By what year do you think the Singularity will occur? Answer such that you think, conditional on the Singularity occurring, there is an even chance of the Singularity falling before or after this year. If you think a singularity is so unlikely you don’t even want to condition on it, leave this question blank
You won’t be able to distinguish people who think singularity is super unlikely from people who just didn’t want to answer this question for whatever reason (maybe they forgot or thought it’s boring or whatever).
So, if I want that information I think I could get close by looking at everyone who answered the question before and the question after, but didn’t answer Singularity.
I’ll change the text to say they should enter something not a number, like “N/A” and then filter out anything that isn’t a number when I’m doing math to it.
I think you can also ask them to put some arbitrarily large number (3000 or 10000 or so) and then just filter out all the numbers above some threshold.
I don’t think there’s a lot of value in distinguishing 3000 and 1,000,000 and probably for any aggregate you’ll want to show this will just be “later than 2200” or something like that. But yes this way they can’t make a statement that this will be 1,000,000 which is some downside.
I’m not a big fan of looking at the neighbors to decide whether this is a missing answer or high estimate (it’s OK to not want to answer this one question). So some N/A or −1 should be ok.
(Just to make it clear, I’m not saying this is an important problem)
You won’t be able to distinguish people who think singularity is super unlikely from people who just didn’t want to answer this question for whatever reason (maybe they forgot or thought it’s boring or whatever).
Hrm.
So, if I want that information I think I could get close by looking at everyone who answered the question before and the question after, but didn’t answer Singularity.
I’ll change the text to say they should enter something not a number, like “N/A” and then filter out anything that isn’t a number when I’m doing math to it.
I think you can also ask them to put some arbitrarily large number (3000 or 10000 or so) and then just filter out all the numbers above some threshold.
I could, but what if someone genuinely thinks it’s that high number? Someone put 1,000,000 on the 2022 version of that question.
I don’t think there’s a lot of value in distinguishing 3000 and 1,000,000 and probably for any aggregate you’ll want to show this will just be “later than 2200” or something like that. But yes this way they can’t make a statement that this will be 1,000,000 which is some downside.
I’m not a big fan of looking at the neighbors to decide whether this is a missing answer or high estimate (it’s OK to not want to answer this one question). So some N/A or −1 should be ok.
(Just to make it clear, I’m not saying this is an important problem)