2023 LessWrong Community Census, Request for Comments

AI questions we currently have:

P(GPT-5 Release) 
What is the probability that OpenAI will release GPT-5 before the end of 2024?

Singularity 
By what year do you think the Singularity will occur?

Tangential AI questions we currently have:

P(Global catastrophic risk)
What is the probability that the human race will make it to 2100 without any catastrophe that wipes out more than 90% of humanity?

P(Simulation)
What is the probability that our universe is a simulation?

I think Singularity basically gets at your AI timelines question, though not in a lot of detail. You said themes; are you hoping for a subsection of multiple questions trying to ask about that from different angles, or one good question for each? 

I'd be tempted to reword the open-source LLM toward something like "How would you describe your opinion on open-source LLMs? [pro-open-source, lean open-source, neutral, lean regulated, pro-regulation]" or something along those lines. I also have an instinct to define LLM with context in the question ("How would you describe your opinion on open-source Artificial Intelligence such as LLMs" perhaps) but maybe that's unnecessary here.

Changelog, 2023-11-28

• Retitled Tailcalled's questions so as to mess with the results as little as possible. They're now titled "TC[#]", in the hopes that simple numbers don't mess with anything.
• Added a "Where did you find this survey from?" question
• Removed P(Space), SRS, as well as a couple questions I lost track of from Community and LW sections. Removed the question about whether they also took the ACX census, since I think this one will come out first.
• Added titles to questions without titles.
• Added a symmetrical question about cross group identity to what I expect the ACX census will use.

I don't expect the question titles to mess with much, but it's hard to cheaply know for sure, due to the hyper-empirical approach used to construct the test. It should be feasible to recognize after the fact if there are any issues, and I assume issues would be localized to one or a few items so one could just look at the other items for comparison.

Deletion suggestions:

• Seems redundant: "Religious Background What is your family's religious background, as of the last time your family practiced a religion?"
• Maybe one of the aliens questions is enough.
• P(Pastafarianism)
• "Best Virtue
  Which of the twelve virtues of rationality do you think the LessWrong community scores highest on at the moment?" 
  I don't really understand the question. Same for "worst virtue".
• The willingness-to-pay for the sequences, hpmor and the codex. This could just be asked outside of the survey.
• ideas for LW April Fools’ Day (I think you don't need a centralized question for that.)
• "Tax Opinion": I think it's not useful to answer "higher" or "lower"
• "Great stagnation": seems to specific

I'd love to add some questions about discussion norms and expectations on LessWrong.

Over the last year there was some pretty strong disagreement on how to argue with other users. I know of about two and a half posts on how rationalist discourse ought to be conducted, and I'm curious what kind of consensus any of them have. (I suspect mentioning the disagreement can reawaken the disagreement and would be sad if the object level disagreement broke out here. If there is a crux that could be answered by a community census though, there's conveniently one planned anyway!)

In general, I want to reduce the number of questions.

I'm gonna suggest 20 questions (should take maybe 2.3 minutes to fill out), which of course is in tension with you wanting to reduce the number of questions. Maybe you could split them out into some extra-optional part of the survey?

I've been factor-analyzing hundreds of statements for the purpose of creating a measure of ideology/worldview. I haven't finished the test yet, but it would still be interesting to include some of the top items for the factors so that the LessWrong data can be observed and compared to my data, once it's published.

Each item has 5 response options: "Disagree strongly", "Disagree", "Neither", "Agree", and "Agree strongly". In total, there are 5 factors, which should be close to independent. Some of the top loading items for each factor are (with "(R)" meaning that it is reverse scored):

Factor 0:

• Companies that focus on profit buy up and reduce the wages of companies that try to pay workers more.
• The stock market fails to punish powerful people for poor investments because people in power just get the government to bail them out using taxpayer money.
• The government has regulations that make financial markets work well and fairly. (R)
• The government knows well how to balance costs and benefits. (R)

Factor 1:

• Academia has been taken over by a woke culture which suppresses dissent.
• Minority groups tend to be biased and favor wokeness over fairness.
• You can see from the gender ratios in income and work areas that there's still tons of sexism around. (R)
• Climate science is critically important due to global warming. (R)

Factor 2:

• One of the greatest benefits of art is that management can place it in workplaces to set a calming, productive tone.
• Brand reputation is the main way consumers know that products are safe and high-quality.
• Fashion is a good way to build confidence.
• Democratic elections are basically polls about who you trust to lead the country, so democratically elected leaders are considered especially trustworthy.

Factor 3:

• Teaching will need to start incorporating AI technology.
• Genetically modified organisms will make farming more effective in the future.
• AI cannot replace designers as computers lack creativity. (R)
• Elon Musk's project of colonizing Mars is a useless vanity project. (R)

Factor 4:

• To save the environment, people should eat seasonal locally grown food instead of importing food from across the world.
• Claims that it's soon the end of the world are always hyperbolic and exaggerated.
• It is important that the news is run independent of the government so it can serve as a check on those in power.
• The moon landing was faked. (R)

I have a research idea in mind - I would like to know how by how certain expectations shape peoples' decisions. In addition to certain questions already in the survey, the question suggestions for this are:

1. Were you surprised by the capabilities of chatgpt?

2. Self-rate your knowledge of 
Global income and wealth distributions
AI
Geopolitics
Climate change 
Practical ethics
Animal suffering
Effective interventions to help the poor
 

3. Self-rate your social skills on a scale from 0 to 10

4. Suffering of poor people that live today touches me emotionally: 0 to 10 scale
5. Suffering of animals that live today touches me emotionally: 0 to 10 scale
6. Whether people 10,000 years in the future exist touches me emptionally: 0 to 10 scale
7. Whether humanity will go extinct within the next 100 years touches me emptionally: 0 to 10 scale. 

8. I rate my expectations as:
- insert "Noisy to well-calibrated" scale
- insert "Biased towards optimism to biased towards pessimism" scale
 

9. I believe that the median human's life in 2040 compared to today will be (your median expectation):

• better than today
• worse than today 
• doesn't apply because humans will be extinct
• other answer: 

10. I do not have more children than I have because: 
Lack of a partner
Unwilling partner
This is my ideal family size
More are planned or expected
I don't have time
Personal finance reasons
Personal Biology reasons
It is more important to help others who exist
I think the future is not livable
I think they would be born into a short life and/or suffer
Later is better
Other reasons:

11. My overall happiness: 
(0 to 10 scale)

12. I expect to live to an age of:

13. I save a relevant amount of money or other resources for old age:
- No, because I do not expect to live long enough
- No, because I expect an age of abundance
- No, but I think I should
- No, for other reasons
- Yes

I would benefit from hearing what secondary sources (aka not papers or blog posts written by researchers about their research) people find useful for learning about AI alignment research.

In 2022, I was advised to make the privacy state of answers clear (that is, what would be released in the public dataset and what wouldn't be) so I put three options for the only required question on the census.

1. Release the responses, including the row
2. Use the responses when I summarize the census, but don't release the row
3. Don't use the responses to summarize, and don't release the row.

Note that it's a required radio select: you have to pick an answer before it will let you hit submit. This year I removed 3, because I wasn't going to do anything with those responses so why bother collecting them. 

The main argument I see for bringing 3 back is to say I won't use the responses to summarize and won't release the row, but will show it to the LessWrong team. That gives people a way to potentially exert a little influence on what the devs are up to without showing up in the public statistics. I don't think that's a strong argument though since there's lots of ways to make the LW team aware of feedback.

I think you're misinterpreting. That question is for opting in to the highest privacy option. Not checking it means that your data will be included when the survey is made public. Wanting to not be included at all, even in summaries, is indicated by simply not submitting any answers.

Huh. So, the instructions currently say to fill things out starting at the top and if you decide you're done to scroll to the bottom and hit submit. Only the very first question is required (well, first two at the moment but one of those is going to go away when the census opens) so in theory this should kind of happen automatically. It sort of looks like this happens? There's a long left tail of people filling out the basic demographic info and then submitting that. People don't check the first required box (or the first box and like, fill out Age Country and Race) and then hit submit.

Do you think it needs to be an explicit "don't want to fill it out" box?

The slightly sneaky thing would be to make the link such that I know how many people clicked on it. I'm currently lightly opposed to doing that since it feels slightly sneaky, but it's also pretty standard practice for basically every survey or feedback link I ever used in corporate.