And humans, even lesswrong readers, are all varying degrees of irrational. Therefore understanding the distribution of political affiliation of people that use the site is a significant step towards understanding the site’s bias.
It may be evidence, but it still leaves as an open question whether political affilitations are slanted as a result of greater rationality or a political bias. Without some sort of controlled experiment this would be hard to tell.
If they aren’t slanted, it either means that what we discuss is not related to politics (implausible) or that Lesswrong doesn’t have an impact on such matters.
I would upvote an attempt to actually measure LW’s political bias.
Well, there’s a Lesswrong census every year, and that includes questions on political affiliation.
link to 2012 results
Other than that, I’m not sure how you would measure political bias.
Bias is something different than having a political affiliation.
Bias means that you make are irrational in some way.
And humans, even lesswrong readers, are all varying degrees of irrational. Therefore understanding the distribution of political affiliation of people that use the site is a significant step towards understanding the site’s bias.
It may be evidence, but it still leaves as an open question whether political affilitations are slanted as a result of greater rationality or a political bias. Without some sort of controlled experiment this would be hard to tell.
If they aren’t slanted, it either means that what we discuss is not related to politics (implausible) or that Lesswrong doesn’t have an impact on such matters.
I’m not sure how to measure it, either—hence my pledge of karma for whoever figures it out. :)