I don’t want to marginalise your concerns, but can you give an example how exactly the data included in this survey could (with non-negligible probability) be abused?
For instance, forcibly “outing” an atheist in an unfriendly community.
Perhaps more importantly: if people do not have the presumption of anonymity when they fill out a survey, then survey results in general become more unreliable. There’s been plenty of work done on how self-reports change when the people filling them out know they’ll be viewed by people in their out-group and/or in-group.
If your concern is that there is too little data in the survey to identify individual members, I would direct you to gwern’s essay on The Tragedy of Light.
Completely off the topic of the thread, but I take issue with an essay which claims that Death Note is essentially a thought experiment for “given the perfect murder weapon, how can you screw up anyway?” L caught Light, not because he was making appropriate Bayesian updates on the status of the murderer, but because he was being handed information by authorial fiat. In multiple steps he narrows the hypothesis space far more than the observations available to him permit.
When your hypothesis space is broad enough to include the possibility of supernatural action-at-a-distance fate manipulating murder weapons, it’s broad enough to include possible culprits which aren’t even human beings. L was jumping the gun even by concluding that he had a pool of 7 billion to narrow down from.
L is justified in assuming humans by the decision-theoretic consequences: he likely can do nothing against supernatural entities (and IIRC, even in the extremely difficult scenario of killing a shinigami, that doesn’t stop the killings with Death Notes), so proceeding on the assumption that it is a human is better than not proceeding.
Besides that, I don’t think L is ‘hax’. (Near and Mikami, on the other hand, is a major example of authorial fiat and the part of Death Note I hate the most.)
There are alternatives to a human killer which would provide some opportunity to make headway, which do not have priors that are obviously lower than a human with a supernatural weapon, such as extraterrestrials or some sort of supernatural creature which is humanly beatable.
The first point where I got really pissed off though was when L jumps all the way to “the killer must know the victim’s real name” based on the murder of Lind L. Tailor. Lind L. Tailor was a convicted criminal, and L. wasn’t, and killing criminals was already Kira’s suspected modus operandi. It was not just possible, but probable, that Kira wouldn’t react to a non-criminal’s threat to apprehend him (it could have been against protocol, against his/her/it’s moral code, unnecessary because Kira is completely unassailable, rejected as unnecessary because Kira is confident enough to think he/she/it is unassailable, etc,) even if doing so was entirely within Kira’s abilities. And even if we take for granted that Kira would want to kill L, and assume that Kira has magic action-at-a-distance murder powers, but not magic action-at-a-distance information gathering powers, then whether the victim’s name is known or not is just one variable that’s flipped between L and Lind L. Tailor. L could just as well have been impervious because he eats too many sweets.
If your concern is that there is too little data in the survey to identify individual members,
Yes, I suspect there is too little data in the survey to identify individual members with enough certainty and reasonable effort. I can’t contrive a concrete scenario where an atheist would be identified this way.
I would direct you to gwern’s essay on The Tragedy of Light.
Can you please provide some context? I have no idea what the essay is about.
I don’t want to marginalise your concerns, but can you give an example how exactly the data included in this survey could (with non-negligible probability) be abused?
For instance, forcibly “outing” an atheist in an unfriendly community.
Perhaps more importantly: if people do not have the presumption of anonymity when they fill out a survey, then survey results in general become more unreliable. There’s been plenty of work done on how self-reports change when the people filling them out know they’ll be viewed by people in their out-group and/or in-group.
If your concern is that there is too little data in the survey to identify individual members, I would direct you to gwern’s essay on The Tragedy of Light.
Completely off the topic of the thread, but I take issue with an essay which claims that Death Note is essentially a thought experiment for “given the perfect murder weapon, how can you screw up anyway?” L caught Light, not because he was making appropriate Bayesian updates on the status of the murderer, but because he was being handed information by authorial fiat. In multiple steps he narrows the hypothesis space far more than the observations available to him permit.
When your hypothesis space is broad enough to include the possibility of supernatural action-at-a-distance fate manipulating murder weapons, it’s broad enough to include possible culprits which aren’t even human beings. L was jumping the gun even by concluding that he had a pool of 7 billion to narrow down from.
L is justified in assuming humans by the decision-theoretic consequences: he likely can do nothing against supernatural entities (and IIRC, even in the extremely difficult scenario of killing a shinigami, that doesn’t stop the killings with Death Notes), so proceeding on the assumption that it is a human is better than not proceeding.
Besides that, I don’t think L is ‘hax’. (Near and Mikami, on the other hand, is a major example of authorial fiat and the part of Death Note I hate the most.)
There are alternatives to a human killer which would provide some opportunity to make headway, which do not have priors that are obviously lower than a human with a supernatural weapon, such as extraterrestrials or some sort of supernatural creature which is humanly beatable.
The first point where I got really pissed off though was when L jumps all the way to “the killer must know the victim’s real name” based on the murder of Lind L. Tailor. Lind L. Tailor was a convicted criminal, and L. wasn’t, and killing criminals was already Kira’s suspected modus operandi. It was not just possible, but probable, that Kira wouldn’t react to a non-criminal’s threat to apprehend him (it could have been against protocol, against his/her/it’s moral code, unnecessary because Kira is completely unassailable, rejected as unnecessary because Kira is confident enough to think he/she/it is unassailable, etc,) even if doing so was entirely within Kira’s abilities. And even if we take for granted that Kira would want to kill L, and assume that Kira has magic action-at-a-distance murder powers, but not magic action-at-a-distance information gathering powers, then whether the victim’s name is known or not is just one variable that’s flipped between L and Lind L. Tailor. L could just as well have been impervious because he eats too many sweets.
… Good rational answers always seem obvious in retrospect, don’t they...
Yes, I suspect there is too little data in the survey to identify individual members with enough certainty and reasonable effort. I can’t contrive a concrete scenario where an atheist would be identified this way.
Can you please provide some context? I have no idea what the essay is about.
I can’t imagine doing better than gwern’s preface.