Did that.
Re. relationships: The only people I’ve heard use “polyamorous” are referring to committed, marriage-like relationships involving more than two adults. There ought to be a category for those of us who don’t want exclusivity with any number.
I’ve left most of the probability questions blank, because I don’t think it is meaningfully possible to assign numbers to events I have little or no quantitative information about. For instance, I’ll try P(Aliens) when we’ve looked at several thousand planets closely enough to be reasonably sure of answers about them.
In addition, I don’t think some of the questions can have meaningful answers. For example, the “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, if true, would have no testable (falsifiable) effect on the observable universe, and therefore I consider the question to be objectively meaningless. The same goes for P(Simulation), and probably P(God).
P(religion) also suffers from vagueness: what conditions would satisfy it? Not only are some religions vaguely defined, but there are many belief systems that are arguably relgions or not religions. Buddhism? Communism? Atheism?
The singularity is vague, too. (And as I usually hear it described, I would see it as a catastrophe if it happened. The SF story “With Folded Hands” explains why.)
Extra credit items:
Great Stagnation—I believe that the rich world’s economy IS in a great stagnation that has lasted for most of a century, but NOT for the reasons Cowen and Thiel suggest. The stagnation is because of “progressive” politics, especially both the welfare state and overregulation/nanny-statism, which destroy most people’s opportunities to innovate and profit by it. This is not a trivial matter, but a problem quite comparable to those listed in the “catastrophe” section, and one which may very well prevent a solution to a real catastrophe if we become headed for one. (Both parties’ constant practice of campaigning-by-inventing-a-new-phony-emergency-every-month makes the problem worse, too: most rational people now dismiss any cry of alarm as the boy who cried wolf. Certainly the environmental movement, including its best known “scientists”, have discredited themselves this way.) This is why the struggle for liberty is so critical.
I did the survey.
I felt that I had to leave blank some of the questions that ask for a probability number, because no answer that complies with the instructions would be right. For instance, I consider the “Many Worlds” hypothesis to be effectively meaningless, since while it does describe a set of plausible alleged facts, there is, as far as I know, no possible experiment that could falsify it. (“Supernatural” is also effectively meaningless, but for a different reason: vagueness. “Magic”, to me, describes only situations where Clarke’s Third Law applies. And so forth.)
I would like to participate in a deeper discussion of the idea of the Singularity, but don’t know if that’s welcome on LW. I want to attack the idea on several levels: (1) the definition of it, which may be too vague to be falsifiable; (2) the definition of intelligence—I don’t think we’re talking about a mere chess-playing computer, but it’s not clear to me whether Minsky’s criteria are sufficient; (3) if those first two points are somehow nailed down, then I’m not at all sure that a machine intelligence is desirable, and certainly I’d hesitate to connect one to hardware with enough abilities that the revolution in “I, Robot” becomes possible; and (4) if such a change does happen, I would prefer, and I think most people would insist, that it happen relatively slowly to give everyone then alive time to cope with the change, thus making it not really a singularity in the mathematical sense.
(I do like the transhumanist notion that humans should feel free to modify our own hardware individually, but I don’t see that as necessarily connected with a Singularity, and I don’t use the jargon of transhumanism for the same reason I avoid the jargon of anarchism when talking politics—it scares people needlessly.)
I left both MIRI questions blank because I don’t know who or what MIRI is.
Re. The Great Stagnation: This theory asserts that we are in an economic stall, if you will, because of a lack of innovation, and is set against the assertion of a “Great Divergence” in which rising income inequality and globalization are to blame for the stall. I didn’t answer because I consider both views to be baloney—we are in an economic stall because of unnecessary and crony-driven overregulation, much of it done in the name of the misguided green and “social justice” movements.
I didn’t do the finger length questions; not sure what “the bottom crease” is, or maybe I don’t have them. (Do you mean the crease at the base of the fingers, or one farther down on the hand?)
Re. feminism, I answered based on what I believe the current use of the term is, which is not at all like the definition on Wikipedia. Wikipedia calls it more or less pro-equality and I support that, but the current usage is more like “social justice” and that whole concept is complete hooey.