The political section is begging for a one line write in, seriously. Please consider adding on in addition to the pick one option poll. I’m not having warm fuzzies for any of the groups and had to bite my tongue and pick one I really really dislike, just because the alternatives are so much worse and one of the alternatives, while probably quite popular a choice, will be misinterpreted if I chose it.
From your perspective, that makes sense. From my perspective—I don’t intend to ever look at this data. I’m going to import it into SPSS, have it crunch numbers for me, and come out with some result like “Less Wrong users are 65% libertarian” or like “Men are more likely to be socialist than women.”
If you put “other”—and this applies to any of the questions, not just this one—you’re pretty much wasting your vote unless someone else is going to sift through the data and be interested that this particular anonymous line of the spreadsheet believes in strong environmental protection but an otherwise free market.
Looking at the answers, I really shouldn’t have allowed write-ins for any questions—I was kind of surprised how many people can’t settle on a specific gender, even though the aim of the question was more to figure out how many men versus women are on here than to judge how people feel about society (I considered saying “sex” instead, but that has its own pitfalls and wouldn’t have let me get the transgender info as easily. I’ll do it that way next time.)
I was particularly harsh on the politics question because I know how strong the temptation is. I think next survey I’ll give every question an “other” check box, but it will literally just be a check box and there will be no room to write anything in.
I was kind of surprised how many people can’t settle on a specific gender
You could cut the gordian knot by borrowing Randall Munroe and
Relsqui’s solution for the xkcd color survey,
which was to ask about chromosomal
sex:
Do you have a Y chromosome?
[Don’t Know] [Yes] [No]
If unsure, select “Yes” if you are physically male and “No” if you are
physically female. If you have had SRS, please respond for your sex at
birth. This question is relevant to the genetics of colorblindness.
Technically, isn’t it the number of X chromosomes that matters to colorblindness? It’s just that people with Y chromosomes almost always have one X chromosome, and people without them almost always have two.
You’re correct; we asked for Y chromosomes rather than X chromosomes because it’s way easier to have an extra X and not know it than to have a Y and not know it. So if we ask about Y, we can rough-sort into “probably XY” and “probably XX” groups and then look at the statistics for chromosomal deviations within those groups.
I thought I did. Now that I’ve followed your link, I realize that even if it were less common, it would probably only be marginally so, so I withdraw my comment above.
Most people don’t actually know their karyotype, and are often surprised to learn that it’s not always what you assume. You can’t necessarily infer chromosomes from external appearance and self-identification reliably; you have to look at the actual chromosomes to be sure.
If I’m not mistaken, you don’t need a DNA test for this. A cell sample under a strong microscope will show the barr bodies for XX (this won’t distinguish XXY, but that’s pretty rare).
Looking at the barr bodies is not a karyotype test. A test that can’t detect whether or not someone is not XX/XY sufficient to actually tell you the information you need to know your chromosome type.
Yes, in terms of strict probability most people will be one of those. The test of the method is how well it handles edge cases (not at all); this is of considerably greater importance when you’re talking about those edge cases.
Also, rereading that explanation, I’m annoyed at how I worded it. It’s okay, but my trans*-inclusive vocabulary has improved since then and I could do better. Hell, just “if unsure, select ‘yes’ if you were born with a penis” would have been sufficient.
Fair point. I’m not sure either; I think I’m relying on a given individual who is e.g. intersex either a) knowing that, and being able to make a better-educated guess about their chromosomes than any heuristic I offer, or b) not knowing that, which I’m willing to assume correlates well to having genitals that either do look like a penis or don’t.
Perhaps the politics question would be better phrased negatively:
On a scale of zero to ten, how much do you despise each of the following political ideologies? If you endorse an ideology, put zero. If you very mildly despise it, put one. If your life’s focus is to expunge it from the world, put 10. You must give each ideology a unique ranking.
All you have to care about is the lowest number, and anyone who wants to do more with the numbers is able to. People would be less inclined to complain about cultural focus or balance issues.
I second that idea, but even then the cultural focus/balance issues will remain when a word and a “definition” are given in a way that appears to be a strawman or a very US-centric view of things. Maybe remove the words (“libertarian”, “socialist”, …) and just give the one-sentence definition ?
What people primarily seem to want is a more diverse list. Increasing the word count per entry makes that less feasible. As one source of complaint is, as you imply, the linking of a term with a description, what if descriptions were eliminated all together?
I could begin a political survey discussion post asking people to PM me a one to three word description of a view they endorse or almost endorse, as well as another view they think important. I would update the main page to reflect submissions so more of the same wouldn’t be submitted. Then the political ideology list could be trimmed down a bit somehow, and people could do a despise-style survey in which they express their disapproval of each.
As the previous LW survey had about 150 takers, I would expect about that many people going through the trouble of sending me submissions, and many would be redundant, and perhaps by consensus or fiat a representative list of 35 or so could be set for the survey. Would that be a reasonable number of one or three word phrases to scan? It would be an order of magnitude more effort to read that many political sentences.
The despise survey might reveal interesting things that the approval one did not—for example, we might find we have many transhumanists that dislike libertarianism and monarchism, and hate everything else. Or meta-contrarian people who approve of currently popular movements and no fringe ones. I don’t know.
I fear eliminating the descriptions would lead to even more problems, since words like “libertarian”, “socialist” or “communist” don’t mean the same depending of your cultural background. I would have answered the question differently if the descriptions were not given, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
Or maybe, could we just ask for Political Compass score ? Would be a straight-forward question and easy to exploit later on, even if a bit caricatural. And if people don’t want to take the full Political Compass test, they can still say roughly where they stand on the two axis.
Having read it, I realise this post may seem or be overly critical. Oh well.
But what the results will actually show, if 65% of people pick libertarian, is that 65% of people Identify with libertarianism more than the other options. This is obviously possible wthout being a libertarian. One could even just hate libertarianism slightly less than the other options and identify most with it. As well as people who’s political views aren’t well deliniated by any option, there are a few people who are apolitical and would have to just pick at random. or one could be forced to hammer a square peg into a round hole. Multiple choice and no choice for “none of the above” for something like this means hammering square pegs into round holes or abstaining if you don’t strongly lean one way or another. if you think you’ll put a box for other in next survey why not put it in this survey? even an uncounted other option allows people who’d rather have their choice not count than be identified with one of the options given not to add a tally to one and gives you the number of people with that preference which is interresting in itself.
The rest of this post is ideas for minor modifications to wording.
Can’t you just change it to “sex” now?
“With what race or ethnic group do you most closely identify?” Some people might identify most closely with a race other than their own. I don’t think the intent is to allow for this but until I read the post this is a reply to, if I did identify with another race more strongly than my own i’d answer that way were i to fill out the survey. Maybe just ask what option best describes or approximates your race.
maths might be the field of a non-trivial percentage of less wrong readers.
I think martial arts would go along nicely with self help, pickup artistry and meditation as an option for the communities question. All are relatively common self-improvement things, as is less wrong. Also I think members of competive gameing (card games, board games, video games, anything i’ve missed) communities would be overrepresented on less wrong.
Expertise question. The bar set for “fairly knowledgable” here might be a little high. I think even someone with an undergraduate degree in maths or physics might be out of their depth in heavy discussion with an expert. Maybe change heavy to light or remove the qualifier.
From your perspective, that makes sense. From my perspective—I don’t intend to ever look at this data. I’m going to import it into SPSS, have it crunch numbers for me, and come out with some result like “Less Wrong users are 65% libertarian” or like “Men are more likely to be socialist than women.”
If you put “other”—and this applies to any of the questions, not just this one—you’re pretty much wasting your vote unless someone else is going to sift through the data and be interested that this particular anonymous line of the spreadsheet believes in strong environmental protection but an otherwise free market.
Virtue Ethics got in the current poll because it was a common enough write in by posters. I consider the write in option to be useful in some spots because that way one can figure out if one is missing certain common clusters.
I am quite willing to bet that some political categories that are rare or fringe elsewhere may be prominent on Lesswrong, simply because high IQ people are more likley to try and consistently conform to a particular ideology than low IQ people. I mean Libertarian and Communist are (depending on the country) basically such exotic positions, imagine someone making a poll not expecting to find significant numbers of either on Lesswrong.
How exactly could he figure this out and add those two? Oh sure on a different forum, people might just say, well I’m X-terian and a lot of other people are or something to that effect, but that seems a pretty rude thing to a LWer with our politics taboo. I for one don’t want to know what any particular poster’s ideological leanings are! Information is always good but our brain is literally built to be hijacked by such information.
I for one don’t want to know what any particular poster’s ideological leanings are! Information is always good but our brain is literally built to be hijacked by such information.
I wasn’t and still am not sure what “Virtue Ethics” is supposed to mean. My personal ethics are based on the libertarian “non-aggression principle,” in other words, don’t violate the rights of other persons, and beyond that, do whatever you want. (Which does not mean I don’t see a point to charity—I just see charity as one of many things you might do with your money or time because it makes you happy. In my experience, enough people feel that way that it’s rare for anyone to starve or freeze unless he behaves so badly that he doesn’t deserve to be helped.)
Apologies if this violates a politics ban, but I can’t really answer an ethics question without going there.
As far as the objective “existence” of morals: it’s a meaningless idea. Even if there is just one God, his opinion doesn’t automatically become The Truth any more than yours or mine does.
Ultimately, morals/ethics are a matter of taste and nothing more. But they’re a unique exception to the old saw “there’s no accounting for taste” because your moral code determines whether you can be trusted (to do any particular thing someone else expects of you, a question that of course depends on who and what it is).
My personal ethics are based on the libertarian “non-aggression principle,” in other words, don’t violate the rights of other persons, and beyond that, do whatever you want.
This would be deontological: you are ethical if you are following the rules.
Per my understanding of it, virtue ethics looks to the traits of the individual moral agents. It is good to be a compassionate person. A compassionate person is more likely to give to charity, and so giving to charity may be indicative of virtue, but a person is ethical for being compassionate, not for the act itself.
I just see charity as one of many things you might do with your money or time because it makes you happy. In my experience, enough people feel that way that it’s rare for anyone to starve or freeze unless he behaves so badly that he doesn’t deserve to be helped.
My personal ethics are based on the libertarian “non-aggression principle,” in other words, don’t violate the rights of other persons,
You’re describing a deontological branch of ethics, I think.
As for virtue ethics, I believe virtue ethicists evaluate the morality of a deed based on whether it ennobles or debases the doer. In short, “charity is good” because it instills to you habits of charity that makes you a better person. But perhaps a virtue ethicist would be better fit to explain it (and my apologies to them if I got it wrong).
You’ve taken a sufficiently coherent political philosophy and pressed it into service as a moral philosophy, where it doesn’t fit. The principle “do not harm” doesn’t imply that you should (may?) give to charity because it makes you feel good. It only implies the converse, that you should give to charity if it makes you feel good.
But [Edit: one] purpose of a moral theory is to tell you when (if ever) to give to charity (and what charity to give to, etc.)
But the purpose of a moral theory is to tell you when (if ever) to give to charity (and what charity to give to, etc.)
I tend to like moral theories to also tell me whether or not to eat babies. Or is wanting the purpose to be a tad more general than charity donation just me?
In my experience, enough people feel that way that it’s rare for anyone to starve or freeze unless he behaves so badly that he doesn’t deserve to be helped.
There is a nice critique of this libertarian view of ethics here.
Okay, first things first: my initial reaction to a certain line in your comment was a reflexive downvote, but after a minute I reconsidered; applying the principle of charity, it’s more likely that I’ve misinterpreted you than that you actually meant what I found ridiculous. So, to clarify:
In my experience, enough people feel that way that it’s rare for anyone to starve or freeze unless he behaves so badly that he doesn’t deserve to be helped.
Surely, surely you are not blaming the victims of starvation?
Also, secondly:
I wasn’t and still am not sure what “Virtue Ethics” is supposed to mean.
WP has an okay summary, but the short version is: an act is moral or not based on the character and intentions of the actor. It sounds like your ethics are rather more deontological (i.e. rule-based).
wouldn’t have let me get the transgender info as easily
Only ask one question at a time. If you wanted info about “transgender” then ask a “transgender” question. Example:
Are you transgender?
No
Yes, F->M
Yes, M->F
Yes, but I prefer not to specify
Prefer not to answer
Of course, this logically excludes those who would prefer to answer but are Yes—other, but your earlier point about ‘other’ applies if you don’t want to code open-ends.
Seriously, dude, coding. Surely someone would be willing to volunteer to code a couple hundred open-ends. It should take like 5 minutes if you’re willing to use broad brushstrokes. And if most of the raw data is made public, the later sifting for interesting tidbits is crowdsourced.
Well, sure, you could do that. But if I decided to hand-code all of the political write-ins into standard political terms like “liberal”, “conservative”, “etc”, then all I’d end up with is a list of people’s political preferences in a few bins of standard political terms.
Which is exactly what I have now when I don’t allow write-ins. This way is easier for me and allows people to choose their bin themselves rather than have me try to guess whether some complicated philosophy is more conservative than libertarian or vice versa.
If you put “other”—and this applies to any of the questions, not just this one—you’re pretty much wasting your vote
I disagree; it might be important to identify oneself as something which is not one of the presented options, even if no one cares what other thing you are. For example …
I was kind of surprised how many people can’t settle on a specific gender, even though the aim of the question was more to figure out how many men versus women are on here
… I’m genderqueer, and when I take demographic surveys it’s important to me that I’m not counted in either the “men” or the “women” group. Firstly, it would be lying, and secondly, it would be lying in a way which perpetuates the invisibility of my actual identity. That may not be a big deal to the survey writer, but it’s always a big deal to me.
I think next survey I’ll give every question an “other” check box, but it will literally just be a check box and there will be no room to write anything in.
I love that! The urge to signal is almost irresistable when there is a place to write something in.
I took the survey but you don’t have to rec me as I’ve lost like 35 karma points in the last month and I’d like to see how low I can go.
Ultimately, the question becomes how you will interpret the difference between no-answer and checking a particular box. If no answer by convention means “I don’t know the answer to this question,” then it makes sense to have a “I know the answer, but it’s none of the choices you give” box (aka “other”). It may also make sense to have a “I know the answer, but it’s more than one of the choices you give” box. Or a “I know the answer but don’t want to tell you” box. Etc.
Or, not. Much as people get annoyed by being asked to categorize themselves, that is basically the point of this sort of survey, and nobody is obligated to take it. There’s no particular reason you should change your strategy to alleviate our annoyance.
There’s also a validation issue. A blank could mean “I accidentally scrolled past this question without noticing it”. The standard for online surveys is to (where appropriate) include choices for “Other”, “None”, and “Prefer not to answer”, and then force a response for every question so that you know nothing was accidentally skipped.
That said, online surveys often fail at this, for instance having “gender” questions with just the 2 options (they should at least have an “other”) or only accepting as “valid” answers that do not fit the entire population (For example, a survey for doctors with no explicit age cutoff limited ages to <99; at the time, there was one practicing doctor older than that—he would just have been given an error message that his age was “invalid”.)
Would it be possible for you to write down the ideas/suggestions you’ve had about the next survey(s) somewhere (possibly the LW wiki)?
We might be able to use your expertise from these first two surveys to try to establish a good and (more) standardised survey that can be run easily every year or so.
Would it be possible in the future, rather than having a write-in or group identification, to do something like political compass coordinates? This would have the benefit of allowing people to express views that don’t fit into camps without having the opportunity to write lots of words no one will read.
Right now for the politics question, you have three(!) different strains of neoliberalism, social democracy, and Stalinism. That’s hardly representative of the global political spectrum, and I’m honestly surprised that anyone designing that question on a survey would make that mistake.
Right now for the politics question, you have three(!) different strains of neoliberalism, social democracy, and Stalinism.
Alternative complaints:
Right now for the politics question, you have three(!) different strains of leftism, libertarianism, and conservatism. That’s hardly representative of the historical political spectrum, and I’m honestly surprised that anyone designing that question on a survey would make that mistake.
… or:
Right now for the politics question, you have four(!) different strains of statism, and libertarianism. That’s hardly representative of the diversity of ideologies, and I’m honestly surprised that anyone designing that question on a survey would make that mistake.
Yes, anarchists, monarchists, theocrats, etc. might object that their view isn’t represented, but I think that limiting the possibilities was still the right choice (see also the objections to the gender question). Keeping the focus on LessWrong away from politics seems best.
The current limitation of possibilities doesn’t keep the focus on LessWrong away from politics. It focuses on certain types of politics.
Further, if you’re calling Labor or the Democrats leftist, or the Libertarian party anti-state, you’re just wrong by almost any metric worth caring about.
It wouldn’t have been hard to have one option for each of capitalist/pro-state, leftist/pro-state, capitalist/anti-state, and leftist/anti-state. That would have captured all modern political alignments, and anything more specific could be another option.
As it stands, that question is totally useless to me, and probably to most other leftists. So any conclusion like “women are more likely to be socialists” will be equally meaningless. Most socialists don’t even consider European social democracies to be socialist.
I took the survey.
The political section is begging for a one line write in, seriously. Please consider adding on in addition to the pick one option poll. I’m not having warm fuzzies for any of the groups and had to bite my tongue and pick one I really really dislike, just because the alternatives are so much worse and one of the alternatives, while probably quite popular a choice, will be misinterpreted if I chose it.
From your perspective, that makes sense. From my perspective—I don’t intend to ever look at this data. I’m going to import it into SPSS, have it crunch numbers for me, and come out with some result like “Less Wrong users are 65% libertarian” or like “Men are more likely to be socialist than women.”
If you put “other”—and this applies to any of the questions, not just this one—you’re pretty much wasting your vote unless someone else is going to sift through the data and be interested that this particular anonymous line of the spreadsheet believes in strong environmental protection but an otherwise free market.
Looking at the answers, I really shouldn’t have allowed write-ins for any questions—I was kind of surprised how many people can’t settle on a specific gender, even though the aim of the question was more to figure out how many men versus women are on here than to judge how people feel about society (I considered saying “sex” instead, but that has its own pitfalls and wouldn’t have let me get the transgender info as easily. I’ll do it that way next time.)
I was particularly harsh on the politics question because I know how strong the temptation is. I think next survey I’ll give every question an “other” check box, but it will literally just be a check box and there will be no room to write anything in.
You could cut the gordian knot by borrowing Randall Munroe and Relsqui’s solution for the xkcd color survey, which was to ask about chromosomal sex:
Technically, isn’t it the number of X chromosomes that matters to colorblindness? It’s just that people with Y chromosomes almost always have one X chromosome, and people without them almost always have two.
You’re correct; we asked for Y chromosomes rather than X chromosomes because it’s way easier to have an extra X and not know it than to have a Y and not know it. So if we ask about Y, we can rough-sort into “probably XY” and “probably XX” groups and then look at the statistics for chromosomal deviations within those groups.
… especially if they’re responding to xkcd polls.
You have some reason to believe that Klinefelte’s syndrome (XXY) is less common among xkcd readers than among the general population?
I thought I did. Now that I’ve followed your link, I realize that even if it were less common, it would probably only be marginally so, so I withdraw my comment above.
Most people don’t actually know their karyotype, and are often surprised to learn that it’s not always what you assume. You can’t necessarily infer chromosomes from external appearance and self-identification reliably; you have to look at the actual chromosomes to be sure.
If I’m not mistaken, you don’t need a DNA test for this. A cell sample under a strong microscope will show the barr bodies for XX (this won’t distinguish XXY, but that’s pretty rare).
Looking at the barr bodies is not a karyotype test. A test that can’t detect whether or not someone is not XX/XY sufficient to actually tell you the information you need to know your chromosome type.
Yes, in terms of strict probability most people will be one of those. The test of the method is how well it handles edge cases (not at all); this is of considerably greater importance when you’re talking about those edge cases.
Also, rereading that explanation, I’m annoyed at how I worded it. It’s okay, but my trans*-inclusive vocabulary has improved since then and I could do better. Hell, just “if unsure, select ‘yes’ if you were born with a penis” would have been sufficient.
I’m not sure how any of these wordings of questions handle people with ambiguous genitalia.
Fair point. I’m not sure either; I think I’m relying on a given individual who is e.g. intersex either a) knowing that, and being able to make a better-educated guess about their chromosomes than any heuristic I offer, or b) not knowing that, which I’m willing to assume correlates well to having genitals that either do look like a penis or don’t.
Perhaps the politics question would be better phrased negatively:
All you have to care about is the lowest number, and anyone who wants to do more with the numbers is able to. People would be less inclined to complain about cultural focus or balance issues.
I second that idea, but even then the cultural focus/balance issues will remain when a word and a “definition” are given in a way that appears to be a strawman or a very US-centric view of things. Maybe remove the words (“libertarian”, “socialist”, …) and just give the one-sentence definition ?
What people primarily seem to want is a more diverse list. Increasing the word count per entry makes that less feasible. As one source of complaint is, as you imply, the linking of a term with a description, what if descriptions were eliminated all together?
I could begin a political survey discussion post asking people to PM me a one to three word description of a view they endorse or almost endorse, as well as another view they think important. I would update the main page to reflect submissions so more of the same wouldn’t be submitted. Then the political ideology list could be trimmed down a bit somehow, and people could do a despise-style survey in which they express their disapproval of each.
As the previous LW survey had about 150 takers, I would expect about that many people going through the trouble of sending me submissions, and many would be redundant, and perhaps by consensus or fiat a representative list of 35 or so could be set for the survey. Would that be a reasonable number of one or three word phrases to scan? It would be an order of magnitude more effort to read that many political sentences.
The despise survey might reveal interesting things that the approval one did not—for example, we might find we have many transhumanists that dislike libertarianism and monarchism, and hate everything else. Or meta-contrarian people who approve of currently popular movements and no fringe ones. I don’t know.
I fear eliminating the descriptions would lead to even more problems, since words like “libertarian”, “socialist” or “communist” don’t mean the same depending of your cultural background. I would have answered the question differently if the descriptions were not given, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
Or maybe, could we just ask for Political Compass score ? Would be a straight-forward question and easy to exploit later on, even if a bit caricatural. And if people don’t want to take the full Political Compass test, they can still say roughly where they stand on the two axis.
LCPW, so one should describe something like how much one despises the best relatively sizable minority position of each.
Having read it, I realise this post may seem or be overly critical. Oh well.
But what the results will actually show, if 65% of people pick libertarian, is that 65% of people Identify with libertarianism more than the other options. This is obviously possible wthout being a libertarian. One could even just hate libertarianism slightly less than the other options and identify most with it. As well as people who’s political views aren’t well deliniated by any option, there are a few people who are apolitical and would have to just pick at random. or one could be forced to hammer a square peg into a round hole. Multiple choice and no choice for “none of the above” for something like this means hammering square pegs into round holes or abstaining if you don’t strongly lean one way or another. if you think you’ll put a box for other in next survey why not put it in this survey? even an uncounted other option allows people who’d rather have their choice not count than be identified with one of the options given not to add a tally to one and gives you the number of people with that preference which is interresting in itself.
The rest of this post is ideas for minor modifications to wording.
Can’t you just change it to “sex” now?
“With what race or ethnic group do you most closely identify?” Some people might identify most closely with a race other than their own. I don’t think the intent is to allow for this but until I read the post this is a reply to, if I did identify with another race more strongly than my own i’d answer that way were i to fill out the survey. Maybe just ask what option best describes or approximates your race.
maths might be the field of a non-trivial percentage of less wrong readers.
I think martial arts would go along nicely with self help, pickup artistry and meditation as an option for the communities question. All are relatively common self-improvement things, as is less wrong. Also I think members of competive gameing (card games, board games, video games, anything i’ve missed) communities would be overrepresented on less wrong.
Expertise question. The bar set for “fairly knowledgable” here might be a little high. I think even someone with an undergraduate degree in maths or physics might be out of their depth in heavy discussion with an expert. Maybe change heavy to light or remove the qualifier.
Virtue Ethics got in the current poll because it was a common enough write in by posters. I consider the write in option to be useful in some spots because that way one can figure out if one is missing certain common clusters.
I am quite willing to bet that some political categories that are rare or fringe elsewhere may be prominent on Lesswrong, simply because high IQ people are more likley to try and consistently conform to a particular ideology than low IQ people. I mean Libertarian and Communist are (depending on the country) basically such exotic positions, imagine someone making a poll not expecting to find significant numbers of either on Lesswrong.
How exactly could he figure this out and add those two? Oh sure on a different forum, people might just say, well I’m X-terian and a lot of other people are or something to that effect, but that seems a pretty rude thing to a LWer with our politics taboo. I for one don’t want to know what any particular poster’s ideological leanings are! Information is always good but our brain is literally built to be hijacked by such information.
Kibbitzing off acts as a good filter here.
I wasn’t and still am not sure what “Virtue Ethics” is supposed to mean. My personal ethics are based on the libertarian “non-aggression principle,” in other words, don’t violate the rights of other persons, and beyond that, do whatever you want. (Which does not mean I don’t see a point to charity—I just see charity as one of many things you might do with your money or time because it makes you happy. In my experience, enough people feel that way that it’s rare for anyone to starve or freeze unless he behaves so badly that he doesn’t deserve to be helped.)
Apologies if this violates a politics ban, but I can’t really answer an ethics question without going there.
As far as the objective “existence” of morals: it’s a meaningless idea. Even if there is just one God, his opinion doesn’t automatically become The Truth any more than yours or mine does.
Ultimately, morals/ethics are a matter of taste and nothing more. But they’re a unique exception to the old saw “there’s no accounting for taste” because your moral code determines whether you can be trusted (to do any particular thing someone else expects of you, a question that of course depends on who and what it is).
This would be deontological: you are ethical if you are following the rules.
Per my understanding of it, virtue ethics looks to the traits of the individual moral agents. It is good to be a compassionate person. A compassionate person is more likely to give to charity, and so giving to charity may be indicative of virtue, but a person is ethical for being compassionate, not for the act itself.
If only...
You’re describing a deontological branch of ethics, I think.
As for virtue ethics, I believe virtue ethicists evaluate the morality of a deed based on whether it ennobles or debases the doer. In short, “charity is good” because it instills to you habits of charity that makes you a better person. But perhaps a virtue ethicist would be better fit to explain it (and my apologies to them if I got it wrong).
You’ve taken a sufficiently coherent political philosophy and pressed it into service as a moral philosophy, where it doesn’t fit. The principle “do not harm” doesn’t imply that you should (may?) give to charity because it makes you feel good. It only implies the converse, that you should give to charity if it makes you feel good.
But [Edit: one] purpose of a moral theory is to tell you when (if ever) to give to charity (and what charity to give to, etc.)
I tend to like moral theories to also tell me whether or not to eat babies. Or is wanting the purpose to be a tad more general than charity donation just me?
There is a nice critique of this libertarian view of ethics here.
Okay, first things first: my initial reaction to a certain line in your comment was a reflexive downvote, but after a minute I reconsidered; applying the principle of charity, it’s more likely that I’ve misinterpreted you than that you actually meant what I found ridiculous. So, to clarify:
Surely, surely you are not blaming the victims of starvation?
Also, secondly:
WP has an okay summary, but the short version is: an act is moral or not based on the character and intentions of the actor. It sounds like your ethics are rather more deontological (i.e. rule-based).
Only ask one question at a time. If you wanted info about “transgender” then ask a “transgender” question. Example:
Are you transgender?
No
Yes, F->M
Yes, M->F
Yes, but I prefer not to specify
Prefer not to answer
Of course, this logically excludes those who would prefer to answer but are Yes—other, but your earlier point about ‘other’ applies if you don’t want to code open-ends.
Seriously, dude, coding. Surely someone would be willing to volunteer to code a couple hundred open-ends. It should take like 5 minutes if you’re willing to use broad brushstrokes. And if most of the raw data is made public, the later sifting for interesting tidbits is crowdsourced.
Well, sure, you could do that. But if I decided to hand-code all of the political write-ins into standard political terms like “liberal”, “conservative”, “etc”, then all I’d end up with is a list of people’s political preferences in a few bins of standard political terms.
Which is exactly what I have now when I don’t allow write-ins. This way is easier for me and allows people to choose their bin themselves rather than have me try to guess whether some complicated philosophy is more conservative than libertarian or vice versa.
But does not allow for the creation of new bins, if we spot different clusters.
What dlthomas said. If 20% of your respondents wrote in “anarchist”, then you have a new punch.
I disagree; it might be important to identify oneself as something which is not one of the presented options, even if no one cares what other thing you are. For example …
… I’m genderqueer, and when I take demographic surveys it’s important to me that I’m not counted in either the “men” or the “women” group. Firstly, it would be lying, and secondly, it would be lying in a way which perpetuates the invisibility of my actual identity. That may not be a big deal to the survey writer, but it’s always a big deal to me.
I think next survey I’ll give every question an “other” check box, but it will literally just be a check box and there will be no room to write anything in.
I love that! The urge to signal is almost irresistable when there is a place to write something in.
I took the survey but you don’t have to rec me as I’ve lost like 35 karma points in the last month and I’d like to see how low I can go.
Mike
Ultimately, the question becomes how you will interpret the difference between no-answer and checking a particular box. If no answer by convention means “I don’t know the answer to this question,” then it makes sense to have a “I know the answer, but it’s none of the choices you give” box (aka “other”). It may also make sense to have a “I know the answer, but it’s more than one of the choices you give” box. Or a “I know the answer but don’t want to tell you” box. Etc.
Or, not. Much as people get annoyed by being asked to categorize themselves, that is basically the point of this sort of survey, and nobody is obligated to take it. There’s no particular reason you should change your strategy to alleviate our annoyance.
There’s also a validation issue. A blank could mean “I accidentally scrolled past this question without noticing it”. The standard for online surveys is to (where appropriate) include choices for “Other”, “None”, and “Prefer not to answer”, and then force a response for every question so that you know nothing was accidentally skipped.
That said, online surveys often fail at this, for instance having “gender” questions with just the 2 options (they should at least have an “other”) or only accepting as “valid” answers that do not fit the entire population (For example, a survey for doctors with no explicit age cutoff limited ages to <99; at the time, there was one practicing doctor older than that—he would just have been given an error message that his age was “invalid”.)
Would it be possible for you to write down the ideas/suggestions you’ve had about the next survey(s) somewhere (possibly the LW wiki)?
We might be able to use your expertise from these first two surveys to try to establish a good and (more) standardised survey that can be run easily every year or so.
Would it be possible in the future, rather than having a write-in or group identification, to do something like political compass coordinates? This would have the benefit of allowing people to express views that don’t fit into camps without having the opportunity to write lots of words no one will read.
Right now for the politics question, you have three(!) different strains of neoliberalism, social democracy, and Stalinism. That’s hardly representative of the global political spectrum, and I’m honestly surprised that anyone designing that question on a survey would make that mistake.
Alternative complaints:
… or:
Yes, anarchists, monarchists, theocrats, etc. might object that their view isn’t represented, but I think that limiting the possibilities was still the right choice (see also the objections to the gender question). Keeping the focus on LessWrong away from politics seems best.
If only “nitpickers” was a political position, then all of this trouble could have been avoided.
The current limitation of possibilities doesn’t keep the focus on LessWrong away from politics. It focuses on certain types of politics.
Further, if you’re calling Labor or the Democrats leftist, or the Libertarian party anti-state, you’re just wrong by almost any metric worth caring about.
It wouldn’t have been hard to have one option for each of capitalist/pro-state, leftist/pro-state, capitalist/anti-state, and leftist/anti-state. That would have captured all modern political alignments, and anything more specific could be another option.
As it stands, that question is totally useless to me, and probably to most other leftists. So any conclusion like “women are more likely to be socialists” will be equally meaningless. Most socialists don’t even consider European social democracies to be socialist.