2020 LessWrong Demographics Survey Results
Thank you to everyone who participated! You can see the original post here, but the survey is now closed. Here are the results:
Google forms results: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfHJtg9ju6cCDl7T1PZvuBC9aIYIEN4Qb_MoQFPa9iMkUIFLQ/viewanalytics
Copy of the original survey (to view the questions in context): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfBt1l3XBCZHx8DTJhWWTSK_bH7Tw6W4PdYYLKmMyplt1k0Ag/viewform
[Anyone wanting to revive the old (larger) annual LW-surveys can contact me if they need help/funding.]
- 2020 LessWrong Demographics Survey by (11 Jun 2020 20:05 UTC; 20 points)
- 's comment on 2022 Unofficial LessWrong General Census by (31 Jan 2023 3:50 UTC; 8 points)
- What happened to the annual LW demographic surveys? by (11 Oct 2022 0:19 UTC; 5 points)
- 's comment on 10 Fun Questions for LessWrongers by (19 Aug 2020 7:12 UTC; 3 points)
- 's comment on Sherrinford’s Shortform by (29 Jul 2020 7:10 UTC; 3 points)
It’s really disappointing there were only 61 respondents, compared to e.g. the 2016 survey with over 3000 respondents.
Note: this wasn’t the official 2020 survey (the team has some plans for a more comprehensive survey, later in the year. Originally we were going to do it around April, but covid struck and changed a lot of our priorities)
It’s not super obvious to me what the frontpage status of the post should have been (for sure, it’d be easier to run ad-hoc surveys if we frontpaged them all, but it’s not obviously best to encourage that. The current frontpage norms are based, in part, on a model that it’s really tempting to do community meta discussion all the time, but that actually for the site to be healthy people should focus more on object level intellectual progress, and deliberately pushes a bit in that direction)
I somehow missed the survey, and I read LW almost daily. I guess we need some mechanism for increased visibility of things like this.
That’s probably because the moderators decided to keep the post a personal blogspot for some reason.
I fear the spreadsheet may make it possible to identify certain respondents.
I mean I did say in advance that I would publish the raw data, plus I specifically tried to avoid too personal questions, plus I explicitly said in my old posts to not answer questions you feel uncomfortable about, but if it makes you really uncomfortable I’ll delete that part of the post.
No, sorry—you are right, you mentioned all that in advance.