I saw the poll, found it really yucky, and thus didn’t answer it. I like LW for mostly staying on low simulacrum levels, and this poll felt like anything but. In more detail:
“Today is Petrov Day! A day celebrating that the world didn’t end, and the virtues that helped it not end. There’s been a lot of discussion.” [...]
Virtue A – Avoiding actions that noticeably increase the chance that civilization is destroyed [...]
Virtue D – Resisting social pressure
So the poll begins with an explanation of Petrov Day, and then leads with that as the first answer. This felt like one of those television thingies where they aren’t allowed to just enter you into a giveaway, and instead make you answer a question like “The president of the US is X. Who is the president of the US?”, so that it’s considered a game of skill, rather than pure chance. This kind of yucky Dark Arts style of leading questions is common, but I expect much more from LW.
Another leading / biasing aspect: Virtue A is by far the longest answer, and on my screen is the only one that covers two lines rather than one.
Anyway, having decided that I don’t like the poll, there’s no option for me to pick. Since the poll is so transparently biased towards making people pick Virtue A, even if I would’ve answered that in other circumstances, that’s not an option now. And choosing Virtue D is not “resisting social pressure”, it’s conforming to the social pressure of answering a flawed poll. Where was my option for “I’m cranky and this poll is stupid”?
Or if not that, then where was the option for “I saw the poll but don’t want to answer it?”. Twitter polls often have that, so that people don’t just pick an option at random to see the results.
Due to the lack of such a “mu” option, conscientious objection to the event didn’t work well this time, in contrast to some previous Petrov Day celebrations, where “do nothing” was a legitimate option.
There’s something ironic about the poll rewarding answers of the form “avoiding actions”, while actually punishing the avoidance of action.
I’m sad you didn’t like it. It indeed was not a carefully planned rigorous survey of Petrov Day attitudes.
In my thinking, it was more the start to a ~game/exercise than trying to maximally model people’s attitudes. I wanted to assign people to “teams” (I’d considered random assignment), but this felt this was a little more meaningful, and there’s non-zero bits even in an imperfect survey.
There was no intention to be leading in the responses, nor to corral for any particular response.
I actually hoped that the slap-dash nature would make people suspicious (plus inadvertent bugs/typos) and get them more into Petrov Day mood. From other comments, it sounds like this did happen somewhat.
I think if a failure happened here, it’s that you and others saw the poll as primarily an attempt to accurate survey LessWrong member’s beliefs about Petrov (pretty reasonable belief), but for me it was the start to something else, and goal wasn’t “rigorous survey”, for which a mu option would have made sense.
I’m uncertain how much we should ever be a little sneaky/misleading for the sake of games/experiments/etc. I’m a pro norm that on April Fool’s and Petrov Day and similar, people might hoodwink you a little. At least I might, I will as say a matter of metahonesty.
There was no intention to be leading in the responses, nor to corral for any particular response.
Sure, I get that. But the result also matters. I predict that, if you presented the parts I quoted from the survey message to a random sample of the university-educated population, and asked them whether they thought the poll was biased, >50% would say yes. Doubly so if you also showed them the lopsided survey results.
Anyway, if the first message had been presented as a pick-your-team exercise, I indeed would’ve been somewhat less frustrated with it. Though even then, I don’t think the team category “resist social pressure” or “be contrarian” ever works; it’s an inherent contradiction. And as such, and in keeping with the Petrov Day theme, I maintain that it’s important to offer a true “mu” option, or a “do not participate”.
And insofar as one is inevitably tempted to interpret the results, while you do mention “there’s non-zero bits even in an imperfect survey”, your post does some interpretation but imo without sufficiently acknowledging the imperfection, which I don’t think is particularly conducive to painting an epistemically accurate picture. For example, without the “mu” option, we don’t even know which fraction of LWers who saw that message actually picked an option!
I predict that, if you presented the parts I quoted from the survey message to a random sample of the university-educated population, and asked them whether they thought the poll was biased, >50% would say yes
That seems quite plausible to me. My response was that we weren’t trying especially hard to avoid bias because we weren’t trying to get a super clear result.
And as such, and in keeping with the Petrov Day theme, I maintain that it’s important to offer a true “mu” option, or a “do not participate”.
Petrov Day has a variety of themes. A few comments here endorse the unilateralist interpretation, but insofar as another thematic connection is conscientious objection or resisting social pressure, the following argument applies:
You offered the option “resist social pressure”. As I argued, this option doesn’t really work, in that picking it doesn’t really mean what it sounds like. It’s like giving someone the options “think inside the box” or “think outside the box”. Then choosing the latter is not a sign of creativity, just like choosing the option “resist social pressure” is not sufficiently (honoring the virtue of) resisting social pressure, because by picking it you’re ultimately still conforming to the frame you’ve been given. I don’t know if this point resonates, but I feel pretty strongly about it.
(Relatedly, it’s in some sense harder to resist the social pressure of your own peer group than that of the broader society.)
Anyway, due to the above, if you want an option to actually symbolize <resist social pressure>, then options like “mu” or “do not participate” imo work much better than the explicit description “resist social pressure”, because these alternatives let people answer without needing to buy into the provided frame.
Sorry, I get the point that the option provided doesn’t let you mu/reject the frame. It’s not clear to me that this is a core framing of Petrov’s actions/virtue was conscientious objection or so on.
Beyond that, the survey wasn’t aiming to allow people to symbolically act out their responses or to reject the frame in an unambiguous way. Insisting that you get to register that you saw it but didn’t like it feels like insisting that you get to participate, but in your own way, rather than simply not engaging if you don’t like it. I also feel like if there was an option to conscientious object and you took that, that’d still be within the frame I created for you to do so? But open to being corrected here.
Beyond that, the survey wasn’t aiming to allow people to symbolically act out their responses or to reject the frame in an unambiguous way. Insisting that you get to register that you saw it but didn’t like it feels like insisting that you get to participate, but in your own way, rather than simply not engaging if you don’t like it.
Well, personally speaking, I’ve already spent more time on my comments here than were warranted by my initial annoyance. So if I consider just myself, then choosing not to vote, followed by registering that non-vote in a comment, was of course a sufficient (albeit time-consuming) way to object.
However, looking at this comment thread by Said shows that besides me, at least three other people (EDIT: here’s one more) had problems with the framing and hence didn’t vote. But because there was no “mu” option, we’ll never know whether the proportion of those people was 0.1%, 1%, 10%, 50%, 90%, or whatever. That I continue to find unfortunate, and a “mu” option would’ve remedied this problem.
If I were to do it again, I might include such an option, though I’m still not terribly sad I didn’t.
If we really wanted that info, I could sample and survey people who received the message, looked at it (we have data to know this) and ask them why they didn’t vote. My guess is between 1-10% of people who didn’t vote because of frame commented about it,, so that’s 40 to 400.
372 people have responded by now out of 2500, so 15%. Let’s guess that 50% of people saw it by now, so ~1250 (though could get better data on it). A third responded if so, which seems great for a poll. Of those the 800 who saw but didn’t, I could see 100-400 doing so because the frame didn’t really seem right (lining up with the above estimate). Which seems fine. I bet if I’d spent 10x developing the poll, I wouldn’t get that number down much, and knowing it with more precision doesn’t really help. It’s LW, people are very picky and precise (a virtue...but also makes having some nice things hard).
I saw the poll, found it really yucky, and thus didn’t answer it. I like LW for mostly staying on low simulacrum levels, and this poll felt like anything but. In more detail:
So the poll begins with an explanation of Petrov Day, and then leads with that as the first answer. This felt like one of those television thingies where they aren’t allowed to just enter you into a giveaway, and instead make you answer a question like “The president of the US is X. Who is the president of the US?”, so that it’s considered a game of skill, rather than pure chance. This kind of yucky Dark Arts style of leading questions is common, but I expect much more from LW.
Another leading / biasing aspect: Virtue A is by far the longest answer, and on my screen is the only one that covers two lines rather than one.
Anyway, having decided that I don’t like the poll, there’s no option for me to pick. Since the poll is so transparently biased towards making people pick Virtue A, even if I would’ve answered that in other circumstances, that’s not an option now. And choosing Virtue D is not “resisting social pressure”, it’s conforming to the social pressure of answering a flawed poll. Where was my option for “I’m cranky and this poll is stupid”?
Or if not that, then where was the option for “I saw the poll but don’t want to answer it?”. Twitter polls often have that, so that people don’t just pick an option at random to see the results.
Due to the lack of such a “mu” option, conscientious objection to the event didn’t work well this time, in contrast to some previous Petrov Day celebrations, where “do nothing” was a legitimate option.
There’s something ironic about the poll rewarding answers of the form “avoiding actions”, while actually punishing the avoidance of action.
Anyway, overall, I really didn’t like this.
I’m sad you didn’t like it. It indeed was not a carefully planned rigorous survey of Petrov Day attitudes.
In my thinking, it was more the start to a ~game/exercise than trying to maximally model people’s attitudes. I wanted to assign people to “teams” (I’d considered random assignment), but this felt this was a little more meaningful, and there’s non-zero bits even in an imperfect survey.
There was no intention to be leading in the responses, nor to corral for any particular response.
I actually hoped that the slap-dash nature would make people suspicious (plus inadvertent bugs/typos) and get them more into Petrov Day mood. From other comments, it sounds like this did happen somewhat.
I think if a failure happened here, it’s that you and others saw the poll as primarily an attempt to accurate survey LessWrong member’s beliefs about Petrov (pretty reasonable belief), but for me it was the start to something else, and goal wasn’t “rigorous survey”, for which a mu option would have made sense.
I’m uncertain how much we should ever be a little sneaky/misleading for the sake of games/experiments/etc. I’m a pro norm that on April Fool’s and Petrov Day and similar, people might hoodwink you a little. At least I might, I will as say a matter of metahonesty.
Sure, I get that. But the result also matters. I predict that, if you presented the parts I quoted from the survey message to a random sample of the university-educated population, and asked them whether they thought the poll was biased, >50% would say yes. Doubly so if you also showed them the lopsided survey results.
Anyway, if the first message had been presented as a pick-your-team exercise, I indeed would’ve been somewhat less frustrated with it. Though even then, I don’t think the team category “resist social pressure” or “be contrarian” ever works; it’s an inherent contradiction. And as such, and in keeping with the Petrov Day theme, I maintain that it’s important to offer a true “mu” option, or a “do not participate”.
And insofar as one is inevitably tempted to interpret the results, while you do mention “there’s non-zero bits even in an imperfect survey”, your post does some interpretation but imo without sufficiently acknowledging the imperfection, which I don’t think is particularly conducive to painting an epistemically accurate picture. For example, without the “mu” option, we don’t even know which fraction of LWers who saw that message actually picked an option!
That seems quite plausible to me. My response was that we weren’t trying especially hard to avoid bias because we weren’t trying to get a super clear result.
Can you elaborate on this?
Petrov Day has a variety of themes. A few comments here endorse the unilateralist interpretation, but insofar as another thematic connection is conscientious objection or resisting social pressure, the following argument applies:
You offered the option “resist social pressure”. As I argued, this option doesn’t really work, in that picking it doesn’t really mean what it sounds like. It’s like giving someone the options “think inside the box” or “think outside the box”. Then choosing the latter is not a sign of creativity, just like choosing the option “resist social pressure” is not sufficiently (honoring the virtue of) resisting social pressure, because by picking it you’re ultimately still conforming to the frame you’ve been given. I don’t know if this point resonates, but I feel pretty strongly about it.
(Relatedly, it’s in some sense harder to resist the social pressure of your own peer group than that of the broader society.)
Anyway, due to the above, if you want an option to actually symbolize <resist social pressure>, then options like “mu” or “do not participate” imo work much better than the explicit description “resist social pressure”, because these alternatives let people answer without needing to buy into the provided frame.
Sorry, I get the point that the option provided doesn’t let you mu/reject the frame. It’s not clear to me that this is a core framing of Petrov’s actions/virtue was conscientious objection or so on.
Beyond that, the survey wasn’t aiming to allow people to symbolically act out their responses or to reject the frame in an unambiguous way. Insisting that you get to register that you saw it but didn’t like it feels like insisting that you get to participate, but in your own way, rather than simply not engaging if you don’t like it. I also feel like if there was an option to conscientious object and you took that, that’d still be within the frame I created for you to do so? But open to being corrected here.
Well, personally speaking, I’ve already spent more time on my comments here than were warranted by my initial annoyance. So if I consider just myself, then choosing not to vote, followed by registering that non-vote in a comment, was of course a sufficient (albeit time-consuming) way to object.
However, looking at this comment thread by Said shows that besides me, at least three other people (EDIT: here’s one more) had problems with the framing and hence didn’t vote. But because there was no “mu” option, we’ll never know whether the proportion of those people was 0.1%, 1%, 10%, 50%, 90%, or whatever. That I continue to find unfortunate, and a “mu” option would’ve remedied this problem.
If I were to do it again, I might include such an option, though I’m still not terribly sad I didn’t.
If we really wanted that info, I could sample and survey people who received the message, looked at it (we have data to know this) and ask them why they didn’t vote. My guess is between 1-10% of people who didn’t vote because of frame commented about it,, so that’s 40 to 400.
372 people have responded by now out of 2500, so 15%. Let’s guess that 50% of people saw it by now, so ~1250 (though could get better data on it). A third responded if so, which seems great for a poll. Of those the 800 who saw but didn’t, I could see 100-400 doing so because the frame didn’t really seem right (lining up with the above estimate). Which seems fine. I bet if I’d spent 10x developing the poll, I wouldn’t get that number down much, and knowing it with more precision doesn’t really help. It’s LW, people are very picky and precise (a virtue...but also makes having some nice things hard).