I want to do a good job on this one. The decision to mostly re-use previous questions was a deliberate attempt to return to the Scott Alexander era, and my main changes were in trying to avoid what I see as the flaws in 2017 and 2020. 2017 used special software that wound up with software issues, so I went back to Google Forms. 2020 didn’t get seen by very many people, so I made an effort to get this one more visibility. So far nobody has mentioned a software issue and we already have more responses than 2020, so I’m feeling relatively good about how it’s going.
The goal of having a clear return to form overrode most of the new questions I wanted to explore. The remnants of that are the “Do You Organize Less Wrong Meetups?” question (I’m curious what percentage of people who read LW go to meetups, and what percentage of people who go to meetups run them!) and the “Most Important Lesson” question that I plan to feed directly into Meetups-In-A-Box activities to emphasize those lessons. In the end I decided I wanted the census to look familiar and reliable, so the new questions in Section 10 are mostly goofy and everything else is pretty standard.
“Demand” seems a bit stronger than I wanted to communicate but we might have a difference in connotations. It’s now called the Unofficial General Census, which might lower that somewhat. I was going for “encourage” rather than “demand.” Still, if this attempt flops and people subtract some of my Calling For Stag Hunt points, I would find that reasonable and fair. I’m also happy with the amount of endorsement; this census isn’t official, I’m not associated with the LessWrong team, most surveys shouldn’t wind up in front of the whole site, but this census isn’t blocked or dis-endorsed either.
I want to do a good job on this one. The decision to mostly re-use previous questions was a deliberate attempt to return to the Scott Alexander era, and my main changes were in trying to avoid what I see as the flaws in 2017 and 2020. 2017 used special software that wound up with software issues, so I went back to Google Forms. 2020 didn’t get seen by very many people, so I made an effort to get this one more visibility. So far nobody has mentioned a software issue and we already have more responses than 2020, so I’m feeling relatively good about how it’s going.
The goal of having a clear return to form overrode most of the new questions I wanted to explore. The remnants of that are the “Do You Organize Less Wrong Meetups?” question (I’m curious what percentage of people who read LW go to meetups, and what percentage of people who go to meetups run them!) and the “Most Important Lesson” question that I plan to feed directly into Meetups-In-A-Box activities to emphasize those lessons. In the end I decided I wanted the census to look familiar and reliable, so the new questions in Section 10 are mostly goofy and everything else is pretty standard.
“Demand” seems a bit stronger than I wanted to communicate but we might have a difference in connotations. It’s now called the Unofficial General Census, which might lower that somewhat. I was going for “encourage” rather than “demand.” Still, if this attempt flops and people subtract some of my Calling For Stag Hunt points, I would find that reasonable and fair. I’m also happy with the amount of endorsement; this census isn’t official, I’m not associated with the LessWrong team, most surveys shouldn’t wind up in front of the whole site, but this census isn’t blocked or dis-endorsed either.
Thanks. All seems good here to me.