"Mark all that apply" is useful if you want humans to visually inspect the results, but makes things difficult if you want computers to analyze the results. With answers that are either yes/no, or a number, you can do a regression, or logistic regression, factor analysis, PCA, or lots of other powerful numerical algorithms. If you've got a bunch of boxes that can be checked or not checked, with no known relationship between those boxes, what are you going to do with it?
If you want to give those answers in excrutiating, painful detail, you can totally answer the optional demographic questions on the COVID-19 Impact survey!
Personally, I skipped that answer. To me as a German, anything about race is super scary and weird, because it immediately evokes my countries history.
TLDR: Just skip it, I would say it's a weird US thing
Let me be more clear: I'm disgusted by the way Americans still file data on and talk about race like it's the 1940s. If you want to talk ethnicity or social standing that's fine, but everything else should not be in data like this. If the German federal state would ask for race data in, say, passports, the public outcry would be massive.
"more reason to investigate" - no, pretty uncool since nazi times.
I am aware that critical race theory exists, and how it's important in the US etc, but I'd rather not import the US notions of race into my own country nor thinking.
Huh, that's a really interesting cultural difference. (I'm from the US.) If you don't mind me asking you to elaborate: Do most Germans consider themselves "colorblind" / think racism is a thing of the past? Or do most people generally feel like racism is still an issue in modern German society, but that explicitly categorizing race is part of the problem?
Should have noticed this when these were first posted, but weaknesses in the demographic survey:
- No multiracial
- No Native America or Pacific Islander
- Hispanic is not a race, though I selected it (I am multiracial White and Native American)
- I have no clue whether people within two generations of my family have been diagnosed with specific mental illnesses and I'm not sure how widely that type of thing gets discussed outside of immediate family
- Was the above intended to only include direct ancestors? Because I took it to include siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles
- You gave us the ability to say we're not interested in politics and not registered with a party, but did not give the ability to indicate we don't feel any particular allegiance to any of the listed named ideologies, either
I don't understand much about how the US thinks about their races so forgive me for my ignorance but if "Hispanic" is not a race where do you put people coming from Latin/Hispanic America?
As a US person I think the Hispanic/non-Hispanic scale is gesturing at indigenous ancestry from different regions, and also at language, but then also at situations of general "otherness." The scale doesn't make sense to many people in the US either. Spanish and British colonialism worked out differently. British did not create the "mixed race Indian and something else" classes so that even if multiracial people with Indian ancestry existed they were subsumed into white or black. Spanish colonialism did create the category of "mixed race Indian and something else" and so the categories don't map neatly from one region to another.
My impression was that "white" meant "mostly european ancestry", and thus hispanic was useful because it meant "mostly central and south American ancestry", even if those tend to be more mixed than Europe. The thing is, I think two things are mixed in the USA definition of race: the genetic origin of people, and how people are categorized into groups by other people based on their appearance, culture, the way they act. The first part is the "medical" part of the definition of race, and is useful in cases like sickle cell disease. The second part is the "sociological" definition of race, and is useful in cases of discrimination, racism, and studying society in general. The way both are mixed strikes me as unhelpful.
As Marginalia said, the "Hispanic" category is cultural, an artifact of the Spanish empire creating a distinct mestizo identity and subsequent countries, most notably Mexico, explicitly embracing mestizo identity as their national identity. This is quite different from the one-drop rule of the United States, but just like the United States, the people populating other American countries, including Latin American countries, were either natives or they came from somewhere else, mostly colonizers from Europe and slaves from Africa, and their races are the same as the races of the people in the United States. The biggest difference is there are far more people of partial or majority native descent.
Most official documents (employment applications and the like) have one question for "race" with a range of races, and a separate question for "ethnicity", with the two options of "Hispanic/Latino" or "Not Hispanic/Latino". As detailed in this presentation on the 2020 census: https://www2.census.gov/about/training-workshops/2020/2020-02-19-pop-presentation.pdf this dates back to the 1970 census, when the Office of Management and Budget defined "ethnicity" as a technical term referring solely to whether or not someone is Hispanic/Latino. Apparently, research has shown that integrating Hispanic-or-not into the "race" question is better design....but the 1997 OMB standards require that the question be asked separately. All the employment and university applications I've filled out follow this pattern, likely for similar legal reasons.
That's copied from my last survey demographic section, but I had it in there for a few reasons:
1. One of the things I used the survey for was to investigate what things are due to biological sex vs. self-identified gender. Without distinguishing between those, that would be impossible. I'm not going to prevent myself from investigating important questions just to avoid offending people. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-people-immune-to-optical-illusions/ for an example of some research I did with those questions.
2. Without that distinction, transgender readers might be confused about what answers to give, or people interpreting the survey might be confused about what their answers meant. Regardless of your ideology it's important to make sure you're communicating clearly with your subjects and that their answers mean what you think they mean.
3. Past research has suggested that about 3-4% of ACX readers are transgender, which is significantly overrepresented compared to the general population. I'm interested in tracking that and investigating why.
Scott, I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my rather brief message.
⛔ I'm not in the least offended but I do object to the normalisation of a particular socio-political / idealogical framework as the normative view of human categories. That I most certainly do object to. ⛔
If the purpose of the questionaire was to determin the embeddedness of a particular Ideology in the readership then fine, we'd all know the purpose and could continue on that basis but this does not seem to be the case.
If that were the case then we should have a control group using normative categories to compare and contrast against and we don't have that, so again I question the appropriateness of it's inclusion.
And so to restate my position, and with regret, I do not feel I can contribute to a ideo politically compromised questionaire without providing tacit approval to its ideo political contents.
"If that were the case then we should have a control group using normative categories to compare and contrast against and we don't have that, so again I question the appropriateness of it's inclusion."
I'm confused - what would that mean?
Suppose the readership is 100 cis men, 100 cis women, 10 trans men, and 10 trans women.
You can already tell that if you just ask "what is your gender?" without allowing anything about trans as an option, 110 of them will say male and 110 will say female.
Can you explain more how a control group would work?
My objection ⛔ is to the highly partisan language and idealogical basis of the foundational questions in this questionnaire.
You've chosen language only supported by ~8% of the american population, at most. And much less popular is other English speaking countries around the world.
Now a questionnaire on the relative support of Gender Ideaology would be a very worthwile thing to do in it's own right but mixing it's highly contentious and partisan language and ideas in has I believe biased this questionaire at it's outset and my participation in it would be to support these highly divisive idealogical ideas, which I will not support. ⛔
I'm sure such ideopolitical framing would help ward off any future New York Times hit pieces though 😕
But on that particular contentious topic, I despair at finding ANY set of terminology that's "neutral"; EVERY set of words to describe anything related to sex or gender has become politically loaded and subject to endless fights, as seen in the edit history and discussion page of any Wikipedia article on the topic. (Myself, I don't like the "Assigned * at birth" construction... what, is there a Sorting Hat making the assigment? Biological sex is *observed* at birth.)
I would be absolutely shocked if only 8% of the US population was supporting the idea of sex vs gender. You link specifies Progressive Activists, but i am most definitely not one and i support the idea.
I somewhat disagree with Gerd, but he/she/it/etc. has a point: it might be a good idea to include fallback survey options such as "I disagree with the very notion of gender as separate from sex", or something of the sort.
You are presuming a normative framework, but demography is a descriptive framework.
If you believe that trans people don't exist, or that they shouldn't list, or that they are deluded perverts, or whatever, that is your normative perspective.
But a descriptive approach acknowledges that there are a whole bunch of people who believe gender and birth sex do not align in their case. Failing to account for that perspective makes your data worse. If you just ask "man/woman" when you really want to know birth sex, you get junk data. Even if a researcher wanted to use your normative categories, they couldn't trust their responses to properly disambiguate the data.
I am trying very hard to be charitable, but even if I agreed with your ideological position (and to be clear, I don't), I'm not sure how avoiding the question would allow you to get at the information you want.
Surely, even from the point of view that transsexuals are delusional, it is useful demographic information to know whether a given subject suffers from said delusion?
I don't see anything in the survey that assumes self-identified gender is correct - it doesn't ask "what gender *are* you", but "with what gender do you primarily identify".
I think you are close to a very important insight which can allow you to better empathize with people around you. The thing you've experinced is exactly how being offended feels from inside. This rightful fury, after visualizing terrible consequences if the things would continue to go this way, this feeling of menace, of violation of someones freedoms and liberties, of being enforced some categories and narratives which you didn't consent to - is exactly the way one of these ~8% of the american population would feel reading your reply and for mostly the same reasons!
We may want to distinguish between this cluster of feelings from bitterness or resentment. Something a children may feel when their wish isn't immediately satisfied. Is it what you've meant when saying that you are not in the least offended - that you are not like this children, that your concerns are much more valid? I can agree there can be a meaningful distinction and if so, then virtue of precision motivates us to try to reshape the categories to grasp this distinction. But by exactly the same logic there is a meaningful distinction between sex and gender categories and we ougth to grasp it in order to be more precise.
It's sad that these topics are politicised. But we don't have to accept this narrative of politization. We can just try to talk about categories as precise as we can trying to figure correlationsand causality between them. Imagine how annoying and counterproductive it would be if question of not being offended was heavily politicised. If people would immediately and with straight face start to tell you that you are a deluded liar for claiming not to be offended when you clearly are, that words have meanings and you are just trying to smuggle your political agenda into the conversation.
Many readers of this blog and takers of this survey, myself included to some extent, would see a *lack* of acknowledgement of the existence/validity of transgender identities as an objectionable ideological framework.
Maybe you need a “This survey is shit button—I’m out” button to track how many people see things as starkly as Gerd that you just aren’t tracking. Might be useful to know.
Then again it’s also what the comments section is for to some extent.
I agree that from one viewpoint, it's annoying. But there are many people out there who are very much of a different viewpoint, so for the sake of taking a survey, if someone wants to identify as non-binary trans masc panromantic soft femme, let 'em and let's get on with it. I'm not gonna fight with someone else over their weirdness if they don't fight with me over mine.
This doesn't make sense to me, because the "cis" label implies the explict *absence* of any such baggage. All that weird gender identity stuff I don't understand or relate to? Doesn't apply to me. Won't hold it. Therefore, cis. The fact that this is relevant to *other* people's identity doesn't make the label that distinguishes me as "not one of them" an indictment, or imply that I endorse the ideology or whatever.
It's like, at first I live in an all-white neighbourhood and I don't even know the word 'Caucasian'. Then a black family moves in and they say "We're African-American, you're Caucasian." If they claim that they're deserving of better treatment because of this distinction, I might disagree. But I don't fight against being labeled as different when we *are* different.
There's another way of looking at this: the "cis" label implies that there can be something else than a cis woman. I think that's what C MN is referring to.
It might socially imply that, but it doesn't logically imply it.
BUT ALSO: If God (or a sufficiently advanced alien) 'changed' your sex in every possible meaning of the word 'sex' that you personally subscribe to, would that not make you the opposite sex by your own definition?
I'm not sure what you mean by "logically implying" here, but surely if you say "cis women", you're using "cis" as a modifier for "women" and thus saying that there are one or multiple "* women". If not you wouldn't use "cis" before women?
> If God (or a sufficiently advanced alien) 'changed' your sex in every possible meaning of the word 'sex' that you personally subscribe to, would that not make you the opposite sex by your own definition?
I think that would, but I don't see what you're getting at.
1. Saying 'large elephant' doesn't imply that small elephants exist.
2. If god made man into a woman, they would not be a cis woman (cis meaning assigned at birth). You seemed to be saying it is not logically possible for there to be such a thing as a non-cis woman, but this is an example where you agree there could be.
If God made 1% of all men into women, wouldn't 'cis' become a useful and meaningful term that is fine to include on surveys where relevant?
I agree completely -- the term "cis" does impose a certain worldview on the reader. I have no problem with it myself, but I can see how others might. A better survey design might look something like this:
Excellent solution. I think it is important to allow the option of conscientiously objecting to the implications of politically loaded and often intrinsically normative terminology being introduced under the guise of being merely descriptive
and put these more ideo political questions within their relevant Gender Identity sub questionnaire #17 for those that subscribe to those particular beliefs.
Everyone would have been catered to and nobody left out.
Agreed. I've been taught survey writing at the college level and that's how I would have handled it. Keep biological sex as its own question, and then for the people who believe they have a "gender identity" or whatever, they can answer question(s) about that.
But then you would get ambiguity--people who do believe that sex and gender are separate would not be clear whether they should put their biological sex or identified gender if there was only one question with only those categories.
A more fitting analogy - from the perspective of the critics here - would be if a family claiming to be aliens moved into your neighborhood, and thenceforth you had to identify as a 'terrestrial' in surveys, which would implicitly affirm the idea that some of their neighbors are actually extraterrestrials, which might be irksome.
I see your point, I'd also be irked if surveys started asking me if I identified as a flat-earther in the same way they asked me about my gender, if only because it suggests that the Overton window has shifted towards flat-earth in a way that's unacceptable to me. But then refusing to take the survey, or demanding that they *not* ask anyone whether they're a flat-earther, just seems like sticking my head in the sand. Flat-earthers exist, no matter how much I wish they don't. Taking that out on survey-takers is actively counterproductive.
As I said above, a better survey design would have questions that capture this view; something along the lines of, "I'm just a normal person and I don't think aliens exist", as opposed to, "I'm terrestrial, implying that I'm not an alien, even though that is technically correct".
I don't see how it implies that. I am definitely a terrestrial bipod primate and saying that doesn't imply any of the people in my neighborhood I'm reasonably sure are also human might actually be extraterrestrials. If it was the case that some small minority believed themselves to be extraterrestrials and this had interesting social and policy implications, though, it would be useful to capture that information in demographic surveys.
The "what do you identify as?" language seems to make both this and the original question about as fact-based and non-controversial as they can possibly be. Trans-women/men, defined as "People who were born in a male/female body and currently say about themselves that they are actually women/men" are definitely a group who exist - a question about that is entirely appropriate. In the analogy "do you identify as terrestrial or alien?" is a perfectly valid question. The fact that you may think "those people who identify as aliens are complete loons who are just as terrestrial as me" is not captured by your replying "I identify as terrestrial" - but it doesn't have to be.
Funny, because I think it's the very framing of "what do you identify as" that is problematic. By asking what one "identifies" with, the implication is that in so "identifying," one accepts, likes or is content with or at least tolerates, and/or finds some sense of meaning in said identification. Which is not at all the case for me, with respect to my biological femaleness -- i.e. I am and have always been a female, but I certainly had no choice about that, and I do NOT "identify" with "being a woman" or "womanhood" (not that I even know what "womanhood" is supposed to mean).
No one asks whether I "identify" with/as my actual demographic categories of height, age, ethnicity, citizenship, weight, eye color, or anything else. Those things are just facts, ones that you can't control and didn't have any choice about. In one COULD identify as their preferred weight category, surely there would be a whole lot of overweight people who "identify" as thin. Surely plenty of old people "identify with" being young.
I selected "cis woman" because I am heterosexual female and I'm not trans or nonbinary or whatever all the other categories are. But I certainly don't "identify" with or as a "woman" if that means some type of socially-prescribed but amorphously prescribed gender role or necessarily LIKE or feel comfortable as a woman. I just am one and it would never occur to me that there was anything I could do about it or that anyone would care how I felt about it, and the same way that there is nothing I can do about my height or age, and therefore how much I "identify" with those things is completely irrelevant.
I didn't have a problem with the survey question, and I think it's necessary to include a question that clarifies which respondents are trans, but I can see that there is a problem with "cis gender" in that presumes that a person believes in gender identity at all, or identifies as anything.
It *is* interesting, because I think I probably have a very similar attitude towards womanhood/femininity to what you are describing - that is, yeah, I have a female body therefore I'm a woman (*shrug*). I'm deeply suspicious of the very concept of "feeling like a woman/man" - that is, I believe people when they say they experience life this way, I don't experience it myself, I don't really understand how you can be so sure that you "feel like" ... some any disparate group of people with their own individual feelings about things.
But I take the whole "identify as" question much more operationally - if someone says 'are you a man or a woman?' what do I say? And, yeah, I am saying "woman" because I'm not taking gender-orthodoxy seriously (which would presumably prescribe that I should say "non-binary") and solely working on the basis of physical body. But they didn't ask that!
It occurs to me that Social Justice makes it seem plausible to be very concerned about how one is perceived demographically, even if one is generally in disagreement with social justice.
It is necessary to talk about trans issues, and impossible to talk about them without making the cis / trans distinction. It's okay to redefine our terms within a specific discussion. Words were not handed down by God.
Like, if I said 'anyone with a nose that extends between 2 and 5 cm from their lip is a flim', and that describes you, then calling you a flim doesn't carry any particular baggage between the literal meaning.
So, if you believe in sex not gender, what should an androgen insensitive person write? Given that they could likely appear female to anything but a genetic test, and live their life in that manner. As a corollary of that, have you ever had your chromosones tested? Do you know that you are in fact the chromosonal sex you are based on your phenotype?
I mean, to take devil's advocate, first of all they could just believe in phenotypal sex, and in that model there would then not be a problem with having "other" or "intersex" as a category.
This is what the "were you assigned at birth" language sorts out, doesn't it? An androgen insensitive genetic-XY person was almost certainly assigned female and had that on their birth certificate and so can say "was assigned female" - if they're happy with that, "cisgender woman" as in "gender identifies as woman, was assigned female at birth" is completely appropriate
Not him, but I personally dislike the "assigned at birth" phrasing. It connotes (in my opinion) an arbitrariness which isn't really accurate 90+% of the time. We say that (for instance) people are assigned to a specific customer support person. Or at work, we say that we were assigned a particular desk and workstation. In each case, it describes an executive decision made by management for how things will go in the future.
Picking which sex to put a birth certificate isn't like that. The doctor (or midwife or other responsible person) is making a judgement call about which typical sex binary the baby is closest to matching (which is occasionally a difficult choice, and sometimes made incorrectly.) But we don't typically use the word 'assigned' for a situation like this. We use the word 'categorize'.
I prefer the phrasing "how were you categorized at birth?"
(That said, 'assigned at birth' is a common usage and not generally worth fighting. I suspect the OP's actual issue is that it's an unambiguous tribal symbol for the blue tribe.)
The "categorized" phrasing is probably more accurate, but the common understanding assumes that the categories are natural and objective (which for intersex people, they aren't). Assignment entails some arbitrariness, which is appropriate (not that gender assignment is totally arbitrary, just... a little. In some cases).
I agree. Agreeing to be labelled as 'cisgendered' is acquiescing to a use of language that I don't want to. In the same way that someone (forget who) in response to the notion that one should be able to choose one's labelled gender (er 'woman' not 'trans-woman') said 'man' not 'cis-man'
My opinion on this is that any holdouts will simply be co-opted into the agenda. You only want a category "woman" or "man"? Perfectly fine for the trans types who want everyone to agree that there is no difference at all - "a trans woman is a real woman", not "a trans woman is a trans woman", after all. A biological male who had surgery and is loading up on hormones will be the very same thing as a biological female under such categories, and the language-police you disdain will see that as a victory for them, not for you.
If I have to pick "cis" out of "are you cis, trans, other" then I'll do so because I do insist that yes, there is a difference between natally female and female via surgeries and hormones so for me there is a difference between "cis" and "trans" (and the "assigned at birth" language annoyed me as well, but again, I'll go with that rather than surrender the field).
I acknowledge that (for example) 'man' and 'trans-man' as categories has it's problems, the migration to 'cis-man' & 'trans-man' meaning I am 'cis-man' is without my consent being sought or given
I happen to think “don't categorize me without my consent” generalizes pretty poorly as a “true” rule—and you might be interested to know that that's one of the problems I run into when communicating in some other highly genderqueer-etc.-friendly (I almost want to say -centric even though they claim to theoretically not be) circles! That is, people there taking it on as a social reality defense: “how dare you put gender in things where it doesn't belong”, or “if you think of me as anything other than *just* my declared gender you're causing problems”, and especially “if you have reason to identify a variant/specific case of category X and then add *anything* to a term indicating ‘someone who isn't in that subcategory’ and use it on me, you're marginalizing me”. Observing the symmetrical position here is… interesting.
This is without saying that the pattern has no use or is harmful in all cases—only that it generalizes badly, and the badness is especially salient here, because a hard “you may only analyze me using ontologies I approve of” will escalate any attempt at comparative analysis between groups that don't share ontology preferences on the relevant information into “don't even try”.
My impression of the trans community is that they do want to be treated differently from ordinary men or women.
For example, I am a cisgender man, who is also fat and has long hair (though not for much longer I fear). Back in my youth, strangers who only saw me from behind (thus unable to observe my beard) would address me as "ma'am" or some variant. Socially speaking, this is a minor faux pas at worst. However, if I were transgender, such an instance of misgendering would be treated as a severe insult, and potentially hate speech -- and my sense is that the modern transgender community would endorse this view.
Should I start rejecting the label of 'democrat' because I think republicans shouldn't exist and don't want to acknowledge them as a legitimate political orientation?
Because I would love to start doing that, sounds like a lot of fun.
More like rejecting the label of "democrat" because you don't have any political beliefs at all.
The people who object to "cisgender" don't believe "gender identity" exists (for them), so they object to the insinuation their biological body matches something that doesn't exist (for them).
On the weight loss survey if I lost a lot of weight due to a untreated medical condition, (then gained that weight back when the condition was treated), I'm guessing it'd be more appropriate to answer "no" to "have you ever lost more than 20lbs under a year" question, even if the answer is technically "yes"?
... I'm guessing "have untreated Crohn's Disease and c. diff for 6-8 months" isn't the sort of hot weight loss tips the survey is interested in.
Yeah, had to abandon it as well. Please remove from the list. Did a lot, but it was hard on my eyes, seemed repetative and there was no indication at all how many where left :-(
Yes, they should at least indicate roughly how long it would last. I gave up as well and had annoying visual after-effects for a bit making me slightly woozy
I'm one of the many for whom the same thing happened. Tried in Firefox on FreeBSD and Chrome on Windows. Adblocker enabled in both, which I guess might be relevant?
And this comes from someone who clung on to using IE to the bitter end until finally they forced me off with "Edge now, no other options" and made me finally move to Chrome.
On the other hand, I'm someone who NEVER used IE as my primary browser at any time; I stuck with Netscape 4 long after it was obsolete until Mozilla finally got stable enough to use as my main browser; then stuck with the Mozilla Suite/Seamonkey for a long time until finally switching to Firefox which I continue to use.
Sorry, I think what happened here is that Scott posted the wrong link, since the one that I sent was a generic one that changes into a user specific one once you actually click one it. Now the study think that one very annoying person would try to do the study very often :)
Yes, it´s an experiment rather than a survey, those are annoyingly long most of the times (since we need a lot of trials to account for the high variability in responses). Sorry for that, I´ll try to insert a progress bar in between trials.
I was about 30 minutes into the survey with no end in sight, when I quit. Since I didn't make it to the end, I couldn't give feedback/ask about the study, is there any way I can do that, that is not a comment section?
They're not kidding that it's very long! I think you should give a break about half-way through to let people rest their eyes; I found that constant staring made the images start to 'burn into' my retinas and interfered with the following images.
It was interesting in that there was definitely one image that would not resolve into uniformity for me, while a few others did very quickly.
Same here -- there was always that one problematic image that would keep popping up. Also, some of the images did cause an optical illusion for me, where the red cross would appear to float in front of the monitor.
Finished the experiment. I'll note that with the exception of the blue, I almost always (90%+) pressed the space bar 3-4 times before it accepted it, presumably because the peripheral image wasn't officially fully loaded yet.
Maybe I'm the only one, but it seems that if you're using the timing of pressing the space bar for anything, then gathering the time before the outside is completely faded in might be more useful information. As it is, for almost all of my responses, you're going to be measuring where I was in the timing of hitting the space bar and then releasing and hitting it again, rather than anything more meaningful, because the image became uniform before I was allowed to hit the space bar.
I presume you've taken it yourself to see how it works in practice?
Evaluation should give special treatment to space bar presses that were very close to the end of the loading time, they could be the n-th repetition already.
I also had the experience where pressing space did not always immediately move to the next screen. I was not sure if it was intentional to the experiment, a bug in the experiment, or an issue with my keyboard.
As it didn't suggest I should press it more than once, I didn't, with the exception of a few where, after pressing it the first time, it looked like it stopped matching the peripheral, and then the peripheral moved back in sync with the image again.
I'll note that because this effect, there were some points that I hit 'Q' because of looking away from the red cross _after_ hitting space.
Yup, that works. I agree that if it won't mess up your experiment it would be good to have some sort of indication of progress. (Maybe just some words every now and then saying things like "You're about 1/4 of the way through.")
It seemed like some of the images appeared non-uniform, at least for some time, for a reason you may not have intended: after-image effects from the initial image. (Of course, maybe you totally did intend that, but I wanted to point it out in case not.) I would be entirely unsurprised if there were cases where the inner and outer regions genuinely matched perfectly but I didn't press the spacebar because the inner region still looked darker/brighter/less-blue/... because stuff was shown there sooner.
Oh, while I'm making suggestions: as a reward at the end it would be nice if you linked to a list of what the images actually were, or a thing that lets you do the experiments without contributing to the statistics -- having tried my best to be Good all the way through and therefore _not_ see properly what was really going on at the edges, I'd have liked to see what it was I'd been missing or not missing in each case. Even better if you gave a bit of information about what effects you were looking for (perhaps with a note saying "please don't tell other people who might do the experiment later").
The webpage became unresponsive after about 3 images - the screen was just a red cross on a white background with nothing happening for 20+ seconds, and neither spacebar/Q did anything.
Yeah, I got that, except I stared at that one red cross for over ten minutes before finally coming to the comments section to see if that was what was supposed to happen. :(
I don't know what to answer in Survey 0, Demographics, for the psychological conditions where I'm both guessing I might have it (though not formally diagnosed) and I know I have a family member who's been diagnosed.
@Scott, I'll wait several hours before completing the survey in case you want to clarify which I should answer?
Survey 5 lists "Bupropion" and "Wellbutrin" separately. Is there some reason to do this, e.g. does Wellbutrin differ from generic bupropion in its effects?
The survey should list the brand name as well as the generic. People may know the former but not the latter. I Googled them, like a good little boy/girl, but I shouldn't have had to.
Given that this is the summer, survey-takers in between (HS/university/grad school) and (university/grad school/fulltime employment) are especially likely to be in weird in-between states with respect to their occupations and residence statuses. Any preference on whether to answer as one's past or future self?
If you are going HS->Uni, HS->HS or Uni->Uni I'd say you're still a student. If you're going Uni-> job but haven't started work, you're unemployed (sorry!)
I answered as my future self, even though it'll take a bit for me to actually get to studying my chosen field. Mostly because my past self didn't really have a specific area of study.
I have an identifier from a previous survey, I assume I should reuse that? The instructions don't explicitly say to use your old identifier if you have one!
Trying to do the weight loss one but I can't answer whether I have ever lost more than 20 lbs in a year as the side-effect of a medication or for some other reason because the answer is both. This seems to assume that if you have ever lost more than 20 lbs in a year, it only happened once. I suspect that is not the case for a lot of people and certainly isn't for me (for me, it's mostly because of sports, but at least once, it was actually due to medication side effects).
As a point of reference, if you pay attention to NBA basketball or NFL football where skinnier players bulk up to get strong in the offseason, but struggle to keep that on during the season, it really isn't uncommon to see the same guy lose 20 pounds in a year every year for 15 years in a row. For weight class athletes, they might lose 20 pounds 10 times in the *same* year.
Sure, but how do you treat that when it's roughly the same amount repeatedly? The in-season, off-season cycle, or fighting-weight, training-weight, tends to involve gaining and losing the same amount over and over. No single event is necessarily more extreme than others.
Survey 13 includes mescaline in the list of "psychedelic tryptamines", but mescaline is a phenethylamine, not a tryptamine. This makes it unclear whether people with experience with other psychedelic phenethylamines (2C-B, DOM, etc.) should include them in the "other" category.
I'm willing to give LSD a pass as an honorary tryptamine. It does contain the tryptamine skeleton inside its ring structure, so it can be analyzed as a highly substituted tryptamine where the substitutions include additional rings. It is also covered by the Shulgins in TiHKAL.
Survey 19 has the polarity of the answers switch halfway through the survey with no notice (ie, 1 switches from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”). I suspect the answers after that point are going to be spoiled unless that’s fixed.
I noticed that! I nearly went the wrong way round and I wonder if that was deliberate to make sure people hadn't just picked a number and were filling in by rote?
It's good survey design to mix up the polarity question to question (and user to user, if you can get away with it). Unfortunate that it might come after a series of questions that don't do so, but such is life - hopefully it'll wash out with the randomized survey order.
Granting that you don't want to establish an expectation and then flip it halfway through like that one did, it's nonetheless important to shuffle around the presentation to fight against directional biases in response. It's similar to how a good election ballot randomizes the candidate order *per ballot*, because we know that being first on the ballot is automatically worth a few percentage points.
I'm a bit unclear on what I should put down as my work status since I'm a student but am also working at a convenience store. I guess I'll put student?
Completed all of the surveys that apply to me, other than the optical illusion survey which doesn't work. I consider this sufficient to boast/worry about, as per the post's suggestions
I find the political spectrum question tricky because I consider myself a centrist in my country but that would put me very much on the left in the US.
I wonder - one thing that comes up in my conversations with Europeans is that while I'm a centrist in the US I would probably also be a centrist in, say Norway (which would put me much further objectively left) because their government is better run.
Survey 1's probability section asks for answers from 0-100 in percent, but requires a numerical answer with no other characters (and also no bounds on possible answers). This creates a lot of practical ambiguity if some people revert to answering on a 0-1 scale, since having all one's answers be less than 1% is not unreasonable.
That one is poor, but since it was phrased in "things happening TODAY" terms and since I don't think cryonics (as we have it in the past, now, and the near future) is anyway workable, I gave all those a resounding 0.
*Maybe* in 50 - ? years time, something that is feasible will come along, but honestly? Right now? I think it's the equivalent of sticking Auntie Gladys into the chest freezer after she's popped her clogs and hoping some day something can be done about it.
I entered decibel answers, and they weren't rejected, so I assumed it was alright? But I did find the wording confusing, and wondered if I should round to 0 on the smaller numbers.
I agree, but just so you know, it saves your responses even if you don't finish. For me, it took about thirty minutes including breaks for eyestrain.
I read it twice and was still totally confused.
I believe you can still skip the questions, even though the radio buttons may not let you unselect after you picked an aswer at random
+1
I'm half Japanese, quarter French, and quarter German. How should I answer the race question?
Also, the profession question. I don't work or study anything at all.
"Have you completed your formal education?" I'm a college dropout. I'd like to go back someday, but have no current plans.
I'd say "no" to that one, I guess. I'm a drop-out with no desire/plan to back, so I said "yes."
It feels weird to answer that way because it makes basically no actual difference either way. It's just something I tell myself.
Ah, but are not the stories we tell ourselves amongst those most important?
No, I don't think so. Not if they have no bearing on reality.
The standard way to do this is "mark all that apply", disappointing that Scott's using outdated methodology.
"Mark all that apply" is useful if you want humans to visually inspect the results, but makes things difficult if you want computers to analyze the results. With answers that are either yes/no, or a number, you can do a regression, or logistic regression, factor analysis, PCA, or lots of other powerful numerical algorithms. If you've got a bunch of boxes that can be checked or not checked, with no known relationship between those boxes, what are you going to do with it?
Personally, I barely managed to resist the temptation to answer "Other: 100 yard dash"
If you want to give those answers in excrutiating, painful detail, you can totally answer the optional demographic questions on the COVID-19 Impact survey!
There being other questions on other surveys doesn't change the fact that there are these questions to answer on this survey.
What are your feelings on the Alsace-Lorraine question? 😉
My feeling is that the Schleswig-Holstein Question is the more interesting one.
Was that on a different survey? I don't recall it.
You said you are quarter french/quarter German, she made a joke about a question that divides these nationalities.
Ah. Well, just goes to show how little connection I have with my heritage...
White
It's a bit late for that, for a more modern version "What are your feelings about the EU?" could get you some nice answers.
It's never too late for this type of thing… and historically Taunton is a part of Minehead, I'd have you know!
Personally, I skipped that answer. To me as a German, anything about race is super scary and weird, because it immediately evokes my countries history.
TLDR: Just skip it, I would say it's a weird US thing
You shouldn't skip it just because it seems weird. Rather, all the more reason to investigate.
Let me be more clear: I'm disgusted by the way Americans still file data on and talk about race like it's the 1940s. If you want to talk ethnicity or social standing that's fine, but everything else should not be in data like this. If the German federal state would ask for race data in, say, passports, the public outcry would be massive.
"more reason to investigate" - no, pretty uncool since nazi times.
I am aware that critical race theory exists, and how it's important in the US etc, but I'd rather not import the US notions of race into my own country nor thinking.
Huh, that's a really interesting cultural difference. (I'm from the US.) If you don't mind me asking you to elaborate: Do most Germans consider themselves "colorblind" / think racism is a thing of the past? Or do most people generally feel like racism is still an issue in modern German society, but that explicitly categorizing race is part of the problem?
Should have noticed this when these were first posted, but weaknesses in the demographic survey:
- No multiracial
- No Native America or Pacific Islander
- Hispanic is not a race, though I selected it (I am multiracial White and Native American)
- I have no clue whether people within two generations of my family have been diagnosed with specific mental illnesses and I'm not sure how widely that type of thing gets discussed outside of immediate family
- Was the above intended to only include direct ancestors? Because I took it to include siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles
- You gave us the ability to say we're not interested in politics and not registered with a party, but did not give the ability to indicate we don't feel any particular allegiance to any of the listed named ideologies, either
I don't understand much about how the US thinks about their races so forgive me for my ignorance but if "Hispanic" is not a race where do you put people coming from Latin/Hispanic America?
By their race. White, black, mixed...
Those are skin colors, not races.
As a US person I think the Hispanic/non-Hispanic scale is gesturing at indigenous ancestry from different regions, and also at language, but then also at situations of general "otherness." The scale doesn't make sense to many people in the US either. Spanish and British colonialism worked out differently. British did not create the "mixed race Indian and something else" classes so that even if multiracial people with Indian ancestry existed they were subsumed into white or black. Spanish colonialism did create the category of "mixed race Indian and something else" and so the categories don't map neatly from one region to another.
My impression was that "white" meant "mostly european ancestry", and thus hispanic was useful because it meant "mostly central and south American ancestry", even if those tend to be more mixed than Europe. The thing is, I think two things are mixed in the USA definition of race: the genetic origin of people, and how people are categorized into groups by other people based on their appearance, culture, the way they act. The first part is the "medical" part of the definition of race, and is useful in cases like sickle cell disease. The second part is the "sociological" definition of race, and is useful in cases of discrimination, racism, and studying society in general. The way both are mixed strikes me as unhelpful.
As Marginalia said, the "Hispanic" category is cultural, an artifact of the Spanish empire creating a distinct mestizo identity and subsequent countries, most notably Mexico, explicitly embracing mestizo identity as their national identity. This is quite different from the one-drop rule of the United States, but just like the United States, the people populating other American countries, including Latin American countries, were either natives or they came from somewhere else, mostly colonizers from Europe and slaves from Africa, and their races are the same as the races of the people in the United States. The biggest difference is there are far more people of partial or majority native descent.
Most official documents (employment applications and the like) have one question for "race" with a range of races, and a separate question for "ethnicity", with the two options of "Hispanic/Latino" or "Not Hispanic/Latino". As detailed in this presentation on the 2020 census: https://www2.census.gov/about/training-workshops/2020/2020-02-19-pop-presentation.pdf this dates back to the 1970 census, when the Office of Management and Budget defined "ethnicity" as a technical term referring solely to whether or not someone is Hispanic/Latino. Apparently, research has shown that integrating Hispanic-or-not into the "race" question is better design....but the 1997 OMB standards require that the question be asked separately. All the employment and university applications I've filled out follow this pattern, likely for similar legal reasons.
What's with all the gender Ideology stuff in the 0: General Demographic Information survey?
At that I'm out ⛔
It looks more like an idealogical purity test than a demographic survey.
Sex Not Gender ♂️♀️
I ignored my true beliefs on the matter and ticked the cis box, but my vast amounts of privilege makes this kind of lie very easy for me to bear.
That's copied from my last survey demographic section, but I had it in there for a few reasons:
1. One of the things I used the survey for was to investigate what things are due to biological sex vs. self-identified gender. Without distinguishing between those, that would be impossible. I'm not going to prevent myself from investigating important questions just to avoid offending people. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-people-immune-to-optical-illusions/ for an example of some research I did with those questions.
2. Without that distinction, transgender readers might be confused about what answers to give, or people interpreting the survey might be confused about what their answers meant. Regardless of your ideology it's important to make sure you're communicating clearly with your subjects and that their answers mean what you think they mean.
3. Past research has suggested that about 3-4% of ACX readers are transgender, which is significantly overrepresented compared to the general population. I'm interested in tracking that and investigating why.
Interesting hypothesis! Let's see how the survey data pans out--I think there was a question in one of em about autism iirc?
Scott, I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my rather brief message.
⛔ I'm not in the least offended but I do object to the normalisation of a particular socio-political / idealogical framework as the normative view of human categories. That I most certainly do object to. ⛔
If the purpose of the questionaire was to determin the embeddedness of a particular Ideology in the readership then fine, we'd all know the purpose and could continue on that basis but this does not seem to be the case.
If that were the case then we should have a control group using normative categories to compare and contrast against and we don't have that, so again I question the appropriateness of it's inclusion.
And so to restate my position, and with regret, I do not feel I can contribute to a ideo politically compromised questionaire without providing tacit approval to its ideo political contents.
"If that were the case then we should have a control group using normative categories to compare and contrast against and we don't have that, so again I question the appropriateness of it's inclusion."
I'm confused - what would that mean?
Suppose the readership is 100 cis men, 100 cis women, 10 trans men, and 10 trans women.
You can already tell that if you just ask "what is your gender?" without allowing anything about trans as an option, 110 of them will say male and 110 will say female.
Can you explain more how a control group would work?
Once again thanks for replying.
My objection ⛔ is to the highly partisan language and idealogical basis of the foundational questions in this questionnaire.
You've chosen language only supported by ~8% of the american population, at most. And much less popular is other English speaking countries around the world.
https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/
Now a questionnaire on the relative support of Gender Ideaology would be a very worthwile thing to do in it's own right but mixing it's highly contentious and partisan language and ideas in has I believe biased this questionaire at it's outset and my participation in it would be to support these highly divisive idealogical ideas, which I will not support. ⛔
I'm sure such ideopolitical framing would help ward off any future New York Times hit pieces though 😕
Again agree. Control of language is power of itself. See most of Orwell's work for further detail
But on that particular contentious topic, I despair at finding ANY set of terminology that's "neutral"; EVERY set of words to describe anything related to sex or gender has become politically loaded and subject to endless fights, as seen in the edit history and discussion page of any Wikipedia article on the topic. (Myself, I don't like the "Assigned * at birth" construction... what, is there a Sorting Hat making the assigment? Biological sex is *observed* at birth.)
I would be absolutely shocked if only 8% of the US population was supporting the idea of sex vs gender. You link specifies Progressive Activists, but i am most definitely not one and i support the idea.
Yep. This commenter is clearly a crank
I somewhat disagree with Gerd, but he/she/it/etc. has a point: it might be a good idea to include fallback survey options such as "I disagree with the very notion of gender as separate from sex", or something of the sort.
Edit: as I'd mentioned above, it might be good to include some options such as "I'm just a man/just a woman", in addition to "cis/trans".
Great idea. The people who select "just an X" are different from those who select "cis/trans."
Good suggestion.
You are presuming a normative framework, but demography is a descriptive framework.
If you believe that trans people don't exist, or that they shouldn't list, or that they are deluded perverts, or whatever, that is your normative perspective.
But a descriptive approach acknowledges that there are a whole bunch of people who believe gender and birth sex do not align in their case. Failing to account for that perspective makes your data worse. If you just ask "man/woman" when you really want to know birth sex, you get junk data. Even if a researcher wanted to use your normative categories, they couldn't trust their responses to properly disambiguate the data.
I am trying very hard to be charitable, but even if I agreed with your ideological position (and to be clear, I don't), I'm not sure how avoiding the question would allow you to get at the information you want.
Surely, even from the point of view that transsexuals are delusional, it is useful demographic information to know whether a given subject suffers from said delusion?
I don't see anything in the survey that assumes self-identified gender is correct - it doesn't ask "what gender *are* you", but "with what gender do you primarily identify".
I think this is like objecting to research programs whose goal is to study some topic that isn't yet thoroughly understood.
I think you are close to a very important insight which can allow you to better empathize with people around you. The thing you've experinced is exactly how being offended feels from inside. This rightful fury, after visualizing terrible consequences if the things would continue to go this way, this feeling of menace, of violation of someones freedoms and liberties, of being enforced some categories and narratives which you didn't consent to - is exactly the way one of these ~8% of the american population would feel reading your reply and for mostly the same reasons!
We may want to distinguish between this cluster of feelings from bitterness or resentment. Something a children may feel when their wish isn't immediately satisfied. Is it what you've meant when saying that you are not in the least offended - that you are not like this children, that your concerns are much more valid? I can agree there can be a meaningful distinction and if so, then virtue of precision motivates us to try to reshape the categories to grasp this distinction. But by exactly the same logic there is a meaningful distinction between sex and gender categories and we ougth to grasp it in order to be more precise.
It's sad that these topics are politicised. But we don't have to accept this narrative of politization. We can just try to talk about categories as precise as we can trying to figure correlationsand causality between them. Imagine how annoying and counterproductive it would be if question of not being offended was heavily politicised. If people would immediately and with straight face start to tell you that you are a deluded liar for claiming not to be offended when you clearly are, that words have meanings and you are just trying to smuggle your political agenda into the conversation.
Many readers of this blog and takers of this survey, myself included to some extent, would see a *lack* of acknowledgement of the existence/validity of transgender identities as an objectionable ideological framework.
Maybe you need a “This survey is shit button—I’m out” button to track how many people see things as starkly as Gerd that you just aren’t tracking. Might be useful to know.
Then again it’s also what the comments section is for to some extent.
I'm a white hetero married Republican Mormon, and I'm perfectly fine with answering that question. I'm curious about the data.
Also just probably outed myself in the survey data, huh. But that's OK. I'm not too worried about my answers.
Yep, there can't be too many of those around here, even considering the likely positve correlation of those traits.
He definitely didn't out himself.
I agree that from one viewpoint, it's annoying. But there are many people out there who are very much of a different viewpoint, so for the sake of taking a survey, if someone wants to identify as non-binary trans masc panromantic soft femme, let 'em and let's get on with it. I'm not gonna fight with someone else over their weirdness if they don't fight with me over mine.
Same. I am not a cis woman. I am a woman. The "cis" label implies a whole bunch of baggage that I am not going to hold.
This doesn't make sense to me, because the "cis" label implies the explict *absence* of any such baggage. All that weird gender identity stuff I don't understand or relate to? Doesn't apply to me. Won't hold it. Therefore, cis. The fact that this is relevant to *other* people's identity doesn't make the label that distinguishes me as "not one of them" an indictment, or imply that I endorse the ideology or whatever.
It's like, at first I live in an all-white neighbourhood and I don't even know the word 'Caucasian'. Then a black family moves in and they say "We're African-American, you're Caucasian." If they claim that they're deserving of better treatment because of this distinction, I might disagree. But I don't fight against being labeled as different when we *are* different.
There's another way of looking at this: the "cis" label implies that there can be something else than a cis woman. I think that's what C MN is referring to.
It might socially imply that, but it doesn't logically imply it.
BUT ALSO: If God (or a sufficiently advanced alien) 'changed' your sex in every possible meaning of the word 'sex' that you personally subscribe to, would that not make you the opposite sex by your own definition?
I'm not sure what you mean by "logically implying" here, but surely if you say "cis women", you're using "cis" as a modifier for "women" and thus saying that there are one or multiple "* women". If not you wouldn't use "cis" before women?
> If God (or a sufficiently advanced alien) 'changed' your sex in every possible meaning of the word 'sex' that you personally subscribe to, would that not make you the opposite sex by your own definition?
I think that would, but I don't see what you're getting at.
1. Saying 'large elephant' doesn't imply that small elephants exist.
2. If god made man into a woman, they would not be a cis woman (cis meaning assigned at birth). You seemed to be saying it is not logically possible for there to be such a thing as a non-cis woman, but this is an example where you agree there could be.
If God made 1% of all men into women, wouldn't 'cis' become a useful and meaningful term that is fine to include on surveys where relevant?
I agree completely -- the term "cis" does impose a certain worldview on the reader. I have no problem with it myself, but I can see how others might. A better survey design might look something like this:
"I identify as:
( ) Cis Man
( ) Cis Woman
( ) Trans Man
( ) Trans Woman
( ) Simply a Man
( ) Simply a Woman
( ) Non-binary
( ) Gender-fluid
( ) Other
That's a really good way to put it.
Excellent solution. I think it is important to allow the option of conscientiously objecting to the implications of politically loaded and often intrinsically normative terminology being introduced under the guise of being merely descriptive
Yes, as it stood, I just wrote it under "other." I'm just a body! My experience of my own brain isn't gendered (unsure how I'd even know if it was).
Better yet to simply ask in questionnaire #0
Male ()
Female ()
Prefer not to say ()
and put these more ideo political questions within their relevant Gender Identity sub questionnaire #17 for those that subscribe to those particular beliefs.
Everyone would have been catered to and nobody left out.
Agreed. I've been taught survey writing at the college level and that's how I would have handled it. Keep biological sex as its own question, and then for the people who believe they have a "gender identity" or whatever, they can answer question(s) about that.
But then you would get ambiguity--people who do believe that sex and gender are separate would not be clear whether they should put their biological sex or identified gender if there was only one question with only those categories.
A more fitting analogy - from the perspective of the critics here - would be if a family claiming to be aliens moved into your neighborhood, and thenceforth you had to identify as a 'terrestrial' in surveys, which would implicitly affirm the idea that some of their neighbors are actually extraterrestrials, which might be irksome.
I see your point, I'd also be irked if surveys started asking me if I identified as a flat-earther in the same way they asked me about my gender, if only because it suggests that the Overton window has shifted towards flat-earth in a way that's unacceptable to me. But then refusing to take the survey, or demanding that they *not* ask anyone whether they're a flat-earther, just seems like sticking my head in the sand. Flat-earthers exist, no matter how much I wish they don't. Taking that out on survey-takers is actively counterproductive.
As I said above, a better survey design would have questions that capture this view; something along the lines of, "I'm just a normal person and I don't think aliens exist", as opposed to, "I'm terrestrial, implying that I'm not an alien, even though that is technically correct".
I don't see how it implies that. I am definitely a terrestrial bipod primate and saying that doesn't imply any of the people in my neighborhood I'm reasonably sure are also human might actually be extraterrestrials. If it was the case that some small minority believed themselves to be extraterrestrials and this had interesting social and policy implications, though, it would be useful to capture that information in demographic surveys.
Bad analogy.
You're talking about a disagreement in empirical facts - where they were born.
There's no disagreement on empirical facts in the trans debate (or at least, not among educated members of the debate on both sides.)
Objecting to someone saying empirical facts which aren't true is different from objecting to someone changing semantic definitions of words.
The "what do you identify as?" language seems to make both this and the original question about as fact-based and non-controversial as they can possibly be. Trans-women/men, defined as "People who were born in a male/female body and currently say about themselves that they are actually women/men" are definitely a group who exist - a question about that is entirely appropriate. In the analogy "do you identify as terrestrial or alien?" is a perfectly valid question. The fact that you may think "those people who identify as aliens are complete loons who are just as terrestrial as me" is not captured by your replying "I identify as terrestrial" - but it doesn't have to be.
Funny, because I think it's the very framing of "what do you identify as" that is problematic. By asking what one "identifies" with, the implication is that in so "identifying," one accepts, likes or is content with or at least tolerates, and/or finds some sense of meaning in said identification. Which is not at all the case for me, with respect to my biological femaleness -- i.e. I am and have always been a female, but I certainly had no choice about that, and I do NOT "identify" with "being a woman" or "womanhood" (not that I even know what "womanhood" is supposed to mean).
No one asks whether I "identify" with/as my actual demographic categories of height, age, ethnicity, citizenship, weight, eye color, or anything else. Those things are just facts, ones that you can't control and didn't have any choice about. In one COULD identify as their preferred weight category, surely there would be a whole lot of overweight people who "identify" as thin. Surely plenty of old people "identify with" being young.
I selected "cis woman" because I am heterosexual female and I'm not trans or nonbinary or whatever all the other categories are. But I certainly don't "identify" with or as a "woman" if that means some type of socially-prescribed but amorphously prescribed gender role or necessarily LIKE or feel comfortable as a woman. I just am one and it would never occur to me that there was anything I could do about it or that anyone would care how I felt about it, and the same way that there is nothing I can do about my height or age, and therefore how much I "identify" with those things is completely irrelevant.
I didn't have a problem with the survey question, and I think it's necessary to include a question that clarifies which respondents are trans, but I can see that there is a problem with "cis gender" in that presumes that a person believes in gender identity at all, or identifies as anything.
It *is* interesting, because I think I probably have a very similar attitude towards womanhood/femininity to what you are describing - that is, yeah, I have a female body therefore I'm a woman (*shrug*). I'm deeply suspicious of the very concept of "feeling like a woman/man" - that is, I believe people when they say they experience life this way, I don't experience it myself, I don't really understand how you can be so sure that you "feel like" ... some any disparate group of people with their own individual feelings about things.
But I take the whole "identify as" question much more operationally - if someone says 'are you a man or a woman?' what do I say? And, yeah, I am saying "woman" because I'm not taking gender-orthodoxy seriously (which would presumably prescribe that I should say "non-binary") and solely working on the basis of physical body. But they didn't ask that!
It occurs to me that Social Justice makes it seem plausible to be very concerned about how one is perceived demographically, even if one is generally in disagreement with social justice.
It is necessary to talk about trans issues, and impossible to talk about them without making the cis / trans distinction. It's okay to redefine our terms within a specific discussion. Words were not handed down by God.
It doesn't, though.
Like, if I said 'anyone with a nose that extends between 2 and 5 cm from their lip is a flim', and that describes you, then calling you a flim doesn't carry any particular baggage between the literal meaning.
So, if you believe in sex not gender, what should an androgen insensitive person write? Given that they could likely appear female to anything but a genetic test, and live their life in that manner. As a corollary of that, have you ever had your chromosones tested? Do you know that you are in fact the chromosonal sex you are based on your phenotype?
I mean, to take devil's advocate, first of all they could just believe in phenotypal sex, and in that model there would then not be a problem with having "other" or "intersex" as a category.
This is what the "were you assigned at birth" language sorts out, doesn't it? An androgen insensitive genetic-XY person was almost certainly assigned female and had that on their birth certificate and so can say "was assigned female" - if they're happy with that, "cisgender woman" as in "gender identifies as woman, was assigned female at birth" is completely appropriate
Had a good chuckle at this one because I realized I have no idea which direction you’re being triggered from
"All the gender ideology stuff" being the single question about if you're trans or not? Unless it's been edited since you wrote this.
Not him, but I personally dislike the "assigned at birth" phrasing. It connotes (in my opinion) an arbitrariness which isn't really accurate 90+% of the time. We say that (for instance) people are assigned to a specific customer support person. Or at work, we say that we were assigned a particular desk and workstation. In each case, it describes an executive decision made by management for how things will go in the future.
Picking which sex to put a birth certificate isn't like that. The doctor (or midwife or other responsible person) is making a judgement call about which typical sex binary the baby is closest to matching (which is occasionally a difficult choice, and sometimes made incorrectly.) But we don't typically use the word 'assigned' for a situation like this. We use the word 'categorize'.
I prefer the phrasing "how were you categorized at birth?"
(That said, 'assigned at birth' is a common usage and not generally worth fighting. I suspect the OP's actual issue is that it's an unambiguous tribal symbol for the blue tribe.)
The "categorized" phrasing is probably more accurate, but the common understanding assumes that the categories are natural and objective (which for intersex people, they aren't). Assignment entails some arbitrariness, which is appropriate (not that gender assignment is totally arbitrary, just... a little. In some cases).
I agree. Agreeing to be labelled as 'cisgendered' is acquiescing to a use of language that I don't want to. In the same way that someone (forget who) in response to the notion that one should be able to choose one's labelled gender (er 'woman' not 'trans-woman') said 'man' not 'cis-man'
My opinion on this is that any holdouts will simply be co-opted into the agenda. You only want a category "woman" or "man"? Perfectly fine for the trans types who want everyone to agree that there is no difference at all - "a trans woman is a real woman", not "a trans woman is a trans woman", after all. A biological male who had surgery and is loading up on hormones will be the very same thing as a biological female under such categories, and the language-police you disdain will see that as a victory for them, not for you.
If I have to pick "cis" out of "are you cis, trans, other" then I'll do so because I do insist that yes, there is a difference between natally female and female via surgeries and hormones so for me there is a difference between "cis" and "trans" (and the "assigned at birth" language annoyed me as well, but again, I'll go with that rather than surrender the field).
I acknowledge that (for example) 'man' and 'trans-man' as categories has it's problems, the migration to 'cis-man' & 'trans-man' meaning I am 'cis-man' is without my consent being sought or given
I happen to think “don't categorize me without my consent” generalizes pretty poorly as a “true” rule—and you might be interested to know that that's one of the problems I run into when communicating in some other highly genderqueer-etc.-friendly (I almost want to say -centric even though they claim to theoretically not be) circles! That is, people there taking it on as a social reality defense: “how dare you put gender in things where it doesn't belong”, or “if you think of me as anything other than *just* my declared gender you're causing problems”, and especially “if you have reason to identify a variant/specific case of category X and then add *anything* to a term indicating ‘someone who isn't in that subcategory’ and use it on me, you're marginalizing me”. Observing the symmetrical position here is… interesting.
This is without saying that the pattern has no use or is harmful in all cases—only that it generalizes badly, and the badness is especially salient here, because a hard “you may only analyze me using ontologies I approve of” will escalate any attempt at comparative analysis between groups that don't share ontology preferences on the relevant information into “don't even try”.
My impression of the trans community is that they do want to be treated differently from ordinary men or women.
For example, I am a cisgender man, who is also fat and has long hair (though not for much longer I fear). Back in my youth, strangers who only saw me from behind (thus unable to observe my beard) would address me as "ma'am" or some variant. Socially speaking, this is a minor faux pas at worst. However, if I were transgender, such an instance of misgendering would be treated as a severe insult, and potentially hate speech -- and my sense is that the modern transgender community would endorse this view.
In my experience, they don't make a big deal out of honest mistakes. They'll just correct you.
Should I start rejecting the label of 'democrat' because I think republicans shouldn't exist and don't want to acknowledge them as a legitimate political orientation?
Because I would love to start doing that, sounds like a lot of fun.
Already happened:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
More like rejecting the label of "democrat" because you don't have any political beliefs at all.
The people who object to "cisgender" don't believe "gender identity" exists (for them), so they object to the insinuation their biological body matches something that doesn't exist (for them).
Thanks, your ideology relating to these topics will not be recorded.
On the weight loss survey if I lost a lot of weight due to a untreated medical condition, (then gained that weight back when the condition was treated), I'm guessing it'd be more appropriate to answer "no" to "have you ever lost more than 20lbs under a year" question, even if the answer is technically "yes"?
... I'm guessing "have untreated Crohn's Disease and c. diff for 6-8 months" isn't the sort of hot weight loss tips the survey is interested in.
I wasn't sure how to answer in relation to pregnancy either. I answered honestly, but I think it will seem inaccurate.
I ran into the same issue. Pregnancy seemed not to have been anticipated by the responses available
Same.
Survey 21, optical illusions, would not open with the error "A problem occurred:
Couldn't find cookie for study result ID 31188. Are cookies allowed in your browser?"
I experienced the same error on all of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
Fine on Firefox on Android
I got the same error in Firefox on both a Windows computer and an Iphone.
Forgot to mention, I tried on Safari and Chrome on MacOS
Weird, it works for me (though it's very long and annoying). I'll email the author.
Worked, but way too long. I abandoned it
Yeah, had to abandon it as well. Please remove from the list. Did a lot, but it was hard on my eyes, seemed repetative and there was no indication at all how many where left :-(
I felt exactly the same way. Sorry, but I have kids wanting their supper, and I really need to know approximately how long this is going to take.
Yes, they should at least indicate roughly how long it would last. I gave up as well and had annoying visual after-effects for a bit making me slightly woozy
I got the same on Chrome.
Maybe if anyone *can* see 'the test', *that* is the optical illusion!
I now realize that the correct answer to the metaphysics survey was "what survey?"
I'm getting the same problem on Chrome, including incognito Chrome.
I'm one of the many for whom the same thing happened. Tried in Firefox on FreeBSD and Chrome on Windows. Adblocker enabled in both, which I guess might be relevant?
Same issue in Firefox, with adblocker enabled.
I tried on Chrome, Opera GX, Firefox, and *Microsoft Edge*, no luck :(
You tried Edge? That's *real* desperation! 😁
And this comes from someone who clung on to using IE to the bitter end until finally they forced me off with "Edge now, no other options" and made me finally move to Chrome.
On the other hand, I'm someone who NEVER used IE as my primary browser at any time; I stuck with Netscape 4 long after it was obsolete until Mozilla finally got stable enough to use as my main browser; then stuck with the Mozilla Suite/Seamonkey for a long time until finally switching to Firefox which I continue to use.
Same, on my chrome copycat, aka "brave browser"
Sorry, I think what happened here is that Scott posted the wrong link, since the one that I sent was a generic one that changes into a user specific one once you actually click one it. Now the study think that one very annoying person would try to do the study very often :)
With this link, it should work:
https://jatos.mindprobe.eu/publix/1521/start?batchId=1702&generalMultiple
Holy moly is your survey long. I’d have appreciated some kind of progress meter telling me how far through it I was.
Yes, it´s an experiment rather than a survey, those are annoyingly long most of the times (since we need a lot of trials to account for the high variability in responses). Sorry for that, I´ll try to insert a progress bar in between trials.
Thanks for perservering anyhow!
I was about 30 minutes into the survey with no end in sight, when I quit. Since I didn't make it to the end, I couldn't give feedback/ask about the study, is there any way I can do that, that is not a comment section?
Yeah me too, I didn't have that much free time, I probably did about 20 images and then quit.
They're not kidding that it's very long! I think you should give a break about half-way through to let people rest their eyes; I found that constant staring made the images start to 'burn into' my retinas and interfered with the following images.
It was interesting in that there was definitely one image that would not resolve into uniformity for me, while a few others did very quickly.
Same here -- there was always that one problematic image that would keep popping up. Also, some of the images did cause an optical illusion for me, where the red cross would appear to float in front of the monitor.
Finished the experiment. I'll note that with the exception of the blue, I almost always (90%+) pressed the space bar 3-4 times before it accepted it, presumably because the peripheral image wasn't officially fully loaded yet.
Maybe I'm the only one, but it seems that if you're using the timing of pressing the space bar for anything, then gathering the time before the outside is completely faded in might be more useful information. As it is, for almost all of my responses, you're going to be measuring where I was in the timing of hitting the space bar and then releasing and hitting it again, rather than anything more meaningful, because the image became uniform before I was allowed to hit the space bar.
I presume you've taken it yourself to see how it works in practice?
+1, except less than 90% -- maybe 30%?
Evaluation should give special treatment to space bar presses that were very close to the end of the loading time, they could be the n-th repetition already.
Ditto.
I also had the experience where pressing space did not always immediately move to the next screen. I was not sure if it was intentional to the experiment, a bug in the experiment, or an issue with my keyboard.
As it didn't suggest I should press it more than once, I didn't, with the exception of a few where, after pressing it the first time, it looked like it stopped matching the peripheral, and then the peripheral moved back in sync with the image again.
I'll note that because this effect, there were some points that I hit 'Q' because of looking away from the red cross _after_ hitting space.
Yup, that works. I agree that if it won't mess up your experiment it would be good to have some sort of indication of progress. (Maybe just some words every now and then saying things like "You're about 1/4 of the way through.")
It seemed like some of the images appeared non-uniform, at least for some time, for a reason you may not have intended: after-image effects from the initial image. (Of course, maybe you totally did intend that, but I wanted to point it out in case not.) I would be entirely unsurprised if there were cases where the inner and outer regions genuinely matched perfectly but I didn't press the spacebar because the inner region still looked darker/brighter/less-blue/... because stuff was shown there sooner.
Oh, while I'm making suggestions: as a reward at the end it would be nice if you linked to a list of what the images actually were, or a thing that lets you do the experiments without contributing to the statistics -- having tried my best to be Good all the way through and therefore _not_ see properly what was really going on at the edges, I'd have liked to see what it was I'd been missing or not missing in each case. Even better if you gave a bit of information about what effects you were looking for (perhaps with a note saying "please don't tell other people who might do the experiment later").
I really wished for this as well.
+1
The webpage became unresponsive after about 3 images - the screen was just a red cross on a white background with nothing happening for 20+ seconds, and neither spacebar/Q did anything.
Yeah, I got that, except I stared at that one red cross for over ten minutes before finally coming to the comments section to see if that was what was supposed to happen. :(
How do I enter my key at that link? I didn't have a dark room handy for this survey so I haven't tried it yet.
21 seems to be broken - "A problem occurred:
Couldn't find cookie for study result ID 31188. Are cookies allowed in your browser?"
Have the same problem
Same.
Sorry, there was some link mix up.
With this link, it should work:
https://jatos.mindprobe.eu/publix/1521/start?batchId=1702&generalMultiple
I don't know what to answer in Survey 0, Demographics, for the psychological conditions where I'm both guessing I might have it (though not formally diagnosed) and I know I have a family member who's been diagnosed.
@Scott, I'll wait several hours before completing the survey in case you want to clarify which I should answer?
Just check that you're guessing you might have it.
Sorry those aren't multi-check boxes, Google Forms is really bad at letting you analyze multi-check boxes and I try to avoid them whenever possible.
Tip for future surveys: Specify that the survey-takers should choose the first option that applies to them if multiple options apply.
Survey 5 lists "Bupropion" and "Wellbutrin" separately. Is there some reason to do this, e.g. does Wellbutrin differ from generic bupropion in its effects?
I was curious about this, as well.
The survey should list the brand name as well as the generic. People may know the former but not the latter. I Googled them, like a good little boy/girl, but I shouldn't have had to.
I thought it might be a technique to figure out how savy/informed a person is, but they don't seem to do that with other drugs.
For family members with mental illness, what is considered family? Sister? Uncle? Cousin? Or strictly two generations of ancestors?
More specifically, I assumed that only blood relatives counted, but it doesn't say so.
first cousins are within two generations (shared grandparents), second cousins aren't
Given that this is the summer, survey-takers in between (HS/university/grad school) and (university/grad school/fulltime employment) are especially likely to be in weird in-between states with respect to their occupations and residence statuses. Any preference on whether to answer as one's past or future self?
If you are going HS->Uni, HS->HS or Uni->Uni I'd say you're still a student. If you're going Uni-> job but haven't started work, you're unemployed (sorry!)
I answered as my future self, even though it'll take a bit for me to actually get to studying my chosen field. Mostly because my past self didn't really have a specific area of study.
I have an identifier from a previous survey, I assume I should reuse that? The instructions don't explicitly say to use your old identifier if you have one!
Alert: Survey 2 doesn't ask for user ID
That doesn't seem to be the only one; #7 doesn't either.
Yeah, I told the survey makers this but they didn't seem interested in fixing it, so I guess they won't have that demographic information.
Survey #15 also does not ask for ID.
Trying to do the weight loss one but I can't answer whether I have ever lost more than 20 lbs in a year as the side-effect of a medication or for some other reason because the answer is both. This seems to assume that if you have ever lost more than 20 lbs in a year, it only happened once. I suspect that is not the case for a lot of people and certainly isn't for me (for me, it's mostly because of sports, but at least once, it was actually due to medication side effects).
As a point of reference, if you pay attention to NBA basketball or NFL football where skinnier players bulk up to get strong in the offseason, but struggle to keep that on during the season, it really isn't uncommon to see the same guy lose 20 pounds in a year every year for 15 years in a row. For weight class athletes, they might lose 20 pounds 10 times in the *same* year.
The instructions say, "If you lost a lot of weight more than once, pick he most extreme case."
Sure, but how do you treat that when it's roughly the same amount repeatedly? The in-season, off-season cycle, or fighting-weight, training-weight, tends to involve gaining and losing the same amount over and over. No single event is necessarily more extreme than others.
Survey 13 includes mescaline in the list of "psychedelic tryptamines", but mescaline is a phenethylamine, not a tryptamine. This makes it unclear whether people with experience with other psychedelic phenethylamines (2C-B, DOM, etc.) should include them in the "other" category.
Likewise for LSD.
I'm willing to give LSD a pass as an honorary tryptamine. It does contain the tryptamine skeleton inside its ring structure, so it can be analyzed as a highly substituted tryptamine where the substitutions include additional rings. It is also covered by the Shulgins in TiHKAL.
Yes, I had the same concern. I left out any non-tryptamine psychedelics (excluding LSD and analogues if we want to be that fussy)
Survey 19 has the polarity of the answers switch halfway through the survey with no notice (ie, 1 switches from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”). I suspect the answers after that point are going to be spoiled unless that’s fixed.
I noticed that! I nearly went the wrong way round and I wonder if that was deliberate to make sure people hadn't just picked a number and were filling in by rote?
I wondered if that might be intentional based on the survey content.
It's good survey design to mix up the polarity question to question (and user to user, if you can get away with it). Unfortunate that it might come after a series of questions that don't do so, but such is life - hopefully it'll wash out with the randomized survey order.
Why is that good survey design? Doesn't it increase the risk of people answering the opposite of what they mean?
Granting that you don't want to establish an expectation and then flip it halfway through like that one did, it's nonetheless important to shuffle around the presentation to fight against directional biases in response. It's similar to how a good election ballot randomizes the candidate order *per ballot*, because we know that being first on the ballot is automatically worth a few percentage points.
Ditto
What's the deal with user ID? Where can I get one? Is it necessary?
There's a link to a random ID generator in the first survey.
What's to stop you from using a nonrandomized User ID? Why is a randomized one required?
Nothing stops you and it isn't required. But a random one is better at maintaining anonymity and less likely to be picked by multiple people.
For me, survey 21 says: A problem occurred:
Couldn't find cookie for study result ID 31188. Are cookies allowed in your browser?
I have cookies enabled.
Some commented elsewhere in this thread with a corrected link.
I'm a bit unclear on what I should put down as my work status since I'm a student but am also working at a convenience store. I guess I'll put student?
The digital literacy survey has some typos and grammatical errors.
Completed all of the surveys that apply to me, other than the optical illusion survey which doesn't work. I consider this sufficient to boast/worry about, as per the post's suggestions
Congratulations! (also, you're *fast*)
I had to leave out the fun ones about psychedelics and being trans and so on, because I am Very, Very Boring And Dull.
Still, I hope I can boast/worry in company with my peers here!
Same! We should get a medal.
Wow! If you want to complete the last one also, try the fixed ink :)
https://jatos.mindprobe.eu/publix/1521/start?batchId=1702&generalMultiple
Same (I did get the optical illusion one to work for me and I feel doubly proud to have sat all the way through that one.)
Same here. When you do it over the course of few days, it's not much at all.
I just took all of em (except the ones that don't apply to me) in a blatant bout of procrastination from packing!
I find the political spectrum question tricky because I consider myself a centrist in my country but that would put me very much on the left in the US.
The people asking questions about US politics will probably just exclude non-Americans anyway.
I wonder - one thing that comes up in my conversations with Europeans is that while I'm a centrist in the US I would probably also be a centrist in, say Norway (which would put me much further objectively left) because their government is better run.
Survey 1's probability section asks for answers from 0-100 in percent, but requires a numerical answer with no other characters (and also no bounds on possible answers). This creates a lot of practical ambiguity if some people revert to answering on a 0-1 scale, since having all one's answers be less than 1% is not unreasonable.
That one is poor, but since it was phrased in "things happening TODAY" terms and since I don't think cryonics (as we have it in the past, now, and the near future) is anyway workable, I gave all those a resounding 0.
*Maybe* in 50 - ? years time, something that is feasible will come along, but honestly? Right now? I think it's the equivalent of sticking Auntie Gladys into the chest freezer after she's popped her clogs and hoping some day something can be done about it.
Yup. I just answered those with a 0.000001.
There should be a 'technically possible, but not happening' button on those
50 years is way too early. I am not convinced cryonics is even theoretically possible, let alone technologically achievable.
I entered decibel answers, and they weren't rejected, so I assumed it was alright? But I did find the wording confusing, and wondered if I should round to 0 on the smaller numbers.