Stretch goal: bake EA principles in from the start.
This would be a huge turnoff for many people, including myself.
namespace
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Could you elaborate on what you mean? If you’ve already taken the survey prior to this post your results were counted and you don’t need to take it again.
Yes, all responses should be turned in by May 1st.
I have taken the survey.
We will get that suggestion sorted asap.
I actually can’t do that. The way our survey engine works changing the question answers mid-survey would require taking it down for maintenance and hand-joining the current respondents to the new respondents. In general I planned to handle the “within 10 cm” thing during analysis. Try to fermi estimate the value and give your closest answer, then the probability you got it right. We can look at how close your confidence was to a sane range of values for the answer.
I.E, if you got it within ten and said you had a ten percent chance of getting it right you’re well calibrated.
Note: I am not entirely sure this is sane, and would like feedback on better ways to do it.
EDIT: I should probably be very precise here. I cannot change the question answers in the software, presumably because it would involve changing the underlying table schema for the database. I can change the question/ question descriptions so if there’s a superior process for answering these I could describe it there.
Yeah, you’re right.
Currently trying to figure out how to do that in the least intrusive way.
EDIT: Good news it turns out that I can edit the calibration question ‘answers’ after all. The ones where a range would make sense have been edited to include one. Questions such as “which is heavier” have not been because the ignorance prior should be fairly obvious.
Fri Mar 25 19:50:41 PDT 2016 | Answers on or before this date where the ranges have been added will be controlled for at analysis time.
I don’t throw out data. Ever. I only control for it. (Well barring exceptional circumstances.)
This is a really good point. It’d make an especially interesting question set because it would give us some idea of how seriously LWers take the comparative advantage idea when it comes to charity, as measured by their actions.
Hi.
What the hell was the purpose of checking whether someone was “inactive for too long”? So what, they were inactive, now they are active again, what’s the big deal? Sometimes real life intervenes.
I have no idea why that happened and I’m really sorry. It’s definitely not supposed to. root@localhost isn’t a real email address it’s just there to stymie system ‘error’ messages we were receiving that were bogus.
The real mailing address you want is jd@fortforecast.com. We’d love to talk to you.
Looking into it now.
EDIT: Added this warning to the save form:
“We store the password and send it to you by email, so please do not use a ‘trusted’ password for this that you use for anything important.” (Not our design decision by the way.)
I’d like to make a miniature announcement so there isn’t any confusion:
Most of the time when somebody writes in a suggestion for improving the questions I don’t reply to it, I just silently upvote the post and write down the question in a list of things to do for the next survey. But I am reading them, and I plan to go through and read them again before I wrap up the final survey analysis.
We had some power outage related downtime for three hours or so, should be back up now.
If you’d be willing to go through the trouble of doing it, yes that’s exactly what you should do. I didn’t think of that, thanks.
Though from a data-consistency perspective people doing this would skew our response rate higher than it really is, I’d rather have the question data than an accurate response rate though so. shrug
On the session timeout front, we’re trying something out to make the sessions longer, which should cut down on that particular problem significantly.
Oh I’m sorry about that. It’s actually an option in the software but I didn’t turn it on because I couldn’t imagine anybody would use it. ^^;
Fixing now.
EDIT: Should be an option now when you complete the survey, thanks!
On all of these. I’m a bit busy today though so expect them much later today or tomorrow.
Update (Tue May 3 21:34:49 PDT 2016):
Points two and three have been fixed, formal write up to follow.
Update on where I’m at:
Right this minute I’m writing a tool that imports the survey structure into a python datastructure to improve the analysis. This might take a bit, but once it’s done it should make developing a generic basic analysis to replace the current one much easier. It’ll also let me fix issues like the answers being in a weird order, with this I’ll be able to order them by the order they appeared on the survey. To clarify what I said earlier, I think I can get out a fixed basic analysis today. A formal writeup will probably take longer.
Sub-update (Mon May 2 17:36:47 PDT 2016):
Wrote the tool, now writing the analysis with it.
Sub-update (Mon May 2 22:58:34 PDT 2016):
I have a mostly-working prototype of the analysis, finishing it up now.
Sub-update (Mon May 2 23:26:28 PDT 2016):
I’ve reached the point where I’m too tired to do anymore today, but what I’ve done so far seems to be enough to patch up the holes in the report system. I’ll finish it tomorrow but in the meantime:
Basic Analysis With Null Entries Included Basic Analysis With Null Entries Excluded
2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part One (Meta and Demographics)
2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Results
I’m somehow reminded of the scene in Logicomix where Russel figures that Godel should be given some kind of award for actually reading his Principia, though he’s not sure what.
You went through the analysis files, closely enough to spot errors, and then actually went and reported them? Props.
Hi. As a longtime lurker (my first introduction to the site may have been as early as twelve years old) I’m very glad to see this conversation finally come to a head. I’m of the opinion that the current site needs to either reinvent itself or shut down. I think that the biggest negative of the rationalist diaspora has in fact been keeping track of who has flown to what corner of the earth, further Eliezer Yudowsky and others posting on Facebook is annoying to me, because I do not use Facebook and find it to be an actual pain at times to get access to their posts. Having a less proprietary mirror would make me much more likely to read their writings. At the same time, given the implied privacy of Facebook I have to wonder if the point of posting there is so that things will not be read outside of the small audience EY now caters to.
Reinventing LessWrong as an archival site for the sequences and a hub for coordinating the diaspora would be a prudent use of its Schelling-Point real estate.
I largely agree with your analysis, though I do have some ideas on what an online community that does not waste peoples time and gets them to do interesting things would look like. If somebody would be interested in discussing this with me they may email me at:
wqcbfgntr@yvahkznvy.bet (Rot13′d to prevent email spam.)
(or here, but I’m kind of public discussion shy).