It was at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I’m glad no offense was taken. That said, this survey frustrated me, as there were underlying and incorrect assumptions in a lot of questions, and no option for “does not apply to me”. Specifics:
#1: liked this a lot. anti-equilibrium is fun! Is there any way to see current results without re-taking the survey?
#2: Karma is mostly irrelevant—I read posts based on title and comments.
#3,4: I couldn’t find a clear proposition for what it would mean to “believe in the thesis of civilizational inadequacy”. Only an if-then that sets out conditions for not being surprised that economists at the BoJ are incorrect in some way. I don’t know if the survey was intended to say “believe that many current humans are pretty wrong”, or “humans are doomed to wrongness”, or something else.
#5: Many of these terms I’ve known and used in conversation long before Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong.
#6: I’d quibble about the examples of Slack (I come at it from the Subgenius tradition, rather than the current rationalist fad) but no real problem.
#7,8.10: No worrries, injecting an actual “feedback for mods / is this worth it” question into otherwise-fun survey.
#9: Emotions play a role in identifying my goals, more than in a as pursuing them.
Even with all that, it delivered about 70% of what it promised (that was about 7 questions worth of fun), and that’s more than I’d have guessed before I took it. Good work!
Haha. Sorry if it was frustrating. I didn’t mean it to be very serious, and I still think it’ll be fun to see the answers (and how they correlate) even if the q’s aren’t perfect. I’m glad I gave you 70% of fun.
#5: Many of these terms I’ve known and used in conversation long before Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong.
For this one, I tried to answer based on whether I had learned the terms from LW or not. But wasn’t 100% sure whether that’s what the survey wanted. Would def have appreciated that being stated more clearly.
Alas. I want to note that I did try to be clear, the question said “because of LessWrong (and other rationalist blogs)”. Like, if you heard of ‘slack’ elsewhere, but then started to use it significantly more because of LW, then I wanted that to count.
One of the reasons I felt like throwing up a quick survey (note: primary reason was because it was fun and easy) was to get more in touch with making surveys and finding out how LWers feel about them. I have quite high error bars on how many will respond to this, and will update based on it.
For example I can imagine moving from one massive schelling survey to regular smaller surveys throughout the year.
Either way, do want to get back to doing a high quality survey for the audience. Not my current project (which is the LW book), but can imagine focusing on it next.
We could give people an identifier (e.g. random number) to enter each time, or perhaps incorporate the survey into the LW site directly to associate it with your account.
(It’s probably the wrong call, but I do want to think about it some more.)
I appreciate it.
As a random piece of info, to the question “What’s the biggest problem with LessWrong” I liked whoever answered “low-quality surveys”.
It was at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I’m glad no offense was taken. That said, this survey frustrated me, as there were underlying and incorrect assumptions in a lot of questions, and no option for “does not apply to me”. Specifics:
#1: liked this a lot. anti-equilibrium is fun! Is there any way to see current results without re-taking the survey?
#2: Karma is mostly irrelevant—I read posts based on title and comments.
#3,4: I couldn’t find a clear proposition for what it would mean to “believe in the thesis of civilizational inadequacy”. Only an if-then that sets out conditions for not being surprised that economists at the BoJ are incorrect in some way. I don’t know if the survey was intended to say “believe that many current humans are pretty wrong”, or “humans are doomed to wrongness”, or something else.
#5: Many of these terms I’ve known and used in conversation long before Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong.
#6: I’d quibble about the examples of Slack (I come at it from the Subgenius tradition, rather than the current rationalist fad) but no real problem.
#7,8.10: No worrries, injecting an actual “feedback for mods / is this worth it” question into otherwise-fun survey.
#9: Emotions play a role in identifying my goals, more than in a as pursuing them.
Even with all that, it delivered about 70% of what it promised (that was about 7 questions worth of fun), and that’s more than I’d have guessed before I took it. Good work!
Haha. Sorry if it was frustrating. I didn’t mean it to be very serious, and I still think it’ll be fun to see the answers (and how they correlate) even if the q’s aren’t perfect. I’m glad I gave you 70% of fun.
For this one, I tried to answer based on whether I had learned the terms from LW or not. But wasn’t 100% sure whether that’s what the survey wanted. Would def have appreciated that being stated more clearly.
Alas. I want to note that I did try to be clear, the question said “because of LessWrong (and other rationalist blogs)”. Like, if you heard of ‘slack’ elsewhere, but then started to use it significantly more because of LW, then I wanted that to count.
But yeah, agree the answers will be noisy.
We used to have high quality census surveys and it’s been a while since the last one happened.
One of the reasons I felt like throwing up a quick survey (note: primary reason was because it was fun and easy) was to get more in touch with making surveys and finding out how LWers feel about them. I have quite high error bars on how many will respond to this, and will update based on it.
For example I can imagine moving from one massive schelling survey to regular smaller surveys throughout the year.
Either way, do want to get back to doing a high quality survey for the audience. Not my current project (which is the LW book), but can imagine focusing on it next.
That means you can see a lot less for the same amount of survey taking because you don’t see how various questions relate to each other.
We could give people an identifier (e.g. random number) to enter each time, or perhaps incorporate the survey into the LW site directly to associate it with your account.
(It’s probably the wrong call, but I do want to think about it some more.)
There was a smaller one here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yn4Aw6jejS3SHKuzu/2020-lesswrong-demographics-survey-results It was not promoted to frontpage post, but had some interesting results nonetheless.