One of the questions on internet usage asks how old the person was when they first used social media. I have visited the websites of Facebook, Twitter, etc on occasion but I have never signed up or logged in (ie had an account) with any of them. I am unsure if this means I have "used" social media under your definition. If the answer is no, there doesn't seem to be a way to indicate that since one has to input a number greater than 0
> If you notice any problems, please ask yourself “Is this a real objection rather than a nitpick? Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?”
Surely you can decide for yourself whether you want to count certain edge cases as social media. FWIW, I would count LiveJournal and Xanga as fairly standard examples, and both are described by wikipedia as social media/networking sites.
I did indeed count Livejournal and did not count Usenet (though possibly just because I didn't think of it), so I'm pleased to see that this is, if not a universal interpretation, at least not an n=1 interpretation.
having read the CTW with Jonathan Haidt I am now enlightened to understand that its the use of an algorithm to direct content towards you that gives social media that extra something that goes beyond information exchange tool.
I wish Tumblr had been on there — it's the only social media I really use regularly, and there are a decent number of Scott-readers (both fans and critics) over there.
I thought about counting Usenet (or BBSes), and LJ, but decided Facebook was the central sort of example. But it was one of the questions I spent too much time dithering over.
I entered "9999" for "age of owning a smartphone", since I've never owned one. I eventually decided I had used social media, especially when I saw that scot was counting youtube and substack.
> How many hours a day do you spend online, other than for work? Count playing online games. Don't count offline games, TV, etc.
This question seems very ambiguous to me. If watching TV doesn't count, does watching Netflix count? Watching YouTube videos? Reading blogs? Wikipedia? Web serials?
I'm guessing the intention here is "digital social interactions"..?
I mostly spend time online reading stuff, not interacting, and definitely counting this as online. Yes agree that Netflix and other streaming platforms is SLIGHTLY ambiguous but I'd count that as TV because it's a functional equivalent of putting a DVD into a player.
Depending on whether you're a lumper or a splitter, YouTube could be either. Most of my YouTube watching is on my TV, so there's no possibility of interaction. So is it still social, or is it another way to watch TV?
Yeah I don't really buy YT as social media because it's defined by interactivity and posting own content to me and I've never interacted or made yt posts (not that I use much YT). That said : fed by an algorithm is another aspect here and this fully applies to YT. TT isn't all that super interactive from what I've heard yet it's pure algorithm.
I counted online reading as online, even though in reality I first mass-save a bunch of stuff to online-read locally, and then read it in a viewer program that doesn't connecto to the network.
Based on how he talked about YouTube as a social media company, I think that would be included. Online videos where ordinary people can upload and other ordinary people can comment seems to be central examples for the survey.
That said, I think watching network news online would not count as "online."
In an urban location. In a rural area, it’s a weird question. I just put 1, since it doesn’t bother me unless a tree falls on the road which is against the spirit of the question
...actually, in retrospect, the intent of these question is unclear to me: am I not bothered by these things because I'm not in an environment where they happen enough to bother me, or because I hypothetically wouldn't be bothered even if I lived in a place where all that stuff happens?
I took it as something like "would your life personally be better if we as a society dedicated resources to fixing this problem"
So if you never encounter it, or if you encounter it but not enough to matter, or if you encounter it a lot but happen not to mind, that would all count as "no"
When I'm birding residential areas, I prefer to walk through the alleys rather than along the streets, since the weeds and untrimmed bushes that one finds in alleys provide better bird habitat than mown lawns and manicured shrubs. Overgrown vacant lots make for even better habitat, so more and better birds.
I have the type of "overgrown/dead plants" at my house that clearly do belong in this list (along with peeling paint) because I'm a lazy slob, but they clearly aren't bothering me.
[Not important] This could be a deliberate design choice, but I don't like the 1-10 rating scale for Left v Right as it does not have a middle. I think best is -5 to 5, more clear / symmetric.
Yeah, this is a common technique in psych to get more accurate answers (otherwise people bunch up exactly at the midpoint).
The issue is that if you put numbers like 1–10, lots of people make an off-by-one error and think 5 is the middle option. I usually prefer verbal labels because of that.
My memory tells me it's exactly the opposite: that people usually don't want to answer the middle point, and including it will create non-normal distributions that restrict the use of some basic statistics? Might differ based on the question obviously.
This is also a problem with long COVID. I had the impression from reading a couple of papers on long COVID that getting out of breath easily or experiencing brain fog for a couple of months then getting better absolutely does count and makes up the majority of cases, and that was the case for me, but it's not clear whether the question is asking about current symptoms or symptoms at the time the respondent had it.
My sense of taste got weird, but after 2-3 years I think I'm over it. This is long covid, but it's not the sort of thing people think about when they hear the phrase.
>>How strictly did your parents limit your Internet use as a young child (eg age 7)?
would it be more productive to have an option called "i did not care at all for internet back then, so my parents didn't even think about it?" or would that fall into the category "there was no internet back then"?
also, the first social media usage question has "youtube (this time it blocks all videos, not just comments)" as a possible answer, instead of just "youtube".
When I was a teenager the internet was very new, so there weren't that many places to go. Internet speeds were so low that the best you could do was individual pictures, slowly loading one at a time. There wasn't nearly as much to protect kids from, though it was still non-zero. There was no Google or other good way to search for that stuff, so it was also harder to find bad things. A few years later porn infiltrated pretty much everything, so that advertisements on otherwise reputable websites might include porn. By then I was an adult, so my parents didn't know or regulate. That was a weird time.
Yeah, at the literal age of 7, my nerd of a dad was actually trying to convince me to use the internet more, but I really didn't want to. It wasn't until a few years later that I found any online content that could hold the attention of a child (it was Homestar Runner)
This question really puts in stark releif how much things have changed
I distinctly remember that sometime around (I think) the very early '00s, I was sent a link by an online acquaintance to some fun web quiz or something like that, and only noticed about twenty minutes later that the site was absolutely loaded with pornographic banner ads. I mentioned it to her and she was like "Oh, I didn't see them either." They were large and prominent, we both just had learned banner ad blindness. I still lived with my parents at the time so it was lucky that I eventually noticed--that sort of thing would have freaked them out.
Yes, it was a very weird time. Perfectly normal banner ads for like, toothpaste or something would cycle through with obvious links to porn sites and sometimes included full nudity. The way ads often worked, it didn't seem to matter much what kind of site you were on. I think the ad space was sold through a company that had no direct relation to the website hosting the banners, and apparently no one was doing quality control to confirm the ads were okay for where they were being used.
How long have you been reading ACX has no option between 1-2 years and since it was SSC! I'm not misremembering that ACX has been around for at least 4 years, am I?
It's really easy to make a mistake in the "annual salary" question if you live in a country where income is usually expressed per-month. Stackoverflow surveys confirmed this, they got unusually weird results from Poland, Czech Republic etc, it turns out this was the reason. I literally thought about the Stackoverflow blog post on this when I saw the question, but then did all the calculations in my head in monthly amounts, converted and still almost made the mistake.
I suggest splitting the question into two, an income question and whether you're expressing as monthly or annually. This would complicate result processing but not by much, you can convert the results back to annual with a simple Excel formula.
I was more confused by "pre-tax". I ignored my payroll-taxes. Also, did not add the child-benefits, "Kindergeld" (ca. 10k/year with 3 kids). Hope that is ok. Similar ballpark.
I think you probably meant child benefits / allowance since you mentioned "Kindergeld", which is money the state pays you because you have a child. Child support is money that a parent usually pays after after a divorce to support the child living with the other parent or someone else (Kindesunterhalt).
In standard US terms, for a salaried or hourly employee, "pre-tax income" means the amount your employer pays you in wages and bonuses (including stock awards and profit sharing, if applicable) before payroll and income taxes are withheld.
Tax credits (government benefits paid through the income tax system) are not counted; e.g. our equivalent of kindergeld is the "child tax credit", where the federal government credits a certain amount of money towards your taxes owed for each child you have, and you get a refund check if this means you withheld more money than you end up owing after tax credits.
Other government payments usually aren't counted, either, unless they're earned income (i.e. wages for current government employees or pensions for retired employees) or monetary benefits intended to support you while you aren't working due to disability, old age, temporary situational unemployment, etc.
Thank you! Thus I failed. ;) In German: 'Brutto' (pre-tax) resp. "netto" (post-t). Usually, statisticians will ask for "brutto", as the netto will vary strongly. Should Scott want to check our income or how it correlates with other stuff, it would make more sense to ask for post-tax, I presume.
Yup, this. Also Europeans just don't think about pre-tax, it's automatically deducted. I just think about how much money gets into my account each month (I get an SMS from the bank with it).
Not fully I guess, because there are a bunch of taxes companies pay directly for employing you (but still go towards your pension, health care etc) that aren't included in your pay package. I have no idea if this situation is the same in the US.
Being in part responsible for frickin' payroll, I wish more of them bloody *did* know it, too many times having to explain to working adults who have been working for years why their pay is different this week (due to how the PAYE system works) and no, they have to get on to Revenue to fix it, I can't do it for them.
It's not simply young people in their first job, there's a lot of older people who have no idea how the tax system works, tax rates, credits, etc.
In the US, there's a payroll or "FICA" (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) tax that is used to fund Social Security (old age and disability pensions) and Medicare (singlish-payer health care coverage for retirees). It's assessed so half is nominally paid by the employee and half nominally paid by the employer. The employee half is counted as part of your take-home income, while the employer half is not.
The FICA rate is 7.65% for each half (15.3% total) on the first $168,800 of payroll income and 1.35% of payroll income above $168,800. If you're self-employed, you pay both halves of the tax (15.3% below the limit and 2.7% above it).
Most people who are salaried or hourly employees never think about the employer side of the payroll tax unless we're economics or public policy nerds because we never see or hear about that money.
So what is the primary negotiation number for a European white collar employee? In the US its this "pre-tax" salary. I am hoping the answer is not something like non one negotiates, its determined by your union.
When you are taking a new job, how does the job offer specify what your wages would be? Do they just tell you pre-tax income (and that's the last time you think about it), or are they able to calculate your take-home income and quote that to you?
In the US, it's always pre-tax income quoted in job offers and annual salary reviews because our tax system is hairy enough that your employer can't know with confidence and precision what your after-tax income would be, as it depends on if you have income from other sources (second job, hobby business, taxable investment income, etc), how many children you have, whether or not you own your home and if so how much you pay in property taxes and mortgage interest, how much you give to charity, whether or not you're married and if so how much income does your spouse have, how much you pay into tax-advantaged retirement savings, etc.
Not true, and generalizing about Europeans is silly in general, since it's like 50 pretty different countries. E.g. Swedes definitely think about pre-tax, but by that they mean post payroll tax but pre income tax, so pre like half the taxes.
This, and also "pre-tax" is a loaded question in more than one way.
Here in Spain, for example, we pay (among quite a few other minor taxes) two main ones on our paycheck:
1) Income tax (IRPF) - This is the run-of-the-mill progressive tax, bracketed, you pay more (in %) if you earn more. Brackets go from 15 to 45%, approx.
2) Social Security (pays for public medical system + public pensions + job loss insurance + lots of minor public services and pensions), which is paid part from your paycheck, but in largest part "by your employer". The total amount is 30%, partition is 6%/24%. Meaning that, if you get, like, 2000€/month, "gross", a surcharge of around 600€ is added. So, your employer is paying 2600€, from which you see your "gross" or "pre-tax" of ~2000€, from which you pay your part of Social Security, income tax and assorted minor taxes, and get your "take-home" pay of ~1600€ (I'm deliberately simplifying it a lot). Thus, my "pre-tax" does not match at all my full salary cost.
Besides, if you are curious, this Social Security is apart, and added, to the regular income tax. So our real tax brackets reach upwards of 50% with ease, and in some cases as high as 75%.
I'd suggest adding a pre-tax and post-tax question, both for consistency reasons and for us financial/fiscal nerds. And clarifying about if taxes are to be only considered "income" taxes.
I think he's talking about the gross income as it shows up on your tax forms. I'm assuming there's a tax form I guess.
It's a *very rough* guess as to how financially prosperous you are. The converter in the link only does currency conversion. There's no PPP, no taxes (income or consumption) included. I didn't check while I was doing it, but someone who's in the position of a traditional housewife could answer 0 income, and it could be completely misleading.
I'm also confused about the correct answer here. My salary? Total income from our 2023 tax return divided by two? (It's sitting right here on my desk!) Total income from 2023 tax return?
This isn't just an ACX issue though, I feel like every dataset that gets into income for households of mixed composition ends up dealing with it in a very unclear fashion.
He’s asking individual questions about personal income. There are some questions that mention family, this isn’t one of them. I don’t find that unclear at all, on this or other surveys. Income is all personal income.
I agree with that. Income is useless without taking into account wealth. A pensioner playing down his wealth will have a low income but potentially a good lifestyle. Here, though, Scott is possible trying to associate what class people think they are with gross earnings.
Yep, agreed on both this and pre-tax problems. Russian salaries, for instance, have a weird situation where there's the official number (let's call it 100%) but the employer actually pays ~129% and the employee receives 87% because 13% count against the salary but the rest are social payments on top.
This is like when I did a little investigation into names. There is no limit on the number of names a person can have at any one time, or over a lifetime, or types of names, or limit to how long each name can be, or the characters in any given name. This is for real world people.
I'm not sure how you ask a question like this in a way where you can figure out a reasonably reliable answer as to how personally prosperous a person is, when the person could be living anywhere in the world.
Even "gross income" is only a vague wave in the direction of prosperity. How much you can actually spend varies a lot.
I am confused by what counts as social media. For facebook/instagram/tiktok/etc I never visit or only when absolutely forced. For twitter there's <5 accounts I occasionally visit, and I've never posted/liked/etc.
But I do watch youtube videos, subscribe, like, maybe comment once per month. Does this count as using social media? Feels like no to me, but "What social media do you use?" seems to think so.
The mental health section isn't very specific on timeframes. I read it as current, major or persistent issues rather than historical ones. But it could be read different ways depending on how much you make mental health a part of your personality.
The US viewpoint doesn't quite fit with UK realities. The Tories are not really conservative any more. Socioeconomic class is based more around culture than money. A US detached house is probably equivalent to a UK terraced one. But yes that perhaps falls into nitpicky.
How happy are you with your paid subscription? I feel frustrated not to be able to say that it enriches my life by informing me of things I had not thought about. It doesn't so much change my views as provide me with things to have views about.
I think the point being made is that equivalent price/value of a US detached house will get you a terraced house in the UK, which is just saying that the UK has terrible quality housing (space per person as well as quality).
Oh. I was assuming the question was just about the physical house. If Scott wants that information, it would be simpler to ask about the value of the house.
Yes I think that is about right. Even if you have a posh job in London (which is where all the posh jobs are) you are still going to be living in a flat or terraced house.
There’s plenty of homes , from large old houses, to even council (or ex council ) houses with gardens in London. Not necessarily affordable but people do live there. I don’t think that New York or Boston are all that different anyway.
How should a PhD student déclare their work status? I'm technically still a student but I don't have any classes, I have a salary and I mainly do research and teach so I feel my experience is closer to academics, although I don't feel confortable calling myself this either
Same. I don't know how to properly answer that question. Is a PhD student and junior researcher at a government research center a job for the government, or a non-profit, or an academy, or a student?
What is the difference of living in a "condo" or an "apartment" (up to 10 units resp. 10+units)? All right, I answered "apt. up to ten". Thus picking nits. But I am confused, honestly. Anyone knows?
Yeah, this threw me too – I live in a co-op in an apartment building with more than 11 units. I chose "condo / duplex / rowhouse / etc.", but I wasn't sure what the intent of the question was, so that might have been wrong.
Appreciate the answers! Seems a single "apartment" is always "rented" - while condos or houses are owned. But as all of those are often let for rent and thus "rented" - we are still confused. Or maybe Scott thinks: 'Condos that are not apartments'. Or: "cheaper, poorer, crowded places" (apartments can be quite large and expensive, though).
Some question are unclear. How do I rate my attractiveness? Should I rate it with respect to my age and sex? Should an average 20 years old girl rate herself more attractive than the same woman at the age of 60?
What is life satisfaction? Over what time horizon? Weeks, monthes, years? Same about many other question. There is no time horizon given, making a question unclear.
What is gender? This concept is so vague that I think I don't have gender identity.
> How old were you when you got your own smartphone?
What should I answer if I never had a smartphone? And what is "my own"? If it was given to my by work, and did not belong to me, does it count?
I'm in the same boat as you re: smartphone; I left the question blank, since that seemed to be the most consistent with the rest of the survey's methodology.
I went with how attractive I am right now in my middle age. Not sure about women, but as a man, I've gotten older, balder, a little fatter, and more gray hair. Aging definitely has an impact, but some people age better than others.
I figured it was most fair to answer the attractiveness question on the scale of all humans of all ages rather than just all male humans in their 40s.
I answered same as you with an absolute scale rather than relative. So now I'm quite curious to know what percentage of survey participants answered it the same way.
>Should an average 20 years old girl rate herself more attractive than the same woman at the age of 60?
I mean, the Oktrends blog and Dataclysm the book would definitely say so, and the 20 year old would get several OOM more messages?
I feel like there's a pretty central interpretation to most of these, and quibbling about the details or edge cases is impractical and just leads to lizardman constants in the answers.
They're social science survey answers, not tablet-carven truths that need to be rigorously provable. Just answer whatever you feel like the right answer is.
For disorders, how should marriage and adoption be counted? I assume it's about genetic relatives, so if my wife or adopted child or step-mom has a condition, I should leave that off?
I didn't think of Substack as a social medium, so I had to go back and revise an earlier answer. Does LiveJournal count? I've been active there since around 2002.
Notes made it much more social, but if all you do is subscribe to people and read the emails without commenting, it really isn’t a social media. Of course, you commented here, exposing yourself to the social media
I just crossed off mentally Substack from the list. If blog comments are "social media", then so much more forums and the like. Discord, or at least most servers I've tried, feels more like the old chat rooms. But forums and blog comments are their own thing. If you were to count that, is Wikipedia a social media site, if you edit and sometimes interact in Talk pages?
What’s happening here in the comments isn’t distinct from media like Reddit. The only difference is that the top level reddit post is more often a link, but it isn’t always. It’s a post by a Redditor.
The other difference is that only Scott can post at the top level, but reddit groups allow certain members to post and there it’s also restricted.
Hm, I just assumed whatever passed for social media when you joined the ranks of the eternal September counts. Livejournal, your favourite phpbb forum, Ward's Wiki, that dodgy bbs that came online for two hours a day, maybe even Fidonet echomail... Maybe that was wrong, IDK. Past "regularly interacting with stream of consciousness dumps from complete strangers", how do you draw the line?
I went with when I joined LiveJournal, but maybe should have gone back further to Usenet.
It seems weird to record it by respondent age rather than by calendar year. A millennial saying they joined social media at 18 means something very different from a zoomer who joined it at 18.
If people provide their current ages then it's trivial to convert between the two, but it would still seem more natural to ask for calendar year and then convert it to age if required rather than to ask for age.
I defined "social media" has having algorithmic feeds, so not LiveJournal, forums, or IRC. Otherwise my answer would've been about 15 years younger than I put down. (my GameFAQs account is old enough to drink...)
I previously mentioned the time I went to a bar and a guy in a rubber suit was being tied up and suspended from the ceiling. (Yeah, it was that kind of bar). No penetration involved, but I'm kind of assuming that guy had a sexual motive.
If I counted kink without genitals of at least one party being touched by the other party this would nearly double my (already approximate) body count. I considered doing that but then realised it was likely I'm the top few % either way and assumed "penetration" included oral and anal orifice wise and digital and lingual insertable wise, I'm not counting CBT, impact play, foot stuff or bondage even if sexually driven and arousing.
Mmm, I'd be broad-minded on "what counts as sex?" If it's meant to arouse you sexually and it does arouse you sexually and you get tingly feelings (whether or not a complete orgasm) then by jinkies, that's good enough for me, even if it does mean dressing up as Big Bird and hanging from the ceiling while the person or persons below throw rice at you and nobody touches their jiggly bits together.
If we're going by strict legal definitions, though, I suppose penetration is what counts.
Yeah, this threw me off too. I left the answer blank not because I'm too shy to answer, but because it the technically-correct answer felt too misleading with this clause.
Yeah, also left it blank. My “body count” is high enough that I don’t remember all the details of all the encounters so there’s no way I could recompute it based on someone else’s definitions…
"In his deposition for the Jones lawsuit, Clinton denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. Based on the evidence—a blue dress with Clinton's semen that Lewinsky provided—Starr concluded that the president's sworn testimony was false and perjurious.
During the deposition, Clinton was asked "Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1?" The judge ordered that Clinton be given an opportunity to review the agreed definition. Afterwards, based on the definition created by the Independent Counsel's Office, Clinton answered, "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." Clinton later said, "I thought the definition included any activity by [me], where [I] was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies" which had been explicitly listed (and "with an intent to gratify or arouse the sexual desire of any person"). In other words, Clinton denied that he had ever contacted Lewinsky's "genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks", and effectively claimed that the agreed-upon definition of "sexual relations" included giving oral sex but excluded receiving oral sex."
As I said on the question, I don't want to include an explicit description of every possible sexual act and whether it counts or not on a survey that under-18s will be taking.
A less-dumb and still concise definition I've seen is "direct genital contact for the purpose of fun/pleasure/orgasm", which, yes, is a *little* explicit, but not much more than "penetration".
Additionally, I really think that "whatever you think of as sex" will give less dumb answers than "penetration".
Problems I am having with this question:
(1) I am legitimately factually confused about what you mean by "penetration": does this only mean PIV or does penetrative fingering count?
(1a) If you only mean PIV: do you mean to say that most cis lesbians have never had a sex partner? (someone pointed out to me that at least in heavily queer communities like ours, this will bias towards saying women have less sex than men even if this is not really meaningfully true)
(1b) If penetrative fingering counts I have no idea what my answer is because that's not a distinction meaningful to me so I don't record or remember it.
(2) For most sociological purposes "did these people have a sexual experience together where maybe they were naked and maybe an orgasm happened etc." is just way more relevant than "did This One Specific Sex Act happen". (admittedly not for all - "how many people have you had PIV with" is quite relevant for some purposes! - but the wording seems to imply you'll draw additional conclusions from this about Sex In General)
(3) When I complained about this to some friends, I had *multiple people* tell me "yeah that definition is dumb so I answered as though a less dumb question had been asked". I will personally abide by the definition (uh, though per (1) above I'm not actually sure what definition you meant and my answers in those two cases are *quite different*) because statistics are sacred but empirically a lot of people will not, so your data will end up measuring *neither* the question you say you're asking nor the thing you're actually asking.
>How have your politics changed in the past ten years
expressed as a movement left or right? Does this even make sense now?
>How would you describe your opinion on anthropogenic climate Change?
I would describe it as highly speculative and uncertain.
Immigration - a perfect world would have more openness, but wouldn’t need it. Easy to goof this up, so in the real world, no idea.
>How would you describe your opinion of the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?
Not familiar with this term, and the definition isn’t a lot of help. Maybe this is a polite way to ask if I am a racist? People differ in socially relevant ways, but what would this mean for races? Social norms should be different depending on the racial identity of those interacting?
>How strict are you / would you be with your child when they are 7?
Fortunately for me, my kids were not very interested in internet/social media until after becoming adults.
>God tells you beforehand that there will never be any major existential risk from AI, a
I have trouble with this sort of hypothetical. Basically, it is trying to get me to short-circuit my actual evidence gathering and make a judgement based on… something?
Rather than asking whether I would wave a magic wand that halted AI research, better to ask, would I feel relieved if some bizarre evidence were to appear indicating that self-improving AGI is simply impossible, to the point where even Yudkowsky is saying “okay, never mind.”? Hard to imagine. I still need to think it over. I would probably feel relieved to not have that on my list, but deeply conflicted about the true significance of waving that wand. We can stipulate whatever we want in the thought experiment, but that just makes it an empty exercise for me. To Remove all uncertainty is to remove all realism and relevance.
I left the political spectrum question blank, because I'm a strong libertarian (constitutionalist rather than anarchocapitalist) and don't consider myself to be either "left" or "right"---but I'm definitely not moderate or middle of the road.
I don't consider "right" to be a well defined category. I've seen it used for anarchocapitalists, constitutionalist libertarians, classical liberals, American constitutionalist conservatives, Old World king/army/land/established church conservatives, nationalists, racists, fascists, and various more esoteric positions that disagree with each other on nearly everything. For a long time "left" seemed more monolithic, but we've been seeing splits there too of late.
I strongly suspect "political spectrum" from a US-centric view, as Scott tends to write from the US perspective most of the time. Then, as the bonmot goes, a typical Democrat would be a conservative in most of Europe, and a typical Republican would be a far-right-winger, so what do I do with that question?
"a typical Democrat would be a conservative in most of Europe, and a typical Republican would be a far-right-winger"
I'm amazed that so people repeat this, when it doesn't seem true to me at all. There's only one issue where this looks clearly true, and that's universal health care (which is itself confounded by the fact that the US is many times larger than every other developed country). Maybe it's true of taxes and welfare spending, but I'd expect these to vary a lot in every country and I've never seen anyone add these up and show that they're clearly higher in nearly every European country.
On the other hand, my impression is that on immigration, trans issues and affirmative action, the Democrats are far, far to the left of the centre-left position in most western countries. I could be wrong; I'm neither American nor European.
I'd be curious to know (a) what country you're from and (b) what makes you think that statement is true.
Historically left wing parties in Europe have been socialist - that is they were often founded by labour unions and believed in large state ownership. Saying the Democratic Party isn’t in favour of free health care is to say it isn’t socialist.
Trans and immigration (etc) are liberal ideas, not socialist. Nevertheless left wing parties in Europe have absorbed some of this, to their detriment.
Affirmative action wouldn’t be relevant for generations of European countries until recently, and in any case the US is repairing race relations based on its history which doesn’t apply universally.
(To anticipate some replies here I know that there were some union links with the Democratic Party and some democratics are socialist. It did have a socialist element, also it had a racist element. It’s a strange party. )
The classical political spectrum would be based on socioeconomic class analysis and stereotypes rather than identity. What would "left" and "right" have meant in 1980? That's how I interpreted it, anyway.
It's interesting that you describe your opinion as speculative and uncertain. Most people with doubt would say things like "I'm not wedded to it" or "I'm still making up my mind".
“The classical political spectrum would be based on socioeconomic class analysis and stereotypes rather than identity. “
If we were betting on that, how would we settle the bet?
“What would "left" and "right" have meant in 1980? That's how I interpreted it, anyway.”
In 1980 it made a bit more sense. But only a bit. I guess my point would be, I have trouble projecting my ideological trajectory onto a one dimensional graph at all, much less one that supposedly makes sense of how people talk about left and right.
“It's interesting that you describe your opinion as speculative and uncertain. Most people with doubt would say things like "I'm not wedded to it" or "I'm still making up my mind".”
I’d say I seem to have a bias. My impulse on reading a climate pessimist is to think, must I believe this? When I read optimists, I am more likely to think, can I believe this? So maybe not wedded, but engaged and a bit self-conscious about it. Persuaded but not particularly confident.
No ID key option this year to make correlations with the prediction contest etc? I'm putting my ID key as my e-mail address, but it's not actually a valid e-mail address.
Missing option: "The internet existed when I was a young child [and, in my case, it was not even limited to just research centers], but my family didn't have an internet connection".
"How old were you when you got your own smartphone? IE a phone capable of browsing the Internet." This is a weird definition. In the 2000s there were many phones that were capable of some very basic web browsing, but wouldn't usually be considered smartphones. Even my 2003 Siemens A55 was capable of some very very basic web browsing, so was the original Motorola RAZR flip phone. I expect that many people will put when they got a "modern", touchscreen smartphone even if their previous dumpphones would count under your definition.
"End all social media": are small, independent forums and blogs also considered social media, or only huge sites like the ones listed?
"Do you believe in the supernatural? (ghosts, vital energy, spiritual beings, etc)" Ambiguous if God is included: the examples suggest no, the question itself suggests yes.
The internet certainly existed in 1989. There are various starting dates you could argue for: 1969 when ARPANET started, 1974 when the term "internet" first appeared in an RFC, 1982 or 1983 when TCP/IP was standardised, 1986 when NSFNet started. The first commercial ISPs launched in 1989.
Yes, I know. I was explaining that I was taking the "internet didn't exist" option to include "we didn't have it yet" as there was no response option for the latter - which would only make sense as a comment if I *did* know the internet already existed.
Oh wow, I didn't even notice the smartphone question was "phone capable of browsing the internet, including feature phones". I know *exactly* when I got my first internet-capable phone, which was a feature phone. I have an extremely hazy idea of when I got a smartphone, and accordingly left it blank.
+1 to all of that. I suppose that will be common for those between 40 and 50. Not old enough for "didn't exist" (or, as I suppose one should read it, "didn't exists in a practical form"), and in many cases, old enough to be the first ones in the family to connect, explore and teach the rest.
Even as a 31 year old, when I was 7 we had internet access at home and used it occasionally at school but I just had no interest in using it at home. It basically felt like a boring adult thing like Microsoft Word.
Kids these days, started off with their fancy Word programme, never even heard of WordStar and having to put the floppy in to a separate drive because the first drive was running the floppy with the OS 😀 (that was *my* first introduction to The Wonderful World of Computers when I was in my early twenties, in an educational context):
You Western colonizers think you're all hard, but you're soft. Soft as a newborn imperialist baby chick. Try using EinsteinWriter for a living, then I'll be impressed.
I interpreted "the Internet" as meaning WWW. Usenet and IRC are technically "internet", of course (and constituted the bulk of the internet before the web started becoming broadly available in the early-to-mid 90s), but are immensely qualitatively different from what we now think of as "internet". I had access to CompuServe and a local BBS as a fairly young child, and would occasionally use them under moderate parental supervision in order to download encyclopedia and news-wire articles for school projects, but I clicked "didn't exist" for the seven-years-old question.
In order to be most useful, those questions should very probably be cross-tabulated with age, since the significance of parents feeling the need to meter or restrict "internet" access is very different in the dial-up BBS era, the early WWW era, or the "Web 2.0" era.
It doesn't seem "immensely qualitatively different" to me. Sure, today the UX is flashier, the moderation has to be more sophisticated, and the backend protocols are different, but today I use Reddit pretty much the same way I used to use USENET, and Discord the same way I used to use IRC.
Yes, there are definitely places that are very close analogs to pre-web online services in both function and purpose, but there's a ton of stuff that doesn't have close analogs. I could limit my daughter to a handful of selected subreddits, reuters.com, and wikipedia and thus give her something qualitatively similar (but vastly greater in scope) to what I had access to at a little older than her current age, but my experience represented nearly-unrestricted access to my local dial-up service in 1988, while her experience would represent very strict restrictions.
I think everyone aged 20 - 45 has the same issue where "the internet" (if you were on it) was something totally different between the ages of 7/16.
At some point in the 2000s, "Letting your kid freely use the internet" transformed from having vibes of "letting your kid tinker with harmless electronics" to "letting your kid develop a meth habit".
It should be known by anyone answering this that the question about joint hypermobility has potential use testing a hypothesis about prevalence in trans people, and therefore also potentially has use in detecting trans people non consensually.
For more context, this hypothesis has previously been written about on ACX with results from an earlier version of the survey, where he also mentioned the additional question for this year.
Well, you said "Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?" so here goes...
This was mentioned last time. The gender question at the start. I can guarantee you there are many people who are upset with the way it's worded. As someone put it last time, "cisgender" is equivalent "heathen". Yes, it has a supposed neutral meaning as "non-transgender" or "non-Christian", but in practice it is asking you to implicitly endorse an ideology by agreeing to the description. And I don't think this is fair, and I don't think many people here would be happy with the question "are you a Christian or a heathen?"
Worse, even putting aside my emotion, I don't know how to accurately answer the question, without saying something I consider misleading or false. My own perception of myself is: I am not a "cisgender male", I have not chosen a male identity, or discovered a male identity. I am male, as a matter of entirely objective, external fact. That is my perception. I do not perceive that I have a gender, if that means something different from sex. I do not in any deliberate way "perform" or "identify" with a set of masculine characteristics, and I'd consider it dishonest and/or uncivilised if I did.
So I either have to be told my perceptions are false and to give an answer that feels misleading and dishonest, or I have to answer "other" and presumably mess up the survey results, since I don't think that's what you want.
I am really not trying to start a fight (though I'm sure I'll be accused of doing so). I really just wish there was a politically-neutral (and easily answerable) phrasing of this question, especially when every other question in your surveys is very meticulously so.
Did I not read a comment, extremely similar to this, from the last survey?
For what it's worth, if a Christian (or a Muslim) asks me to define myself as religious/heathen, or religious/infidel, I know what's the correct answer. Anyway, the "mu" option is there, in the "Other" section. As for a politically-neutral way, there isn't, and there won't be. Euphemism treadmills will guarantee that. You either take "their" language and make it yours (and ignore any and all voices saying you're doing it wrong, or at least until 70% of the way into the hyperstitious cascade), or abandon public space. And I, for one, am not about to abandon.
"Did I not read a comment, extremely similar to this, from the last survey?"
I think so. It wasn't me, but I'm probably repeating significant parts of it, as I was annoyed it didn't get addressed. (Actually I think there were quite a few such comments).
I don't understand this: "and ignore any and all voices saying you're doing it wrong, or at least until 70% of the way into the hyperstitious cascade". Who are the ones saying you're doing it wrong? Left or right in this case? And which hyperstitious cascade changes what exactly?
Sorry, I was trying to be terse while referencing what I expected was common ACX lore.
I'm not woke (nor anti-woke), nor was a SJW when that was a thing. I'm not even "left", and I distaste the current flavor of the word "progressive". Thus, when I use some of "those" words (you know which ones, but anything cis/trans is usually one of these), I regularly have some "holier than thou" types saying I'm using them wrong. Despite that, sometimes those words have non-negligible amounts of meaning. So I take a page from "their" manual and reclaim (or "reappropiate") them. If the only ones using "cis" were "they", then "we" are a) Left with a lack of a useful word to describe a thing, and forced to invent a new one (like "non-trans"), or to explain why we don't need at all a new word (while in the process demonstrating why we do, indeed, need it) b) giving up public space, and, through evaporative cooling, cementing "their" grip on the language. Despite THAT, sometimes a word comes to signify something so strongly you simply cannot utter it (like those words so sacred that are thus referenced only by their initial). THOSE you have lost to the hyperstitious cascade. But I don't think "cis" is there yet. So, I defend its usefulness.
Consider, however, you can apply this to both left- and right-coded words.
And consider than the fact that I also act and seem and feel male, and have a gender that matches my chromosomes, does not in any way affect the previously said. I can now say that I crossdress, or that I have intersexual genitalia (just to confuse), and it is still valid.
I think it ought to be a norm that when one objects to terminology they propose their own replacements. It isn't one (yet?), of course, but I think all such discussions would be more productive this way
In that spirit: what would you have put for the category labels on this question?
I think alternatives have been proposed before, and appear to have been ignored, but I admit I could be wrong about that.
Personally, I'd prefer the question be scrapped and replaced with something like "do you identify as trans/fluid-gendered/blah-blah-the-entire-200-letter-or-whatever-it-is-now-acronym?" And that can have options for all the different identities, and simply a "no" for the rest of us.
If not that, an additional option on the existing question for "I already answered the sex question, and don't think there's anything more to say".
If not that, a terser "object to the premise of the question".
If not *that*, at the very least a note in the question description (like many other questions have) saying "if you don't think you have a gender separate from your sex, select Other" so that we know that Other won't be taken as "my gender is a 14-word-description that must be not be truncated or I'm being oppressed".
I agree with you that that should be a norm, but this topic can get so much hostility even in this free-speech space, that I was nervous enough just making the objection.
EDIT: sorry if this was a bit too snarky, I'm touchy at the number of times I've been yelled at for merely raising these questions.
What word would you suggest? If you put Male, many trans people would select that result. Male cis gender might offend people, but it’s most likely to get accurate results.
“Cisgender” is simply the official term for someone who is not transgender. It doesn’t matter if you’re cis by default rather than having actively identified as such—the same is true for the vast majority of cisgender people. It’s absolutely accurate to be describing you as cisgender, regardless of your endorsement of the term.
Now, are the terms “cisgender” and especially “cis” primarily used by the trans community, often in a pejorative way? Sure. Same thing with how “homosexual” as a noun was primarily used by in far-right discourse to the point where gay people find it weirdly uncomfortable now, even as bisexuals and asexuals happily call themselves such. That doesn’t mean “homosexual” isn’t the technically correct term.
You could try throwing a new word onto the euphemism treadmill if you want, but I doubt it would help.
> “Cisgender” is simply the official term for someone who is not transgender.
I agree with @ascend on this one: yes, this is an official term, as long as you accept the official terminology -- which not everyone does. It is indeed quite similar to asking e.g. "Do you 1). believe in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, or are you 2). a Hell-bound infidel ?" For an atheist, the correct answer is technically (2), but committing to it requires accepting a certain frame of mind that the atheist might not naturally possess.
(And I say this as someone who did pick the "cisgender" option)
I think there’s an important difference between these cases, namely the actual origin of the words. As an atheist, one presumably thinks “hellbound” is factually inaccurate. “Infidel” is derived from the same meaning as “infidelity”—meaning disloyalty. In contrast “atheist” is the Greek “a” prefix in front of “theist” (meaning someone who does believe in a god). Even if “atheist” were to become an insult, the linguistic origin of the word is still objectively correct in a way “hellbound infidel” could never be.
“Cis” is not a made-up prefix; it’s latin and is also applied in other contexts, such as chemistry (e.g. cis and trans isomers). “Cis” is fundamentally the opposite of “trans”. If you would describe yourself as “not transgender” then that is very literally just the less technical definition of “cisgender”. Even if you want to define “transgender” in a way totally outside of transgender mentality—saying that “transgender” means “people with a certain mental disorder” or “people making stuff up to be special snowflakes” or whatever, “cisgender” (i.e. the opposite of transgender) is still the natural and sensible term.
I don't think that etymology matters all that much; what matters is how the words are used and the belief networks they imply, not their construction. To put it another way, I would feel the same if instead of "cisgender/transgender" people used the terms "qwer/tyui" to mean the same things.
Hmm, so you’d be equally bothered by “non-transgender/transgender” as survey options? I feel like even for a completely nonsensical belief network like “I think that my blurgle is actually a smeltic, rather than a narg” it would be very easy for me to say that I was a non-whatever-the-fuck-that-would-be-called.
This is also coming from the perspective of someone who actively dislikes being asked their “preferred pronouns” and leaves that blank whenever it’s an option so that people can just assume them instead. It’d feel like being asked my “preferred name” when I literally just go by a name that my parents picked for me, which I use regardless of whether or not I’d prefer it to other names. So I WOULD also be annoyed by a survey question that asked for a “preferred gender identity” because of the implication of a decision where there wasn’t one.
But being cisgender doesn’t require having thought “Yep, I’m definitely [gender that is the same as assigned at birth].” It just means NOT having done the opposite of that.
I think that someone who actively disliked the term "cisgender" would find "non-transgender" more acceptable, because it only implies the rejection of the alternative. That is to say, it is compatible with both the statements "while some people have perfectly valid gender expression that does not match their chromosomal sex, I am not one of those people", and "I reject the notion of gender as being separate from sex", as well as other positions somewhere between these two. By contrast, the term "cisgender" requires you to accept a certain ontological framework even if your place in it does match that of a median human's.
Cis just means "Yes, and I was born this way." I'm confused why you think it's equivalent to "heathen".
Suppose you were part of a hypothetical religion (I'll call it X) where some members believed that people could not legitimately convert to that religion (you're either born in it or not), and you were one of the members who didn't believe in conversion. Would you be offended if a survey asked about your religious background and had the options "X (since birth)" and "X (converted later in life)", or would you just accurately check "X (since birth)"?
We could have an entire political fight about this one, but I honestly don't care that much. Cisgender is a back-formation because transgender people (some of 'em, at least) started getting butthurt (as the young people say) about that term being used for them, so *normative*, as if being trans was some kind of exception to the rule! So they invented the term cisgender (lifting it from chemistry, I believe, on the lines of cis- and trans-isomers) so they could go "if you're going to call us a particular name, we're gonna call you a particular name, yah boo!"
I don't give a damn, really; in my more obnoxious moments, I just treat "cisgender" as "this means normal".
I think it's just Latin, as in "cisalpine Gaul" vs. "transalpine Gaul"? Although it's a different sense of "trans"; one is about "this is here vs. that is over there across the boundary", and the other is about "having crossed a boundary". But eh, I boldly split infinitives, so whatever.
I get so annoyed by the the refusal of certain political factions to accept any sort of label, that I think it would be hypocritical to refuse to use a label like "cis" when it's simple and clear and generic. Any word can be used as a slur, of course, but (again betraying my annoyance with certain political factions) that's not the fault of the word.
I agree with you, but I also sympathize with the opposition. The term "cisgender" does not just imply "born that way"; it means something like, "while gender expression is separate from sex and being a man (or a woman) has little to do with one's biology, my gender expression happens to match the biological makeup of the majority of people who express the same gender as I do". I phrased this sentence in the strongest way possible to highlight the issue and of course weaker formulations are also possible; but still, the word "cisgender" does imply the acceptance of a certain specific model of human sexuality.
I too sympathize with the opposition; it's one of those fences that I uncomfortably straddle, what with the razor wire and all.
And yeah, I think there is a linguistic power-game being played, of forcing people to use terminology that re-centers the discourse and positions their "normal" existence as merely a co-equal option. We have limited attention, and language can force people to spend that attention in particular ways. I don't read Aella much, but she had a good piece a while back about "frame control" as a tool of abuse:
Sorry, but no. I believe that gender expression is usually quite closely connected to sex and that being a man (or woman) has a great deal of My gender expression "happens" to match my biology because that's normal for like 99.7% of humanity and I'm not one of the outliers. But the outliers *do* exist, and they're not going to pretend to not exist for your intellectual comfort, so we do sometimes need a word that means "man, and not one of the trans guys".
That word is "cisgender". It does not mean anything other than "man, and not one of the trans guys". It does not require accepting anything beyond the fact that people claiming to be transmen do exist and aren't shutting up about it and maybe you feel like distinguishing yourself from them. It is not pejorative or diminutive or otherwise impolite. And since we've all settled on that word for the purpose, you don't get to pick another and expect to communicate.
> And since we've all settled on that word for the purpose...
Who is this "we", kemosabe ? That's kind of the entire point. I personally accept your definition of "transgender/cisgender" above, but there are people who do not: they would reject the notion that the statement "man, and not one of the trans guys" has any meaning. By dictating your terms to them, you are attempting to define your way to victory in the debate. This is a rhetorical power-move, but it is not rational.
"But the outliers *do* exist, and they're not going to pretend to not exist for your intellectual comfort"
I can't see how this isn't a pure strawman. Practically no one anywhere (in the west at least) is asking anybody to pretend not to exist. Unless you define "pretend not to exist" as "entertain the theoretical possibility that your personal feelings are not an impeccable guide to objective truth". And even the latter was not what I was saying in this thread.
Consider four approaches.
1. People who claim to have a "gender" that is different from their sex are lying to get attention.
2. Some people feel that they have a gender, but they are mistaken. Gender, if it means something different to sex, is not a coherent real thing.
3. Maybe some people do have a gender, and sometimes this matches their sex and sometimes it doesn't. Others do not, and for them the word "gender", unless it's a synonym for sex, has no useful meaning.
4. Every person has chosen, or found within themselves, a non-biological "gender". Some people have the same gender as their sex, some have the opposite one, and some have one that doesn't match either.
Only 1 can be reasonably called offensive, since it accuses people of lying. Neither 2 nor 3 are remotely non-respectful, or in any way telling people they don't exist (unless you hold the woke attitude that disagreement is oppression, which I thought everyone here rejected). Telling someone you accept they have certain beliefs, but you don't think those beliefs are true, is literally the same as disagreeing about religious beliefs. I thought we agreed as a society about 300 years ago that people can hold different metaphysical beliefs and not feel personally threatened by others' differing beliefs.
My point above was that the word "cisgender" implicitly assumes 4, since it can only mean "my gender stays within the bounds of my sex", thus telling people they have a non-biological gender. And on your understanding, wouldn't that amount to telling me to pretend not to exist?
I was therefore advocating 3, or allowing for it on the survey. But even were I to advocate 2, that would not be denying anyone's existence or perceptions, only disagreeing about reality.
And it would be based on the incoherence of things like "some people have the same gender as their sex" in option 4 above. What can this possibly mean? If there *is* such a thing as gender, and that is a different kind of thing to sex, and is not biological, then what on earth does it mean for your gender to be the same as your sex??? Or to match your sex? It would be category error, like saying the soul is located next to the heart. There's an incoherency built into this whole framework that is hardly ever really addressed.
I find the cis/trans divide to be a false equivalence too. This is less because I'm a biological essentialist and more because I find the Ozzy Frantz "cis by default" theory to be a better description of me; possibly a decent chunk of the population are the same.
In this sense I don't identify as an anything. I am physically male, it's easy to fit into the male social role, it seems like it would be a lot of trouble to be anything else and very little gain except in some narrow social circles, and I don't care. If the Gender Swap Fairy waved its wand at me I'd have a lot of relearning and explaining to do because I'm an adult now, but if the wand had been waved at age 0 I think I'd just be female. I more or less understand what transpeople say they want, and I certainly believe them, but it's like someone dying their hair every day for 20 years: I don't actually "get" why they want to be a redhead so much that they'd do all that work. I think a lot of people are like this.
The way we ask these kinds of questions can shape our understanding of the whole thing. "Are you Christian or a heathen?" covers up the different types of heathen, and for that matter the different types of Christian. That being said my objection to it could be easily handled by a follow-up question and isn't as fundamental as yours.
1) I'm a "nominally full time" student and also self employed freelance and I'm absolutely incapable of deciding which of these is more important.
2) Why doesn't question on family religious background doesn't include atheism? I've observed fascinating differences between people who grew up non-religious vs those who had to "break out" of family religious coditioning.
3) How did I find ACT -- NO IDEA.
4) Agree with whoever said UK Tories are not socially traditionalist in a way even remotely comparable to GOP
5) PMS question doesn't allow for post menopausal or otherwise non menstruating women. I answered for when I was menstruating but it should be specified.
6) Children internet use question does not allow for "internet wasn't really a thing children would be capable of using when my child was 7".
7) Online hours Q doesn't specify if study, including non compulsory study (eg searching for papers and printing/reading them, watching videos listed as optional in your course content etc) counts as work or as "time online". I answered in the spirit of "largely voluntary AND I could easily stop without affecting other parts of my life" so not included required or elective study but it's removed half or more of my time online.
8) dead plants affect me because my garden is an absolute bomb site and I can't afford help with it but I answered in the spirit of combining them with litter and graffiti as mark of urban decay. I'd remove dead plants from that Q.
> Why doesn't question on family religious background doesn't include atheism? I've observed fascinating differences between people who grew up non-religious vs those who had to "break out" of family religious coditioning.
I’ve noticed the atheists from the more extreme religious families being the most vociferously anti religious and intolerant. This is I suppose a reaction and a genetic legacy.
Reaction, often some trauma or at least a personal feeling of being harmed too. See: Dawkins.
And I suspect societal factors load onto this too. I grew up in a very religious society in an atheist family (uniquely, each of my parents had an atheist father and a religious mother) so I grew up "meh" about religion philosophically but very anticlerical. Then I moved to a very secular society (UK) and calmed down about "churches being evil" too.
Whether I inherited "no god gene" idk. My sister is atheist by default, both of my children are more uncommited/ less open to the idea of not completely materialistic world despite growing up in a secular society with an atheist and very weakly agnostic parents.
The tories and social traditionalism is an odd one because it's skewed back and forth quite a lot: They have historically been the party of tradition but spent the late 20th and early 21st centuries drifting socially left, until in the early 2010s they were about as progressive as the US democrats of the same era. Since the politically seismic 2016 brexit referendum they've swung fairly hard in a reactionary direction - but are still distinct from republicans in that their vision is much more secular, and abortion is not really a salient issue at all.
On 2), the question does say "when last your family had a religion", or words to that effect. Might be several generations back. Perhaps "it's lost in the mists of time" should be an option.
Physical attractiveness: should I fill in how attractive I was when young, OR rate my attractiveness within my current age cohort, OR rate my attractiveness among all age groups from 15-99 year old?
For me, the "common sense" use is for each one to compare among reasonably close characteristics. That is, in my case, for a male (my feminine beauty would be quite low, with all the beard, wouldn't it?), my age, my race, etc. Any other options assumes a universal canon, which seems wrong, and universal capability of attraction, which seems wronger.
I went with my physical attractiveness among all age groups. I think for most of us at a certain age attractiveness declines, and I figure it's fair to assess myself honestly as I am now rather than as I was in my prime.
I also went with a "general public" rule here. Maybe some people are attracted to balder, grayer, fatter men, but I think the conventional rules make good sense for answering the question.
I also think Scott's "be honest" reminder should apply to anyone who might underrate their attractiveness too.
There is presented sex as well. Women as a population are rated as more attractive than men by both men and women.
I answered the question as "among people of your sex / gender". I'm getting more glances and smiles these days than when I was younger. The world is a mystery.
I think I read ACX because I work in AI safety, rather than the other way round.
So, I start out thinking AI safety is a computer security problem much like the others I've worked on ... and then discover it has a community. (Well, an apocalyptic religious cult).
And I clicked yes to the 'ban AI now, even if no existential risk' question.
Technically speaking, the Internet did exist when I was a kid, but I didn't have access to it until university in '84 or so. And the Internet of those days was rather different to the thing we have now.
Yeah, my family got internet in my late teen years. My access was completely unrestricted and I never stumbled across anything that would have bothered my very conservative parents at all. I can’t imagine that now.
I think it was a natural virus that was leaked from a lab (maybe enhanced, maybe not, but probably not engineered.) So I don't know. I split the difference.
"How long have you been reading" seems to have been copied from the last survey. It goes from "1 to 2 years" to "since it was slate star codex" but it's now been more than three years since ACX started. So since I've been here since 2021, I can't give an accurate answer. (EDIT: Arghh sorry, I missed that this was already mentioned.)
On the political question: I'm really amazed these are missing: there's no option for Communitarian/Populist (e.g. like Christian Democratic parties in many European countries, or a certain segment of Trump voters: traditional values and a welfare state, or anti-immigration and anti-business), and there's no option for Centrist/Moderate. This seems to potentially exclude a *lot* of people. On the other hand, "Liberal" and "Social-Democratic" are almost the exact same thing, but to different degrees (and only on the economic dimension at that). And there are two tiny far-right movements that are probably almost indistinguishable to most people (at least as much as anarchism and communism are, if not much more). It just seems a very warped political possibility-space to me.
On the other hand, and to balance out my obsessive negativity: thank you for fixing up the YIMBY/NIMBY question. Last time it was something like "you think more, and more afforadable, housing is good" vs "you think more, and more affordable, housing is bad". This one's much better!
If you were to ask anything more complex than cis/transgender, then you'ld get more objections and confused stares.
But, it could conceptualised as two dimensional, gender variance vs how much you care...
1. I identify with my assigned at birth sex and this is very important to me.
2. Like, I guess I'm fairly typical for my birth sex but ... whatever ... do people even have a gender?
3. I do not identify with my assigned at birth sex and this is very important to me.
4. Like, since you're asking, I guess I'm gender atypical, but I have no interest in hormones or sex reassignment surgery. I see no reason why I would want to do that.
(The descriptions are intended to be evocative examples, not what you'ld put on a survey question)
Yeah, I just ticked cis but I am very much cis by default and I would take T to try it out / for the ability to ditch periods and lift weights, if it didn't come with so much social baggage / gatekeeping
Testosterone will do more than that for you, you'll get facial and body hair growth and male-pattern baldness. Depends if you're willing to spend money on shaving/hair removal products that you save on products for periods.
I never know what to put in the left/right spectrum, it entirely depends what you calibrate on. On the Swedish scale I'm probably a 6, but on the American scale it's more of a 3. I averaged it a bit and put 4, but I'm not happy about it.
Your list of social media providers includes 'Option 9' which does not appear to be some kind of hipster provider I didn't know about but is probably an error where you meant to include another provider
Kidney donation: I wanted an answer for 'I am interested but know I would be immediately rejected from the current process so haven't tried', I put 'not interested' but neither that or started the process was really correct.
Eugenics: no room for nuance, I wanted an answer to express I would want some selection types banned (eg selecting against autism, probably most conditions that aren't immediate death or hideous suffering and might turn out to have diversity value) but others are clearly great (eg selecting against conditions incompatible with life).
I think it's at least somewhat by design. If such selection is allowed at all, there's going to be a lot of debate of what acceptable and what isn't, on which you'd have very limited control. So how careful do you want people to be with their criteria if you don't get to pick-and-choose the criteria you personally favour?
I picked the middle option to represent this, but I feel like it mixes up 'I don't think the technology would work / is worth it due to effect size' with this, which is more 'I think the technology would absolutely work and we should be very careful with it but I am not against the whole thing'
There is also a possibility of "I think it would work but have unintended consequences if we're not careful" (think "select against autism, eventually end up with no mathematicians").
If immediate death or hideous suffering are worth selecting against, then "almost immediate death" and "almost hideous suffering" should be too. All the way down the line to eliminating suffering. Seems strange to tolerate suffering for diversity value. We could get more diversity in disease by deliberately harming children or stop treating them, but nobody finds that acceptable.
You are deciding who gets to exist. The answer to "how much pain are you willing to tolerate before you would prefer not to exist" is usually finite but above zero.
Given the decision to decide between a person that suffers a lot in life and one that suffers little, we should choose the one that suffers little all else being equal. Do you disagree?
I disagree that for a number of the options there we have anything like that decision. You are dealing with tiny risk factors, not certainties; meanwhile, outcomes over the course of a whole life depend on much more than just genetics.
I know autistic people who are very happy with their life.
Their mental situation being equal, the outcome nevertheless could easily have been otherwise; where they are now and have been to date is an accident of where they were born and raised, and what encounters and opportunities presented themselves.
Nobody serious disputes that these are probabilities, not certainties or that environment is not contributing somes.
There are also people live good lives despite disability and mental disorder. But it is obvious that -- all else equal -- it is better not to have disability and mental disorder.
If some mental condition does not contribute to more suffering or disability on net, then it's not an issue that I'm talking about.
Is it obvious, though? There are deaf communities who strongly feel that their kids will have better lives if they are deaf because there is otherwise a risk of feeling excluded from family and community.
Sure, make decisions for your own kids; but realise that your preferences are not universal.
I disagree that all else is equal in this scenario - we could easily accidentally prune humanity of good and useful traits because we maximise suffering avoidence. Previous generations would have pruned a lot of traits that are just considered normal variation today.
The exact threshold for suffering that's bad enough to take this risk about is a complicated question but that doesn't mean the only possible answers are the endpoints.
We're not going to wholly eliminate any traits since not everyone is going to use this technology ever. When considering what is the past decision for a parent, a decision between a high-disease high-suffering embryo and a low-disease low-suffering embryo is clear. Current selection is against diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease, etc. It don't think there's a good reason to keep those traits around. If there were we would maybe want doctors not to treat them. Psychological traits is more complicated, but I was responding to your general idea about suffering/diversity.
"A decision between a high-disease high-suffering embryo and a low-disease low-suffering embryo is clear" - you don't get that decision, though. You get to decide to shift some very specific known probabilities a tiny amount, while also shifting a whole bunch of things we don't know about by unknown amounts.
>Previous generations would have pruned a lot of traits that are just considered normal variation today.
And yet, even if less diverse, people today would be taller, smarter, prettier, and in better health.
If we'd been taking positive eugenics seriously, we'd have had ~8 positively selected generations since Francis Galton was advocating for eugenics. 8 generations isn't much, we're definitely hampered by being long-lived and slow breeding and developing, but you can actually accomplish a surprising amount.
What can you do in 8 generations?
> Between 2000 and 2016, US dairy cattle breeders, by applying selection pressure to increase the productive life, achieved an increase of about 10 months
> After eight generations of selection, the percentage of dogs with an excellent hip quality score (as assessed by an extended view hip score) increased from 34 to 93% in German Shepherd Dogs and from 43 to 94% in Labrador retrievers.
> In dogs, it's generally thought that it takes ~7-8 generations to get a new measurably distinct *breed* entirely
> More generally, traits with a heritability of at least 15% are considered good candidates for genetic selection. Essentially everything we care about in humans (intelligence, height, strength, conscientousness, neuroticism, mental illness, health, etc) is way above 15% heritability
Now, just imagine if we had applied that level of selection at a large scale to a significant human population for 8 generations. That population would enjoy significant buffs in things like intelligence, conscientiousness, and health.
Yes, if everyone is tall and smart and pretty, we're theoretically less "diverse." But that's the bad kind of diversity - we want the kind of diversity where healthy and highly capable people all specialize in what they most care about, and self-actualize at higher levels than would be possible if they were sicker, dumber, and less capable.
Would you want all people that previous generations would have eliminated (including anyone gay, trans, sexually promiscuous and at different times too liberal) to be pre-emptively removed? I'm pretty sure that 1980s conservatives would have done that, given the choice to make sure their kids weren't gay, and 95% of the population would have agreed.
I claimed "Given the decision to decide between a person that suffers a lot in life and one that suffers little, we should choose the one that suffers little all else being equal"
If we introduce other elements into the equation like socially disaproved sexual orientations or identities, it is not longer a clear cut question.
I also think "medicine should be used to help sick people." And you could say, well what if a trans person is considered sick by society? And then someone might say that's offensive or untrue. Or Scott or Freddie might defend it so that they can get heathcare, or we could go down some other long tangent.
I don't know the optimal number of gay people or promiscuous people. But the more defensible central point is still true in my view.
It sounds like you're making a motte and bailey argument. The motte is that severely disabled people should be prevented from existing or replaced by not-severely-disabled people instead. That's fine, it's a pretty defensible position, and I wouldn't argue with you about it. The bailey is the move to "all suffering" while explicitly taking it beyond what we would call a disability, let alone a severe disability.
You correctly recognize that some people will say that a group of people are sick/disabled/suffering while others will claim that they are not. If we cannot agree on what "suffering" means or accurately attach that label to specific individuals, then at the very best your idea is unworkable. At the worst it gets into Nazi-level crap where someone decides on a list that others find evil.
Some people will make individual decisions that they don't want a gay/short/autistic/whatever child and ask for the treatment. From a moral society level, "we" literally cannot make that decision or argument for all suffering, because "we" don't agree about what constitutes suffering. Even pretty extreme cases like moderate autism (and rarely even extreme autism) is protected by some. And maybe for good reason! Autism seems to be linked to certain styles of thinking and maybe (for instance) better computer programmers, so maybe autism is a good thing in moderation. A lot of maybes, because we don't know. Which is part of my point - we don't know what things exist that seem bad may be involved in good outcomes elsewhere.
I have no problem with that, in full honesty. I just use it as an example of something that is very likely to happen that is different from the standard examples of removing disease or making kids more intelligent. Some people only think of the things they would want to remove, rather than things other people might choose to remove.
You decide who gets to exist every time you use birth control, a condom or pull out. Only difference is that you're deciding whether a random human gets to exist vs a pre-selected one.
I'm not normally a hardliner on this - e.g. I'm pro-choice - but deliberately making a ton of viable embryos then destroying most of them based on tiny correlations observed across an entire population seems like a very different sort of thing to wearing a condom.
When it's this unclear which set of railtracks people are tied to, some would prefer to leave their hands off the lever.
I completely disagree. Adversity makes us stronger as we learn to overcome it. A society of people who never suffer in normal small ways will fall apart if anything big happens.
You may argue that eugenics cannot stop all adversity and I would agree with you, but that doesn't mean we should eliminate all genetic causes of any kind of pain.
That goes beyond the "people born with a deformed arm are still people" approaches, which I also agree with.
Imagine a child is born unusaully health and happy. Should the parents make the child suffer adversity (perhaps hurting them or disabling them) to help them learn to overcome it and become stronger?
Yes. By pushing them beyond what they would naturally do. Not by cutting off a leg or something else drastic, but definitely by both not insulating them from all adversity and by pushing them into things that will challenge them.
I don't disagree when it comes to conditions so bad that the child will die or never live much of life. But you jumped into the conversation to argue for the elimination of *all* suffering, which is a very different argument.
If suffering actually improved the quality of a person's life to the point that they have a net positive utility then it could be worthwhile, but that was not what I had in mind. I don't personally think that having a disability makes you so much mentally stronger that it pushes you beyond the negative effects of the disability...that sounds unlikely generally, but could theoretically be true in some cases. I think it would be better to just push your child to achieve more without needing to inflict disease or suffering on them. Seems like we can have both.
"All suffering" definitely takes us past the point where we might consider something a disability. Consider introverts, which we do not consider a disability. They will absolutely have situations where they are uncomfortable/suffering from having to talk to strangers in public. Should we genetically engineer all people to be extroverts? (Which may add a different problem for these new extroverts who are now sad/suffering when they have to be alone).
I feel like by the time we call it a "disability" we've decided that the suffering has gone too far and it's now a decided net-negative. Unfortunately "we" rarely decide such things, and there are definitely different tolerance levels for what used to be "obvious" disabilities. For instance gender-dysphoria and (at least more mild forms of) autism.
Re: eugenics and the non-coercive positive type, I'm against it personally *and* very sceptical that Nanny Government is going to get it right or have it work out for people. Yes, gather all that Nobel Prizewinner sperm, not like that has ever been tried before. People have done various small and half-assed attempts at breeding baby geniuses, I don't think large scale efforts will go better. First, to make sure the Nobel baby has the best start in life, you're going to need to have the rich parents being the hosts because nobody is going to expect that dumping Baby Neumann into a single parent household living on the crack estate is going to get you anywhere. So we're not really pulling up the entire social genetic level, just concentrating it at the already existing levels.
That will ripple on for the whole of the Baby Geniuses lives; the schools they go to, the degrees they get, the jobs they go into - all will depend on family having the money to make sure the positive environment happens, because the state is not going to turn the oil tanker of the education system around fast enough to make sure that the supports for public education are in place.
So in sum, it's going to be "please, already smart and well-off parents, have more kids! Hey look, we'll give you free Nobel Prize winner sperm and everything to do this!"
At the time I was duly informed that if we just get lots of rich people to donate sperm, more of the next generation will be rich.
So perhaps there's your answer: breed rich people first, then work on selecting for Nobel prizes once the single parent crack estate households are all gone.
I think the baby would also need the right family upbringing. Raising a genius around non-geniuses will limit their growth but also limit how much they feel included and encouraged to be a genius. Von Neumann wouldn't have been the same person without his eccentric dad pushing education at home. He still would have been smart, but maybe hid it or got into a more normie profession (accounting or business manager).
Then I'm sure Baby Nobel will have no trouble at all being born of a neglectful parent who (to take an example from work) is considered a 'good mother' because she turns away from the toddler when she shoots up drugs. No, he or she is destined to go to Oxbridge and be a high-flyer, it's genes all the way, baby!
I think @Ives Parr's point is (though I could be wrong) the reverse: he claims that if you took an ordinary baby with ordinary genes, and gave it the best care and education that money can buy, then that baby still has no shot at all at becoming a Nobel prize winner.
That's true, and that's genes: if you have Baby Ordinary and Baby Nobel in the same circumstances, there's a much better chance the baby with the Nobel Prize winner sperm donor will do better.
Not a dead certainty, still. But more likely.
Putting the less able child in good circumstances won't get you a Nobel prize winner, but they may do better than expected. Putting them in worse circumstances, they won't do as well. And I expect the same for the Nobel baby: they may still be smart, but they'll have a lot of obstacles and encumbrances to hold them back. Not least that simply getting the sperm isn't the end of it; if the pregnant woman smokes, drinks, doesn't make sure to eat healthily, etc. during pregnancy this will have an effect on Baby Nobel's development. Once born, if neglected and (for example) not spoken to, dumped in front of Youtube as a baby sitter, etc. then there will be developmental delays. There will be a lot of catching up to do in order to get where they should be at, and they may never get there - maybe Baby Nobel is diverted into joining a gang and being a smart criminal instead of winning that scholarship to Oxbridge and working on a cure for cancer.
You're selecting practically the worst possible example that you can think of to argue for the environment. In this hypothetical, you are certain it'll turn out one way. I am mentioning a general finding to say that mostly environment is less important than genes. Nobody would ever say that a neglectful crack parent is bad, but mostly parenting is unimportant relative to genes in the typical case. I have never said--nor does anyone serious advocating for PGT-P--that life is 100% genes.
I think it's long been an argument over "nature versus nurture" and I don't expect to settle it. So let it lie here.
Certainly, all else being equal, genes make the most difference. But we first have to stipulate that all else is equal, hence why some putative government programme about "let's make Nobel prize winner sperm available to all" isn't going to raise the eugenic waterline, as it were, *if* that's all that is done. If you want to raise IQ level over the general population, that means a slew of interventions that do mean spending a lot of money on social changes and indeed, what some might deem interfering with family choice and engaging in social engineering.
"People who were probably going to have kids who would go on to be successful anyway now enabled to have slightly smarter kids" is not the game-changing intervention there.
The relative influence of genes and environment is determined by the heritability of traits. For IQ, it's highly heritable in adulthood and so the influence of nature is greater than nurture. My original statement is correct. There isn't any debate to settle here.
The appropriate counterfactual is if the child in a bad scenario would be more/less successful without the different set of genes (PGT-IQ/Nobel sperm). Obviously, the genes will increase the probability of success. I don't think the environment is as large of a hinderance as you're thinking, but I can only appear to the general state of the science. I can't debunk a hypothetical that you have conceived of about a crack mother raising a nobel baby. But I will say the evidence suggests that --environment held equal--genes for high IQ are more likely to lead to success than genes for low IQ.
> Baby Nobel will have no trouble at all being born of a neglectful parent who (to take an example from work) is considered a 'good mother' because she turns away from the toddler when she shoots up drugs.
Not going to happen in practice. The people who can follow the regimen required for successful IVF are future-oriented and capable of deferring gratification. They are going to be overwhelmingly UMC.
Your comments seem like a disgust reaction rather than carefully considered thoughts. I wonder where that is coming from?
I have a revulsion to the idea of aristocracy, that some children are somehow better than others simply because of their parent's social position. This seems like it might be related to that, the Eloi and Morlocks thing.
In the short term (four, five generations) it might be better for humanity as a whole to allow individual couples to do this eugenical stuff, because progress comes from the 0.001 percent at the top end of IQ x persistence x political skill. I just have this intuition that after that, it could make things worse, a lot worse, for nearly everybody.
"The people who can follow the regimen required for successful IVF are future-oriented and capable of deferring gratification. They are going to be overwhelmingly UMC."
That is precisely the point I was trying to make; a programme that simply goes "free Nobel Prize sperm for all!" isn't going to have the success that every baby born from this, no matter the circumstances, is going to be the winner in life. Environment counts here where we're not talking about "all else being equal".
Every baby born from "Nobel Prize sperm" *is* likely to be a winner, because people unable to follow the IVF regimen will not have babies. There's only a 30% chance of a baby if you follow the protocol perfectly. People who can do that three times will create the environment to make the resulting baby a winner also.
Sure, there will be mass disappointment and tremendous inefficiency and waste of scarce medical resources. But the babies that result will be fine, barring the usual accidents that afflict everyone.
Wasn’t the eugenics question in reference to IVF? In which case you choose not to implant an egg which is a choice you are going to have to make anyway. I’m sure that most people practice eugenics already - ie not implanting an egg where the child has potential major congenital issues. Which is perfectly fine c
I don't think that's what I'm arguing with Mr. Parr over, at least not from my side. Yes, if you're doing IVF anyway and yes, if there is a definite risk of a disease, illness or hereditary condition, then selecting your embryo is going to happen and it'll give a chance of a better life.
As I understood the survey question, it wasn't about this. It was about non-coercive eugenics, e.g. the government sets this up and it's paid for by private actors so people have the choice to do the whole polygenic thing, including 'we will provide you with Nobel Prize Winner sperm' (as an aside, the uncanny resemblance to AI for cattle etc. makes me laugh https://www.teagasc.ie/media/website/animals/beef/AI-and-Heat-Detection.pdf - a visit from the AI man when Janet is at peak fertility to make sure she and Brad have the superior baby?)
And my argument there was that *this* kind of intervention *on its own* isn't going to raise the IQ and niceness and whatever other positive traits you desire in the general population, because while everyone might agree that it's much better if the next generation of babies born to single mothers living in the crack council estate are not doomed to a live of repeating the same cycle, and that the argument is "moar IQ better because moar money job if smart", just making sure Annjaleyna is knocked up with Nobel sperm not druggie petty criminal boyfriend sperm won't achieve that for you. Baby Nobel is going to be raised in the same conditions by the same type of parenting as Annjaleyna was, and the outcomes are likely to be "much less opportunity for Baby Nobel to get the hell out of that trap" and more "if he or she are anyway smart, they may manage to get a job flipping burgers in McDonalds - WHICH IS NOT A BAD OUTCOME - but they're not going to be the next generation of cancer researchers".
The people who *will* benefit the most from such schemes are the people who were going to be decent, stable families with opportunities to attend good schools, get into good universities, and networking so Baby Nobel can get an internship to a good job afterwards anyway.
So we're just perpetuating the same old division between "why aren't the smart people having more babies, and the underclass having fewer?" *unless* there is one hell of an overhaul of everything from schools to how you parent your kids and where they live on up.
That, at least, is the argument I'm making, based on my 'lived experience' of working in the areas associated with schooling in deprived areas and social housing and now special needs education. Ives Parr may have a hugely different experience, and may be answering a different question to the one I'm answering.
lumping together "IT" and "programming, etc" is both information-hiding and considered somewhat offensive by the second category. "your IT guy" is not the same job as "guy who writes load balancers at Netflix", but that same guy is not really an academic computer scientist either.
Ouch. I got that wrong too as I watched Dune II yesterday and definitely (spoilers) was reminded of the colosseum. But normally o don’t think about the Roman Empire more than once a week. So I’ll keep the answer.
I was missing an option to say crime positively impacts my life on the crime question, since I commit it minorly (buying not-very-illegal drugs online, parking illegally, etc) and it benefits me
The covid masking question should've had an option for "wore one longer than most, will still wear one in certain circumstances (e.g. hospitalization rates go back up)."
On the immigration question: “expand visa programs (more legal immigration) and less illegal immigration” is a common position, particularly in the US. It is hard to align that with the question as stated: should immigration be stricter/more open in your country.
Completely agree. The survey should distinguish between legal and illegal immigration. I believe many in your audience would be in favor of legal and opposed to illegal.
It's more complex than that. Lots of people, such as myself, are also illiberal on low-quality legal immigration and liberal on high-quality legal immigration.
Plus one for tweaking the immigration question. In my case my opinions about the immigration system narrowly and the asylum system are very different and I wasn't sure how broadly you were asking.
Yep, agreed 100%. I think the border as it is now is an awful tragedy and a legal mess. But that doesn't mean I don't want people to immigrate or even work here. I just want it to happen in a sensible, secure, humane way.
I don't even really care about the comments some have made about "low quality" vs. "high quality". I think we've got room for all sorts. I just want it to happen safely and not have a big huge open border and all the smuggling and human trafficking that encourages.
Very minor observation: Not everyone lives in a building. I'm a full-time RVer, for example, so I left it blank. Although I guess in some sense it is a detached single family home?
Is your question social media usage made under the assumption that people first began browsing the internet using their smartphone? I got my first smartphone at age 14 but browsed the internet (including social media) before that. Also, do forum count as social media? I used those before i used major social media, but given the examples listed i assumed only major social media was meant.
Yeah, but there are questions about where you live, so he can split on that.
(Or rather, probably just throw away all the non-US answers since there probably won’t be enough to say anything significant about any other countries.)
Amusingly Scott didn't mention any of the older social media like BBSes and phpBB forums, even though he's definitely old enough to be aware of them. I assume that they are included in the questions.
For "How old were you when you first started using social media", I've made the judgment call to count forums (BBS) as social media.
I was pretty surprised that they weren't mentioned at all, since they've dominated the early internet as the main social thing (alongside IRC and Usenet), and it's a question about childhood.
(I've also made the judgment call to not count coding video game AI as "working in AI capabilities", for purposes of this survey.)
I rate myself as 2/5 addicted to the Internet. It's just too powerful and useful, even counting streaming sites/apps as "TV". But I use it when I need to or when I find it useful, not otherwise, and I practically don't use "social media" (and Substack, when one is merely reading blogs and sometimes commenting, doesn't count, even if you explicitly put it on the list). Yet I count myself as 12-14 hours in front of "screens", mainly because I live in front of a PC, and to me, work, play, productivity (including writing) and entertainment (including reading) comes from the same device. Cut my Internet connection, and my productivity falls, but I will log the same numbers of hours, if on different activities. Same for "online". I'm "online" when I'm sending whatsapp messages, and that can be casual chat, important communication or even work. I could do the same with voice over telephone and that, mysteriously, wouldn't count as "online"? And what if Wikipedia is the best general reference, Wordreference the best dictionary, and Duolingo is my Japanese teacher? Those are merely examples: I could cite several dozen services or sites merely among the ones that see daily use, or almost.
Also, the "The government is extremely competent and does a great job figuring out ...." questions, have been answered no, not because I distrust government interventions, even when competent and well-meaning (I do, but I swear I wasn't fighting the hypothetical), but because I don't need them. I eat healthy and spend online what time do I need, automatically. But I extremely strongly dislike being limited by outside authority. I would have liked to have some option to reflect this.
However, I would sign up for the "government forbids me going to social media", and it is not because I use them. On the contrary, I almost never do. But other people force me to, when they share/link to it (and it appears interesting). And it is always bad having to evade ads (or rather, anti-adblocker measures, I blocked ads long ago), clickbait and things-I-was-not-looking-for. Thus, if it were known that people can't go there, both bloggers and friends would be forced to publish/send me whatever they want be to see, instead of linking to those dens of perdition. I mean, links are fine, provided the whole post don't depend on them or there are full quotes or at least screenshots. But "go there to keep reading, I'll wait here for you to come back", THAT I hate
> I would love to never get ads for things I don't want to use.
It always amazes me that the ad duopoly, Meta and GOOG, with their tens of thousands of Phd's each, are SO BAD at targeted ads.
With the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of Phd's working around the clock, FB and GOOG routinely fail to show me ANY advertisements anywhere on the internet that are even tangentially related to anything I care about and would buy. And I'm a comparatively heavy spender in relation to the USA median - I have some pretty expensive hobbies, and for the non-expensive hobbies, I'm more than willing to throw down hundreds or thousands on a whim. Do FB or GOOG, the literal worldwide online advertisement monopoly tap into any of that? Not at all.
"How much do the following problems negatively affect your life: crime"
The detailed description implies violent crimes (e.g. robbery, rape, murder - things you are afraid of) but one could also consider "white collar" crime. For example, my corrupt government affects my life in a very negative way, but I wouldn't say I'm a victim (am I?) nor am I physically afraid. Am I supposed to still say that crime affects my life?
- Purely political effects on your life (being angry that there's so much crime)
- Exposure through the media (you were traumatized after reading a story about a crime victim)"
But there are real (not just political) effects of corruption, for example: 1) a "bad" company bribes the government to get a construction job, leading to a poorly constructed building or a single road being paved instead of two because they pocketed the money etc. 2) someone bribes the doctor to get preferential treatment (scan, hospital room etc.) instead of someone else, resulting in prolonged suffering for the patient that got skipped over. If I have experienced something like this in real life, that would mean that crime affected my life negatively, right?
Ah, okay, I would think that falls within his definition if those things affected you directly (i.e. you use the road/building in question) but not if you read about the corruption elsewhere.
I wouldn't count anything the government does as crime, since the government is who decides what is criminal and what is not. Otherwise we'd all have to say we're suffering under the crime of taxation and so on ...
We could discuss judicial/executive/legislative branches and who decides what, but I used "the government" as shorthand for some type of public official. If they do something that is clearly against the law, and is described in the law as a crime, than that would in fact be a crime. In my example, that would be "it is illegal to give the contract to the company that offered you a bribe, instead of to the best bidder".
Personally, I would think you should directly transfer the scores. The return to 1600 still has an optional essay section scored out of an additional 800.
For mental health conditions e.g. eating disorder, do you want to know if someone had this condition and recovered from it years ago? Maybe change the wording to "have/had" if so.
Agree. I was a fully-fledged alcoholic when I was younger, but haven't had a drink for nearly 20 years. I answered 'yes' to do you have a diagnosis of alcoholism.
"What kind of building do you live in?" - I live in a small building (< 10 apartments) that is part of a huge complex of such buildings. I answered small because you said building but I wasn't sure that was what you wanted.
“What social media do you use?” currently has “option 9” listed as the 6th option.
I’m hoping that this is supposed to be Tumblr, as it seems like an oversight in a collection of mind-numbing social media sites otherwise. But I am not confident enough in that guess to select it.
Usual gripe about the political affiliation one - I'm not an American Republican or UK Tory, but neither am I a (current) Democrat either, so I have to go with the nearest which is Social Democrat (but I am not socially liberal/multicultural). I would prefer if there was an "Other" option, if possible.
As for the supernatural, again I have trouble with that one. I believe in God but not in ghosts/spiritual forces or energies, or the New Age-y astrology Wicca thing. So how do I answer there? I had to go with "strongly believe" because I do believe in souls, the afterlife, God, etc. but on the other hand I'm not about to sign up for a workshop on crystal healing with my guardian angel fairy door maker.
I struggled with the supernatural question as well. I believe in God and "spiritual beings", but the category seemed much closer to New Age than religion. I think I ended up putting a 3, which didn't feel right but better than the alternatives.
I left this one blank. Same reason. I get why many people would consider Thomas Aquinas's arguments for the Triune God and His angelic hosts to be on the same plane as believing crystals give off mood energy, but I couldn't figure out whether that was what the question itself was aiming at or not, and so opted out.
> but on the other hand I'm not about to sign up for a workshop on crystal healing with my guardian angel fairy door maker.
Fairy... door maker ? Is it a fairy that makes doors, or a human manufacturer of doors for use by fairies, or a fae-like creator deity who happens to also be a door, or what ?
Seemingly fairy doors are a thing (are these people insane, don't they have any idea what the fairies are really like? read Pratchett's "Lords and Ladies") and so this requires people to make them.
And several others. This is particularly egregious in Ireland, since we have our own fairy folklore which is *not* the Victorian butterfly winged flower fairies notion, you do *not* meddle with the fairies and most of all you do *not* invite them into your garden or home. But this kind of 'quaint' crap is being produced and sold now because it's the pop culture notion of fairies from TV cartoons, not native folklore which is gone with the past. Now it's all about monetising heritage.
I've never heard of this "fairy door" phenomenon, but I suppose it does make sense, metaphysically speaking. It's similar to inscribing a pentagram on the floor in order to summon demons: yes, demons can technically pop up anywhere, but they might find it easier to do so within a well-defined dimensional anchor. Presumably this logic would apply to other malevolent extradimensional entities, such as the fae.
Just chiming in that I felt the same ambiguity and made the same choice as Deiseach on the "supernatural" question. God, souls, angels, demons, afterlife: yes; new age-y stuff: very much no.
For the human biodiversity question there should be two questions covering both favorability and agreement so we can say strongly agree that it's true but still have a highly unfavorable opinion of most of the people that bring it up all the time.
Would like a division between work days and free days for the internet-screen use. I'm on them for pretty much every free moment I have, which is six or seven hours on work days and 16 to 18 hours on free days.
Yeah, I just went for work days as they're more frequent and also more uniform (sometimes I go out and do stuff on a weekend, sometimes I'm glued to a screen)
It's probably late to change this now, if you ever intend to, but for the mental health category, I'd suggest having an "I've been formally diagnosed but no longer believe I meet the criteria" category.
When I was younger (around middle school age IIRC,) I was diagnosed with OCD, and with anorexia. I don't believe I've shown the symptoms to meet the diagnostic criteria for OCD for nearly twenty years now, and the last time I displayed eating disorder tendencies was nearly that long ago. There might be a sense in which the disorders are still "there," but I don't think another psychiatrist would diagnose them in me independently now.
On the risk of flaming up infamous parts of current cultural war I have an issue with the question "With what gender do you primarily identify?"
This question assumes that everyone has a 'gender identification' which *in the context of the current cultural war* is a controversial and nebulous idea. And notoriously fluid, from what I saw sex/gender distinction and what it means to 'be a given gender' have undergone a significant and sinusoidal evolution in the last 20 years. Answering on this question in any way tacitly adheres to the validity of the concept of universal gender identity, and by that forces to take a side in the war. Or at the very least it mixes under the "other" two completely different groups - people who *identify* as non-binary and people who don't identify as anything, because they contest the notion.
Similar problems pertain to the question about 'racial identification'.
The very idea everyone 'identifies' as some race from specifically American dictionary is an overreach for at least some international readers. This question to me might be even worse than about gender and it looks structurally equivalent to the following:
"What NFL team do you root for the most?
- Dallas Cowboys
- Philadelphia Eagles
- New England Patriots
- Kansas City Chiefs
- Other"
To be less dependent on assumptions taken straight from identity politics maybe there should be options 'i don't identify with any gender' and 'i don't identify with any of the above'?
It is not obvious to me the answers aren't required.
Some questions have information that you can skip them, these two don't. If the questions are indeed optional then you are right that not answering is a reasonable choice.
Now that you bring it up I did think "what do any of these labels have to do with me" on the race question. I identify with my nationality (amongst other things) not the color of my skin.
But then I filled out what an American would classify me as, figured that was as close to the spirit of the question as it was going to get.
"If you notice any problems, please ask yourself “Is this a real objection rather than a nitpick? Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?” - and if the answer is yes, comment here so I can fix it."
Yes, it is a nitpick, I will still post it because I am upset by it :D The list of relatives for the questions of "died from" includes self. Somehow, I think that dead people don't fill out the survey.
Might be worth clarifying the AI questions. At the start of the survey you have a question about working in AI. I answered yes because by _many_ metrics I do. I have ML engineer in my title and I've been a data scientist for a long time.
I've worked on actual AI teams before! However, none of that was GenAI, besides playing around with APIs and building stuff on top.
Later on you ask about working on capabilities or safety. That's pretty focussed on recent GenAI / GAI.
That's what's so weird about the AI, it's whatever is at the bleeding edge. Once it becomes kinda understood and mainstream it's not AI anymore, it's ML.
* I picked "Academics (on the teaching side)" even though I'm not actually teaching any classes because my job doesn't otherwise differ from that of my colleagues who are.
* In order for answers to such questions to be mutually exhaustive one has to interpret "No, I don't want to" rather broadly (to include "I don't have the time" and similar) so I did, but the natural interpretation would be much stronger (like "I still wouldn't even if I had a lot more time on my hands") which wouldn't apply to me.
* Dammit, in the "better or worse" question I hadn't noticed the "combination of Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten" part, so I only answered about the latter!
* In the "Immigration" question you really should specify whether you mean de jure or de facto -- it's not such a rare position to believe more people should be legally allowed but more effort should be spent on keeping everybody else out (or, in principle, vice versa -- which I can't remember anyone argue for about immigration but I have about e.g. recreational drugs).
* "Strongly in favor" and "pro-choice" aren't the same thing -- not many people think any women who otherwise wouldn't want to abort should be required to or even encouraged to, so "pro-choice" isn't actually the mirror image of "pro-life". Still, I took 1 and 5 to be the extreme of the Overton window as it actually exists.
* In the COVID fatigue question I guess by "never" you actually mean "any more often than before COVID"
* "a phone capable of browsing the Internet" I've had for quite some time, but for the first few years I did doing so was unreasonably expensive (roughly as much as browsing using an Italian SIM while in South Korea is nowadays) so in practice I hardly ever did -- I kinda answered with an average over possible reasonable interpretations of the question
* "using social media" -- I didn't count defunct ones which I only used occasionally, only still extant ones which I use regularly
* I interpreted "the Internet didn't exist" rather broadly -- there were ISPs for the general public back then, but in my country they required a rather expensive subscription so basically nobody used them.
* "Restriction on porn" -- I hardly use any anyway, so I would sign up if it paid me a penny a day and wouldn't sign up if I had to pay a penny a day. I picked "No", is this right?
* Only one of the three embryos we managed to get via IVF was euploid -- "number of chromosomes" does count as a polygenic test score, right? (I can't remember which of the last two options I picked anyway.)
* "traffic": I counted all negative externalities of widespread motor vehicle use (having to be mindful when carrying a baby stroller, knowing at least two people with immediate family killed in car accidents) -- was I supposed to only count getting from A to B in a car being much slower than if there were no other cars? If so, I would have answered rather differently (haha bicycle/subway/etc. go brrrrr!). (Keeping everything else constant, most ways of ameliorating the latter would make the former worse and vice versa.)
* "noise": the one that bothers me most is one I have never seen mentioned in such discussions (namely, church bells)
* "the group shapes, even a little, how you identify, how you look, how you think of yourself, or how others treat you" -- well, "French" does shape whether I capitalize the first letter of my surname, but no way am I going to count that. (My great-grandfather had grown up in Italy, and was required to otherwise Italianize his last name by OG Fascists in 1924. None of my other seven great-grandparents had anything to do with France.)
> Only one of the three embryos we managed to get via IVF was euploid -- "number of chromosomes" does count as a polygenic test score, right?
No. That's PGT-A (Preimplantation Genetic Testing for Aneuploidy), not PGT-P (polygenic). In practice PGT-A is a subset of PGT-P, but PGT-A is near-universal in IVF (and its in-utero equivalent is also widespread), whereas PGT-P is quite new and mostly unknown. There's also PGT-M (testing for monogenic conditions). PGT-A and -M are generally going to give hard answers - your kid will or will not have Down syndrome, and this can be determined pre-implantation with very high confidence - whereas PGT-P is generally expressed as a bunch of relative risk factors like you see in Scott's post about it (A% more likely to have condition 1, B% less likely to have condition 2, etc., all relative to either the general population or to other embryos you have).
In theory, having only one euploid embryo makes PGT-P relatively pointless, since you aren't going to be selecting between embryos, you'll take what you can get. However, I can imagine somebody who, seeing a sufficiently awful result (e.g. extreme likelihood of something like early-onset dementia or something very physically painful), decides to abort the whole cycle and discard the technically-viable embryo in favor of either another extraction round, donor, adoption, or not parenting. Also, even in less extreme cases, it could still be informative, in the same way that normal genetic health tests can be informative; for example if you're at high risk of developing diabetes you'll probably be more watchful for relevant symptoms and/or careful of your diet, and with PGT-P you could start that from (or even before) birth for every condition they can test for.
(We did do PGT-M too. We didn't do PGT-P, and since it wasn't even offered to us I guess it's either not legally available in our country or would have been way out of our budget.)
I would suggest splitting the Protestant category in the "religion" tab into "Mainline" and "Evangelical". From the outside this may not look like a big difference - I am of a mainline background, and can tell you from having an evangelical girlfriend it makes *all* the difference in terms of many aspects of both practice and worldview.
I might also suggest on next year's survey re-evaluating the political questions. While the basic features of both "Neoreactionary" and "Alt-Right" political beliefs are still around, it has been quite a long time since I have seen anyone self-identify as either. There might be better labels to use for each, though I admit the idea space has yet to coalesce around a single name for each. Maybe "national populism/nationalist populism" for the latter has caught on?
This is pretty much a US based distinction - while there are evangelical, charismatic and other distinct groups of protestants alongside Anglicans, Methodists etc in the UK, the dividing line of mainline vs not mainline is much fuzzier, whereas the Catholic / Protestant / Orthodox distinction is more worldwide.
How about Restorationists? By some account we are super Prostestants! By others, weird "other!" It's basically a coin toss whether I pick "other" or "Protestant" on surveys.
The question With what Gender do you primarily identify, should have two additional responses: Male, Female. Male (cisgender), Female (cisgender) is not the same as Male, Female. I am 100% traditional in my gender id.
It kinda is by definition of what cisgender is because it's more or less whatever remains after you exclude other cases. Cf. https://gender.fandom.com/wiki/Cis-genderless which is what best fits me and is, by definition, a subset of cis.
Re: internet use at age 7. How do I answer this if the Internet was available at the time but it was too expensive and my parents didn't want to pay for it? I think maybe 10% of my neighborhood had internet access at the time.
I just answered that case as the Internet didn't exist, it did technically exist off somewhere else but it wasn't a realistic prospect to have access to it as a kid.
I answered that as my parents didn't let me use the internet at all, since they could have chosen to buy a home computer and connect it to the internet, but chose not to.
IMO, I felt that the intent of the question was clearly to be about actions your parents took with the express purpose and intention of preventing or limiting you from accessing the Internet. If they didn't have it because it was too expensive, the answer is "the Internet didn't exist". If they specifically didn't get it because they didn't want you using it, then the answer is "they didn't let me use it".
There is a question about why I am not a paying subscriber, and the closest match (which I selected) is that the price is too high, but I think it is worth making clear that I think the price is fair, and me being broke is more of a me problem.
Also it feels weird to count YouTube as social media. I just watch stuff; there's no social component any more than there is on Netflix, and my account isn't tied to my real name even if I were in the habit of commenting.
Did you know there’s a special student/broke discount price (based on the honor system)? Personally I’m extremely broke and am happy to pay the almost-nothing price, but if I weren’t broke it wouldn’t be worth the full price, so I would respect the honor system and go back to being a free subscriber.
Kind of an odd situation to be in that’s it’s only worth the price because I have no money...
Likewise, I'm not broke, just frugal. I would pay the broke price but not the regular price. So I'm a free subscriber and chose "the price is too high" on the survey.
Yeah, $10 a month is always gonna be too steep for me, but I guess Scott knows his primary market and it sure ain’t me. I’m not even happy paying that much for Spotify premium which is an app I use hours a day every single day.
I was really angry about how Scott was treated and initially subscribed in order to make sure he could get on his feet. IIRC, I'd seen a later post indicating that he had indeed and so I didn't renew after the first year.
I didn't count YouTube as social media in the first set of questions, since I mostly watch, rarely read comments, and never post comments. But later questions assumed that it was social media, so I responded to those as if it were, and I'd generally prefer that the Internet have a video site that allows comments.
Well I got as far as calculating my bmi and the link took me away from the survey and it forgot all my answers. What am I supposed to do now, start over? Will that mess up the results by double counting answers or are answers not submitted til the end?
Fascinating. I ctrl-f'ed 'bmi' to see if anyone complained, and all three hits were in these two comments: one in 'bmi' itself and two in 'submit[ted]'. What are the chances the only place anyone uses the word 'submit' is in a comment on bmi?
On immigration I want significantly more legal immigration than the system currently allows, including faster processing, but I also want the elimination of all illegal immigration.
This is not an easy position to express on the survey.
I was makina perhaps overly-subtle joke. On the "more legal, no illegal" model from Mr. Doolittle's comment, the eugenics question would be unable to capture the position "I want more coerced eugenics, less uncoerced eugenics".
I resigned myself to collapsing a number of my more nuanced views into a 1-dimensional representation. It's no worse than an IQ test, I suppose. Shadows on the cave wall, and all that.
I (mis?)interpreted the question as being about process rather than level, such that thinking everyone should be allowed in as long as they're formally processed on entry would be maximally strict despite being far less restrictive than the status quo.
Just to qualify my answer to the last question, my son is currently in Italy for a school trip, so, yeah, I’ve thought about the Roman Empire a lot in the last few days: otherwise, I don’t think about it more than once a month or so : )
Sam Kriss just wrote a piece about Elagabalus. I literally clenched my jaw and tapped 'yes' thinking, "Great, here comes a result showing that right-of-center white males think about Rome, when I swear it was only because I was reading a delightful pro-AME piece from a Jewish communist!" Let's hope there's not too much noise in the signal.
Thanks for mentioning that, I liked that post! I don't know if he's ever read 'Till We Have Faces', that has a good part about the stone Ungit, and there is the tradition in Hinduism of rocks/stones being considered images/representations of the goddess (or god, e.g. the shaligram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaligram).
Man, I'd forgotten that from TWHF entirely. In this case I think he protests too much (and or is too naturally transgressive: talking about how the two most famously iconoclastic religions used to be into worshipping stones). That is, I think setting up a stone as a marker for something greater-than-ourselves is just plain human (see: megalithic europe), and precedes any discursive thinking about the stones by immensities of time. Seeing the sun rise over a standing stone fills me with joy.
Yeah, even if you're reading fiction or non-fiction, there's so many references and allusions and so many metaphors and echoes and "rhymes with" Roman empire stuff I don't know how you avoid it even if you're not a history nerd.
Caesar crossing the Rubicon, anything to do with Egypt or Cleopatra or doomed romances, anything to do with Jesus, crucifixion, or Christian persecution or rise and expansion, anything to do with gladiatorial combat or public spectacles, anything to do with assassination, anything to do with bread and circuses, anything to do with Senatorial conventions or Senators or Consuls, anything to do with Republics, anything to do with dictatorships, anything to do with transitions from Republic or democracy to dictator or emperor or monarch, anything to do with military combat, tactics, or strategies, anything referring to Carthage or "X delenda est" - that's just the tip of the iceberg, too. Roman and Greek history is pervasive and ubiqitous in Western Gedankenwelts.
Also, wasn't this originally a metaphor for men thinking about sex every day or something? If you take it in the metaphorical sense, aren't there going to be some noticeable fraction that answer "yes" based on the sex thing vs strictly being about the Roman empire?
As for me and my house, we think about both sex AND the Roman empire on at least a 12 hour basis. 😂
The subtitle of this question is not matched with the question:
"If you said you succeeded in reaching jhana, about how many times have you entered jhanas? If you never succeeded, give the total amount of time you spend trying. If you did succeed, give the amount of time you had to try before succeeding."
About the question "How long have you been reading ACX?" - it has an option of 1-2 years and then "Since it was Slate Star Codex". But Astral Codex Ten was started in 2021 according to Wikipedia, so I believe that there is an answer missing.
The question about polygenic screening would benefit from an answer for "I'm morally opposed to IVF, but if you're going to deliberately create human embryos just to throw most of them in the garbage, I don't see why it's worse to choose the ones least likely to flourish as the ones to throw in the garbage." Or, just "I'm morally opposed to IVF," because if so the whole question of polygenic screening becomes irrelevant.
Yes, this would have been a good option to have. I still would have found it difficult to choose among several relevant answers, but I concur that the ethics around regular IVF (either personal or large-scale) are not fully comfortable for much of the population, including myself.
The question about Covid origins is ambiguous. The options given are natural origins vs lab leak.
What if it was a virus that first occurred naturally in wild animals, was being studied but not modified at WIV, and escaped from that lab into the human population? Does that count as natural origins or lab leak?
It wasn't clear to me, since there also exist theories different from that one that would unambiguously count as either natural origins or lab leak.
That's my understanding as well. I'm pretty sure that the people studying the virus were doing a fair bit of modification, but I don't think that's at all common knowledge or even common belief among lab-leak proponents. It is pretty common knowledge that the virus came into the lab in infected bats, and I think it's pretty unusual to understand just how it was being studied.
"Lab leak" means nothing beyond the fact that the virus was being studied in a lab, and it leaked out. If we'd meant it to mean exclusively some Dr. Moreau type creating new viral strains in the lab, we'd have called it something like "Lab-created".
I'm noting this more because I think it's funny than as a real nitpick. In "Did anyone in your family die (as per your best guess) from COVID? Please answer regarding first and second degree relatives - ie self, brother, sister...", I suspect there won't be many responses where "self" applies.
I can't remember my SAT score let alone the breakdown, but the GRE was more recent. I was tempted to just put the math score from there in, but refrained and left it blank.
I clicked straight to the survey from the substack app and when I followed the link to the joint mobility test I couldn’t get back to the survey; did everyone who completed the survey do the smart thing and open it in a browser from the start? Scott, maybe you should include a note to be sure to do that? (I tried to copy-paste the joint mobility link to a browser, but my phone wasn’t having it for some reason).
Also I doubt I’m the only person who has no coherent answer for ‘where do you stand on the left to right political spectrum’ but Scott probably knows this and is making the forced choice to avoid too many quibblers who still fit somehow…
The question “ If you have children, how do you plan to limit their Internet use at age 7?
If you already have children, describe what you did. If not, describe what you think you will most likely try.” presupposes that your children were exposed to the internet. My children were born in the 70’s. No internet exposure.
"Women: do you get PMS symptoms that affect your mood?" I answered this as if it meant "do you, or when you used to menstruate, did you." But I encourage you to avoid the usages, all too common, that make us postmenstrual women invisible.
I had the same conundrum (and on every ACX/SSC previous survey). I just put down the number of my biological children and not my step children despite that feeling very weird. I'd have put both, but that would imply that they could be counted twice which is even weirder.
Huh, I've been an egg donor and likely have 5-10 biological children out there, but it didn't even occur to me to count them. I really don't think he's looking for answers to include "children that you have no way of verifying even exist but probably do, and that you've never had any relationship with." How would that factor into anything or be relevant at all?
Regarding mental illnesses: By "family" are you looking explicitly for biological relatives? Or would spouse, in-laws, etc. count as well? I assumed you're looking for hereditary connections and answered accordingly, but specificity would be helpful (in either case).
Regarding kidney donation: There was't really a category for "interested but ineligible"
Regarding restrictions on diet: I answered "no" because I shop (both in family and volunteer capacities) for people who would not be part of this program, so can't imagine it working acceptably. If you are interested just in whether respondants would be willing to precommit to constraining their individual consumption choices, my answer might have been different - maybe more caveats or explanation could make that clear if that's your intent?
Admitted nitpick: Women usually reach menopause somewhere between age 40 and 60. Do you want to know how PMS was when we still had cycles however long ago that was or do you want an opt out option?
Since I'm done with that, I skipped that question but yeah, if it was "back when you still had the curse, how was it?" I never had PMS as such, but I definitely revved up in aggression and quickness off the trigger as my period came on stream.
The question "restriction on your screen time" seems to describe a restriction on my internet usage, i.e. my tv/kobo/offline game screen time could be as high as I want under those circumstances.
I wouldn't mention it, but you do make the distinction above of how many hours you spend on screen time vs online, so it might give people the wrong idea, (that the government would be shutting off their TV after a few hours).
Slight nitpick from a Danish person about the political affiliation. You say that the difference between american liberal/democrat and scandinavian socialdemocrat is regulation of markets.
Actually Scandinavian countries does not have much more regulation, despite their high level of redistribution, Denmark for example has a better Ease of Doing Bussiness score than the US.
Personally I am in favour of redistribution, including tax funded healthcare and tax funded universities, but also very much in favour of a generally free market in all other ways, a position I think I share with many scandinavian socialdemocrats. So perhaps there should be a way to decouple regulation from redistribution.
'Substack' felt like a very noncentral example of a social media because its ~mostly just an extension of blogs, which are fine, and so imo made the social media question less evocative of opinions on the on-the-face-of-it question about "would you ban social media".
Rated "traffic" at a 5, but its negative effects on me are almost entirely because of a) traffic noise, and b) the risk of motorists committing a crime by hitting me with their car - so it's semi-redundant with the surrounding questions.
I was also a bit confused by that. I ended up putting traffic at 1 because I figured it was mainly about waiting in traffic or navigating traffic, while I put noise at 10, though most of the noise that bothers me is from modifed cars and motorcycles (which I guess technically count as crime too, though you wouldn't know it with how unenforced the relevant laws are)
I had a bunch of quibbles while taking the survey but forgot to make a note of them. Remembered just now when I tapped the email link to take me over here to the substack. Oh yeah one was about the BMI not making as much sense for people who are very strong.
Re: BMI, I'm definitely chunky, let us say, but that's as much as I'm willing to divulge and I'm certainly not going to give any figures. You can know how old and how tall I am, but my waist measurement is between me and the doctor.
This particular study compares it in a multiethnic American population, where it's particularly strong, and a Korean one, where it's weaker (but still strong). Korea is quite a bit less obese, so there would be more high-fat people of normal BMI, and East Asians have similar obesity-related complications to white people at lower BMIs, so the overweight/obesity thresholds should be lower.
BMI *does* break somewhat for very tall or short people, because its formula doesn't do height extremes well. To some degree you can judge this visually, at least if you have comparisons from normal-height people (most people see overweight people as "normal" due to the obesity crisis skewing what you see), but if you know the BMIs of some people of average height, and you as a very tall/short person are clearly much thinner/fatter than normal-height people of your nominal BMI, you can adjust on that. There are some alt-formulas designed to accommodate this.
Yeah I was just grousing about it because on the one question that specifies that I shouldn't lie (attractiveness) I gave myself high marks, but there's no place to input my height (a large portion of why people find me attractive). And then there's a question about the BMI, which is really broken in my particular case. Bah anyhow this comment chain got out of hand now I'm just bragging instead of humblebragging.
> Oh yeah one was about the BMI not making as much sense for people who are very strong.
You have to work so, so hard to be "overweight" by BMI but still ripped. I've done it, and it took 5+ years of sustained effort. I think only professional athletes, bodybuilders, competing powerlifters, etc, have any chance of this at all, and they're well less than 1% of the population.
Is "Option 9" some obscure social media site I haven't heard of and can't find on google, or did Scott accidentally leave a default option label when creating the form?
Or some third option, I guess. Measuring a lizardman constant?
Sunday was Palm Sunday and the reading of the long Gospel, so definitely this is the week to think of the Roman Empire for Maundy Thursday/Good Friday/Holy Saturday/Easter Sunday/Easter Monday.
My answer is biased because I watched a movie on a plane where the third act took place in a gladiatorial arena. If not for that, I wouldn't have thought about it.
I mentioned this on the SAT/IQ post, but it would be nice if you specified which SAT score you were interested in. Highest? Most recent? Earliest?
Many high schoolers, especially those interested in top tier Universities, will take the SAT multiple times and submit their application with the highest scores. I suspect people will tend to pick their highest scores when filling out surveys like this, because we're all a little vain.
1. substack counts as social media...? i'm not counting it; i spend more than 10 minutes a week reading substack but i spend perhaps 5 minutes a month interacting with any of its social features (this comment is this month's quota)
2. there appears to be a typo of ANNUL (presumably ANNUAL)
> How would you describe your opinion of social justice/anti-racism/"wokeness"?
I found this question difficult to answer; I'm in favor of social justice but against wokeness. I think they're rather different things; social justice is about noticing ways in which our society unfairly disadvantages certain people and trying to fix it, whereas wokeness is about making up pointlessly convoluted rules and getting very angry on social media as a form of status signaling.
The mental health questions are also confusing. It's unclear whether you're asking to determine social prevalence or genetic correlations, so I don't know whether I should be counting my partner as "family". And if a family member seems to maybe have one of the conditions but hasn't been formally diagnosed, does that count? The distinction is made clear for the "me" answers, but not for the family ones.
...But those are the same thing. You can't have one of them without the other. There is always going to be disagreement on who is being disadvantaged and whether or not its justified. That ultimately results in stupid, convoluted rules and people being angry. And you can't expect any "altruistic" pursuit to not have an absurd amount of status signaling involved.
- Question on immigration is extremely ambiguous. Should separate into legal and illegal, as one can have nearly opposite opinions on them
- Question on AI existential risk: shouldn't it be also split in two? I consider AI high risk in a few years, but had to mark it low-moderate on your survey, because imho the world is now facing equally high and much more immediate risks.
- addiction to some drug "other than alcohol or tobacco"... and caffeiine :)
Sorry if I duplicated some other responses - I haven't had time to read all 300 of them
I've never taken an IQ test, but I did take the SAT. However, I only remember my total score, not the verbal. This seems like it could be useful information to collect, but maybe my situation is uncommon.
Regarding rating physical attractiveness? Do we control for our age? i.e. "A good looking 40 year old?" Or should a 40 year old woman give herself a lower rating than a 19 year old woman?
I answered that on "I have a mirror and my eyes are still functional". I've been unattractive all my life, so age doesn't enter into it, but definitely getting older means you lose some of the positive effects of being young (thicker hair, smoother skin, everything not migrating towards the kneecaps, etc.)
Not sure if this is a nitpick or not, but on the free speech question, "hate speech/misinformation/etc" covers a lot of things in one bucket. For me, "vaccines cause autism" and "womyn should be able to have their own spaces" are very different categories of speech, independently of whether I agree with the statements or not.
Party registration and actual partisan affiliation are very different; the question should probably clarify which you want (as political scientists have shown you get very different results for each of these).
As an example, I'm technically registered as a Republican, which I did to cast a vote for Haley in the primaries; but I'd identify as a Democrat or Democratic-leaning independent.
I'm pretty sure the question, at least as currently worded, asks how you're registered, so I don't think it's unclear. But I agree that this can be a misleading question. I'm registered as a Democrat because where I live, the Democratic primaries are the only competitive races and you need to be a registered Democrat to vote in them; when I lived in an open-primary state, I was registered as an Independent.
The literal meaning is clear, but generally party identification is the more useful metric, so it's not clear which I should be providing for the survey.
"How much do the following problems negatively affect your life: poor health"
My health? If I have to take care of an elderly relative, should that impact my answer? I'm going to assume the question refers to anyone with illness that I need to take care of or be concerned for.
The "What social media do you use" question has an answer that's "option 9", which presumably should have been removed or filled in with another social medium.
I hated how a bunch of questions included 3 or more examples, where I had strongly differing opinions based on which of the examples I considered. Like the one about non-coercive eugenics - pretty strongly against subsidizing 'elective' eugenics to select for IQ. However I could support some money for people who (IMHO) are less likely to be able to afforc contraception and in the best place to decide if they'd want their own children to have the same life experiences they've had.
With regards to the question about diagnosis of PTSD:
Both of my Grandfathers fought in WW2. Other relatives who knew them then described to me changes in their personality before and after service, one becoming angry more of the time and the other more reserved/isolated. PTSD did not exist as a diagnosis at that time, but it seems reasonable to entertain the notion that war-time trauma had an impact on these changes.
I expect others have similar stories they could tell. I marked "no family history" for that question because, indeed, no one within two generations of me has had a diagnosis, but I'm not sure if the question captures what you meant it to.
I answered "yes" to that because, like you, the family member didn't have a diagnosis since PTSD did not exist as a concept entertained by the Irish army at that time, but I'm damn sure they had it.
I agree that the question is confusing. I just used my best guess for what I thought they probably had. Unless the family members are our minor children we can't know for sure what they have or haven't been diagnosed with, and formal diagnoses for anything but the most extreme cases of alcoholism, depression, ADHD, autism, etc. were much rarer in earlier generations than they are today.
I expect that Scott included the verbiage about clinical diagnosis to filter out lay people (like yours truly) making guesses about what exactly was wrong with their relatives. Given the responses to my original comment, this does not appear to have been everyone's take, so I wanted to highlight that before we try to draw conclusions from the results.
Not sure what your intent is, but the 'job' questions might be better as check boxes than radio buttons (select more than one). Many people have multiple jobs, or a paid job and a volunteer position. I picked the one I spend the most time doing, but not the one I would prefer to do if the pay wouldn't make me and my family homeless.
A few minor comments if they help improve future polls!
1 - In Part 5, the intelligence section, you don't say people shouldn't put in anything if they do not have any IQ tests. (e.g., 'Leave blank if you have not taken any IQ tests or do not remember your last result')
2 - You call out SAT but a substantial percentage of people take the ACT. Perhaps worth noting, ACT is substantially more common in the Midwest which is also typically more Republican - there may be some interesting skew from that and overrreliance on SAT only. A quick Google showed 1.9m took the SAT in 2023, 1.4 took the ACT in 2023, I'm sure some set took both. It would be good to either add a field for ACT score or just let people put SAT or ACT in the same box because of scoring difficulties.
3 - 'Immigration' question feels like you will get muddy data. Partisan responses like 'illegal immigration should be more strictly mitigated' on the right and 'legal immigration should be less strict/more open to reduce # of illegals', seem likely to overrule the actual question. E.g., People might think illegal immigration should be more strictly treated but also people feel that legal immigration policies are too strict. Seems like extra muddy data which could be reduced by splitting into two topics (especially since this is such a big talking point right now).:
- Should illegal immigration/the border should be more strict?
- Should legal immigration practices (excluding illegal immigration/border control) be more strict?
"Restriction on porn" is less meaningful without asking whether you currently consume porn. As someone who is uninterested in porn, being able to magically turn it off is all upside.
I would say it's all (personal) downside! If you're not seeing any porn at all, then it's not bothering you, and you may find the option useful later, if you do develop an interest, or if you want to access it for some other reason (e.g. fact checking a claim about porn).
The nitpicking *is* the most fun part of the survey. We being who we are, there will be a lot of "this did not convey enough nuance" but I do note that there are some changes in the questions this time round. It's extremely American-centric but again, have to accept that since the majority audience is USA. So even if we poor deprived non-Americans don't have a SAT or an ACT to our name, much less an IQ test result, we will just have to press our runny orphan noses up against the glass and gaze wistfully in at the warm, candle-lit, glittering array of things beyond our purses or grasp while the Americans laugh merrily and frolic within 😀
Being American doesn't necessarily help. I had an official IQ test done at some point when I was a kid in school. I also took the SAT. I 100% have 0 recollection what my score was on either. It never occurred to me or someone in my family that this was something you should hold onto for any particular reason. The IQ score was good enough to get me into a Gifted and Talented program and the SAT score was good enough to get an offer from Tulane (a selectivish college) but that's all I got. Then I read that recent post on IQ/SAT scores here that had lots of comments suggesting the only reason anybody wouldn't remember their scores forever was if they were low and unnoteworthy and got a poignant reminder how *weird* and *different* from how I grew up the upper middle class is. Most humans do not remember various scores they got on standardized tests in school forever even when those scores were (probably) kinda high.
What is the difference between being Gifted and being Talented, or was this just a catch-all way of getting everyone into the same programme? E.g. you're very good at art, so we'll classify you as Talented?
It's just a somewhat old fashioned term for what would now be called AP (Advanced Placement) classes. Basically it selects out the midwit+ students and puts them in classes with somewhat more challenging course material. It also lets you accelerate some classes (by say taking Algebra a year early) so you can take more advanced math and science classes (like Calculus) your senior year that just aren't part of the standard high school curriculum.
I chuckled at the last question about the Roman Empire. I'm assuming it's related to the InstaTok meme and I look forward to whatever results you get out of it.
"If you said you succeeded in reaching jhana, about how many times have you entered jhanas?
If you never succeeded, give the total amount of time you spend trying. If you did succeed, give the amount of time you had to try before succeeding."
I don't understand if the question is about the number of times I've SUCCESSFULLY reached jhana, or the number of times I've ATTEMPTED to do so before succeeding. The title and the subtitle don't match.
For ethnicity, I put Canadian under Other. I much more strongly identify as Canadian than any of my more distant ancestry, and Ancestry .com is able to identify me as Canadian.
Canadian or American is a perfectly fine answer. Because of the implication. By which I mean ethnogenesis. However nationality is not ethnicity but I doubt you are making that mistake here.
I just took a prenatal screening questionairre in America, and it asked, among about five other options such as South-East Asian or Ashkenazi Jew, is I were Quebecois, which is apparently an ethnicity of genetic interest.
I'm not sure what to select for the living arrangement question — I live in a college dormitory, so I thought the ">10 apartments" option was most accurate but still quite wrong, so I left the question blank.
You have a section called "Income and Charity" but there are no questions about charity. I remember seeing such a question on previous surveys, so I assume it was left out by accident. That's too bad :(
Wherever Scott puts it, someone is going to complain. I don't care one way or the other, since it doesn't gore my ox. While I might agree with you in general, if someone is trans and feels that this is calling their situation "you're insane" and objects, I see the objection and there's not much harm in accommodating that.
(Someone not trans but getting all ""will nobody think of the children" about it can go for a walk).
Not a nitpick, just a heads-up of weird answer interpretation from my side:
"Restriction on your diet" - just wanted to comment that I said 'No', not because I mind a restriction of my diet (it's already fairly restricted and I like to think that if I were to sign up for this, approximately nothing about my food intake would actually change), but because I'd be suspicious of hidden costs. I don't think this is 'fighting the hypothetical' - "government programs are rarely truly free" is a reasonable prior to have. I'd actually clicked 'Yes' originally, since I like the idea of supporting a program like this in theory and therefore signal-boosting its perceived usefulness for wider society, but figured ethically the right answer is 'No', since I shouldn't decide that for other people, and, well, costs.
This absolutely goes into the bucket of overthinking answers, and I am sorry. But once I'd had this thought I couldn't bring myself to change the answer.
(Contrast to the 'Restriction on your screen time'. I'm very comfortable with my internet usage (and I assume 'research for the books you're writing' classes as work even if it's not income related), but I'm pretty sure it would run afoul of metrics anyway, so my 'No' there is much more selfish. Also contrast the porn restriction, where I don't really consume any (though... I guess r/GoneWildAudio as of about month and change ago, though, which I assume counts? So this statement's no longer actually true, even if I identify with said statement), but worry quite a lot about the effects the removal of porn would have on society.)
"What social media do you use?" Needs a schlaugh.com option! (Kidding.)
Also, I skipped all the kids & internet questions, which I hope isn't too weird. The reason's pretty simple: I don't plan to have kids. Having a "don't care, because I don't plan to have kids" option might actually be good for people like me.
Thanks for doing the survey! Very curious about the results, as always.
In the "Do you belong to any of these ethnic groups?" question, you leave out "Indian" (the country), though you have some of the countries surrounding it. Am I missing something or is this just an oversight? (I think it was like this last year too.)
I'm interested in politics the way a mouse is interested in cats.
The "formal diagnosis of this condition" questions should have an option for "I had the condition, and got a formal diagnosis, and then the condition was fixed, so now the diagnosis is irrelevant". It probably says something about the state of mental health care that this wasn't an option.
Similarly, with Long CoViD, there didn't seem to be a clear way to say "I had lingering effects, which declined in severity until they went away completely, and this crosses the boundary for formal definitions of 'long covid' even though it is a very non-central example".
The Beighton’s score failed to specify how far apart our feet should be before touching our palms to the floor. Silly test, you deserve the answer you get.
For first social media use, I'm counting UNIX as social media. Plans, projects, fingering, ytalk, tracking IP addresses to see who's at home...
Condo vs. apartment is conflating ownership structure with physical layout.
Couple of thoughts. I haven't read all 400 (!) comments, so some might be repeats. I had some of these thoughts in previous years but didn't comment them.
1. The blue-collar/white collar dichotomy doesn't really work for the other-jobs options (I had this problem last year, when I was working-primarily rather than studying-primarily, in a job that didn't fit either). Many service-sector jobs don't fit this dichotomy well.
2. I wanted to give an age range on "first smartphone", but it required an exact answer. I think a lot of people aren't sure about this. I had a similar problem for "social media", where I can't really put a firm age (I started participating in online forums as a kid).
3. I wasn't sure about a lot of the magic-wand questions and felt the need for some "elaborate on why you answered yes or no" textbox afterwards. This applied probably even stronger to the PGS questions, where I just kind of stared at them thinking "wow, I hate all these takes" -- I picked options (that seem hilarious in combination) that were wrong but gestured usefully at some things, and felt the unfilled need to expand on them in a textbox. (Note: this is *not* a request for an "other" option. I think adding an "other" option without adding long-response boxes would make things strictly worse.)
4. Building on that last one, there are too many "my special and unique situation is not accounted for" options. Yes, I know #3 and #4 sound like weird concerns to both have. It's the intersection of them -- there's a lot of "select any of these buttons or the button for your special and unique situation" and not enough "elaborate on why you responded with what you responded". The "I want to check that I'm not religious" button in the what-religion-are-you question has been a scourge of the surveys for as long as I've been aware they exist. I basically want to see more things like the "has the blog gotten worse" question, where a forced-choice with no snowflake option was followed by the opportunity to elaborate.
For the "identity" questions, I gave up on my internal state, and just went with what an external observer would report. Colloquially, it's not what you want, but it gives you the answers you want.
Some of the questions used the word "prefer". There are many facets of reality which I would prefer to be different. Perhaps I am heterosexual but all things considered would prefer to be homosexual; what then? Or for something that people here might actually answer, perhaps I am mono but would prefer to be poly. Of course, this gets into transracialism, and from thence into very dangerous territory.
The "crime" question packs in some assumptions about what is considered "crime", and who does the considering. If I'm impacted by extraordinarily unethical behavior, which is not technically illegal at the moment in the geopolitical entity that has jurisdiction over my body, does that count?
Penetration as a counter for sex is much weirder than just not specifying what you mean with sex. Now I'm unsure whether to count a lesbian relationship. Is that intended?
Another nitpick: I use the internet recreationally a LOT for research. I enjoy doing research. Not sure if this would be counted as limited or non-limited in the spirit of the question.
I would be fine with an intervention that disables mindless scrolling. But I still need reddit to do research on various hobby and life topics, so I wouldn't agree to the intervention.
"Now I'm unsure whether to count a lesbian relationship. Is that intended?"
Well, if I go by a gynaecologist appointment I had several years back, "no" and "maybe". After trying to convey that no, indeed I had never done the deed with anyone, first he tried to make sure that I knew what was meant by "sex" and that meant "penetrative sex" (with accompanying helpful hand gestures).
You know, just in case I had accidentally tripped and fallen on an erect penis with my vagina. Or that I thought this activity was called "putting the Devil in Hell" and not "sex".
Once *that* was out of the way, he then tried to 'tactfully' ask was I a lesbian.
Yeah. That medical appointment certainly is a special memory.
Politically speaking, I picked "US Democrat" on previous iterations of the survey as the political party that was the closest match to my views (though far from a perfect match). My views have not substantially changed, but the Democratic Party has changed significantly, and now I can no longer pick that option... so I'm kind of left without a compatible survey answer.
Perhaps not authoritarian politcies, but going from "okay, gay marriage legal, whatever" to "trans strippers on the White House lawn" *might* leave some people going "that's not where my views moved".
Okay, not strippers. But please lady, shill your OnlyFans some other time, okay?
If 9 out of 10 Democrats are pro- strippers on the White House lawn (hypothetically speaking), and assuming I disapprove, how can I voice my disapproval and (ideally) reduce the number of lawn-strippers, other than by not voting for Democrats ?
They have been leaning hard into "hate speech" laws ever since the early 2000s, and have recently expanded into trying to manage "misinformation", up to the point of proposing a "Ministry of Truth". While in power, they colluded directly with social media networks to spin their preferred narrative. Some of their COVID policies were quite heavy-handed (though arguably justified, depending on whom you ask). Their policy on gender peculiarities appears to be increasingly coercive. In general they seek to impose demographic quotas for all kinds of institutions (and they have largely succeeded). They are also heavily invested in censoring media of all kinds in order to maintain their preferred demographic narrative. Those are just some items off the top of my head, I'm sure there are others.
The only gender policy from the White House I am aware of is a partial ban on trans athletes. They allowed trans athletes at very low levels competition, but allow prohibitions at the competitive level. It’s up to the leagues, not the government. All of the gender medicine stuff that is so controversial is happening due to a lack of oversight, not an authoritarian government. In Europe they are actually banning youth gender medicine in most cases, which is more authoritarian than just letting it rip like we do over here.
I don’t know about hate speech laws.
Regarding free speech, it’s the Republicans who are trying to coerce a sale of tik tok, although the democrats seem more interested now that they believe it’s being used to criticize Israel.
In general, Democrats are currently significantly more likely than Republicans to support speech-restrictive policies, be it in the form of national laws, state and local laws, or internal corporate regulations. This didn't use to be the case; one major reason why I used to vote Democrat is precisely because they opposed the Republicans' theocratic efforts to restrict expression.
For the mental health conditions I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, but don't have it now. So I selected the last option of I don't have it. You might want to add another option if this is information you are interested in capturing.
The SAT got recentered a bit over the years. I don't think just asking for an SAT score without asking when it was taken is a good idea: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sat+recentering
For the relatives option for mental illness, I didn't know what the generations meant so I mentally counted grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles under familial mental illness. Maybe it's dumb to count grandparents under that because two generations means you + siblings and then your parents but I don't know why you wouldn't include grandparents in the measure as well. Grandparents didn't apply in this scenario for me, but that could be confusing and mess up the data.
Regarding the question of whether I've thought about Roman Empire, I'm >50% sure I did, so I answered yes, but I definitely had thought about the Roman Republic. Were it not >50% to begin with, does the Republic count?
The physical attractiveness question needs an option for "how the hell would I know?"
I also don't know my weight, so I just have to guess at BMI
P.S. The survey took me 28 minutes, even though I was able to quickly just answer "no" to many of the questions. I think your time estimates are overly optimistic.
I might recommend putting the "do you mind if I share your answers (anonymized)" question at the end of the survey -- I left it blank because I didn't know what the questions were, then forgot to go back and re-consider.
Probably not actual feedback: On the political topics: I wished there was a better way to indicate that I hold some but not all of the beliefs in the category. In particular, on free speech, I'm pro social media moderation (private companies! the internet was better when it was more spread out so different places could have different norms!) but also very pro free speech in general (do not want increased legal restrictions on speech). On HBD, it almost certainly exists but I don't think most people have any reason to care outside of medicine. I just tried to average my two answers to roughly the % of the set of beliefs that I agreed with, instead of indicating strength of agreement/disagreement. (Maybe that's the point of the scale?)
On IVF and polygenetic selection: serious question, has anyone done a proof of concept with a breed of dogs that has a clearly defined breed standard appearance that isn't otherwise medically harmful? (so like, labs, not bulldogs). Purebred dogs are typically less healthy than mutts and subject to more genetic diseases; if someone could use polygenetic screening to produce a line of healthy, "attractive" purebred dogs (instead of just accidentally selecting for some new genetic disease), that would be a pretty good proof of concept.
I *never* know how to answer that as a retired person. I have a small annuity, I get returns on investments, and I sell a little when needed, which leads to either gains or losses that show up in the pre-tax income. But I also always do Roth conversions as big as necessary to get my income up to just below the 35% bracket. Do I count that?
> a government program (let's say funded by private actors so it wouldn't raise taxes)
Seems simpler/clearer for this to be an NGO? My answer changed significantly when I realised I was confused about the idea of a non-coercive government program, reread the question and realised these were privately funded.
I assume others have already mentioned that it's awkward for the "race" question to be a radio button rather than checkboxes, especially if "multiracial" is not one of the options.
> How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?
"Favorable/Unfavorable" seems to be a very ambiguous answer. Am I supposed to be answering whether I believe that genetic racial differences exist? Or that they are a good thing/should be celebrated? Or that I am in favor of a view strongly associated with believing that they exist, i.e. that they are a bad thing?
ETA: also, nitpicking, but for the mental health section: Where's the options for "I have a formal diagnosis of this condition but I suspect the diagnosis is flawed (e.g. by mistaking one of the given conditions for another)", and "I don't have access to family history"? Honestly this section should have been checkboxes: "diagnosis?" "probably have it?" "verified absence in family history?" "verified presence in family history?".
Also, where's the libertarian-friendly form of the nanny state questions? "Suppose the government..." NO. "Don't figh--". NO IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE.
Seriously? It's $CURRENT_YEAR and you still want to pretend these are even remotely anticorrelated, let alone mutually exclusive? I will assume that you meant "The presence of a virology lab is pure coincidence"..."Most likely a lab leak" and will answer accordingly, but I suspect that someone with different priors would be happier to assume you meant "zoogenic"..."someone literally named Dr. Frankenstein assembled DNA one nucleotide at a time in order to do a biological warfare" and will also answer accordingly, and as a result your data will be more bimodal than it should have been. Then again maybe this was actually the point and this was a galaxy-brain question wording; who can say?
Anyways, my point is how am I supposed to answer if I think there's a decent chance (~50%) this was completely zoogenic, and yet I also think it *obviously* leaked from the lab (~100%)?
I think opinion along those lines goes "it occurred spontaneously in the wild, was one of a bunch of viruses collected from the wild to be studied in the lab, then someone dun messed up and it escaped" rather than "the lab was working on a bioweapon and it got out".
Nobody but a handful of conspiracy theorists believe COVID came from a biological weapons program. Lots of people were and are a bit fuzzy on how exactly 21st century biologists go about studying infected bats people send them, and "lab leak" has generally been understood to cover all of those.
And it encompasses the bioweapons nutjobs, most of them anyway, but it isn't defined by them.
I suggest that the question on attractiveness ask people to rate themselves as attractive within their social - age group. Clearly younger people are probabilistically more attractive than older people. I don’t think you intended that confounder? Or maybe you did.
I was briefly confused by this as well, but then decided it must mean in overall terms so an 80 year old should always give an honest hotness level of 0 or 1. Even once you accept it means in overall terms though, this is still especially confusing for people who are above average hotness in like 30-45 age range. 30-45 obviously counts against you but above average in this range still puts you above like overweight people in their 20s. I finally went with something like "how hot are you relative to a supermodel" and was able to work with that.
Yeah, all those hags and dotards once they hit 30, how can they ever think they might be good-looking? 😁
Never a problem for me because I never had any looks to boast of, but I do find it funny how "women are at their very peak of attractiveness in the age range 16-19, once they hit their 20s they're passable, any older than 29 and just haul them off to the glue factory" is a thing.
It's mostly a skin/weight thing. Most people have notable lines by their mid thirties and most people gain weight as they get older. Having good skin genes and/or watching your weight obviously extends this quite a bit.
Well, sunscreen helps a lot too. All the people I've known (almost all women) that had really great skin and less facial aging in their 40's-60's were religious about sunscreen usage and sun-blocking hats and such.
I'm pretty sure Scott intends that question to give him very different information than "are my readers attractive or not?" My guess is that he's going to cross-tab with things like number of partners (obvious), biological sex, or even things like political affiliation to see if *self reported* attractiveness correlates with those or other things.
I had the same question. As a 40-something woman, I chose to answer by comparison to my age-gender cohort since that's mostly where it matters in practical terms; those who have reason to care about my attractiveness don't much overlap those who have reason to care about the attractiveness of men, 18-yr-old women, or 80-yr-old women.
I was a little confused by the options for "Did you have any lingering fatigue problems from COVID?". I skimmed the question and didn't really notice the "lingering" and took a while to understand that, despite fatigue being my main COVID (short COVID) symptom, "I got COVID, but never felt fatigued" was the option for me.
"I improved the way I deal with a mental illness" is both too ambiguous (do other people's mental illnesses count?) and specific (does undiagnosed narcissism count?).
The question about whether somebody in my family has died of COVID: do in-laws count? I took the absence of no in-law words (mother-in-law, sister-in-law, etc.) in the example list to mean "no" but I spent 20ish seconds waffling on whether I should select yes or no before I decided on "no." (Sister-in-law died of COVID).
This is probably a nitpick but it did pass the very low hurdle of "Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?" because I was genuinely uncertain about it for a bit.
I thought attractiveness was being used as a surrogate for status and so would be age and socio relative. An attractive 60 year old woman in a room of her peers has high status.
I am a student and have lots of annoying student nitpicks, plus a few others:
1. If there is a difference between our official home address and the place we live most of the year (e.g. because of college), what should we pick?
2. Does sexual orientation go by biological sex or by presentation/identity?
3. There should probably be an "other" option for work/major, I just picked the thing that was closest to mine.
4. Seconding other people's statement that there should be an option for "I used to have this condition but don't anymore."
5. Does having family members with a certain condition require formal diagnosis, and if not, what severity of behavior qualifies? For example, my grandma is quite preoccupied with her own and other people's weight, eats very little and encourages other family members, especially women, to do the same, and seems to be noticeably underweight, but she is in her eighties and still going strong. Would someone like this, or an equivalent for another disorder (say, someone who is consistently very sad and lethargic), count for the family members answer?
6. Polygenic selection should probably have some kind of "mixed feelings" option.
The question about race is very america-centric. I doubt many europeans identify strongly with their skin colour. Rather, people identify themselves based on their country of origin.
Hey is the graphic for this post from GPT4? I'll bet it is, because it's got a typical hollow-head AI error in it: It's showing a place where someone is to answer yes or no, and they're answering both ways, but by putting a check in the *yes* box and an x in the *no* box. (And then toying with the idea of turning the x into a chex.). Reminds me of the time I asked the thing for an image of what a standing person would capture in a selfie if the took one of the parts of themselves they could see by holding the camera at eye level pointing down: Torso, legs and feet, the parts increasingly smaller and foreshortened as you get lower, right? It gave me a picture of somebody taking that selfie. And yet the image Scott chose *looks* really good, right? -- like a good-quality advertising image.
People are making little children's story books the same way, and selling them on Amazon. Betcha they look great and are as hollow-headed and hollow-hearted as this image. We're going to lose more IQ points from that sort of shit in the new generation than we would have gained by embryo-tweaking for inteligence.
> Betcha they look great and are as hollow-headed and hollow-hearted as this image. We're going to lose more IQ points from that sort of shit in the new generation
I have worried about this in relation to children's TV shows, especially badly-animated and badly-voice-acted shows. Shows where all the parts are recorded separately and then later mixed together, as opposed to shows where the voice actors respond to one another in real time while recording. I can swear I can hear it in some kids I know, where their conversation is ever-so-slightly disjointed, and they seem to be trying to elicit laughter or applause with every other sentence that comes out of their mouth, as though they're constantly playing to an audience.
Kinda, yeah. I have to wonder about those teens' experience of the world, which made "influencer" seem like their highest best destiny. It's like asking "what's your favorite food" and getting back "heroin".
I don't know. The person who told me is quite a committed ACX reader, and no fool. He and his wife are about to start having children and he has been reading up on schools, lives and interests of kids in this era, etc. He probably read it someplace reasonably respectable.
Wow, so this is one of those fake fakes -- like people on Twitter accusing each other of being bots. I does seem still seem to me like a weird flaw to have somebody checking off both Yes and No. And from the point of view of ad copy quality, seems like it would be more appealing to have a nice big check mark in YES.
I think this is a real question and not a nitpick: do you mean "Physical attractiveness" relative to conventional western beauty standards, relative to the beauty standards of your own culture, or relative to your own 'type'?
No, I really don't think that's true. A butch lesbian who's into other butches might consider herself very attractive, for example, while being aware that she's pretty much the opposite of the Hollywood female beauty standard.
All of the comments here about how to interpret questions & what to do about the ones that do not seem to cover one's own case -- its a wonderful demonstration of how impossible it is to come up with adequate categorization systems for any aspect of human life.
It didn't give the option of saying I've never gotten a smartphone, so I left that one blank. Which is too bad, because I would have been curious to know how many people haven't ever gotten a smartphone.
The "do you have this mental disorder" questions could maybe use an answer that says "I have family members who think they have this condition, but have not been formally diagnosed."
'Polygenic selection for cognitive traits' could use a "I would ban it for everyone, if I could, to prevent an IQ race, but otherwise I'd use the heck out of it", or some other "moral quandary" option.
Dreams: Take note that there's no way for me to express "my dreams often take place in the house I grew up in, and never in the house I've lived in as an adult, but also, my own children (who I had as an adult) show up in my dreams more often than people I knew as a kid".
As an aside to the ding-dong over the eugenics/IVF questions in the survey, why "AI" meant something *very* different to me than it does in the context of paperclip maximisers:
AI = Artificial Insemination, not Artificial Intelligence (unless we're talking about the book and movie Demon Seed where the AI wanted and got a baby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Seed):
"Why should I use AI?
• If herd size is small it allows you to avoid the purchase cost and annual maintenance costs of a stock bull.
• AI offers access to a range of proven, genetically superior bulls of different breeds which produce faster- growing calves
• It allows the selective mating of cows/heifers to selected sires strong on particular traits, e.g. proven easy calving bulls on heifers and young cows.
• The production of quality replacement heifers
• AI removes the hazard of having a bull on the farm and the need for special housing.
I took the SAT, but that was 50 years ago. I know I did well, but I have no memory at all of what my actual scores were. I'm not the kind of person who remembers test scores for 50 years.
Wanted to chime in and say that I have also never owned a smartphone and left that question blank, and would prefer if the survey was able to disambiguate this from "not sure / left blank for other reason".
1. I thought “country” was confusing. I assumed it meant nationality or country of origin, but then the next question asked Americans what state we live in, which made me question whether as an expat I was supposed to have listed my current country of residence.
2. A political option for “fiscal left, social conservative” other than ethnonationalist populism would’ve been nice.
3. By “Internet” I took you to mean “web” which we restrict very heavily with our kids, rather than, say, streaming a movie.
> How strictly did your parents limit your Internet use as a young child (eg age 7)?
When I was 7, my family had Internet but my parents hadn't introduced me to it yet. They didn't have any rules about how I was allowed to use it, I just didn't know that it existed. Not sure which option this falls under.
I know a family still running a version of this. The children regularly mourn that their iPad “didn’t come with” various apps that they know their friends go on. The parents simply commiserate and hope that they won’t learn about the app store for a while yet.
I really appreciate the addition of a "mixed" option to the family religious background question! In past years I was pretty confused about how to answer, and now I feel I can answer this accurately.
The question about political views has a line from left to right. That can't represent the full gamut of political world-views, and in particular, by implication, lumps supporters of a small state and the free market with fascists. I was obliged to leave that question blank. A series of questions would be better, on the preferred size of a state, the duties of government, free trade versus protectionism, and so on.
Survey for you fine people: what’s the deal with the whole ACX-EA-LessWrong-rationalist-e/acc network/movement? I just discovered this blog like 2 weeks ago and each rabbit hole I go down makes me feel more and more that I’ve stumbled upon a guerrilla intelligentsia that I’ve never heard of before.
Nitpick about the career section: I'm in an assistant position at a school, and had no idea whether this was blue collar or white collar. I ended up putting blue collar because of the amount of physical labor and the low pay, but it really seems like childcare/education should rate as an option, or at least grey collar jobs (google says that teaching and childcare are both grey collar). I know another person who works in early childhood education who was also very confused about this question, and don't know which option they ended up choosing.
on a lot of the policy positions, I found myself being like "well, I agree this is an issue, and I don't favor doing nothing, but my proposed solution isn't well-represented by either pole shown here"
eg climate change: more subsidies for good tech, not economically costly cutbacks or whatever
eg immigration: too much illegal immigration, not enough legal & employment-related immigration
eg free speech / hate/misinfo - more stuff like community notes, more collective ability to filter stuff
Why might enough people be uncomfortable sharing why they've thought about the Roman Empire in the last 24 hours that it's specifically mentioned in the question?
On the IQ question, I last took a formal test at the age of eight, five and a half decades ago. (I read the score upside down from a paper on the child psych's desk.) My answer should probably be decreased ten or more points for changes in population IQ since then, and a further standard deviation for not exercising my brain very much in the last two decades.
I assume the «abortion» question is abortion legality — I am in favour of a government using «what would make you not choose abortion» surveys as an important input to social policies, for example, but also against criminal action against the woman for seeking abortion — ever. I basically guess that it has to be US-centric enough, so I should answer a different question than asked; it is somewhat confusing to me.
I hope that my diet restriction answer does not count as fighting the hypothetical: I am probably eating somewhat too much overall, at home, mostly of things that would count as healthy if I cut all of them 15% (not sure about exact number and don't have a way to measure my weight…). So categorical restrictions and portion sizes for food sold in portions would not do much anyway so why bother.
Possibly a nitpick but maybe not: on the ethnicity section, "Malaysian" is generally considered a nationality, while "Malay" is an ethnicity. A large minority of Malaysians are not ethnic Malays.
Re polygenic selection - I would ideally like more options, in that: combining the question to be about intelligence and appearance feels restrictive - my opinions vary quite a lot depending on the specific trait - could there be an option for this ?
My prediction: although there are more males here than females, those females who are here, will be more ACX-ish (more Alexandrian?) than the males. (Admittedly, I base this on a mere two data points: The most prolific female commenters at Data Secrets Lox tend to be on the autism spectrum, and the recent post about polyamory mentioned that the women surveyed were more likely than the men to favor polyamory.)
I think in the religious views section, there isn't really a view that fits perennialism. Maybe that should be an option? Don't know how obscure it is, I feel I had already heard of it before I got into it.
I think there is a mistake on the "how many time did you enter jhana" description - it looks like a copy-paste-ish of the first paragraph of the previous question (it says "give the amount of time you had to try before succeeding", which doesn't make sense).
A question I had a hard time answering because of the phrasing: "If you said you tried to reach jhana, how long did you spend trying?" This doesn't account for where you start from, the answer will be very dependent on past meditation practice experience (especially concentration practice). I did experience it on my first 10 day jhana retreat but I had been practicing concentration meditation for years before, I just never really tried jhana. I answered in a few months, which I feel would be consistent with settling the mind enough to get to jhana for me after a long break in practice.
I felt confused by the "do you read the subreddit/Discord" question because I feel like I fall between "read it" and "don't want to read it". I definitely want to read more but I probably only see about 1% of the content when my wife points it out or during the 5 minutes a week I actually visit. If you're using the "read it" question as a proxy for "will you see announcements I post there in a reasonable timeframe" the answer is probably no; if you're using it as "do you literally ever look at the site" the answer is technically yes.
I've been annoyed by "saving...draft saved" popups before but not specifically on Gmail, not sure why that one was singled out? Usually it's sites where the notification is more obnoxious that that, i.e. text that comes with its own helpful glowy rectangle popup. I think Gmail is subtle enough that I never noticed it before, or else forgot about it.
Re: question about polygenic selection for cognitive/physical traits (e.g. IQ, height)
Those are very very different. IQ selection has positive externalities; height selection is not only a purely positional good treadmill, it leads to health problems—it's basically a prisoner's dilemma.
On the mental health disorders, you should add an option for "I have a diagnosis but don't think I actually have it". There are plenty of people with an ADD diagnosis just to get their Adderall but who don't think they really have it, and there are plenty of people in denial of their diagnoses.
On the questions on how one would restrict their kid's Internet use, you assumed that everyone either already had kids or would have kids. No option given for people who will never have kids. But of course, the devotedly childless often have some of the strongest opinions on everything that parents do wrong, so I answered those questions anyway, with what I thought others should do, even though I won't ever have to deal with it (I assumed that was the right thing to do given no instruction or option for those who wouldn't ever have kids).
Dreams : I wake up remembering a dream maybe once a year, so the questions aren't gonna be very relevant for me. I could have just not answered but ... apparently I'm one of those guys who needs a “option for those who need an option” button.
This survey gets points for inclusivity! I like how Scott reminds us that thinking about the Byzantine Empire is still thinking about the Roman Empire.
Many of the questions touch subjects where my opinion developed away from that one-dimensional sub-space between both extremes. Therefore not participating. But maybe i am not the intended audience anyway: e.g. "Length of Time", i perceive the SSC/ACX switch as something recent but it is displayed as end-of-scale.
For the question: "How happy are you with your paid subscription?"
One of the answers is, "Happy because I just subscribed to support the blog, and I am" but it never ends. I am genuinely confused about what it implies.
As with all surveys like this, I wish for all questions there was an "other" option where you could give a very short text answer and the people operating the survey could decide what "bucket" I should fall into.
For example, I am a high school, college, and university dropout (with many cumulative years across them all). So my highest degree is none, yet I generally consider myself more well educated than the *vast* majority of humanity (including a significant portion of the subset that completed a PhD program) because I dedicate my life to continued learning self teach any subject of interest to me (which is many).
For questions like this I answer with technically correct, but I would feel better leaving such decision making up to the survey operator who can decide if this question is meant to represent accumulated knowledge or how closely one followed standard path through life. Both are interesting, but different questions wrapped into one.
Note: I merely use this question as an example, I had a similar problem on many questions in the survey. I even had trouble answering the "Profession" and "Country" questions which seem like they should be no-brainers. I worked in one field for ~20 years, now I do R&D in different field, run a company in 2 other fields, and do "hobby" work (with a team that I pay) in yet another. None make me any money of significance (for various intentional reasons) so I guess I'm retired from 20-year industry? Or maybe I work in non-profit on current passion project? But that doesn't at all capture my Profession or Work Status, and my residence, citizenship, and birth/upbringing country are all different.
The takeaway, I have high anxiety, but only while filling out these forms (also not an option). 😆
Scott, you need to either to tell people to adjust their SAT scores taken before 1991 to the new scale (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563025.pdf), or to report their given score and tell you what year they took it so you can adjust the scores.
For whatever reason, the survey did not allow me to enter my income. It kept saying something like "Must be a non-zero number". I tried several formats before skipping the question.
That's probably a very 'me problem' request, but... I tend to 'read the internet' via the aggregated RSS feed and for various reasons (being busy etc.) I am often-enough about a month 'late' to reading latest posts.
I would have liked to fill this survey, but by the time I've learned it's up it was already too late.
So an advance warning that something like this is going to be posted (e.g. 'in a couple of weeks I'm going to post a survey that will be open for a couple of weeks') or just keeping the survey open for longer (assuming that doesn't create other problems) would have been helpful.
I honestly have no idea if this would be useful to anyone but me -- but thought I'd post in case I'm not the only person like this.
One of the questions on internet usage asks how old the person was when they first used social media. I have visited the websites of Facebook, Twitter, etc on occasion but I have never signed up or logged in (ie had an account) with any of them. I am unsure if this means I have "used" social media under your definition. If the answer is no, there doesn't seem to be a way to indicate that since one has to input a number greater than 0
If you think of the way you browse them as "using social media", put the age you started browsing in that way. Otherwise leave blank.
I mean what I'm wondering is, like, what about LiveJournal. Or, say, Xanga...
> If you notice any problems, please ask yourself “Is this a real objection rather than a nitpick? Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?”
Surely you can decide for yourself whether you want to count certain edge cases as social media. FWIW, I would count LiveJournal and Xanga as fairly standard examples, and both are described by wikipedia as social media/networking sites.
I really wanted to include Usenet in this question but I resisted.
...I didn't resist! Hopefully a certain amount of random noise can be tolerated.
Or bulletin boards
I wouldn't count Usenet, but I would count Livejournal.
I think there's a meaningful distinction between web forums and places where you're expected to make a personal profile and have people follow you.
If Reddit counts, then Usenet ought to.
I did indeed count Livejournal and did not count Usenet (though possibly just because I didn't think of it), so I'm pleased to see that this is, if not a universal interpretation, at least not an n=1 interpretation.
having read the CTW with Jonathan Haidt I am now enlightened to understand that its the use of an algorithm to direct content towards you that gives social media that extra something that goes beyond information exchange tool.
I wish Tumblr had been on there — it's the only social media I really use regularly, and there are a decent number of Scott-readers (both fans and critics) over there.
I thought about counting Usenet (or BBSes), and LJ, but decided Facebook was the central sort of example. But it was one of the questions I spent too much time dithering over.
I also came for this exact question. I spontaneously entered 0, too, so possibly Scott should treat 0 as “I have never used social media”.
I entered "9999" for "age of owning a smartphone", since I've never owned one. I eventually decided I had used social media, especially when I saw that scot was counting youtube and substack.
> How many hours a day do you spend online, other than for work? Count playing online games. Don't count offline games, TV, etc.
This question seems very ambiguous to me. If watching TV doesn't count, does watching Netflix count? Watching YouTube videos? Reading blogs? Wikipedia? Web serials?
I'm guessing the intention here is "digital social interactions"..?
I mostly spend time online reading stuff, not interacting, and definitely counting this as online. Yes agree that Netflix and other streaming platforms is SLIGHTLY ambiguous but I'd count that as TV because it's a functional equivalent of putting a DVD into a player.
Depending on whether you're a lumper or a splitter, YouTube could be either. Most of my YouTube watching is on my TV, so there's no possibility of interaction. So is it still social, or is it another way to watch TV?
Yeah I don't really buy YT as social media because it's defined by interactivity and posting own content to me and I've never interacted or made yt posts (not that I use much YT). That said : fed by an algorithm is another aspect here and this fully applies to YT. TT isn't all that super interactive from what I've heard yet it's pure algorithm.
I counted online reading as online, even though in reality I first mass-save a bunch of stuff to online-read locally, and then read it in a viewer program that doesn't connecto to the network.
Based on how he talked about YouTube as a social media company, I think that would be included. Online videos where ordinary people can upload and other ordinary people can comment seems to be central examples for the survey.
That said, I think watching network news online would not count as "online."
> litter, graffiti, literal broken windows, peeling paint, overgrown/dead plants, etc.
One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn't belong
Which one?
The one that doesn't belong is the overgrown plants, right? They can be beautiful.
They are an example of bad maintenance like the rest.
In an urban location. In a rural area, it’s a weird question. I just put 1, since it doesn’t bother me unless a tree falls on the road which is against the spirit of the question
...actually, in retrospect, the intent of these question is unclear to me: am I not bothered by these things because I'm not in an environment where they happen enough to bother me, or because I hypothetically wouldn't be bothered even if I lived in a place where all that stuff happens?
Oh, well, too late, I've answered now :)
I took it as something like "would your life personally be better if we as a society dedicated resources to fixing this problem"
So if you never encounter it, or if you encounter it but not enough to matter, or if you encounter it a lot but happen not to mind, that would all count as "no"
The dead and overgrown plants are in my yard, and my life would be significantly worse if society in general acted like a picky HOA
When I'm birding residential areas, I prefer to walk through the alleys rather than along the streets, since the weeds and untrimmed bushes that one finds in alleys provide better bird habitat than mown lawns and manicured shrubs. Overgrown vacant lots make for even better habitat, so more and better birds.
Literal awards are given to the most beautiful alley-facing garden in my community, as well as awards for sidewalk poetry.
Shovel snow off you walk, uncover a haiku.
If they are beautiful they are not *over*grown, by definition. :-)
(I mean graffiti, for the same reason, and you can similarly claim that if they are beautiful they are street art not graffiti...)
I paused on this one. While I am surrounded by a great deal of all of these things, they don't bother me.
I have the type of "overgrown/dead plants" at my house that clearly do belong in this list (along with peeling paint) because I'm a lazy slob, but they clearly aren't bothering me.
[Not important] This could be a deliberate design choice, but I don't like the 1-10 rating scale for Left v Right as it does not have a middle. I think best is -5 to 5, more clear / symmetric.
For the question "Are you interested in donating a kidney?" I would have liked to answer "Interested, but not in the next 10 years" or something.
Also, I know, only one of mine is really fine. I would donate all when dead, ofc. - In the spirit of the question, I went for: No.
0 to 10 (or 0 to 5 or 0 to 100) are good too. These are easy to convert to each other, unlike 1 to 10, 1 to 5, 1 to 100.
I think he's said before that the scale is on purpose so that people have to pick. Almost everyone leans, even if very little.
Yeah, this is a common technique in psych to get more accurate answers (otherwise people bunch up exactly at the midpoint).
The issue is that if you put numbers like 1–10, lots of people make an off-by-one error and think 5 is the middle option. I usually prefer verbal labels because of that.
My memory tells me it's exactly the opposite: that people usually don't want to answer the middle point, and including it will create non-normal distributions that restrict the use of some basic statistics? Might differ based on the question obviously.
I don't like the scale because it isn't a scale. "Left" and "Right" are extremely similar; the "middle" position isn't between them.
For disorders: More than one option should be possible, since thinking you have a disorder and having a family member with it are not incompatible.
There is also no option for "I had this disorder in the past but no longer do", which would be highly relevant.
Agreed
Seconded
Thirded
This is also a problem with long COVID. I had the impression from reading a couple of papers on long COVID that getting out of breath easily or experiencing brain fog for a couple of months then getting better absolutely does count and makes up the majority of cases, and that was the case for me, but it's not clear whether the question is asking about current symptoms or symptoms at the time the respondent had it.
Fourthed.
Not sure about autism/ schizophrenia, but lots of ex-bulimics out there.
Yeah, I missed that option too.
I had long covid, but it was a weird variant.
My sense of taste got weird, but after 2-3 years I think I'm over it. This is long covid, but it's not the sort of thing people think about when they hear the phrase.
>>How strictly did your parents limit your Internet use as a young child (eg age 7)?
would it be more productive to have an option called "i did not care at all for internet back then, so my parents didn't even think about it?" or would that fall into the category "there was no internet back then"?
also, the first social media usage question has "youtube (this time it blocks all videos, not just comments)" as a possible answer, instead of just "youtube".
For the psych ones, put whatever the strongest option that applies is (eg if you have it and a relative has it, say you have it).
Fixed the YouTube one, thanks.
It looks like when you fixed it, you also inserted a mysterious "Option 9".
I thought option 9 was just a social media I never heard of
I thought it's a deliberate check for the lizardman's constant via inserting a non-existent name.
I googled Option 9, and almost checked it because I thought it would be funny in the context of “I have never used social media”.
Me too lmao
When I was a teenager the internet was very new, so there weren't that many places to go. Internet speeds were so low that the best you could do was individual pictures, slowly loading one at a time. There wasn't nearly as much to protect kids from, though it was still non-zero. There was no Google or other good way to search for that stuff, so it was also harder to find bad things. A few years later porn infiltrated pretty much everything, so that advertisements on otherwise reputable websites might include porn. By then I was an adult, so my parents didn't know or regulate. That was a weird time.
Yeah, at the literal age of 7, my nerd of a dad was actually trying to convince me to use the internet more, but I really didn't want to. It wasn't until a few years later that I found any online content that could hold the attention of a child (it was Homestar Runner)
This question really puts in stark releif how much things have changed
Same. The only website I knew about was Wikipedia, and I was scared of the "Internet Browser".
I distinctly remember that sometime around (I think) the very early '00s, I was sent a link by an online acquaintance to some fun web quiz or something like that, and only noticed about twenty minutes later that the site was absolutely loaded with pornographic banner ads. I mentioned it to her and she was like "Oh, I didn't see them either." They were large and prominent, we both just had learned banner ad blindness. I still lived with my parents at the time so it was lucky that I eventually noticed--that sort of thing would have freaked them out.
Yes, it was a very weird time. Perfectly normal banner ads for like, toothpaste or something would cycle through with obvious links to porn sites and sometimes included full nudity. The way ads often worked, it didn't seem to matter much what kind of site you were on. I think the ad space was sold through a company that had no direct relation to the website hosting the banners, and apparently no one was doing quality control to confirm the ads were okay for where they were being used.
Similarly: How old were you when you first started using social media?
EG Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
There should be an option of I have never really used social media (my case).
Substack is an option.
How long have you been reading ACX has no option between 1-2 years and since it was SSC! I'm not misremembering that ACX has been around for at least 4 years, am I?
Since 2021. But yeah, that ol' question needs an update. https://slatestarcodex.com/2021/01/21/introducing-astral-codex-ten/
It's really easy to make a mistake in the "annual salary" question if you live in a country where income is usually expressed per-month. Stackoverflow surveys confirmed this, they got unusually weird results from Poland, Czech Republic etc, it turns out this was the reason. I literally thought about the Stackoverflow blog post on this when I saw the question, but then did all the calculations in my head in monthly amounts, converted and still almost made the mistake.
I suggest splitting the question into two, an income question and whether you're expressing as monthly or annually. This would complicate result processing but not by much, you can convert the results back to annual with a simple Excel formula.
I was more confused by "pre-tax". I ignored my payroll-taxes. Also, did not add the child-benefits, "Kindergeld" (ca. 10k/year with 3 kids). Hope that is ok. Similar ballpark.
I think you probably meant child benefits / allowance since you mentioned "Kindergeld", which is money the state pays you because you have a child. Child support is money that a parent usually pays after after a divorce to support the child living with the other parent or someone else (Kindesunterhalt).
Ja, das war falsch. Will edit. Danke!
In standard US terms, for a salaried or hourly employee, "pre-tax income" means the amount your employer pays you in wages and bonuses (including stock awards and profit sharing, if applicable) before payroll and income taxes are withheld.
Tax credits (government benefits paid through the income tax system) are not counted; e.g. our equivalent of kindergeld is the "child tax credit", where the federal government credits a certain amount of money towards your taxes owed for each child you have, and you get a refund check if this means you withheld more money than you end up owing after tax credits.
Other government payments usually aren't counted, either, unless they're earned income (i.e. wages for current government employees or pensions for retired employees) or monetary benefits intended to support you while you aren't working due to disability, old age, temporary situational unemployment, etc.
Thank you! Thus I failed. ;) In German: 'Brutto' (pre-tax) resp. "netto" (post-t). Usually, statisticians will ask for "brutto", as the netto will vary strongly. Should Scott want to check our income or how it correlates with other stuff, it would make more sense to ask for post-tax, I presume.
Another thing that's not obvious to me is whether capital income is supposed to be included. (The question was "annual income" IIRC.)
All income i would assume.
I also wonder about this question.
Yup, this. Also Europeans just don't think about pre-tax, it's automatically deducted. I just think about how much money gets into my account each month (I get an SMS from the bank with it).
I’m definitely aware of my pre tax annual income here in Ireland. That’s what’s on the contract and what is negotiated on getting a job.
Not fully I guess, because there are a bunch of taxes companies pay directly for employing you (but still go towards your pension, health care etc) that aren't included in your pay package. I have no idea if this situation is the same in the US.
Over here employer taxes or PRSI is not that large a take compared to some of Europe.
It’s also not something we worry about as it’s not really something that employees need to know.
I'm also not certain where employer taxes would end and expenses to employ you would begin.
Office space (not so much now I guess), employer laptops and phones, etc.
Being in part responsible for frickin' payroll, I wish more of them bloody *did* know it, too many times having to explain to working adults who have been working for years why their pay is different this week (due to how the PAYE system works) and no, they have to get on to Revenue to fix it, I can't do it for them.
It's not simply young people in their first job, there's a lot of older people who have no idea how the tax system works, tax rates, credits, etc.
In the US, there's a payroll or "FICA" (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) tax that is used to fund Social Security (old age and disability pensions) and Medicare (singlish-payer health care coverage for retirees). It's assessed so half is nominally paid by the employee and half nominally paid by the employer. The employee half is counted as part of your take-home income, while the employer half is not.
The FICA rate is 7.65% for each half (15.3% total) on the first $168,800 of payroll income and 1.35% of payroll income above $168,800. If you're self-employed, you pay both halves of the tax (15.3% below the limit and 2.7% above it).
Most people who are salaried or hourly employees never think about the employer side of the payroll tax unless we're economics or public policy nerds because we never see or hear about that money.
So what is the primary negotiation number for a European white collar employee? In the US its this "pre-tax" salary. I am hoping the answer is not something like non one negotiates, its determined by your union.
Same in the UK. There's a bunch of stuff considered after (e.g. bonus, pension salary sacrifice + company matching, etc).
But on negotiation and how you "think" about it is gross yearly
When you are taking a new job, how does the job offer specify what your wages would be? Do they just tell you pre-tax income (and that's the last time you think about it), or are they able to calculate your take-home income and quote that to you?
In the US, it's always pre-tax income quoted in job offers and annual salary reviews because our tax system is hairy enough that your employer can't know with confidence and precision what your after-tax income would be, as it depends on if you have income from other sources (second job, hobby business, taxable investment income, etc), how many children you have, whether or not you own your home and if so how much you pay in property taxes and mortgage interest, how much you give to charity, whether or not you're married and if so how much income does your spouse have, how much you pay into tax-advantaged retirement savings, etc.
Not true, and generalizing about Europeans is silly in general, since it's like 50 pretty different countries. E.g. Swedes definitely think about pre-tax, but by that they mean post payroll tax but pre income tax, so pre like half the taxes.
This, and also "pre-tax" is a loaded question in more than one way.
Here in Spain, for example, we pay (among quite a few other minor taxes) two main ones on our paycheck:
1) Income tax (IRPF) - This is the run-of-the-mill progressive tax, bracketed, you pay more (in %) if you earn more. Brackets go from 15 to 45%, approx.
2) Social Security (pays for public medical system + public pensions + job loss insurance + lots of minor public services and pensions), which is paid part from your paycheck, but in largest part "by your employer". The total amount is 30%, partition is 6%/24%. Meaning that, if you get, like, 2000€/month, "gross", a surcharge of around 600€ is added. So, your employer is paying 2600€, from which you see your "gross" or "pre-tax" of ~2000€, from which you pay your part of Social Security, income tax and assorted minor taxes, and get your "take-home" pay of ~1600€ (I'm deliberately simplifying it a lot). Thus, my "pre-tax" does not match at all my full salary cost.
Besides, if you are curious, this Social Security is apart, and added, to the regular income tax. So our real tax brackets reach upwards of 50% with ease, and in some cases as high as 75%.
I'd suggest adding a pre-tax and post-tax question, both for consistency reasons and for us financial/fiscal nerds. And clarifying about if taxes are to be only considered "income" taxes.
I think he's talking about the gross income as it shows up on your tax forms. I'm assuming there's a tax form I guess.
It's a *very rough* guess as to how financially prosperous you are. The converter in the link only does currency conversion. There's no PPP, no taxes (income or consumption) included. I didn't check while I was doing it, but someone who's in the position of a traditional housewife could answer 0 income, and it could be completely misleading.
Also, I wish the question stated whether you were asking for personal income our household income. I literally do not know what to answer.
I answered with individual since it seemed like most (all?) other questions were about us as individuals, but I also found this ambiguous.
I'm also confused about the correct answer here. My salary? Total income from our 2023 tax return divided by two? (It's sitting right here on my desk!) Total income from 2023 tax return?
This isn't just an ACX issue though, I feel like every dataset that gets into income for households of mixed composition ends up dealing with it in a very unclear fashion.
He’s asking individual questions about personal income. There are some questions that mention family, this isn’t one of them. I don’t find that unclear at all, on this or other surveys. Income is all personal income.
Probably right. This may be my accumulated frustration from years of dealing with poorly arranged household income datasets speaking.
I agree with that. Income is useless without taking into account wealth. A pensioner playing down his wealth will have a low income but potentially a good lifestyle. Here, though, Scott is possible trying to associate what class people think they are with gross earnings.
Yes. I am a full time homemaker (nice to see that was an option on the survey), so my individual income is 0.
I answered with our household income, since that is what affects my other answers like social class, willingness to pay for a subscription, etc.
Thanks, I've capitalized annual.
Actually says ANNUL now which was very confusing.
Yep, agreed on both this and pre-tax problems. Russian salaries, for instance, have a weird situation where there's the official number (let's call it 100%) but the employer actually pays ~129% and the employee receives 87% because 13% count against the salary but the rest are social payments on top.
Your gross is 100%.
This is like when I did a little investigation into names. There is no limit on the number of names a person can have at any one time, or over a lifetime, or types of names, or limit to how long each name can be, or the characters in any given name. This is for real world people.
I'm not sure how you ask a question like this in a way where you can figure out a reasonably reliable answer as to how personally prosperous a person is, when the person could be living anywhere in the world.
Even "gross income" is only a vague wave in the direction of prosperity. How much you can actually spend varies a lot.
I am confused by what counts as social media. For facebook/instagram/tiktok/etc I never visit or only when absolutely forced. For twitter there's <5 accounts I occasionally visit, and I've never posted/liked/etc.
But I do watch youtube videos, subscribe, like, maybe comment once per month. Does this count as using social media? Feels like no to me, but "What social media do you use?" seems to think so.
The mental health section isn't very specific on timeframes. I read it as current, major or persistent issues rather than historical ones. But it could be read different ways depending on how much you make mental health a part of your personality.
The US viewpoint doesn't quite fit with UK realities. The Tories are not really conservative any more. Socioeconomic class is based more around culture than money. A US detached house is probably equivalent to a UK terraced one. But yes that perhaps falls into nitpicky.
How happy are you with your paid subscription? I feel frustrated not to be able to say that it enriches my life by informing me of things I had not thought about. It doesn't so much change my views as provide me with things to have views about.
How do you figure a UK terrace is equivalent to a US detached? I thought UK terrace= US rowhouse.
I agree about class though.
I think the point being made is that equivalent price/value of a US detached house will get you a terraced house in the UK, which is just saying that the UK has terrible quality housing (space per person as well as quality).
Oh. I was assuming the question was just about the physical house. If Scott wants that information, it would be simpler to ask about the value of the house.
Yes I think that is about right. Even if you have a posh job in London (which is where all the posh jobs are) you are still going to be living in a flat or terraced house.
There’s plenty of homes , from large old houses, to even council (or ex council ) houses with gardens in London. Not necessarily affordable but people do live there. I don’t think that New York or Boston are all that different anyway.
How should a PhD student déclare their work status? I'm technically still a student but I don't have any classes, I have a salary and I mainly do research and teach so I feel my experience is closer to academics, although I don't feel confortable calling myself this either
Same. I don't know how to properly answer that question. Is a PhD student and junior researcher at a government research center a job for the government, or a non-profit, or an academy, or a student?
What is the difference of living in a "condo" or an "apartment" (up to 10 units resp. 10+units)? All right, I answered "apt. up to ten". Thus picking nits. But I am confused, honestly. Anyone knows?
I'm accustomed to "condo" being a property that you own in a complex of such properties; an "apartment" is a property that you rent from the owner.
Ah. I got that wrong then as I own an apartment in a property with exactly ten units. Condo is not common outside the US
Same I think, I own an apartment in a much larger complex and answered large apartment instead of condo. Condo term is not used at all in Australia.
Yeah, this threw me too – I live in a co-op in an apartment building with more than 11 units. I chose "condo / duplex / rowhouse / etc.", but I wasn't sure what the intent of the question was, so that might have been wrong.
Appreciate the answers! Seems a single "apartment" is always "rented" - while condos or houses are owned. But as all of those are often let for rent and thus "rented" - we are still confused. Or maybe Scott thinks: 'Condos that are not apartments'. Or: "cheaper, poorer, crowded places" (apartments can be quite large and expensive, though).
A condo is a type of ownership; houses and apartments are types of buildings. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condominium
Income Status
I am disabled without benefits. Can’t seem to find my option and "post significant money-making" sounds a bit cynical.
I'll add it next time, sorry.
<3
Some question are unclear. How do I rate my attractiveness? Should I rate it with respect to my age and sex? Should an average 20 years old girl rate herself more attractive than the same woman at the age of 60?
What is life satisfaction? Over what time horizon? Weeks, monthes, years? Same about many other question. There is no time horizon given, making a question unclear.
What is gender? This concept is so vague that I think I don't have gender identity.
> How old were you when you got your own smartphone?
What should I answer if I never had a smartphone? And what is "my own"? If it was given to my by work, and did not belong to me, does it count?
I'm in the same boat as you re: smartphone; I left the question blank, since that seemed to be the most consistent with the rest of the survey's methodology.
I went with how attractive I am right now in my middle age. Not sure about women, but as a man, I've gotten older, balder, a little fatter, and more gray hair. Aging definitely has an impact, but some people age better than others.
I figured it was most fair to answer the attractiveness question on the scale of all humans of all ages rather than just all male humans in their 40s.
I answered same as you with an absolute scale rather than relative. So now I'm quite curious to know what percentage of survey participants answered it the same way.
>Should an average 20 years old girl rate herself more attractive than the same woman at the age of 60?
I mean, the Oktrends blog and Dataclysm the book would definitely say so, and the 20 year old would get several OOM more messages?
I feel like there's a pretty central interpretation to most of these, and quibbling about the details or edge cases is impractical and just leads to lizardman constants in the answers.
They're social science survey answers, not tablet-carven truths that need to be rigorously provable. Just answer whatever you feel like the right answer is.
For disorders, how should marriage and adoption be counted? I assume it's about genetic relatives, so if my wife or adopted child or step-mom has a condition, I should leave that off?
Yes, please ignore any nongenetic relatives.
I didn't think of Substack as a social medium, so I had to go back and revise an earlier answer. Does LiveJournal count? I've been active there since around 2002.
Yeah, also came here to ask this. LJ is kind of "mother of all social media", but then again, like Substack, it's not QUITE the same as FB/IG etc.
Notes made it much more social, but if all you do is subscribe to people and read the emails without commenting, it really isn’t a social media. Of course, you commented here, exposing yourself to the social media
I just crossed off mentally Substack from the list. If blog comments are "social media", then so much more forums and the like. Discord, or at least most servers I've tried, feels more like the old chat rooms. But forums and blog comments are their own thing. If you were to count that, is Wikipedia a social media site, if you edit and sometimes interact in Talk pages?
What’s happening here in the comments isn’t distinct from media like Reddit. The only difference is that the top level reddit post is more often a link, but it isn’t always. It’s a post by a Redditor.
The other difference is that only Scott can post at the top level, but reddit groups allow certain members to post and there it’s also restricted.
Hm, I just assumed whatever passed for social media when you joined the ranks of the eternal September counts. Livejournal, your favourite phpbb forum, Ward's Wiki, that dodgy bbs that came online for two hours a day, maybe even Fidonet echomail... Maybe that was wrong, IDK. Past "regularly interacting with stream of consciousness dumps from complete strangers", how do you draw the line?
I went with when I joined LiveJournal, but maybe should have gone back further to Usenet.
It seems weird to record it by respondent age rather than by calendar year. A millennial saying they joined social media at 18 means something very different from a zoomer who joined it at 18.
If people provide their current ages then it's trivial to convert between the two, but it would still seem more natural to ask for calendar year and then convert it to age if required rather than to ask for age.
I defined "social media" has having algorithmic feeds, so not LiveJournal, forums, or IRC. Otherwise my answer would've been about 15 years younger than I put down. (my GameFAQs account is old enough to drink...)
penetration is a dumb counter for sex, unless you count penetrating a mouth as penetration.
This is gay side erasure and so I adopted a correct-er definition of sex to include oral.
And then there are the kinksters.
I previously mentioned the time I went to a bar and a guy in a rubber suit was being tied up and suspended from the ceiling. (Yeah, it was that kind of bar). No penetration involved, but I'm kind of assuming that guy had a sexual motive.
If I counted kink without genitals of at least one party being touched by the other party this would nearly double my (already approximate) body count. I considered doing that but then realised it was likely I'm the top few % either way and assumed "penetration" included oral and anal orifice wise and digital and lingual insertable wise, I'm not counting CBT, impact play, foot stuff or bondage even if sexually driven and arousing.
Mmm, I'd be broad-minded on "what counts as sex?" If it's meant to arouse you sexually and it does arouse you sexually and you get tingly feelings (whether or not a complete orgasm) then by jinkies, that's good enough for me, even if it does mean dressing up as Big Bird and hanging from the ceiling while the person or persons below throw rice at you and nobody touches their jiggly bits together.
If we're going by strict legal definitions, though, I suppose penetration is what counts.
Yeah, this threw me off too. I left the answer blank not because I'm too shy to answer, but because it the technically-correct answer felt too misleading with this clause.
Yeah, also left it blank. My “body count” is high enough that I don’t remember all the details of all the encounters so there’s no way I could recompute it based on someone else’s definitions…
I stopped counting years ago, but it's a strict numeric input so no way to say that. I just put in a round number around the right order of magnitude.
"I adopted a correct-er definition of sex to include oral"
Not if you're Bill Clinton, or maybe you don't remember the Monica Lewinsky affair:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton%E2%80%93Lewinsky_scandal
"In his deposition for the Jones lawsuit, Clinton denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. Based on the evidence—a blue dress with Clinton's semen that Lewinsky provided—Starr concluded that the president's sworn testimony was false and perjurious.
During the deposition, Clinton was asked "Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1?" The judge ordered that Clinton be given an opportunity to review the agreed definition. Afterwards, based on the definition created by the Independent Counsel's Office, Clinton answered, "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." Clinton later said, "I thought the definition included any activity by [me], where [I] was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies" which had been explicitly listed (and "with an intent to gratify or arouse the sexual desire of any person"). In other words, Clinton denied that he had ever contacted Lewinsky's "genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks", and effectively claimed that the agreed-upon definition of "sexual relations" included giving oral sex but excluded receiving oral sex."
don't worry, if giving counts but not receiving, my answer ain't changing
As I said on the question, I don't want to include an explicit description of every possible sexual act and whether it counts or not on a survey that under-18s will be taking.
Maybe you could subcontract that part out to Aella? ;-)
A less-dumb and still concise definition I've seen is "direct genital contact for the purpose of fun/pleasure/orgasm", which, yes, is a *little* explicit, but not much more than "penetration".
Additionally, I really think that "whatever you think of as sex" will give less dumb answers than "penetration".
Problems I am having with this question:
(1) I am legitimately factually confused about what you mean by "penetration": does this only mean PIV or does penetrative fingering count?
(1a) If you only mean PIV: do you mean to say that most cis lesbians have never had a sex partner? (someone pointed out to me that at least in heavily queer communities like ours, this will bias towards saying women have less sex than men even if this is not really meaningfully true)
(1b) If penetrative fingering counts I have no idea what my answer is because that's not a distinction meaningful to me so I don't record or remember it.
(2) For most sociological purposes "did these people have a sexual experience together where maybe they were naked and maybe an orgasm happened etc." is just way more relevant than "did This One Specific Sex Act happen". (admittedly not for all - "how many people have you had PIV with" is quite relevant for some purposes! - but the wording seems to imply you'll draw additional conclusions from this about Sex In General)
(3) When I complained about this to some friends, I had *multiple people* tell me "yeah that definition is dumb so I answered as though a less dumb question had been asked". I will personally abide by the definition (uh, though per (1) above I'm not actually sure what definition you meant and my answers in those two cases are *quite different*) because statistics are sacred but empirically a lot of people will not, so your data will end up measuring *neither* the question you say you're asking nor the thing you're actually asking.
Second all of this, as a queer woman. I just mentally changed the question to 'how many sexual partners would I say I've had'
Let the nitpicking begin!
classic political spectrum? Eye roll.
>How have your politics changed in the past ten years
expressed as a movement left or right? Does this even make sense now?
>How would you describe your opinion on anthropogenic climate Change?
I would describe it as highly speculative and uncertain.
Immigration - a perfect world would have more openness, but wouldn’t need it. Easy to goof this up, so in the real world, no idea.
>How would you describe your opinion of the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?
Not familiar with this term, and the definition isn’t a lot of help. Maybe this is a polite way to ask if I am a racist? People differ in socially relevant ways, but what would this mean for races? Social norms should be different depending on the racial identity of those interacting?
>How strict are you / would you be with your child when they are 7?
Fortunately for me, my kids were not very interested in internet/social media until after becoming adults.
>God tells you beforehand that there will never be any major existential risk from AI, a
I have trouble with this sort of hypothetical. Basically, it is trying to get me to short-circuit my actual evidence gathering and make a judgement based on… something?
Rather than asking whether I would wave a magic wand that halted AI research, better to ask, would I feel relieved if some bizarre evidence were to appear indicating that self-improving AGI is simply impossible, to the point where even Yudkowsky is saying “okay, never mind.”? Hard to imagine. I still need to think it over. I would probably feel relieved to not have that on my list, but deeply conflicted about the true significance of waving that wand. We can stipulate whatever we want in the thought experiment, but that just makes it an empty exercise for me. To Remove all uncertainty is to remove all realism and relevance.
I left the political spectrum question blank, because I'm a strong libertarian (constitutionalist rather than anarchocapitalist) and don't consider myself to be either "left" or "right"---but I'm definitely not moderate or middle of the road.
I don't consider "right" to be a well defined category. I've seen it used for anarchocapitalists, constitutionalist libertarians, classical liberals, American constitutionalist conservatives, Old World king/army/land/established church conservatives, nationalists, racists, fascists, and various more esoteric positions that disagree with each other on nearly everything. For a long time "left" seemed more monolithic, but we've been seeing splits there too of late.
I strongly suspect "political spectrum" from a US-centric view, as Scott tends to write from the US perspective most of the time. Then, as the bonmot goes, a typical Democrat would be a conservative in most of Europe, and a typical Republican would be a far-right-winger, so what do I do with that question?
"a typical Democrat would be a conservative in most of Europe, and a typical Republican would be a far-right-winger"
I'm amazed that so people repeat this, when it doesn't seem true to me at all. There's only one issue where this looks clearly true, and that's universal health care (which is itself confounded by the fact that the US is many times larger than every other developed country). Maybe it's true of taxes and welfare spending, but I'd expect these to vary a lot in every country and I've never seen anyone add these up and show that they're clearly higher in nearly every European country.
On the other hand, my impression is that on immigration, trans issues and affirmative action, the Democrats are far, far to the left of the centre-left position in most western countries. I could be wrong; I'm neither American nor European.
I'd be curious to know (a) what country you're from and (b) what makes you think that statement is true.
Historically left wing parties in Europe have been socialist - that is they were often founded by labour unions and believed in large state ownership. Saying the Democratic Party isn’t in favour of free health care is to say it isn’t socialist.
Trans and immigration (etc) are liberal ideas, not socialist. Nevertheless left wing parties in Europe have absorbed some of this, to their detriment.
Affirmative action wouldn’t be relevant for generations of European countries until recently, and in any case the US is repairing race relations based on its history which doesn’t apply universally.
(To anticipate some replies here I know that there were some union links with the Democratic Party and some democratics are socialist. It did have a socialist element, also it had a racist element. It’s a strange party. )
The classical political spectrum would be based on socioeconomic class analysis and stereotypes rather than identity. What would "left" and "right" have meant in 1980? That's how I interpreted it, anyway.
It's interesting that you describe your opinion as speculative and uncertain. Most people with doubt would say things like "I'm not wedded to it" or "I'm still making up my mind".
“The classical political spectrum would be based on socioeconomic class analysis and stereotypes rather than identity. “
If we were betting on that, how would we settle the bet?
“What would "left" and "right" have meant in 1980? That's how I interpreted it, anyway.”
In 1980 it made a bit more sense. But only a bit. I guess my point would be, I have trouble projecting my ideological trajectory onto a one dimensional graph at all, much less one that supposedly makes sense of how people talk about left and right.
“It's interesting that you describe your opinion as speculative and uncertain. Most people with doubt would say things like "I'm not wedded to it" or "I'm still making up my mind".”
I’d say I seem to have a bias. My impulse on reading a climate pessimist is to think, must I believe this? When I read optimists, I am more likely to think, can I believe this? So maybe not wedded, but engaged and a bit self-conscious about it. Persuaded but not particularly confident.
No ID key option this year to make correlations with the prediction contest etc? I'm putting my ID key as my e-mail address, but it's not actually a valid e-mail address.
Missing option: "The internet existed when I was a young child [and, in my case, it was not even limited to just research centers], but my family didn't have an internet connection".
"How old were you when you got your own smartphone? IE a phone capable of browsing the Internet." This is a weird definition. In the 2000s there were many phones that were capable of some very basic web browsing, but wouldn't usually be considered smartphones. Even my 2003 Siemens A55 was capable of some very very basic web browsing, so was the original Motorola RAZR flip phone. I expect that many people will put when they got a "modern", touchscreen smartphone even if their previous dumpphones would count under your definition.
"End all social media": are small, independent forums and blogs also considered social media, or only huge sites like the ones listed?
"Do you believe in the supernatural? (ghosts, vital energy, spiritual beings, etc)" Ambiguous if God is included: the examples suggest no, the question itself suggests yes.
Right. I used local chat / Email / Usenet in college, but of course my parents had know Idea it existed in 1985.
I took "The internet didn't exist yet" to include "My family didn't have internet access yet" and ticked that option for age 7 (1989 in my case)
Yeah, same with me.
The internet certainly existed in 1989. There are various starting dates you could argue for: 1969 when ARPANET started, 1974 when the term "internet" first appeared in an RFC, 1982 or 1983 when TCP/IP was standardised, 1986 when NSFNet started. The first commercial ISPs launched in 1989.
Yes, I know. I was explaining that I was taking the "internet didn't exist" option to include "we didn't have it yet" as there was no response option for the latter - which would only make sense as a comment if I *did* know the internet already existed.
Oh I read that backwards, my bad.
This is hair-splitting. For nearly everybody the internet started in Eternal September, 1995.
Oh wow, I didn't even notice the smartphone question was "phone capable of browsing the internet, including feature phones". I know *exactly* when I got my first internet-capable phone, which was a feature phone. I have an extremely hazy idea of when I got a smartphone, and accordingly left it blank.
Some of the childhood Internet questions were awkwardly phrased for someone my age:
* At 7, the Internet did exist but my family wasn't on it.
* But we were on CompuServe, so I treated that as "the Internet" for the purpose of my responses.
* I answered that I was time-restricted, but that was mostly because we were billed by the hour.
* I said I started using social media at 11, by which I mean IRC and USENET.
+1 to all of that. I suppose that will be common for those between 40 and 50. Not old enough for "didn't exist" (or, as I suppose one should read it, "didn't exists in a practical form"), and in many cases, old enough to be the first ones in the family to connect, explore and teach the rest.
Even as a 31 year old, when I was 7 we had internet access at home and used it occasionally at school but I just had no interest in using it at home. It basically felt like a boring adult thing like Microsoft Word.
Kids these days, started off with their fancy Word programme, never even heard of WordStar and having to put the floppy in to a separate drive because the first drive was running the floppy with the OS 😀 (that was *my* first introduction to The Wonderful World of Computers when I was in my early twenties, in an educational context):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar
You Western colonizers think you're all hard, but you're soft. Soft as a newborn imperialist baby chick. Try using EinsteinWriter for a living, then I'll be impressed.
https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware-game.php?abandonware=Einstein+Writer+7&gid=3590
Try edlin. Or ed on Unix(TM) systems. By comparison Xedit on IBM mainframes was luxury.
I've used ed, briefly. One of my professors was still recommending it in 2018.
I interpreted "the Internet" as meaning WWW. Usenet and IRC are technically "internet", of course (and constituted the bulk of the internet before the web started becoming broadly available in the early-to-mid 90s), but are immensely qualitatively different from what we now think of as "internet". I had access to CompuServe and a local BBS as a fairly young child, and would occasionally use them under moderate parental supervision in order to download encyclopedia and news-wire articles for school projects, but I clicked "didn't exist" for the seven-years-old question.
In order to be most useful, those questions should very probably be cross-tabulated with age, since the significance of parents feeling the need to meter or restrict "internet" access is very different in the dial-up BBS era, the early WWW era, or the "Web 2.0" era.
It doesn't seem "immensely qualitatively different" to me. Sure, today the UX is flashier, the moderation has to be more sophisticated, and the backend protocols are different, but today I use Reddit pretty much the same way I used to use USENET, and Discord the same way I used to use IRC.
Yes, there are definitely places that are very close analogs to pre-web online services in both function and purpose, but there's a ton of stuff that doesn't have close analogs. I could limit my daughter to a handful of selected subreddits, reuters.com, and wikipedia and thus give her something qualitatively similar (but vastly greater in scope) to what I had access to at a little older than her current age, but my experience represented nearly-unrestricted access to my local dial-up service in 1988, while her experience would represent very strict restrictions.
I think everyone aged 20 - 45 has the same issue where "the internet" (if you were on it) was something totally different between the ages of 7/16.
At some point in the 2000s, "Letting your kid freely use the internet" transformed from having vibes of "letting your kid tinker with harmless electronics" to "letting your kid develop a meth habit".
It should be known by anyone answering this that the question about joint hypermobility has potential use testing a hypothesis about prevalence in trans people, and therefore also potentially has use in detecting trans people non consensually.
For more context, this hypothesis has previously been written about on ACX with results from an earlier version of the survey, where he also mentioned the additional question for this year.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-do-transgender-people-report
Well, you said "Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?" so here goes...
This was mentioned last time. The gender question at the start. I can guarantee you there are many people who are upset with the way it's worded. As someone put it last time, "cisgender" is equivalent "heathen". Yes, it has a supposed neutral meaning as "non-transgender" or "non-Christian", but in practice it is asking you to implicitly endorse an ideology by agreeing to the description. And I don't think this is fair, and I don't think many people here would be happy with the question "are you a Christian or a heathen?"
Worse, even putting aside my emotion, I don't know how to accurately answer the question, without saying something I consider misleading or false. My own perception of myself is: I am not a "cisgender male", I have not chosen a male identity, or discovered a male identity. I am male, as a matter of entirely objective, external fact. That is my perception. I do not perceive that I have a gender, if that means something different from sex. I do not in any deliberate way "perform" or "identify" with a set of masculine characteristics, and I'd consider it dishonest and/or uncivilised if I did.
So I either have to be told my perceptions are false and to give an answer that feels misleading and dishonest, or I have to answer "other" and presumably mess up the survey results, since I don't think that's what you want.
I am really not trying to start a fight (though I'm sure I'll be accused of doing so). I really just wish there was a politically-neutral (and easily answerable) phrasing of this question, especially when every other question in your surveys is very meticulously so.
Did I not read a comment, extremely similar to this, from the last survey?
For what it's worth, if a Christian (or a Muslim) asks me to define myself as religious/heathen, or religious/infidel, I know what's the correct answer. Anyway, the "mu" option is there, in the "Other" section. As for a politically-neutral way, there isn't, and there won't be. Euphemism treadmills will guarantee that. You either take "their" language and make it yours (and ignore any and all voices saying you're doing it wrong, or at least until 70% of the way into the hyperstitious cascade), or abandon public space. And I, for one, am not about to abandon.
"Did I not read a comment, extremely similar to this, from the last survey?"
I think so. It wasn't me, but I'm probably repeating significant parts of it, as I was annoyed it didn't get addressed. (Actually I think there were quite a few such comments).
I don't understand this: "and ignore any and all voices saying you're doing it wrong, or at least until 70% of the way into the hyperstitious cascade". Who are the ones saying you're doing it wrong? Left or right in this case? And which hyperstitious cascade changes what exactly?
Sorry, I was trying to be terse while referencing what I expected was common ACX lore.
I'm not woke (nor anti-woke), nor was a SJW when that was a thing. I'm not even "left", and I distaste the current flavor of the word "progressive". Thus, when I use some of "those" words (you know which ones, but anything cis/trans is usually one of these), I regularly have some "holier than thou" types saying I'm using them wrong. Despite that, sometimes those words have non-negligible amounts of meaning. So I take a page from "their" manual and reclaim (or "reappropiate") them. If the only ones using "cis" were "they", then "we" are a) Left with a lack of a useful word to describe a thing, and forced to invent a new one (like "non-trans"), or to explain why we don't need at all a new word (while in the process demonstrating why we do, indeed, need it) b) giving up public space, and, through evaporative cooling, cementing "their" grip on the language. Despite THAT, sometimes a word comes to signify something so strongly you simply cannot utter it (like those words so sacred that are thus referenced only by their initial). THOSE you have lost to the hyperstitious cascade. But I don't think "cis" is there yet. So, I defend its usefulness.
Consider, however, you can apply this to both left- and right-coded words.
And consider than the fact that I also act and seem and feel male, and have a gender that matches my chromosomes, does not in any way affect the previously said. I can now say that I crossdress, or that I have intersexual genitalia (just to confuse), and it is still valid.
Ok, I think I understand now. I did recognise the hyperstitious cascade reference, but wasn't clear how you were applying it.
I think it ought to be a norm that when one objects to terminology they propose their own replacements. It isn't one (yet?), of course, but I think all such discussions would be more productive this way
In that spirit: what would you have put for the category labels on this question?
I think alternatives have been proposed before, and appear to have been ignored, but I admit I could be wrong about that.
Personally, I'd prefer the question be scrapped and replaced with something like "do you identify as trans/fluid-gendered/blah-blah-the-entire-200-letter-or-whatever-it-is-now-acronym?" And that can have options for all the different identities, and simply a "no" for the rest of us.
If not that, an additional option on the existing question for "I already answered the sex question, and don't think there's anything more to say".
If not that, a terser "object to the premise of the question".
If not *that*, at the very least a note in the question description (like many other questions have) saying "if you don't think you have a gender separate from your sex, select Other" so that we know that Other won't be taken as "my gender is a 14-word-description that must be not be truncated or I'm being oppressed".
I agree with you that that should be a norm, but this topic can get so much hostility even in this free-speech space, that I was nervous enough just making the objection.
EDIT: sorry if this was a bit too snarky, I'm touchy at the number of times I've been yelled at for merely raising these questions.
I think this could actually be a useful addition to the survey; perhaps something like this:
"How would you describe your sex and/or gender ? Pick the option that sounds best to you, as long as it's not entirely inaccurate."
* Male
* Cisgender male
* Transgender male
* Female
* Cisgender female
* Transgender female
* Nonbinary
* Gender-fluid
* I reject the notion of biological sex and/or gender"
What word would you suggest? If you put Male, many trans people would select that result. Male cis gender might offend people, but it’s most likely to get accurate results.
How about "Male (not transgender)"?
EDIT: Oh, I already see exactly the same suggestion in this thread. Which perhaps is evidence that this is a natural solution.
Pretty sure I left that one blank for that reason.
I wasn't so much upset than confused. I don't really know what cis-gender means. I think it needed an explanation.
“Cisgender” is simply the official term for someone who is not transgender. It doesn’t matter if you’re cis by default rather than having actively identified as such—the same is true for the vast majority of cisgender people. It’s absolutely accurate to be describing you as cisgender, regardless of your endorsement of the term.
Now, are the terms “cisgender” and especially “cis” primarily used by the trans community, often in a pejorative way? Sure. Same thing with how “homosexual” as a noun was primarily used by in far-right discourse to the point where gay people find it weirdly uncomfortable now, even as bisexuals and asexuals happily call themselves such. That doesn’t mean “homosexual” isn’t the technically correct term.
You could try throwing a new word onto the euphemism treadmill if you want, but I doubt it would help.
> “Cisgender” is simply the official term for someone who is not transgender.
I agree with @ascend on this one: yes, this is an official term, as long as you accept the official terminology -- which not everyone does. It is indeed quite similar to asking e.g. "Do you 1). believe in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, or are you 2). a Hell-bound infidel ?" For an atheist, the correct answer is technically (2), but committing to it requires accepting a certain frame of mind that the atheist might not naturally possess.
(And I say this as someone who did pick the "cisgender" option)
I think there’s an important difference between these cases, namely the actual origin of the words. As an atheist, one presumably thinks “hellbound” is factually inaccurate. “Infidel” is derived from the same meaning as “infidelity”—meaning disloyalty. In contrast “atheist” is the Greek “a” prefix in front of “theist” (meaning someone who does believe in a god). Even if “atheist” were to become an insult, the linguistic origin of the word is still objectively correct in a way “hellbound infidel” could never be.
“Cis” is not a made-up prefix; it’s latin and is also applied in other contexts, such as chemistry (e.g. cis and trans isomers). “Cis” is fundamentally the opposite of “trans”. If you would describe yourself as “not transgender” then that is very literally just the less technical definition of “cisgender”. Even if you want to define “transgender” in a way totally outside of transgender mentality—saying that “transgender” means “people with a certain mental disorder” or “people making stuff up to be special snowflakes” or whatever, “cisgender” (i.e. the opposite of transgender) is still the natural and sensible term.
I don't think that etymology matters all that much; what matters is how the words are used and the belief networks they imply, not their construction. To put it another way, I would feel the same if instead of "cisgender/transgender" people used the terms "qwer/tyui" to mean the same things.
Hmm, so you’d be equally bothered by “non-transgender/transgender” as survey options? I feel like even for a completely nonsensical belief network like “I think that my blurgle is actually a smeltic, rather than a narg” it would be very easy for me to say that I was a non-whatever-the-fuck-that-would-be-called.
This is also coming from the perspective of someone who actively dislikes being asked their “preferred pronouns” and leaves that blank whenever it’s an option so that people can just assume them instead. It’d feel like being asked my “preferred name” when I literally just go by a name that my parents picked for me, which I use regardless of whether or not I’d prefer it to other names. So I WOULD also be annoyed by a survey question that asked for a “preferred gender identity” because of the implication of a decision where there wasn’t one.
But being cisgender doesn’t require having thought “Yep, I’m definitely [gender that is the same as assigned at birth].” It just means NOT having done the opposite of that.
I think that someone who actively disliked the term "cisgender" would find "non-transgender" more acceptable, because it only implies the rejection of the alternative. That is to say, it is compatible with both the statements "while some people have perfectly valid gender expression that does not match their chromosomal sex, I am not one of those people", and "I reject the notion of gender as being separate from sex", as well as other positions somewhere between these two. By contrast, the term "cisgender" requires you to accept a certain ontological framework even if your place in it does match that of a median human's.
Cis just means "Yes, and I was born this way." I'm confused why you think it's equivalent to "heathen".
Suppose you were part of a hypothetical religion (I'll call it X) where some members believed that people could not legitimately convert to that religion (you're either born in it or not), and you were one of the members who didn't believe in conversion. Would you be offended if a survey asked about your religious background and had the options "X (since birth)" and "X (converted later in life)", or would you just accurately check "X (since birth)"?
We could have an entire political fight about this one, but I honestly don't care that much. Cisgender is a back-formation because transgender people (some of 'em, at least) started getting butthurt (as the young people say) about that term being used for them, so *normative*, as if being trans was some kind of exception to the rule! So they invented the term cisgender (lifting it from chemistry, I believe, on the lines of cis- and trans-isomers) so they could go "if you're going to call us a particular name, we're gonna call you a particular name, yah boo!"
I don't give a damn, really; in my more obnoxious moments, I just treat "cisgender" as "this means normal".
I think it's just Latin, as in "cisalpine Gaul" vs. "transalpine Gaul"? Although it's a different sense of "trans"; one is about "this is here vs. that is over there across the boundary", and the other is about "having crossed a boundary". But eh, I boldly split infinitives, so whatever.
I get so annoyed by the the refusal of certain political factions to accept any sort of label, that I think it would be hypocritical to refuse to use a label like "cis" when it's simple and clear and generic. Any word can be used as a slur, of course, but (again betraying my annoyance with certain political factions) that's not the fault of the word.
I agree with you, but I also sympathize with the opposition. The term "cisgender" does not just imply "born that way"; it means something like, "while gender expression is separate from sex and being a man (or a woman) has little to do with one's biology, my gender expression happens to match the biological makeup of the majority of people who express the same gender as I do". I phrased this sentence in the strongest way possible to highlight the issue and of course weaker formulations are also possible; but still, the word "cisgender" does imply the acceptance of a certain specific model of human sexuality.
I too sympathize with the opposition; it's one of those fences that I uncomfortably straddle, what with the razor wire and all.
And yeah, I think there is a linguistic power-game being played, of forcing people to use terminology that re-centers the discourse and positions their "normal" existence as merely a co-equal option. We have limited attention, and language can force people to spend that attention in particular ways. I don't read Aella much, but she had a good piece a while back about "frame control" as a tool of abuse:
https://aella.substack.com/p/frame-control
Sorry, but no. I believe that gender expression is usually quite closely connected to sex and that being a man (or woman) has a great deal of My gender expression "happens" to match my biology because that's normal for like 99.7% of humanity and I'm not one of the outliers. But the outliers *do* exist, and they're not going to pretend to not exist for your intellectual comfort, so we do sometimes need a word that means "man, and not one of the trans guys".
That word is "cisgender". It does not mean anything other than "man, and not one of the trans guys". It does not require accepting anything beyond the fact that people claiming to be transmen do exist and aren't shutting up about it and maybe you feel like distinguishing yourself from them. It is not pejorative or diminutive or otherwise impolite. And since we've all settled on that word for the purpose, you don't get to pick another and expect to communicate.
> And since we've all settled on that word for the purpose...
Who is this "we", kemosabe ? That's kind of the entire point. I personally accept your definition of "transgender/cisgender" above, but there are people who do not: they would reject the notion that the statement "man, and not one of the trans guys" has any meaning. By dictating your terms to them, you are attempting to define your way to victory in the debate. This is a rhetorical power-move, but it is not rational.
"But the outliers *do* exist, and they're not going to pretend to not exist for your intellectual comfort"
I can't see how this isn't a pure strawman. Practically no one anywhere (in the west at least) is asking anybody to pretend not to exist. Unless you define "pretend not to exist" as "entertain the theoretical possibility that your personal feelings are not an impeccable guide to objective truth". And even the latter was not what I was saying in this thread.
Consider four approaches.
1. People who claim to have a "gender" that is different from their sex are lying to get attention.
2. Some people feel that they have a gender, but they are mistaken. Gender, if it means something different to sex, is not a coherent real thing.
3. Maybe some people do have a gender, and sometimes this matches their sex and sometimes it doesn't. Others do not, and for them the word "gender", unless it's a synonym for sex, has no useful meaning.
4. Every person has chosen, or found within themselves, a non-biological "gender". Some people have the same gender as their sex, some have the opposite one, and some have one that doesn't match either.
Only 1 can be reasonably called offensive, since it accuses people of lying. Neither 2 nor 3 are remotely non-respectful, or in any way telling people they don't exist (unless you hold the woke attitude that disagreement is oppression, which I thought everyone here rejected). Telling someone you accept they have certain beliefs, but you don't think those beliefs are true, is literally the same as disagreeing about religious beliefs. I thought we agreed as a society about 300 years ago that people can hold different metaphysical beliefs and not feel personally threatened by others' differing beliefs.
My point above was that the word "cisgender" implicitly assumes 4, since it can only mean "my gender stays within the bounds of my sex", thus telling people they have a non-biological gender. And on your understanding, wouldn't that amount to telling me to pretend not to exist?
I was therefore advocating 3, or allowing for it on the survey. But even were I to advocate 2, that would not be denying anyone's existence or perceptions, only disagreeing about reality.
And it would be based on the incoherence of things like "some people have the same gender as their sex" in option 4 above. What can this possibly mean? If there *is* such a thing as gender, and that is a different kind of thing to sex, and is not biological, then what on earth does it mean for your gender to be the same as your sex??? Or to match your sex? It would be category error, like saying the soul is located next to the heart. There's an incoherency built into this whole framework that is hardly ever really addressed.
Would you be happy with "Male (not transgender)"?
I find the cis/trans divide to be a false equivalence too. This is less because I'm a biological essentialist and more because I find the Ozzy Frantz "cis by default" theory to be a better description of me; possibly a decent chunk of the population are the same.
In this sense I don't identify as an anything. I am physically male, it's easy to fit into the male social role, it seems like it would be a lot of trouble to be anything else and very little gain except in some narrow social circles, and I don't care. If the Gender Swap Fairy waved its wand at me I'd have a lot of relearning and explaining to do because I'm an adult now, but if the wand had been waved at age 0 I think I'd just be female. I more or less understand what transpeople say they want, and I certainly believe them, but it's like someone dying their hair every day for 20 years: I don't actually "get" why they want to be a redhead so much that they'd do all that work. I think a lot of people are like this.
The way we ask these kinds of questions can shape our understanding of the whole thing. "Are you Christian or a heathen?" covers up the different types of heathen, and for that matter the different types of Christian. That being said my objection to it could be easily handled by a follow-up question and isn't as fundamental as yours.
1) I'm a "nominally full time" student and also self employed freelance and I'm absolutely incapable of deciding which of these is more important.
2) Why doesn't question on family religious background doesn't include atheism? I've observed fascinating differences between people who grew up non-religious vs those who had to "break out" of family religious coditioning.
3) How did I find ACT -- NO IDEA.
4) Agree with whoever said UK Tories are not socially traditionalist in a way even remotely comparable to GOP
5) PMS question doesn't allow for post menopausal or otherwise non menstruating women. I answered for when I was menstruating but it should be specified.
6) Children internet use question does not allow for "internet wasn't really a thing children would be capable of using when my child was 7".
7) Online hours Q doesn't specify if study, including non compulsory study (eg searching for papers and printing/reading them, watching videos listed as optional in your course content etc) counts as work or as "time online". I answered in the spirit of "largely voluntary AND I could easily stop without affecting other parts of my life" so not included required or elective study but it's removed half or more of my time online.
8) dead plants affect me because my garden is an absolute bomb site and I can't afford help with it but I answered in the spirit of combining them with litter and graffiti as mark of urban decay. I'd remove dead plants from that Q.
> Why doesn't question on family religious background doesn't include atheism? I've observed fascinating differences between people who grew up non-religious vs those who had to "break out" of family religious coditioning.
I’ve noticed the atheists from the more extreme religious families being the most vociferously anti religious and intolerant. This is I suppose a reaction and a genetic legacy.
Reaction, often some trauma or at least a personal feeling of being harmed too. See: Dawkins.
And I suspect societal factors load onto this too. I grew up in a very religious society in an atheist family (uniquely, each of my parents had an atheist father and a religious mother) so I grew up "meh" about religion philosophically but very anticlerical. Then I moved to a very secular society (UK) and calmed down about "churches being evil" too.
Whether I inherited "no god gene" idk. My sister is atheist by default, both of my children are more uncommited/ less open to the idea of not completely materialistic world despite growing up in a secular society with an atheist and very weakly agnostic parents.
The tories and social traditionalism is an odd one because it's skewed back and forth quite a lot: They have historically been the party of tradition but spent the late 20th and early 21st centuries drifting socially left, until in the early 2010s they were about as progressive as the US democrats of the same era. Since the politically seismic 2016 brexit referendum they've swung fairly hard in a reactionary direction - but are still distinct from republicans in that their vision is much more secular, and abortion is not really a salient issue at all.
On 2), the question does say "when last your family had a religion", or words to that effect. Might be several generations back. Perhaps "it's lost in the mists of time" should be an option.
I COMPLETELY missed that bit and assumed it meant my family of origin only! Wow.
Physical attractiveness: should I fill in how attractive I was when young, OR rate my attractiveness within my current age cohort, OR rate my attractiveness among all age groups from 15-99 year old?
Money makes one more attractive, especially as one ages.
Does that apply to women as well? I mean not the beauty-procedures they may afford, but just looking wealthy?
I believe so. Men (and women, I suppose) would like a sugar-mommy.
And per Helena Rubinstein, founder of a cosmetics company, "There Are No Ugly Women, Only Lazy Ones."
For me, the "common sense" use is for each one to compare among reasonably close characteristics. That is, in my case, for a male (my feminine beauty would be quite low, with all the beard, wouldn't it?), my age, my race, etc. Any other options assumes a universal canon, which seems wrong, and universal capability of attraction, which seems wronger.
Also I'm an ungodly poor judge of my own attractiveness.
I went with my physical attractiveness among all age groups. I think for most of us at a certain age attractiveness declines, and I figure it's fair to assess myself honestly as I am now rather than as I was in my prime.
I also went with a "general public" rule here. Maybe some people are attracted to balder, grayer, fatter men, but I think the conventional rules make good sense for answering the question.
I also think Scott's "be honest" reminder should apply to anyone who might underrate their attractiveness too.
There is presented sex as well. Women as a population are rated as more attractive than men by both men and women.
I answered the question as "among people of your sex / gender". I'm getting more glances and smiles these days than when I was younger. The world is a mystery.
I think I read ACX because I work in AI safety, rather than the other way round.
So, I start out thinking AI safety is a computer security problem much like the others I've worked on ... and then discover it has a community. (Well, an apocalyptic religious cult).
And I clicked yes to the 'ban AI now, even if no existential risk' question.
Technically speaking, the Internet did exist when I was a kid, but I didn't have access to it until university in '84 or so. And the Internet of those days was rather different to the thing we have now.
Yeah, my family got internet in my late teen years. My access was completely unrestricted and I never stumbled across anything that would have bothered my very conservative parents at all. I can’t imagine that now.
The options for the origins of Covid were natural or lab leak. There’s another option - lab.
Would intentional lab leak cover that?
Well it would be unlikely. 5D chess.
Oh I think I didn’t understand the other option you meant?
I think it was a natural virus that was leaked from a lab (maybe enhanced, maybe not, but probably not engineered.) So I don't know. I split the difference.
Two further issues.
"How long have you been reading" seems to have been copied from the last survey. It goes from "1 to 2 years" to "since it was slate star codex" but it's now been more than three years since ACX started. So since I've been here since 2021, I can't give an accurate answer. (EDIT: Arghh sorry, I missed that this was already mentioned.)
On the political question: I'm really amazed these are missing: there's no option for Communitarian/Populist (e.g. like Christian Democratic parties in many European countries, or a certain segment of Trump voters: traditional values and a welfare state, or anti-immigration and anti-business), and there's no option for Centrist/Moderate. This seems to potentially exclude a *lot* of people. On the other hand, "Liberal" and "Social-Democratic" are almost the exact same thing, but to different degrees (and only on the economic dimension at that). And there are two tiny far-right movements that are probably almost indistinguishable to most people (at least as much as anarchism and communism are, if not much more). It just seems a very warped political possibility-space to me.
On the other hand, and to balance out my obsessive negativity: thank you for fixing up the YIMBY/NIMBY question. Last time it was something like "you think more, and more afforadable, housing is good" vs "you think more, and more affordable, housing is bad". This one's much better!
Seconding this.
If you were to ask anything more complex than cis/transgender, then you'ld get more objections and confused stares.
But, it could conceptualised as two dimensional, gender variance vs how much you care...
1. I identify with my assigned at birth sex and this is very important to me.
2. Like, I guess I'm fairly typical for my birth sex but ... whatever ... do people even have a gender?
3. I do not identify with my assigned at birth sex and this is very important to me.
4. Like, since you're asking, I guess I'm gender atypical, but I have no interest in hormones or sex reassignment surgery. I see no reason why I would want to do that.
(The descriptions are intended to be evocative examples, not what you'ld put on a survey question)
Yeah, I just ticked cis but I am very much cis by default and I would take T to try it out / for the ability to ditch periods and lift weights, if it didn't come with so much social baggage / gatekeeping
Testosterone will do more than that for you, you'll get facial and body hair growth and male-pattern baldness. Depends if you're willing to spend money on shaving/hair removal products that you save on products for periods.
> If you notice any problems, please ask yourself “Is this a real objection rather than a nitpick? [...]"
I feel personally attacked. :-)
I mean, right?!
I never know what to put in the left/right spectrum, it entirely depends what you calibrate on. On the Swedish scale I'm probably a 6, but on the American scale it's more of a 3. I averaged it a bit and put 4, but I'm not happy about it.
Building on this, I would have liked a two dimensional representation of politics. Potentially left-right and authoritarian-libertarian.
Your list of social media providers includes 'Option 9' which does not appear to be some kind of hipster provider I didn't know about but is probably an error where you meant to include another provider
I just figured I was old and out of it. Which is also true.
Kidney donation: I wanted an answer for 'I am interested but know I would be immediately rejected from the current process so haven't tried', I put 'not interested' but neither that or started the process was really correct.
Eugenics: no room for nuance, I wanted an answer to express I would want some selection types banned (eg selecting against autism, probably most conditions that aren't immediate death or hideous suffering and might turn out to have diversity value) but others are clearly great (eg selecting against conditions incompatible with life).
I think it's at least somewhat by design. If such selection is allowed at all, there's going to be a lot of debate of what acceptable and what isn't, on which you'd have very limited control. So how careful do you want people to be with their criteria if you don't get to pick-and-choose the criteria you personally favour?
I picked the middle option to represent this, but I feel like it mixes up 'I don't think the technology would work / is worth it due to effect size' with this, which is more 'I think the technology would absolutely work and we should be very careful with it but I am not against the whole thing'
There is also a possibility of "I think it would work but have unintended consequences if we're not careful" (think "select against autism, eventually end up with no mathematicians").
I just assumed the "skeptical" option or whatever it was also covered "skeptical that the result will be good"
If immediate death or hideous suffering are worth selecting against, then "almost immediate death" and "almost hideous suffering" should be too. All the way down the line to eliminating suffering. Seems strange to tolerate suffering for diversity value. We could get more diversity in disease by deliberately harming children or stop treating them, but nobody finds that acceptable.
You are deciding who gets to exist. The answer to "how much pain are you willing to tolerate before you would prefer not to exist" is usually finite but above zero.
Given the decision to decide between a person that suffers a lot in life and one that suffers little, we should choose the one that suffers little all else being equal. Do you disagree?
I disagree that for a number of the options there we have anything like that decision. You are dealing with tiny risk factors, not certainties; meanwhile, outcomes over the course of a whole life depend on much more than just genetics.
I know autistic people who are very happy with their life.
Their mental situation being equal, the outcome nevertheless could easily have been otherwise; where they are now and have been to date is an accident of where they were born and raised, and what encounters and opportunities presented themselves.
Nobody serious disputes that these are probabilities, not certainties or that environment is not contributing somes.
There are also people live good lives despite disability and mental disorder. But it is obvious that -- all else equal -- it is better not to have disability and mental disorder.
If some mental condition does not contribute to more suffering or disability on net, then it's not an issue that I'm talking about.
Is it obvious, though? There are deaf communities who strongly feel that their kids will have better lives if they are deaf because there is otherwise a risk of feeling excluded from family and community.
Sure, make decisions for your own kids; but realise that your preferences are not universal.
I disagree that all else is equal in this scenario - we could easily accidentally prune humanity of good and useful traits because we maximise suffering avoidence. Previous generations would have pruned a lot of traits that are just considered normal variation today.
The exact threshold for suffering that's bad enough to take this risk about is a complicated question but that doesn't mean the only possible answers are the endpoints.
We're not going to wholly eliminate any traits since not everyone is going to use this technology ever. When considering what is the past decision for a parent, a decision between a high-disease high-suffering embryo and a low-disease low-suffering embryo is clear. Current selection is against diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease, etc. It don't think there's a good reason to keep those traits around. If there were we would maybe want doctors not to treat them. Psychological traits is more complicated, but I was responding to your general idea about suffering/diversity.
"A decision between a high-disease high-suffering embryo and a low-disease low-suffering embryo is clear" - you don't get that decision, though. You get to decide to shift some very specific known probabilities a tiny amount, while also shifting a whole bunch of things we don't know about by unknown amounts.
>Previous generations would have pruned a lot of traits that are just considered normal variation today.
And yet, even if less diverse, people today would be taller, smarter, prettier, and in better health.
If we'd been taking positive eugenics seriously, we'd have had ~8 positively selected generations since Francis Galton was advocating for eugenics. 8 generations isn't much, we're definitely hampered by being long-lived and slow breeding and developing, but you can actually accomplish a surprising amount.
What can you do in 8 generations?
> Between 2000 and 2016, US dairy cattle breeders, by applying selection pressure to increase the productive life, achieved an increase of about 10 months
> After eight generations of selection, the percentage of dogs with an excellent hip quality score (as assessed by an extended view hip score) increased from 34 to 93% in German Shepherd Dogs and from 43 to 94% in Labrador retrievers.
> In dogs, it's generally thought that it takes ~7-8 generations to get a new measurably distinct *breed* entirely
> More generally, traits with a heritability of at least 15% are considered good candidates for genetic selection. Essentially everything we care about in humans (intelligence, height, strength, conscientousness, neuroticism, mental illness, health, etc) is way above 15% heritability
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8450581/
Now, just imagine if we had applied that level of selection at a large scale to a significant human population for 8 generations. That population would enjoy significant buffs in things like intelligence, conscientiousness, and health.
Yes, if everyone is tall and smart and pretty, we're theoretically less "diverse." But that's the bad kind of diversity - we want the kind of diversity where healthy and highly capable people all specialize in what they most care about, and self-actualize at higher levels than would be possible if they were sicker, dumber, and less capable.
Why wouldn't we want this?
Would you want all people that previous generations would have eliminated (including anyone gay, trans, sexually promiscuous and at different times too liberal) to be pre-emptively removed? I'm pretty sure that 1980s conservatives would have done that, given the choice to make sure their kids weren't gay, and 95% of the population would have agreed.
I claimed "Given the decision to decide between a person that suffers a lot in life and one that suffers little, we should choose the one that suffers little all else being equal"
If we introduce other elements into the equation like socially disaproved sexual orientations or identities, it is not longer a clear cut question.
I also think "medicine should be used to help sick people." And you could say, well what if a trans person is considered sick by society? And then someone might say that's offensive or untrue. Or Scott or Freddie might defend it so that they can get heathcare, or we could go down some other long tangent.
I don't know the optimal number of gay people or promiscuous people. But the more defensible central point is still true in my view.
It sounds like you're making a motte and bailey argument. The motte is that severely disabled people should be prevented from existing or replaced by not-severely-disabled people instead. That's fine, it's a pretty defensible position, and I wouldn't argue with you about it. The bailey is the move to "all suffering" while explicitly taking it beyond what we would call a disability, let alone a severe disability.
You correctly recognize that some people will say that a group of people are sick/disabled/suffering while others will claim that they are not. If we cannot agree on what "suffering" means or accurately attach that label to specific individuals, then at the very best your idea is unworkable. At the worst it gets into Nazi-level crap where someone decides on a list that others find evil.
Some people will make individual decisions that they don't want a gay/short/autistic/whatever child and ask for the treatment. From a moral society level, "we" literally cannot make that decision or argument for all suffering, because "we" don't agree about what constitutes suffering. Even pretty extreme cases like moderate autism (and rarely even extreme autism) is protected by some. And maybe for good reason! Autism seems to be linked to certain styles of thinking and maybe (for instance) better computer programmers, so maybe autism is a good thing in moderation. A lot of maybes, because we don't know. Which is part of my point - we don't know what things exist that seem bad may be involved in good outcomes elsewhere.
What's the problem with selecting your kids so they aren't gay?
I have no problem with that, in full honesty. I just use it as an example of something that is very likely to happen that is different from the standard examples of removing disease or making kids more intelligent. Some people only think of the things they would want to remove, rather than things other people might choose to remove.
I disagree. I don't think we should choose one way or the other.
You decide who gets to exist every time you use birth control, a condom or pull out. Only difference is that you're deciding whether a random human gets to exist vs a pre-selected one.
I'm not normally a hardliner on this - e.g. I'm pro-choice - but deliberately making a ton of viable embryos then destroying most of them based on tiny correlations observed across an entire population seems like a very different sort of thing to wearing a condom.
When it's this unclear which set of railtracks people are tied to, some would prefer to leave their hands off the lever.
I completely disagree. Adversity makes us stronger as we learn to overcome it. A society of people who never suffer in normal small ways will fall apart if anything big happens.
You may argue that eugenics cannot stop all adversity and I would agree with you, but that doesn't mean we should eliminate all genetic causes of any kind of pain.
That goes beyond the "people born with a deformed arm are still people" approaches, which I also agree with.
Imagine a child is born unusaully health and happy. Should the parents make the child suffer adversity (perhaps hurting them or disabling them) to help them learn to overcome it and become stronger?
Yes. By pushing them beyond what they would naturally do. Not by cutting off a leg or something else drastic, but definitely by both not insulating them from all adversity and by pushing them into things that will challenge them.
I don't disagree when it comes to conditions so bad that the child will die or never live much of life. But you jumped into the conversation to argue for the elimination of *all* suffering, which is a very different argument.
If suffering actually improved the quality of a person's life to the point that they have a net positive utility then it could be worthwhile, but that was not what I had in mind. I don't personally think that having a disability makes you so much mentally stronger that it pushes you beyond the negative effects of the disability...that sounds unlikely generally, but could theoretically be true in some cases. I think it would be better to just push your child to achieve more without needing to inflict disease or suffering on them. Seems like we can have both.
"All suffering" definitely takes us past the point where we might consider something a disability. Consider introverts, which we do not consider a disability. They will absolutely have situations where they are uncomfortable/suffering from having to talk to strangers in public. Should we genetically engineer all people to be extroverts? (Which may add a different problem for these new extroverts who are now sad/suffering when they have to be alone).
I feel like by the time we call it a "disability" we've decided that the suffering has gone too far and it's now a decided net-negative. Unfortunately "we" rarely decide such things, and there are definitely different tolerance levels for what used to be "obvious" disabilities. For instance gender-dysphoria and (at least more mild forms of) autism.
Re: eugenics and the non-coercive positive type, I'm against it personally *and* very sceptical that Nanny Government is going to get it right or have it work out for people. Yes, gather all that Nobel Prizewinner sperm, not like that has ever been tried before. People have done various small and half-assed attempts at breeding baby geniuses, I don't think large scale efforts will go better. First, to make sure the Nobel baby has the best start in life, you're going to need to have the rich parents being the hosts because nobody is going to expect that dumping Baby Neumann into a single parent household living on the crack estate is going to get you anywhere. So we're not really pulling up the entire social genetic level, just concentrating it at the already existing levels.
That will ripple on for the whole of the Baby Geniuses lives; the schools they go to, the degrees they get, the jobs they go into - all will depend on family having the money to make sure the positive environment happens, because the state is not going to turn the oil tanker of the education system around fast enough to make sure that the supports for public education are in place.
So in sum, it's going to be "please, already smart and well-off parents, have more kids! Hey look, we'll give you free Nobel Prize winner sperm and everything to do this!"
I last attempted to make this kind of point here: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/galton-ehrlich-buck?r=f8dxg&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=16156613
At the time I was duly informed that if we just get lots of rich people to donate sperm, more of the next generation will be rich.
So perhaps there's your answer: breed rich people first, then work on selecting for Nobel prizes once the single parent crack estate households are all gone.
So Elon is single-handedly taking on the task of breeding the next generation of rich people!
I think the baby would also need the right family upbringing. Raising a genius around non-geniuses will limit their growth but also limit how much they feel included and encouraged to be a genius. Von Neumann wouldn't have been the same person without his eccentric dad pushing education at home. He still would have been smart, but maybe hid it or got into a more normie profession (accounting or business manager).
Genes are more influential in life outcomes than shared environment generally. This is a well-established finding of behavioral genetics.
Then I'm sure Baby Nobel will have no trouble at all being born of a neglectful parent who (to take an example from work) is considered a 'good mother' because she turns away from the toddler when she shoots up drugs. No, he or she is destined to go to Oxbridge and be a high-flyer, it's genes all the way, baby!
I think @Ives Parr's point is (though I could be wrong) the reverse: he claims that if you took an ordinary baby with ordinary genes, and gave it the best care and education that money can buy, then that baby still has no shot at all at becoming a Nobel prize winner.
That's true, and that's genes: if you have Baby Ordinary and Baby Nobel in the same circumstances, there's a much better chance the baby with the Nobel Prize winner sperm donor will do better.
Not a dead certainty, still. But more likely.
Putting the less able child in good circumstances won't get you a Nobel prize winner, but they may do better than expected. Putting them in worse circumstances, they won't do as well. And I expect the same for the Nobel baby: they may still be smart, but they'll have a lot of obstacles and encumbrances to hold them back. Not least that simply getting the sperm isn't the end of it; if the pregnant woman smokes, drinks, doesn't make sure to eat healthily, etc. during pregnancy this will have an effect on Baby Nobel's development. Once born, if neglected and (for example) not spoken to, dumped in front of Youtube as a baby sitter, etc. then there will be developmental delays. There will be a lot of catching up to do in order to get where they should be at, and they may never get there - maybe Baby Nobel is diverted into joining a gang and being a smart criminal instead of winning that scholarship to Oxbridge and working on a cure for cancer.
You're selecting practically the worst possible example that you can think of to argue for the environment. In this hypothetical, you are certain it'll turn out one way. I am mentioning a general finding to say that mostly environment is less important than genes. Nobody would ever say that a neglectful crack parent is bad, but mostly parenting is unimportant relative to genes in the typical case. I have never said--nor does anyone serious advocating for PGT-P--that life is 100% genes.
I think it's long been an argument over "nature versus nurture" and I don't expect to settle it. So let it lie here.
Certainly, all else being equal, genes make the most difference. But we first have to stipulate that all else is equal, hence why some putative government programme about "let's make Nobel prize winner sperm available to all" isn't going to raise the eugenic waterline, as it were, *if* that's all that is done. If you want to raise IQ level over the general population, that means a slew of interventions that do mean spending a lot of money on social changes and indeed, what some might deem interfering with family choice and engaging in social engineering.
"People who were probably going to have kids who would go on to be successful anyway now enabled to have slightly smarter kids" is not the game-changing intervention there.
The relative influence of genes and environment is determined by the heritability of traits. For IQ, it's highly heritable in adulthood and so the influence of nature is greater than nurture. My original statement is correct. There isn't any debate to settle here.
Interventions aimed at increasing IQ are hollow or fadeout (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2015.10.006).
The appropriate counterfactual is if the child in a bad scenario would be more/less successful without the different set of genes (PGT-IQ/Nobel sperm). Obviously, the genes will increase the probability of success. I don't think the environment is as large of a hinderance as you're thinking, but I can only appear to the general state of the science. I can't debunk a hypothetical that you have conceived of about a crack mother raising a nobel baby. But I will say the evidence suggests that --environment held equal--genes for high IQ are more likely to lead to success than genes for low IQ.
> Baby Nobel will have no trouble at all being born of a neglectful parent who (to take an example from work) is considered a 'good mother' because she turns away from the toddler when she shoots up drugs.
Not going to happen in practice. The people who can follow the regimen required for successful IVF are future-oriented and capable of deferring gratification. They are going to be overwhelmingly UMC.
Your comments seem like a disgust reaction rather than carefully considered thoughts. I wonder where that is coming from?
I have a revulsion to the idea of aristocracy, that some children are somehow better than others simply because of their parent's social position. This seems like it might be related to that, the Eloi and Morlocks thing.
In the short term (four, five generations) it might be better for humanity as a whole to allow individual couples to do this eugenical stuff, because progress comes from the 0.001 percent at the top end of IQ x persistence x political skill. I just have this intuition that after that, it could make things worse, a lot worse, for nearly everybody.
"The people who can follow the regimen required for successful IVF are future-oriented and capable of deferring gratification. They are going to be overwhelmingly UMC."
That is precisely the point I was trying to make; a programme that simply goes "free Nobel Prize sperm for all!" isn't going to have the success that every baby born from this, no matter the circumstances, is going to be the winner in life. Environment counts here where we're not talking about "all else being equal".
Every baby born from "Nobel Prize sperm" *is* likely to be a winner, because people unable to follow the IVF regimen will not have babies. There's only a 30% chance of a baby if you follow the protocol perfectly. People who can do that three times will create the environment to make the resulting baby a winner also.
Sure, there will be mass disappointment and tremendous inefficiency and waste of scarce medical resources. But the babies that result will be fine, barring the usual accidents that afflict everyone.
No reason that the government has to get involved (except that the government typically gets involved in everything). See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention
"nobody is going to expect that dumping Baby Neumann into a single parent household living on the crack estate is going to get you anywhere"
Strong disagree here.
Wasn’t the eugenics question in reference to IVF? In which case you choose not to implant an egg which is a choice you are going to have to make anyway. I’m sure that most people practice eugenics already - ie not implanting an egg where the child has potential major congenital issues. Which is perfectly fine c
I don't think that's what I'm arguing with Mr. Parr over, at least not from my side. Yes, if you're doing IVF anyway and yes, if there is a definite risk of a disease, illness or hereditary condition, then selecting your embryo is going to happen and it'll give a chance of a better life.
As I understood the survey question, it wasn't about this. It was about non-coercive eugenics, e.g. the government sets this up and it's paid for by private actors so people have the choice to do the whole polygenic thing, including 'we will provide you with Nobel Prize Winner sperm' (as an aside, the uncanny resemblance to AI for cattle etc. makes me laugh https://www.teagasc.ie/media/website/animals/beef/AI-and-Heat-Detection.pdf - a visit from the AI man when Janet is at peak fertility to make sure she and Brad have the superior baby?)
And my argument there was that *this* kind of intervention *on its own* isn't going to raise the IQ and niceness and whatever other positive traits you desire in the general population, because while everyone might agree that it's much better if the next generation of babies born to single mothers living in the crack council estate are not doomed to a live of repeating the same cycle, and that the argument is "moar IQ better because moar money job if smart", just making sure Annjaleyna is knocked up with Nobel sperm not druggie petty criminal boyfriend sperm won't achieve that for you. Baby Nobel is going to be raised in the same conditions by the same type of parenting as Annjaleyna was, and the outcomes are likely to be "much less opportunity for Baby Nobel to get the hell out of that trap" and more "if he or she are anyway smart, they may manage to get a job flipping burgers in McDonalds - WHICH IS NOT A BAD OUTCOME - but they're not going to be the next generation of cancer researchers".
The people who *will* benefit the most from such schemes are the people who were going to be decent, stable families with opportunities to attend good schools, get into good universities, and networking so Baby Nobel can get an internship to a good job afterwards anyway.
So we're just perpetuating the same old division between "why aren't the smart people having more babies, and the underclass having fewer?" *unless* there is one hell of an overhaul of everything from schools to how you parent your kids and where they live on up.
That, at least, is the argument I'm making, based on my 'lived experience' of working in the areas associated with schooling in deprived areas and social housing and now special needs education. Ives Parr may have a hugely different experience, and may be answering a different question to the one I'm answering.
"Computers (practical: IT, programming, etc.)"
lumping together "IT" and "programming, etc" is both information-hiding and considered somewhat offensive by the second category. "your IT guy" is not the same job as "guy who writes load balancers at Netflix", but that same guy is not really an academic computer scientist either.
"Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?"
Coincidentally, I would have changed my answer if the day were different, or it asked about 48 hours, because of a computer game.
I had a weird aside yesterday about Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon by peeling off all the stickers.
The only time I ever think about it is when someone asks if I do (don't think of and elephant style).
Can we stop this now. It's become like "you just lost the game".
I think the Holy Roman Empire should count. But I said no because I guess it does not.
Ouch. I got that wrong too as I watched Dune II yesterday and definitely (spoilers) was reminded of the colosseum. But normally o don’t think about the Roman Empire more than once a week. So I’ll keep the answer.
A week or two ago, definitely, as it was the Ides of March and that was all over Tumblr.
I was in the same boat. I answered honestly, no in the last 24 hours, but for sure I've thought of it in the last 48.
I've definitely thought about the Holy Roman Empire in the last 24 hours. Planning my first visit to France.
I was missing an option to say crime positively impacts my life on the crime question, since I commit it minorly (buying not-very-illegal drugs online, parking illegally, etc) and it benefits me
The covid masking question should've had an option for "wore one longer than most, will still wear one in certain circumstances (e.g. hospitalization rates go back up)."
Yes, I still wear mine in public transport, but not in shops, so I clicked No.
On the immigration question: “expand visa programs (more legal immigration) and less illegal immigration” is a common position, particularly in the US. It is hard to align that with the question as stated: should immigration be stricter/more open in your country.
Completely agree. The survey should distinguish between legal and illegal immigration. I believe many in your audience would be in favor of legal and opposed to illegal.
Agree as well. Failure to make this distinction (whatever your views) makes public discussion much more difficult for everyone.
+1, very important distinction.
It's more complex than that. Lots of people, such as myself, are also illiberal on low-quality legal immigration and liberal on high-quality legal immigration.
Plus one for tweaking the immigration question. In my case my opinions about the immigration system narrowly and the asylum system are very different and I wasn't sure how broadly you were asking.
Yep, agreed 100%. I think the border as it is now is an awful tragedy and a legal mess. But that doesn't mean I don't want people to immigrate or even work here. I just want it to happen in a sensible, secure, humane way.
I don't even really care about the comments some have made about "low quality" vs. "high quality". I think we've got room for all sorts. I just want it to happen safely and not have a big huge open border and all the smuggling and human trafficking that encourages.
+1, I ended up putting 3/5 (the middle option) because I felt my view was orthogonal to the options provided.
Very minor observation: Not everyone lives in a building. I'm a full-time RVer, for example, so I left it blank. Although I guess in some sense it is a detached single family home?
Yeah, likewise - I just skipped that one, because I'm retired and travel so much I live in different circumstances probably every couple of months.
Is your question social media usage made under the assumption that people first began browsing the internet using their smartphone? I got my first smartphone at age 14 but browsed the internet (including social media) before that. Also, do forum count as social media? I used those before i used major social media, but given the examples listed i assumed only major social media was meant.
Same, I started using social media on a PC before I had a smartphone.
Noting that I think income levels, as well as views on immigration and school choice responses, will have very different meanings for non-Americans.
Yeah, but there are questions about where you live, so he can split on that.
(Or rather, probably just throw away all the non-US answers since there probably won’t be enough to say anything significant about any other countries.)
Amusingly Scott didn't mention any of the older social media like BBSes and phpBB forums, even though he's definitely old enough to be aware of them. I assume that they are included in the questions.
For "How old were you when you first started using social media", I've made the judgment call to count forums (BBS) as social media.
I was pretty surprised that they weren't mentioned at all, since they've dominated the early internet as the main social thing (alongside IRC and Usenet), and it's a question about childhood.
(I've also made the judgment call to not count coding video game AI as "working in AI capabilities", for purposes of this survey.)
I can't remember precisely when I got a smartphone and started using social media, so I gave an approximate figure.
"Screens" questions were hard to do.
I rate myself as 2/5 addicted to the Internet. It's just too powerful and useful, even counting streaming sites/apps as "TV". But I use it when I need to or when I find it useful, not otherwise, and I practically don't use "social media" (and Substack, when one is merely reading blogs and sometimes commenting, doesn't count, even if you explicitly put it on the list). Yet I count myself as 12-14 hours in front of "screens", mainly because I live in front of a PC, and to me, work, play, productivity (including writing) and entertainment (including reading) comes from the same device. Cut my Internet connection, and my productivity falls, but I will log the same numbers of hours, if on different activities. Same for "online". I'm "online" when I'm sending whatsapp messages, and that can be casual chat, important communication or even work. I could do the same with voice over telephone and that, mysteriously, wouldn't count as "online"? And what if Wikipedia is the best general reference, Wordreference the best dictionary, and Duolingo is my Japanese teacher? Those are merely examples: I could cite several dozen services or sites merely among the ones that see daily use, or almost.
Also, the "The government is extremely competent and does a great job figuring out ...." questions, have been answered no, not because I distrust government interventions, even when competent and well-meaning (I do, but I swear I wasn't fighting the hypothetical), but because I don't need them. I eat healthy and spend online what time do I need, automatically. But I extremely strongly dislike being limited by outside authority. I would have liked to have some option to reflect this.
However, I would sign up for the "government forbids me going to social media", and it is not because I use them. On the contrary, I almost never do. But other people force me to, when they share/link to it (and it appears interesting). And it is always bad having to evade ads (or rather, anti-adblocker measures, I blocked ads long ago), clickbait and things-I-was-not-looking-for. Thus, if it were known that people can't go there, both bloggers and friends would be forced to publish/send me whatever they want be to see, instead of linking to those dens of perdition. I mean, links are fine, provided the whole post don't depend on them or there are full quotes or at least screenshots. But "go there to keep reading, I'll wait here for you to come back", THAT I hate
I gave the same two answers to the government ones; I don't want outside authority, but I would love to never get ads for things I don't want to use.
> I would love to never get ads for things I don't want to use.
It always amazes me that the ad duopoly, Meta and GOOG, with their tens of thousands of Phd's each, are SO BAD at targeted ads.
With the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of Phd's working around the clock, FB and GOOG routinely fail to show me ANY advertisements anywhere on the internet that are even tangentially related to anything I care about and would buy. And I'm a comparatively heavy spender in relation to the USA median - I have some pretty expensive hobbies, and for the non-expensive hobbies, I'm more than willing to throw down hundreds or thousands on a whim. Do FB or GOOG, the literal worldwide online advertisement monopoly tap into any of that? Not at all.
...Or they'd just see the people on the program as not worth catering to.
"How much do the following problems negatively affect your life: crime"
The detailed description implies violent crimes (e.g. robbery, rape, murder - things you are afraid of) but one could also consider "white collar" crime. For example, my corrupt government affects my life in a very negative way, but I wouldn't say I'm a victim (am I?) nor am I physically afraid. Am I supposed to still say that crime affects my life?
He addressed that in the question itself - no, you would not say you are affected by crime.
Can you point out where that is addressed?
I have seen this explanation:
"Please DON'T count:
- Purely political effects on your life (being angry that there's so much crime)
- Exposure through the media (you were traumatized after reading a story about a crime victim)"
But there are real (not just political) effects of corruption, for example: 1) a "bad" company bribes the government to get a construction job, leading to a poorly constructed building or a single road being paved instead of two because they pocketed the money etc. 2) someone bribes the doctor to get preferential treatment (scan, hospital room etc.) instead of someone else, resulting in prolonged suffering for the patient that got skipped over. If I have experienced something like this in real life, that would mean that crime affected my life negatively, right?
That sounds countable to me.
Ah, okay, I would think that falls within his definition if those things affected you directly (i.e. you use the road/building in question) but not if you read about the corruption elsewhere.
I wouldn't count anything the government does as crime, since the government is who decides what is criminal and what is not. Otherwise we'd all have to say we're suffering under the crime of taxation and so on ...
We could discuss judicial/executive/legislative branches and who decides what, but I used "the government" as shorthand for some type of public official. If they do something that is clearly against the law, and is described in the law as a crime, than that would in fact be a crime. In my example, that would be "it is illegal to give the contract to the company that offered you a bribe, instead of to the best bidder".
For the SAT, if you took it when it was scored 2400, do you just directly put the scores for reading and math, or use a converter (like https://blog.prepscholar.com/new-sat-conversion-chart-old-2400-to-new-1600)?
Personally, I would think you should directly transfer the scores. The return to 1600 still has an optional essay section scored out of an additional 800.
... and no answer for those of us who only took the ACT.
Shoot, I guess this means I have to change my answer about how often I post...
For mental health conditions e.g. eating disorder, do you want to know if someone had this condition and recovered from it years ago? Maybe change the wording to "have/had" if so.
Agree. I was a fully-fledged alcoholic when I was younger, but haven't had a drink for nearly 20 years. I answered 'yes' to do you have a diagnosis of alcoholism.
Should "within two generations" be interpreted to include nephews/nieces?
FWIW I only considered ancestors & descendants; could use more specificity.
Surely it does, and uncles and aunts.
"What kind of building do you live in?" - I live in a small building (< 10 apartments) that is part of a huge complex of such buildings. I answered small because you said building but I wasn't sure that was what you wanted.
Another problem with that question - I spend much of my time in a college dorm (being an undergrad ofc), but none of the answers correspond to that.
Should "within two generations" be interpreted to included nephews/nieces--ChatGPT is noncommital on this question
Nephews and nieces are one generation to the side and one down, easily within two generations.
“What social media do you use?” currently has “option 9” listed as the 6th option.
I’m hoping that this is supposed to be Tumblr, as it seems like an oversight in a collection of mind-numbing social media sites otherwise. But I am not confident enough in that guess to select it.
Usual gripe about the political affiliation one - I'm not an American Republican or UK Tory, but neither am I a (current) Democrat either, so I have to go with the nearest which is Social Democrat (but I am not socially liberal/multicultural). I would prefer if there was an "Other" option, if possible.
As for the supernatural, again I have trouble with that one. I believe in God but not in ghosts/spiritual forces or energies, or the New Age-y astrology Wicca thing. So how do I answer there? I had to go with "strongly believe" because I do believe in souls, the afterlife, God, etc. but on the other hand I'm not about to sign up for a workshop on crystal healing with my guardian angel fairy door maker.
I struggled with the supernatural question as well. I believe in God and "spiritual beings", but the category seemed much closer to New Age than religion. I think I ended up putting a 3, which didn't feel right but better than the alternatives.
I left this one blank. Same reason. I get why many people would consider Thomas Aquinas's arguments for the Triune God and His angelic hosts to be on the same plane as believing crystals give off mood energy, but I couldn't figure out whether that was what the question itself was aiming at or not, and so opted out.
> but on the other hand I'm not about to sign up for a workshop on crystal healing with my guardian angel fairy door maker.
Fairy... door maker ? Is it a fairy that makes doors, or a human manufacturer of doors for use by fairies, or a fae-like creator deity who happens to also be a door, or what ?
Seemingly fairy doors are a thing (are these people insane, don't they have any idea what the fairies are really like? read Pratchett's "Lords and Ladies") and so this requires people to make them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_door
I think the type of people who huckster "meet your guardian angel" stuff would indeed try to have the cross-over between angels and fairies.
"Fairy doors" are definitely an American thing that some chancers are trying to make money off even here in Ireland:
https://theirishfairydoorcompany.com/about/
https://www.awaywiththefairies.ie/
And several others. This is particularly egregious in Ireland, since we have our own fairy folklore which is *not* the Victorian butterfly winged flower fairies notion, you do *not* meddle with the fairies and most of all you do *not* invite them into your garden or home. But this kind of 'quaint' crap is being produced and sold now because it's the pop culture notion of fairies from TV cartoons, not native folklore which is gone with the past. Now it's all about monetising heritage.
I've never heard of this "fairy door" phenomenon, but I suppose it does make sense, metaphysically speaking. It's similar to inscribing a pentagram on the floor in order to summon demons: yes, demons can technically pop up anywhere, but they might find it easier to do so within a well-defined dimensional anchor. Presumably this logic would apply to other malevolent extradimensional entities, such as the fae.
Just chiming in that I felt the same ambiguity and made the same choice as Deiseach on the "supernatural" question. God, souls, angels, demons, afterlife: yes; new age-y stuff: very much no.
For the human biodiversity question there should be two questions covering both favorability and agreement so we can say strongly agree that it's true but still have a highly unfavorable opinion of most of the people that bring it up all the time.
Would like a division between work days and free days for the internet-screen use. I'm on them for pretty much every free moment I have, which is six or seven hours on work days and 16 to 18 hours on free days.
Yeah, I just went for work days as they're more frequent and also more uniform (sometimes I go out and do stuff on a weekend, sometimes I'm glued to a screen)
I'd just average it out.
It's probably late to change this now, if you ever intend to, but for the mental health category, I'd suggest having an "I've been formally diagnosed but no longer believe I meet the criteria" category.
When I was younger (around middle school age IIRC,) I was diagnosed with OCD, and with anorexia. I don't believe I've shown the symptoms to meet the diagnostic criteria for OCD for nearly twenty years now, and the last time I displayed eating disorder tendencies was nearly that long ago. There might be a sense in which the disorders are still "there," but I don't think another psychiatrist would diagnose them in me independently now.
This is a good idea.
On the risk of flaming up infamous parts of current cultural war I have an issue with the question "With what gender do you primarily identify?"
This question assumes that everyone has a 'gender identification' which *in the context of the current cultural war* is a controversial and nebulous idea. And notoriously fluid, from what I saw sex/gender distinction and what it means to 'be a given gender' have undergone a significant and sinusoidal evolution in the last 20 years. Answering on this question in any way tacitly adheres to the validity of the concept of universal gender identity, and by that forces to take a side in the war. Or at the very least it mixes under the "other" two completely different groups - people who *identify* as non-binary and people who don't identify as anything, because they contest the notion.
Similar problems pertain to the question about 'racial identification'.
The very idea everyone 'identifies' as some race from specifically American dictionary is an overreach for at least some international readers. This question to me might be even worse than about gender and it looks structurally equivalent to the following:
"What NFL team do you root for the most?
- Dallas Cowboys
- Philadelphia Eagles
- New England Patriots
- Kansas City Chiefs
- Other"
To be less dependent on assumptions taken straight from identity politics maybe there should be options 'i don't identify with any gender' and 'i don't identify with any of the above'?
Wouldn't not answering the question be a relevant complication?
It is not obvious to me the answers aren't required.
Some questions have information that you can skip them, these two don't. If the questions are indeed optional then you are right that not answering is a reasonable choice.
Some questions _reinforce_ it but I think they are literally all technically optional, and this seems intended.
There should be an option “I reject American problems”
Now that you bring it up I did think "what do any of these labels have to do with me" on the race question. I identify with my nationality (amongst other things) not the color of my skin.
But then I filled out what an American would classify me as, figured that was as close to the spirit of the question as it was going to get.
"If you notice any problems, please ask yourself “Is this a real objection rather than a nitpick? Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?” - and if the answer is yes, comment here so I can fix it."
Yes, it is a nitpick, I will still post it because I am upset by it :D The list of relatives for the questions of "died from" includes self. Somehow, I think that dead people don't fill out the survey.
I will nitpick your nitpick: what if they had a cardiac arrest, technically met criteria for death, and then were revived?
— You died!
— I got better.
Well… do you actually intend to count such things as deaths more generally?
Might be worth clarifying the AI questions. At the start of the survey you have a question about working in AI. I answered yes because by _many_ metrics I do. I have ML engineer in my title and I've been a data scientist for a long time.
I've worked on actual AI teams before! However, none of that was GenAI, besides playing around with APIs and building stuff on top.
Later on you ask about working on capabilities or safety. That's pretty focussed on recent GenAI / GAI.
That's what's so weird about the AI, it's whatever is at the bleeding edge. Once it becomes kinda understood and mainstream it's not AI anymore, it's ML.
Here come the nitpicks!
* I picked "Academics (on the teaching side)" even though I'm not actually teaching any classes because my job doesn't otherwise differ from that of my colleagues who are.
* In order for answers to such questions to be mutually exhaustive one has to interpret "No, I don't want to" rather broadly (to include "I don't have the time" and similar) so I did, but the natural interpretation would be much stronger (like "I still wouldn't even if I had a lot more time on my hands") which wouldn't apply to me.
* Dammit, in the "better or worse" question I hadn't noticed the "combination of Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten" part, so I only answered about the latter!
* In the "Immigration" question you really should specify whether you mean de jure or de facto -- it's not such a rare position to believe more people should be legally allowed but more effort should be spent on keeping everybody else out (or, in principle, vice versa -- which I can't remember anyone argue for about immigration but I have about e.g. recreational drugs).
* "Strongly in favor" and "pro-choice" aren't the same thing -- not many people think any women who otherwise wouldn't want to abort should be required to or even encouraged to, so "pro-choice" isn't actually the mirror image of "pro-life". Still, I took 1 and 5 to be the extreme of the Overton window as it actually exists.
* In the COVID fatigue question I guess by "never" you actually mean "any more often than before COVID"
* "a phone capable of browsing the Internet" I've had for quite some time, but for the first few years I did doing so was unreasonably expensive (roughly as much as browsing using an Italian SIM while in South Korea is nowadays) so in practice I hardly ever did -- I kinda answered with an average over possible reasonable interpretations of the question
* "using social media" -- I didn't count defunct ones which I only used occasionally, only still extant ones which I use regularly
* I interpreted "the Internet didn't exist" rather broadly -- there were ISPs for the general public back then, but in my country they required a rather expensive subscription so basically nobody used them.
* "Restriction on porn" -- I hardly use any anyway, so I would sign up if it paid me a penny a day and wouldn't sign up if I had to pay a penny a day. I picked "No", is this right?
* Only one of the three embryos we managed to get via IVF was euploid -- "number of chromosomes" does count as a polygenic test score, right? (I can't remember which of the last two options I picked anyway.)
* "traffic": I counted all negative externalities of widespread motor vehicle use (having to be mindful when carrying a baby stroller, knowing at least two people with immediate family killed in car accidents) -- was I supposed to only count getting from A to B in a car being much slower than if there were no other cars? If so, I would have answered rather differently (haha bicycle/subway/etc. go brrrrr!). (Keeping everything else constant, most ways of ameliorating the latter would make the former worse and vice versa.)
* "noise": the one that bothers me most is one I have never seen mentioned in such discussions (namely, church bells)
* "the group shapes, even a little, how you identify, how you look, how you think of yourself, or how others treat you" -- well, "French" does shape whether I capitalize the first letter of my surname, but no way am I going to count that. (My great-grandfather had grown up in Italy, and was required to otherwise Italianize his last name by OG Fascists in 1924. None of my other seven great-grandparents had anything to do with France.)
> Only one of the three embryos we managed to get via IVF was euploid -- "number of chromosomes" does count as a polygenic test score, right?
No. That's PGT-A (Preimplantation Genetic Testing for Aneuploidy), not PGT-P (polygenic). In practice PGT-A is a subset of PGT-P, but PGT-A is near-universal in IVF (and its in-utero equivalent is also widespread), whereas PGT-P is quite new and mostly unknown. There's also PGT-M (testing for monogenic conditions). PGT-A and -M are generally going to give hard answers - your kid will or will not have Down syndrome, and this can be determined pre-implantation with very high confidence - whereas PGT-P is generally expressed as a bunch of relative risk factors like you see in Scott's post about it (A% more likely to have condition 1, B% less likely to have condition 2, etc., all relative to either the general population or to other embryos you have).
In theory, having only one euploid embryo makes PGT-P relatively pointless, since you aren't going to be selecting between embryos, you'll take what you can get. However, I can imagine somebody who, seeing a sufficiently awful result (e.g. extreme likelihood of something like early-onset dementia or something very physically painful), decides to abort the whole cycle and discard the technically-viable embryo in favor of either another extraction round, donor, adoption, or not parenting. Also, even in less extreme cases, it could still be informative, in the same way that normal genetic health tests can be informative; for example if you're at high risk of developing diabetes you'll probably be more watchful for relevant symptoms and/or careful of your diet, and with PGT-P you could start that from (or even before) birth for every condition they can test for.
I meant to type ":-)" in there but forgot to. :-)
(We did do PGT-M too. We didn't do PGT-P, and since it wasn't even offered to us I guess it's either not legally available in our country or would have been way out of our budget.)
I would suggest splitting the Protestant category in the "religion" tab into "Mainline" and "Evangelical". From the outside this may not look like a big difference - I am of a mainline background, and can tell you from having an evangelical girlfriend it makes *all* the difference in terms of many aspects of both practice and worldview.
I might also suggest on next year's survey re-evaluating the political questions. While the basic features of both "Neoreactionary" and "Alt-Right" political beliefs are still around, it has been quite a long time since I have seen anyone self-identify as either. There might be better labels to use for each, though I admit the idea space has yet to coalesce around a single name for each. Maybe "national populism/nationalist populism" for the latter has caught on?
This is pretty much a US based distinction - while there are evangelical, charismatic and other distinct groups of protestants alongside Anglicans, Methodists etc in the UK, the dividing line of mainline vs not mainline is much fuzzier, whereas the Catholic / Protestant / Orthodox distinction is more worldwide.
How about Restorationists? By some account we are super Prostestants! By others, weird "other!" It's basically a coin toss whether I pick "other" or "Protestant" on surveys.
The question With what Gender do you primarily identify, should have two additional responses: Male, Female. Male (cisgender), Female (cisgender) is not the same as Male, Female. I am 100% traditional in my gender id.
It kinda is by definition of what cisgender is because it's more or less whatever remains after you exclude other cases. Cf. https://gender.fandom.com/wiki/Cis-genderless which is what best fits me and is, by definition, a subset of cis.
Re: internet use at age 7. How do I answer this if the Internet was available at the time but it was too expensive and my parents didn't want to pay for it? I think maybe 10% of my neighborhood had internet access at the time.
I just answered that case as the Internet didn't exist, it did technically exist off somewhere else but it wasn't a realistic prospect to have access to it as a kid.
I answered that as my parents didn't let me use the internet at all, since they could have chosen to buy a home computer and connect it to the internet, but chose not to.
IMO, I felt that the intent of the question was clearly to be about actions your parents took with the express purpose and intention of preventing or limiting you from accessing the Internet. If they didn't have it because it was too expensive, the answer is "the Internet didn't exist". If they specifically didn't get it because they didn't want you using it, then the answer is "they didn't let me use it".
There is a question about why I am not a paying subscriber, and the closest match (which I selected) is that the price is too high, but I think it is worth making clear that I think the price is fair, and me being broke is more of a me problem.
Also it feels weird to count YouTube as social media. I just watch stuff; there's no social component any more than there is on Netflix, and my account isn't tied to my real name even if I were in the habit of commenting.
Did you know there’s a special student/broke discount price (based on the honor system)? Personally I’m extremely broke and am happy to pay the almost-nothing price, but if I weren’t broke it wouldn’t be worth the full price, so I would respect the honor system and go back to being a free subscriber.
Kind of an odd situation to be in that’s it’s only worth the price because I have no money...
Likewise, I'm not broke, just frugal. I would pay the broke price but not the regular price. So I'm a free subscriber and chose "the price is too high" on the survey.
Yeah, $10 a month is always gonna be too steep for me, but I guess Scott knows his primary market and it sure ain’t me. I’m not even happy paying that much for Spotify premium which is an app I use hours a day every single day.
I was really angry about how Scott was treated and initially subscribed in order to make sure he could get on his feet. IIRC, I'd seen a later post indicating that he had indeed and so I didn't renew after the first year.
I didn't count YouTube as social media in the first set of questions, since I mostly watch, rarely read comments, and never post comments. But later questions assumed that it was social media, so I responded to those as if it were, and I'd generally prefer that the Internet have a video site that allows comments.
Well I got as far as calculating my bmi and the link took me away from the survey and it forgot all my answers. What am I supposed to do now, start over? Will that mess up the results by double counting answers or are answers not submitted til the end?
I would guess that until you hit 'submit', none of your answers go anywhere
Fascinating. I ctrl-f'ed 'bmi' to see if anyone complained, and all three hits were in these two comments: one in 'bmi' itself and two in 'submit[ted]'. What are the chances the only place anyone uses the word 'submit' is in a comment on bmi?
On immigration I want significantly more legal immigration than the system currently allows, including faster processing, but I also want the elimination of all illegal immigration.
This is not an easy position to express on the survey.
I felt the same way about the question on eugenics.
What's wrong with the question on eugenics?
I was makina perhaps overly-subtle joke. On the "more legal, no illegal" model from Mr. Doolittle's comment, the eugenics question would be unable to capture the position "I want more coerced eugenics, less uncoerced eugenics".
I resigned myself to collapsing a number of my more nuanced views into a 1-dimensional representation. It's no worse than an IQ test, I suppose. Shadows on the cave wall, and all that.
I (mis?)interpreted the question as being about process rather than level, such that thinking everyone should be allowed in as long as they're formally processed on entry would be maximally strict despite being far less restrictive than the status quo.
Just to qualify my answer to the last question, my son is currently in Italy for a school trip, so, yeah, I’ve thought about the Roman Empire a lot in the last few days: otherwise, I don’t think about it more than once a month or so : )
Sam Kriss just wrote a piece about Elagabalus. I literally clenched my jaw and tapped 'yes' thinking, "Great, here comes a result showing that right-of-center white males think about Rome, when I swear it was only because I was reading a delightful pro-AME piece from a Jewish communist!" Let's hope there's not too much noise in the signal.
Thanks for mentioning that, I liked that post! I don't know if he's ever read 'Till We Have Faces', that has a good part about the stone Ungit, and there is the tradition in Hinduism of rocks/stones being considered images/representations of the goddess (or god, e.g. the shaligram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaligram).
Man, I'd forgotten that from TWHF entirely. In this case I think he protests too much (and or is too naturally transgressive: talking about how the two most famously iconoclastic religions used to be into worshipping stones). That is, I think setting up a stone as a marker for something greater-than-ourselves is just plain human (see: megalithic europe), and precedes any discursive thinking about the stones by immensities of time. Seeing the sun rise over a standing stone fills me with joy.
Yeah, even if you're reading fiction or non-fiction, there's so many references and allusions and so many metaphors and echoes and "rhymes with" Roman empire stuff I don't know how you avoid it even if you're not a history nerd.
Caesar crossing the Rubicon, anything to do with Egypt or Cleopatra or doomed romances, anything to do with Jesus, crucifixion, or Christian persecution or rise and expansion, anything to do with gladiatorial combat or public spectacles, anything to do with assassination, anything to do with bread and circuses, anything to do with Senatorial conventions or Senators or Consuls, anything to do with Republics, anything to do with dictatorships, anything to do with transitions from Republic or democracy to dictator or emperor or monarch, anything to do with military combat, tactics, or strategies, anything referring to Carthage or "X delenda est" - that's just the tip of the iceberg, too. Roman and Greek history is pervasive and ubiqitous in Western Gedankenwelts.
Also, wasn't this originally a metaphor for men thinking about sex every day or something? If you take it in the metaphorical sense, aren't there going to be some noticeable fraction that answer "yes" based on the sex thing vs strictly being about the Roman empire?
As for me and my house, we think about both sex AND the Roman empire on at least a 12 hour basis. 😂
The subtitle of this question is not matched with the question:
"If you said you succeeded in reaching jhana, about how many times have you entered jhanas? If you never succeeded, give the total amount of time you spend trying. If you did succeed, give the amount of time you had to try before succeeding."
About the question "How long have you been reading ACX?" - it has an option of 1-2 years and then "Since it was Slate Star Codex". But Astral Codex Ten was started in 2021 according to Wikipedia, so I believe that there is an answer missing.
The question about polygenic screening would benefit from an answer for "I'm morally opposed to IVF, but if you're going to deliberately create human embryos just to throw most of them in the garbage, I don't see why it's worse to choose the ones least likely to flourish as the ones to throw in the garbage." Or, just "I'm morally opposed to IVF," because if so the whole question of polygenic screening becomes irrelevant.
Yes, this would have been a good option to have. I still would have found it difficult to choose among several relevant answers, but I concur that the ethics around regular IVF (either personal or large-scale) are not fully comfortable for much of the population, including myself.
The question about Covid origins is ambiguous. The options given are natural origins vs lab leak.
What if it was a virus that first occurred naturally in wild animals, was being studied but not modified at WIV, and escaped from that lab into the human population? Does that count as natural origins or lab leak?
It wasn't clear to me, since there also exist theories different from that one that would unambiguously count as either natural origins or lab leak.
I understood this scenario to count as "lab leak", and indeed to be the belief of the typical person saying "it was a lab leak".
That's my understanding as well. I'm pretty sure that the people studying the virus were doing a fair bit of modification, but I don't think that's at all common knowledge or even common belief among lab-leak proponents. It is pretty common knowledge that the virus came into the lab in infected bats, and I think it's pretty unusual to understand just how it was being studied.
"Lab leak" means nothing beyond the fact that the virus was being studied in a lab, and it leaked out. If we'd meant it to mean exclusively some Dr. Moreau type creating new viral strains in the lab, we'd have called it something like "Lab-created".
I'm noting this more because I think it's funny than as a real nitpick. In "Did anyone in your family die (as per your best guess) from COVID? Please answer regarding first and second degree relatives - ie self, brother, sister...", I suspect there won't be many responses where "self" applies.
I died of COVID.
(I got better.)
This is erasure of the differently alive community! Reg Shoe would like a word 😀
Can I suggest adding an option for ACT score next time? I never took the SAT.
I can't remember my SAT score let alone the breakdown, but the GRE was more recent. I was tempted to just put the math score from there in, but refrained and left it blank.
I clicked straight to the survey from the substack app and when I followed the link to the joint mobility test I couldn’t get back to the survey; did everyone who completed the survey do the smart thing and open it in a browser from the start? Scott, maybe you should include a note to be sure to do that? (I tried to copy-paste the joint mobility link to a browser, but my phone wasn’t having it for some reason).
Also I doubt I’m the only person who has no coherent answer for ‘where do you stand on the left to right political spectrum’ but Scott probably knows this and is making the forced choice to avoid too many quibblers who still fit somehow…
My desktop computer also refused to copypaste that link.
The question “ If you have children, how do you plan to limit their Internet use at age 7?
If you already have children, describe what you did. If not, describe what you think you will most likely try.” presupposes that your children were exposed to the internet. My children were born in the 70’s. No internet exposure.
1. Invent time machine
2. Travel back to the 70s
3. Bring children at age 7 then forward to present day
4. Implement restrictions on their exposure to the Internet
5. Profit!
"Women: do you get PMS symptoms that affect your mood?" I answered this as if it meant "do you, or when you used to menstruate, did you." But I encourage you to avoid the usages, all too common, that make us postmenstrual women invisible.
When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31771
Probably on your radar already but this paper provides a larger sample for your 'would you ban social media' question.
In PART NINE: INCOME AND CHARITY there is no question about charity, only income.
> Income
> What is your approximate ANNUL
I was confused by this typo (should be "annual"), and tried looking up some sort of abbreviation.
How should sperm donors answer the "how many children do you have" question? Are you counting biological children regardless of social parentage?
Same question. I used ~central estimate of biological
That's just boasting, Metacelsus. "I estimate that I produced 200 bonny bouncing babies" and the rest of us are just nowhere besides that 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjW_yvrC0cE
"Fred : Mrs Whipple Poofer loves to talk to
Mrs Hildendorfer of the fatal natal day
She had her silly Willy
Nanette : Mrs Hudson-Cooper loves to talk to
Mrs Golden-Wasser
Of her major operations
When she had her twins.
Jack : But when Mother comes along
She silences the others
She accomplished something
That is very rare in mothers.
All : MGM has got a Leo
But Mama has got a trio
She is proud but says three is a crowd"
I had the same conundrum (and on every ACX/SSC previous survey). I just put down the number of my biological children and not my step children despite that feeling very weird. I'd have put both, but that would imply that they could be counted twice which is even weirder.
So, just 20 kids for me..
Huh, I've been an egg donor and likely have 5-10 biological children out there, but it didn't even occur to me to count them. I really don't think he's looking for answers to include "children that you have no way of verifying even exist but probably do, and that you've never had any relationship with." How would that factor into anything or be relevant at all?
I answered "condo", but my condo is located in a high rise building (20+ floors). So I'm not sure if I answered correctly.
Regarding mental illnesses: By "family" are you looking explicitly for biological relatives? Or would spouse, in-laws, etc. count as well? I assumed you're looking for hereditary connections and answered accordingly, but specificity would be helpful (in either case).
Regarding kidney donation: There was't really a category for "interested but ineligible"
Regarding restrictions on diet: I answered "no" because I shop (both in family and volunteer capacities) for people who would not be part of this program, so can't imagine it working acceptably. If you are interested just in whether respondants would be willing to precommit to constraining their individual consumption choices, my answer might have been different - maybe more caveats or explanation could make that clear if that's your intent?
Someone else asked about the family thing in another comment, he said, "Yes, please ignore any nongenetic relatives."
Thanks, I was trying to find that answer.
I was nearly done when the quiz reset to the start! I'll try it again . . .
Did you want to ask for the code from previous surveys? I saved mine.
immigration – fails to distinguish legal from illegal so can't be answered when they're different
"don't want" usually means "does want to avoid" rather than "have no interest in"
Admitted nitpick: Women usually reach menopause somewhere between age 40 and 60. Do you want to know how PMS was when we still had cycles however long ago that was or do you want an opt out option?
Since I'm done with that, I skipped that question but yeah, if it was "back when you still had the curse, how was it?" I never had PMS as such, but I definitely revved up in aggression and quickness off the trigger as my period came on stream.
The question "restriction on your screen time" seems to describe a restriction on my internet usage, i.e. my tv/kobo/offline game screen time could be as high as I want under those circumstances.
I wouldn't mention it, but you do make the distinction above of how many hours you spend on screen time vs online, so it might give people the wrong idea, (that the government would be shutting off their TV after a few hours).
Slight nitpick from a Danish person about the political affiliation. You say that the difference between american liberal/democrat and scandinavian socialdemocrat is regulation of markets.
Actually Scandinavian countries does not have much more regulation, despite their high level of redistribution, Denmark for example has a better Ease of Doing Bussiness score than the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index
Personally I am in favour of redistribution, including tax funded healthcare and tax funded universities, but also very much in favour of a generally free market in all other ways, a position I think I share with many scandinavian socialdemocrats. So perhaps there should be a way to decouple regulation from redistribution.
'Substack' felt like a very noncentral example of a social media because its ~mostly just an extension of blogs, which are fine, and so imo made the social media question less evocative of opinions on the on-the-face-of-it question about "would you ban social media".
Rated "traffic" at a 5, but its negative effects on me are almost entirely because of a) traffic noise, and b) the risk of motorists committing a crime by hitting me with their car - so it's semi-redundant with the surrounding questions.
I was also a bit confused by that. I ended up putting traffic at 1 because I figured it was mainly about waiting in traffic or navigating traffic, while I put noise at 10, though most of the noise that bothers me is from modifed cars and motorcycles (which I guess technically count as crime too, though you wouldn't know it with how unenforced the relevant laws are)
I had a bunch of quibbles while taking the survey but forgot to make a note of them. Remembered just now when I tapped the email link to take me over here to the substack. Oh yeah one was about the BMI not making as much sense for people who are very strong.
Yes, I checked the box on the survey for ADHD.
Re: BMI, I'm definitely chunky, let us say, but that's as much as I'm willing to divulge and I'm certainly not going to give any figures. You can know how old and how tall I am, but my waist measurement is between me and the doctor.
Nicely phrased. That leaves ambiguous whether you're built like a barrel and squat six plates, or if you're built like Rumpelstiltskin from Shrek.
As the saying goes, "built for comfort not for speed" 😀
I happen to be in shape. "Spherical" is a shape.
My problem is that I don't *know* my weight. I got a physical last year but don't seem to have bothered writing down the results.
That particular problem with BMI is drastically overstated. The correlation between BMI and fat mass index is very strong:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9977890/
This particular study compares it in a multiethnic American population, where it's particularly strong, and a Korean one, where it's weaker (but still strong). Korea is quite a bit less obese, so there would be more high-fat people of normal BMI, and East Asians have similar obesity-related complications to white people at lower BMIs, so the overweight/obesity thresholds should be lower.
BMI *does* break somewhat for very tall or short people, because its formula doesn't do height extremes well. To some degree you can judge this visually, at least if you have comparisons from normal-height people (most people see overweight people as "normal" due to the obesity crisis skewing what you see), but if you know the BMIs of some people of average height, and you as a very tall/short person are clearly much thinner/fatter than normal-height people of your nominal BMI, you can adjust on that. There are some alt-formulas designed to accommodate this.
Yeah I was just grousing about it because on the one question that specifies that I shouldn't lie (attractiveness) I gave myself high marks, but there's no place to input my height (a large portion of why people find me attractive). And then there's a question about the BMI, which is really broken in my particular case. Bah anyhow this comment chain got out of hand now I'm just bragging instead of humblebragging.
Wait, there is an option to put in your height in centimeters - after the question about BMI.
Whoops hope I didn't miss that while grumbling about the BMI. I fill out surveys too quickly.
> Oh yeah one was about the BMI not making as much sense for people who are very strong.
You have to work so, so hard to be "overweight" by BMI but still ripped. I've done it, and it took 5+ years of sustained effort. I think only professional athletes, bodybuilders, competing powerlifters, etc, have any chance of this at all, and they're well less than 1% of the population.
Is "Option 9" some obscure social media site I haven't heard of and can't find on google, or did Scott accidentally leave a default option label when creating the form?
Or some third option, I guess. Measuring a lizardman constant?
Likely just an innocent mistake. When you add new options to questions in Google Forms, the default text is "Option X".
I believe I selected Option 9 because I spend time on a social media site not listed, so that's going to throw off the lizardman constant.
"Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?"
It's Holy Week, when we commemorate Jesus being executed by order of the Roman governor. This answer is going to be somewhat higher than normal.
Tomorrow! Spy Wednesday! Though not the Roman Empire as such, it's about Judas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Wednesday
Sunday was Palm Sunday and the reading of the long Gospel, so definitely this is the week to think of the Roman Empire for Maundy Thursday/Good Friday/Holy Saturday/Easter Sunday/Easter Monday.
My answer is biased because I watched a movie on a plane where the third act took place in a gladiatorial arena. If not for that, I wouldn't have thought about it.
I mentioned this on the SAT/IQ post, but it would be nice if you specified which SAT score you were interested in. Highest? Most recent? Earliest?
Many high schoolers, especially those interested in top tier Universities, will take the SAT multiple times and submit their application with the highest scores. I suspect people will tend to pick their highest scores when filling out surveys like this, because we're all a little vain.
2 notes:
1. substack counts as social media...? i'm not counting it; i spend more than 10 minutes a week reading substack but i spend perhaps 5 minutes a month interacting with any of its social features (this comment is this month's quota)
2. there appears to be a typo of ANNUL (presumably ANNUAL)
> How would you describe your opinion of social justice/anti-racism/"wokeness"?
I found this question difficult to answer; I'm in favor of social justice but against wokeness. I think they're rather different things; social justice is about noticing ways in which our society unfairly disadvantages certain people and trying to fix it, whereas wokeness is about making up pointlessly convoluted rules and getting very angry on social media as a form of status signaling.
The mental health questions are also confusing. It's unclear whether you're asking to determine social prevalence or genetic correlations, so I don't know whether I should be counting my partner as "family". And if a family member seems to maybe have one of the conditions but hasn't been formally diagnosed, does that count? The distinction is made clear for the "me" answers, but not for the family ones.
Paused on this one. Think each one would need a separate question. My problem is definitional...
...But those are the same thing. You can't have one of them without the other. There is always going to be disagreement on who is being disadvantaged and whether or not its justified. That ultimately results in stupid, convoluted rules and people being angry. And you can't expect any "altruistic" pursuit to not have an absurd amount of status signaling involved.
It would be cool if we could see a histogram of each question.
"How many children do you have" is hard to answer, as a foster parent. Permanently? None. Long term? 1. On a given day? Up to 3.
- Question on immigration is extremely ambiguous. Should separate into legal and illegal, as one can have nearly opposite opinions on them
- Question on AI existential risk: shouldn't it be also split in two? I consider AI high risk in a few years, but had to mark it low-moderate on your survey, because imho the world is now facing equally high and much more immediate risks.
- addiction to some drug "other than alcohol or tobacco"... and caffeiine :)
Sorry if I duplicated some other responses - I haven't had time to read all 300 of them
I've never taken an IQ test, but I did take the SAT. However, I only remember my total score, not the verbal. This seems like it could be useful information to collect, but maybe my situation is uncommon.
Scott is getting interested in embryo selection for IQ. Cool!
Regarding questions like: "I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family"
... I assume this refers to blood relatives? Or do we include family by marriage?
Regarding rating physical attractiveness? Do we control for our age? i.e. "A good looking 40 year old?" Or should a 40 year old woman give herself a lower rating than a 19 year old woman?
I did control for age, fwiw
I answered that on "I have a mirror and my eyes are still functional". I've been unattractive all my life, so age doesn't enter into it, but definitely getting older means you lose some of the positive effects of being young (thicker hair, smoother skin, everything not migrating towards the kneecaps, etc.)
I can't donate a kidney b/c I only have 1 kidney.
Not sure if this is a nitpick or not, but on the free speech question, "hate speech/misinformation/etc" covers a lot of things in one bucket. For me, "vaccines cause autism" and "womyn should be able to have their own spaces" are very different categories of speech, independently of whether I agree with the statements or not.
"What kind of building do you live in?
Detached single family house (alone or with family)
Group house (ie single family house but with roommates instead of a family)"
I have roommates AND family. I'm putting 'Group House.'
Party registration and actual partisan affiliation are very different; the question should probably clarify which you want (as political scientists have shown you get very different results for each of these).
As an example, I'm technically registered as a Republican, which I did to cast a vote for Haley in the primaries; but I'd identify as a Democrat or Democratic-leaning independent.
I'm pretty sure the question, at least as currently worded, asks how you're registered, so I don't think it's unclear. But I agree that this can be a misleading question. I'm registered as a Democrat because where I live, the Democratic primaries are the only competitive races and you need to be a registered Democrat to vote in them; when I lived in an open-primary state, I was registered as an Independent.
The literal meaning is clear, but generally party identification is the more useful metric, so it's not clear which I should be providing for the survey.
"How much do the following problems negatively affect your life: poor health"
My health? If I have to take care of an elderly relative, should that impact my answer? I'm going to assume the question refers to anyone with illness that I need to take care of or be concerned for.
The "What social media do you use" question has an answer that's "option 9", which presumably should have been removed or filled in with another social medium.
I hated how a bunch of questions included 3 or more examples, where I had strongly differing opinions based on which of the examples I considered. Like the one about non-coercive eugenics - pretty strongly against subsidizing 'elective' eugenics to select for IQ. However I could support some money for people who (IMHO) are less likely to be able to afforc contraception and in the best place to decide if they'd want their own children to have the same life experiences they've had.
With regards to the question about diagnosis of PTSD:
Both of my Grandfathers fought in WW2. Other relatives who knew them then described to me changes in their personality before and after service, one becoming angry more of the time and the other more reserved/isolated. PTSD did not exist as a diagnosis at that time, but it seems reasonable to entertain the notion that war-time trauma had an impact on these changes.
I expect others have similar stories they could tell. I marked "no family history" for that question because, indeed, no one within two generations of me has had a diagnosis, but I'm not sure if the question captures what you meant it to.
I answered "yes" to that because, like you, the family member didn't have a diagnosis since PTSD did not exist as a concept entertained by the Irish army at that time, but I'm damn sure they had it.
I agree that the question is confusing. I just used my best guess for what I thought they probably had. Unless the family members are our minor children we can't know for sure what they have or haven't been diagnosed with, and formal diagnoses for anything but the most extreme cases of alcoholism, depression, ADHD, autism, etc. were much rarer in earlier generations than they are today.
I expect that Scott included the verbiage about clinical diagnosis to filter out lay people (like yours truly) making guesses about what exactly was wrong with their relatives. Given the responses to my original comment, this does not appear to have been everyone's take, so I wanted to highlight that before we try to draw conclusions from the results.
Not sure what your intent is, but the 'job' questions might be better as check boxes than radio buttons (select more than one). Many people have multiple jobs, or a paid job and a volunteer position. I picked the one I spend the most time doing, but not the one I would prefer to do if the pay wouldn't make me and my family homeless.
A few minor comments if they help improve future polls!
1 - In Part 5, the intelligence section, you don't say people shouldn't put in anything if they do not have any IQ tests. (e.g., 'Leave blank if you have not taken any IQ tests or do not remember your last result')
2 - You call out SAT but a substantial percentage of people take the ACT. Perhaps worth noting, ACT is substantially more common in the Midwest which is also typically more Republican - there may be some interesting skew from that and overrreliance on SAT only. A quick Google showed 1.9m took the SAT in 2023, 1.4 took the ACT in 2023, I'm sure some set took both. It would be good to either add a field for ACT score or just let people put SAT or ACT in the same box because of scoring difficulties.
3 - 'Immigration' question feels like you will get muddy data. Partisan responses like 'illegal immigration should be more strictly mitigated' on the right and 'legal immigration should be less strict/more open to reduce # of illegals', seem likely to overrule the actual question. E.g., People might think illegal immigration should be more strictly treated but also people feel that legal immigration policies are too strict. Seems like extra muddy data which could be reduced by splitting into two topics (especially since this is such a big talking point right now).:
- Should illegal immigration/the border should be more strict?
- Should legal immigration practices (excluding illegal immigration/border control) be more strict?
"Restriction on porn" is less meaningful without asking whether you currently consume porn. As someone who is uninterested in porn, being able to magically turn it off is all upside.
I would say it's all (personal) downside! If you're not seeing any porn at all, then it's not bothering you, and you may find the option useful later, if you do develop an interest, or if you want to access it for some other reason (e.g. fact checking a claim about porn).
But I do see lots of (ads/spam for) porn just browsing the Internet. That's what I'd be removing.
Isn't access to porn directly correlated with lower rape rates and domestic abuse and things like that? Or were those pre-Replication Crisis studies?
The nitpicking *is* the most fun part of the survey. We being who we are, there will be a lot of "this did not convey enough nuance" but I do note that there are some changes in the questions this time round. It's extremely American-centric but again, have to accept that since the majority audience is USA. So even if we poor deprived non-Americans don't have a SAT or an ACT to our name, much less an IQ test result, we will just have to press our runny orphan noses up against the glass and gaze wistfully in at the warm, candle-lit, glittering array of things beyond our purses or grasp while the Americans laugh merrily and frolic within 😀
Being American doesn't necessarily help. I had an official IQ test done at some point when I was a kid in school. I also took the SAT. I 100% have 0 recollection what my score was on either. It never occurred to me or someone in my family that this was something you should hold onto for any particular reason. The IQ score was good enough to get me into a Gifted and Talented program and the SAT score was good enough to get an offer from Tulane (a selectivish college) but that's all I got. Then I read that recent post on IQ/SAT scores here that had lots of comments suggesting the only reason anybody wouldn't remember their scores forever was if they were low and unnoteworthy and got a poignant reminder how *weird* and *different* from how I grew up the upper middle class is. Most humans do not remember various scores they got on standardized tests in school forever even when those scores were (probably) kinda high.
What is the difference between being Gifted and being Talented, or was this just a catch-all way of getting everyone into the same programme? E.g. you're very good at art, so we'll classify you as Talented?
It's just a somewhat old fashioned term for what would now be called AP (Advanced Placement) classes. Basically it selects out the midwit+ students and puts them in classes with somewhat more challenging course material. It also lets you accelerate some classes (by say taking Algebra a year early) so you can take more advanced math and science classes (like Calculus) your senior year that just aren't part of the standard high school curriculum.
I chuckled at the last question about the Roman Empire. I'm assuming it's related to the InstaTok meme and I look forward to whatever results you get out of it.
"If you said you succeeded in reaching jhana, about how many times have you entered jhanas?
If you never succeeded, give the total amount of time you spend trying. If you did succeed, give the amount of time you had to try before succeeding."
I don't understand if the question is about the number of times I've SUCCESSFULLY reached jhana, or the number of times I've ATTEMPTED to do so before succeeding. The title and the subtitle don't match.
For ethnicity, I put Canadian under Other. I much more strongly identify as Canadian than any of my more distant ancestry, and Ancestry .com is able to identify me as Canadian.
"Ancestry .com is able to identify me as Canadian"
Mormons discover gene for poutine eating? 😁
Probably "relatively closely related to our other customers who live in Canada and put down 'Canadian'".
I have ancestors who have lived in Canada since before it was a country. Does that count?
"South Park" does not lie.
Canadian or American is a perfectly fine answer. Because of the implication. By which I mean ethnogenesis. However nationality is not ethnicity but I doubt you are making that mistake here.
I just took a prenatal screening questionairre in America, and it asked, among about five other options such as South-East Asian or Ashkenazi Jew, is I were Quebecois, which is apparently an ethnicity of genetic interest.
I'm not sure what to select for the living arrangement question — I live in a college dormitory, so I thought the ">10 apartments" option was most accurate but still quite wrong, so I left the question blank.
You have a section called "Income and Charity" but there are no questions about charity. I remember seeing such a question on previous surveys, so I assume it was left out by accident. That's too bad :(
"Gender dysphoria" belongs under "mental health" rather than biological sex and sexual orientation.
Do you really expect a professional psychiatrist to ignore the official medical guidelines to score epic Substack e-points?
Wherever Scott puts it, someone is going to complain. I don't care one way or the other, since it doesn't gore my ox. While I might agree with you in general, if someone is trans and feels that this is calling their situation "you're insane" and objects, I see the objection and there's not much harm in accommodating that.
(Someone not trans but getting all ""will nobody think of the children" about it can go for a walk).
Not a nitpick, just a heads-up of weird answer interpretation from my side:
"Restriction on your diet" - just wanted to comment that I said 'No', not because I mind a restriction of my diet (it's already fairly restricted and I like to think that if I were to sign up for this, approximately nothing about my food intake would actually change), but because I'd be suspicious of hidden costs. I don't think this is 'fighting the hypothetical' - "government programs are rarely truly free" is a reasonable prior to have. I'd actually clicked 'Yes' originally, since I like the idea of supporting a program like this in theory and therefore signal-boosting its perceived usefulness for wider society, but figured ethically the right answer is 'No', since I shouldn't decide that for other people, and, well, costs.
This absolutely goes into the bucket of overthinking answers, and I am sorry. But once I'd had this thought I couldn't bring myself to change the answer.
(Contrast to the 'Restriction on your screen time'. I'm very comfortable with my internet usage (and I assume 'research for the books you're writing' classes as work even if it's not income related), but I'm pretty sure it would run afoul of metrics anyway, so my 'No' there is much more selfish. Also contrast the porn restriction, where I don't really consume any (though... I guess r/GoneWildAudio as of about month and change ago, though, which I assume counts? So this statement's no longer actually true, even if I identify with said statement), but worry quite a lot about the effects the removal of porn would have on society.)
"What social media do you use?" Needs a schlaugh.com option! (Kidding.)
Also, I skipped all the kids & internet questions, which I hope isn't too weird. The reason's pretty simple: I don't plan to have kids. Having a "don't care, because I don't plan to have kids" option might actually be good for people like me.
Thanks for doing the survey! Very curious about the results, as always.
In the "Do you belong to any of these ethnic groups?" question, you leave out "Indian" (the country), though you have some of the countries surrounding it. Am I missing something or is this just an oversight? (I think it was like this last year too.)
I'm interested in politics the way a mouse is interested in cats.
The "formal diagnosis of this condition" questions should have an option for "I had the condition, and got a formal diagnosis, and then the condition was fixed, so now the diagnosis is irrelevant". It probably says something about the state of mental health care that this wasn't an option.
Similarly, with Long CoViD, there didn't seem to be a clear way to say "I had lingering effects, which declined in severity until they went away completely, and this crosses the boundary for formal definitions of 'long covid' even though it is a very non-central example".
The Beighton’s score failed to specify how far apart our feet should be before touching our palms to the floor. Silly test, you deserve the answer you get.
For first social media use, I'm counting UNIX as social media. Plans, projects, fingering, ytalk, tracking IP addresses to see who's at home...
Condo vs. apartment is conflating ownership structure with physical layout.
Re "have you thought about the Roman Empire in the last 24 hours", does the Holy Roman Empire count? What about re-reading an essay I wrote about re-creating it? ( https://pontifex.substack.com/p/european-defence-policy-how-europe )
Couple of thoughts. I haven't read all 400 (!) comments, so some might be repeats. I had some of these thoughts in previous years but didn't comment them.
1. The blue-collar/white collar dichotomy doesn't really work for the other-jobs options (I had this problem last year, when I was working-primarily rather than studying-primarily, in a job that didn't fit either). Many service-sector jobs don't fit this dichotomy well.
2. I wanted to give an age range on "first smartphone", but it required an exact answer. I think a lot of people aren't sure about this. I had a similar problem for "social media", where I can't really put a firm age (I started participating in online forums as a kid).
3. I wasn't sure about a lot of the magic-wand questions and felt the need for some "elaborate on why you answered yes or no" textbox afterwards. This applied probably even stronger to the PGS questions, where I just kind of stared at them thinking "wow, I hate all these takes" -- I picked options (that seem hilarious in combination) that were wrong but gestured usefully at some things, and felt the unfilled need to expand on them in a textbox. (Note: this is *not* a request for an "other" option. I think adding an "other" option without adding long-response boxes would make things strictly worse.)
4. Building on that last one, there are too many "my special and unique situation is not accounted for" options. Yes, I know #3 and #4 sound like weird concerns to both have. It's the intersection of them -- there's a lot of "select any of these buttons or the button for your special and unique situation" and not enough "elaborate on why you responded with what you responded". The "I want to check that I'm not religious" button in the what-religion-are-you question has been a scourge of the surveys for as long as I've been aware they exist. I basically want to see more things like the "has the blog gotten worse" question, where a forced-choice with no snowflake option was followed by the opportunity to elaborate.
For the "identity" questions, I gave up on my internal state, and just went with what an external observer would report. Colloquially, it's not what you want, but it gives you the answers you want.
Some of the questions used the word "prefer". There are many facets of reality which I would prefer to be different. Perhaps I am heterosexual but all things considered would prefer to be homosexual; what then? Or for something that people here might actually answer, perhaps I am mono but would prefer to be poly. Of course, this gets into transracialism, and from thence into very dangerous territory.
The "crime" question packs in some assumptions about what is considered "crime", and who does the considering. If I'm impacted by extraordinarily unethical behavior, which is not technically illegal at the moment in the geopolitical entity that has jurisdiction over my body, does that count?
Penetration as a counter for sex is much weirder than just not specifying what you mean with sex. Now I'm unsure whether to count a lesbian relationship. Is that intended?
Another nitpick: I use the internet recreationally a LOT for research. I enjoy doing research. Not sure if this would be counted as limited or non-limited in the spirit of the question.
I would be fine with an intervention that disables mindless scrolling. But I still need reddit to do research on various hobby and life topics, so I wouldn't agree to the intervention.
"Now I'm unsure whether to count a lesbian relationship. Is that intended?"
Well, if I go by a gynaecologist appointment I had several years back, "no" and "maybe". After trying to convey that no, indeed I had never done the deed with anyone, first he tried to make sure that I knew what was meant by "sex" and that meant "penetrative sex" (with accompanying helpful hand gestures).
You know, just in case I had accidentally tripped and fallen on an erect penis with my vagina. Or that I thought this activity was called "putting the Devil in Hell" and not "sex".
Once *that* was out of the way, he then tried to 'tactfully' ask was I a lesbian.
Yeah. That medical appointment certainly is a special memory.
Politically speaking, I picked "US Democrat" on previous iterations of the survey as the political party that was the closest match to my views (though far from a perfect match). My views have not substantially changed, but the Democratic Party has changed significantly, and now I can no longer pick that option... so I'm kind of left without a compatible survey answer.
How is it changes? Most of the party leadership has been the exact same people it’s always been. Biden was elected to the Senate in the 1970s.
Perhaps, but their public messaging has changed significantly, as did their policies. They are much more authoritarian now than they used to be.
What are some authoritarian policies they are trying to pass?
Perhaps not authoritarian politcies, but going from "okay, gay marriage legal, whatever" to "trans strippers on the White House lawn" *might* leave some people going "that's not where my views moved".
Okay, not strippers. But please lady, shill your OnlyFans some other time, okay?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vntm73zsWk
That’s kinda gross but doesn’t say much about the Democratic Party or their policies. I try to focus more on policy than vibes I guess.
If 9 out of 10 Democrats are pro- strippers on the White House lawn (hypothetically speaking), and assuming I disapprove, how can I voice my disapproval and (ideally) reduce the number of lawn-strippers, other than by not voting for Democrats ?
They have been leaning hard into "hate speech" laws ever since the early 2000s, and have recently expanded into trying to manage "misinformation", up to the point of proposing a "Ministry of Truth". While in power, they colluded directly with social media networks to spin their preferred narrative. Some of their COVID policies were quite heavy-handed (though arguably justified, depending on whom you ask). Their policy on gender peculiarities appears to be increasingly coercive. In general they seek to impose demographic quotas for all kinds of institutions (and they have largely succeeded). They are also heavily invested in censoring media of all kinds in order to maintain their preferred demographic narrative. Those are just some items off the top of my head, I'm sure there are others.
The only gender policy from the White House I am aware of is a partial ban on trans athletes. They allowed trans athletes at very low levels competition, but allow prohibitions at the competitive level. It’s up to the leagues, not the government. All of the gender medicine stuff that is so controversial is happening due to a lack of oversight, not an authoritarian government. In Europe they are actually banning youth gender medicine in most cases, which is more authoritarian than just letting it rip like we do over here.
I don’t know about hate speech laws.
Regarding free speech, it’s the Republicans who are trying to coerce a sale of tik tok, although the democrats seem more interested now that they believe it’s being used to criticize Israel.
Here's just one gender-oriented example:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB826
This bill followed in the footsteps of a long-held Democratic tradition of supporting Affirmative Action, i.e. demographic quotas.
I don't know much about trans athletes (I don't really follow sports in general). Regarding free speech, the Ministry of Truth was all too real:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Board
In general, Democrats are currently significantly more likely than Republicans to support speech-restrictive policies, be it in the form of national laws, state and local laws, or internal corporate regulations. This didn't use to be the case; one major reason why I used to vote Democrat is precisely because they opposed the Republicans' theocratic efforts to restrict expression.
For the mental health conditions I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, but don't have it now. So I selected the last option of I don't have it. You might want to add another option if this is information you are interested in capturing.
The SAT got recentered a bit over the years. I don't think just asking for an SAT score without asking when it was taken is a good idea: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sat+recentering
Agreed, although he did ask our age, which should let him get most of us to within 2 or 3 years.
For the relatives option for mental illness, I didn't know what the generations meant so I mentally counted grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles under familial mental illness. Maybe it's dumb to count grandparents under that because two generations means you + siblings and then your parents but I don't know why you wouldn't include grandparents in the measure as well. Grandparents didn't apply in this scenario for me, but that could be confusing and mess up the data.
once again chemistry is omitted from the list of hard sciences, despite often being one of the largest departments in major universities
For the mental illness questions I would have preferred a "not currently diagnosed but have been in the past" option
For the polygenic question on physical/cognitive ability, I would have preferred a "against, but would use it if it wasn't banned" option
Regarding the question of whether I've thought about Roman Empire, I'm >50% sure I did, so I answered yes, but I definitely had thought about the Roman Republic. Were it not >50% to begin with, does the Republic count?
The physical attractiveness question needs an option for "how the hell would I know?"
I also don't know my weight, so I just have to guess at BMI
P.S. The survey took me 28 minutes, even though I was able to quickly just answer "no" to many of the questions. I think your time estimates are overly optimistic.
I might recommend putting the "do you mind if I share your answers (anonymized)" question at the end of the survey -- I left it blank because I didn't know what the questions were, then forgot to go back and re-consider.
Probably not actual feedback: On the political topics: I wished there was a better way to indicate that I hold some but not all of the beliefs in the category. In particular, on free speech, I'm pro social media moderation (private companies! the internet was better when it was more spread out so different places could have different norms!) but also very pro free speech in general (do not want increased legal restrictions on speech). On HBD, it almost certainly exists but I don't think most people have any reason to care outside of medicine. I just tried to average my two answers to roughly the % of the set of beliefs that I agreed with, instead of indicating strength of agreement/disagreement. (Maybe that's the point of the scale?)
On IVF and polygenetic selection: serious question, has anyone done a proof of concept with a breed of dogs that has a clearly defined breed standard appearance that isn't otherwise medically harmful? (so like, labs, not bulldogs). Purebred dogs are typically less healthy than mutts and subject to more genetic diseases; if someone could use polygenetic screening to produce a line of healthy, "attractive" purebred dogs (instead of just accidentally selecting for some new genetic disease), that would be a pretty good proof of concept.
"How would you describe your opinion of Donald Trump?"
Compared to what? Seriously. I despise the man, but he's the only game in town.
"ANNUAL pretax personal income"
I *never* know how to answer that as a retired person. I have a small annuity, I get returns on investments, and I sell a little when needed, which leads to either gains or losses that show up in the pre-tax income. But I also always do Roth conversions as big as necessary to get my income up to just below the 35% bracket. Do I count that?
> a government program (let's say funded by private actors so it wouldn't raise taxes)
Seems simpler/clearer for this to be an NGO? My answer changed significantly when I realised I was confused about the idea of a non-coercive government program, reread the question and realised these were privately funded.
I assume others have already mentioned that it's awkward for the "race" question to be a radio button rather than checkboxes, especially if "multiracial" is not one of the options.
As an American, I was offended by the presence of the metric system in the height section.
> How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?
"Favorable/Unfavorable" seems to be a very ambiguous answer. Am I supposed to be answering whether I believe that genetic racial differences exist? Or that they are a good thing/should be celebrated? Or that I am in favor of a view strongly associated with believing that they exist, i.e. that they are a bad thing?
ETA: also, nitpicking, but for the mental health section: Where's the options for "I have a formal diagnosis of this condition but I suspect the diagnosis is flawed (e.g. by mistaking one of the given conditions for another)", and "I don't have access to family history"? Honestly this section should have been checkboxes: "diagnosis?" "probably have it?" "verified absence in family history?" "verified presence in family history?".
Also, where's the libertarian-friendly form of the nanny state questions? "Suppose the government..." NO. "Don't figh--". NO IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE.
> Most likely natural
> Most likely lab leak
Seriously? It's $CURRENT_YEAR and you still want to pretend these are even remotely anticorrelated, let alone mutually exclusive? I will assume that you meant "The presence of a virology lab is pure coincidence"..."Most likely a lab leak" and will answer accordingly, but I suspect that someone with different priors would be happier to assume you meant "zoogenic"..."someone literally named Dr. Frankenstein assembled DNA one nucleotide at a time in order to do a biological warfare" and will also answer accordingly, and as a result your data will be more bimodal than it should have been. Then again maybe this was actually the point and this was a galaxy-brain question wording; who can say?
Anyways, my point is how am I supposed to answer if I think there's a decent chance (~50%) this was completely zoogenic, and yet I also think it *obviously* leaked from the lab (~100%)?
since this is a novel coronavirus what are you saying here? That it appeared naturally in the lab and was leaked?
I think opinion along those lines goes "it occurred spontaneously in the wild, was one of a bunch of viruses collected from the wild to be studied in the lab, then someone dun messed up and it escaped" rather than "the lab was working on a bioweapon and it got out".
Nobody but a handful of conspiracy theorists believe COVID came from a biological weapons program. Lots of people were and are a bit fuzzy on how exactly 21st century biologists go about studying infected bats people send them, and "lab leak" has generally been understood to cover all of those.
And it encompasses the bioweapons nutjobs, most of them anyway, but it isn't defined by them.
Hmmm - this strikes me as exactly the kind of response a bioweapons lab that deliberately leaked a pandemic would make!
😀
> NO. "Don't figh--". NO IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE.
I would love to read a small feminist rant about the phrasing of those questions.
Alternatively, maybe a parody where the phrasing of those questions is transplanted into a dating context.
I suggest that the question on attractiveness ask people to rate themselves as attractive within their social - age group. Clearly younger people are probabilistically more attractive than older people. I don’t think you intended that confounder? Or maybe you did.
I was briefly confused by this as well, but then decided it must mean in overall terms so an 80 year old should always give an honest hotness level of 0 or 1. Even once you accept it means in overall terms though, this is still especially confusing for people who are above average hotness in like 30-45 age range. 30-45 obviously counts against you but above average in this range still puts you above like overweight people in their 20s. I finally went with something like "how hot are you relative to a supermodel" and was able to work with that.
Yeah, all those hags and dotards once they hit 30, how can they ever think they might be good-looking? 😁
Never a problem for me because I never had any looks to boast of, but I do find it funny how "women are at their very peak of attractiveness in the age range 16-19, once they hit their 20s they're passable, any older than 29 and just haul them off to the glue factory" is a thing.
It's mostly a skin/weight thing. Most people have notable lines by their mid thirties and most people gain weight as they get older. Having good skin genes and/or watching your weight obviously extends this quite a bit.
If you want to avoid wrinkles, facial fat works for that.
But having facial fat means being podgy elsewhere. So it's a trade-off between "do I want lines or skinny?"
Well, sunscreen helps a lot too. All the people I've known (almost all women) that had really great skin and less facial aging in their 40's-60's were religious about sunscreen usage and sun-blocking hats and such.
I'm pretty sure Scott intends that question to give him very different information than "are my readers attractive or not?" My guess is that he's going to cross-tab with things like number of partners (obvious), biological sex, or even things like political affiliation to see if *self reported* attractiveness correlates with those or other things.
I mean, I guess? I don't really see how this changes how to answer the question. He even said "be honest" in it.
I had the same question. As a 40-something woman, I chose to answer by comparison to my age-gender cohort since that's mostly where it matters in practical terms; those who have reason to care about my attractiveness don't much overlap those who have reason to care about the attractiveness of men, 18-yr-old women, or 80-yr-old women.
I was a little confused by the options for "Did you have any lingering fatigue problems from COVID?". I skimmed the question and didn't really notice the "lingering" and took a while to understand that, despite fatigue being my main COVID (short COVID) symptom, "I got COVID, but never felt fatigued" was the option for me.
It'd be great if you could add an option to add ACT scores as well.
I replied this as well, totally agree that it's a big gap.
Life Effects:
"I improved the way I deal with a mental illness" is both too ambiguous (do other people's mental illnesses count?) and specific (does undiagnosed narcissism count?).
The question about whether somebody in my family has died of COVID: do in-laws count? I took the absence of no in-law words (mother-in-law, sister-in-law, etc.) in the example list to mean "no" but I spent 20ish seconds waffling on whether I should select yes or no before I decided on "no." (Sister-in-law died of COVID).
This is probably a nitpick but it did pass the very low hurdle of "Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?" because I was genuinely uncertain about it for a bit.
I thought attractiveness was being used as a surrogate for status and so would be age and socio relative. An attractive 60 year old woman in a room of her peers has high status.
I am a student and have lots of annoying student nitpicks, plus a few others:
1. If there is a difference between our official home address and the place we live most of the year (e.g. because of college), what should we pick?
2. Does sexual orientation go by biological sex or by presentation/identity?
3. There should probably be an "other" option for work/major, I just picked the thing that was closest to mine.
4. Seconding other people's statement that there should be an option for "I used to have this condition but don't anymore."
5. Does having family members with a certain condition require formal diagnosis, and if not, what severity of behavior qualifies? For example, my grandma is quite preoccupied with her own and other people's weight, eats very little and encourages other family members, especially women, to do the same, and seems to be noticeably underweight, but she is in her eighties and still going strong. Would someone like this, or an equivalent for another disorder (say, someone who is consistently very sad and lethargic), count for the family members answer?
6. Polygenic selection should probably have some kind of "mixed feelings" option.
The question about race is very america-centric. I doubt many europeans identify strongly with their skin colour. Rather, people identify themselves based on their country of origin.
I was surprised to find only one instance of "the the" and it ended up not being important in any way
Hey is the graphic for this post from GPT4? I'll bet it is, because it's got a typical hollow-head AI error in it: It's showing a place where someone is to answer yes or no, and they're answering both ways, but by putting a check in the *yes* box and an x in the *no* box. (And then toying with the idea of turning the x into a chex.). Reminds me of the time I asked the thing for an image of what a standing person would capture in a selfie if the took one of the parts of themselves they could see by holding the camera at eye level pointing down: Torso, legs and feet, the parts increasingly smaller and foreshortened as you get lower, right? It gave me a picture of somebody taking that selfie. And yet the image Scott chose *looks* really good, right? -- like a good-quality advertising image.
People are making little children's story books the same way, and selling them on Amazon. Betcha they look great and are as hollow-headed and hollow-hearted as this image. We're going to lose more IQ points from that sort of shit in the new generation than we would have gained by embryo-tweaking for inteligence.
> Betcha they look great and are as hollow-headed and hollow-hearted as this image. We're going to lose more IQ points from that sort of shit in the new generation
I have worried about this in relation to children's TV shows, especially badly-animated and badly-voice-acted shows. Shows where all the parts are recorded separately and then later mixed together, as opposed to shows where the voice actors respond to one another in real time while recording. I can swear I can hear it in some kids I know, where their conversation is ever-so-slightly disjointed, and they seem to be trying to elicit laughter or applause with every other sentence that comes out of their mouth, as though they're constantly playing to an audience.
Ugh! Someone I was talking to this afternoon told me he'd read that 70% of teens list "influencer" as their desired career. Same shit, right?
Kinda, yeah. I have to wonder about those teens' experience of the world, which made "influencer" seem like their highest best destiny. It's like asking "what's your favorite food" and getting back "heroin".
Does that figure come from an opt-in poll conducted on Tik-Tok?
I don't know. The person who told me is quite a committed ACX reader, and no fool. He and his wife are about to start having children and he has been reading up on schools, lives and interests of kids in this era, etc. He probably read it someplace reasonably respectable.
> Hey is the graphic for this post from GPT4? I'll bet it is, because it's got a typical hollow-head AI error in it
Nope, TinEye reverse image search shows that that photo has been circulating since at least 2017. Just one of hundreds of examples: https://thefinancegenie.com/4th-quarter-2017-end-year-financial-checklist/
Wow, so this is one of those fake fakes -- like people on Twitter accusing each other of being bots. I does seem still seem to me like a weird flaw to have somebody checking off both Yes and No. And from the point of view of ad copy quality, seems like it would be more appealing to have a nice big check mark in YES.
(Obligatory annoyed lesbian comment about defining sex as penetration)
I think this is a real question and not a nitpick: do you mean "Physical attractiveness" relative to conventional western beauty standards, relative to the beauty standards of your own culture, or relative to your own 'type'?
That’s definitely a nitpick. Standards of beauty are fairly uniform anyway.
No, I really don't think that's true. A butch lesbian who's into other butches might consider herself very attractive, for example, while being aware that she's pretty much the opposite of the Hollywood female beauty standard.
I would sign up to the Restriction on your screen time program if it only applied to work days.
There is a section titled income/charity, that then has no questions about charity?
All of the comments here about how to interpret questions & what to do about the ones that do not seem to cover one's own case -- its a wonderful demonstration of how impossible it is to come up with adequate categorization systems for any aspect of human life.
It didn't give the option of saying I've never gotten a smartphone, so I left that one blank. Which is too bad, because I would have been curious to know how many people haven't ever gotten a smartphone.
The "do you have this mental disorder" questions could maybe use an answer that says "I have family members who think they have this condition, but have not been formally diagnosed."
'Polygenic selection for cognitive traits' could use a "I would ban it for everyone, if I could, to prevent an IQ race, but otherwise I'd use the heck out of it", or some other "moral quandary" option.
Dreams: Take note that there's no way for me to express "my dreams often take place in the house I grew up in, and never in the house I've lived in as an adult, but also, my own children (who I had as an adult) show up in my dreams more often than people I knew as a kid".
As an aside to the ding-dong over the eugenics/IVF questions in the survey, why "AI" meant something *very* different to me than it does in the context of paperclip maximisers:
AI = Artificial Insemination, not Artificial Intelligence (unless we're talking about the book and movie Demon Seed where the AI wanted and got a baby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Seed):
"Why should I use AI?
• If herd size is small it allows you to avoid the purchase cost and annual maintenance costs of a stock bull.
• AI offers access to a range of proven, genetically superior bulls of different breeds which produce faster- growing calves
• It allows the selective mating of cows/heifers to selected sires strong on particular traits, e.g. proven easy calving bulls on heifers and young cows.
• The production of quality replacement heifers
• AI removes the hazard of having a bull on the farm and the need for special housing.
• The risk of bull infertility is eliminated"
I took the SAT, but that was 50 years ago. I know I did well, but I have no memory at all of what my actual scores were. I'm not the kind of person who remembers test scores for 50 years.
Wanted to chime in and say that I have also never owned a smartphone and left that question blank, and would prefer if the survey was able to disambiguate this from "not sure / left blank for other reason".
1. I thought “country” was confusing. I assumed it meant nationality or country of origin, but then the next question asked Americans what state we live in, which made me question whether as an expat I was supposed to have listed my current country of residence.
2. A political option for “fiscal left, social conservative” other than ethnonationalist populism would’ve been nice.
3. By “Internet” I took you to mean “web” which we restrict very heavily with our kids, rather than, say, streaming a movie.
> How strictly did your parents limit your Internet use as a young child (eg age 7)?
When I was 7, my family had Internet but my parents hadn't introduced me to it yet. They didn't have any rules about how I was allowed to use it, I just didn't know that it existed. Not sure which option this falls under.
I know a family still running a version of this. The children regularly mourn that their iPad “didn’t come with” various apps that they know their friends go on. The parents simply commiserate and hope that they won’t learn about the app store for a while yet.
I really appreciate the addition of a "mixed" option to the family religious background question! In past years I was pretty confused about how to answer, and now I feel I can answer this accurately.
The question about political views has a line from left to right. That can't represent the full gamut of political world-views, and in particular, by implication, lumps supporters of a small state and the free market with fascists. I was obliged to leave that question blank. A series of questions would be better, on the preferred size of a state, the duties of government, free trade versus protectionism, and so on.
Survey for you fine people: what’s the deal with the whole ACX-EA-LessWrong-rationalist-e/acc network/movement? I just discovered this blog like 2 weeks ago and each rabbit hole I go down makes me feel more and more that I’ve stumbled upon a guerrilla intelligentsia that I’ve never heard of before.
I was at it for over five minutes and now have to start again after I was redirected to the main post after using the currency transformation link.
Nitpick about the career section: I'm in an assistant position at a school, and had no idea whether this was blue collar or white collar. I ended up putting blue collar because of the amount of physical labor and the low pay, but it really seems like childcare/education should rate as an option, or at least grey collar jobs (google says that teaching and childcare are both grey collar). I know another person who works in early childhood education who was also very confused about this question, and don't know which option they ended up choosing.
on a lot of the policy positions, I found myself being like "well, I agree this is an issue, and I don't favor doing nothing, but my proposed solution isn't well-represented by either pole shown here"
eg climate change: more subsidies for good tech, not economically costly cutbacks or whatever
eg immigration: too much illegal immigration, not enough legal & employment-related immigration
eg free speech / hate/misinfo - more stuff like community notes, more collective ability to filter stuff
Why might enough people be uncomfortable sharing why they've thought about the Roman Empire in the last 24 hours that it's specifically mentioned in the question?
On the IQ question, I last took a formal test at the age of eight, five and a half decades ago. (I read the score upside down from a paper on the child psych's desk.) My answer should probably be decreased ten or more points for changes in population IQ since then, and a further standard deviation for not exercising my brain very much in the last two decades.
I assume the «abortion» question is abortion legality — I am in favour of a government using «what would make you not choose abortion» surveys as an important input to social policies, for example, but also against criminal action against the woman for seeking abortion — ever. I basically guess that it has to be US-centric enough, so I should answer a different question than asked; it is somewhat confusing to me.
I hope that my diet restriction answer does not count as fighting the hypothetical: I am probably eating somewhat too much overall, at home, mostly of things that would count as healthy if I cut all of them 15% (not sure about exact number and don't have a way to measure my weight…). So categorical restrictions and portion sizes for food sold in portions would not do much anyway so why bother.
This survey is missing a question that I would find most interesting.
Perhaps a single survey question for another day.
Do ACX readers lean more toward Arts and Letters, or more toward Science and Technology?
My guess is that readers are concerned with both to varying degrees.
Art/Letters [5] [4] [3] [2] [1] ---- Balance ---- [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Science/Tech
This sort of thing:
Quality of writing vs reasoning and substantiation
Imaginative leaps vs technical know how
Personal expression vs methods of logic
Aesthetic concerns vs core concept
"How old were you when you first started using social media?"
Does Makeoutclub count?
Possibly a nitpick but maybe not: on the ethnicity section, "Malaysian" is generally considered a nationality, while "Malay" is an ethnicity. A large minority of Malaysians are not ethnic Malays.
Re polygenic selection - I would ideally like more options, in that: combining the question to be about intelligence and appearance feels restrictive - my opinions vary quite a lot depending on the specific trait - could there be an option for this ?
My prediction: although there are more males here than females, those females who are here, will be more ACX-ish (more Alexandrian?) than the males. (Admittedly, I base this on a mere two data points: The most prolific female commenters at Data Secrets Lox tend to be on the autism spectrum, and the recent post about polyamory mentioned that the women surveyed were more likely than the men to favor polyamory.)
I think in the religious views section, there isn't really a view that fits perennialism. Maybe that should be an option? Don't know how obscure it is, I feel I had already heard of it before I got into it.
I think there is a mistake on the "how many time did you enter jhana" description - it looks like a copy-paste-ish of the first paragraph of the previous question (it says "give the amount of time you had to try before succeeding", which doesn't make sense).
A question I had a hard time answering because of the phrasing: "If you said you tried to reach jhana, how long did you spend trying?" This doesn't account for where you start from, the answer will be very dependent on past meditation practice experience (especially concentration practice). I did experience it on my first 10 day jhana retreat but I had been practicing concentration meditation for years before, I just never really tried jhana. I answered in a few months, which I feel would be consistent with settling the mind enough to get to jhana for me after a long break in practice.
For "Work Status ... For-profit work ... Non-profit work", how should someone employed by OpenAI or Mozilla respond?
I felt confused by the "do you read the subreddit/Discord" question because I feel like I fall between "read it" and "don't want to read it". I definitely want to read more but I probably only see about 1% of the content when my wife points it out or during the 5 minutes a week I actually visit. If you're using the "read it" question as a proxy for "will you see announcements I post there in a reasonable timeframe" the answer is probably no; if you're using it as "do you literally ever look at the site" the answer is technically yes.
I've been annoyed by "saving...draft saved" popups before but not specifically on Gmail, not sure why that one was singled out? Usually it's sites where the notification is more obnoxious that that, i.e. text that comes with its own helpful glowy rectangle popup. I think Gmail is subtle enough that I never noticed it before, or else forgot about it.
Re: question about polygenic selection for cognitive/physical traits (e.g. IQ, height)
Those are very very different. IQ selection has positive externalities; height selection is not only a purely positional good treadmill, it leads to health problems—it's basically a prisoner's dilemma.
On the mental health disorders, you should add an option for "I have a diagnosis but don't think I actually have it". There are plenty of people with an ADD diagnosis just to get their Adderall but who don't think they really have it, and there are plenty of people in denial of their diagnoses.
On the questions on how one would restrict their kid's Internet use, you assumed that everyone either already had kids or would have kids. No option given for people who will never have kids. But of course, the devotedly childless often have some of the strongest opinions on everything that parents do wrong, so I answered those questions anyway, with what I thought others should do, even though I won't ever have to deal with it (I assumed that was the right thing to do given no instruction or option for those who wouldn't ever have kids).
Dreams : I wake up remembering a dream maybe once a year, so the questions aren't gonna be very relevant for me. I could have just not answered but ... apparently I'm one of those guys who needs a “option for those who need an option” button.
This survey gets points for inclusivity! I like how Scott reminds us that thinking about the Byzantine Empire is still thinking about the Roman Empire.
Hispanic is not a race. You can be black, indigenous, white, Asian, or some mix of these.
I live in a single family row house. It isn't detached.
Many of the questions touch subjects where my opinion developed away from that one-dimensional sub-space between both extremes. Therefore not participating. But maybe i am not the intended audience anyway: e.g. "Length of Time", i perceive the SSC/ACX switch as something recent but it is displayed as end-of-scale.
I forgot i've had a youtube account since i was 10 years old, so i ended up answering the social media question with 13 instead of 10.
For the question: "How happy are you with your paid subscription?"
One of the answers is, "Happy because I just subscribed to support the blog, and I am" but it never ends. I am genuinely confused about what it implies.
As with all surveys like this, I wish for all questions there was an "other" option where you could give a very short text answer and the people operating the survey could decide what "bucket" I should fall into.
For example, I am a high school, college, and university dropout (with many cumulative years across them all). So my highest degree is none, yet I generally consider myself more well educated than the *vast* majority of humanity (including a significant portion of the subset that completed a PhD program) because I dedicate my life to continued learning self teach any subject of interest to me (which is many).
For questions like this I answer with technically correct, but I would feel better leaving such decision making up to the survey operator who can decide if this question is meant to represent accumulated knowledge or how closely one followed standard path through life. Both are interesting, but different questions wrapped into one.
Note: I merely use this question as an example, I had a similar problem on many questions in the survey. I even had trouble answering the "Profession" and "Country" questions which seem like they should be no-brainers. I worked in one field for ~20 years, now I do R&D in different field, run a company in 2 other fields, and do "hobby" work (with a team that I pay) in yet another. None make me any money of significance (for various intentional reasons) so I guess I'm retired from 20-year industry? Or maybe I work in non-profit on current passion project? But that doesn't at all capture my Profession or Work Status, and my residence, citizenship, and birth/upbringing country are all different.
The takeaway, I have high anxiety, but only while filling out these forms (also not an option). 😆
You ask for BMI and height. Seems simpler to just ask for height and weight (and then you derive BMI on backend).
Scott, you need to either to tell people to adjust their SAT scores taken before 1991 to the new scale (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563025.pdf), or to report their given score and tell you what year they took it so you can adjust the scores.
For whatever reason, the survey did not allow me to enter my income. It kept saying something like "Must be a non-zero number". I tried several formats before skipping the question.
I live in a semi-detached & chose the townhouse option, though I feel it might be closer to detached
Where are the questions and anonymized answers from surveys in previous years? Is that (still?) publicly available?
That's probably a very 'me problem' request, but... I tend to 'read the internet' via the aggregated RSS feed and for various reasons (being busy etc.) I am often-enough about a month 'late' to reading latest posts.
I would have liked to fill this survey, but by the time I've learned it's up it was already too late.
So an advance warning that something like this is going to be posted (e.g. 'in a couple of weeks I'm going to post a survey that will be open for a couple of weeks') or just keeping the survey open for longer (assuming that doesn't create other problems) would have been helpful.
I honestly have no idea if this would be useful to anyone but me -- but thought I'd post in case I'm not the only person like this.