I personally prefer names to be self-explanatory. Therefore, in this example I would consider a “blegg” to be a blue egg, regardless of its other qualities, and a “rube” to be a red cube, regardless of its other qualities. I suspect many other people would have a similar intuition.
Elund
Thanks for posting this. Your explanations are fascinating and helpful. That said, I do have one quibble. I was misled by the Two Aces problem because I didn’t know that the two unknown cards (2C and 2D) were precluded from also being aces or aces of spaces. It might be better to edit the post to make that clear.
Not if they followed the survey instructions, which asked for only the scores from the most recent professional IQ test they took.
It looks like you created the 2014 survey before I got around to posting my comment for this one. Oh well. Hopefully you will still find my comment useful. :)
Some answer choices from the survey weren’t included in the results, without any explanation as to why. Does that mean no one selected them? If so, I suggest editing the post to make that clear.
I noticed that 13.6% of respondents chose not to answer the “vegetarian” question. I think it would have helped if you provided additional choices for “vegan” and “pescatarian”.
Finally, at the end of the survey I had a question offering respondents a chance to cooperate (raising the value of a potential monetary prize to be given out by raffle to a random respondent) or defect (decreasing the value of the prize, but increasing their own chance of winning the raffle). 73% of effective altruists cooperated compared to 70% of others—an insignificant difference.
I have some doubts as to how good of a gauge this question is for altruism. People may choose to defect if they have immediate pressing needs for money, if they think their charity is superior to what most other people would have chosen, or if they don’t see a net altruistic benefit in taking more money away from the prize-giver just to give it to a randomly selected survey-taker. I suppose if they bothered to think through it carefully they might have reasoned that all else being equal you’d prefer them to cooperate, which is why you’re willing to give them more money for it. However, it could have also been that you saw the promise of extra money as a necessary sacrifice in order to set up the dilemma properly, but secretly wished for most people to defect. (Which one was it, by the way, if you don’t mind me asking? :P)
I don’t know for sure that Mensa is on the level, so I tried again deleting everyone who took a Mensa test—leaving just the people who could name-drop a well-known test or who knew it was administered by a psychologist in an official setting. This caused a precipitous drop all the way down to 138.
I think I know why removing the Mensa tests from the IQ results brought down the average. It’s not because the Mensa test is unreliable, but because the people who bothered to take it are likely to have relatively higher IQs, in which case it would make sense to remove them from the sample to remove the bias.
People who spend more time on Less Wrong have lower IQs.
My guess is that lower IQ people may spend more time on LW because they derive more benefit from reading posts about rationality. Perhaps higher-IQ people are more likely to efficiently limit their time on LW to reading only the top-rated interesting-looking posts and the top-rated comments.
Height is, bizarrely, correlated with belief in the supernatural and global catastrophic risk.
Your data actually showed that height is anti-correlated with belief in the supernatural, unless that minus sign wasn’t supposed to be there.
Thanks for posting these surveys and survey results, by the way. They are very fascinating. :)
Well, the process of research and discovery can itself be enjoyable. That said, I don’t feel that there is a need to hold onto our current enjoyable activities if a CEV can create novel superior ways for us to have fun.
Now children sometimes want to avoid growing up, but I don’t know of any such case we can’t explain as simple fear of death.
They can be afraid of having to deal with adult responsibilities, or the physical symptoms of aging after they’ve reached their prime.
CEV is supposed to aim for the optimal future, not a satisficing future. My guess is that there is only one possible optimal future for any individual, unless there is a theoretical upper limit to individual utility and the FAI has sufficiently vast resources.
Also, if the terminal goals for both humans and dogs are to simply experience maximum subjective well-being for as long as possible, then their personal CEVs at least will be identical. However, since individuals are selfish, there’s no reason to expect that the ideal future for one individual will, if enacted by a FAI, lead to ideal futures for the other individuals who are not being extrapolated.
I took the survey.
I have a few suggestions though.
For the race question, I recommend allowing people to pick more than one option, or creating an extra option saying “I don’t primarily identify with one race”.
For profession, I feel like it was unclear what people who aren’t currently students or employed are supposed to pick. What they most recently worked in or studied in a formal setting? What about students who haven’t declared a major yet? The field of study they’re leaning toward?
For the time in community question, I suggest clarifying whether that includes lurking. My guess was no, but I think it was sufficiently vague to where a significant number of people wouldn’t have guessed that.
I would also be interested in seeing a question relating to use of artificial cognitive enhancement techniques such as tDCS and nootropics.
Thanks for working on the survey. :)
My worry is that taking an IQ test online (even timed with reliable questions) cannot duplicate the exact same experience as taking an IQ test in a proctored setting. There are likely to be more confounding factors that throw off the scores relative to proctored tests, since the environments cannot be as strictly controlled.
Thirded. I was momentarily stumped by that question, not being sure whether a simulator living in a universe with different natural laws than our own counted as “supernatural”. I ended up deciding no. The simulator’s universe might be a different kind of natural, but not “supernatural”. Still, including a clarification in the question would have reduced errors due to misunderstanding, not to mention saved us time. The survey is already quite long as it is.
That would seem kind of redundant as it’s already not necessary to answer every question, even the ones that don’t say they’re extra credit or skippable. Maybe Yvain could have made that clearer at the beginning?
I personally wouldn’t have minded a longer survey either. I’m just worried that making it longer would deter others from completing as many questions or even taking the survey in the first place. It might be a good idea to have a poll (perhaps within the survey itself) asking for the amount of time we’d be willing to spend on such a survey.
I think you’re supposed to measure from the middle of the bottom crease to the middle of the tip. Also, since the bottom crease itself can be about a millimeter or two wide, I measured from the middle of that crease by its width in addition to its length. When I do that I get consistent results even on repeated measurements.
Agreed. Most rulers don’t give measurements more precise than millimeters.
I think it should be fine to just hold a ruler up to your finger. The only potential problem might be that the highest tip of your finger wouldn’t actually touch the ruler, but if you don’t want to estimate by sight you can hold another flat surface perpendicular to it to see where that touches the ruler. I get consistent measurements this way.
I think it means largest volume without counting the volume enclosed.
Even then your subjective probability wouldn’t have been exactly 0. You could have put 0.00000000001 or something like that. The instructions didn’t forbid you from using long decimals. Even so, I think it would have been fine to put 0 if your subjective probability really was 0 or you felt like rounding down to it.
Maybe the corresponding fingers on your other hand really are different in length. Mine are. Whenever I press my fingers against each other such as to line up their bottom creases (keeping the orientation of the fingers as straight as possible), the middle and upper creases and fingertips don’t line up. My right fingers are slightly shorter.
Good point about the photocopier. Hopefully these issues won’t add too much noise to the results and obscure any significant results.
Putting 0 is misleading. It implies that you’re confident there is no chance at all. If you’re really not leaning one way or another, your best bet is to just put 50, or perhaps even skip the question if you really don’t want to give a probability.
You can click “select your monitor dimension” to resize the ruler. The default they gave me was wrong. I actually suggest making the ruler even smaller than the authentic size, so that the distance between millimeters will be shorter and thus the ratio will be more precise.
“Most people choose option 1.” I find this hard to believe. Were they forced to answer quickly or under cognitive load, and without access to a calculator or pen and paper? I would appreciate it if you could edit the post to provide a citation.