score was 27

Only about 1 in 10 people on Less Wrong are "normal" in terms of the empathizing/systematizing scale.

This is grossly overstated, because the survey respondents are in no way known to be representative of LessWrong. In fact, I would suspect a very strong selection bias. Before you can go saying anything about the LessWrong community, you need some response statistics. How many people were offered the survey? (You could get this from the server logs. Your survey wasn't promoted and was only up for a day or so, an exposure that already subsets its audience from "LessWrong") How many of the people who saw the survey decided to fill it out? How do the people who filled out the survey differ from the people who did not fill out the survey? I doubt the answers to any of these questions would be satisfying unless you started with a random sample, then individually and privately invited each of the sampled people to participate. Even then, the response bias might be bad enough to preclude any conclusions about LessWrong.

I scored a 12, but was not inspired to actually take that test until reading this post. And I haven't bothered putting up a response to the original post. People who are most likely to take that test seem like people who already suspect they may have AS to some extent. People who know that they very clearly don't are unlikely to be interested enough to take it. So there is excellent reason to suspect that your sample is highly non-representative and bias in favor of overreporting.

One thing I noticed on the AQ test is a number of questions which don't clearly relate to any of the direct symptoms, but are chosen apparently because these things correlate with Asperger's/Autism.

For instance, the statement "I find numbers fascinating". This may well correlate with Autism, but I bet it correlates even more strongly with an interest in math or math-heavy sciences. That math olympians nearly all answered yes to this question, doesn't really tell us anything new about the correlation between math and AQ. The fact that this question is scored positively for AQ has built the correlation assumption into the test.

There are some less obvious examples such as "I see patterns all the time". I would wild-ass guess that at least 2-3 points of the gap between the math heavy groups' scores and the population average scores are represented by answers to questions that are not related directly to symptoms, but are personality/brain traits correlated with symptoms, which also happen to be highly useful for doing math.

I am hoping to learn the population standard deviation for the AS quotient. No luck so far, but this paper has the following info: 100 people suspected of having Asperger's took the test, and then were evaluated by two clinicians using the DSM-IV criteria. The 73 subsequently diagnosed with Asperger's had a mean of 36.62 and std. dev. of 6.63. The 27 not diagnosed had a mean of 26.22 and std. dev. of 9.39. Needless to say, one should interpret these numbers carefully because of the selection into the study, and due to variation across clinicians in coming to the same diagnosis.

Please insert a section break near the start of this post, so the whole thing doesn't show up on "NEW".

Any idea what share of the general population would report "Severe impairment in reciprocal social interaction?

I guess it would be better to reword that question for the general population. Too many people would switch off when they saw the word "reciprocal."

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but I think that this Aspie Quiz is more thorough than the one in Wired.

IMO these kinds of quizzes do have their drawbacks as many aspie traits can be compensated for with time and practice. Female aspie traits (or the special nuances in them) may also be overlooked.

I got a 12 on the AQ test, although I'm not that happy with all my responses. Feel free to ask me questions:

http://www.formspring.me/neurotypical

Doing this with a shill account so no one will know how egotistical I am. Don't expect responses to messages directed at this LW account as I probably won't log in to it again. For reference, my real Less Wrong account's karma is in the 500-1000 range.

If anyone has a good prior for the average level of nonresponse bias in surveys of the form "Might you have X?", post as a subcomment of this comment.

I originally looked at the poll but didn't answer until now.

I fit two of the Gillberg diagnostic criteria and scored 19 on the wired test. I would've definitely scored much higher a few years back when I suspected I might have asperger's. My social skills have developed a lot since then and I'm now more inclined to attribute my social deficiencies to lack of practice than anything else.

For what it's worth, I do seem to follow a pattern of intense pursuit of relatively few interests that change over time.

Commenting in response to the edit...

I took the Wired quiz earlier but didn't actually fill in the poll at the time. Sorry about that. I've done so now.

Remarks: I scored a 27 on the quiz, but couldn't honestly check any of the four diagnostic criteria. I lack many distinctive autism-spectrum characteristics (possibly to the extent of being on the other side of baseline), but have a distinctly introverted/antisocial disposition.

Saw the survey earlier and skipped it, just took it and scored 25 on the Wired test, which I see is below the convenience sample's 27 average.

(Also, 82 responses in the original batch?! I didn't think there were so many regular posters here.)