Sunday Meetup: Workshop on Online Surveys with Spencer Greenberg

Alternate title: “Geez LessWrong peeps do more empiricism please”.

At this Sunday’s LW meetup, special guest Spencer Greenberg will be running a workshop on how to run a psychology study using online tools.

The LessWrong community raises a lot of interesting questions. I’ve long wished we did more empirical answering of those questions. In the past year I’ve become excited about several of the tools Spencer has created, which help make it easier to run surveys and studies over mechanical turk. I think it’d be valuable if a number of LessWrong users developed a basic affordance doing that.

So this Sunday at noon PT, we’ll be hosting a 2 hour workshop, with two phases:

In the first half, Spencer will walk us through how to use Positly (a wrapper for mechanical turk that gives you lots of demographic data and streamlines the process), and GuidedTrack, which can be used to create flexible surveys and online experiments. He’ll also talk about practices for good study design.

In the second half, people will work to create a simple project in Positly and Guided Track. Spencer will answer questions that come up. At the end, people are welcome to briefly share what they ended up working on.

The meetup will be held in Gather Town – we’ll be experimenting with using their Presenter Mode functionality so that everyone can hear Spencer give his talk, and then chat in small groups as they work on their separate projects. Users will be able to “walk up to the microphone” to ask questions that the whole room can hear.

Gather Town instance:

https://​​gather.town/​​app/​​Dgohwk4BUg5HjGZE/​​lesswrong-clubhouse