2024 Unofficial LessWrong Census/​Survey

[Screwtape]

The Less Wrong General Census is unofficially here! You can take it at this link.

Update: The census is closed, thank you all for taking it! I plan to have the data out sometime in January.

The oft-interrupted annual tradition of the Less Wrong Census is once more upon us!

If you are reading this post and identify as a LessWronger, then you are the target audience. If you are reading this post and don’t identify as a LessWronger, you just read posts here or maybe go to house parties full of rationalists or possibly read rationalist fanfiction and like talking about it on the internet, or you’re not a rationalist you’re just, idk, adjacent, then you’re also the target audience.

If you want to just spend five minutes answering the basic demographics questions before leaving the rest blank and hitting submit, that’s totally fine. The survey is structured so the fastest and most generally applicable questions are (generally speaking) towards the start. At any point you can scroll to the bottom and hit Submit, though you won’t be able to add more answers once you do. It is about 2/​3rds the size of last year’s survey if that helps.

The survey shall remain open from now until at least January 1st, 2025. I plan to close it sometime on Jan 2nd.

I don’t work for LessWrong, but I do work on improving rationalist meetups around the world. Once the survey is closed, I plan to play around with the data and write up an analysis post like this one sometime in late January.

Remember, you can take the survey at this link.

Update: Survey is closed, and I plan to have the data out in mid to late January.

Ancient tradition is that if you take the survey you can comment here saying you took the survey, and people upvote you for karma.

[Nathan Young]

Surveys seem very important. Unclear if this post should be where my favour goes but still.

[Screwtape]

Self Review:

This got nominated for the Best Of LessWrong review. I don’t think it should be in the Best Of collection; maybe the results should be (I’m thinking of the Skill Issue section) but the call for the census isn’t and I actually don’t think general demographics info is worth inclusion. Worth the work, and I’m glad I did it, and some of us are getting good use out of the census, but it just seems the wrong type of post.

I expect to see you all next year, where maybe I’ll argue the 2024 results are worth it. That’d be a stronger argument if I’d ever spun Skill Issue out into its own post I suppose.

[Raemon]

Mod note: I’m frontpaging this despite it being the sort of thing we normally wouldn’t frontpage (i.e. non-timeless community insider stuff) because it seemed particularly important.

(I will aim to un-frontpage it in a few days so it doesn’t show up in the timeless recommendation engine)

[Screwtape]

Thank you, that’s appreciated!

[Screwtape]

How do you feel about pinning the census for a few days at some point this month?

[Sodium]

What is the probability that the human race will NOT make it to 2100 without any catastrophe that wipes out more than 90% of humanity?

Could we have this question be phrased using no negations instead of two? Something like “What is the probability that there will be a global catastrophe that wipes out 90% or more of humanity before 2100.”

[Screwtape]

Argh, I hate tweaking historical questions. This seems equivalent so lets try it.

It wound up phrased that way trying to make a minimal change from the historical version of the question, where the question and the title were at odds.

[Measure]

At least one of the rot13 questions has a title P(X and Y) that doesn’t match the X and Y described in the question.

[Screwtape]

Whelp, that’s a dumb error on my part. Fixed and thank you.

[Lucie Philippon]

Completed! It was really fun. Thanks for the question to give appreciation to another LWer :)

[Screwtape]

You’re welcome!

Last year I had a version of that question where (mimicking a question the LW team asked) I said I’d keep it private. Reading the answers felt nice, and I realized an anonymous but public version of that could be really nice for a lot of people.

[Simcha]

I’ve completed the survey, thanks for running it!
What’s the point of the ID key?

[Screwtape]

Thank you for taking the survey!

I wasn’t the one who first put the ID key in there, but I’ve kept it because it means I can sometimes compare the same person across years. I’m interested in whether people get more rational- for many definitions of that word- as a result of ongoing exposure to LessWrong and the community.

[Screwtape]

I think the passphrase got introduced when there was a monetary reward attached at one point, and then reused for some prisoner’s dilemma questions later.

[Gordon Seidoh Worley]

Completed

[Screwtape]

Thank you for taking it!

[Gunnar_Zarncke]

Completed.

I think it is not clear how the P(Simulation) question interacts with some of the other questions, such as P(God).

[Gyrodiot]

I filled out the survey. Thank you so much for running this!

[Screwtape]

You’re welcome! Thank you for taking it.

[Søren Elverlin]

My answers to the IQ questions could seem inconsistent: I’d pay a lot to get a higher IQ, and if it turned out LLM usage decreased my IQ, that would be a much smaller concern. The reason is that I expect AI Alignment work to be largely gated by high IQ, such that a higher IQ might allow me to contribute much more, while a lower IQ might just transform my contribution from neglible to very neglible.

[Screwtape]

Noted. I’m already expecting marginal values of IQ to be weird since IQ isn’t a linear scale in the first place.

I admit I’m testing a chain of conjectures with those questions and probably will only get weak evidence for my actual question. The feedback is really appreciated!

[ProgramCrafter]

I’ve completed the survey, skipping just a few questions I thought too ambiguous!

(Note: I’ve waited a bit to intentionally mask submit time, since otherwise I’d be identifiable by brag order :-) )

[DanielFilan]

About how often do you use LLMs like ChatGPT while active?

What does “while active” mean in this question?

[Screwtape]

“Hourly” doesn’t count while asleep. If you use it for work, weekends don’t count against “Daily.” Etc.

[DanielFilan]

Dojo Organizations What organizations are you aware of that are providing some kind of rationality dojo format (courses focused on improving the skill of rationality)?

Seems like the stuff after “Dojo Organizations” should be on a new line.

[Screwtape]

. . . yep, it should be. I think I just fixed it, but I can’t figure out how that got like that in the first place. Thanks!

[gjm]

I have just noticed something that I think has been kinda unsatisfactory about the probability questions since for ever.

There’s a question about the probability of “supernatural events (including God, ghosts, magic, etc.)” having occurred since the beginning of the universe. There’s another question about the probability of there being a god.

I notice an inclination to make sure that the first probability is >= the second, for the obvious reason. But, depending on how the first question is interpreted, that may be wrong.

If the existence of a god is considered a “supernatural event since the beginning of the universe” then obviously that’s the case. But note that one thing a fair number of people have believed is that a god created the universe and then, so to speak, stepped away and let it run itself. (It would be hard to distinguish such a universe from a purely natural one, but perhaps you could identify some features of the universe that such a being would be more or less likely to build in.) In that case, you could have a universe that (1) created by a god in which (2) no supernatural events have ever occurred or will ever occur.

The unsatisfactory thing, to be clear, is the ambiguity.

For future years, it might be worth considering either (1) replacing “God” with something like “acts of God” or “divine interventions” in the first question, or (2) adding an explicit clarification that the mere existence of a god should be considered a “supernatural event” in the relevant sense even if what that god did was to make a universe that runs naturally, or (3) tweaking the second question to explicitly exclude “deistic” gods.

[cqb]

I did the survey! Skipped some questions out of laziness though

[Screwtape]

Thank you for taking it! It’s designed to let people skip lots of questions if they want.

[Drake Morrison]

Completed the survey. I really appreciate the work you do @Screwtape to make the census better!

[Screwtape]

Thank you, both for taking the survey and for the appreciation!

[mayleaf]

What does “optimizing for group fun” mean? Is this a reference to a particular blog post?

[Screwtape]

I don’t believe it’s a reference to a particular post. Some people have fun as a group, whether partying or playing games together or just spending time showing each other cat pictures. Some ways to have fun as a group result in more fun than others, and people might try to test which ways have more fun.

[gjm]

It seems like a thing that literally[1] everyone does sometimes. “Let’s all go out for dinner.” “OK, where shall we go?” As soon as you ask that question you’re “optimizing for group fun” in some sense. Presumably the question is intending to ask about some more-than-averagely explicit, or more-than-averagely sophisticated, or more-than-averagely effortful, “optimizing for group fun”, but to me at least it wasn’t very clear what sort of thing it was intending to point at.

[1] Almost literally.

[Sherrinford]

I completed it.

[Screwtape]

Thank you!

[Perhaps]

Any way that we can easily get back our own results from the survey? I know you can sometimes get a copy of your responses when you submit a Google form.

[Screwtape]

Not easily.

In order to give people a copy of their responses with google forms, I would need to collect emails. It even becomes a required question on the form. Collecting emails changes the tenor of the survey quite a bit I think, even if I invited people to enter nonsense for an email if they didn’t want to give that information.

[Document]

Came to complain about a fundraising email with broken unsubscribe links. Saw the survey and filled it out. On reflection, I’m not sure that I was the target audience, but it’s done.

[Screwtape]

Well, thank you for filling the survey out. If you used to be around and aren’t any more, I’m happy to have you in the dataset.

I hope you get unsubscribed successfully, and best of luck in whatever you’re up to now!

[habryka]

Lol, I am sorry about the fundraising email. It was really quite embarrassing.

(Context, a recent fundraising email I sent out to a bunch of old LessWrong accounts had unsubscribe links that pointed to localhost:3000 instead of lesswrong.com, which of course is the most important link not to break)

[nick lacombe]

filled out the survey :)

[nick lacombe]

to the person that downvoted me: the following is part of the post:

Ancient tradition is that if you take the survey you can comment here saying you took the survey, and people upvote you for karma.

[Screwtape]

Thanks!

[gjm]

There is arguably a discrepancy between the title of the question “P(Anti-Agathics)” and the actual text of the question; there might be ways of “reaching an age of 1000 years” that I at least wouldn’t want to call “anti-agathics”. Uploading into a purely virtual existence. Uploading into a robot whose parts can be repaired and replaced ad infinitum. Repeated transfer of consciousness into some sort of biological clones, so that you get a new body when the old one starts to wear out.

My sense is that the first of those is definitely not intended to be covered by the question, and the second probably isn’t; I’m not sure about the third. “Magical” options like survival of your immortal soul in a post-mortem heaven or hell, magical resurrection of your body by divine intervention, and reincarnation, are presumably also not intended.

In future years, it might be worth tweaking the wording by e.g. inserting the word “biological” or some wording like “in something that could credibly be claimed to be the body they are now living in”. Or some other thing that better matches the actual intent of the question.

[Screwtape]

Hrm. My definition of “anti-agathic” is something that prolongs life, so it isn’t obviously not counting a brain transplant to a younger body.

I’m somewhat opposed to tweaking the wording on long-standing parts of the census, since that makes it harder to compare to earlier years. If we want to go this route, I’d rather write a new question and ask both some year so we can compare them.

[gjm]

Yeah, I do see the value of keeping things the same across multiple years, which is why I said “might be worth” rather than “would be a good idea” or anything of the sort.

To me, “anti-agathics” specifically suggests drugs or something of the kind. Not so strongly that it’s obvious to me that the question isn’t interested in other kinds of anti-aging measures, but strongly enough to make it not obvious whether it is or not.

[Martin Randall]

Should non-theistic religions, such as Buddhism, go under “Deist/​Pantheist/​etc” or “Atheist but spiritual”?

Some of the probability questions are awkward given the recent argument that (raw) probabilities are cursed and given that P(“god”) is higher in simulations and there is an explicit P(simulation). I weighted the probabilities by leverage in an unprincipled way.

It would be nice to have an “undefined” answer for some probability questions, eg the P(Cryonics) and P(Anti-Agathics) questions mostly gave me a divide-by-zero exception. I suppose the people who believe in epsilon probabilities have to suck it up as well. But there was an N/​A exception given for the singularity, so maybe that could be a general note.

[Screwtape]

I’d say non-theistic religions should mark “Athiest but spiritual.”

I’m confident that’s not the least principled way someone has answered the probability questions. I’m currently like asking people to come up with a number, even one they’re pulling out of their rear, and explicitly mentioning N/​As feels like it gets me fewer numbers to play with.

[Neil]

Sent it in!

[less-wronger-numb89]

I took the survey! Just didn’t read the post fully the first time I clicked, and came here now to look at results (though a bit too early, but anyways)