“Target audience” size for the Less Wrong sequences
[Note: My last thread was poorly worded in places and gave people the wrong impression that I was interested in talking about growing and shaping the Less Wrong community. I was really hoping to talk about something a bit different. Here’s my revision with a completely redone methodology.]
How many people would invest their time to read the LW sequences if they were introduced to them?
So in other words, I’m trying to estimate the theoretical upper-bound on the number of individuals world-wide who have the ability, desire, and time to read intellectual material online and who also have at least some pre-disposition to wanting to think rationally.
I’m not trying to evangelize to unprepared, “reach” candidates who maybe, possibly would like to read parts of the sequences. I’m just looking for likely size of the core audience who already has the ability, the time, and doesn’t need to jump through any major hoops to stomach the sequences (like deconverting from religion or radically changing their habits—like suddenly devoting more of their time to using computers or reading.)
The reason I’m investigating this is because I want to build more rationalists. I know some smart people whose opinions I respect (like Michael Vassar) who contend we shouldn’t spend much time trying to reach more people with the sequences. They think the majority of people smart enough to follow the sequences and who do weird, eccentric things like “read in their spare time”, are already here. This is my second attempt to figure this out in the last couple days, and unlike my rough 2M person figure I got with my previous, hasty analysis, this more detailed analysis leaves me with a much lower world-wide target audience of only 17,000.
Filter |
Total Population |
Filters Away (%) |
Everyone |
6,880,000,000 |
|
Speaks English + Internet Access |
536,000,000 |
92.2% |
Atheist/Agnostic |
40,000,000 |
92.55% |
Believes in evolution | Atheist/Agnostic |
30,400,000 |
24% |
“NT” (Rational) MBTI |
3,952,000 |
87% |
IQ 130+ (SD 15; US/UK-Atheist-NT 108 IQ) |
284,544 |
92.8% |
30 min/day reading or on computers |
16,930 |
94.05% |
Yep, that’s right. There are basically only a few thousand relatively bright people in the world who think reason makes sense and devote at least 2% of their day to arcane activities like “reading” and “using computers”.
Considering we have 6,438 Less Wrong logins created and a daily readership of around 5,500 people between logged in and anonymous readers, I now actually find it believable that we may have already reached a very large fraction of all the people in the world who we could theoretically convince to read the sequences.
This actually matters because it makes me update in favor of different, more realistic growth strategies than buying AdWords or doing SEO to try and reach the small number of people left in our current target audience. Like translating the sequences into Chinese. Or creating an economic disaster that leaves most of the Westerner world unemployed (kidding!). Or waiting until Eliezer publishes his rationality book so that we can reach the vast majority of our potential, future audience who currently still reads but doesn’t have time to do anti-social, low-prestige things like “reading blogs”.
For those of you who want to consider my methodology, here’s the rationale for each step that I used to disqualify potential sequence readers:
Doesn’t Speak English or have Internet Access: The sequences are English-only (right now) and online-only (right now). Don’t think there’s any contention here. This figure is the largest of the 3 figures I’ve found but all were around 500,000,000.
Not Atheist/Agnostic: Not being an Atheist or Agnostic is a huge warning sign. 93% of LW is atheist/agnostic for a reason. It’s probably a combo of 1) it’s hard to stomach reading the sequences if you’re a theist, and 2) you probably don’t use thinking to guide the formation of your beliefs anyway so lessons in rationality are a complete waste of time for you. These people really needs to have the healing power of Dawkins come into their hearts before we can help them. Also, note that even though it wasn’t mentioned in Yvain’s top-level survey post, the raw data showed that around 1/3rd of LW users who gave a reason for participating on LW cite “Atheism”.
Evolution denialist: If you can’t be bothered to be moved to correct beliefs about the second most obvious conclusion in the world by the mountains of evidence in favor of it, you’re effectively saying you don’t think induction or science can work at all. These people also need to go through Dawkins before we can help them.
Not “NT” on the Myers-Briggs typology: Lots of people complain about the MBTI. But in this case, I don’t think it matters that the MBTI isn’t cleaving reality perfectly at the joints or that these types aren’t natural categories. I realize Jung types aren’t made of quarks and aren’t fundamental. But I’ve also met lots of people at the Less Wrong meet-ups. There’s an even split of E/I and P/J in our community. But there is a uniform, overwhelmingly strong disposition towards N and T. And we shouldn’t be surprised by this at all. People who are S instead of N take things at face value and resist using induction or intuition to extend their reasoning. These people can guess the teacher’s password, but they’re not doing the same thing that you call “thinking”. And if you’re not a T (Thinking), then that means you’re F (Feeling). And if you’re using feelings to chose beliefs in lieu of thinking, there’s nothing we can do for you—you’re permanently disqualified from enjoying the blessings of rationality. Note: I looked hard to see if I could find data suggesting that being NT and being Atheist correlated because I didn’t want to “double subtract” out the same people twice. It turns out several studies have looked for this correlation with thousands of participants… and it doesn’t exist.
Lower than IQ 130: Another non-natural category that people like to argue about. Plus, this feels super elitist, right? Excluding people just because they’re “not smart enough”. But it’s really not asking that much when you consider that IQ 100 means you’re buying lottery tickets, installing malware on your computer, and spending most of your free time watching TV. Those aren’t the “stupid people” who are way down on the other side of the Gaussian—that’s what a normal 90 − 110 IQ looks like. Real stupid is so non-functional that you never even see it… probably because you don’t hang out in prisons, asylums and homeless shelters. Really. And 130 isn’t all that “special“ once you find yourself being a white (+6IQ) college graduate (+5IQ) atheist (+4IQ) who’s ”NT” on Myers-Briggs (+5IQ). In Yvain’s survey, the average IQ on LW was 145.88. And only 4 out of 68 LWers reported IQs below 130… the lowest being 120. I find it inconceivable that EVERYONE lied on this survey. I also find it highly unlikely that only the top 1⁄2 reported. But even if everyone who didn’t report was as low as the lowest IQ reported by anyone on Less Wrong, the average IQ would still be over 130. Note: I took the IQ boost from being atheist and being MBTI-“N” into account when figuring out the proportion of 130+ IQ conditional on the other traits already being factored in.
Having no free time: So you speak English, you don’t hate science, you don’t hate reason, and you’re somewhat bright. Seem like you’re a natural part of our target audience, right? Nope… wrong! There’s at least one more big hurdle: Having some free time. Most people who are already awesome enough to have passed through all these filters are winning so hard at life (by American standards of success) that they are wayyy too busy to do boring, anti-social & low-prestige tasks like reading online forums in their spare time (which they don’t have much of). In fact, it’s kind of like how knowing a bit about biases can hurt you and make you even more biased. Being a bit rational can skyrocket you to such a high level of narrowly-defined American-style “success” that you become a constantly-busy, middle-class wage-slave who zaps away all your free time in exchange for a mortgage and a car payment. Nice job buddy. Thanks for increasing my GDP epsilon%… now you are left with whatever rationality you started out with minus the effects of your bias dragging you back down to average over the ensuing years. The only ways I see out of this dilemma are 1) being in a relatively unstructured period of your life (ie, unemployed, college student, semi-retired, etc) or 2) having a completely broken motivation system which keeps you in a perpetually unstructured life against your will (akrasia) or perhaps 3) being a full-time computer professional who can multi-task and pass off reading online during your work day as actually working. That said, if you’re unlucky enough to have a full-time job or you’re married with children, you’ve already fallen out of the population of people who read or use computers at least 30 minutes / day. This is because having a spouse cuts your time spent reading and using computers in half. Having children cuts reading in half and reduces computer usage by 1/3rd. And having a job similarly cuts both reading and computer usage in half. Unfortunately, most people suffer from several of these afflictions. I can’t find data that’s conditional on being an IQ 130+ Atheist but my educated guess is employment is probably much better than average due to being so much more capable and I’d speculate that relationships and children are about the same or perhaps a touch lower. All things equal, I think applying statistics from the general US civilian population and extrapolating is an acceptable approximation in this situation even if it likely overestimates the number of people who truly have 30 minutes of free time / day (the average amount of time needed just to read LW according to Yvain’s survey). 83% of people are employed full-time so they’re gone. Of the remaining 17% who are unemployed, 10% of the men and 50% of the women are married and have children so that’s another 5.1% off the top level leaving only 11.9% of people. Of that 11.9% left, the AVERAGE person has 1 hour they spend reading and ”Playing games and computer use for leisure“. Let’s be optimistic and assume they somehow devote half of their entire leisure budget to reading Less Wrong, that still only leaves 5.95%. Note: These numbers are a bit rough. If someone wants to go through the micro-data files of the US Time Use Survey for me and count the exact number of people who do more than 1 hour of “reading” and “Playing games and computer use for leisure”, I welcome this help.
Anyone have thoughtful feedback on refinements or additional filters I could add to this? Do you know of better sources of statistics for any of the things I cite? And most importantly, do you have new, creative outreach strategies we could use now that we know this?
If you think the goal is to get people to read the sequences, you may be setting yourself up to fail.
The sequences are HUGE. The indexes for just the four “core sequences” are somewhere north of 10,000 words. Those link to over a hundred and fifty 2,000-3,000-word posts. That’s about 300,000-450,000 words for those four. And there are eighteen sequences in all. For comparison, Lord Of The Rings is 454,000 words.
So what you’re asking for is: How many people would invest their time to closely read several thick self-published volumes of philosophy writing by someone they’ve never heard of if they were introduced to them?
I fear this number may be rather small.
In addition, people tend to avoid reading large philosophical treatises intended to infect them with memes, presented to them by people wanting to infect them with memes. This is because these sort of people tend to wake them up by knocking on their door too early on a Sunday morning. You know it’s not a cult, but they don’t.
And they’re not being just foolish or refusing to learn because they won’t privilege the hypothesis of your personal favoured infectious meme cluster being good for them rather than a sucker shoot - there’s good reason to pay attention to one’s mental hygiene before decompartmentalising too early, particularly for the average human who not only has the biases but is largely unaware of them. Memetic parasites are real, so one must in fact make the effort not to inadvertently present oneself as looking like the victim of one.
I hope you can look at the numbers and understand why, when someone answers a newbie’s question on something with “You should try reading the sequences”, it’s pretty much an extremely rude dismissal.
Possible useful approach: you don’t really know the material until you own it in your own head and could rewrite it. So. Make rationality posts on your own blog too, for outreach. Copy good ones here for LW’s consumption. But get your friends interested in rationality.
BTW, I’m Myers-Briggs ENFP. And no, I haven’t ploughed through the sequences. Though I have been reading books again of late, so it’s in the plausible range.
Here is someone doing something like this: blogging about reading all of LessWrong from the start.
The other thing is, if I were picking the best 450,000 words on Less Wrong I wouldn’t just pick the sequences.
So, I was directed toward this post, in no small part because I am, demographically, a bit unusual for LW. At times, I’m quite optimistic about LW and rationality-in-general’s prospects, but then I remember that my being here, and participating, is the product of happenstance. But then again, I actually have been pointed to LW from three different sources, so perhaps it was inevitable.
Ah, but here comes my embarrassing admission:
The above is a much more influential factor in my considering how much to participate than I feel happy admitting. I’ll openly admit that being rational is not my default mode; I wasn’t even targeted as “bright” as a kid. No out-of-ordinary test scores came from me. I have had to really work to get my thoughts to avoid being immediately processed through a Is this the kind of belief that will get me social status? filter. So, I do have this massive fear that being rational is just not natural for me. Nor is my IQ, I suspect, anywhere near the high end of the spectrum here....though that filter for social status has been, I think, obscuring my intelligence for most of my life.
Does socializing on the internet feel low-status to me? Yeah, it does....and had I not basically grown up on the internet, I doubt I’d ever give a community like this a second glance. It’s been really tough divorcing society’s ideal of what is status-y from what I actually want to do. I love the internet, and I spend a vast amount of time on it, but it still feels low status to me, and so it’s not something I advertise. Despite my ability to find more interesting conversation here than I can possibly hope to find in real life!
So, even though I was pointed to LW multiple times independently, I probably would never have actually become an active participant (insofar as I am one) had I not had the personal endorsement of my brother, who is an active member, that this was a very intelligent place. Honestly, I wasn’t properly calibrated to identify this place as, well, what it actually is. I don’t know what to suggest to get this to be more appealing to people that are like me—that is, smart enough to benefit from the sequences, but not likely to seek it out on their own. The rationality book is probably the best bet.
Which three sources? (I’m guessing your brother was one, but I’m curious about the other two.)
The other two were a friend of mine and a productivity blog whose name and url I have since forgotten.
Interesting comment!
I can think of about a dozen personal acquaintances who fit all of your criteria and for whom I think LW would be appropriate. Of these, three read Less Wrong—one because I referred her, one because he referred me, and one because he was referred by the same mutual friend who referred me.
I think I’ve referred about five or six of the remaining nine over here at some point or other and it just didn’t take for some reason.
Of these dozen people, the number whom I talked to about Less Wrong who were already reading it by coincidence (ie not in a way causally linked to me reading Less Wrong) was zero. Despite moving in circles that are mostly made up of people from the groups above, I’ve never just randomly met another LW reader.
Even though that’s anecdotal evidence, I think it’s pretty unlikely that most of our potential readers are already here.
I can think of several people who would enjoy a blog about rationality that was about rationality and didn’t seem to require buying into the transhumanist belief cluster as a prerequisite.
So, find the fiesty ones and sic them on LW. The only way to avoid evaporative cooling is to invite and welcome people who disagree with you. I’m interested in rationality and AI (note the lack of G), but don’t buy into the transhumanist belief cluster- if more people like me show up, we’ll move in that direction. But I don’t see the change happening without the population to make the posts and upvote them and comment encouragingly.
Yep. It doesn’t have to be anti-transhumanist, or anti-anything—it just needs to be more on topic, and less off topic. Here’s a suggestion list.
Note that I’ve been here three weeks, so (per Shirky’s A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which appears to have fallen offline—Google cache for the moment) have much less claim to the secret of making LW the social forum from Rationalist Heaven than those who’ve been here three years. So evaluate my words with a suitable quantity of salt. OTOH, it was basically in agreement with Yvain, the second-rated poster on the site and a transhumanist.
I find it very pleasing that I have been able to make quite strong criticisms (e.g.) of locally favoured memes and get upvoted, because I’ve taken the time to show my working, link my references and show my understanding of what I’m criticising. So the moderation system (“vote up what you want more of”) appears to work as advertised.
And I’ve found it personally very useful discipline in learning to think clearly as I write, instead of just spewing abuse at people for being stupid. Not that there’s no place for that sort of thing, just that this isn’t it and it’s not an effective way to convince someone they’re wrong.
Trying to change Less Wrong into an anti-transhumanist site sounds like trying to divert a river. Unless perhaps somehow transhumanist beliefs and rationality can be shown to be opposed.
Check your assumptions; what evidence do you have that this statement describes my goal? Is that evidence sufficient?
I meant it in a hypothetical sense, so I apologize for the implication that that would really be your goal. It might be my goal if I thought transhumanism was irrational though, as I would consider irrational beliefs to be at odds with the mission of a rationalist site.
There could certainly be irrational aspects of transhumanism worthy of criticism without the entire belief-cluster being invalidated as well. My main interest is in the cryonics sub-cluster (which is complex enough in its own right) -- one could in theory be a transhumanist and opposed to cryonics, or a cryonicist opposed to most other transhumanist beliefs. (I know some anti-uploading cryonicists, for example.)
I think there is a certain obsession with The Sequences. To be rational is not the same as to read The Sequences, and having read them is not a necessary condition to read and understand what is written on LW. It is a bad habit of some Lesswrongers to use “read The Sequences” as an advice to an apparently irrational commenter. Linking to a specific Sequences article is fine, bud demanding to read the whole huge bulk of text in order to be worth of participating in LW discussions is silly. After all, rationality is not a religion, and it doesn’t have one source of concentrated wisdom.
(Personally I have read parts of The Sequences, probably more than half, because they were fun to read, well written, with important and interesting insights. I wouldn’t do it if it was presented as a necessary work that one must do to become a rationalist, and this is the way how a lot of people present them in the discussions.)
Also, I don’t believe in the IQ 130 lower limit.
I’m only trying to estimate the number of people who are naturally ready to read the sequences if they wanted to—those who have no obvious barriers to entry. I’m not trying to say that 99% of the world is unworthy or unwelcome here… only that most people appear to have a barrier or two and are under-prepared in one way or another. I’m sure their experience reading LW would be even more beneficial and helpful to them than it would be to the most obviously prepared potential readers and our community would be all the better if they are able to overcome those barriers.
Also, I agree that telling people to “read the sequences” is asinine and unproductive. I’m sorry if my article looked like I was promoting that idea. The main reason I’m now using a target of “who’s obviously ready to read the sequences” is because last time I tried this, I mentioned growing the number of Less Wrong participants and accidentally elicited everyone’s theory on how we should manage the growth and maintenance of LW instead of getting feedback on my core audience estimates or ideas on how I could improve them.
Thanks for clarifying, this sounds quite reasonable. I liked and upvoted your comment here and appreciate your effort to disseminate the content of the best of the Less Wrong postings to a broader audience.
I fully agree.
Am I the only one dying to know what explanation for the existence of complex life is endorsed by the 24% of atheists who don’t believe in evolution?!
My girlfriend is a weak Buddhist/Atheist (who gives a 60% chance to “ghosts exist”) and she doesn’t think evolution is correct. I asked her why and she said because it’s not proven. She said she read a biology professor’s book in Taiwan several years ago that says they are “missing evidence” and so that makes the theory invalid. Also, she points out that since it’s a theory and not a law, it’s not true yet. The evolution thing is kind of extra funny to me because she dragged me to a lame dinosaur museum a few days ago where we watched a really basic movie about how evolution happened. Her take is that it’s just a silly story scientist made up to feel smart.
And she has a degree in engineering and went to the best magnet school in Taiwan for high school where she concentrated on math and physics.
So, where does she think all this complexity came from?
Ghosts.
(sorry!)
It looks like that category includes agnostics too.
I was unfortunate enough to spend some time talking to an agnostic that doesn’t believe in evolution. Her reasoning was “evolution is just as faith based as creationism”. She was also interested in astrology and the like.
The complexity of modern life arises from a conspiracy organized the Illuminati, but now controlled by the CIA and the oil companies. Either that or Bill Gates.
Two categories of comments:
Argument about which categories to choose
Atheism is, in almost every way, a harder choice to make than rejecting creationism, your “second place.” The oft-cited example of “smart guy who believes in god” ’round here is Robert Aumann. Another thing to consider is that only looking for people who already agree with the site is bad—we want people who don’t agree or don’t know, but who are willing to listen. So although highly correlated with being on LW, reporting as atheist/agnostic is not a good category, and you should probably find something else.
The NT distinction is reasonable when looking at the current audience of LessWrong, but probably too strict when talking about the potential audience, for the same reason as above. We don’t want to “permanently disqualify” anyone from being rational for 1 category—we want to peach the gospel, in a sense.
130 IQ? Really? Predictably Irrational was the #23 selling book on Amazon in 2008. It is astronomically unlikely that every single person who read the book had IQ over 130. Some filter for intelligence is needed, sure. But not 1.5 standard deviations, single tailed! Or, more anecdotally: I know plenty of average (less than 1 s.d. above mean) people who like reading interesting things.
Statistical things to fix
You did a generally good job controlling for correlations, with a few gaps on (30 minutes on computer)|(all the other stuff)
The real problem with “no free time”: you assume everyone’s average rather than accounting for variation, which would increase the numbers there.
Yvain’s survey. I think you’re underestimating the awesome power of response bias. And also neglecting the extra factor that all those people signed up for LW, not just spent some time reading.
I’ll try and be a bit more constructive when I have more time.
“130 IQ? Really? Predictably Irrational was the #23 selling book on Amazon in 2008. It is astronomically unlikely that every single person who read the book had IQ over 130. Some filter for intelligence is needed, sure. But not 1.5 standard deviations, single tailed! Or, more anecdotally: I know plenty of average (less than 1 s.d. above mean) people who like reading interesting things.”
I bet you don’t. Liking to read at all immediately makes someone non-average. The average USian reads four books per year ( source http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/21/AR2007082101045.html ), with 25% not reading at all. The same source says “The Bible and religious works were read by two-thirds in the survey, more than all other categories. Popular fiction, histories, biographies and mysteries were all cited by about half, while one in five read romance novels. Every other genre including politics, poetry and classical literature were named by fewer than five percent of readers.”
I know that the mean adult in the UK buys 1.8 books per year (they read another three or four from the library or friends).
Assuming any kind of correlation between amount of books read and intelligence (which I think is a fair assumption) and taking ‘like to read’ as meaning reading more than one book a month, say, then assuming IQ can be a reasonable proxy for intelligence (an assumption I don’t share, but leave that for present) then while I can’t find the raw data for that poll, I bet that twelve books per year is a couple of standard deviations from the mean, and probably correlates with an intelligence a couple of standard deviations above the mean (especially when you talk about ‘interesting’ books, which on this forum I take to be more likely to mean, say, Godel, Escher, Bach than The DaVinci Code)
There’s probably a selection bias present there—you probably think of people as being closer to the mean than they really are, because in general people tend to associate with people with similar tastes whenever possible.
Yeah, there’s probably some selection bias, but not so much that I can’t compensate for it. I think you misinterpreted me, or I wasn’t clear enough—nobody is average in every way, so I would have to be really stupid to mean “average everything including book-reading habits” when I said average. So what did I mean when I said “average?” Well, what seemed like the obvious interpretation to me was that I meant “average-ish IQ.” As in “I know people within 1 standard deviation of average IQ who like reading interesting things, and it’s a bad plan to respond to someone else’s personal experience with ‘you must be lying or stupid.’” A better choice would have been “then you’re very unusual” or “but I don’t, and here are some numbers.”
Standard deviations may not be the best way to think about this distribution. They’ll lead you to picture it as exponential decay even though it isn’t. Plus that 1.8 books/yr number may be stuck in your head, even though that was sales (I bought 0 books this year). The median for reading was 7 books/yr in your linked survey. So if 25% read 0 books, that means the spread is big, putting 12 only around the 3rd quartile. I.e. less than 1 standard deviation above the mean of a bell-curve.
Nah, they wouldn’t be able to handle GEB. My prototype was Predictably Irrational. I’d guess about 1⁄5 of the sequence posts are that level (if “fluent” usage of the internet is also assumed), and with some editing (perhaps by some sort of directed community effort) that number could be raised to 1⁄3 (and not assuming internet fluency), containing most of the important stuff. Which is still several books worth, iirc.
I don’t really see how being smart grants you extra hours / day. Your commute, your job, your wife, your children, and your body (which wants sleep, food, sex, emotional connection, etc) all don’t care how smart you are—they want the exact same amount of time from you in all cases regardless of you being being IQ 80 or IQ 180.
Smart people maybe get a couple hours / week back by avoiding church. What other savings do rationalists realistically get in a uniform way?
ALSO—although I labeled it Atheist/Agnostic, I’m counting anyone who is unsure about the existence of god as being those two, not just the 1% of people who self-ID as atheist.
I agree that being smart doesn’t magically give you extra time (although maybe watching less TV goes here).
What I said was that you assumed everyone was the average for their group and didn’t account for variation: you discount everyone who’s employed/has kids, rather than instead looking at what percentage of those groups spend >30 minutes/day on the computer.
ALSO - ( :P ) I still think that’s too strict. You don’t even accept the full number of people who declared “none” for religion, apparently (15% in 2008 - see your link pg 5). You claim that if you believe in god then “lessons in rationality are a complete waste of time for you,” when I’d think that it would be the opposite: it is when someone is irrational that they can use lessons in rationality. The question is then not “who already agrees?” but “who is willing to listen?”
“your wife… don’t care how smart you are”
Mine does. I don’t see this thing you’re claiming about one’s spouse/partner/whatever being a timesink. Surely most people (at least most rational people) would marry someone who shares their interests, rather than detracts from them? There are plenty of things that have removed big chunks of my time (work foremost among them) but I don’t have any less free time since my marriage...
I’ll try to think of ways to integrate this with what I’ve been reading in the US time use surveys. I know you’re not American, but being married in the US typically halves peoples’ leisure time spent reading and using computers and the displaced time ends up being spent as extra time at work. This pattern matches really well to what I’ve seen from my friends and colleges at old jobs who went from being single to married… even smart ones.
So I wasn’t making a wild, sexist conjecture without context. I was just pointing to the mountains of data supporting this point and assuming that people wouldn’t find it controversial.
“the displaced time ends up being spent as extra time at work” But you’re already counting “being in full-time work” as one of your factors, so you’re counting that twice. If someone’s in full-time work, you say it’s impossible for them to read LessWrong, and then on top of that you cut out all those who are married because they’ll be working more! You’re also assuming that someone who will be interested in reading the site will follow normal patterns of behaviour and time use, when the very fact that they’re interested in reading the site would suggest otherwise...
I’m pretty sure I’m counting each separately and disqualifying people for having either one or both. I don’t see how that’s counting twice. Usually the extra time lost during marriage goes to work because lots of people have both a spouse and a job. But even without a job, a spouse typically diminishes free time spent on solitary leisure activities by a factor of 2 which I keep mentioning. I’m glad your personal situation is better than this.
I agree that people currently on LW are somehow re-prioritizing their time in novel ways which allow them to read the site. I’m just pointing out that there are likely 10-20x as many people out there for every current LW reader who don’t have the skills to effectively do this and this barrier keeps them from possibly reading the sequences or using LW.
Maybe trying to teach people better time management skills and prioritization would be helpful? This would allow them to have the free time to possibly read LW or do whatever it was they found exciting or helpful in life.
I’ve spent the past 24h thinking this over, but I can’t find a different way to say it and I still think it needs to be said: the four sentences above strike me as among the most offensively stupid things I’ve come across on LW.
You’re totally missing the point of MBTI and I wouldn’t be comfortable trusting you with any other psychometric instrument until I saw evidence you’d understood your mistake. MBTI is supposed to measure preference and not ability; and like any other similar instrument should be used to help bridge over communication difficulties rather than to pigeonhole people. It freaks the hell out of me when I see people doing that pigeonholing thing; it’s the same problem as with horoscopes—people just aren’t that damn simple!
More directly adressing the nonsense above, absolutely nothing I’ve ever read about MBTI has led me to the conclusion that people with an S preference “take things at face value and resist using induction or intuition” or that people with an F preference are “using feelings to chose beliefs in lieu of thinking”.
A typical reference on MBTI would say that an S preference means you “approach situations with an eye to the facts” or “work from the facts to the big picture”, both things that strike me as being perfectably compatible with a community which prides itself on “updating on the evidence”. Someone with an F preference would take into account others’ feelings when making a decision, when someone with a T preference would tend to discount their own as well as others’ feelings. In many situations the former can be a more (instrumentally) rational thing to do and the latter less rational. (As for epistemic rationality: feelings are facts, and denying that people have feelings is not a mark of rationality but a caricature of it.)
If MBTI can be used to improve communication, then it can be used to predict whether a fixed method of communication will work. That is exactly the purpose of the post: asking whom can be reached by LW in its current form. Even if Louie is completely wrong about the meaning of NS,TF, the empirical regularity seems perfectly appropriate for the project.
Psychometric instruments don’t have purposes.
I don’t think this statement communicated well (I almost reflexively downvoted) because “instruments” is a term that typically implies design and hence purpose.
It might be better to say that the purpose of psychometric instruments is simply to reveal truth, and truth doesn’t have a specific purpose (it’s just useful for lots of things you might want to accomplish).
Compare the statement “an inch has no purpose” to the statement “a ruler has no purpose”—the latter has the purpose of measuring the former, whereas length itself is just a property of an object in the universe.
Mixing together international statistics with American statistics is probably not a good idea, at least in those fields where you can expect some difference between the two—the “free time” test, and especially the “believes in evolution” test (where the USA are among the most prominent outliers).
I agree this is sloppy. Although, I did also look up UK statistics (where available) and that forms the largest possible fraction of English speaking internet users that two sets of statistics can accomplish.
If anyone can point me to more international numbers, I will adjust my numbers accordingly.
I’m in Australia right now and it occurs to me that people here are probably much more likely to make it through several of the above filters since there is a high enough minimum wage here (~$15US/hr) and enough mandatory time off work to basically put everyone into the comfortable economic range where their IQ maxes out at whatever level they were going to make it to (instead of stalling due to economic hardship or lack of free time like in the US). Also, there seems to be no public respect for religion in Australia. Almost everyone I meet here laughs at the thought of taking it seriously. It’s like I’m 100 years in the future. Another data point is of course that in the last election for Prime minister in Australia, both the candidates were openly Atheist.
Uh, what? Julia Gillard is an atheist, but Tony Abbott is a staunch Catholic. He went to seminary. He’s called “the Mad Monk.” He said before the election that he wanted to make studying the Bible mandatory in Australian schools.
Where on Earth did you get the idea that he was an atheist?
(Just to add to the confusion: the Liberal Party of Australia is the conservative party.)
Thanks for the correction David! I thought I read that in an Australian newspaper a few weeks ago but I must have misremembered which election that article was referring to… maybe that was about another regional or local election and I got the coverage confused because I don’t know all the politicians here by name.
Again, great work. This has been going around in my mind for a day or so and here’s some observations:
If IQ correlates with all that, why are we filtering by all that AND IQ as if they were orthogonal?
Also, you may want to try filtering by age groups. Younger people tend to be more atheist and have time on computers and the internet. And if we get to them before they join a hedge fund, then they won’t end up ‘winning so hard they won’t have time to do anything meaningful’.
Moreover, you may want to add some gray to your filters. If 5% of lesswrongers self-reported to be outside the 130+ IQ bracket, and maybe sampling bias makes that 10%, then perhaps this should be reflected in the filter.
Another one that I just thought about, what about people who read and understand -some- of the sequences, and get some value out of them but don’t end up signing up and participating? Are they a waste of resources? As far as I know from experiences, people who participate in a community tend to be the peak of the iceberg (1-10%?), and the effects of this this self-selection should not be ignored.
Finally, to add to the uncertainty, an anecdote: Some people tend to be open to convincing if they find the right arguments. I self-identified as a christian when I started reading the sequences and came out an atheist, and I think there’s quite a few of us if I recall correctly from the rationalist origin story thread. Given that, I think the religion filter needs a fair bit of gray added to it.
Overall I think this estimate has swung in the opposite direction. I would be very surprised if the sequences had reached 50% of everyone who would benefit from them. At the very least, this fact would imply something counter-intuitive about the habits of our target audience. (e.g. that they tend to cluster and so LW has saturated word-of-mouth or news outlets where the target audience gathers, without even trying, but further trying would be unproductive.)
Interesting idea, but as the comment debate demonstrates, it’s probably pretty hard to figure out how correlated these features are. For example, I imagine being 130+ IQ is well correlated with spending 30 minutes a day reading on computers.
It might be useful to keep percolation theory in mind if you’re trying to model the spread of the meme that LW exists and is worth checking out in a small population buffered by a larger population that is unlikely to find the message true enough to pass along.
Think of the social graph as a crystal lattice. Now imagine that some percentage, p, of the nodes in the lattice are likely to pass the message along because they find it useful. The message is like a fluid trying to spread through the medium via the nodes that will pass it along.
See here for an image of a percolation theoretic display of the square lattice in two dimensions with percolation probability p=0.51.
If p is high enough and/or the lattice has a lot of connections, then you get a sea of transmissibility with islands of isolation (because they are surrounded by buffer nodes) that need an unusual effort to reach. If p is too low and/or the network is too sparse then you have islands of opportunity and each separate island needs to be contacted by extraordinary means in order of the message to reach it.
Given the way you’ve specified the target demographic, I’d guess that we’re dealing with the island scenario. LW is probably an island. It may not even be the largest island there is. My naive guess would be that outreach to other islands would be tricky… like… how does one entire community Aumann update with another entire community?
This is likely to matter to our outreach strategy.
Some of the claims made within this article are too strong and unnecessarily inflammatory:
People compartmentalize and can be very rational in some domains of their lives while being much less so in others. The statement “the lessons in rationality are a complete wasted [sic] of time for you” is too broad and sweeping. Also, religion may be instrumentally rational for some people.
Again, this statement is too sweeping; there may be evolution denialists who ascribe to induction and science but who haven’t carefully considered the evidence for evolution on account of being involved in other (possibly valuable) things.
One can be primarily sensing and still have very good intuition and one can be primarily feeling while still being very good at thinking. So your exclusion of people who are primarily sensing or primarily feeling seems unjustified, at least in the absence of further supporting evidence.
Reason is not the only means of overcoming bias.
Just because somebody currently chooses beliefs based on feeling rather than thinking doesn’t mean that he or she will persist in doing, so the use of “permanently” is inappropriate here.
It’s not clear that choosing beliefs based on feeling rather than thinking is irrational.
The phrase “there’s nothing that we can do for you” conjures images of tribalism and I find the use of “blessings of rationality” uncomfortably religious/cultish in tone.
Even assuming that the vast majority of those with IQ < 130 are unable to benefit from Less Wrong articles/sequences, there may be people with IQ < 130 who are statistical outliers in other ways and who can consequently benefit from Less Wrong articles/sequences.
Your use of “unlucky” in describing those who have full-time jobs and those who are married with children seems unjustified.
And again, even if most people in the demographic of those who have full-time jobs and/or are married with children don’t have time to read, there may be some people in this demographic who are statistical outliers in other ways (e.g. naturally low in their need for sleep) which leave them with free time for reading.
Thanks for your feedback multifoliaterose!
Fair enough. They still aren’t part of our target audience since Atheists/Agnostics are 125x more likely than a Theist to read LW. No response bias to the survey could be extreme enough to fully account for this.
There could be people like that. But there’s no reason to think there should be many. I’m not counting being “unsure” about evolution against people—only being opposed to it. I think there’s good evidence that being an outright evolution denialist makes you MUCH more likely to be the type of person who is hostile towards science and reason in general.
That’s a good point. I made a mistake when I worded my analysis of the MBTI section as if
S ⇒ !N and F ⇒ !T
when really it’s
S ⇒ S > N and F ⇒ F > T
So it doesn’t make sense to talk as if someone is “missing” a trait—it’s only non-dominant. Thanks for reminding me of that.
That said, most people can’t use their non-dominant traits that well. Heck, most people can’t use their dominant traits that well! Even being exceptionally smart doesn’t turn someone into a “fully developed”, multi-modal savant who can switch from feelings to thought and sensing to intuition naturally. Most people seem to emulate their non-dominate trait using their dominant one. I’m not particularly impressed by most people’s ability to emulate… especially when it comes to emulating thought with feelings.
That’s a fascinating strategy! Pitting your biases against each other! I like the idea of focusing my irrationalities on each other in a way that annihilates them. Are you planning to write more about this in other contexts? Although, in a way, this may be a common technique since this is how a typical person keeps their life from falling apart. They just manage their irrationalities with their other irrationalities since that’s all they have to work with.
It’s optimistic to assume people “choose” their personality style and even more optimistic to assume they can change to a different one. I’m not saying it never happens, just that it never happens enough to warrant considering when I’m trying to estimate demographics dealing with millions of people. The number of people who will change their personalities in that context is pretty much noise.
Choosing individual actions based on feelings probably isn’t irrational. That’s you just quickly distilling your beliefs so that you can act quickly without thinking. But using your feelings to choose your beliefs (which are the inputs to your feelings) is certainly not optimal. It’s ungrounded and circular, and it only works if you have a belief system you don’t want to change over time.
I thought they were funny at the time that I wrote them. Maybe it’s too snarky. Why would you complain about those but not “Dawkins coming into [someone’s] heart”?
Remember, I’m not trying to setup a litmus test to prevent people from joining LW. I don’t want anyone who falls outside of my narrowly defined “core target audience” to feel like they’re not welcome on the site or they are less desirable members. I’d love more diversity of personality, thought, and opinion within the rationalist community here. I think we could stand to have wayyy more diversity than we do. And I’m expecting people who fall outside of these filters to show up here and love it and want to stay forever! That would be great.
All I want from this is a way to find the majority of potential readers within as narrow of a definition as I can create. I’m only using it to decide which promotion strategies to undertake, so it’s OK if it’s imprecise and doesn’t capture everyone. I just want the right order of magnitude.
My tone here probably contributed a lot to people being critical of the time section. Sorry about that. Of course, I do still think the facts there are justified. It makes complete sense that having a spouse lowers the absolute amount of time someone engages in solitary leisure activities like “reading” or “using computers”. The time you spend with a spouse or doing things for a spouse usually comes out of the time you used to spend alone or with other people. Same for having a child or having a job. Of course, I understand how having those things can also boost motivation and engagement with the world so perhaps it’s a bit harsh to dismiss them with words like “unlucky”. I went too far trying to be ironic on the internet.
I was thinking today that taking Provigil is perhaps a way in which smart people systematically end up with more hours in their day.
A general and potentially serious problem with your analysis is that you’re excluding populations based on what the average such member of the population is like, ignoring small minorities which may be highly significant because the number that you’ve ended up with is so small.
•Less Wrong is currently read by many times more atheists/agnostics than theists. I would hesitate to read too much into what this says about the potential readership of Less Wrong. There could be a selection effect which resulted in “early adopters” of Less Wrong being more likely to be atheists than potential readers of Less Wrong.
•The relevant quantity is not the relative frequencies of potential LW readers within atheist/agnostic populations and theist populations, but the absolute frequency of potential LW readers among atheist/agnostic populations and theist populations. This difference is actually significant insofar only around 12% of the world population describes itself as nonreligious.
I agree that evolution denialists are much more likely to be hostile toward science and reason in general than others. However:
•Some people are probably evolution denialists not because they have a strong anti-evolution agenda but because they heuristically adopt the beliefs about those around them about things that they haven’t thought very much about.
For example, I believe that HIV causes AIDS despite having no direct exposure to the evidence that HIV causes AIDS. Serge Lang has suggested that HIV does not cause AIDS and this could be true—certainly I have no object level evidence against his claim—but I find it quite unlikely.
Some evolution denialists who’s acquaintances are all or mostly evolution denialists may be in a similar situation with respect to evolution.
•There aren’t many Less Wrong readers altogether, so that even if there aren’t many evolution denialists who are potential Less Wrong readers, it’s conceivable that the number is greater than the number of current Less Wrong readers!
I agree; the issues that I had with your remarks on this point are:
•The general issue that I mentioned above of small minorities of given populations potentially being highly significant to the sort of analysis that you’re trying to do.
•I could imagine the phrasing (which is missing the disclaimers that you’ve since given) being offensive to newcomers who identify with the MBTI sensing and feeling types. For example, they seem to have rubbed Morendil the wrong way.
Yes, me too :-)
Possibly; I have to think about whether I have more useful stuff to say about this that I can articulate in words.
I have a similar impression. This strategy may work well for some people when it comes to self-interested motivations and near-mode altruism. When it comes to far-mode altruism the situation is of course very bleak.
Again, possibly not relative to the potential LW readership.
Yes, but some people do want to have a belief system that doesn’t change with time (at least on some matters!) in line with Vladimir_M’s comment here. They may not realize what the cost of having such a belief system is on account of inferential distance.
I agree that people who currently want to have a belief system that does not change with time are at best “high hanging fruit” from the point of view of potential Less Wrong readership.
I had a similar reaction to the “Dawkins coming into [someone’s] heart passage; not sure why I didn’t mention it; maybe because it seemed less self-serving.
I think here there’s an issue of you attempting to countersignal Things You Can’t Countersignal. There are issues of contingencies making Less Wrong prone to being perceived as a cult as come across in a comment by Vladimir_M and the RationalWiki article on Less Wrong.
As Alicorn says, there’s no problem with saying such things in person with friends who one knows well, but I think that one should be careful when an intended countersignal is easily read as a signal.
Great to hear :-). Again, I think there was an issue of you attempting to countersignal Things You Can’t Countersignal by using overly strong language and omitting to include the disclaimer that you just wrote in your original post.
Again, it’s not clear to me that your strategy is capturing the right order of magnitude and focusing on the right audiences! :-)
I’d be happy to correspond with you about promotion strategies. I know a number of people who may be potential Less Wrong readers and may have useful remarks.
I agree with everything here.
Upvoted, I appreciate your responsiveness. I have a few followup comments but am presently missing a keyboard; will respond within a few days.
Intuition would suggest that P(30 min/day reading or on computers|IQ 130+) >> P(30 min/day reading or on computers). I doubt that atheism and NT personality type are independent, either.
Are you outside of the 3 categories I mentioned in the time section? Most people who read LW have relatively unstructured lives (students, unemployed, etc) or are computer professionals. Are you one of those? Perhaps you just don’t have any close friends who are adults to see how much of a time suck wives, children, and full-time jobs are. Being smart doesn’t create extra hours in someone’s day. Working full-time, commuting, sleeping, and dealing with a family pretty much maxes out anyone no matter how clever they are (or were).
Also, I had doubts that atheism and NT could be independent, but I looked hard for evidence that they were related and instead found only studies showing it wasn’t correlated. I’d be really grateful if you could find correct data showing the opposite if that’s in fact true.
cough
Forgot about gay LW members’ husbands. Sorry. ;)
Upvoted for being funny. Come on folks, if you can’t laugh about marginalizing minorities, what can you laugh about?
seriously though, which does LW have more of: women, or gay/bisexual men? I honestly don’t know.
I know that polls like this seem to be generally frowned upon at LW, and this is probably a silly place to put a poll, but I’m going to go ahead and start one here anyway.
upvote this comment if you’re a heterosexual male
upvote this comment if you’re female
upvote this comment if you’re a gay or bisexual male
I’m a bisexual male, but can’t upvote my own comment.
So the results so far are: 4 women, 4 gay/bisexual men, and 5 heterosexual men.
This means that that there are approximately as many women on LW as there are gay/bisexual men. And almost half of the men on LW are gay/bisexual.
And yes, I know that there are probably several reasons why this poll’s results are biased or otherwise unreliable, but at least now we have some data.
One obvious problem with this poll: it contradicts a previous survey, which said:
“(96.4%) were male, 5 (3%) were female, and one chose not to reveal their gender.”
so it looks like there were lots of heterosexual males who didn’t bother voting.
Unfortunately, we don’t know whether people who read the discussion section have significant differences from those who don’t.
downvote this comment if you find this poll annoying
upvote this comment if you somehow don’t belong in any of the other categories listed here.
downvote this comment if you upvoted one of the other comments
downvote this comment if you find this poll annoying
upvote this comment if you’re a heterosexual male
Sorry about being flippant. I understand that you want to reduce the smack of sexism around here and that’s almost certainly a good thing.
Incidentally, if you have any data or statistics which could help me show something different than the 2x diminishing of solitary leisure activities of those who are married, I’d be grateful for the help in correcting my misunderstanding of this issue. I really prefer to not have to believe this if there were reliable evidence in the other direction.
Also, there are people who are specifically worried about what happens when one reads the sequences. I have one friend who loves HPMoR but refuses to read the sequences because she has “heard that the Less Wrong archives are like TVTropes on crack.” I don’t know what to do about that and I don’t know how common that situation is.
The tab explosion thing is a mixture of good and bad—as David Gerard says, it makes for a very interesting read. However, it can be annoying if you just want to read about one aspect of rationality and process it without having to read a whole bunch of posts about related ideas. It may be that rationality concepts should be processed in a bundle rather than in isolation, or it may be that the Sequences can be better organized. Regardless, it does make it harder to plan out how you want to read the Sequences because you inevitably find yourself reading more posts than you intended.
Footnote: As far as I can tell, the posts about cognitive biases are the most isolated, and the ones pertaining to language, the Mind Projection Fallacy, and reductionism are the most interconnected.
LW does tend to be a tab explosion site for smart people. (RW thinks this is a good thing.)
Tell you what, the thing I really like about LW is that the comments are pretty much troll-free. The moderation system—“vote up if you want more like this” rather than “vote up if you agree”—really seems to work.
Boy, that RationalWiki page is really annoying.
Really? It seems extremely fair-minded to me; then again, I have a thick skin and I agree with most of those criticisms. (Disclaimer: I have never written a single character on RW.)
The Cryonics page, on the other side, makes me raise an eyebrow - there’s so much snark mixed with the legitimate criticism that it looks more like a pasted-together forum thread.
Clicking the “Random Page” button several times, that seems to describe pretty much every page there (at least the ones that are about topics that left-leaning traditional rationalists from the English-speaking world don’t unanimously agree are good things).
I’ve got nothing invested in it, but such quotations as
and
don’t seem fair-minded to me at all.
(Rather, they both strike me as incorrect and intentionally annoying. Lovingly annoying, says David Gerard, but still.)
Of course David Gerard would say that...
I stand by my opinion on saying “You should try reading the sequences”—telling someone to read a million words(*) of philosophy before they talk to you is effectively an extremely rude dismissal.
(*) rough estimate. Has anyone counted?
For the first one (the phrasing of which is a quote from a +7 comment) - have you had a chance to read Roko’s banned post and subsequent discussion? While grains of salt were employed by the majority, a minority took the concern extremely seriously (including Eliezer, and were his comment to receive widespread attention I think he would soon long for the days when he was simply accused of arrogance).
I agree that the second is too harsh (being in a footnote, I didn’t notice it before).
I have read the post-that-shall-not-be-named and studied the discussion somewhat intensively, and I agree with your analysis. However, I believe David was referring to more than just that incident.
As for the second point: while I think it is phrased rather harshly, telling someone to go read the sequences is often a condescending Courtier’s reply.
But the Courtier’s Reply isn’t necessarily a logical fallacy. It is when it serves to mask one’s lack of a counterargument; but it isn’t usual for the answer to a simple question to be a long, complicated, and easily screwed-up one. I once raised a pretty straightforward question about identity in the LW IRC channel and was directed to one of the Sequences, and in hindsight that proved a lot more useful to me than trying to replicate the whole argument on the spot (though I still wasn’t persuaded).
I wouldn’t classify the Courtier’s Reply as a fallacy in the same sense as the conjunction fallacy or an ad hominem argument, but it is logically rude.
Funny, I didn’t even realize that was what “courtier’s reply” referred to. The fallacy in the courtier’s reply was that the literature referred to could not possibly demonstrate the proposition claimed, because it dealt only with the consequences of said proposition, and hence it can be ignored without actually reading it; so I took that as the defining characteristic, rather than just the referral to a large and intimidating body of literature.
Seems I had it right: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/05/who_says_we_dont_need_bible_sc.php
Annoying doesn’t necessarily mean incorrect.
As I said when I said hi.
“The only ways I see out of this dilemma are 1) being in a relatively unstructured period of your life (ie, unemployed, college student, semi-retired, etc) or 2) having a completely broken motivation system which keeps you in a perpetually unstructured life against your will (akrasia) or perhaps 3) being a full-time computer professional who can multi-task and pass off reading online during your work day as actually working. ”
I really don’t see this. While I am (at present) in category three, until two years ago I was working first in a bank and then as a nursing assistant, both more-than-full-time jobs, and also married. I still managed to read a few books a week, two broadsheet newspapers a day, and spend a couple of hours reading and writing stuff online.
Admittedly, I’m in the UK, so have/had a relatively short commute and also decent public transport (so can read on the ’bus/train), but I really don’t think having a job stops people spending half an hour a day on their interests (in fact I did the above while doing part-time university studies and being in a band).
Indeed. I’m a middle-aged domestic suburban dad. I have a newly-chronically-ill girlfriend and a small child (and two step-teenagers). Thankfully I can work from home as often as I need to, which turns out to be most days of a week. And I’m presently looking for outside hours consulting income, because a family of five can eat all the money you can think of.
But I take LW out of my internet-as-television time budget. Time I am deliberately relaxing. I’m here because I enjoy it, while I enjoy it.
There are those who are not happy with this level of commitment, of course. So one should think carefully whether getting any of someone’s time is better than none, or if you really do only want committed time.
That’s impressive! Thanks for the data point. I’ll definitely take your experience into consideration. It seems that no one wants to believe that time might constrain their lives or the lives of other intelligent people.
Question: Do you even own a TV?
Wasn’t meant to be impressive—like I said, there are several factors that helped (short commute on public transport rather than long commute by car). Time does, of course, constrain people’s lives—I am in constant agonies about how much I could actually get done if I didn’t have to spend forty hours or more a week sat in a place I don’t want to be doing things I don’t want to do—but you’re talking about half an hour a day average, not some sort of huge commitment of time. If you bring a book to work and read on your lunch break, or even just spend three and a half hours on Sunday afternoon reading a novel, you’re doing that much. As a matter of fact I don’t own a TV—I do watch DVDs and the occasional programme off the BBC iPlayer on my computer, though. I’d guess maybe five hours a week watching video material, something like that.
My point is just that pressures of time really don’t stop the vast majority from committing that much time to something they’re interested in. I can’t think of anyone I know who’s ever said “I don’t have time to watch TV for 30 minutes a day”, or ”...to play video games for 30 minutes a day”, or “to listen to music/have sex/watch sports/talk with my friends”.
What you’re seeing as a time pressure is actually a priority pressure—most people put watching TV as a higher priority than reading. Which is a valid choice—there is nothing about TV as a medium that makes it intrinsically any worse than any other, and one could get far more out of I, Claudius, Life On Earth, an old 60s Doctor Who story or The Ascent Of Man than out of, say, J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown—but it does put a limit on how much time they’ll spend reading rather dense pieces of text.
But that’s definitely not the same thing as a limit on their time, it’s a limit on their interest.
It’s surprising nobody has brought up HPatMoR. Look at the comments in the welcome thread. Harry Potter is a very effective recruiter.
As a rough feel (and not a statistical inference), looks like HPatMoR attracts a much more diverse readership to LW than the takers of that old survey.
Example: look at me. You’d filter me off on two of those categories, both of which happen to be 92+% filters, and one is specifically mentioned in the welcome thread as a warning to turn back. And yet this blog is one of the most addictive finds on the internet.
Maybe you shouldn’t underestimate the readership by the periphery.
Speaking of filters, what do you mean by
Should I take it to mean that 24% of Atheists / Agnostics don’t believe in evolution? That’s a surprising number.
Most of the complaints have centered around the US Time Use Survey I’ve been using. I’m looking for a more helpful data set that can replace them and serve a similar function. I found this:
http://www.visualeconomics.com/how-the-world-spends-its-time-online_2010-06-16/
But yet, I can’t locate the raw data from the Pew surveys or Nielsen to see any of the breakdowns of internet usage. It’s interesting to see that supposedly 10% of all American read blogs every day. That’s kind of surprising… I would venture to say it’s unbelievable in fact. My guess is the methodology was a phone survey and it only include the “All Americans” who have stable land lines in urban and suburban areas. So the “All Americans” is probably about as representative as psychology studies done on a group of only psychology students. Also, I can’t find what kind of blogs people are reading or for how long… and Pew normally does surveys in English and Spanish so that’s another reason I need to find the raw data to see the breakdown. Can someone help me locate the original Pew Research or Nielsen data used to make this graphic?
This data would be really helpful because it might allow me to combine the English Speaking screen + 30 minutes reading / using computers screen into a single, more precise filter for English + 30 online reading time / day which would be cleaner for purposes like avoiding double counting and more accurately track what I care about.
If the survey was done with land lines, I’d expect that to undercount the population that reads blogs, rather than overcount. Landlines are used more by people who are older.
Regarding the specific Pew study, I’m not sure, but is it the study mentioned here?