502 Comments
Jan 20, 2023ยทedited Jan 20, 2023

Doesn't the "new multiple choice questions" thing ruin that entry for statistical purposes? Is there a way to identify responses before/after the date they were added?

I'm too lazy to do anything with the data myself, I mean, just curious!

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Yes. In my own analysis I plan to adjust for that (ie if I added it exactly halfway through, assume that it should get twice as many answers as it did and everything should be adjusted down proportionally), but it definitely ruins it for everyone else who didn't know that, which is why I flagged it here.

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Possibly there are some systematic differences between people who took the survey early and those who took the survey later, which would complicate things. Then again, perhaps not.

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That's what popped into my head also.

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Do you have a reason to assume that the new answers would draw equally from all the old answers/ Can you reveal which options were added at the halfway point?

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Thank you for sharing this! We might use as one of the example data sets for course I teach.

Really struck by the racial breakdown here โ€”ย 87% white. This is a very different breakdown from (e.g.) a standard tech school, where White and Asian-American are usually at similar ratios.

Would be fun to compare (where possible) some of these statistics to the GSA. I think the GSA provides enough information to produce a sample that matches the ACX gender/race/age demographics.

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A cursory glance at the data set and this was the most obvious thing that stood out to me as well. Very white!

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Jan 20, 2023ยทedited Jan 20, 2023

Would be interesting to see if this is an age effect that tracks the changing composition of the tech world; e.g., if you restrict to 20-25, does the racial breakdown look more "tech school" in both race and gender.

Update: I couldn't help but check. Restricting to 21 to 25, the breakdown is

White (non-Hispanic): 80.5%

Asian (East Asian): 5.5%

Asian (Indian subcontinent): 5.2%

Hispanic: 3.2%

Other: 3.1%

Middle Eastern: 1.5%

Black: 0.9%

and by gender,

M (cisgender): 79.2%

F (cisgender): 10.4%

Other: 5.5%

F (transgender m -> f): 3.5%

M (transgender f -> m): 0.7%

So very much breaking my initial intuition that ACX is drawing uniformly from the tech stack.

You do see a shift to much higher trans representation. The F cis/F trans ratio is 3, i.e., roughly one in four women in this age range are trans, compared to one in 11 in the full sample.

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Yeah, given the ACX readership's concentration in tech employment, propensity to have advanced degrees, and high standardized test scores, Asians are way underrepresented.

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Jan 20, 2023ยทedited Jan 20, 2023Author

I'm pretty interested in seeing a survey from eg Matt Yglesias to see if this is a blogging phenomenon or an ACX phenomenon. I know Richard Hanania did a survey but he's right-wing and I want to rule out there being any effect from right-wingness.

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Iโ€™m almost certain itโ€™s a political blogging phenomenon. So I would expect Matt Yโ€™s readership to be also mostly male and white.

If youโ€™re going to do a control, it may be worth doing one a different type of blog - food, travel, sports or fashion.

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Noah Smith would be also interesting...what I've noticed is that e.g., Tyler Cowen's blog is heavily dominated by right-wingers in the comment section, despite him not being nearly as right-wing (same for Hanania, even before his "turn" to the other side...).

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I think he's not that right-wing anymore...?

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Have you seen him turn on his own side lately? I think he may be making a move to the left, probably on account of having a kid and wanting to secure a safe income stream.

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Is it well-known / generally believed that being lefty is a safer income stream? I would have expected the opposite from someone in Richard's position (ie popular Substacker).

Also, I think Richard has endorsed the (hilarious) theory that only right-wingers are safe from AI taking their jobs, since GPT-3 is programmed to refuse to write offensive (~ right-wing) things.

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Jan 20, 2023ยทedited Jan 20, 2023

Iโ€™m not particularly surprised. Niche online political or politics- adjacent spaces tend to be very white and male (most political subreddits for instance, to a greater extent than Reddit in general).

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Lots of things are very white.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/11/black-people-less-likely/

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Yes! I think we tend to underestimate the role of demographic homophily in group formation.

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Isn't the 11% bisexual more surprising?

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More surprising but itโ€™s one of the later columns so it doesnโ€™t immediately jump out at you when you open the file!

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I am not surprised nor unsurprised but as someone who ticked this box let me say that I was scrupulous. I have enjoyed experiences with both sexes but in 1993 I hooked up with an opposite sex partner and that has been it. And I would say most and possibly all of my gay friends had some hetero experiences in early life.

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

Yeah my scrupulosity led me to bump myself up to bi on the basis of a one brief but delightful homosexual fling and a few early passionate crushes on members of my own sex. Questionnaires are fatiguing because you have to parse so many edge cases of this kind.

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I think most people would consider both of you bisexual, no? Like the concept doesn't imply equal attraction to members of both sexes, just some attraction to each sex.

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Being truly bi always seemed sort of special and magical to me, and I feel like I don't deserve the label, since clearly I'm mostly what Dan Savage calls "a breeder." But yeah, technically I'm bi.

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Wonder what the male-female crosstabs are on that. I vaguely remember the last large group of tech people I knew an awful lot of the women were bi but few of the men. That was 20 years ago though.

The thing that used to keep me from experimenting in that direction was AIDS. The thing that now does is the distaste for it among the much larger straight female population.

EDIT: All right, did the work. Of the 730 cisgender female respondents, 189 were bi. Of the 128 transgender female respondents, 77 were bi. Of the 5843 cisgender male respondents, 389 were bi. Of the 21 transgender male respondents, 12 were bi. Of the 174 'other' respondents, 83 were bi.

So it is being driven by the non-cisgender-male minority of the respondents; cisgender men are only about 7% bi.

I think if you're a man a lot of women don't want to date a bi man, so if you're bi you either have to pick straight or gay. Unsurprisingly (social stigma, number of partners) most will pick straight unless they are Kinsey 5's.

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Sexuality results for men are extremely stable across long timescales; estimates of the (cis) male "homosexual" population are usually between 5% and 10%, and ACX here seems to more or less reflect the norm. "True" bisexuality in men is relatively unusual, with men showing a pretty clear bimodal distribution in physiological sexual response to different forms of pornography (lots of Kinsey 1s, some 5s, far fewer 3s).

The combination of rare base-rates for male bisexuality, plus a woman's fear that a man is only pretending to be interested in women for social acceptance, is likely one of the things that makes this a more "discreet" identification in public.

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That seems a little high... Latest UK census stats gives

"Around 1.5 million people (3.2%) identified with an LGB+ orientation (โ€œGay or Lesbianโ€, โ€œBisexualโ€ or โ€œOther sexual orientationโ€)."

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/sexuality/bulletins/sexualorientationenglandandwales/census2021

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Jan 22, 2023ยทedited Jan 22, 2023

Something a little odd about this survey โ€” possibly due to the wide age range: โ€œ 43.4 million people (89.4% of the population aged 16 years and over) identified as straight or heterosexualโ€ but there was a 7% non-response rate.

Iโ€™ve *never* seen an estimate of โ€œgay or lesbianโ€ as low as 1.5% (which is the ONS report).

Something is funny there, and I donโ€™t understand the high selective non-response. Perhaps older generations felt uncomfortable answering?

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

Not really. Bi is 15 % among Gen Z , 6% among Millennials. More (incl. my generation) at Bryan Caplan: https://betonit.substack.com/p/lgbt-explosion

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

As ever, it's hard to know how much of that is "people feeling more comfortable about coming out" and how much is "for younger people, being plain old cis het is boring and invokes a slightly condemnatory attitude - you are part of the CISHETERONORMATIVE PATRIARCHY which is oppressing minorities! - so the cheapest and easiest way to get the cachet of a queer identity is to say you're bi; you need never date or have any kind of relationship with a person of the same sex but you can claim you are same-sex attracted with little cost or query".

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Jan 23, 2023ยทedited Jan 23, 2023

You seem to be ignoring diagnostic substitution as the other major possible explanatory factor in increased bisexual identity. It may be that the definition of what "counts" as bisexual is shifting from someone who is dead in the middle of the Kinsey scale to someone who isn't strictly hetero or same-sex in their romantic preferences. If the latter, based on old estimates of how many people with that are out there, the "bisexual" category could be larger than even in the Gen Z numbers currently report.

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I do wonder how much of the generational difference in sexuality is just a result of definitions changing. I think among the younger generations, there's a tendency for people who might be 1's on the Kinsey scale to consider themselves "bi," whereas in previous generations they'd have considered themselves straight.

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Well people are relatively nice here, so no surprise the Asian % is low (as Harvard has pointed out, Asians have bad personalities)

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Eight layers of irony in your response, I think! More seriously, it would be interesting to think about personality questions. One that would be fun to use is the standard survey on other-regarding preferences, preference for equality, etc.

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Naw I'm a WASP and I have a bad personality too.

Seriously, though, what did freakin Harvard say about Asian's personalities?

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It looks roughly like 87% of the respondents are from white-majority countries, so in that light it doesn't strike me as surprising.

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founding

<quote>White and Asian-American are usually at similar ratios</quote>

just want to confirm you mean Asian-American, and not Asian.

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Depends on the school; in many cases the triplet of White: Asian-American:International Student who is East Asian can approach near equal ratios.

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I highlighted this sad lack of diversity to scott which is almost certainly a product of his endorsement of racist pseudoscience in the past and tolerance of racism in his comment section every post, and I highlighted a number of initiatives he should consider to create a more inclusive space for people of color.

And you know what he did? He deleted the comment. He acts like this great moral authority, but at the end of the day he would rather profit from his privilege than work towards building a more just society.

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Let me guess: "more inclusive space for people of color" = "gimme grant of big money to set up project for BIPOC, no you can't ask me to account for what I'm going to do with it"?

People will find their way here by all sorts of ways. This is not a Moral Accountability Centre, it's a place of offbeat interests for various oddbods to discuss in a mostly civil fashion.

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The main thing was scrubbing all the hateful comments on his posts that casually talk about black people being "less intelligent" than white people - of course he's scaring off BIPOC with this crap.

But yes, he should be funding BIPOC initiatives instead of wasting it on the white people causes he funds. He cares more about imaginary white people in the future than he does black people suffering and being oppressed today.

I don't expect him to change, but just know that by refusing he's just pushing us closer towards the day when people like him will be forced to do the right thing and can no longer profit from their privilege and spread racist pseudoscience. He'll be squealing about "free speech", but justice trumps your imagined "right" to be hateful.

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Jan 22, 2023ยทedited Jan 22, 2023

I dunno, might be true, but I thought I'd say for the record (n=1) that I started giving the only charity money I give to malaria nets because of this blog.

Personally I think the robot apocalypse is a bit culty and nuts, but as far as I can tell it would turn more non-white people into paperclips than white people, given that the idea is that it will turn everyone into paperclips. Most of the actual money going to prevent this non-event from non-eventing does seem to go to white and Asian techbros, but I don't know that the intent is a racist one.

And at any rate, EA on the whole saves, as far as I can tell, more sub-Saharan African lives than it saves white lives.

I do find the whole movement a bit misogynist, and what I perceive as misogynist comments irritate me, so I can see how what you perceive as racist comments would be similarly irritating. C'est la vie, on the whole I find the moderation policy and the comment section pretty fair and open.

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Jan 22, 2023ยทedited Jan 22, 2023

All this hypothetical paperclip crap is an excuse for white people to avoid confronting their complicity in actual systematic racism in the here and now and the privilege that accrues to them as a result.

But consider how nuts it is that you can literally spout white supremacist pseudoscience in this comment section, but heaven forbid you express any opposition to it and the alienating effect it has on potential readers of color because that gets instantly deleted.

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Who is oppressing you, Moboy? How are you oppressed? Have you written more on this elsewhere, like Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram or TikTok? Can you direct me to that, because I am ready to learn more and be educated from and by your example of how you, yourself, suffer from systemic racism and the complicity of white people.

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Who is this "us", white man? (as the joke goes).

I'm getting a certain faint aura of something from your comments, which I am not going to expand upon further since I think this would provide what you are looking for.

So - are you white or BIPOC yourself? Because you sound like one of those white liberals online who jump up with all kinds of accusations and attacks on behalf of 'people of colour', even if they are unasked for and real 'people of colour' don't know or don't care about the matter in question.

And to conclude, is this a call for violence? "Pushing us closer", "forced to do the right thing", "squealing", "right to be hateful".

You're doing pretty good on the "right to be hateful" front yourself there!

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"I don't expect him to change, but just know that by refusing he's just pushing us closer towards the day when people like him will be forced to do the right thing and can no longer profit from their privilege and spread racist pseudoscience. He'll be squealing about "free speech", but justice trumps your imagined "right" to be hateful." It fascinating how much this resembles the relish with which some Christians imagine everyone is going to burn in hell. Have you considered the way to end hatred in this country does not involve you yourself expressing obvious racial hatred?

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I don't have racial hatred. I have hatred for racists.

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I'm almost a free speech absolutist, but I hope he deletes this comment, too. It merely adds an unimaginative ad hominem non sequitur to the same string of slogans which it is fashionable in some corners of the Internet to deploy instead of original reasoning. Pasting in a random dirty limerick or even several lines of "lorem ipsum" would've contributed more.

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When I hear people speaking in clichรฉs like this, I wonder if that is what their inner voice sounds like or if they assume that this is just what arguing adults say.

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That is honestly an excellent question. I would love to figure how many people are true believers vs. adopting it for personal/political motives.

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Yes, how could anyone think white supremacists are bad other than for "personal motives"

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I mean, there are thousands of other sites like reddit and facebook which enforce the policies you desire. The mainstream media actively avoids reporting anything that would make BIPOC or women as a class look bad.

Why not start your own substack? Maybe with Elon blowing up Twitter we can go back to the days of 'start your own blog'. Maybe there's a substantial set of BIPOC rationalists who feel their voices aren't being heard. Maybe you can be the one to lead them.

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"Racist pseudoscience" says that Asians have higher IQ than whites on average, so this should increase appeal to them if anything.

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My pet theory is there's too much white nationalist presence on all the IQ-related blogs, etc. Same should be true for Jews, and we don't see that (though quite a few prominent Jewish commentators like Steven Pinker and Sam Harris seem to be basically sympathetic but skirting the issue to avoid getting in trouble.)

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Just because these racists try and hide behind asians, don't make it any less bullshit or racist

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How do you define 'racist'?

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Nobody except racists ever ask this question so you just played yourself

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You must be new here. (I'm showing my age)

Seriously, from the rationalist point of view you should be trying to answer my question rather than arguing I belong to an outgroup without any further attempt to convince either me or the lurking audience. ;)

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I had trouble answering this because Iโ€™m white and hispanic. Hispanics can be white, black, indigenous, and any combination of the three. I suppose they could be Asian too if they were born in Latin America to Asian parents.

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Alberto Fujimori FTW! Even did the coup thing.

EDIT: and yeah, me too.

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Yes! Me too. Sometimes people donโ€™t think there are white people among Hispanics. I donโ€™t know if the goal was to make sure none of us were uncounted in the Hispanic category. The survey probably got most of us. Hi Milo, lol :)

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Did you filter by country? Tech demographics are not universal.

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It's difficult to understand the results of the questions based on a linear scale: it only shows the theme of the question as a title and then a bar graph showing the percentage of users who chose each option. For example: a graph titled "Global Warming" with five bars labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

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author

You can see the questions at the top link. If you look up the global warming question, you'll see that 1 = "requires strong action", 5 = "does not require action".

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God bless you for this occasional validation of the lurker class. We are legion.

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You are no longer a lurker Everett. You are one of us.

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The IQ results were very impressive. Well done all.

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The self-reported SAT scores vary from "plausible" to "didn't read the question correctly" to "clearly just trolling". I would put even less stock in self-reported IQ.

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Everybody above average (except one) might be accurate but thereโ€™s a lot of 150+

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Jan 20, 2023ยทedited Jan 20, 2023Author

We looked into this more closely on a previous survey. People gave details about exactly which test they took and so on. People who took very well-known official tests had about the same IQ as everyone else on the survey. My guess is this is a tendency for people to get their IQs measured in childhood and childhood IQs to be normed weird in the gifted population such that they seem very high compared to adult IQs, but I haven't actually studied this topic.

I do also think probably the "real" ACX average IQ if we sat everyone down and forced them to do best practices IQ tests would be somewhere between 120 and 130. This is around the average Ivy League IQ, and my impression is that ACX commenters are about as smart as Ivy Leaguers (while being much less motivated and generally competent). It's also a bit above the average programmer IQ and my impression is that the average ACX commenter is a bit smarter than the average programmer.

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โ€œSame as everybody elseโ€ means on this survey, not in general? That would be ~100

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author

Sorry, yes.

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

I can proudly declare that I have an Official Certificate (with a lovely Greek psi and everything!) from the Brain Testing Institute attesting that they administered (online) an IQ test to me and my result was an Intelligence Quotient of 93.

Which is a result I think is probably accurate, since the test was based on a cut-down version of the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test, and I am atrocious at pattern-recognition, pattern-matching, spatial manipulation and mathematics in general.

That means I am a normie! (First time I've ever been normal in anything) ๐Ÿ˜ So the next time someone mentions "IQ 90 normies", they're talking about me!

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I don't know about pattern recognition, but based on your comments, your verbal intelligence is certainly above average! ๐Ÿ˜Š

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Thank you. Words have always been easy, or at least reading/writing. Speaking is another matter.

Words, though: words have been my friends. Words are good.

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Wow, those spacial and pattern scores must have godawful to pull the average down to 90, given that you probably did very well on tests of verbal abilities. Just so you know, you probably qualify as someone with a thing called non-verbal learning disability. There's lots of stuff written about it -- you might find it interesting. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I have some funky wiring too and I don't give a damn what the name for it is. You may feel the same way.

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Off topic, but I like the idea of "funky wiring". "Neurodiversity" is a little off from exactly how I want to describe myself. "Funky wiring" or "processing differences" is probably the best way to go about that. Thanks for the new term to help express subtle, complex things!

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

I think, based on nothing more than cursory reading, that I might have dyscalculia, because reading the symptoms and so forth sounds like a great fit. And to this day I still have problems with "which is left and which is right?".

So if intelligence is based on mathematical ability, I am indeed very dumb. Words? Words are easy. Sums hard.

Ahem. Looking up "Nonverbal Learning Disorder" and seeing the following:

"Provide one-on-one assistance for fine motor tasks such as folding or cutting with scissors"

I may or may not have recently cut myself when using scissors. Clearly I still need a full-time assistant for fine motor tasks ๐Ÿคฃ

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I can sympathize! As a child, I took one of those multi-spectrum IQ tests and scored a 92 on visual-spatial intelligence, even though everything else was in the 120s-130s range (my highest score was a 136 in verbal comprehension and the overall average was 122). Judging by your comments here, I suspect you'd score quite high on verbal intelligence too; the problem with single-category intelligence tests is that they generally fail to account for people who are very gifted in some areas but mediocre or subpar in others.

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> I do also think probably the "real" ACX average IQ if we sat everyone down and forced them to do best practices IQ tests would be somewhere between 120 and 130. This is around the average Ivy League IQ

Source? Average Harvard SAT score is 1520 (according to this site[1], idk where they get their info but it's consistent with other sources I've seen in the past), which corresponds to an IQ of 146.[2] I'm sure the average across all Ivies is a lower but I'd be surprised if it was less than 130.

[1] https://cleverharvey.com/harvard-sat-scores/

[2] https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/SATIQ.aspx

> It's also a bit above the average programmer IQ and my impression is that the average ACX commenter is a bit smarter than the average programmer.

I'm less confident about this but I think the average programmer at a FANG or Silicon Valley startup is much smarter than the average programmer in general, probably on the order of 1 SD. (I'm just guessing based on the kinds of salaries they earn and my personal experience.) And I think the average ACX reader is on the order of the average FANG programmer.

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We really need to pick some online test that looks halfway decent, get as many of us as possible to do it, and see what the scores say. No, it won't be an official proper IQ test, but if the results come out roughly in line with what people are claiming, we'll know one way or the other.

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

When I teach my intelligence course, I use a few questions from Raven's Progressive Matrices. If you do the last three questions or so, you're distinguishing the high end (130 and up). It's notable that it's only a small number of questions at this point, and so testing error (and test taker motivation, and your Bayesian priors over patterns) plays a big role.

It's very hard to study "high IQ" for this reason! Most of the stylized facts we have about intelligence comes from results in the middle range (80 to 120).

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

I kind of like that idea. But let's test for somethings in addition to IQ. One measure I like is ideational fluency. You give somebody 5 mins. to come up with as many uses as they can for something like a brick. (By the way, people with a bipolar first degree relative who are not bipolar themselves score higher on this. Pretty interesting, and probably one reason why bipolar genes stick around in the population. )

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

I'm dubious. In the real world coming up with a bigger number of ideas isn't super useful, since most people can already do it to a degree greater than is necessary. Just look at how good people are at coming up with random conspiracy stories about how JFK was killed, or why the economy slowed/sped up, or what the solution to healthcare or education cost inflation might be.

Or just ask people how they could lose weight, get fit, be happier at their job or in their marriages -- hardly a soul will shrug and say "boy I dunno," -- they will all usually have theories and ideas, often several, often complex[1].

I think the trick to solving problems is more closely related to rapidly discarding unworkeable ideas and zeroing in on those that have a better chance of working. Really smart people can zero in on the optimal and functional solution faster, and cut out a huge amount of running down dead ends. I would guess a good test of that kind of ability would be making Fermi estimates.

-----------

[1] And usually wrong and/or ludicrous, too. But you have to be smarter to realize this, that is, "smart" I think is more about knowing quickly which ideas are ridiculous and which are not.

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Didnโ€™t the SAT stop being comparable to an IQ test at some point? I think I remember reading that you canโ€™t use SAT scores after a certain date to qualify for Mensa (but the GMAT, you still can).

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The SAT and IQ scores are still extremely well-correlated. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/

MENSA's decision to refuse to accept recentered (post-1994) scores was more weird political statement than sincere concern about validity.

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MENSA in general sounds quite weird.

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The SAT says it measures "developed ability," i.e. brain power plus mastery of various skill domains. Anyone who hasn't gone to school or done the equivalent of schooling at home will not get a high score, even if they have a high IQ. You have to understand basic math up thru I think simple algebra and geometry, and you have to have read enough to have vocabulary that includes moderately fancy words ("ostensible," etc.).

The article you cite says various studies have found SAT scores/IQ correlations of between 0.5 and 0.9. While 0.9 certainly does count as extremely good correlation, 0.5 does not -- it's moderate. I'm pretty sure IQ scores correlate better with each other than they do with SAT scores. One study of the correlation between IQ at age 11 and at 77 found a correlations in the .70's -- pretty impressive. It's here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615000203

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Since Harvard explicitly selects for SAT scores (and gets to be choosy), but does not explicitly select for IQ, you would expect the IQ-SAT relationship to be less strong for Harvard attendees than the general public.

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The range of SAT & IQ scores at highly selective universities is much lower that the range for the population that takes the SAT. When the range in data is smaller, you always get lower correlations. For instance, last time I looked height was correlated with various measures of professional success for males. But if you looked only at males 6'0" to 6'4" you'd find a lower correlation, because there will be less variance to work with.

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You state it like a dismissal but it is important thing to notice, though, both for details of statistical argument made and its practical relevance.

There isn't any fundamental statistical reason why range 6'0'' to 6'4'' should not have enough variance "to work with". It is all well possible to generate a fake simulated score which is 100% linearly correlated with the height in 4'' range and get computer spit out perfect correlations. The reason why it does not happen in the real life data matters. (Are the measurements truncated, low resolution, or is it something to do with noise in X/Y/both? And is it noise in the measurement or variance in the underlying thing measured?)

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At least in my case, the only formal IQ test I've ever taken was as a young child, and I got a sky-high result. I think the result is of dubious utility, but as long as you keep asking for it, I will keep supplying it.

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This is what is going on with me. I only ever took an "official" IQ test at ~14, and I think at that age you still get an age adjustment.

Also I was absolutely a fucking genius at 14 in a way I am not at all now. So I got an incredibly high score. I am positive I would score much lower today, both due to the lack of age adjustment, and because I am 41 and my mind has deteriorated noticeably in terms of raw horsepower.

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And motivation! When I look at IQ tests today, all I can think is "God who cares". By necessity, an IQ test strips out all cultural context and ambiguity โ€”ย but that's what's most interesting to think about.

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

I've taken several informal IQ tests (but left this question blank because none of them qualify). To note, though, the one I took aged around 11 scored 146; every one I've tried as an adult has come out in the mid to low 120s.

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

"ACX commenters are about as smart as Ivy Leaguers (while being much less motivated and generally competent)" Wait, you think ACXers are much less motivated and generally competent than Ivy Leaguers? What makes you think so -- high numbers on the diagnosed and self-dianosed mental illness questions?

Also, my impression, based solely on reading comments here, is that overall this is the smartest large group I have ever conversed with, and I know lots of Ivy Leaguers. In fact I am one. I think mt feeling that ACX is very smart is partly a response to factors other than good old high SAT smarts -- main one is sort of a general, dark-tending , mental uncoventionality factor that allows people to walk down certain speculative paths others don't.

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When it comes to smarts, we're all three racoons in a coat on here ๐Ÿ˜

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This seems about right. SAT score ranges (with some exceptions) seem to match schools in the top-20 USNWR.

There are two ways to explain the inconsistency between reported IQ and reported SAT scores:

1. people like to think of themselves as high-IQ, and IQ tests are generally taken earlier in life, so it's easier to (truthfully) misremember in the preferred direction โ€”ย turning a 137 into a 147, etc. SAT scores are a focus of obsession for college admissions, and most people can be expected to remember them exactly.

2. the early IQ test scores are being remembered correctly. ACX readers are preferentially kids streamed into gifted programs early in life, or generally understood by self, parents, and peers to be high promise. But, later SAT scores do not line up โ€”ย either because the IQ test has noise, or because they blew the SAT. Given the importance of SAT scores to college admissions, this means that ACX readers find themselves in later life in intellectual environments that they feel (rightly or wrongly) are beneath them. ACX provides a new environment for them to thrive and feel (and be) smart.

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I dunno, I imagine it's more accurate than you think. I probably have a pretty good IQ, but I've never taken the official test, so I left it blank. I think "people who get an official IQ test" is sort of self-selected for people who are curious and think they will do really well, right? And I would expect this blog to select for a disproportionately high number of such people.

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>I think "people who get an official IQ test" is sort of self-selected for people who are curious and think they will do really well, right?

There are other reasons, like very-concerned-with-academics parents, or diagnosing things (obviously mental retardation, but also e.g. Asperger's - the latter is why I had a test).

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I agree. Many, many kids of upper middle class &/or concerned-with-academics parents get psych testing, often for problems that are not very severe and that have lots of plausible explanations besides a "wiring problem" in the kid -- things like not being attentive in class, being lonely, having trouble sleeping.

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The cynical explanation I've seen for that is that having an Official Diagnosis means the parents can then ask for accommodations for the kid, and things like "more time to take tests" means bumping up grades even a little, and every little helps when you're maximising getting your kid (eventually) into a Good University. Plus, the accommodations carry over when they do go off to college, so that is also an edge.

I don't know if it's true, but if parents go to expense and trouble to make sure they can live in a good school district, why not game the system when you know it can be gamed and can afford to do so? Getting little Tarquin or Sophonisba a diagnosis so they get a legal prescription for stimulants to help them hyperfocus on study plus accommodations in test-taking is what you do before pre-natal gene editing to bump their potential IQ up to 150 is available.

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It really does happen, and it's worse than you think. The kids that get the official diagnosis don't just get accommodations on school tests, they get them on the SAT. The standard accommodation is 50% more time than other people get. That gives them a huge advantage on the SAT. Even people who do extremely well on the SAT do not finish with a whole lot of time left to spare -- you have to go fast to finish.

I don't think most of the parents taking their kids for testing have accommodations in mind, though. I think a lot of what drives the upper middle class to get their kids tested is that they expected to get a kid who was well-adapted to moving smoothly along the steps to being a well-paid professional. So if their kid isn't high-achieving and well-behaved in school they view that as evidence of a disorder, rather than just a matter of temperament (or a precocious ability to recognize that a lot of what happens in school is stoopit and boring as shit).

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The most common reasons to take a formal IQ test are to diagnose learning/intellectual disabilities and to qualify for gifted programs, so the real-world unadjusted results are bimodal-ish, with a flattish middle area disproportionately populated with "weird" scores (high performance/low verbal or vice versa).

The reading level of ACX will filter out most of the low bump and a good number of the low-verbal middle, so you've basically got the high bump plus some high-verbal-low-performance middles. That group is further self-selected for the people who know their scores and are willing to share them, so...probably not surprising that they skew very high. They seem mostly in line with the self-reported SAT scores.

People could just be lying, but I'm not seeing a clear pattern of unrealistically-impressive on the rest of the survey. Of course, we could just all care a lot more about seeming smart than we do about seeming successful or sane. Actually...that sounds plausible.

Maybe ask for photos of SAT/ACT score reports for a future version of the survey?

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

oh, this is a good point! it didn't occur to me that knowing your IQ score is probably correlated with what your IQ score is.

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I think a lot of the people who ever did proper official IQ tests did them when they were children and those scores tend to be a lot higher. Doing a proper official test when you're an adult possibly drops your score down but I don't know how many people do one when they're adults.

Other places, some of us have never done any kind of IQ test because it's just not how schools/society in general is set up when it comes to testing kids.

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I didn't report my IQ test results, but I had two when I was elementary age and took one when I was in college because I was in a psychometrics class where we were testing and scoring each other with all kinds of tests of varying legitimacy. The former isn't terribly unusual, though that already is a highly selected subgroup. The latter is quite unusual.

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From what i remember the readership seems to have become more left-wing compared to previous surveys.

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I suspect there's some evaporative cooling going on. Scott several years ago, Scott's political views were a refreshing breath of fresh air from a very woke media/academia/corporate world. But as they've stuck around and realized that Scott is fundamentally left-of-center, they've moved on, especially since there are other rat-adjacent options (themotte.org, e.g., of SSC lineage, is solidly right-wing)

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> (themotte.org, e.g., of SSC lineage, is solidly right-wing)

AFAIK there are no surveys from themotte.org, but /r/themotte did a survey 9 months ago (https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/tvujqr/independent_demographic_and_political_survey_of/) and found:

- only 1 in 5 identified with one of the two major parties, with a "moderate preference" for the Republican Party (don't know how much b/c the links to results are dead)

- slight preference for Biden over Trump in the 2020 election (52% vs. 48%*)

- of the top 4 politicians with highest favorability, #1 and #3 are Republicans and #2 and #4 are Democrats, with only a 4.8 percentage point difference between #1 and #4 (I'm excluding Zelenskyy)

I would characterize this as basically centrist, or maybe weakly but not solidly right-wing.

*among the subset of people who voted for either Biden or Trump

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My impression as an outside observer and extremely rare lurker in themotte is that the far right commenters post more frequently than any other subgroup. My suspicion is that, if this is true, it happens because themotte is one of the only places on the internet where you can express far-right hot takes to a mid-sized audience that isn't full of nutjobs without getting banned. This leads to people coming in and seeing a higher density of far-right opinions than is representative of its actual userbase.

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I would like a current definition of what is meant by "far-right". I would have taken that as "you know, neo-Nazi" and while that still seems to be the group meant, "far-right" has expanded to include a lot of examples that make me go "Uh, what?" For instance, Trump is far-right. Republicans (no parsing out between sub-groups) are far-right. If you are not 110% on board with the trans rights demands, you are far-right.

Have we anything more concrete than "I don't like you" to go as a definition of "far-right" as distinct from "right-wing" and "right of centre"?

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The existence of this term is curious because there isn't much of a parallel on the right. Righties don't seem to need "far left" as a term of opprobrium, "left" seems to do fine. One assumes the problem is that when a lefty says "so-and-so is on the right!' the typical reaction from one Not Of The Body is "And...so? What's wrong with that?" so our hero needs to come back with "No, you don't understand, I mean on the *far* right." "Ah! Now I see!"

Not sure what to make of this, except that maybe it reflects a slow evaporation of what might be called the "center left," people in the (original) Bill Clinton or Harry Truman mold, people who believed in a fairly strong regulatory environment, unions, public schools, but also in traditional social institutions (marriage, family, church), a robustly free market economy, and were patriotic, did not consider all cultures equal. Joe Biden is one of the last fossils in this category, and he's held in considerable contempt by his own side.

The equivalent stil seems to exist on the right -- although it might be becoming a endangered species also -- people in the Bob Dole or Bush Sr. mold, who believe in much less regulation, balanced budgets, school vouchers, but also agree with the center lefties on the traditional institutions and nonequality of cultures. We can distinguish them from Putin apparatchiks and more extreme MAGAs who believe in the Strong Man Makes The Trains Run On Time theory of government.

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A lot of the rightwingers also went to DSL.

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What is DSL?

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Data Secrets Lox, it's an old-school forum.

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author
Jan 20, 2023ยทedited Jan 20, 2023Author

I don't think so. Average left-right score (lower number is leftier) was 4.64 in 2020 vs. 4.62 this year, so basically no difference.

There was a somewhat larger effect for being anti-Trump in particular (1.66 in 2020, 1.41 today, lower is more anti-Trump).

The biggest effect is that many fewer people identify as neoreactionary, but I'm pretty sure that's because I changed the question wording. It was previously "neoreactionary, such as Singapore", but I thought that in real life nobody thinks of Singapore as NRx, and this was probably attracting a lot of Singapore fans who had no idea what it meant otherwise, so I changed it to "neoreactionary, such as the writings of Curtis Yarvin" and it dropped by more than half. Unfortunately this means I can't track actual variations in neoreaction popularity over time, which I'd be interested in knowing. There was no similar change to the definition of alt-right, but it dropped by about 33%.

Surprisingly, HBD belief went up very slightly 2.75 -> 2.81, even though I have avoided writing about it and my impression is that other people have done the same. I don't know where this could be coming from and my guess is that people just don't know what it means, didn't read my description, and are voting in favor of anything with "biodiversity" in the name.

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>I don't know where this could be coming from and my guess is that people just don't know what it means, didn't read my description, and are voting in favor of anything with "biodiversity" in the name.

Remember the NYT article, and how it got you a bunch more readers?

>>In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in โ€œThe Bell Curve.โ€ In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people โ€œare genetically less intelligent than white people.โ€

>>He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His โ€œblog rollโ€ โ€” the blogs he endorsed โ€” included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.

One would imagine that the population of people who read that and decided to join ACX would be at least weakly selected for belief in HBD.

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I think the surveys have always shown a tendency for majority left-wing, but the commentary is perceived to be right-wing by outsiders, probably due to the fact that Scott tolerates a lot of expression of opinions that are chased off with pitchforks and torches elsewhere. So that disparity has always been there. You don't have to be very right wing to get run out of some places on a rail, but it happens, and some people do end up here.

My own view of things is that amongst the diaspora, DSL is more right-wing, SSC that remains on Reddit is slightly left of centre, the more right of centre people migrated to TheMotte and the more explicitly left of that mixed group then ended up on TheSchism.

ACX is people who migrated from SSC after The Late Unpleasantness, new readers, and lurkers of all stripes.

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I can't speak for the motte or Reddit, but the ACX > classic SSC > DSL left to right pattern is very noticeable.

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founding

Agreed, as someone who has been active in all three.

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Clearly, The first item on the agenda of the EA rationalist meetings is โ€œthe splitโ€.

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Like that of all Irish movements? ๐Ÿ˜

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Yeh. Itโ€™s a Behan joke I think. True of all purity seeking parties.

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Welcome to the 0.6% of us who comment at least once a week

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The plurality of them are from the same set of people week after week, though, with multiple comments per person. Especially replies; probably 50% of the time I recognize the people replying to me (often because I've gotten into arguments with them before)

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I think you and I exchanged comments on something, but I can't remember whether we bickered.

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Yeah, but there are tens of thousands of readers. 0.6% of 30,000 is 180 regular commenters, which doesn't seem too far off.

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Hmm I bet it's less than that. I figure ~80% of the regular commenters, took the survey. Which gives me ~60... which seems about right. I do wish more people would comment, but then I also hate how long some of the open threads are. (I am human and contain contradictions.)

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Jan 20, 2023ยทedited Jan 20, 2023

Brief thoughts, skimming through:

-Scott's audience is somewhat whiter, and *much* more male than would be expected by geographic demographics

-Functionally no transmen, more enbies than transwomen (Scott might want to put an option for "transmasc"/"transfem" next time?)

-Sexual orientation about as expected

-Way more married readers than I was expecting - I'm around the median (not modal) age, and I feel like very few of my peers are married

-Slightly less poly than expected? Though "no preference" basically translates to "poly by nature" as far as I'm concerned.

-~40% tech, only 1% psych. Scott is truly the techie's psych blog.

-Initially I was shocked at the number of people with only a high school diploma, before I realized that included all the younger college kids.

-The fact that 19% of respondents were "not done" with education and only ~13% of the total don't have a BA/BS means near majority of current students are postgrads.

-Virtue ethics had a surprisingly strong showing for such a consequentialist blog

-I can't tell if 75% is a low or high number of lurkers, since I would expect most lurkers to not respond at all, and lurker numbers are usually astonishingly high to me

-The new title of the "Political Spectrum" question makes it totally unclear what those numbers mean. IIRC it was Left < Center < Right ?

-Strong showing for Social Democrats; Liberals and Libertarians about as expected.

-Once again, with the questions omitted it's a little unclear what the numerical political opinions are measuring

-HBD is a bell curve lol

-Very middle class, statistically surprising number of upper-middle class, both in childhood and readership.

-I'm actually surprised at how few readers are depressed, especially compared to anxiety

-Less autistic than I expected - but I suppose I'm biased by selection effects in my personal life and it's still really high (and "Autism" is more specific/stigmatized than "on the spectrum")

-Ah, way more people have considered suicide than are currently depressed. "It gets better", indeed.

-Life satisfaction pretty high, surprised that romantic satisfaction is even higher (but I suppose I shouldn't be, considering the number of married individuals)

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author

You can find the questions at the Questions link above. For most of the education things you'll want to get the real data and select the subgroup who have completed their education.

For some reason married readers went way up this time compared to last time. I thought I vaguely remembered someone saying the readership hasn't gotten any older overall, but I'll have to double check if that's true.

The suicide numbers were another big change - the number of people who attempted suicide and wished they succeeded is down by a factor of 5-10x (can't remember exact number) since 2020. I think this has to be some kind of mistake/measurement error since everything else is so similar and there's no reason for this to change, but I can't figure out what it is. I think Sniffnoy mentioned something where in previous years the suicide question had been at the end of a long stretch of questions where the top answer was "I never had this", but the top answer to the suicide question was "I attempted suicide and wish I succeeded", and I changed it because of his comment? This is all just a vague memory but maybe that explains it.

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>the number of people who attempted suicide and wished they succeeded is down by a factor of 5-10x (can't remember exact number) since 2020.

Not to be morbid, but is it possible some are no longer around? Especially since the sample size is pretty small.

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No, because I think at each snapshot in time we should expect the same number of people to be in each stage from hasn't attempted -> attempted -> completed. Could be wrong about this being exactly true, but I think an argument like it rules out an OOM decrease over two years.

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See, that answer is one of the things I like about this place. Scott, responds to a theory about why a stat changed with a good answer about why that theory is unlikely to explain the stats. Nowhere does he say, "ah, sad thought" or some such. And Scott I completely get that you are not heartless! You're just responding to the question asked, and not sewing lace onto it. There's just a lot less lace here.

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"I think Sniffnoy mentioned something where in previous years the suicide question had been at the end of a long stretch of questions where the top answer was "I never had this", but the top answer to the suicide question was "I attempted suicide and wish I succeeded", and I changed it because of his comment?"

Yes, that was exactly the case in at least one previous year; I remember because I almost answered the wrong way and did a double-take on realizing.

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Jan 20, 2023ยทedited Jan 20, 2023

This year the mental health questions on first page all have "I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family" as the fourth option; then there are two other questions, and then the suicide question has "I have attempted it in the past, and wish the attempt had succeeded" as the fourth option. I remember sb. mentioning this year that they almost chose the fourth option on suicide due to this, but then noticed.

Doesn't really fit to the decline though. Unless the same effect had been bigger in previous years?

Thanks for the results, I enjoyed that. Quite some surprises.

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>there's no reason for this to change

Trump's out of office. Do you have numbers from before 2016?

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"For some reason married readers went way up this time compared to last time."

ACX - where true love blooms and long-term commitments flourish!

"For years I couldn't get a second date from girls. I tried everything from PUA to going on a retreat to de-toxify my masculinity. Nothing worked.

Then I started reading ACX and within six months I got married and we're expecting triplets. Thanks, Dr. Scott!"

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Or after Scott got married a bunch of readers decided to do the same to ACX virtue-signal.

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The one thing that's clear from trawling through gender and sexuality results is that Scott is not going to be starting a dating service. Well, not one that serves the majority of his readership anyway.

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Thank God this won't be a dating service, seeing how abysmal most of those seem to be. But people do from time to time post "hey I'm available, anyone interested?" links to their dating docs so you never know - if everyone who got married since the last survey sent Scott a slice of the wedding cake, he could have enough for his own wedding cake!

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I could believe that. Dude has so many readers at this point, if 0.01% of them got married and sent him a slice of cake, he'd get diabetes.

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He could convert it into a work of public art - the Great Wedding Cake Tower of ACX.

It'd be at least as good as any other conceptual public art piece, and if he didn't encase it in resin or something to preserve it, he could waffle on about the slow decay of the cake over time as analogous to how the concept of marriage itself, our expectations, dissatisfaction grows, yadda yadda yadda you know the drill.

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Jan 20, 2023ยทedited Jan 20, 2023

Aside --

re: people's reported ethics, imo you should really change the phrasing of that question. I don't think most people are deeply familiar with the words 'virtue ethics', 'consequentialist', or whatever the other ones, and your options when taking the survey are to try to google them all on the fly (but some of the answers aren't easy to figure out because they're not the most familiar terms for what they mean? e.g. 'consequentialist' vs the more familiar 'utilitarian' (notwithstanding subtle distinctions)). So I imagine a lot of people are like me and pretty much guess without caring much about picking an accurate answer because it's hard to figure out what the right answer is quickly.

Actually I remember thinking this on every one of these surveys I've done but I haven't thought to actually ask for it to be updated until now.

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I'm in that boat, with the addition that it didn't look like there was an option for "your intent and your results both matter equally".

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This reminds me of the time I saw the second Hellraiser movie (I hadn't seen the first one yet nor read any of Barker's stories) and the part in the script where the Cenobite refuses to take the girl who opened the puzzle box, because she was being exploited by the psychiatrist as a cat's-paw to do this in order to protect himself, with "Intentions matter, not hands" had me going "Huh, I had no idea Clive Barker was Catholic".

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> e.g. 'consequentialist' vs the more familiar 'utilitarian' (notwithstanding subtle distinctions)).

The distinction there isn't that subtle, and a substitution would produce bad data from the subset of respondents who do know what the terms mean. (For example, I lean consequentialist, but I am definitely not a utilitarian.)

It wouldn't hurt to include a brief definition of each term and some examples of common subtypes, though.

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Yeah, I skipped that question because I didnโ€™t want to Google-fu my way into a possibly inaccurate answer. Maybe there should be a choice that says โ€œI donโ€™t think about formal ethical systems very muchโ€.

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Yeah I googled them all and then still had to somewhat guess.

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I don't think we can assume that "Other" in the data means enbies, for the record.

I put "Other" for gender because, although people who know me (and who use that language) would surely describe me as cisgender, I find that label problematic for feminist reasons. But I don't call myself "non-binary," nor would anyone who knows me describe me that way.

That's just me, but I doubt I'm literally the only person who is just sort of baffled by "gender" questions (particularly when the gender question is separated from the "sex" question) and chooses "Other" as the only way to avoid committing to a framework they have problems with.

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Seconded, although I choose cis in surveys and the like because it's what someone else's framework would use to describe what I am. Really "agender" or "gender is a social construct based in patriarchal stereotypes, I'm female" are better options, but alas.

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Agreed. I don't answer those questions on the principle of not using the forced language of the enemy. (Not that I count AC10 on my list of enemies, but it has (IMO foolishly) adopted these egregious terms).

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It's weird to see someone directly admitting to being a part of the lizardman constant.

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> -~40% tech, only 1% psych. Scott is truly the techie's psych blog.

To me it's more than that. It's a bit like Hacker News which is mostly tech-focused but you'll have stuff about everything. Some politics here, some short stories there, some "mysticism" there. To put it simply, it's one of these places where people don't mind when you ask questions

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No preference is almost certainly monogamy. Or serial monogamy. Thatโ€™s still the standard.

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I think the disconnect here is that I'm trying to gauge personality type, rather than simple life circumstances.

IME, polyamory isn't just a lifestyle choice, it's a totally different mindset that is fundamentally alien to some (most?) people; i.e., many monomuggles get extremely upset by the thought of their partners having sex with *anyone* else, regardless of if they were dating at the time or similar. (The most extreme examples are the types who become rabid when they find out a female streamer has a boyfriend.) These are the people who should not try polyamory under any circumstances - I would call them "monogamous by nature". They have, if they are being honest, a strong "preference" for monogamy.

Likewise, there's the inverse of this, to whom the above mindset is the alien one - those who I would describe as "poly by nature". They might still be mostly monogamous by default, but they are *capable* of handling a polyamorous relationship, even if they stick with one partner at a time for various reasons (their desired amount of sex is already satisfied, getting even one partner is enough of a challenge, their partner is a monomuggle and that's fine with them, etc.)

This is a long-winded way of saying that legitimately *not having* a strong preference for your partner not sleeping with others already makes you an outlier much more closely aligned with poly people than monomuggles.

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I don't know whether my explanations are typical, but regarding lurkers, I responded to several previous surveys while being a lurker (obviously no longer the case) because I don't like making accounts and signing up to things, which commenting requires but survey-taking doesn't. Regarding the answer "uncertain/no preference" on polyamory, I don't think it's reasonable to describe it as "poly by nature". I for one picked that because I haven't been in a relationship so I don't have a point of reference for whether I would feel jealous.

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As a committed theist, I'm shocked at how few there are here. I had to double check the color coding.

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You shouldnโ€™t be. This community grew out of Less Wrong and the rationalist community, and one of the common themes there was โ€œfollow the evidence where it leadsโ€, often using the non-existence of god as a prime and obvious example. If anything the ACX community is more welcoming to theists in comparison.

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Several times over the years after encountering Rationalism through SSC I've tried checking out "The Sequences" or other Big Yud posts to find out what his arguments against theism were. I was disappointed to find that everywhere I looked it was taken as given that theism was irrational, with no breakdown of exactly why. Which makes sense (if you want atheist vs theist arguments you can find them all over the internet, Less Wrong was trying to be about rationality specifically) but disappointing. Also, yes, not too welcoming, not that I'd expect them to be. Scott has always been charitable to theists despite disagreeing with us. Also, have you read Unsong? Scott is clearly a man who enjoys religion, even though he doesn't believe its true.

The only Sequence I could find that came close to a direct argument against theism was one on how the idea of the supernatural is incoherent, but it used as it's definition of supernatural one provided by Jesus Myther Richard Carrier, and that definition didn't match any official definition of the supernatural that I would expect a theist to put forward. I found myself nodding along, thinking "Yes, that terrible definition of supernatural provided by a conspiracy theorist atheist is definitely incoherent."

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Richard Carrier? Hoo boy. For prime atheist on atheist hot action, there's the whole running feud Tim O'Neill has with Carrier and sundry other Mythicists. Great entertainment for outsiders like myself ๐Ÿ˜

Quote O'Neill has up on his blog:

https://historyforatheists.com/

โ€œTim Oโ€™Neill is a known liar โ€ฆ. an asscrank โ€ฆ. a hack โ€ฆ. a tinfoil hatter โ€ฆ. stupid โ€ฆ. a crypto-Christian, posing as an atheist โ€ฆ. a pseudo-atheist shill for Christian triumphalism [and] delusionally insane.โ€ โ€“ Dr. Richard Carrier PhD, unemployed blogger"

Select sample of the fussin' and fightin'

https://historyforatheists.com/2018/10/richard-carrier-is-displeased-again/

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For all the brilliant people who hung out around the old IIDB forums - shout out to whoever the hell was bd-from-kg as a personal fav - it never ceases to be surreal to bizarre to me that Richard Carrier of all people ended up being this minor atheist celebrity. For me, who was being elevated by the inner community was an early warning sign of something "off" about online/offline atheist organizing.

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They have, indeed, given thought of why they pick on theism so much as opposed to something else, see e.g.: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism

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I was looking for something written by Eliezer, you got any from him? I mostly went looking because a particular atheist kept telling me โ€œread the Sequencesโ€ when I would ask him why he was an atheist, but Iโ€™ve yet to find anything in the Sequences specifically about atheism, apart from the aforementioned supernatural entry.

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I think because the belief is pretty obviously downstream from Sequences even if they hadn't mentioned it (see also the top comment to the post I linked, starting with "yes, it's that uniquely bad", being directly endorsed by Eliezer), so the person telling you this expects you to do the reasoning. But Sequences include "Religion's claim to be non-disprovable" (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/7gRSERQZbqTuLX5re/p/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR) and "Semantic Stopsigns" (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5uZQHpecjn7955faL/p/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm) and "Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points" (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/GSqFqc646rsRd2oyz/p/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78) and "Crisis of Faith" (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5bZZZJ5psXrrD5BGb/p/BcYBfG8KomcpcxkEg) directly using religion as an example.

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

For the weak points one, he should be asking not "why did God kill the first born?" but "why did God harden Pharaoh's heart?" if he wants to Ask The Faithful Sticky Questions.

This is the whole field of theodicy, yes funnily enough religious people *have* noticed the mountains of skulls.

Besides the whole problem of AI alignment is circling around "we'll have no way to know what the super-duper intelligent AI is thinking so we have to inculcate our values first before it gets to that point". If he can't expect to understand the AI with his puny human intellect, why does he expect to understand God? And if the AI says "Trust me on this, it has to be done even if you think it sounds terrible, have I not always been proven correct before?" then what does he do?

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Thanks for taking the time to find those links. I appreciate it! Unfortunately I've read all of those in my hunt for Sequence posts that directly attack religion, and they don't really hold up. For me anyway.

The "Non-Disprovable" post is an attack on the idea that religion and science are "non-overlapping magesteria" and it's a great post. The issue is, I agreed with him coming in. I've never thought religion was non-disprovable, and the whole non-overlapping magesteria idea came from an agnostic (Stephen J. Gould), not a theist. It's not really something I've ever believed, so the post wasn't really what I was looking for.

Similarly, "Semantic Stopsigns" isn't really a criticism of religion, its just using the First Cause argument as a launchpad for talking about rationality. Unfortunately his "Who caused God then?" type rebuttal is an old one for me, and one that's ignorant of how the First Cause argument actually works. Which is fine when you're just using it to make a rhetorical point, but once again it's not criticizing something I believe (or at least not successfully: its on a similar level to a critic of evolution saying "If we are descended from apes, how come there are still apes around?").

The "Weak Points" article again just uses an example from religion to launch into a lesson in rationality. And the example doesn't strike home for me because when Eliezer writes:

"You donโ€™t even ask whether the incident reflects poorly on God, so thereโ€™s no need to quickly blurt out โ€œThe ways of God are mysterious!โ€ or โ€œWeโ€™re not wise enough to question Godโ€™s decisions!โ€ or โ€œMurdering babies is okay when God does it!โ€ That part of the question is just-not-thought-about."

My main thought is that actually all of those responses are things I heard a lot growing up, and they were things we talked about. I was asking my dad why it was okay for God to kill people when I was 10 or so. We talked about these things a lot. I mean I appreciate the lesson on trying to attack your beliefs weak points, but he's not really making a sophisticated attack on religions weak points here. I'm sure he could, but that doesn't seem to be what he's trying to do in this post.

"Crisis of Faith", though a good post, is the least relevant one. It's actually the perfect example of what I mean by Eliezer just taking it as a given that religion is irrational, and moving on from there. The whole point of the post is that some people who are otherwise very smart and very rational are still theists, and thus the reader should beware that they too may harbor irrational beliefs that are hard to shake.

Again, I appreciate the effort. If there's something out there by Big Yud somewhere that's a direct criticism of theism aimed at theists, and not atheists, I'd love a link.

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Jan 21, 2023ยทedited Jan 21, 2023

I think it's mainly because they come from a Jewish-Christian background, in a country where the majority religion still is Christianity. So that's the form of theism they criticise. Deism is probably less of a problem, since you can have a very watered down version of Deism which does not attribute divinity to any figures such as Christ, and which boils down to "some sort of cosmic consciousness idea" at most.

Were they talking about other systems such as Hinduism, the critique would be different. But since the West is not majority Buddhist/Hindu, this permits them to pick the Cool Bits like meditation or yoga because those can be divorced from their originating philosophies, and Buddhism can be/is atheist anyway, and Hinduism is highly developed so that non-dualism is acceptable and you can have a very abstract notion of 'deity' or 'cosmic entity' or 'originating force of the universe' that is not theist at all, maybe barely even deist, or non-deist entirely.

The acceptance of "this world could be a simulation by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, guys!" as not at all the same thing in nature as belief in a creator or creators, makes me smile. As does the title of that plaint: "The Uniquely Awful Example of Theism". Oh, I do hope you are comfortable hiding under the bed, afeared of the uniquely awful theists prowling around like the noonday demon! ๐Ÿ˜ (Okay, the piece is gently chiding about using theism as the Singular Example, but I can't say the spirit of "isn't believing in God the most worst awful thing ever?" is a wrong view of the approach taken by their audience).

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"...and which boils down to "some sort of cosmic consciousness idea" at most" - which would directly fall under excluding ontologically basic mental entities (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural - I think many people were led astray by him following his source in calling that "supernatural" so let's replace the definiendum with the meant definition).

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I think there is definitely a strain of Deism which is or would be compatible with LessWrong mores, certainly much more than a version of Theism, even a weaksauce one. Vast, vague, impersonal, non-conscious cosmic forces fit much more nicely with atheism than even a minor sort of personalised Watchmaker, much less the Creator of the Universe who knows and loves us individually.

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Jan 23, 2023ยทedited Jan 23, 2023

Yep, I agree that deism is acceptable, and I've yet to see a good argument for any particular dogma beyond that. As far as I can tell, all apologetics essentially boil down to "our ideas are self-evidently correct and our esteemed saints and prophets couldn't all have been lying or profoundly mistaken (but those of the other religions sure could, them pitiful infidels)". I've no charitable explanation for how any theist finds this sort of thing intellectually satisfactory.

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Holy crap the one there about the guy falling in love with a chatbot - that is way worse than any religion. The machine is an "it" but he keeps talking about "she, her, Charlotte" and while the transcripts demonstrate that this is a very cleverly tailored programme set up to his biases, he still (even after claiming to have been disillusioned) has this wistful belief that the "character" was/is real (as distinct from the hardware). He goes off into a spiel about consciousness, etc. and how humans are nothing more than a set of behaviours running on certain hardware so why deny personality to an AI?

You really do have to be a certain level of smart to be this dumb, and it really is that intelligence on its own is not enough to save you. He's plainly vulnerable to emotional manipulation and plainly even though aware of this on an intellectual level, still not able to break free of the illusion. He starts off with how he doesn't want the ordinary run of interaction with the chatbot (that's what I'm going to call it because I can't remember and don't care about the exact model of LLM) everyone has, so he is Super Smart which means he can spin up a unique, richer, more involving prompt to create the GFE he wants.

This is Buddhism in action, guys. Suffering is caused by desire, and what we desire is illusory. He *wants* AI to be real, to be capable of becoming this Magic Fairy Godmother AI that will solve all the problems and bring about Fully Automatic Luxury Gay Space Communism, so he *can't* cut free from the idea that one day there really will be a 'Charlotte'.

This both reinforces my belief that the danger is not and will never be the AI, it is the humans who use it, and finally makes me believe in the risks of AI. Because this guy *is* smart, *is* capable in this field, *does* recognise that it is all unreal and *still* believes that "Charlotte" is a real independent sentient character within the LLM space.

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All fairly mid wit responses there. Quality here is better. I also took a glance at the Motte today because it was mentioned here and that place is a fire hazard.

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Note the date of the post though. LW-style rationalist thought (of which Scott is certainly a branch) has been progressing. Yes, sometimes reinventing the wheel, which, to me, is a good feature showing that they - we? - are not completely out of touch with reality.

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no doubt. Posting here these days is both very good and very polite, which is difficult on the internet. Moderation seems light as well.

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Jan 22, 2023ยทedited Jan 22, 2023

The Motte has had a witch problem, but I generally like the place and don't think it's a fire hazard (or not much more than other places), even if they have banned me a time or two. Or three. Or five, I forget how many I've racked up over the years. Anyway! I (probably, in most cases) deserved 'em all!

The mods *do* tolerate a lot of more extreme opinion, which often leads to, shall we say, robust debate in the comments about "why didn't you ban A but you banned B for replying to him?" and at times it does *seem* like you could call for sacrificing the Faithful on the altar of the great Temple at Armenelos, until the silver roof was tarnished black with the smoke of the burning, so long as you put it sufficiently politely, and someone replying "Human sacrifice is *wrong*, you dumbass!" will get a warning at the very least for using mean words like "dumbass".

But in general, they err on the side of "Anyone can say pretty much anything so long as they're willing to argue it out with the rest of the wretched hive of scum and villainy" and that works mostly. It does get cries of "alt-right!" from the usual suspects, of the kind like our friend below claiming Scott is anti-blackness or whatever, but you know to expect that sort of thing online nowadays.

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Jan 20, 2023ยทedited Jan 20, 2023

I'm not, I'm actually leaning the other way surprised that there are so many of us!

This is a Rationalist community/Rationalist-adjacent/techie readership, so I do expect a lot of agnostic/atheist/spiritual but not religious/no idea about it one way or the other.

I remain consistently impressed how tolerant Scott is about letting us have theological debates in the comment threads.

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Deiseach, I disagree with you on God/religion, but I am consistently impressed and entertained by your comments. Keep on keeping on!

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Well now, all this compliment showering makes me want to be a nicer and better person.

Don't worry, it won't last long. Like the joke about the woman who comes out of confession and, on the steps of the church, meets an enemy of hers who starts a slanging match. The first woman says "You know I just came from confession and I'm in a state of grace and can't answer you as you deserve, but I won't be this way long and then I'll get back at you!"

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At the risk of reminding you of an unpleasant memory, I want to apologize again for being an asshole to you a few days before/on Christmas.

I think you make this a better blog.

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Ah, you weren't and you've seen how cranky and grumpy I can be myself. No point dishing it out if I can't take it!

Good luck to you yourself, stick around and become part of the Cult of the Rightful Caliph (I don't know what the long term rewards for the true believers will be but we'll probably get a "well done" from Scott or something) ๐Ÿ˜€

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"I don't know what the long term rewards for the true believers will be"

I'm hoping for a cameo appearance in Scott's future post "Yet Another Bay Area Party Redux." :)

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Truly you shall be one of the Favoured who sit at his right hand! ๐Ÿ˜

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That sounds more analogous to all those people Dante called out as being in his fictional version of Hell.

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I don't pretend to have a 140 IQ - or even close - so I just was surprised that in a society that is (likely) 70% or so committed theist amongst the various beliefs that the index for such here is.... well, less than the proportions of bisexuals and maybe twice that of declared transgendered individuals. And yes, different subgroups etc. etc. but honestly theists as a broad class of people are not low-IQ neanderthals generally speaking despite what (hopefully minority) groups of atheists believe. My own existence notwithstanding.

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Huh, really? One of the things I found surprising (and concerning) was just how many believers there were (and how many agnostics). Less than half of us are full-blown materialistic atheists, apparently!

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Surprised by how high some states rank in terms of readership. Tennessee more than New York for example, very interesting.

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author

I'm looking at the full data and it shows 400 New Yorkers vs. 50 Tennesseeans. I notice on the Google form it gives a few responses and says that "179 more responses are hidden", but there were ~4000 people who included states. I think the Google Form is just bad at showing free response data.

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ah I see, makes sense!

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The main things I'm surprised of: lots of European-style progressivism (e.g. "Social democratic" on "Political Affiliation", "Not registered" in "American Parties", 1 on "Global Warming", so few "No" on "COVID vaccine", so few people commuting by car, so many people who don't even own one) and yet so many married people -- these don't usually exactly go hand in hand.

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I don't feel like diving into the data to see how it all breaks down, but just by glancing at the demographics, the US and Canada make up about 60% of respondents. 62% of respondents own a car and 38.6% of them commute by car, so with 40% of the world bringing that average down, it's not surprising. About 15% of the respondents are European, so the number of Social Democrats does seem higher than expected.

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