2017 LessWrong Survey

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

Thanks for your work in creating the survey, and for LesserWrong. I shared the link to the survey in our meet-up group, and hope many people will contribute.

A few comments:

Q10: misspelling: "monogomous" should be "monogamous"

Q27: not clear what "as a community initiative" means. My actual impression is that LW2.0 is a project a few people are working on, but that most of "the community" has little visibility of it or input into it.

Q31: really needs an "insufficient data for meaningful answer" option.

Q32: fails to distinguish between "this is an incredibly important goal" and "this is the only goal that matters". If I became 100% convinced that no version of LW was ever going to raise the general sanity waterline I would be disappointed (note: I am already somewhat disappointed) but I wouldn't leave because I like being part of the community for other reasons too.

Q33: totally unclear what it's asking, and it seems like there's far too little information to give an answer that means anything. What is "this forum"? Specifically cafechesscourt (about which I know nothing), or is the picture just there to add colour? The question seems to presuppose that I can tell whether a forum would be worth participating in given only the identity of the person running it, which is bonkers.

Q33ff: there seems to be an underlying assumption here that what LW primarily needs is a technically better forum. I think the problems LW has faced have mostly been social rather than technical, and the main impact technical problems have had is that they have made it harder to address some social issues. (For instance, it was difficult to react appropriately to sustained malfeasance by a political fanatic because the LW server was (a) under the control of people who had little stake in its success and (b) running code that was painful to work with. But the actual problem was the political fanatic's behaviour.)

Q36: shouldn't forbid comments on unchosen options. Don't you want to know why someone doesn't care about something that sounds like it might matter?

Mental health questions: Might be worth distinguishing between "confident I would get a formal diagnosis if examined" and "think I probably have something similar". (The depression question 51, if you pick either version of "yes", opens up a question 52 asking whether you "still qualify for a depression diagnosis". If that distinction doesn't matter, maybe it should say something more like "still suffer from depression". Incidentally, I don't know why that question does this but the others don't. I guess depression more often goes away completely than the others.)

Q67: for some of these, some people with sufficient natural aptitude might have attained a high level of skill without the extreme effort implied by the rightmost column. (E.g., I'm a professional mathematician; I never "practised calculus every day" so far as I can recall.) I am guessing that in such cases you still want that rightmost column ticked (and maybe I should consider effort on more difficult branches of mathematics related to calculus to qualify) but it's not entirely clear. It's also unclear how broadly to take some of the categories; e.g., if someone has put a lot of effort into musical performance, does that count as "painting/drawing/etc."? (Depends whether "etc." is meant to cover other artistic endeavours or other forms of visual art or what.)

Q71,72: I wonder whether you want one more question, asking to what extent people think research into friendly AI is important. (So then you have a three-level funnel: worth working on friendly AI? worth doing it mathematically? is MIRI doing that well? rather than a two-level funnel.)

Q92: is kinda meaningless without knowing what country the respondent is from. (At least in so far as their opinion on this is an actual opinion rather than a mere party label.)

Q100ff: I think the biggest barriers to feasibility of replacing humans in many occupations, even discounting cases where being nonhuman is as such an obstacle, will likely not be down to intelligence unless that's broadened a great deal. Consider, e.g., opera singers or prostitutes. Machines trying to do these jobs will need to look and sound human not only because of people saying "ewwww, fake person" but also because the jobs intrinsically require specifically human-like performance.

Q108: crying out for a probability estimate rather than yes/no. I suspect most people signed up for cryonics think it probably won't work.

Q115ff: unclear (and I think it matters a lot for many people's opinions and feelings) what sort of modification is envisaged and how reliably it's supposed to be known to work. E.g., I have a tweenaged child and if someone said "here is a thing we can do that will increase her intelligence" then, quite apart from the fact that it would need to be her decision as well as mine, I would be incredibly skeptical and greatly disinclined to try the treatment for fear of unforeseen adverse consequences. And even if it were somehow known to be safe, not to mess up people's personalities, etc., it would feel like a big scary intervention in an existing person's life, whereas an in utero treatment might feel quite different. I would guess that this sort of thing will only (at least in the foreseeable future) be feasible in utero, or perhaps even in vitro before implantation, but the question doesn't make it clear what hypothetical we're supposed to be entertaining. (And the reference to "your child" makes it hard for those who have children not to think in terms of modifications to the children they already have, however old.)

Q122: really needs a "don't know / no strong opinion / it varies" option.

Q124: really needs probabilities or something. I can totally envisage scenarios where "the end of work" is a big win and others where it's a huge disaster.

Q127: really wants to be accompanied by some sort of estimate of how probable the event is. If someone thinks there's a 10^-6 chance of any of these things, it doesn't matter much which they think most likely.

Took most of the survey, but seem to have submitted early somehow.

Re: The SAT question. The SAT's actually reverted back to a score out of 1600. Slight nitpick, given that you mention that the current status quo is out of 2400.

For being diagnosed with depression, do you include only major depressive disorder or do you also include persistent depressive disorder and adjustment disorder?

Previous session is set to be finished.

Your browser reports that it was used previously to answer this survey. We are resetting the session so that you can start from the beginning.

Click here to start the survey.

I have just pressed Enter after my country's name. Fix this!

can't access "font fort" with noScript on. It needs to be expressed in the link html, so i can whitelist it.

In addition to the email listed at the end of the survey, you can report bugs by replying to this post and I'll keep a log of their resolution:

Wed Sep 13 00:00:55 PDT 2017: Fixed bug where yourmorals.org survey links took user away from survey page instead of opening in new tab. (If this issue resurfaces please let me know.)

I'm also going to go through and fix the same issue in as many other survey links as I can. In the meantime work around by right clicking to open.

Wed Sep 13 21:50:11 PDT 2017: Fixed bug where enter key on text forms would throw out your survey information. Multiple people reported this and it should no longer happen.

Fri Sep 15 13:46:59 PDT 2017: Fixed bug that prevented survey users from commenting on boxes they hadn't checked in question 36.

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So, what happened?

This post is hidden from Main and the survey "is expired and no longer available", even though the post mentions that it should run for 10 more days. I wanted to share it with Russian LW community, will it be back in some form later?

Firstly, thank you for the survey and for the option of exporting one's answers!

Questions that I found ambiguous or without a clear, correct answer (for future reference, since changing the survey midway is a terrible idea):

1. Is it fundamentally important to you that the 'rationality movement' ever produces a measurable increase in general sanity? (i.e, if you were shown conclusive proof it will not you would likely leave)?

What do you answer if you believe that it is fundamentally important, and worth trying, but still unlikely to succeed (i.e. we're probably doomed, but we should still make an effort)?

1. Do you attend Less Wrong meetups? Yes, once or a few times

Attended once or a few times, in total, or attend once or a few times per year/other reasonable time period?

Thank you for compiling another survey!

And on a completely unrelated note, what is it that we actually want to know about ourselves as LW? Surely it can't be the gender ratio. It's not like we don't already know not to post "traditionally feminine" stuff or something. It seems to me that surveys aren't done to achieve some further goal, although the results, of course, are of some curiosity. Sorry if this is counterproductive, I am genuinely interested in the above question.