Re 'What is your highest degree earned?' the structure of the answers implies both MD and JD are higher than PhD or Masters, and that JD is higher than MD - but maybe you just put JD/MD at the end because they are professional degrees. I would rank them Masters < JD < MD < PhD.
On the mental illness question, after mindlessly checking the bottom box for almost all of them, I initially did the same for "Suicide", only to notice afterward that, oops, the bottom box means something very different there! I don't know if there's any good way to edit this now, but in the future I would suggest making it more obvious that those aren't parallel so that people don't make the same mistake.
Re: "At the end of an average year, what percent of your income will you have saved?"
To clarify: This is how many percent of your income you have saved (verb)? It could also be interpreted as how many percent of your income you have saved (adjective); compare "I have not saved a lot this year, but I have a lot saved".
One of the options is "I think I might have this condition, although I have never been formally diagnosed", and another option is "I have family members (within two generations) with this condition".
Shouldn't there be an option for when you strongly suspect that a family member has depression, but you are not aware of any formal diagnosis?
Re: "Do you usually wear a face mask when going out to stores or restaurants?"
I think this question will depend on a lot on the current status of COVID waves in the answerer's geographical area. Personally I wear masks only when there's a recent surge, when there's a mandate, or when I'm sick. I think the question should be split or phrased in a way that informs you of the personality/habits of the answerer, rather than the current crisis level.
Wasn't there a unique ID you were supposed to remember from previous years survey so you could compare them? Did you drop that idea or maybe forget about it?
Question about why you distrust the media says has "Option for people who put 1, 2, or 3 in questions above"; this is clearly intended to say "3, 4, or 5".
I'm missing "Retired" under Work Status. Should I choose "Homemaker" instead, or "Independently wealthy"? I don't really feel *wealthy*, I just have a pension and some savings....
Suppose one took the SAT during the brief period where there were three sections (Math, Reading, and Writing) and it was scored up to 2400. What should they give as their Verbal/Reading score? Reading, Writing, or (Reading + Writing) / 2?
My second guess for the Moscow distance question was almost exactly my number of unread emails (off by 4), but I swear this wasn't anchoring (I actually answered them in reverse order, I was too lazy to look up my inbox number until I went back).
Why no option for (East) Indian / South Asian in the ethnic group question? There's options for Bengali and Tamil but most Indians are not covered in these groups.
Abortion question: this is a legality question, right? I.e. it's enough for highly pro-choice that abortion services are as accessible as any other medical services and this fact is well-known and not hidden, and even informal stigmatisation is considered bad. Propaganda and state support for child-rearing do not count against this.
I wonder if on policy questions like immigration it would be useful next time to ask «the axes of current thresholds are somewhat reasonably chosen/oriented, independently of thresholds themselves being too high or too low»
This survey was a lot of fun! There are two things that might make sense to change.
1. It seems to me like the race category should allow people to write in a custom option. In particular, the "other" category in the race question mixes multi-racial people with unlisted races (like Native American, African, Pacific Islander) and I think those should be separate categories. A "check all that apply" box could be used too.
2. I opened a new to the BMI calculator when answering the BMI question and that tab stayed open by the time I reached "how many tabs do you have open" question even though I had no intention of returning to the BMI tab later. I think the open tabs data should take place early in the survey, to avoid contamination by the survey itself.
I had to skip a lot of questions, or give non-committal answers, because they didn't make sense. The most salient one was about giving my political views on a spectrum from left to right. Like many people I don't accept or identify with 'left' or 'right' politically. The term 'right' as used in politics is effectively libellous because it defines extreme forms of conservatism, or anti-socialism, as fascist.
Minor points:
City versus suburban living was impossible to answer because there is a third alternative, living in the country, which is different from both the other options; and it's probably not a single dimension.
Class background is (obviously, because the questionnaire is mainly for Americans) defined in American terms and doesn't suit my experience as an Englishman, so I had to translate, with some uncertainty. Specifically, US middle class is equivalent to UK lower middle class. For historical reasons the UK middle classes are taken to be well above the median income and social status.
I had to look up all the philosophical terms: consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, contractualism and natural law. That was embarrassing, because I think of myself as having a broad range of general knowledge, but obviously not as broad as I thought.
I take the survey every year, but ran into an issue for the jobs question. "Other white-collar" and "other blue-collar" are the only listed options for people with an unmentioned job, but many positions don't slot well into those frameworks, and there's no option to actually write-in your profession. As it stands, I can't progress any further in the survey (I assume the question is optional, but it's a big enough one I'd *like* to answer it).
I think «income» question would benefit from an extra country field (especially when changing EU contries too much to identify with a single one more than the country of origin…)
Hmm, my estimation that my viral cold was CoViD is based on once-in-a-lifetime smell distortion symptoms, but they went away within a few days, not a full week (while some weak effect — not sure if heart of lungs — lingered for more than a year)…
Come on Scott, that isn't how it works! Your sex is determined at the moment of fertilisation. I really hope that this was just an oversight from a cut and paste job.
Decided to go one way or the other on voice in head judgement because it's not a category error, sometimes it is positive and sometimes negative, but no real overall skew, and there wasn't really an option for that
LSD: I had an extremely strong and unpleasant physical reaction at a dose where the mental effects were barely perceptible (mostly improved mood/sort of 'inner glow', right up until all my muscles started contracting/vibrating uncontrollably and I spent the next several hours trying to stay calm and avoid going to the hospital). Very similar to my experience with serotonin syndrome, but without the mental/emotional disturbance.
Inner voice: I had trouble answering these questions. I have inner speech (I can imagine speaking, and I can imagine a dialogue by playing each side of it in turn) but I don't have "an inner voice" in the sense of an entity separate from my conscious self that produces verbal thoughts without conscious effort. The first question seemed to be asking about the first thing, so I picked the middle "I can if I want to" option, but then the second question seemed to be asking about the second thing. I picked the middle "this question seems weird" response but wasn't sure if I should be picking the "I don't have one" option instead.
Can we have next year more variety for the country you identify most with? It was surprisingly hard to choose this year, as somebody who is close to be a dual-citizen.
On the same vane, can we have a way to identify ourselves by the city? Myself and my friends would rather identify as Londoners/NY-ers rather than the country we reside in.
I was off on the moscow distance question by many KM then when I answered again I gave an answer that was off by the same amount in the opposite direction! :(
In the glasses question there is also an option «my vision does not count as good, but I still do not correct it». Including blind people who use screen readers to use your blog, I guess.
Corneal damage (or other non-refractionary issues) is also not too likely to be corrected by glasses.
Some people have asymmetry between eyes making correction both more annoying and less necessary; some have similar issues on both eyes that are simply hard to correct in any way and reasonably livable uncorrected.
I am not blind, but I would not say either of the offered options applies to me. I would add options:
«My vision is not good but I do not correct it, and still navigate using it.»
Fascinating, as always! The "previous guess was incorrect" question was a delightful insight into the epistemic process, and I found it very hard to decide whether I should change my answer up or down. (Also, typo: extra "how" in that question.)
Unread emails: this was consistently zero for me until less than a year ago and now it's in 4 digits, and I've no idea why. Some kind of unexplained drop in executive function? (Idk whether that question is in there in its own right or just for anchoring, but I'm kind of curious what it correlates with.)
Re COVID fatigue, there were options for "no fatigue" and "fatigue for a few weeks after" but no option for "fatigue only while actually ill with it and not after". I ticked "no fatigue" as I figured that was the intended meaning, but it felt a bit wrong.
The urbanisation questions seemed inconsistent: the first was on a scale from urban to suburban, and the second on a scale from urban to rural. I prefer suburban to urban, but I prefer both over rural (so would pick urban over rural if those were the only options), and the questions seemed to be conflating suburban with rural.
As always, I think the "family member has this condition" and "I suspect I have this condition" questions should be checkboxes with multiple options allowed, or at least if they're radio buttons it should be explicitly stated which of those trumps the other in cases where both are true.
There's ambiguity on the question "How much do you trust the mainstream media? For example, the New York Times and Washington Post". The word "trust," and what it may mean in the context.
The answer "mostly mistrust" might be chosen by the person who considers that NYT/WaPo publish "false facts," yes. And it may also be chosen by the person who considers them to be the mouthpieces of a social-engineering agenda, publishing facts that are not "false per se" but rather very particularly preselected and spun. The latter also translates to a level of trust which is not zero, but negative.
Perhaps it'd have been great to have separate questions addressing the former and the latter. It's probably too late to split them now, but maybe some wording could be added to the question to clarify the intended meaning of the single question.
Wait, why would an inner voice narrate what I do instead whe I do something trivial, instead of going through something I plan to do afterwards? (My answer would be: it narrates all the time, usually not the thing I am currently doing)
How will you account for the different SAT scoring systems that have been used? Now it's out of 1600 again, but wasn't it out of 2400 or something for a bit?
Just noting that I'm interested to hear what the results of the survey RE: imaginary friends are, but I'm a bit sceptical of the reliability of the results. I left that blank because while I have been informed by my parents that I did have an imaginary friend, I honestly can't recall anything beyond the name, so I have no idea if it was a hallucination, a delusion or just an pretense.
I may be unusually bad at remembering my childhood, but I am doubtful that is the kind of thing people can reliably recall decades later - there's a risk of projecting back an adult level of skepticism, but there's also a risk of incorrectly assuming children are incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality.
LSD: Nobody ever told me and my friends what doses we bought. I decided to write an absurdly high number, which seemed to be the most truthful workable option.
For the mental disorders question, does "family" only include blood relations or should it include one's spouse, in-laws, adopted siblings, etc? My brother-in-law has one of these disorders and I consider him family, but obviously his having the disorder doesn't genetically predispose me toward having it.
I wish the political questions had at least a cultural and economic axis. As an economically left (social democratic) but culturally conservative (monoculturalism, etc.) person, it's really difficult to find a package that suits me.
I also wish you had better warned to not look up the Paris to Moscow distance before answering the last question, as the first thing I did was to check my answer.
I was a bit unsure about the left-right politics question since my answer is wildly different depending on which country you base it on - I would consider myself center-right for Sweden, but far left in American politics. The minimum wage question ended up even harder, since we don't even have a minimum wage here (never needed it because of strong unions). I guess to some extent things like these are inevitable, since you can't account for all the cultural differences around the world in a questionnaire, but it's still frustrating.
I noticed there was no "Green" in 'Political Affiliation. With which of these political descriptions do you most identify?'
I regret I can't easily survey my German acquaintances on this. But starting with the German example, the Green party in Germany is both in national government and in a majority of state governments. Which should somehow be reflected in what persons would choose as their 'Political Affiliation'.
There is also the forth-largest parlamentary group in the European Parliament, which is Green/EFA. And smaller Green parties in many European countries.
I guess I should ask someone for a proper self-identification, nevertheless I assume: "Green: taking actions against climate change, being friendly to the natural environment & animals", would do for such a list (maybe also without the animals). My friends would kill me for leaving out all the pro-democracy, etc., etc. ;)
Under the job categorization, you distinguish AI and broader CS research from “Practical” computer science, lumping IT professionals in with application developers, operating systems developers, and embedded systems types. While my favorite baristo might think we both “do something with computers,” the skill sets couldn’t be more different. The US government puts me in the “Computer/Mathematical” bucket most of the time, which is still imprecise, but a closer match, IMO.
On the subreddit and discord questions, I was missing a 'haven't been there yet, maybe somewhen' or a 'potentially interested, but not enough to currently spend time on' option.
I don't read those, I knew they existed, so three options don't work. 'No, I don't want to read it' suggests a clear and conscious rejection. In my case it's more a mixture of habits, time, priorities, and that nobody has convinced me yet to give it a try.
None of these are errors, just things that made me feel incapable of answering correctly:
I struggle every time I have to decide between being a student and self-employed, and to decide on a profession - I used to work in software development, am self-employed in card-game publishing and am now studying Philosophy/Neuroscience/Cognition. That's all over the map. I went with Philosophy because that's my B.A. but I feel that's not really accurate.
My family has an atheist religious background. There was presumably some Christian somewhat back somewhere, but I don't know which kind and anyway, the last generations have been committed atheist and I feel that should be an option.
Selecting a class is hard for someone who read Bourdieu. Poverty + high education does not make me working-class.
I have an out-of-date formal diagnosis of depression, i.e. I was clinically depressed for much of my youth and well into my early adult life, but haven't been for years. Family members used to have this but don't anymore, too (for death reasons and for getting better reasons).
I also have a very out of date PTSD diagnosis that I don't believe was ever accurate.
How happy am I with my job? Which one? I chose to interpret that as "the job sphere of my life", which includes my studies.
"If you're a student, answer "No, I don't work"" - but the vast majority of students do work! I work 5-20 hours a week, why do I need to select "I don't work"?
Thank you for "in the spirit in which you predict it was intended on the questionnaire" - that changed my answer.
Not being able to answer questions without lying is my #1 reason of abandoning surveys.
What I did like: the "option for people who [question doesn't apply to]". I don't like leaving questions out.
I could be curious to see a mission driven for-profit option, answering with for profit since that's closest.
Re Religious Views
How would you describe your religious views?
Hard for me to answer, I am spiritual and neither pantheist nor atheist. I am undecided and I don't feel a need to decide, nor am I agnostic. I am happy with my spiritual practices and don't need more. I'm probably the minorty here so I'm leaving it unanswered.
Re Discord/Subreddit/Discord/Subscriber
The Yes/No binary doesn't capture deltas. e.g. I do, I don't, I did but now I don't
Deltas are interesting imo, but not necessary
Re: Do you wear glasses?
I stopped wearing them 2 years ago when I began doing somatic experiencing work and noticed increases in my stress levels. My vision has improved since. Saying I have naturally good vision for this, even though I'm not 20/20 yet.
Re: What effect did this dose of LSD have on you?
I've had different experiences at the same dose, can't answer this one accurately so I'm choosing the most common.
Re: Do you have seizures?
At times I have somatic seizures (Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures) when doing somatic work. Answering once or a few times, in exceptional situations
Re: Answer only if you feel completely comfortable doing so: which of the following forms of trauma did you experience as a young child, ie before the age of 10?
Would you consider chronic neglect to be emotional abuse or abandonment? I did not check abandonment as I'm interpreting it to be permanent.
That was a frustrating experience. Most answer ranges were way too binary. The only way to say "neither left nor right" was to put oneself in the mushy middle, which is inaccurate. I do not remember my SAT scores from 1963 and I do not remember the results of my last (if any) officially given IQ test. I couldn't describe my status as a new, unpaid ACX reader or my reason for being unpaid (just getting acquainted) or how I discovered ACX (by being put onto SSC by someone and binge-reading it for a short time a few or several years ago). Possibly by this age (mid-70s) one has taken a lumpy one-off shape that doesn't come close to fitting any mold.
I'm the only one who can't pull up the survey? I've tried both Firefox and Chrome, and the explanation I get is this:
"Firefox does not trust forms.gle because its certificate issuer is unknown, the certificate is self-signed, or the server is not sending the correct intermediate certificates."
I Now Have Additional Questions! (but already submitted, so this is just for calibration purposes...sorry about poorly-formatted bulleted list, the actual questions aren't numbered or anything)
*Industry - made me snort in $EMOTION that every specific answer is white collar, and then the bulk of all other jobs historically and globally gets rounded off to "other blue collar".
*Education Complete? is a weirdly-phrased question, I assume you meant "do you ever want to achieve a higher degree" as opposed to "are you currently a student"? School isn't in the cards for me, hasn't been for a long time, but continued shame over amassing like 150 credits without a Real Bachelor's Degree still smarts. I consider that incomplete.
*Denomination - no love for Daoism? I think it's importantly different from Buddhism, even for an agnostic-dabbler like me that finds bits and pieces of Light in many different religions.
*SSC Subreddit - no option for "used to read". I feel like the value-add went way down after the migration to ACX and subsequent community splintering, have basically never touched it after that.
*Income status - terms are in tension. I'm a "veteran" at my job, with a statistically anomalous length of continuous employment for the branch, but not quite at the pay cap yet for my org chart position. And that's not even considering getting vertically promoted into entire other wage tiers. So it's definitely comfortably into my "career", yet also still entry-level retail, due to unusually few levels of formal hierarchy in the company.
*Depression - weird edge case, I have a diagnosis of Chronic Depression which goes untreated, but is functionally in remission. Not really comfortable saying I got cured or better, cause the blues can strike again quick, but the options are fairly binary and everything else seemed less accurate.
*Vegetarianism - the way it's worded, one can only choose to go halfway and reduce meat "for moral reasons", which strikes me as a weird assumption? I largely don't do it for morality, I do it because it seems like an Unfair Traide, and strongly prefer goods to be priced according to their full externalities as a Platonic ideal. Meat is, uh, not that, most of the time.
*Glasses - no option for "I don't wear glasses because I don't want to, despite vision being bad". Seems inaccurate to round that off to Naturally Good Vision - I wouldn't have three pairs of glasses and an optometry prescription if it was naturally good!
*Orgasm - it would have been so simple to change the scale to "Very Difficult <-> Very Easy". I see what you did there.
*ASMR - unspecified term. I experience frisson pretty strongly from particular auditory patterns; the "Ragnarok" album by Wardruna, Irish folk songs, "Karma" by Kamelot, "The Felt" and "Medium" albums from Homestuck, throat singing...those all do it for me. But this seems like a qualitively different qualia than what people mean when they say ASMR. I think there might be some overlap, but they seem to be different experiences.
*Psychotherapy - had to give a perfectly middle response, since it was Absolutely Useless for one set of ailments, but Totally Life-Changing for others. Reversion to the mean, I guess.
*Group Harm/Divorce - assumed here you didn't mean the technial legal definition of "divorce" etc, with all the paperwork and courts involved, but rather the consequentialist effects of Broken Household and so on. It really doesn't make much difference to the kids if Mommy and Daddy still do weird things during tax season because otherwise the house would be gone, yet are functionally divorced all other times of the year.
*Wireheading - seems like a fairly specific scenario? I'm strongly opposed to that particular iteration, but not the general principle; there are near-analouges that I'd readily slip into. Certain videogames or shows that feel so powerfully compelling, I'd willingly give up Living For Real to LARP them forever. Like the entire premise behind Sword Art Online...
*Media trust - I notice that no one's explicitly prompted me to disaggregate which parts of covid news coverage most made me distrust media, and this is an interesting frame! It's tricky cause my brain screams epistemic foul play for each option, so assigning degree-weights is actually difficult. Plus of course they're strongly correlated news angles...
*Flashing elements - am reminded of Zvi's woes with watching football on TV, and needing to physically block the "stock ticker"-type scroll which commonly accompanies sports coverage now. Plus users with animated .gif usericons which...distract me. (Not specific to ACX.) This is more than half the reason I hate video content vs. text.
*Tabs/emails - hope I'm not the only one who uses "unread email" in lieu of formal reminder systems, and open tabs in lieu of actual bookmarks. Either that have been left unaddressed too long get removed, because - no, I won't actually do that thing/read that post. This also means keeping browsing history permanently, and relying on memory to call up half-remembered posts...thus the first action for any given browsing is "Restore previous session". To keep continuity.
Anyway, that was interesting, and I'm happy to have finally gotten to participate in this august tradition. Looking forward to weird results in January.
I flubbed the Paris-Moscow question. I had what would have been a really close guess based on knowing the circumference of the Earth and the number of timezones that separate them, but forgot to account that timezones are closer together at mid-latitudes than they are at the equator.
I have an inner voice, but it's because I'm thinking in words pretty constantly. It isn't narrating my life. It never occurred to me that people might have inner narrators.
I also have what I call an attack voice telling me I'm an awful person, but it's rarely a narrator.
I used to have migraines, but something like 50 years ago, so I answered no. I didn't do anything to make them stop, they just went away.
Bonus question: Did you look up the distance from Paris to Moscow as soon as you finished the survey?
More bonus questions: Do you like rereading your own writing? Do you correct old typos?
I notice a couple others have brought it up already, but I feel like the urbanization question was either incomplete or poorly worded due to not properly accounting for rural/country as an option. I strongly prefer urban to suburban, but strongly prefer rural to either, so answering the question literally as-asked I would put maximally urban (since I strongly prefer that to suburban, which is the only other option there), but then this feels untrue since I would much rather live in the country than the city.
I haven't taken the SAT, but I have taken the PSAT (for sophomores and juniors as prep) and the ACT, I feel like I remember that there'd be questions about those?
"Regardless of how you feel about it politically, how did COVID lockdown affect your life?
Ignore the direct effect of getting COVID, and focus on things like economic changes, decreased interaction with other people, and getting to switch from office to remote work."
Got a problem with this one. Economic changes and restrictions to my liberty were negative, while the remote work was very liberating. I finally settled on a "3" for balance, but would have appreciated two switches, one for the negative and one for the positive changes.
As for the Bitcoin value question, I think mentioning a number in the question will have anchoring effects, no matter how close the number is to the current valuation. Unless that's precisely what you're trying to measure.
The whole "Questions About Cities" is vexing me for amusing reasons. I basically switch cities every couple of weeks and walk to work out of my location in one of them. It's a pretty exact 50/50 split, so I'm struggling to pick which place to answer for with some of the questions - especially "How long, in years, have you lived in your current neighbourhood?", which might either be around 10 years or 2 years depending on which one I pick! :)
Not a criticism of the survey, just wanted to share my amusement at my situation.
I remembered playing around with Google Earth and finding that the US is about 4 megameters wide... which I remember because I thought megameter was a cool unit of length and wondered why we talk about thousands of km... If you’re going to use SI, then... Thousands of kilos is just a weird mixing of systems. And I knew Moscow was basically on the edge of Europe. So I was visualizing it correctly and had the information to make a good guess... But my second guess was double my first and all about half the real distance.
Scott, you might get some misleading data because the questions about earining, saving, and spending don't clarify household income vs. personal income
Unrelated observation/questions: I see visual snow and notice that if I have just awoken from REM, it has a kaleidoscopic pattern (vs standard random noise). It's kind of like a grid of kaleidoscopic views, maybe 500x500, each with near-identical constantly evolving patterns. I've noticed this 20+ times. I only assume that it is REM - it is strongly correlated with awakening from a dream, but that does not necessarily entail REM. As of recently, I have sleep data (Apple Watch) and confirmed that last night's observation corresponds to awakening from what my watch determined to be REM.
As far as the questions:
- Does anyone else experience this?
- Does anyone experience this who doesn't have visual snow?
- Does anyone know of an explanation of this phenomenon? It seems like it could be an epiphenomenon arising from REM activity in the visual cortex.
Couple of answers that don't fit the provided options:
- I rarely remember dreams, though I think I remember enough to answer the questions. They're not exactly 'in color' or 'in black and white'. I may have some sort of moderate aphantasia, and my dreams are more conceptual, like reading a story without trying to picture it. (Apples vary in how well I can visualize them. Some days they're pure concept, or almost like wireframe, today I can do an imperfect attempts at some texture/color and I hold almost the whole apple 'visible' at once, instead of it having 'out of focus' parts that usually tend to fade out of existence very easily)
- My inner voice usually uses the royal We, so not exactly first or second person! (I may have picked that up from trying to sound more professional when doing projects by myself. I usually write about things I do in the third person, when I'm not directly talking about myself to someone else)
There is a question on childhood trauma that can be skipped, but there is no way to distinguish between someone who skips because they don't want to say they were abused and someone who was never abused. On a normal question, it might be insignificant but I can imagine people some people don't want to reveal they were molested or beaten by their parents.
I'm married and combine finances with my spouse; what should I put for the income questions? I initially tried to answer for just me, but then I got to the savings question and realized that the presence of his income affects our collective savings in ways it's hard to separate out. Should I just go back to the first page and answer everything as though we're a single person with two jobs?
Hurrah, it is the annual "you designed this terribly, why didn't you ask this question/include that option" open season on Scott's survey!
I thought it was interesting, but given that it will be "tabulated by computer", I feel that has definitely cut down the choices to something that can be simply marked into "yes/no" bins by machine.
I never know how to answer the sexuality/relationship questions, and would dearly love an option for "Not interested in/do not want [love/romance/marriage/banging sixty different people of all genders every weekend]". For instance, in the "relationship style" do I answer "prefer monogamous" (because were I interested, that would be my preference) or "other", because I don't want any relationship at all?
The "profession" one always amuses me - God help us if any of us are cleaning ladies, I guess we'll have to go under "other - blue collar", right? 😁
Mostly it's okay, though my permanent gripe remains: Political Affiliation. I *would* like to go with "Liberal, for example the US Democratic Party : market economy plus social welfare, socially permissive multiculturalism" except nix on the "socially permissive", so were I American I suppose I'd be one of the Reagan Democrats.
Second choice would be "Social democratic, for example Scandinavian countries: heavily-regulated market economy, cradle-to-grave social safety net, socially permissive multiculturalism" except, you know, that "socially permissive multiculturalism" again (not so much the multiculturalism but let's not start a battle here).
This forces me to choose "Conservative, for example the US Republican Party and UK Tories: low taxes, low redistribution of wealth, traditional values" and do you know why I am bleeding from the eyes with the wailing of the damned arising from the bowels of Hell as I select this option, hmmmm? Because I am being lumped in with the freakin' TORIES. The party of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Margaret Thatcher (I haven't formed a strong impression of Rishi Sunak yet, except that he gives faint indications of being 'oh, another one of them'*).
Not even the old-fashioned House of Stuart supporting Tories, no, the blinkin' present-day boiling. I would even prefer the "robber that is noted for outrages and cruelty" connotations than *that*:
One of these days, I swear, I will crack and select "Alt-right, for example France's National Front: nationalist revival with an ethnic/racial component" and then I will cackle maniacally as the men in white coats drag me off "See what you made me do! Seeeeee!!!!!"
*Partygate - rules for thee but not for me, not registering the interests of the wife's family's money - see rules for thee but not for me. He did resign over the Pincher sex scandal but it's hard to say how much was principle and how much was rats deserting the sinking ship. Apologies to any rats offended by the comparison. He hasn't done anything out of the ordinary above the common venality of wealthy Tory politicians so either there aren't any more scandals to come, or if there are it will be a doozy (seems very unlikely but who can say?). He did ban (again) fracking, so depending on your views on fracking this was a good/bad decision.
FINALLY, I am fascinated as to how I am supposed to answer this question:
"Compared to other people of your same sex, how hard is it for you to orgasm?"
Are we supposed to be in a group with a stopwatch and everyone times themselves? Watch porn on our own and compare our performance with that onscreen? Be gay and see what our partner(s) achieve versus what we achieve? Sidle on to some subreddit and leave a coy enquiry as to how people there feel they do in 'ease of getting your rocks off'? What?
I miss having odd questions to test weird hypotheses. I don't know whether they were important, but they added flavor.
Scott, is this a change of policy (maybe testing the weird hypotheses wasn't worth the trouble) or just not having a weird hypothesis to test this year, or what?
I am wondering if an "I know what you mean by this question but am upset by the phrasing" checkbox for each question would be useful (for future questionnaires). Reading these comments there seems to be a split between "the question didn't cover my situation" (I have one of those) and folks who know what Scott meant but are unhappy with the way he phrased the question.
SUBREDDIT QUESTION: There should be an option for: "I was banned from the subreddit over nonsense so I don't go there".
I honestly don't even remember the particulars anymore, might have been a year or more ago, but I want to say that the gist of it from my perspective is I was arguing in good faith with one of the mod's friends and we were both being uncharitable, and the mod for some reason banned me despite the interaction being very symmetrical. I want to say I also had the more controversial side of the debate, but I was put off by how out of step the mod's behavior was with what I perceive as the norms of this community. Plus I am not a huge fan of reddit and trying to curtail use.
DISCORD QUESTION: There should be a comment for "other", none of the 4 answers really matches my response. Which would be something like "sure I knew it existed, and in theory I would like to participate, but I simply don't use discord for much (other than online board gaming) and so don't bother. "No I don't want to read it" is definitely not right. But I don't have infinite time.
POLITICAL AFFILIATION QUESTION: This REALLY needs an "other". I am some sort of radical centrist.
Left of the Democrats on some things, right of Republicans on others, a big fan of markets except where they don't work, then I think there should be strong government intervention.
I am also pretty down on voting and pro merit-based civil service. I would like to run the government more like a corporation, but less in terms of there being a powerful "CEO", and more in terms of the departments being professionally staffed and lead without much pressure from electorate. IDK none of the political philosophies are a good one size fits all idea. They are like tools and you need different solutions for different problems.
Asking which of those political philosophies I affiliate with is similar to asking if I think hammers screwdrivers or saws are the best tool. What is the task at hand?
I don’t know the context of the question about weight loss and some weight gain back (and I also may be enough of an outlier not to care), but I felt it to be somewhat unfair in not giving an identifier of fat to muscle ratio of the weight gain back.
I had to write down that I had gained a decent amount of the weight back, but also have weight trained 5/6 days per week and done cardio multiple times per week in the four years since, implying that a large amount of the weight gain (obviously not all) back towards that original number is muscle tissue.
This also reminds me that BMI is dumb. I'm 5'10.5"... I got down to almost 170lbs, which is the skinniest I've been since I was a teenager. Not completely shredded, but definitely, obviously lean. So I starting taking mass gainer, have been for many months, now I'm back up to 182... Which is about where it's been for years, but I'm pretty sure it's significantly more muscle and less fat now. I definitely look more muscular than I ever have. But not like bodybuilder huge or anything. Just the body of someone who does a lot of calisthenics. But I never looked fat at 180~185, at worst maybe ever so slightly chubby.
Speaking of bad health/fitness measures... My Apple watch now says my cardio health is below average?!?!?!?! According to my YUR app, I sometimes burn over 1000s calories in a day playing Beat Saber (Fitbeat custom maps...it's like constant squats, and I often do it for a few hours) and other VR fitness games. That's on top of calisthenics and stretching, and occasional strength endurance. It's almost impossible for me to get out of breath now. Googling it, people are saying it only counts stuff if you're outside for some reason, and that could be it... Was doing a 5k jog and HIIT sprinting once a week each, but haven't in a while now that it's winter...so apparently that's why. Seems pretty misleading.
1. I have an inner voice in the sense that I often clearly visualize words in my head and play them out, have a monolog about my planned actions or whatever. I'm like very much the opposite of the verbal equivalent of aphantasic. Most of my thoughts are in words. But I have no sense of dialog or of the "inner voice" being a separate individual from "me." Wasn't sure if the question about "inner voice" implied separation from "me." I initially confidently answered yes, I have an inner voice, but the follow up questions implied to me that maybe I meant something different by that.
2. The question about childhood trauma should probably have an option for "I experienced none of these; I am not skipping this question," and possibly one for, "I want to be clear that I am neither confirming nor denying that I have had some childhood trauma, so you don't take my skipping this question to mean that I do have childhood trauma and don't want to talk about it."
3. I find masks so uncomfortable that I will skip LONG events that I otherwise want to do if I have to be masked, but they aren't too bad for stuff under like 30 minutes.
I would like a future question about misanthropy, since I was just annoyed yet again by someone who assumes that superior aliens would hate the human race. The question about whether you think people are trustworthy comes close, but that frames it as personal.
What I'm curious about is the people who apparently think they cab accurately estimate the views of morally/scientifically superior entities, and those views are going to be strongly negative. I suppose the same question applies to anyone who thinks God basically doesn't like people.
Maybe this correlates with depression? Narcissism? Strict religious upbringing, and maybe the upbringing for parents and grandparents matters too?
I put "3" for the ASMR question. I'm not sure what I experience is ASMR but I have misophonia and hate, with an extra burning passion, the things that give other people ASMR. So am I getting ASMR and I just hate it? Or do I just hate those types of sounds?
Miscellaneous notes on questions that I didn't feel captured my response well:
- Several questions were framed as "Relative to other people, how good/bad are you at something?" Hard to be sure sometimes without a good intuition for where other people are on average.
- No way specify "I don't have any close friends." (Or "Mostly some other gender," I suppose.)
- On the plane-flying question, there might be a difference between "I don't fly as much because I personally feel less safe flying" versus "I don't fly as much even though I want to, because my employer/family/government/lizard people told me not to." The wording of the question kind of seems to assume the former.
- The "What undermined your trust" question had three different options about COVID coverage. That makes it hard to convey "The flip-floppiness and political expedience of COVID coverage in general."
- Does using a calculator on the "distance" question count as using an outside reference? (I didn't, but it might have helped a little.)
I know this is a losing battle, but I'm once again impelled to point out that "Hispanic" is an ethnicity, not a race. My Hispanic father's ancestry is almost 100% Iberian (i.e. white European).
As a retired person, I found the Profession question a bit hard to answer. "In what area do you _currently_ work or study?" I worked 40+ years in one of these fields, and am happily NOT doing that any more... It was also interesting to notice the absence of "homemaker", or for that matter anything pink collar. I can't even select "other" to reflect my new status as "idle rich" ;-)
Is it not possible next time to make a choice of several options in the issue of employment? I am a graduate student and part-timer (at the same research institute where I study), and I am missing one option. In a EA survey I took recently, this possibility was.
On the question about your SAT score, your coastal bias is showing. The ACT score is much more common in the Midwest USA than the SAT score. There are a large number of people from midwestern america who have never taken the SAT.
Can you add an option for "I have never taken the SAT".
Same question for the scientific IQ test, I didnt quite know what to do since I have never taken a real IQ test.
Reddit/Discord had no answers that worked for me: I do know of them and am interested, but that haven't so far bubbled up to action. May well do so in the future. AI x-risk was weird for me: I gave 1% and think the probability of extinction by 2100 is low, but am extremely concerned about other massive consequences and spend a lot of my time on AF etc. You might think about more Qs on this topic. I mostly trust MSM but simultaneously think there's been serious deterioration. I answered the 'what has shaken your trust' Q despite its being scoped to people who answered the 'do you trust' question differently.
A few of the questions seem to be ambiguous or otherwise sub-optimal.
1) The meetup question includes not attending since not interested and not attending but planning on attending.
A useful additional option would be "not attended but interested in attending.
This would include anyone who is neither committed to not attending nor committed to attending.
2) The political spectrum doesn't accommodate libertarians, like a 4 quadrant political compass would.
3) The human biodiversity question is phrased oddly. It asks whether one has a "favorable opinion on an idea." This is ambiguous and could mean to ask how likely the idea is to be true, or how valuable or "good" the idea is.
4) The mental health question gives two options for yourself - diagnosed with a condition, and think you might have a condition. But it lacks the second option for family members.
If one suspects that a family member has / had a condition without knowing whether they were formally diagnosed, there is no option for it.
5) The mood and anxiety question ask about usual mood rated 1-10, which is fine, but it may have made sense, especially for the anxiety question to ask how often someone feels anxious, as it is not clear whether one should average their moods, or state the modal mood.
Assuming the latter, then the question as is, does not distinguish between someone who experiences anxiety / bad mood 49% of the time and 0% of the time, as long as the rest of the time, they feel fine.
6) The NIMBY / YIMBY questions includes two distinct axes of definition. A) Is the main priority protecting exiting homeowners or making enough housing. B) Thinking that new housing will have various negative effects vs. various positive effects.
One can think that the main priority is protecting existing homeowners, and still think that e.g. new housing will bring down prices (NIMBY on A, YIMBY on B). In fact, in the interest of protecting existing homeowners, one may oppose new housing precisely because it will bring down housing prices.
One could also conceivable effectively be YIMBY on A and NIMBY on B, if they think that owners should have the right to build more housing on their property (strong property rights) while thinking that the results (traffic, etc.) would be negative.
It might be simpler to just ask whether more housing should be generally permitted or restricted.
7) The ASMR question doesn't distinguish between those who have encountered stimuli that are supposed to cause the feeling, but failed to feel it, and those who have not encountered the stimuli in the first place.
8) As others have pointed out, the savings question is ambiguous in whether it is asking for total cumulative savings or annual savings. I.e. if someone earned 100k each year for 10 years, and saved 10k for each of those years, do they answer 10% or 100%.
9) For the geography question, you may want to clarify whether people are allowed to look up the conversion rate for km and mi.
10) The question about flying and COVID conflates the past and the present. The title asks whether behavior changed (i.e. at any time in the past) but the answer options refer exclusively to the present.
11) The question about reguessing the answer to geography question is ambiguous in that it does not define the objective. If the objective is to get very close to the true answer, without no difference between moderately off and very off, then one would never repeat the same answer.
If the goal is to minimize the error, where a very wrong answer is much worse than a moderately wrong answer, then one would probably choose the exact same answer.
12) I realize it isn't your wording, but for the question about hearing voices, I wonder what someone with hypnagogic hallucinations is supposed to answer.
13) Some questions use 1-5 rating and some 1-10. It seems hard to think of an advantage of the former except for consistency with prior studies which potentially used the same scale.
14) For the price of Bitcoin, you give the example entry of '20,000' but it appears that the actual entry cannot include a comma. That is, it should be '20000'
I notice the survey asked a lot of questions about psychosis but then (iirc) didn't actually ask whether I'd suffered from psychosis? This seems too bad; I would have liked to provide this info.
Also, every year I wish the mental illness questions had an answer for "I used to have this but don't anymore".
Mental health: there’s no “I had a formal diagnosis, but I consider I don’t have it now, and nor does any medical professional” option. Are you trying to find current rates, or tendencies? What do you want me to pick? And does this suggest that you don’t think these disorders can ever be ‘cured’?
(I realise that you have a grab bag of things in that section, and some of them generally *aren’t* expected to change, but some of them are!)
> Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID?
Options: No change; Yes, COVID made me fly less.
COVID switched me to fully-remote work. I can fly somewhere and work remotely for a few weeks. I've probably flown 2-3x this year as in any year previously.
So...the answer to the *question* is yes, but the "yes" option is explicitly the opposite of my yes. How seriously should I take the "explanation" part of the answer?
For questions that clearly want a number, but I don't have the recollection/exact knowledge to give one, is it better to leave it blank or put in some explanatory text?
For example, the "largest LSD dose" question, my answer would be "I don't remember the number but it was a medium-low dose." Would it be more helpful if I put that in the box or leave it blank?
EDIT: Never mind, I see the form will only accept a number.
Took the whole survey, then signed into Gmail for the number of emails question, then upon hitting "submit" instead of a submission confirmation, it appeared to reload the first page of the docs form with the address I signed into (not the one I put for the survey) treating the page as if my intent were to re-fill the form but signed in to Google.
This may have just been a waste of 20 minutes of my life because Google can't help itself when it comes to pretending that I want to be part of its ecosystem.
For "What person does your inner voice talk in?" I put down not really either since there wasn't a good option. But for reference it's almost always in terms of 'we'. E.g. 'we should do ...' or 'we could do ...' etc.
"Did you work remotely during the pandemic?" I was temporarily mostly-unemployed during the pandemic specifically because of the pandemic, which there didn't seem to be an option for (there was something like "I don't work", but that seems to imply that you didn't work before the pandemic either).
"You thought your country's COVID response was:" I really appreciate your explicitly distinguishing between the strictness of a response and the competence of a response, though I was still a bit unsure how to answer this. I was basically satisfied with the *degree* of restrictiveness in the COVID response of my country (the US) but I think the restrictions should have started significantly *earlier* so I answered that I thought our response was moderately too lax.
I would have preferred the two Paris-to-Moscow questions being adjacent. After answering the first one and seeing that the question after it was not a related follow-up question, I Googled the correct answer to see how far off I was, so then I couldn't really give an unbiased answer to the second question, so I just skipped it.
The distance estimation question should ask half the Americans to answer in miles and half in km to see just how bad we are at casual use of metric. I got reasonably close but didn’t mentally convert miles to km as well as I should have.
I wonder if the ethnic group checkboxes were chosen using what we have from previous population genomics studies.
It feels odd to have Pakistani be an ethnic cluster, when it constitutes 5+ distinct ethnic groups. Namely : Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Baloch, Kashmiri? & post-partition Indians. The Indian ethnic group choices are pretty weird. Tamil shows up despite being a fairly small group, but there are no options for other Indians. Bengali makes some sense, since it covers 1 Indian state + 1 country.
I added a generic "northwestern Indian" (Since west Indian would have been confusing). But, having a few other options there would've been nice.
Missing an option "No, although I probably should". The existing options assume that whoever has a problem with vision is doing something about it.
> ... as a child?
Please add "I don't remember" option.
> Inner voice
Please explain a bit what you mean? Like, voluntary talking to myself, or involuntary? Considering the latter "what is your inner voice's attitude" question I assume it means involuntary.
> Prediction question
The provided examples are anchoring, at least in my case very strongly because I do not have a strong opinion.
Maybe include also a question about how confident I am about the predictions. My confidence is low, but hey, I can still make a guess if you want me to, but without stating the low confidence I feel a little like an idiot.
Hi! I answered 3 a lot to the likerts, meaning "dunno" or "no opinion", and this might conflate with ambivalence/neutrality. If this is an issue, maybe consider adding a sixth option for us people who don't simply know about the topic to have an idea.
Your 'Race' section is non-ideal. Hispanic yes/no should be a separate ethnicity question and mixed race people would appreciate multiple check boxes over single boxes.
Could you please change the question about circumcision? As currently written has an 'option for women' and that was just an awful dysphoria twinge as a MTF transperson.
For the question: What person does your inner voice talk in?
I don't think it likely deserves its own option, but my primary mode is 'we' (and no, I don't do tulpas or any of that weirdness). Just curious if anyone else had been doing that from a young age.
Where do you think you fall on a classic political spectrum?" What do you mean Left/Right? Are you asking about social or economic views? What about being split on social and economic views? There's no way to select this answer.
I was interested in participating until I saw "What sex were you assigned at birth?" and "With what gender do you primarily identify?" The second is perhaps understandable from an anthropological perspective, to see which if your readers have taken up the gender religion, as long as there is a true nullo option to signify that the survey-taker does not share the religious belief in gender identity that the other options imply. But to have these two questions as a standard for everyone, in the form they now exist, is nonsense -- the equivalent of mandatorily asking which church your readers belonged to as children, and then asking if they identify as Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist (converted from Presbyterian), Mormon (converted from Mennonite), or Other (Christian).
There are an enormous number of people taking the survey to whom these questions do not actually apply, and for whom "Other" gives the false impression of fellow-travelling in the genderist religion.
To state it plainly, nobody was "assigned" a sex at birth -- there are a very small number of males with very specific DSDs who until recently (one hopes) would have their penises and testes removed as infants and who were mostly-unsuccessfully socialised as females; even in these cases, the unsuccessful socialisation is good evidence that the operation and socialisation were not "assignments" so much as medical and social experimentation that mostly didn't pan out. Except for these rare instances, sex at birth was observed, not assigned. Therefore the first question gives you no actual information; perhaps "Other" here could be dominated by people who understand this reality, but I somehow doubt it.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "gender identity", except as a self-referential concept -- like chakras, or Calvinism, or Communism. It only exists insofar as someone can be conned or blackmailed into saying it exists and behaving as though it does. Therefore the second question only informs you which of your readers explicitly claim to be transgender -- here, "Other" will almost certainly be dominated by people who claim to believe in gender identity and who claim to identify as some gender other than exclusively male or female.
I strongly suggest you modify the answers to these questions to include those who do not believe in the genderist religion (like your questions about more conventional religions do not assume Christianity) if you want to get a fuller picture of how your readers actually feel about the subject.
Income box wouldn't let me put my income, said it had to be a number greater than 0 even though it was.
Does a half-brother count as "at least one brother"? I think one can argue that it doesn't. Also are you assuming close contact with those siblings? I saw my half-brothers about once a decade.
The question about main gender of friends has no "I have no friends" option.
The "how long have you read the blog" question is complicated by reading off and on; I was here for Slate Star Codex and then only recently returned, so that could be both Since Slate Star and Past Six Months.
Good survey overall, but I think the question about remote work completely erased me and that there's also many other working-class people it will similarly fail to detect.
No, my job (jobs, actually - I have more than one) didn't go remote. No, I didn't keep working at my normal job site(s). *I got furloughed.* I spent months unemployed.
The options offered amount to "nothing changed" or "yes, I kept working but differently." These are not the only thing that happened to people.
"Atheist but spiritual" can mean far too many things unless you define "spiritual". If you just let people use their own definition, you have no idea what they mean, but most likely they mean something like these people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRujuE-GIY4
I suspect that "atheist and not spiritual", as wrong as it feels to me, is probably the most appropriate answer for me in this context.
Some of the questions would benefit from "None of the above" as an option, e.g. Political Affiliation. I just left those questions blank, which I suppose amounts to the same thing.
Some questions are difficult to answer because they ask for a one-dimensional good/bad or more/less opinion about a word that has more than one meaning or that might vary in more than one way. E.g. what kind of feminism are you talking about? If it's left unspecified, then again, the answer could mean anything.
My inner voice uses "we" or "let's", as in, "let's try this another way". There wasn't an "other" option on the survey so I couldn't really answer that.
OK I searched for some discussion of the 'moral view' question. First off I had to go look all the terms up. And I'm still confused about some (natural law and contractualism..) If someone wanted to give a two sentence definition of each that would be great. I think my moral view might be closest to virtue ethics. But I'm not sure. Why isn't there some box(es) for morals that follow a religion. (Or is that contractual?) I would describe my moral view, as living life as if there was a (Christian) God, even though I'm not sure there is one. Is there a box for that?
Scott, I'm really interested in the question you ask about inner voices and what grammatical person one speaks to oneself with. I'd love to know the intent behind that question -- will you share it with us at some point?
There seems some confusion among respondents here about whether you meant essentially any form of self talk in asking about that or were intending only to ask about people who experience an inner voice that is perceived to be "not themselves."
It's the first time I've ever been asked that question or heard anyone ask that question -- about whether the internal narrator speaks in "I" or "you" or some people say they hear "we" (which I do as well).
I'm curious if people who hear "you" more to themselves have more overbearing inner critics and does that correlate to depression or anxiety. It raises a new possibly fruitful way to work with that inner voice if that's the case. I'm pretty sure for me my "I" voice is the one that experiences things, my "you" voice is generally the critic, and there's a "we" voice that's more parental and kind. I'd never noticed this before, so thank you for that!
My inner monologue often talks in the first person plural: “let’s do this” “now we have to park inside” etc… I selected mixed first and second person singular for lack of a more accurate option. Note that there is no sense of being more than one person, multiple personalities, headmates or anything of the sort. It’s just the way it comes up.
On "Do you have migraines?" it's not clear whether it's intended to include retinal or ocular migraines, or only migraine headaches. I guessed only headaches, so put "no" even though I get retinal ones, but it would be good to clarify on the question.
With the urban/suburban preference and actuality--the first question asks which you prefer urban or suburban. I put urban over suburban. The second question lumps rural with suburban. I live VERY rurally, like 4 miles up a dirt road surrounded by national forest an hour from the closest grocery store, which I prefer over urban. But the wording makes it look like I'm living the opposite of my preference.
I assume, perhaps wrongly, that some of questions are slated for the most likely reader--urban, white collar/computer workers. I wonder if it would change the results at all to give more options to the people who don't fit those categories. Here I'm thinking of the above questions of urban/rural as well as the job question. I don't fit in any of those categories, so I just picked one that is only marginally accurate but that keeps me out of "blue collar"
Possibly interesting note: My inner voice used to be extremely negative (and when it was that way it was always in 3rd person). Having worked on it significantly, it's now overwhelmingly neutral /positive and almost always in first person.
My parents didn't divorce, but one of them died when I was little. Couldn't find an option for that sort of separation so I selected "It's complicated" even though it isn't really.
For the "hearing voices" question I assumed you didn't want to know about the hallucinations I had one time after taking Imovane. Given you ask about LSD in the same survey, you may want to crosstab those results - some people may report auditory hallucinations during a trip, especially given "at any time" in the question.
1) Re: "What religion do you believe?" This seems carefully worded to exclude "cultural X", which I'm pretty sure you considered, but I'm asking anyway. What should an atheist who engages in religious observance put for this? (Not just marking holidays, but actually holding to stuff like kashrus and Shabbos.) I put "Other" and wrote the details, I hope that's what you were going for.
2) Re: Paris to Moscow, are you also intending for your embarrassingly American readers to guess at the miles-km conversion, or is looking that up in the spirit of the question? I hope it is, because I did. (Also I'm pretty pleased with my guess, though I adjusted in the wrong direction at the end.)
There's an ethnic group missing - Romanian. Not at all the same thing as Roma (aka gypsies). I'm mentioning this because, since you seem to have added most European nationalities, it seems likely that you've conflated the two, like everybody else :)
I tried to take this survey but when I click next it takes me back to income and says must be greater than o when I did put an income in, then I lose the whole thing. Three times is enough!
> How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways? Very unfavorable - Very favorable
This is very ambiguous question. It could mean any of:
* Do I believe it's true?
* Conditional on it being true, am I glad that it's true?
* Regardless of whether it's true, am I glad that the theory exists?
These all seem like reasonable interpretations, and I'm not sure which one you meant. Which interpretation people pick could easily mean the difference between a 1 and a 5.
The race question isn't great. Main thing for me is that Hispanic (you mean Latino, by the way, Hispanic excludes Brazil and includes Spain) is orthogonal to race. I'm white, and Hispanic. If I choose Hispanic, it makes it sound like I'm not white, and if I choose white, it's explicitly saying I'm not Hispanic. This is why the Census has a separate question for race and latinidad. For next year, I guess.
I'm not sure if "do you watch a lot of old movies" means as a portion of movies I watch or relative to other people. I watched 6 movies this year and 2 of them were before 1960. So it's not a lot, but it is 1/3 of what I watched.
Clarification on the "ethnic groups" question: is it about identification or genetics? It's quite possible to strongly identify with a country and culture while knowing that your great-grandparents were immigrants to it.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR link is not active. I highlighted and clicked to search. This threw me out of the survey. Unwilling to redo whole deal.
I felt a lot like trying to hammer the square peg down the round hole on some of these questions. In particular the one about inner voices. It's something I can use as a tool sometimes, almost like a second person in the room, to create a back-and-forth dialogue which helps me discuss problems with myself and come up with good answers. I know I'm doing this, I can choose not to do the voice thing if I don't want to. But all the responses felt like uncontrollable, judging voices. Some questions were similar in being sort of off. I tried to answer as accurately as I felt applied to me, but at some level I'm worried I'm throwing off the dataset by picking choices that don't make much sense.
Re 'Do you identify as an effective altruist?'. I think there was a point that it is wrong to call EA people effective altruists (rather than e.g. aspiring effective altruists) because you can e.g. subscribe to the ideology, but not donate any money yet, or be an altruist and be effective in that without having heard of the movement (so limiting the phrase 'effective altruist' only to the movement is pretentious). So I would say that I sorta identify as an effective altruist, while I would say that I strongly identify with EA movement if the question was asked that way.
Re: 'How much do you trust the mainstream media?' I think it should specify that this question is oriented towards Americans. For me, the mainstream media would be Russian propaganda which I obviously don't trust, but I am not sure this is relevant. I am leaving this and related questions unanswered.
After getting all the way to the health part, I clicked the link to calculate my BMI, then I hit “done” (upper left) to go back to the survey. It was gone!
One thing I wanted to mention in regard to the "inner voice": I grew up speaking both English and French in the US. My French is good but not native (level B2 on the CEFR language proficiency scale). I find that my inner voice in English is sporadic and fragmented, rarely speaking in full sentences. My inner voice when I think in French is in full sentences and is much clearer and consciously noticeable. Would be interested to hear if any other multilingual readers have similar experiences between thinking in different languages!
I also felt cornered by the question s related to subreddit and Discord. I don’t read them but it’s not because I don’t want to those two things are inextricably linked in the available answer.
My most recent weight loss attempt was utterly trivial in comparison to the first one years ago, I assume there’s some reason the most recent is important to you but if your assumption is that people never lose much weight and so any of these attempts is roughly as meaningful as any other, then you’d be wrong. My first one was life changing and substantial (over 33% of my weight) and has mostly sustained.
Those of us who went from disgustingly obese to okay-ish at some point in life have an interesting relationship with diets. It’s sort of a constant struggle of “what is the circuit breaker point”, where you hit a number that induced panic again and you fix it, because being obese was so awful.
I just completed your survey, and I have some (potentially nitpicky and annoying) comments and suggestions for you!
1. questions of the format "how often in the last month have you XYZ (burped, had acid reflux, had sexual intercourse)" are pretty much unanswerable, because I just don't use my brain to remember such things. I don't care enough to keep track of all the times I've burped or whatever *and* to map these times onto a calendar unit such as a month. I answer these questions by pulling a number out of my rear end and hoping for the best. The only way you'll get an accurate answer to such questions is if there's a significant life event, e.g., "Let's see, I started dating this guy 3 weeks ago and we had sex for the first time last night, and that was my only time having sex this past month, so that's my answer."
2. Ditto questions of the format "Are you better/worse than the average person at spatial orientation/having an orgasm/whatever." You'll either get the respondent to shrug and say "I have no idea, I'll pick the middle of the range" (that's what I did) or you'll run headlong into the Dunning-Krueger effect, with people who suck at spatial orientation going "Why yes, I'm an absolute whiz at finding my way around!" Sometimes it's obvious that you're better/worse than most at a given skill (you struggle with something that seems to come easily to all your friends, or conversely, your friends keep complimenting you on your skill), but that's a rare outlier.
3. Questions like "how satisfied are you with your life?" are fiendishly difficult to answer, because I have to define and calibrate what "satisfied" means. For example, I have a truly wonderful life (an amazing, loving husband, an adorable child, high-paying and prestigious career, financial security, mostly good health), but at the same time I often feel guilty about not making more of the opportunities that I've been given, and I feel scared of failing at my job and not living up to all my responsibilities. So what does this average out to? I ended up picking a mid-high number, but it felt very arbitrary.
I offer these comments in the spirit of helpfulness. I enjoyed taking the survey, and now I know how far it is from Moscow to Paris. Happy New Year to you!
The hardest question was gauging how much the average person likes bread. I assumed the answer was "will eat it if it's on a table, it's sometimes good, but I don't really care about it."
Is the question regarding multiple personalities/tulpas specifically asking about "multiple personalities AND hallucinatory voices", or asking about multiple personalities in and of themselves? The "voice in your head" framing is confusing me since hallucinatory voices aren't generally observed in DID.
(Don't have DID, but have/had two distinct personalities.)
ETA: Also, what counts as a seizure? Is loss of motor control ("locked-in") a seizure?
I want to note that the question about childhood social class seemed impossible to answer for me. My dad was a professor, so I couldn't really choose 'working class/poor', but it was the nineties in the post-Soviet Eastern Europe so we were somewhat less wealthy than the barmen or security guards or the like. I finally chose "middle class", though it seems like not quite right.
The proviso on the weight loss questions ("have you ever lost 10% of your weight [...] without it being for medical reasons like a chronic disease") seems to be ambiguous between "my weight was associated with a chronic disease, so I decided to lose weight" and "my chronic disease is associated with weight loss, which helped me realize my weight loss intentions", and it's hard to tell if this is intentional or which is intended. The former reading seems to be the more likely reading from the context of the rest of the question, but the latter reading describes the group that is more reasonably removed from this kind of question.
(My case is the former and I didn't answer these questions.)
Currently in the middle of a >half-year sick leave, but since there were no choices perfectly applicable for this kind of a situation, answered the work-related questions as if I was currently working.
Also, at least some of the remote work questions seemed to assume that I would either be forced to go to my workplace XOR be remote working. I go to the office some of the time because I want to, not because I'm required to do so.
And a question: I answered that I'm not interested in buying a subscription, am I still entered for the one-year raffle? The "would buy if it was cheaper" felt wrong as I avoid all subscription payment services even if they seem cheap, having seen monthly service payments sneakily stack up on some people.
I've been in a recent discussion (guess with who) about the amount of violence people generally experience. I suppose it's middleclass or higher people in developed countries. I estimate it as pretty low, the other person estimates it as pretty high, I think.
I'm thinking about possible survey questions on the subject. For example, "Have you ever moved house to get away from (non-government?) violence? Other possible questions?
Risks from government violence are important, but I'd like to get at what's missing from public knowledge.
Maybe there should be a discussion (on the survey?) about how important organized crime is in world history.
Re: Dose of LSD in micrograms -- Maybe my experience is atypical, but I never heard any claims about how many micrograms of LSD were on tabs offered for sale. The survey required a number (or no answer), so I gave a number (one).
You don't include Anarchist in your political options, and you should. A person who identifies as an anarchist or libertarian socialist will have significant differences with the other options.
I have a PhD, but I am taking classes currently and will probably end up with another degree. Is my formal education complete or not? I guessed that it is complete, but can be embellished after completion. I am puzzled about exactly what the question seeks to reveal, and why this would be interesting . What counts as complete? What counts as formal? Many persons who get a bachelors think thei education is complete,but some don’t count it as complete until they have a PhD, or some are satisfied with high school. I realize I am overthinking it, because I am an academia addict, but I can’t even predict what other people would think counts as complete.
Left/right spectrum… I never thought this abstract one dimensional measure had a definite meaning, as it is at beast a projection from a multidimensional space. Events over the past few years have made its meaninglessness even more apparent. I have extreme views that might make me average out as centrist, depending on how the projection is performed. So I don’t think my answer is informative.
Maybe I've missed it, but where were the previous survey results published, or weren't they? It was a collection of 10-20 surveys if I remember correctly, and respondents were supposed to come up with a unique identifier to use.
"Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID?"
I wonder if this answer should have three options: more, less, or no, as opposed to just two. I can maybe think of a contrived example for the "more" option - more companies have started to offer remote work, but will fly employees to HQ or offsites, etc.
I wish you had separated the immigration question into legal and illegal. Big proponent of the former and of the many reforms needed. Proponent of actual enforcement of the latter.
Note for the "mental voice" question, my mental voice mostly uses "us" / "we", and that wasn't quite an option. I answered "I" since it's still first person but it's not quite accurate.
for the working remotely question, i worked in person and then during the lockdowns i was furloughed so stopped going into work but still got paid as part of a government program, rather than working from home or continuing to go into the office. I did go back to the office at certain points during the pandemic so i put continued to go into the office but i think maybe something like 'i stopped working during the pandemic' should be an option?
I wasn’t assigned a sex at birth. I’m a mammal. Mammals are born male or female unless there’s a birth defect involving the in utero formation/development of the genitalia. Want to ask what my gender might be? Fine.
Of course, I flubbed the BMI question. Got distracted converting my weight into pounds even though there is a metric tab (sigh). Enjoy the 200 BMI (I'm 28.4 in reality).
"8. Will a nuclear weapon be detonated (including tests and accidents)?"
I interpret this to mean anywhere in the world, not just in relation to Ukraine. Perhaps that should be specified after numerous priming questions about Ukraine.
FYI, some of your money questions are going to show distorted data for folks who work in finance, because of asking them about "right now" at the end of the year, and because of your inconsistent use of "salary" vs "income". Finance types tend to have normal-to-low "salaries" but very large "bonuses" that arrive at the end of the year.
Wow, what a great set of questions this year! I especially appreciated the Qs about "how much/what kind of inner voice?" and "what is your estimate of the probability of AI-driven extinction?" I have spent a lot of time wondering what others think about those and am rapt to see where the results end up.
This is my yearly reminder to you that the "Country" question is really poorly formulated. You should split it between "country/ies you grew up in", "current country of residence", and "country/ies of cultural background/affinity", and allow multiple answers on each.
As a benefit, it would help you get more clarity into the questions of "race", which currently uses the god-awful American system of racial divisions, allowing you to get more clarity on whether "racial" things you're investigating are cultural vs. biological.
IMO conflating these things is almost as egregious as conflating "sex assigned at birth" with "gender identity".
My pet peeve in all of this was that the "ethnicity" question insists that any American whose ancestors lived in Europe, must have an ethnicity based on which *specific* country their ancestors lived in a hundred and fifty years ago (or whenever).
I happen to know which countries (plural) my ancestors lived in 150 years ago, but only in the sense that I know what my astrological sign is - that datum was "in the water" at the time I was growing up, to the extent that it was impossible to not know it. But neither one is at all significant to my identity, my sense of self, or my interaction with society.
If I were a culture warrior, I might suspect a deliberate attempt to play divide-and-conquer against the largest ethnic group in the contemporary United States, as we enter an age of increasingly strident identity politics.
For the survey question about LSD dosage I feel like there should’ve been an option for I don’t know the dosage. Back when I took it Street drugs were all of highly uncertain potency.
I'm finding the orgasm question surprisingly difficult. I'm a gay man with plenty of experience, but... I guess I've never really compared myself to my partners along that particular axis?
Also, surprised to learn that there are people who talk about this sort of thing with their friends. Although in retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised -- human behavior is always more diverse than I expect, I should update...
Re "Work Status": I have a research position in a (quasi-non-)government research institute where I am allowed (but not required) to teach classes at the university it shares a building with, but I'm not currently teaching any. I still picked "Academics (on the teaching side)" -- should I have picked "Government work" instead?
Re "Subreddit": do you mean "Do you regularly read" or "Do you ever read"? (I answered assuming the former.)
Re "Meetup": it depends on what you mean by "want to" and "make it to any" -- I might attend one if it was within walking distance of me and at a time when I had nothing else to do. Still picked "I don't want to" because it'd feel dishonest to answer "can't make it to any" when there is one a one-hour train ride away.
Re "Immigration": do you mean de jure or de facto? Someone might think more people should be legally allowed to immigrate but we should spend more effort on keeping everybody else out, or conversely that it should be technically illegal for most people to immigrate so we can kick them out if need be without having to bother with due process but so long as they behave themselves we should generally turn a blind eye to them. (I can't remember anyone stating the latter position on immigration specifically, but I can on e.g. recreational drugs.) I picked the average of my replies to the de facto and de jure questions.
Re COVID: I assumed you mean "smell-/taste-related symptoms any more serious than due to the clogged nose" and "fatigue problems any more serious than due to the fever and poor sleep". Or did you mean any noticeable such symptoms at all?
Re "Have you gotten any doses of a COVID vaccine?": you mean by now, not by the time I got COVID, right? Was that deliberate? I'd assume the latter to anti-correlate with whether people get long COVID a lot more than the former (though I *have* heard about a few people where a vaccine seemed to heal their long COVID symptoms).
Re "your country's COVID response": ¿por qué no los dos? I don't think my country (or almost any other country) was even on the Pareto frontier of permissiveness and effectiveness, so it could have been both more permissive and more effective...
Re "mask mandate on flights": Do you mean during taxiing and takeoff or throughout the flight except for meals? (I picked the average of the two answers.) At cruise altitudes hospital-grade HEPA filters are active but I've heard of flights with delayed takeoff ending up being flu superspreader events before the filters were turned on.
Re "Do you work remotely now": a confounding factor is that until one year ago I lived a one-hour train ride away from my office (1 h 30 min door-to-door including walking from my place to the station and from the station to the office) and now I like within a 20-minute bike ride of my office. You might want to discard people who answered 3 or less to the "How long, in years, have you lived in your current neighborhood?" question when analyzing answers to questions like this.
Re "Where do you live now": you might want to give examples for each point of the scale. I live in downtown Turin, which is probably more dense than anywhere in the US ex. NY and NJ, but I still picked 2 rather than 1 because it's no Manila or Dhaka or Shanghai or even Milan or Naples, but I'm not quite sure this is what you have in mind.
Re "how hard is it for you to orgasm", do you mean "other people of your same sex *and age*"?
Re "psychotherapy", what about if I tried it but as a young child and don't quite know how well it worked anymore? (I skipped the question.)
Re "Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID": what if it *had* changed but is now back to late-2019 levels? (I picked "No".)
Re "Your close friends", do you mean right now or ever? (I assumed the latter because I don't have that many of the former)
Re "flashing or changing elements" -- they annoy me but not because they are distracting, just because they're gaudy (static unchanging e.g. Comic Sans annoys me just the same way). Does that still count?
Re "(off by a non-trivial amount)": what's a non-trivial amount? In this context I'd consider 30% "trivial" (unless I was talking to someone who has personally traveled from Paris to Moscow and/or back before), but I'm not sure you would...
I find it kind of funny that "philosophy" is a profession option, but literally the entire goddamned service sector (travel, restaurants, retail, etc) is relegated to "other - white collar" and "other - blue collar".
Re 'What is your highest degree earned?' the structure of the answers implies both MD and JD are higher than PhD or Masters, and that JD is higher than MD - but maybe you just put JD/MD at the end because they are professional degrees. I would rank them Masters < JD < MD < PhD.
Re: "What is your approximate annual income..." - is this meant to be gross income or net income? I think it should be explicitly stated.
On the mental illness question, after mindlessly checking the bottom box for almost all of them, I initially did the same for "Suicide", only to notice afterward that, oops, the bottom box means something very different there! I don't know if there's any good way to edit this now, but in the future I would suggest making it more obvious that those aren't parallel so that people don't make the same mistake.
When you ask for my country, do you mean country of residence or country where I was born and raised?
Re: "At the end of an average year, what percent of your income will you have saved?"
To clarify: This is how many percent of your income you have saved (verb)? It could also be interpreted as how many percent of your income you have saved (adjective); compare "I have not saved a lot this year, but I have a lot saved".
Re: Prediction question: What do you think one Bitcoin will be worth, in dollars, in 2030?
Please give your answer as a number, eg 20,000. If you believe it will be worthless, answer 0.
Question rejects 0 as an answer ("Must be greater than...")
About the depression question:
One of the options is "I think I might have this condition, although I have never been formally diagnosed", and another option is "I have family members (within two generations) with this condition".
Shouldn't there be an option for when you strongly suspect that a family member has depression, but you are not aware of any formal diagnosis?
I selected "3" on the YIMBY/NIMBY question because there wasn't a "I reject this dichotomy" answer.
Re: "Do you usually wear a face mask when going out to stores or restaurants?"
I think this question will depend on a lot on the current status of COVID waves in the answerer's geographical area. Personally I wear masks only when there's a recent surge, when there's a mandate, or when I'm sick. I think the question should be split or phrased in a way that informs you of the personality/habits of the answerer, rather than the current crisis level.
The two adjacent questions about ACX meetups and SSC meetups really mean the same thing, SSC/ACX meetups depending on the time they have happened?
Wasn't there a unique ID you were supposed to remember from previous years survey so you could compare them? Did you drop that idea or maybe forget about it?
Question about why you distrust the media says has "Option for people who put 1, 2, or 3 in questions above"; this is clearly intended to say "3, 4, or 5".
I've been reading since SSC but still consider myself a n00b. Has there been that much growth between the transition from SSC to ACX?
Bitcoin value question. You say if you think it'll be worthless enter 0, but 0 is disallowed (has to be greater than)
I'm missing "Retired" under Work Status. Should I choose "Homemaker" instead, or "Independently wealthy"? I don't really feel *wealthy*, I just have a pension and some savings....
Suppose one took the SAT during the brief period where there were three sections (Math, Reading, and Writing) and it was scored up to 2400. What should they give as their Verbal/Reading score? Reading, Writing, or (Reading + Writing) / 2?
My second guess for the Moscow distance question was almost exactly my number of unread emails (off by 4), but I swear this wasn't anchoring (I actually answered them in reverse order, I was too lazy to look up my inbox number until I went back).
Why no option for (East) Indian / South Asian in the ethnic group question? There's options for Bengali and Tamil but most Indians are not covered in these groups.
The question about Meetups doesn't include an option that you want to go a meetup but haven't yet. The no options are:
No, I don't want to
No, I don't know of any, or can't make it to any
Abortion question: this is a legality question, right? I.e. it's enough for highly pro-choice that abortion services are as accessible as any other medical services and this fact is well-known and not hidden, and even informal stigmatisation is considered bad. Propaganda and state support for child-rearing do not count against this.
I wonder if on policy questions like immigration it would be useful next time to ask «the axes of current thresholds are somewhat reasonably chosen/oriented, independently of thresholds themselves being too high or too low»
Did you abandon the idea of the ACX survey ID that you had us all generate last time?
EDIT: ninjaed.
This survey was a lot of fun! There are two things that might make sense to change.
1. It seems to me like the race category should allow people to write in a custom option. In particular, the "other" category in the race question mixes multi-racial people with unlisted races (like Native American, African, Pacific Islander) and I think those should be separate categories. A "check all that apply" box could be used too.
2. I opened a new to the BMI calculator when answering the BMI question and that tab stayed open by the time I reached "how many tabs do you have open" question even though I had no intention of returning to the BMI tab later. I think the open tabs data should take place early in the survey, to avoid contamination by the survey itself.
I had to skip a lot of questions, or give non-committal answers, because they didn't make sense. The most salient one was about giving my political views on a spectrum from left to right. Like many people I don't accept or identify with 'left' or 'right' politically. The term 'right' as used in politics is effectively libellous because it defines extreme forms of conservatism, or anti-socialism, as fascist.
Minor points:
City versus suburban living was impossible to answer because there is a third alternative, living in the country, which is different from both the other options; and it's probably not a single dimension.
Class background is (obviously, because the questionnaire is mainly for Americans) defined in American terms and doesn't suit my experience as an Englishman, so I had to translate, with some uncertainty. Specifically, US middle class is equivalent to UK lower middle class. For historical reasons the UK middle classes are taken to be well above the median income and social status.
I had to look up all the philosophical terms: consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, contractualism and natural law. That was embarrassing, because I think of myself as having a broad range of general knowledge, but obviously not as broad as I thought.
I take the survey every year, but ran into an issue for the jobs question. "Other white-collar" and "other blue-collar" are the only listed options for people with an unmentioned job, but many positions don't slot well into those frameworks, and there's no option to actually write-in your profession. As it stands, I can't progress any further in the survey (I assume the question is optional, but it's a big enough one I'd *like* to answer it).
I think «income» question would benefit from an extra country field (especially when changing EU contries too much to identify with a single one more than the country of origin…)
Hmm, my estimation that my viral cold was CoViD is based on once-in-a-lifetime smell distortion symptoms, but they went away within a few days, not a full week (while some weak effect — not sure if heart of lungs — lingered for more than a year)…
"What sex were you assigned at birth?".
Come on Scott, that isn't how it works! Your sex is determined at the moment of fertilisation. I really hope that this was just an oversight from a cut and paste job.
Wasn't quite sure how to answer on friend gender - most of my close friends are nonbinary
Decided to go one way or the other on voice in head judgement because it's not a category error, sometimes it is positive and sometimes negative, but no real overall skew, and there wasn't really an option for that
LSD: I had an extremely strong and unpleasant physical reaction at a dose where the mental effects were barely perceptible (mostly improved mood/sort of 'inner glow', right up until all my muscles started contracting/vibrating uncontrollably and I spent the next several hours trying to stay calm and avoid going to the hospital). Very similar to my experience with serotonin syndrome, but without the mental/emotional disturbance.
Inner voice: I had trouble answering these questions. I have inner speech (I can imagine speaking, and I can imagine a dialogue by playing each side of it in turn) but I don't have "an inner voice" in the sense of an entity separate from my conscious self that produces verbal thoughts without conscious effort. The first question seemed to be asking about the first thing, so I picked the middle "I can if I want to" option, but then the second question seemed to be asking about the second thing. I picked the middle "this question seems weird" response but wasn't sure if I should be picking the "I don't have one" option instead.
Can we have next year more variety for the country you identify most with? It was surprisingly hard to choose this year, as somebody who is close to be a dual-citizen.
On the same vane, can we have a way to identify ourselves by the city? Myself and my friends would rather identify as Londoners/NY-ers rather than the country we reside in.
I was off on the moscow distance question by many KM then when I answered again I gave an answer that was off by the same amount in the opposite direction! :(
In the glasses question there is also an option «my vision does not count as good, but I still do not correct it». Including blind people who use screen readers to use your blog, I guess.
Corneal damage (or other non-refractionary issues) is also not too likely to be corrected by glasses.
Some people have asymmetry between eyes making correction both more annoying and less necessary; some have similar issues on both eyes that are simply hard to correct in any way and reasonably livable uncorrected.
I am not blind, but I would not say either of the offered options applies to me. I would add options:
«My vision is not good but I do not correct it, and still navigate using it.»
«I am blind.»
More 0-hating numeric inputs: years in the current neighbourhood.
Fascinating, as always! The "previous guess was incorrect" question was a delightful insight into the epistemic process, and I found it very hard to decide whether I should change my answer up or down. (Also, typo: extra "how" in that question.)
Unread emails: this was consistently zero for me until less than a year ago and now it's in 4 digits, and I've no idea why. Some kind of unexplained drop in executive function? (Idk whether that question is in there in its own right or just for anchoring, but I'm kind of curious what it correlates with.)
Re COVID fatigue, there were options for "no fatigue" and "fatigue for a few weeks after" but no option for "fatigue only while actually ill with it and not after". I ticked "no fatigue" as I figured that was the intended meaning, but it felt a bit wrong.
The urbanisation questions seemed inconsistent: the first was on a scale from urban to suburban, and the second on a scale from urban to rural. I prefer suburban to urban, but I prefer both over rural (so would pick urban over rural if those were the only options), and the questions seemed to be conflating suburban with rural.
As always, I think the "family member has this condition" and "I suspect I have this condition" questions should be checkboxes with multiple options allowed, or at least if they're radio buttons it should be explicitly stated which of those trumps the other in cases where both are true.
There's ambiguity on the question "How much do you trust the mainstream media? For example, the New York Times and Washington Post". The word "trust," and what it may mean in the context.
The answer "mostly mistrust" might be chosen by the person who considers that NYT/WaPo publish "false facts," yes. And it may also be chosen by the person who considers them to be the mouthpieces of a social-engineering agenda, publishing facts that are not "false per se" but rather very particularly preselected and spun. The latter also translates to a level of trust which is not zero, but negative.
Perhaps it'd have been great to have separate questions addressing the former and the latter. It's probably too late to split them now, but maybe some wording could be added to the question to clarify the intended meaning of the single question.
Wait, why would an inner voice narrate what I do instead whe I do something trivial, instead of going through something I plan to do afterwards? (My answer would be: it narrates all the time, usually not the thing I am currently doing)
Re: PART 9: INCOME AND CHARITY, there actually weren’t any questions about charity so kind of a misnomer.
Re: orgasm question, skipped; how the hell would I know??
How will you account for the different SAT scoring systems that have been used? Now it's out of 1600 again, but wasn't it out of 2400 or something for a bit?
Just noting that I'm interested to hear what the results of the survey RE: imaginary friends are, but I'm a bit sceptical of the reliability of the results. I left that blank because while I have been informed by my parents that I did have an imaginary friend, I honestly can't recall anything beyond the name, so I have no idea if it was a hallucination, a delusion or just an pretense.
I may be unusually bad at remembering my childhood, but I am doubtful that is the kind of thing people can reliably recall decades later - there's a risk of projecting back an adult level of skepticism, but there's also a risk of incorrectly assuming children are incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality.
Ah, yes, the famous third sex. Are we still supposed to live in reality?
LSD: Nobody ever told me and my friends what doses we bought. I decided to write an absurdly high number, which seemed to be the most truthful workable option.
No third person option for inner voice :(
For the mental disorders question, does "family" only include blood relations or should it include one's spouse, in-laws, adopted siblings, etc? My brother-in-law has one of these disorders and I consider him family, but obviously his having the disorder doesn't genetically predispose me toward having it.
I wish the political questions had at least a cultural and economic axis. As an economically left (social democratic) but culturally conservative (monoculturalism, etc.) person, it's really difficult to find a package that suits me.
I also wish you had better warned to not look up the Paris to Moscow distance before answering the last question, as the first thing I did was to check my answer.
I was a bit unsure about the left-right politics question since my answer is wildly different depending on which country you base it on - I would consider myself center-right for Sweden, but far left in American politics. The minimum wage question ended up even harder, since we don't even have a minimum wage here (never needed it because of strong unions). I guess to some extent things like these are inevitable, since you can't account for all the cultural differences around the world in a questionnaire, but it's still frustrating.
Media trustworthiness needs an all of the above option.
I noticed there was no "Green" in 'Political Affiliation. With which of these political descriptions do you most identify?'
I regret I can't easily survey my German acquaintances on this. But starting with the German example, the Green party in Germany is both in national government and in a majority of state governments. Which should somehow be reflected in what persons would choose as their 'Political Affiliation'.
There is also the forth-largest parlamentary group in the European Parliament, which is Green/EFA. And smaller Green parties in many European countries.
I guess I should ask someone for a proper self-identification, nevertheless I assume: "Green: taking actions against climate change, being friendly to the natural environment & animals", would do for such a list (maybe also without the animals). My friends would kill me for leaving out all the pro-democracy, etc., etc. ;)
Under the job categorization, you distinguish AI and broader CS research from “Practical” computer science, lumping IT professionals in with application developers, operating systems developers, and embedded systems types. While my favorite baristo might think we both “do something with computers,” the skill sets couldn’t be more different. The US government puts me in the “Computer/Mathematical” bucket most of the time, which is still imprecise, but a closer match, IMO.
On the subreddit and discord questions, I was missing a 'haven't been there yet, maybe somewhen' or a 'potentially interested, but not enough to currently spend time on' option.
I don't read those, I knew they existed, so three options don't work. 'No, I don't want to read it' suggests a clear and conscious rejection. In my case it's more a mixture of habits, time, priorities, and that nobody has convinced me yet to give it a try.
None of these are errors, just things that made me feel incapable of answering correctly:
I struggle every time I have to decide between being a student and self-employed, and to decide on a profession - I used to work in software development, am self-employed in card-game publishing and am now studying Philosophy/Neuroscience/Cognition. That's all over the map. I went with Philosophy because that's my B.A. but I feel that's not really accurate.
My family has an atheist religious background. There was presumably some Christian somewhat back somewhere, but I don't know which kind and anyway, the last generations have been committed atheist and I feel that should be an option.
Selecting a class is hard for someone who read Bourdieu. Poverty + high education does not make me working-class.
I have an out-of-date formal diagnosis of depression, i.e. I was clinically depressed for much of my youth and well into my early adult life, but haven't been for years. Family members used to have this but don't anymore, too (for death reasons and for getting better reasons).
I also have a very out of date PTSD diagnosis that I don't believe was ever accurate.
How happy am I with my job? Which one? I chose to interpret that as "the job sphere of my life", which includes my studies.
"If you're a student, answer "No, I don't work"" - but the vast majority of students do work! I work 5-20 hours a week, why do I need to select "I don't work"?
Thank you for "in the spirit in which you predict it was intended on the questionnaire" - that changed my answer.
Not being able to answer questions without lying is my #1 reason of abandoning surveys.
What I did like: the "option for people who [question doesn't apply to]". I don't like leaving questions out.
Some notes on question/responses
Re: Work Status - What do you currently do?
I could be curious to see a mission driven for-profit option, answering with for profit since that's closest.
Re Religious Views
How would you describe your religious views?
Hard for me to answer, I am spiritual and neither pantheist nor atheist. I am undecided and I don't feel a need to decide, nor am I agnostic. I am happy with my spiritual practices and don't need more. I'm probably the minorty here so I'm leaving it unanswered.
Re Discord/Subreddit/Discord/Subscriber
The Yes/No binary doesn't capture deltas. e.g. I do, I don't, I did but now I don't
Deltas are interesting imo, but not necessary
Re: Do you wear glasses?
I stopped wearing them 2 years ago when I began doing somatic experiencing work and noticed increases in my stress levels. My vision has improved since. Saying I have naturally good vision for this, even though I'm not 20/20 yet.
Re: What effect did this dose of LSD have on you?
I've had different experiences at the same dose, can't answer this one accurately so I'm choosing the most common.
Re: Do you have seizures?
At times I have somatic seizures (Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures) when doing somatic work. Answering once or a few times, in exceptional situations
Re: Answer only if you feel completely comfortable doing so: which of the following forms of trauma did you experience as a young child, ie before the age of 10?
Would you consider chronic neglect to be emotional abuse or abandonment? I did not check abandonment as I'm interpreting it to be permanent.
That was a frustrating experience. Most answer ranges were way too binary. The only way to say "neither left nor right" was to put oneself in the mushy middle, which is inaccurate. I do not remember my SAT scores from 1963 and I do not remember the results of my last (if any) officially given IQ test. I couldn't describe my status as a new, unpaid ACX reader or my reason for being unpaid (just getting acquainted) or how I discovered ACX (by being put onto SSC by someone and binge-reading it for a short time a few or several years ago). Possibly by this age (mid-70s) one has taken a lumpy one-off shape that doesn't come close to fitting any mold.
The "How many tabs do you have open?" question includes options "2 - 5" and "5 - 10". I happened to have exactly 5 open tabs.
I'm the only one who can't pull up the survey? I've tried both Firefox and Chrome, and the explanation I get is this:
"Firefox does not trust forms.gle because its certificate issuer is unknown, the certificate is self-signed, or the server is not sending the correct intermediate certificates."
> What person does your inner voice talk in?
Mine talks in a mix of first and third person -- used to be primarily third! :)
I Now Have Additional Questions! (but already submitted, so this is just for calibration purposes...sorry about poorly-formatted bulleted list, the actual questions aren't numbered or anything)
*Industry - made me snort in $EMOTION that every specific answer is white collar, and then the bulk of all other jobs historically and globally gets rounded off to "other blue collar".
*Education Complete? is a weirdly-phrased question, I assume you meant "do you ever want to achieve a higher degree" as opposed to "are you currently a student"? School isn't in the cards for me, hasn't been for a long time, but continued shame over amassing like 150 credits without a Real Bachelor's Degree still smarts. I consider that incomplete.
*Denomination - no love for Daoism? I think it's importantly different from Buddhism, even for an agnostic-dabbler like me that finds bits and pieces of Light in many different religions.
*SSC Subreddit - no option for "used to read". I feel like the value-add went way down after the migration to ACX and subsequent community splintering, have basically never touched it after that.
*Income status - terms are in tension. I'm a "veteran" at my job, with a statistically anomalous length of continuous employment for the branch, but not quite at the pay cap yet for my org chart position. And that's not even considering getting vertically promoted into entire other wage tiers. So it's definitely comfortably into my "career", yet also still entry-level retail, due to unusually few levels of formal hierarchy in the company.
*Depression - weird edge case, I have a diagnosis of Chronic Depression which goes untreated, but is functionally in remission. Not really comfortable saying I got cured or better, cause the blues can strike again quick, but the options are fairly binary and everything else seemed less accurate.
*Vegetarianism - the way it's worded, one can only choose to go halfway and reduce meat "for moral reasons", which strikes me as a weird assumption? I largely don't do it for morality, I do it because it seems like an Unfair Traide, and strongly prefer goods to be priced according to their full externalities as a Platonic ideal. Meat is, uh, not that, most of the time.
*Glasses - no option for "I don't wear glasses because I don't want to, despite vision being bad". Seems inaccurate to round that off to Naturally Good Vision - I wouldn't have three pairs of glasses and an optometry prescription if it was naturally good!
*Orgasm - it would have been so simple to change the scale to "Very Difficult <-> Very Easy". I see what you did there.
*ASMR - unspecified term. I experience frisson pretty strongly from particular auditory patterns; the "Ragnarok" album by Wardruna, Irish folk songs, "Karma" by Kamelot, "The Felt" and "Medium" albums from Homestuck, throat singing...those all do it for me. But this seems like a qualitively different qualia than what people mean when they say ASMR. I think there might be some overlap, but they seem to be different experiences.
*Psychotherapy - had to give a perfectly middle response, since it was Absolutely Useless for one set of ailments, but Totally Life-Changing for others. Reversion to the mean, I guess.
*Group Harm/Divorce - assumed here you didn't mean the technial legal definition of "divorce" etc, with all the paperwork and courts involved, but rather the consequentialist effects of Broken Household and so on. It really doesn't make much difference to the kids if Mommy and Daddy still do weird things during tax season because otherwise the house would be gone, yet are functionally divorced all other times of the year.
*Wireheading - seems like a fairly specific scenario? I'm strongly opposed to that particular iteration, but not the general principle; there are near-analouges that I'd readily slip into. Certain videogames or shows that feel so powerfully compelling, I'd willingly give up Living For Real to LARP them forever. Like the entire premise behind Sword Art Online...
*Media trust - I notice that no one's explicitly prompted me to disaggregate which parts of covid news coverage most made me distrust media, and this is an interesting frame! It's tricky cause my brain screams epistemic foul play for each option, so assigning degree-weights is actually difficult. Plus of course they're strongly correlated news angles...
*Flashing elements - am reminded of Zvi's woes with watching football on TV, and needing to physically block the "stock ticker"-type scroll which commonly accompanies sports coverage now. Plus users with animated .gif usericons which...distract me. (Not specific to ACX.) This is more than half the reason I hate video content vs. text.
*Tabs/emails - hope I'm not the only one who uses "unread email" in lieu of formal reminder systems, and open tabs in lieu of actual bookmarks. Either that have been left unaddressed too long get removed, because - no, I won't actually do that thing/read that post. This also means keeping browsing history permanently, and relying on memory to call up half-remembered posts...thus the first action for any given browsing is "Restore previous session". To keep continuity.
Anyway, that was interesting, and I'm happy to have finally gotten to participate in this august tradition. Looking forward to weird results in January.
I flubbed the Paris-Moscow question. I had what would have been a really close guess based on knowing the circumference of the Earth and the number of timezones that separate them, but forgot to account that timezones are closer together at mid-latitudes than they are at the equator.
Does the question about how many children we have include children born from donated sperm/eggs?
I have an inner voice, but it's because I'm thinking in words pretty constantly. It isn't narrating my life. It never occurred to me that people might have inner narrators.
I also have what I call an attack voice telling me I'm an awful person, but it's rarely a narrator.
I used to have migraines, but something like 50 years ago, so I answered no. I didn't do anything to make them stop, they just went away.
Bonus question: Did you look up the distance from Paris to Moscow as soon as you finished the survey?
More bonus questions: Do you like rereading your own writing? Do you correct old typos?
I notice a couple others have brought it up already, but I feel like the urbanization question was either incomplete or poorly worded due to not properly accounting for rural/country as an option. I strongly prefer urban to suburban, but strongly prefer rural to either, so answering the question literally as-asked I would put maximally urban (since I strongly prefer that to suburban, which is the only other option there), but then this feels untrue since I would much rather live in the country than the city.
I'd like instructions for when my prediction of the AI risk is less than 1 but not 0.
Does "brother" and "sister" include half-siblings (or step-siblings)? (This has been a problem in previous years too.)
> Inner voice pronouns
am I the only one whose uses 'we'?
I haven't taken the SAT, but I have taken the PSAT (for sophomores and juniors as prep) and the ACT, I feel like I remember that there'd be questions about those?
Rather than skipping it would be nice to have a “none” or “n/a” option to easily fill things out. For example I am retired but I used to work in IT.
"With what race do you most identify?"
"What sex were you assigned at birth?"
"With what gender do you primarily identify?"
The wording of these questions implies that race is a chosen identity like gender. I don't "identify" with any race.
"Regardless of how you feel about it politically, how did COVID lockdown affect your life?
Ignore the direct effect of getting COVID, and focus on things like economic changes, decreased interaction with other people, and getting to switch from office to remote work."
Got a problem with this one. Economic changes and restrictions to my liberty were negative, while the remote work was very liberating. I finally settled on a "3" for balance, but would have appreciated two switches, one for the negative and one for the positive changes.
As for the Bitcoin value question, I think mentioning a number in the question will have anchoring effects, no matter how close the number is to the current valuation. Unless that's precisely what you're trying to measure.
The whole "Questions About Cities" is vexing me for amusing reasons. I basically switch cities every couple of weeks and walk to work out of my location in one of them. It's a pretty exact 50/50 split, so I'm struggling to pick which place to answer for with some of the questions - especially "How long, in years, have you lived in your current neighbourhood?", which might either be around 10 years or 2 years depending on which one I pick! :)
Not a criticism of the survey, just wanted to share my amusement at my situation.
I remembered playing around with Google Earth and finding that the US is about 4 megameters wide... which I remember because I thought megameter was a cool unit of length and wondered why we talk about thousands of km... If you’re going to use SI, then... Thousands of kilos is just a weird mixing of systems. And I knew Moscow was basically on the edge of Europe. So I was visualizing it correctly and had the information to make a good guess... But my second guess was double my first and all about half the real distance.
There is no option for "I dream, but without any visuals/imagery at all"
Within a factor of 10 on Paris-Moscow, so that’s a win.
Strange that there are no questions about exercise
Scott, you might get some misleading data because the questions about earining, saving, and spending don't clarify household income vs. personal income
Three points so far.
1) There should be an option for lsat for intelligence measuring stat.
2)The inner voice Q--my inner voice respectfully addresses me in the third person.
3) Completely pegged my bitcoin value guess to the numerical example in the question.
4) I had no idea of what are the technical definitions of most of the moral views-can that be an option?
Oh man, I have bad intuitions about distance.
Unrelated observation/questions: I see visual snow and notice that if I have just awoken from REM, it has a kaleidoscopic pattern (vs standard random noise). It's kind of like a grid of kaleidoscopic views, maybe 500x500, each with near-identical constantly evolving patterns. I've noticed this 20+ times. I only assume that it is REM - it is strongly correlated with awakening from a dream, but that does not necessarily entail REM. As of recently, I have sleep data (Apple Watch) and confirmed that last night's observation corresponds to awakening from what my watch determined to be REM.
As far as the questions:
- Does anyone else experience this?
- Does anyone experience this who doesn't have visual snow?
- Does anyone know of an explanation of this phenomenon? It seems like it could be an epiphenomenon arising from REM activity in the visual cortex.
Couple of answers that don't fit the provided options:
- I rarely remember dreams, though I think I remember enough to answer the questions. They're not exactly 'in color' or 'in black and white'. I may have some sort of moderate aphantasia, and my dreams are more conceptual, like reading a story without trying to picture it. (Apples vary in how well I can visualize them. Some days they're pure concept, or almost like wireframe, today I can do an imperfect attempts at some texture/color and I hold almost the whole apple 'visible' at once, instead of it having 'out of focus' parts that usually tend to fade out of existence very easily)
- My inner voice usually uses the royal We, so not exactly first or second person! (I may have picked that up from trying to sound more professional when doing projects by myself. I usually write about things I do in the third person, when I'm not directly talking about myself to someone else)
There is a question on childhood trauma that can be skipped, but there is no way to distinguish between someone who skips because they don't want to say they were abused and someone who was never abused. On a normal question, it might be insignificant but I can imagine people some people don't want to reveal they were molested or beaten by their parents.
I'm married and combine finances with my spouse; what should I put for the income questions? I initially tried to answer for just me, but then I got to the savings question and realized that the presence of his income affects our collective savings in ways it's hard to separate out. Should I just go back to the first page and answer everything as though we're a single person with two jobs?
Hurrah, it is the annual "you designed this terribly, why didn't you ask this question/include that option" open season on Scott's survey!
I thought it was interesting, but given that it will be "tabulated by computer", I feel that has definitely cut down the choices to something that can be simply marked into "yes/no" bins by machine.
I never know how to answer the sexuality/relationship questions, and would dearly love an option for "Not interested in/do not want [love/romance/marriage/banging sixty different people of all genders every weekend]". For instance, in the "relationship style" do I answer "prefer monogamous" (because were I interested, that would be my preference) or "other", because I don't want any relationship at all?
The "profession" one always amuses me - God help us if any of us are cleaning ladies, I guess we'll have to go under "other - blue collar", right? 😁
Mostly it's okay, though my permanent gripe remains: Political Affiliation. I *would* like to go with "Liberal, for example the US Democratic Party : market economy plus social welfare, socially permissive multiculturalism" except nix on the "socially permissive", so were I American I suppose I'd be one of the Reagan Democrats.
Second choice would be "Social democratic, for example Scandinavian countries: heavily-regulated market economy, cradle-to-grave social safety net, socially permissive multiculturalism" except, you know, that "socially permissive multiculturalism" again (not so much the multiculturalism but let's not start a battle here).
This forces me to choose "Conservative, for example the US Republican Party and UK Tories: low taxes, low redistribution of wealth, traditional values" and do you know why I am bleeding from the eyes with the wailing of the damned arising from the bowels of Hell as I select this option, hmmmm? Because I am being lumped in with the freakin' TORIES. The party of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Margaret Thatcher (I haven't formed a strong impression of Rishi Sunak yet, except that he gives faint indications of being 'oh, another one of them'*).
Not even the old-fashioned House of Stuart supporting Tories, no, the blinkin' present-day boiling. I would even prefer the "robber that is noted for outrages and cruelty" connotations than *that*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tory#Etymology
One of these days, I swear, I will crack and select "Alt-right, for example France's National Front: nationalist revival with an ethnic/racial component" and then I will cackle maniacally as the men in white coats drag me off "See what you made me do! Seeeeee!!!!!"
*Partygate - rules for thee but not for me, not registering the interests of the wife's family's money - see rules for thee but not for me. He did resign over the Pincher sex scandal but it's hard to say how much was principle and how much was rats deserting the sinking ship. Apologies to any rats offended by the comparison. He hasn't done anything out of the ordinary above the common venality of wealthy Tory politicians so either there aren't any more scandals to come, or if there are it will be a doozy (seems very unlikely but who can say?). He did ban (again) fracking, so depending on your views on fracking this was a good/bad decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rishi_Sunak#Other_actions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rishi_Sunak#Resignation_as_Chancellor
FINALLY, I am fascinated as to how I am supposed to answer this question:
"Compared to other people of your same sex, how hard is it for you to orgasm?"
Are we supposed to be in a group with a stopwatch and everyone times themselves? Watch porn on our own and compare our performance with that onscreen? Be gay and see what our partner(s) achieve versus what we achieve? Sidle on to some subreddit and leave a coy enquiry as to how people there feel they do in 'ease of getting your rocks off'? What?
I miss having odd questions to test weird hypotheses. I don't know whether they were important, but they added flavor.
Scott, is this a change of policy (maybe testing the weird hypotheses wasn't worth the trouble) or just not having a weird hypothesis to test this year, or what?
I am wondering if an "I know what you mean by this question but am upset by the phrasing" checkbox for each question would be useful (for future questionnaires). Reading these comments there seems to be a split between "the question didn't cover my situation" (I have one of those) and folks who know what Scott meant but are unhappy with the way he phrased the question.
I think the questions about mental health conditions should have an option for "I had this in the past."
SUBREDDIT QUESTION: There should be an option for: "I was banned from the subreddit over nonsense so I don't go there".
I honestly don't even remember the particulars anymore, might have been a year or more ago, but I want to say that the gist of it from my perspective is I was arguing in good faith with one of the mod's friends and we were both being uncharitable, and the mod for some reason banned me despite the interaction being very symmetrical. I want to say I also had the more controversial side of the debate, but I was put off by how out of step the mod's behavior was with what I perceive as the norms of this community. Plus I am not a huge fan of reddit and trying to curtail use.
DISCORD QUESTION: There should be a comment for "other", none of the 4 answers really matches my response. Which would be something like "sure I knew it existed, and in theory I would like to participate, but I simply don't use discord for much (other than online board gaming) and so don't bother. "No I don't want to read it" is definitely not right. But I don't have infinite time.
POLITICAL AFFILIATION QUESTION: This REALLY needs an "other". I am some sort of radical centrist.
Left of the Democrats on some things, right of Republicans on others, a big fan of markets except where they don't work, then I think there should be strong government intervention.
I am also pretty down on voting and pro merit-based civil service. I would like to run the government more like a corporation, but less in terms of there being a powerful "CEO", and more in terms of the departments being professionally staffed and lead without much pressure from electorate. IDK none of the political philosophies are a good one size fits all idea. They are like tools and you need different solutions for different problems.
Asking which of those political philosophies I affiliate with is similar to asking if I think hammers screwdrivers or saws are the best tool. What is the task at hand?
I don’t know the context of the question about weight loss and some weight gain back (and I also may be enough of an outlier not to care), but I felt it to be somewhat unfair in not giving an identifier of fat to muscle ratio of the weight gain back.
I had to write down that I had gained a decent amount of the weight back, but also have weight trained 5/6 days per week and done cardio multiple times per week in the four years since, implying that a large amount of the weight gain (obviously not all) back towards that original number is muscle tissue.
This also reminds me that BMI is dumb. I'm 5'10.5"... I got down to almost 170lbs, which is the skinniest I've been since I was a teenager. Not completely shredded, but definitely, obviously lean. So I starting taking mass gainer, have been for many months, now I'm back up to 182... Which is about where it's been for years, but I'm pretty sure it's significantly more muscle and less fat now. I definitely look more muscular than I ever have. But not like bodybuilder huge or anything. Just the body of someone who does a lot of calisthenics. But I never looked fat at 180~185, at worst maybe ever so slightly chubby.
Speaking of bad health/fitness measures... My Apple watch now says my cardio health is below average?!?!?!?! According to my YUR app, I sometimes burn over 1000s calories in a day playing Beat Saber (Fitbeat custom maps...it's like constant squats, and I often do it for a few hours) and other VR fitness games. That's on top of calisthenics and stretching, and occasional strength endurance. It's almost impossible for me to get out of breath now. Googling it, people are saying it only counts stuff if you're outside for some reason, and that could be it... Was doing a 5k jog and HIIT sprinting once a week each, but haven't in a while now that it's winter...so apparently that's why. Seems pretty misleading.
On the "what is your income" question, is that supposed to be about individual or household income?
Three comments:
1. I have an inner voice in the sense that I often clearly visualize words in my head and play them out, have a monolog about my planned actions or whatever. I'm like very much the opposite of the verbal equivalent of aphantasic. Most of my thoughts are in words. But I have no sense of dialog or of the "inner voice" being a separate individual from "me." Wasn't sure if the question about "inner voice" implied separation from "me." I initially confidently answered yes, I have an inner voice, but the follow up questions implied to me that maybe I meant something different by that.
2. The question about childhood trauma should probably have an option for "I experienced none of these; I am not skipping this question," and possibly one for, "I want to be clear that I am neither confirming nor denying that I have had some childhood trauma, so you don't take my skipping this question to mean that I do have childhood trauma and don't want to talk about it."
3. I find masks so uncomfortable that I will skip LONG events that I otherwise want to do if I have to be masked, but they aren't too bad for stuff under like 30 minutes.
I would like a future question about misanthropy, since I was just annoyed yet again by someone who assumes that superior aliens would hate the human race. The question about whether you think people are trustworthy comes close, but that frames it as personal.
What I'm curious about is the people who apparently think they cab accurately estimate the views of morally/scientifically superior entities, and those views are going to be strongly negative. I suppose the same question applies to anyone who thinks God basically doesn't like people.
Maybe this correlates with depression? Narcissism? Strict religious upbringing, and maybe the upbringing for parents and grandparents matters too?
I put "3" for the ASMR question. I'm not sure what I experience is ASMR but I have misophonia and hate, with an extra burning passion, the things that give other people ASMR. So am I getting ASMR and I just hate it? Or do I just hate those types of sounds?
Why is 'low sugar' not one of the diet options?
Miscellaneous notes on questions that I didn't feel captured my response well:
- Several questions were framed as "Relative to other people, how good/bad are you at something?" Hard to be sure sometimes without a good intuition for where other people are on average.
- No way specify "I don't have any close friends." (Or "Mostly some other gender," I suppose.)
- On the plane-flying question, there might be a difference between "I don't fly as much because I personally feel less safe flying" versus "I don't fly as much even though I want to, because my employer/family/government/lizard people told me not to." The wording of the question kind of seems to assume the former.
- The "What undermined your trust" question had three different options about COVID coverage. That makes it hard to convey "The flip-floppiness and political expedience of COVID coverage in general."
- Does using a calculator on the "distance" question count as using an outside reference? (I didn't, but it might have helped a little.)
I know this is a losing battle, but I'm once again impelled to point out that "Hispanic" is an ethnicity, not a race. My Hispanic father's ancestry is almost 100% Iberian (i.e. white European).
As a retired person, I found the Profession question a bit hard to answer. "In what area do you _currently_ work or study?" I worked 40+ years in one of these fields, and am happily NOT doing that any more... It was also interesting to notice the absence of "homemaker", or for that matter anything pink collar. I can't even select "other" to reflect my new status as "idle rich" ;-)
Percent income saved: I used after-tax income for this question.
What is your approximate annual income: I use pre-tax income.
I hope this is ok.
Is it not possible next time to make a choice of several options in the issue of employment? I am a graduate student and part-timer (at the same research institute where I study), and I am missing one option. In a EA survey I took recently, this possibility was.
On the question about your SAT score, your coastal bias is showing. The ACT score is much more common in the Midwest USA than the SAT score. There are a large number of people from midwestern america who have never taken the SAT.
Can you add an option for "I have never taken the SAT".
Same question for the scientific IQ test, I didnt quite know what to do since I have never taken a real IQ test.
For the question around childhood trauma, would the death of a parent count as "abandonment?"
Not including an "anarchist" option in the political affiliation question feels like an oversight
Reddit/Discord had no answers that worked for me: I do know of them and am interested, but that haven't so far bubbled up to action. May well do so in the future. AI x-risk was weird for me: I gave 1% and think the probability of extinction by 2100 is low, but am extremely concerned about other massive consequences and spend a lot of my time on AF etc. You might think about more Qs on this topic. I mostly trust MSM but simultaneously think there's been serious deterioration. I answered the 'what has shaken your trust' Q despite its being scoped to people who answered the 'do you trust' question differently.
Lack of options I struggled with:
1. No anarchist political category
2. No category for part time or seasonal work
3. No job category for skilled crafts, which in my experience differ strongly in prestige from the trades.
A few of the questions seem to be ambiguous or otherwise sub-optimal.
1) The meetup question includes not attending since not interested and not attending but planning on attending.
A useful additional option would be "not attended but interested in attending.
This would include anyone who is neither committed to not attending nor committed to attending.
2) The political spectrum doesn't accommodate libertarians, like a 4 quadrant political compass would.
3) The human biodiversity question is phrased oddly. It asks whether one has a "favorable opinion on an idea." This is ambiguous and could mean to ask how likely the idea is to be true, or how valuable or "good" the idea is.
4) The mental health question gives two options for yourself - diagnosed with a condition, and think you might have a condition. But it lacks the second option for family members.
If one suspects that a family member has / had a condition without knowing whether they were formally diagnosed, there is no option for it.
5) The mood and anxiety question ask about usual mood rated 1-10, which is fine, but it may have made sense, especially for the anxiety question to ask how often someone feels anxious, as it is not clear whether one should average their moods, or state the modal mood.
Assuming the latter, then the question as is, does not distinguish between someone who experiences anxiety / bad mood 49% of the time and 0% of the time, as long as the rest of the time, they feel fine.
6) The NIMBY / YIMBY questions includes two distinct axes of definition. A) Is the main priority protecting exiting homeowners or making enough housing. B) Thinking that new housing will have various negative effects vs. various positive effects.
One can think that the main priority is protecting existing homeowners, and still think that e.g. new housing will bring down prices (NIMBY on A, YIMBY on B). In fact, in the interest of protecting existing homeowners, one may oppose new housing precisely because it will bring down housing prices.
One could also conceivable effectively be YIMBY on A and NIMBY on B, if they think that owners should have the right to build more housing on their property (strong property rights) while thinking that the results (traffic, etc.) would be negative.
It might be simpler to just ask whether more housing should be generally permitted or restricted.
7) The ASMR question doesn't distinguish between those who have encountered stimuli that are supposed to cause the feeling, but failed to feel it, and those who have not encountered the stimuli in the first place.
8) As others have pointed out, the savings question is ambiguous in whether it is asking for total cumulative savings or annual savings. I.e. if someone earned 100k each year for 10 years, and saved 10k for each of those years, do they answer 10% or 100%.
9) For the geography question, you may want to clarify whether people are allowed to look up the conversion rate for km and mi.
10) The question about flying and COVID conflates the past and the present. The title asks whether behavior changed (i.e. at any time in the past) but the answer options refer exclusively to the present.
11) The question about reguessing the answer to geography question is ambiguous in that it does not define the objective. If the objective is to get very close to the true answer, without no difference between moderately off and very off, then one would never repeat the same answer.
If the goal is to minimize the error, where a very wrong answer is much worse than a moderately wrong answer, then one would probably choose the exact same answer.
12) I realize it isn't your wording, but for the question about hearing voices, I wonder what someone with hypnagogic hallucinations is supposed to answer.
13) Some questions use 1-5 rating and some 1-10. It seems hard to think of an advantage of the former except for consistency with prior studies which potentially used the same scale.
14) For the price of Bitcoin, you give the example entry of '20,000' but it appears that the actual entry cannot include a comma. That is, it should be '20000'
I notice the survey asked a lot of questions about psychosis but then (iirc) didn't actually ask whether I'd suffered from psychosis? This seems too bad; I would have liked to provide this info.
Also, every year I wish the mental illness questions had an answer for "I used to have this but don't anymore".
Mental health: there’s no “I had a formal diagnosis, but I consider I don’t have it now, and nor does any medical professional” option. Are you trying to find current rates, or tendencies? What do you want me to pick? And does this suggest that you don’t think these disorders can ever be ‘cured’?
(I realise that you have a grab bag of things in that section, and some of them generally *aren’t* expected to change, but some of them are!)
> Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID?
Options: No change; Yes, COVID made me fly less.
COVID switched me to fully-remote work. I can fly somewhere and work remotely for a few weeks. I've probably flown 2-3x this year as in any year previously.
So...the answer to the *question* is yes, but the "yes" option is explicitly the opposite of my yes. How seriously should I take the "explanation" part of the answer?
For questions that clearly want a number, but I don't have the recollection/exact knowledge to give one, is it better to leave it blank or put in some explanatory text?
For example, the "largest LSD dose" question, my answer would be "I don't remember the number but it was a medium-low dose." Would it be more helpful if I put that in the box or leave it blank?
EDIT: Never mind, I see the form will only accept a number.
Took the whole survey, then signed into Gmail for the number of emails question, then upon hitting "submit" instead of a submission confirmation, it appeared to reload the first page of the docs form with the address I signed into (not the one I put for the survey) treating the page as if my intent were to re-fill the form but signed in to Google.
This may have just been a waste of 20 minutes of my life because Google can't help itself when it comes to pretending that I want to be part of its ecosystem.
For questions referring to ACX, such as the one about ACX meetups, should I assume this includes meetups from the SSC era as well?
This was really fun, thanks so much for putting it together. I look forward to seeing the results.
For "What person does your inner voice talk in?" I put down not really either since there wasn't a good option. But for reference it's almost always in terms of 'we'. E.g. 'we should do ...' or 'we could do ...' etc.
The question on Bitcoin price needs clarification: are we talking present-day dollars, or inflation-adjusted ?
A few points of hopefully-constructive criticism:
"Did you work remotely during the pandemic?" I was temporarily mostly-unemployed during the pandemic specifically because of the pandemic, which there didn't seem to be an option for (there was something like "I don't work", but that seems to imply that you didn't work before the pandemic either).
"You thought your country's COVID response was:" I really appreciate your explicitly distinguishing between the strictness of a response and the competence of a response, though I was still a bit unsure how to answer this. I was basically satisfied with the *degree* of restrictiveness in the COVID response of my country (the US) but I think the restrictions should have started significantly *earlier* so I answered that I thought our response was moderately too lax.
I would have preferred the two Paris-to-Moscow questions being adjacent. After answering the first one and seeing that the question after it was not a related follow-up question, I Googled the correct answer to see how far off I was, so then I couldn't really give an unbiased answer to the second question, so I just skipped it.
The distance estimation question should ask half the Americans to answer in miles and half in km to see just how bad we are at casual use of metric. I got reasonably close but didn’t mentally convert miles to km as well as I should have.
I wonder if the ethnic group checkboxes were chosen using what we have from previous population genomics studies.
It feels odd to have Pakistani be an ethnic cluster, when it constitutes 5+ distinct ethnic groups. Namely : Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Baloch, Kashmiri? & post-partition Indians. The Indian ethnic group choices are pretty weird. Tamil shows up despite being a fairly small group, but there are no options for other Indians. Bengali makes some sense, since it covers 1 Indian state + 1 country.
I added a generic "northwestern Indian" (Since west Indian would have been confusing). But, having a few other options there would've been nice.
> Do you wear glasses?
Missing an option "No, although I probably should". The existing options assume that whoever has a problem with vision is doing something about it.
> ... as a child?
Please add "I don't remember" option.
> Inner voice
Please explain a bit what you mean? Like, voluntary talking to myself, or involuntary? Considering the latter "what is your inner voice's attitude" question I assume it means involuntary.
> Prediction question
The provided examples are anchoring, at least in my case very strongly because I do not have a strong opinion.
Maybe include also a question about how confident I am about the predictions. My confidence is low, but hey, I can still make a guess if you want me to, but without stating the low confidence I feel a little like an idiot.
Hi! I answered 3 a lot to the likerts, meaning "dunno" or "no opinion", and this might conflate with ambivalence/neutrality. If this is an issue, maybe consider adding a sixth option for us people who don't simply know about the topic to have an idea.
In the previous survey, there was a really interesting philosophy (or metaphysics) survey. Did no results come of it?
Your 'Race' section is non-ideal. Hispanic yes/no should be a separate ethnicity question and mixed race people would appreciate multiple check boxes over single boxes.
These are fun. I remembered to save my ID from 2021. And I don't have to look up "deontologist" any more.
Small note: My inner voice usually speaks in third person, and only occasionally second. I answered second person.
Could you please change the question about circumcision? As currently written has an 'option for women' and that was just an awful dysphoria twinge as a MTF transperson.
For the question: What person does your inner voice talk in?
I don't think it likely deserves its own option, but my primary mode is 'we' (and no, I don't do tulpas or any of that weirdness). Just curious if anyone else had been doing that from a young age.
I don't know how to answer "Political Spectrum:
Where do you think you fall on a classic political spectrum?" What do you mean Left/Right? Are you asking about social or economic views? What about being split on social and economic views? There's no way to select this answer.
I hope it wasn't cheating to use a miles-> km calculator because I have no concept of metric unit distances other than that a 5k is about 3 miles
I was interested in participating until I saw "What sex were you assigned at birth?" and "With what gender do you primarily identify?" The second is perhaps understandable from an anthropological perspective, to see which if your readers have taken up the gender religion, as long as there is a true nullo option to signify that the survey-taker does not share the religious belief in gender identity that the other options imply. But to have these two questions as a standard for everyone, in the form they now exist, is nonsense -- the equivalent of mandatorily asking which church your readers belonged to as children, and then asking if they identify as Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist (converted from Presbyterian), Mormon (converted from Mennonite), or Other (Christian).
There are an enormous number of people taking the survey to whom these questions do not actually apply, and for whom "Other" gives the false impression of fellow-travelling in the genderist religion.
To state it plainly, nobody was "assigned" a sex at birth -- there are a very small number of males with very specific DSDs who until recently (one hopes) would have their penises and testes removed as infants and who were mostly-unsuccessfully socialised as females; even in these cases, the unsuccessful socialisation is good evidence that the operation and socialisation were not "assignments" so much as medical and social experimentation that mostly didn't pan out. Except for these rare instances, sex at birth was observed, not assigned. Therefore the first question gives you no actual information; perhaps "Other" here could be dominated by people who understand this reality, but I somehow doubt it.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "gender identity", except as a self-referential concept -- like chakras, or Calvinism, or Communism. It only exists insofar as someone can be conned or blackmailed into saying it exists and behaving as though it does. Therefore the second question only informs you which of your readers explicitly claim to be transgender -- here, "Other" will almost certainly be dominated by people who claim to believe in gender identity and who claim to identify as some gender other than exclusively male or female.
I strongly suggest you modify the answers to these questions to include those who do not believe in the genderist religion (like your questions about more conventional religions do not assume Christianity) if you want to get a fuller picture of how your readers actually feel about the subject.
Income box wouldn't let me put my income, said it had to be a number greater than 0 even though it was.
Does a half-brother count as "at least one brother"? I think one can argue that it doesn't. Also are you assuming close contact with those siblings? I saw my half-brothers about once a decade.
The question about main gender of friends has no "I have no friends" option.
The "how long have you read the blog" question is complicated by reading off and on; I was here for Slate Star Codex and then only recently returned, so that could be both Since Slate Star and Past Six Months.
Good survey overall, but I think the question about remote work completely erased me and that there's also many other working-class people it will similarly fail to detect.
No, my job (jobs, actually - I have more than one) didn't go remote. No, I didn't keep working at my normal job site(s). *I got furloughed.* I spent months unemployed.
The options offered amount to "nothing changed" or "yes, I kept working but differently." These are not the only thing that happened to people.
"What is your highest degree earned?" seems too US centric.
I have no idea what level a German apprenticeship is on. Is that similar to a "2 year degree" or more similar to "High school"? Or something else?
"Atheist but spiritual" can mean far too many things unless you define "spiritual". If you just let people use their own definition, you have no idea what they mean, but most likely they mean something like these people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRujuE-GIY4
I suspect that "atheist and not spiritual", as wrong as it feels to me, is probably the most appropriate answer for me in this context.
"Whenever the word 'spiritual' is used, cosmic horseshit often follows swiftly behind." -- Robert Fripp, from https://www.facebook.com/robertfrippofficial/posts/pfbid02MDzR7YGbMGBeMrjin4AoWr1Q2JMLont4VMJBjVr6SYQCnns29eMAjgqxqCFn75RPl
Some of the questions would benefit from "None of the above" as an option, e.g. Political Affiliation. I just left those questions blank, which I suppose amounts to the same thing.
Some questions are difficult to answer because they ask for a one-dimensional good/bad or more/less opinion about a word that has more than one meaning or that might vary in more than one way. E.g. what kind of feminism are you talking about? If it's left unspecified, then again, the answer could mean anything.
My inner voice uses "we" or "let's", as in, "let's try this another way". There wasn't an "other" option on the survey so I couldn't really answer that.
OK I searched for some discussion of the 'moral view' question. First off I had to go look all the terms up. And I'm still confused about some (natural law and contractualism..) If someone wanted to give a two sentence definition of each that would be great. I think my moral view might be closest to virtue ethics. But I'm not sure. Why isn't there some box(es) for morals that follow a religion. (Or is that contractual?) I would describe my moral view, as living life as if there was a (Christian) God, even though I'm not sure there is one. Is there a box for that?
Scott, I'm really interested in the question you ask about inner voices and what grammatical person one speaks to oneself with. I'd love to know the intent behind that question -- will you share it with us at some point?
There seems some confusion among respondents here about whether you meant essentially any form of self talk in asking about that or were intending only to ask about people who experience an inner voice that is perceived to be "not themselves."
It's the first time I've ever been asked that question or heard anyone ask that question -- about whether the internal narrator speaks in "I" or "you" or some people say they hear "we" (which I do as well).
I'm curious if people who hear "you" more to themselves have more overbearing inner critics and does that correlate to depression or anxiety. It raises a new possibly fruitful way to work with that inner voice if that's the case. I'm pretty sure for me my "I" voice is the one that experiences things, my "you" voice is generally the critic, and there's a "we" voice that's more parental and kind. I'd never noticed this before, so thank you for that!
My inner monologue often talks in the first person plural: “let’s do this” “now we have to park inside” etc… I selected mixed first and second person singular for lack of a more accurate option. Note that there is no sense of being more than one person, multiple personalities, headmates or anything of the sort. It’s just the way it comes up.
On "Do you have migraines?" it's not clear whether it's intended to include retinal or ocular migraines, or only migraine headaches. I guessed only headaches, so put "no" even though I get retinal ones, but it would be good to clarify on the question.
"Cisgender" isn't a thing
As an impression, felt a significant bias in this survey by having missing options.
With the urban/suburban preference and actuality--the first question asks which you prefer urban or suburban. I put urban over suburban. The second question lumps rural with suburban. I live VERY rurally, like 4 miles up a dirt road surrounded by national forest an hour from the closest grocery store, which I prefer over urban. But the wording makes it look like I'm living the opposite of my preference.
I assume, perhaps wrongly, that some of questions are slated for the most likely reader--urban, white collar/computer workers. I wonder if it would change the results at all to give more options to the people who don't fit those categories. Here I'm thinking of the above questions of urban/rural as well as the job question. I don't fit in any of those categories, so I just picked one that is only marginally accurate but that keeps me out of "blue collar"
Possibly interesting note: My inner voice used to be extremely negative (and when it was that way it was always in 3rd person). Having worked on it significantly, it's now overwhelmingly neutral /positive and almost always in first person.
My inner monologue often uses "we"
My parents didn't divorce, but one of them died when I was little. Couldn't find an option for that sort of separation so I selected "It's complicated" even though it isn't really.
For the "hearing voices" question I assumed you didn't want to know about the hallucinations I had one time after taking Imovane. Given you ask about LSD in the same survey, you may want to crosstab those results - some people may report auditory hallucinations during a trip, especially given "at any time" in the question.
Sorry if these have been asked already.
1) Re: "What religion do you believe?" This seems carefully worded to exclude "cultural X", which I'm pretty sure you considered, but I'm asking anyway. What should an atheist who engages in religious observance put for this? (Not just marking holidays, but actually holding to stuff like kashrus and Shabbos.) I put "Other" and wrote the details, I hope that's what you were going for.
2) Re: Paris to Moscow, are you also intending for your embarrassingly American readers to guess at the miles-km conversion, or is looking that up in the spirit of the question? I hope it is, because I did. (Also I'm pretty pleased with my guess, though I adjusted in the wrong direction at the end.)
There's an ethnic group missing - Romanian. Not at all the same thing as Roma (aka gypsies). I'm mentioning this because, since you seem to have added most European nationalities, it seems likely that you've conflated the two, like everybody else :)
I tried to take this survey but when I click next it takes me back to income and says must be greater than o when I did put an income in, then I lose the whole thing. Three times is enough!
The 'inner voice' question needs a 'royal we' option.
> How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways? Very unfavorable - Very favorable
This is very ambiguous question. It could mean any of:
* Do I believe it's true?
* Conditional on it being true, am I glad that it's true?
* Regardless of whether it's true, am I glad that the theory exists?
These all seem like reasonable interpretations, and I'm not sure which one you meant. Which interpretation people pick could easily mean the difference between a 1 and a 5.
The race question isn't great. Main thing for me is that Hispanic (you mean Latino, by the way, Hispanic excludes Brazil and includes Spain) is orthogonal to race. I'm white, and Hispanic. If I choose Hispanic, it makes it sound like I'm not white, and if I choose white, it's explicitly saying I'm not Hispanic. This is why the Census has a separate question for race and latinidad. For next year, I guess.
I'm not sure if "do you watch a lot of old movies" means as a portion of movies I watch or relative to other people. I watched 6 movies this year and 2 of them were before 1960. So it's not a lot, but it is 1/3 of what I watched.
Clarification on the "ethnic groups" question: is it about identification or genetics? It's quite possible to strongly identify with a country and culture while knowing that your great-grandparents were immigrants to it.....
Couldn't answer "race I identified with" and then was stopped cold by "sex assigned at birth".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR link is not active. I highlighted and clicked to search. This threw me out of the survey. Unwilling to redo whole deal.
I had a strong desire to answer that I had been institutionalized as a child because of attending public school, which I resisted.
I felt a lot like trying to hammer the square peg down the round hole on some of these questions. In particular the one about inner voices. It's something I can use as a tool sometimes, almost like a second person in the room, to create a back-and-forth dialogue which helps me discuss problems with myself and come up with good answers. I know I'm doing this, I can choose not to do the voice thing if I don't want to. But all the responses felt like uncontrollable, judging voices. Some questions were similar in being sort of off. I tried to answer as accurately as I felt applied to me, but at some level I'm worried I'm throwing off the dataset by picking choices that don't make much sense.
Re 'Do you identify as an effective altruist?'. I think there was a point that it is wrong to call EA people effective altruists (rather than e.g. aspiring effective altruists) because you can e.g. subscribe to the ideology, but not donate any money yet, or be an altruist and be effective in that without having heard of the movement (so limiting the phrase 'effective altruist' only to the movement is pretentious). So I would say that I sorta identify as an effective altruist, while I would say that I strongly identify with EA movement if the question was asked that way.
Re: 'How much do you trust the mainstream media?' I think it should specify that this question is oriented towards Americans. For me, the mainstream media would be Russian propaganda which I obviously don't trust, but I am not sure this is relevant. I am leaving this and related questions unanswered.
After getting all the way to the health part, I clicked the link to calculate my BMI, then I hit “done” (upper left) to go back to the survey. It was gone!
Not sure if it's worth changing - I answered the Paris - Moscow question in miles and forgot to convert to km.
Possible typo: Political Affiliation question - Libertarian includes "minimal/no distribution of wealth"
I assume this should be "minimal/no redistribution of wealth".
One thing I wanted to mention in regard to the "inner voice": I grew up speaking both English and French in the US. My French is good but not native (level B2 on the CEFR language proficiency scale). I find that my inner voice in English is sporadic and fragmented, rarely speaking in full sentences. My inner voice when I think in French is in full sentences and is much clearer and consciously noticeable. Would be interested to hear if any other multilingual readers have similar experiences between thinking in different languages!
I just came down with Covid in the last ten days, so could not answer the covid -related questions. Edge case I suppose.
I also felt cornered by the question s related to subreddit and Discord. I don’t read them but it’s not because I don’t want to those two things are inextricably linked in the available answer.
My most recent weight loss attempt was utterly trivial in comparison to the first one years ago, I assume there’s some reason the most recent is important to you but if your assumption is that people never lose much weight and so any of these attempts is roughly as meaningful as any other, then you’d be wrong. My first one was life changing and substantial (over 33% of my weight) and has mostly sustained.
Those of us who went from disgustingly obese to okay-ish at some point in life have an interesting relationship with diets. It’s sort of a constant struggle of “what is the circuit breaker point”, where you hit a number that induced panic again and you fix it, because being obese was so awful.
Hi Scott,
I just completed your survey, and I have some (potentially nitpicky and annoying) comments and suggestions for you!
1. questions of the format "how often in the last month have you XYZ (burped, had acid reflux, had sexual intercourse)" are pretty much unanswerable, because I just don't use my brain to remember such things. I don't care enough to keep track of all the times I've burped or whatever *and* to map these times onto a calendar unit such as a month. I answer these questions by pulling a number out of my rear end and hoping for the best. The only way you'll get an accurate answer to such questions is if there's a significant life event, e.g., "Let's see, I started dating this guy 3 weeks ago and we had sex for the first time last night, and that was my only time having sex this past month, so that's my answer."
2. Ditto questions of the format "Are you better/worse than the average person at spatial orientation/having an orgasm/whatever." You'll either get the respondent to shrug and say "I have no idea, I'll pick the middle of the range" (that's what I did) or you'll run headlong into the Dunning-Krueger effect, with people who suck at spatial orientation going "Why yes, I'm an absolute whiz at finding my way around!" Sometimes it's obvious that you're better/worse than most at a given skill (you struggle with something that seems to come easily to all your friends, or conversely, your friends keep complimenting you on your skill), but that's a rare outlier.
3. Questions like "how satisfied are you with your life?" are fiendishly difficult to answer, because I have to define and calibrate what "satisfied" means. For example, I have a truly wonderful life (an amazing, loving husband, an adorable child, high-paying and prestigious career, financial security, mostly good health), but at the same time I often feel guilty about not making more of the opportunities that I've been given, and I feel scared of failing at my job and not living up to all my responsibilities. So what does this average out to? I ended up picking a mid-high number, but it felt very arbitrary.
I offer these comments in the spirit of helpfulness. I enjoyed taking the survey, and now I know how far it is from Moscow to Paris. Happy New Year to you!
If you're taking SAT scores, why not ACT as well?
The hardest question was gauging how much the average person likes bread. I assumed the answer was "will eat it if it's on a table, it's sometimes good, but I don't really care about it."
Option 4 on support for feminism didn’t work
The NYT drug test by self reporting thing crosses the line into outright lying in my opinion. That's no one's definition of a drug test.
Is the question regarding multiple personalities/tulpas specifically asking about "multiple personalities AND hallucinatory voices", or asking about multiple personalities in and of themselves? The "voice in your head" framing is confusing me since hallucinatory voices aren't generally observed in DID.
(Don't have DID, but have/had two distinct personalities.)
ETA: Also, what counts as a seizure? Is loss of motor control ("locked-in") a seizure?
I want to note that the question about childhood social class seemed impossible to answer for me. My dad was a professor, so I couldn't really choose 'working class/poor', but it was the nineties in the post-Soviet Eastern Europe so we were somewhat less wealthy than the barmen or security guards or the like. I finally chose "middle class", though it seems like not quite right.
The proviso on the weight loss questions ("have you ever lost 10% of your weight [...] without it being for medical reasons like a chronic disease") seems to be ambiguous between "my weight was associated with a chronic disease, so I decided to lose weight" and "my chronic disease is associated with weight loss, which helped me realize my weight loss intentions", and it's hard to tell if this is intentional or which is intended. The former reading seems to be the more likely reading from the context of the rest of the question, but the latter reading describes the group that is more reasonably removed from this kind of question.
(My case is the former and I didn't answer these questions.)
I think I mistakenly put down atheist I'm assuming there isn't a way to correct this
Currently in the middle of a >half-year sick leave, but since there were no choices perfectly applicable for this kind of a situation, answered the work-related questions as if I was currently working.
Also, at least some of the remote work questions seemed to assume that I would either be forced to go to my workplace XOR be remote working. I go to the office some of the time because I want to, not because I'm required to do so.
And a question: I answered that I'm not interested in buying a subscription, am I still entered for the one-year raffle? The "would buy if it was cheaper" felt wrong as I avoid all subscription payment services even if they seem cheap, having seen monthly service payments sneakily stack up on some people.
I've been in a recent discussion (guess with who) about the amount of violence people generally experience. I suppose it's middleclass or higher people in developed countries. I estimate it as pretty low, the other person estimates it as pretty high, I think.
I'm thinking about possible survey questions on the subject. For example, "Have you ever moved house to get away from (non-government?) violence? Other possible questions?
Risks from government violence are important, but I'd like to get at what's missing from public knowledge.
Maybe there should be a discussion (on the survey?) about how important organized crime is in world history.
Re: Dose of LSD in micrograms -- Maybe my experience is atypical, but I never heard any claims about how many micrograms of LSD were on tabs offered for sale. The survey required a number (or no answer), so I gave a number (one).
You don't include Anarchist in your political options, and you should. A person who identifies as an anarchist or libertarian socialist will have significant differences with the other options.
I’ll just do that right away / yup love surveys
I have a PhD, but I am taking classes currently and will probably end up with another degree. Is my formal education complete or not? I guessed that it is complete, but can be embellished after completion. I am puzzled about exactly what the question seeks to reveal, and why this would be interesting . What counts as complete? What counts as formal? Many persons who get a bachelors think thei education is complete,but some don’t count it as complete until they have a PhD, or some are satisfied with high school. I realize I am overthinking it, because I am an academia addict, but I can’t even predict what other people would think counts as complete.
When exactly do we get to take the survey ?
Left/right spectrum… I never thought this abstract one dimensional measure had a definite meaning, as it is at beast a projection from a multidimensional space. Events over the past few years have made its meaninglessness even more apparent. I have extreme views that might make me average out as centrist, depending on how the projection is performed. So I don’t think my answer is informative.
Maybe I've missed it, but where were the previous survey results published, or weren't they? It was a collection of 10-20 surveys if I remember correctly, and respondents were supposed to come up with a unique identifier to use.
'How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?'
Should that be 'ie' instead of 'eg'?
"Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID?"
I wonder if this answer should have three options: more, less, or no, as opposed to just two. I can maybe think of a contrived example for the "more" option - more companies have started to offer remote work, but will fly employees to HQ or offsites, etc.
Question about work during COVID had no option for people who were laid off during the lockdowns.
I wish you had separated the immigration question into legal and illegal. Big proponent of the former and of the many reforms needed. Proponent of actual enforcement of the latter.
Note for the "mental voice" question, my mental voice mostly uses "us" / "we", and that wasn't quite an option. I answered "I" since it's still first person but it's not quite accurate.
for the working remotely question, i worked in person and then during the lockdowns i was furloughed so stopped going into work but still got paid as part of a government program, rather than working from home or continuing to go into the office. I did go back to the office at certain points during the pandemic so i put continued to go into the office but i think maybe something like 'i stopped working during the pandemic' should be an option?
“What sex were you assigned at birth?”
I wasn’t assigned a sex at birth. I’m a mammal. Mammals are born male or female unless there’s a birth defect involving the in utero formation/development of the genitalia. Want to ask what my gender might be? Fine.
Of course, I flubbed the BMI question. Got distracted converting my weight into pounds even though there is a metric tab (sigh). Enjoy the 200 BMI (I'm 28.4 in reality).
"8. Will a nuclear weapon be detonated (including tests and accidents)?"
I interpret this to mean anywhere in the world, not just in relation to Ukraine. Perhaps that should be specified after numerous priming questions about Ukraine.
Re "Traumata": I lost a sibling, there was no option for something like that.
FYI, some of your money questions are going to show distorted data for folks who work in finance, because of asking them about "right now" at the end of the year, and because of your inconsistent use of "salary" vs "income". Finance types tend to have normal-to-low "salaries" but very large "bonuses" that arrive at the end of the year.
Wow, what a great set of questions this year! I especially appreciated the Qs about "how much/what kind of inner voice?" and "what is your estimate of the probability of AI-driven extinction?" I have spent a lot of time wondering what others think about those and am rapt to see where the results end up.
This is my yearly reminder to you that the "Country" question is really poorly formulated. You should split it between "country/ies you grew up in", "current country of residence", and "country/ies of cultural background/affinity", and allow multiple answers on each.
As a benefit, it would help you get more clarity into the questions of "race", which currently uses the god-awful American system of racial divisions, allowing you to get more clarity on whether "racial" things you're investigating are cultural vs. biological.
IMO conflating these things is almost as egregious as conflating "sex assigned at birth" with "gender identity".
My pet peeve in all of this was that the "ethnicity" question insists that any American whose ancestors lived in Europe, must have an ethnicity based on which *specific* country their ancestors lived in a hundred and fifty years ago (or whenever).
I happen to know which countries (plural) my ancestors lived in 150 years ago, but only in the sense that I know what my astrological sign is - that datum was "in the water" at the time I was growing up, to the extent that it was impossible to not know it. But neither one is at all significant to my identity, my sense of self, or my interaction with society.
If I were a culture warrior, I might suspect a deliberate attempt to play divide-and-conquer against the largest ethnic group in the contemporary United States, as we enter an age of increasingly strident identity politics.
For the survey question about LSD dosage I feel like there should’ve been an option for I don’t know the dosage. Back when I took it Street drugs were all of highly uncertain potency.
I'm finding the orgasm question surprisingly difficult. I'm a gay man with plenty of experience, but... I guess I've never really compared myself to my partners along that particular axis?
Also, surprised to learn that there are people who talk about this sort of thing with their friends. Although in retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised -- human behavior is always more diverse than I expect, I should update...
Sorry, I don't answer scientifically invalid questions like "sex assigned at birth". My sex was DETERMINED at birth, not "assigned".
Re "Work Status": I have a research position in a (quasi-non-)government research institute where I am allowed (but not required) to teach classes at the university it shares a building with, but I'm not currently teaching any. I still picked "Academics (on the teaching side)" -- should I have picked "Government work" instead?
Re "Subreddit": do you mean "Do you regularly read" or "Do you ever read"? (I answered assuming the former.)
Re "Meetup": it depends on what you mean by "want to" and "make it to any" -- I might attend one if it was within walking distance of me and at a time when I had nothing else to do. Still picked "I don't want to" because it'd feel dishonest to answer "can't make it to any" when there is one a one-hour train ride away.
Re "Immigration": do you mean de jure or de facto? Someone might think more people should be legally allowed to immigrate but we should spend more effort on keeping everybody else out, or conversely that it should be technically illegal for most people to immigrate so we can kick them out if need be without having to bother with due process but so long as they behave themselves we should generally turn a blind eye to them. (I can't remember anyone stating the latter position on immigration specifically, but I can on e.g. recreational drugs.) I picked the average of my replies to the de facto and de jure questions.
Re COVID: I assumed you mean "smell-/taste-related symptoms any more serious than due to the clogged nose" and "fatigue problems any more serious than due to the fever and poor sleep". Or did you mean any noticeable such symptoms at all?
Re "Have you gotten any doses of a COVID vaccine?": you mean by now, not by the time I got COVID, right? Was that deliberate? I'd assume the latter to anti-correlate with whether people get long COVID a lot more than the former (though I *have* heard about a few people where a vaccine seemed to heal their long COVID symptoms).
Re "your country's COVID response": ¿por qué no los dos? I don't think my country (or almost any other country) was even on the Pareto frontier of permissiveness and effectiveness, so it could have been both more permissive and more effective...
Re "mask mandate on flights": Do you mean during taxiing and takeoff or throughout the flight except for meals? (I picked the average of the two answers.) At cruise altitudes hospital-grade HEPA filters are active but I've heard of flights with delayed takeoff ending up being flu superspreader events before the filters were turned on.
Re "Do you work remotely now": a confounding factor is that until one year ago I lived a one-hour train ride away from my office (1 h 30 min door-to-door including walking from my place to the station and from the station to the office) and now I like within a 20-minute bike ride of my office. You might want to discard people who answered 3 or less to the "How long, in years, have you lived in your current neighborhood?" question when analyzing answers to questions like this.
Re "Where do you live now": you might want to give examples for each point of the scale. I live in downtown Turin, which is probably more dense than anywhere in the US ex. NY and NJ, but I still picked 2 rather than 1 because it's no Manila or Dhaka or Shanghai or even Milan or Naples, but I'm not quite sure this is what you have in mind.
Re "how hard is it for you to orgasm", do you mean "other people of your same sex *and age*"?
Re "psychotherapy", what about if I tried it but as a young child and don't quite know how well it worked anymore? (I skipped the question.)
Re "Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID": what if it *had* changed but is now back to late-2019 levels? (I picked "No".)
Re "Your close friends", do you mean right now or ever? (I assumed the latter because I don't have that many of the former)
Re "flashing or changing elements" -- they annoy me but not because they are distracting, just because they're gaudy (static unchanging e.g. Comic Sans annoys me just the same way). Does that still count?
Re "(off by a non-trivial amount)": what's a non-trivial amount? In this context I'd consider 30% "trivial" (unless I was talking to someone who has personally traveled from Paris to Moscow and/or back before), but I'm not sure you would...
I find it kind of funny that "philosophy" is a profession option, but literally the entire goddamned service sector (travel, restaurants, retail, etc) is relegated to "other - white collar" and "other - blue collar".
Readership may include those inclined to paranoia, or maybe just cautious.
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