totally agree. If i talked about race in German, you´d instantly see what I´m doing and decide it´s going into the wrong direction. It´s the anglosphere´s most alien concept to me. Atavistic.
I've lost about 2 inches out of 70 as a age. Did I get 3% fatter? I mean, maybe, if they same external fat is squished shorter...but is it relevant to anything?
And how to define "beaten" anyway? "Parents used corporal punishment" could mean anything from smacking to "punched in the face and bones broken" (some pondscum have tried getting off abuse charges by using the 'corporal punishment is legal' defence).
Even smacking is now defined as physical abuse, something I disagree with. Basically, if you're beating your kid out of anger and frustration, and badly enough to leave marks, it's abusive*. If you're doing it at a mild level as discipline, and will stop once the kid is old enough to reason with/old enough that they should know themselves how to behave, it's not.
When I was seven the school principal beat me badly enough that lawyers were involved and there was a court order forbidding any more physical discipline of me. I was not informed of any of this so that I wouldn't abuse my impunity -- I only found out decades later after the principal in question died. But I lived in a time/place where physical pain/injury was considered a normal part of growing up (boys fought, we fell out of trees, dogs bit) so the incident didn't seem extraordinary at the time.
I can see how some people would still be uncomfortable leaving that question blank if there were a 'none of the above' answer, because that's tantamount to saying 'some of the above'. If you truly wanted to give people an option to withhold that information, leaving it ambiguous is the way to do it.
Actually it's 40 megameters in circumference, and this is not an accident. The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator on a line passing through Paris.
A system purporting to base itself on physical nature would not choose 1/4 of something, and since the rest of the system is multiples of 10^3, using 10^7 makes no sense. Especially since you could easily get a human-scale measurement unit without breaking the conventions of the system.
But if the goal was to make the new system more palatable, you'd want something already familiar.
If the people who created the metric system had been trying to make their new units nearly the same as old units, as that article suggests, then they would have made e.g. the kilogramme something different.
There _is_ some evidence that they were trying to make a unit approximately equal to something else, but the something-else wasn't the yard, it was the length of a pendulum with period 1 second, which had been proposed as a unit of length some years before. They liked the idea but preferred something that wasn't based on the somewhat-arbitrary value of "1 second", and they thought basing the unit on the size of the earth was more objective.
[EDITED to add:] Weirdly, the author of that article _knows_ about the pendulum thing, but then goes on in the very next paragraph to say that _obviously_ the definition in terms of the circumference of the earth was fudged to make the result approximately equal to ... one yard.
(It's hard to tell how seriously the article is intended to be taken. Obviously not entirely seriously, but I get a vibe of "humour for plausible deniability" about it, like the real point of the article is to be rude about the French and the metric system and Europe, but the author knows they don't really have a very good case, so they make deliberately silly arguments and write in a slightly silly voice so that they can say "oh, come on, can't you take a joke?" if anyone complains.)
I read it as less CYA and more amping up the outrage for comedic reasonings.
I think they're using the pendulum as a counterexample of how it would have been done if they were "really" about objectivity. But I think it's also pretty obvious that the naming convention was done for convenience/acceptability sake rather than naturalness. His example of 1 cubic DECImeter = 1 KILOgram = 1 (non-modifier) liter is pretty obvious. And making the base unit require a prefix? In what world does that make sense?
I also agree that the desire to decimalize everything is more arbitrary than "scientific" fwiw.
The Revolutionary-era French did a lot of things that made no sense and the metric system was actually one of their rare exceptions. The meter was, at one time, defined as 1/10,000 of the way from the North Pole to the equator on the meridian of Paris. Dividing the polar circumference into quarters isn't arbitrary; nature does it for us. The poles and the equator would exist whether we existed to observe them or not.
You can't be serious. The Earth is close enough to a sphere to give a measure of distance that was useful to the Revolutionary-period French. Actually, it's good enough for most purposes right now (not GPS or satellite launches).
Re 'What is your highest degree earned?' the structure of the answers implies both MD and JD are higher than PhD or Masters, and that JD is higher than MD - but maybe you just put JD/MD at the end because they are professional degrees. I would rank them Masters < JD < MD < PhD.
How about "At the end of an average year, what percent of your income will you have saved?"?
For me after-tax/net income would make more sense, as I instinctively compare savings to what I could have actually spent, but not sure if the same is true for others.
Also, I interpreted the question as "wage income," but dividends and bond coupon payments are "income," too [so says the IRS]. For "wage income" I used pre-tax. This comes up ALL THE TIME on the Bogleheads personal finance site :-)
This is an issue for many older people. I spend all of my wage income. I save all of my investment income (because essentially all of it is in tax-deferred retirement accounts that I can't touch without a penalty.) The two income sources are of the same order of magnitude.
Most of my "income" is in "required minimum distributions, which is compulsory and confiscatory dis-saving (beyond what I would need to withdraw to cover expenses). Almost all the rest is Social Security, so the answers aren't really comparable over the life cycle. When working, I put the legal maximum into retirement accounts, and I would leave it there (and to my heirs) if I could.
No, nothing is stopping me, and I do that; however, the marginal income tax rate, state and local, on that forced "income" is 25% to30%; also, any income from those new accounts is subject to income tax in the year that it is earned, so the balance grows at a much reduced rate. And I am not paying lower fees in the new accounts (why would you imagine that I would?). If the assets were still in tax-sheltered retirement accounts, my heirs would not have to pay income taxes on the income from those assets until they were, in turn, forced to sell.
In the interest of confusing things even more, I will note that 'part-time' work doesn't seem to be covered :-)
I consider myself to be working part-time (20 hours/week), many of my co-workers refer to me as semi-retired. I don't know if this is common enough to be worth breaking out. I answered employed/for-profit.
Note that this might matter when computing average/median/whatever incomes, too.
I have income from rental properties that I own, manage, and report on my taxes. Does this count as part of my annual income? If so is it the revenue or the net income? (~50k vs ~10k).
On the mental illness question, after mindlessly checking the bottom box for almost all of them, I initially did the same for "Suicide", only to notice afterward that, oops, the bottom box means something very different there! I don't know if there's any good way to edit this now, but in the future I would suggest making it more obvious that those aren't parallel so that people don't make the same mistake.
Thanks. I felt weird starting with "Yes I attempted suicide and wish it succeeded", so I moved it to a slightly different part of the survey where people hopefully wouldn't have the same muscle memory patterns going.
Disagree. It makes perfect sense paired with “attempted”. It's perfectly possible to succeed at other things that people might consider bad, such as hiding evidence of a crime or conquering an unwilling city-state.
I think what you mean is that it's insensitive, but because words are weird I think "succeeded" is appropriate to get the point across in this context.
I'm outraged that you've excluded all the (digital) nomads :D
With regard to the covid questions and whether my country was too strict (etc) I very much enjoyed watching all the ways the mostly European countries varied in their approaches.
My favourite Covid experience was going by train from Copenhagen to Stockholm to get a visa and crossing the bridge into Sweden they announced that we could now take our masks off (this was European Summer 2020).
France curfewing people (6am - 6pm), and making it so you can only get in one entrance of a department store (yay, lets queue outside too close together). That aside, in general, I actually liked a bunch of France's approach -- getting tested was so easy.
This makes me worried that my answers in income, politics and covid sections will be misinterpreted, as economical situation, politics and covid management are quite different between Russia (what I answered) and Germany (where I live)
Re: "At the end of an average year, what percent of your income will you have saved?"
To clarify: This is how many percent of your income you have saved (verb)? It could also be interpreted as how many percent of your income you have saved (adjective); compare "I have not saved a lot this year, but I have a lot saved".
I also assumed, especially in view of the question after it, that it meant something like "what fraction of your income this year did you put into savings/investments and not take out?". I think the "still have it" phrasing currently in the question may be suboptimal; suppose I put in 50%, all into the stock market, and then the market crashed by 50%; it's not clear whether in that situation I should say 50 or 25. (The stock market _hasn't_ crashed by 50% this year, but some people might invest in very volatile things.)
I had to make a *lot* of assumptions (and do a lot of digging!) to get my savings rate -
I ended up counting stock grants I hadn't cashed out as pure savings based on the FMV at vest, but that could be done in a number of different ways (current stock price, stock price at grant), and for us folks whose compensation is largely in stock can make a huge difference in how it's calculated. I did a comparison of net worth YoY to compare but obviously that's all over the place based on the markets.
I ended up including the company 401k match because it was a big chunk, 50% of contributions with no limit ~$10k. I didn't include the company HSA contribution.
I also only ended up including explicit savings (transferred out from main checking to designated savings) rather than cash left over because I ran out of ADHD hyperfocus and wanted to just finish.
I find the financial questions hard to answer. I’m mostly a homemaker with little kids and I work part-time. My income is piddly but doesn’t reflect household income. Depending what you’re measuring about us that might skew things. I contribute 1/4 of what I make to an IRA but it’s peanuts. Husband also contributes a more robust sum to my retirement. So it’s his income but technically my savings; who should count it?
Despite the wording of the question it's very unlikely to go to 0. If you look at other failed coins, they sit at ~$0.00001. I'm not even sure it would be possible for it to go all the way to 0.
Since there are only 21 million coins in total, this would imply that you can't even find 200k people to keep it above 0.01. Or some fraction of 200k holding multiple.
One of the options is "I think I might have this condition, although I have never been formally diagnosed", and another option is "I have family members (within two generations) with this condition".
Shouldn't there be an option for when you strongly suspect that a family member has depression, but you are not aware of any formal diagnosis?
When I had family members that probably had condition xxx, I just answered that I had family members with that condition. Plenty of family members would not have told me about any formal diagnoses they might have had. I also ignored diagnoses given to family members who seemed to have *something* wrong with them, and got a new and different diagnosis every year or two, most of which seem ridiculous in retrospect.
Backyards are a government hoax designed to make you think there's anything outside your house except the great yawning void that consumes you for 8+ hours each day and returns you home with fake memories.
Our opinion on housing doesn't matter because we don't get to pick where new houses go, they seem to sprout from the void overnight.
for me the dichotomy doesn't make sense because being NIMBY (as my area tends to be) most strongly hurts current and lifelong residents. So I want everyone to have housing, and in this case that is in order to protect the people who already live there. New residents can overwhelmingly afford available housing and most new development (YIMBY) is being geared towards them (yes, brings money in) And many more people who have lived here for generations are meeting the criteria for homelessness (couch surfing, living in a camper, etc)
not that clear to me. looks more like "YIMBY but they're doing it wrong" (i.e. new housing unaffordable for current residents and drives prices up, which is bad, but NIMBY wouldn't make things better either)
I did that for the climate change question, for similar reasons. It both does and doesn't "require" strong action, depending on what we are willing to give up, or will give up anyway, because we don't get around to taking (vigorous) action. It's a thing; we're doing it; but almost all possible future trajectories are livable.
I object to it, although I answered (2). I am an ecomodernist/ecopragmatist, and I think climate change requires strong action but not the kind that most people think will be effective. http://www.ecomodernism.org
Also, "strong action" could mean building dikes, farmers switching crop varieties, and the like. I think most people will interpret it as "strong action to reduce climate change," but that isn't the only sort of action nor the most obviously justified.
I don't think so. If you reduce the amount of climate change you reduce its impact. If you prevent flooding by diking you also reduce the impact of the climate change that occurs.
I had a similar thought, which was "intellectually: 100% YIMBY; in actuality: probably more NIMBY than I'd care to admit." Like, if I felt that YIMBY reduced my property values or enjoyment of my neighborhood, I'd have to override my NIMBY urges by sheer force of will / self-guilting (but luckily I have scrupulosity OCD which gives me superpowers in self-guilt).
1) I am against building things I don't like in my backyard (or the backyard of anyone who doesn't want it). I am for building things I like in my backyard (and the backyards of other people, unless they genuinely mind).
2) I want more housing so that people have better living options. I want neighborhoods protected from uncontrolled development so that people have better living options. Those aren't contradictory. The whole conflict feels limited to an extremely specific historical era in an extremely specific place (parts of the US), and plenty of places in the world could provide a blueprint for solving it without taking either the "limit housing so property values rise" or the "just let developers do anything they want, anywhere they want" option, of which both seem extremely unappealing.
Other questions of the sections aren't any clearer.
"Do you prefer the big city or the suburbs?" - both are great for some reasons and awful for others, and my preferred living environment would merge the good aspects of both.
"Where do you live now?" - right now, I live in a townhouse at a town square. On one hand, for European standards, this is as urban as it gets (as in, the environment really does not differ much from historical centres of bigger cities), on the other, it's a small town in the extended suburb system of a bigger city to which I commute to work. So, urban or suburban? Earlier, I lived in a residential tower block neighborhood in the aforementioned bigger city. When you consider their design and architecture, they may be the single most "urban" environments you get around here. But in terms of urban planning and the city's historical development, they're THE suburbs.
Re: "Do you usually wear a face mask when going out to stores or restaurants?"
I think this question will depend on a lot on the current status of COVID waves in the answerer's geographical area. Personally I wear masks only when there's a recent surge, when there's a mandate, or when I'm sick. I think the question should be split or phrased in a way that informs you of the personality/habits of the answerer, rather than the current crisis level.
Agreed. I interpreted it to mean "…when there is no consensus on whether it is or is not appropriate.", e.g., there is no local mandate, but businesses still have signs posted and/or 6-ft markers on the floor.
Wasn't there a unique ID you were supposed to remember from previous years survey so you could compare them? Did you drop that idea or maybe forget about it?
Question about why you distrust the media says has "Option for people who put 1, 2, or 3 in questions above"; this is clearly intended to say "3, 4, or 5".
Related, the question required picking one item that was the "most" relevant to the lack of trust. I did not feel like any of them constituted a single moment that I went from trust to no trust, but I still lost a lot of trust in the same time period due to a mixture of several of those news stories.
‘Since SSC also covers a lot of ground! When in SSCs history? I think i started reading SSC in 2013 but I know there were others who were even earlier to the party, including those who were reading Scott before SSC
Judging by the comments on ACX, very much so - it's a new group, with a new set of consensus views and positions. I read it less than I read SSC, and fairly confidently expect that any comments I make will be ignored as coming from someone who doesn't "get" the things "we" all agree on, unlike with SSC.
I'm missing "Retired" under Work Status. Should I choose "Homemaker" instead, or "Independently wealthy"? I don't really feel *wealthy*, I just have a pension and some savings....
I wish you would add "academic research" or some such to the list of work options. I do mostly scientific research at an R1 institution in the US, and there was no good option for me. I ended up choosing "Government" because technically that's what my university is. "Academia - mostly teaching" doesn't fit me, nor does "nonprofit" (although my research is certainly not for profit) or "student" (not anymore).
Suppose one took the SAT during the brief period where there were three sections (Math, Reading, and Writing) and it was scored up to 2400. What should they give as their Verbal/Reading score? Reading, Writing, or (Reading + Writing) / 2?
My second guess for the Moscow distance question was almost exactly my number of unread emails (off by 4), but I swear this wasn't anchoring (I actually answered them in reverse order, I was too lazy to look up my inbox number until I went back).
Why no option for (East) Indian / South Asian in the ethnic group question? There's options for Bengali and Tamil but most Indians are not covered in these groups.
I went off some list of large/common ethnic groups and I guess those weren't in there. Are there any very large Indian subethnicities not in there which I should include?
Among the diaspora the other groups with substantial representation are Punjabis and Gujaratis. If you have a significant readership in India proper though then even those four groups will only cover a small minority. You may just want a catchall option like ‘ other Indian.’
Drawing from Razib's work, I would atleast add the following clusters:
* Add South Indian as an options ( Telugus dominate as the biggest tech Indian demographic)
* Western Indian (Marathi, Gujju - both big US disasporas & likely to be ACX readers)
* Add Rajasthani/ Punjabi / Pakistani should be 1 genetic cluster. But no self-respecting Indian would tick Pakistani irrespective of how similar they area. North-western Indian / Pakistani is probably a good middle ground.
What about people from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, or Odisha? Given their large population there are probably some ACX readers from there. Also, NW Indian is confusing. Is a person from Central UP belongs to NW Indian?
I say NW-Indians because they all have a significant presence of steppe ancestry.
For UP/Bihar ---> the Yadavs, Jats, Kshatriyas and Gangetic Brahmins would comfortably fit into the NW-indian mega-cluster with significant steppe ancestry. This covers most UP/Bihar diasapora (upper class) in the US
Nepal, Jharkhand, NE Indian, Orissa, Bengal & Bihar have noticeable east-asian ancestry.
Generally though, the whole thing is a spectrum and geographical & linguistic identities don't map neatly onto genetic backgrounds. So, I can see why anyone would struggle with getting the categories right when it comes to India.
Bengalis and Tamils constitute only about 12% of India's population, so the vast majority of Indians are not covered. A large portion of Indian tech employees in the US are Telugu, they're not covered even though I'm pretty sure quite a few of them are your readers. That's probably true of many other Indian sub-ethnicities. Similarly, Sri Lankans or Nepalis are not included either. You should add a category for Indian / South Asian to take these into account.
Abortion question: this is a legality question, right? I.e. it's enough for highly pro-choice that abortion services are as accessible as any other medical services and this fact is well-known and not hidden, and even informal stigmatisation is considered bad. Propaganda and state support for child-rearing do not count against this.
I wonder if on policy questions like immigration it would be useful next time to ask «the axes of current thresholds are somewhat reasonably chosen/oriented, independently of thresholds themselves being too high or too low»
I think it's important to distinguish legal and illegal immigration; I put middle because I want illegal immigration stopped to the greatest extent possible and punished when discovered. But broader legal immigration is desirable, and the backlog for legal immigrants is a disgrace.
Adding another "agreed" here. I'd be down for *some forms* of much more immigration, there's no attempt to differentiate even in broad ways which ones I'd be down for.
Strongly agree. I put middle as well for the same reasons. If there were two choices, one for illegal and one for legal, I would have been at the extremes of both, in opposite directions.
This survey was a lot of fun! There are two things that might make sense to change.
1. It seems to me like the race category should allow people to write in a custom option. In particular, the "other" category in the race question mixes multi-racial people with unlisted races (like Native American, African, Pacific Islander) and I think those should be separate categories. A "check all that apply" box could be used too.
2. I opened a new to the BMI calculator when answering the BMI question and that tab stayed open by the time I reached "how many tabs do you have open" question even though I had no intention of returning to the BMI tab later. I think the open tabs data should take place early in the survey, to avoid contamination by the survey itself.
1. I hate including custom options because if I do, a pretty sizeable percent of people who fit into one of the real options will use it, eg instead of checking "Black" they will write in "I am Black although I don't know for sure if I have some White ancestry somewhere", and then it isn't machine readable. I get thousands of responses and so anything that isn't machine-readable isn't getting processed.
2. If you chose not to close the BMI tab, that's useful information!
I had to skip a lot of questions, or give non-committal answers, because they didn't make sense. The most salient one was about giving my political views on a spectrum from left to right. Like many people I don't accept or identify with 'left' or 'right' politically. The term 'right' as used in politics is effectively libellous because it defines extreme forms of conservatism, or anti-socialism, as fascist.
Minor points:
City versus suburban living was impossible to answer because there is a third alternative, living in the country, which is different from both the other options; and it's probably not a single dimension.
Class background is (obviously, because the questionnaire is mainly for Americans) defined in American terms and doesn't suit my experience as an Englishman, so I had to translate, with some uncertainty. Specifically, US middle class is equivalent to UK lower middle class. For historical reasons the UK middle classes are taken to be well above the median income and social status.
I had to look up all the philosophical terms: consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, contractualism and natural law. That was embarrassing, because I think of myself as having a broad range of general knowledge, but obviously not as broad as I thought.
Yeah, having "suburban" as the extreme option didn't make much sense to me. Suburban is such a broad category that it doesn't really describe a specific level of density to me. Using "rural" as the extreme option would have made more sense, but I guess very few ACXers live in rural areas. Maybe extend it to a seven-point scale too?
english phd scraping buy is still upper-middle class and has social capital to get real and start earning well whenever they want - or think harvard dropout.
I take the survey every year, but ran into an issue for the jobs question. "Other white-collar" and "other blue-collar" are the only listed options for people with an unmentioned job, but many positions don't slot well into those frameworks, and there's no option to actually write-in your profession. As it stands, I can't progress any further in the survey (I assume the question is optional, but it's a big enough one I'd *like* to answer it).
I think «income» question would benefit from an extra country field (especially when changing EU contries too much to identify with a single one more than the country of origin…)
Hmm, my estimation that my viral cold was CoViD is based on once-in-a-lifetime smell distortion symptoms, but they went away within a few days, not a full week (while some weak effect — not sure if heart of lungs — lingered for more than a year)…
Come on Scott, that isn't how it works! Your sex is determined at the moment of fertilisation. I really hope that this was just an oversight from a cut and paste job.
Some intersex conditions cause your sex assigned at birth to differ from your genetic sex - they don't generally do a genetic test to assign sex at birth, they just look at external genitals.
It is easy to be very sure what is written in your documents. Knowing that you don't have a condition where your apparent sex differs from genetic _to the same level_ of being sure probably requires either a genetic test (including a chimerism check). You probably can get quite sure — but still not as sure as about reading a document — if you have children.
So if you want a question where everyone has the same availability of an answer, you use documented observations.
Many intersex people don't know they're intersex! The sex assigned at birth is the best phrasing here because that's what the question is asking for. What did people put down for you when you were born?
Everything else is hard to be sure about and statistically probably doesn't matter.
ETA: It looks like this may be a simple misunderstanding of vocabulary.
"Assigned" also means "to fix or specify in correspondence or relationship"; in this context, your sex is being specified and fixed on your birth certificate.
The phrase "assigned at birth" is commonly used to distinguish "biological sex" from a self-identified gender, since in English we use the same terms for biological sex classifications and the social constructs commonly associated with them.
Yes, they know. I imagine they object to the tone the assigned at birth wording has, which implies a certain arbitrariness, like it's just a doctor's whim, that sex very much does not have.
I have the same objection and would rather not speak woke if possible.
That one bothered me as well. I usually refuse to answer questions framed in this form, though I did this one, because it's Scott. I think that talking about "assignment" is a really creepy way of instilling gender ideology, by implying that biology has nothing to do with what sex I am.
What I always tell people is that my sex was not ASSIGNED at birth - it was IDENTIFIED at birth. In a very small handful of cases, such as those mentioned by Michelle below, it is MISidentified, but a misidentification is still a form of identification, not assignment.
> by implying that biology has nothing to do with what sex I am
Classifying a person by a social group associated with biology and using the one as a proxy for the other is exactly the opposite of implying that they have nothing to do with each other. I'm glad you agree that instilling gender ideology based on someone's genitals is creepy, but it's common enough in western culture that it is generally socially accepted. I would prefer to decouple the two, but that's proving really difficult because of how deeply the association is ingrained in public social constructs (so much that people commonly mistake one for the other!) But unless I've totally missed something, the creepiness of a person's sexual assignment is not what the survey is trying to measure, as it only asks about social sex assignment, not biological sex traits.
I believe by gender ideology he is referring to the claim that sex is a social construct and not biological. I don't know what you are thinking of when you use the term.
I don't think anybody is claiming that there is not such a thing as biological sex characteristics.
"sex is a social construct" is not an ideology; it's a definition. A modern definition, perhaps, and more commonly ascribed to "gender" (which uses the same categorical terminology), but a definition. An ideology ("a system of ideas and ideals" or "the ideas and manner of thinking characteristic of a group") would be something like "as someone of gender X, you should behave/be treated this way". That ideology is absolutely instilled from birth based on people's genitals.
It's "a definition" for a tiny sliver of activists at best; it is not THE definition accepted by the majority of the population throughout the centuries that English has been spoken.
"Sex roles" (/"gender roles") are a social construct, if you wish. "Sex" is biology.
Whether or not your sex is _determined_ at fertilization, there is also a thing that happens at or around birth where your parents/doctors decide what sex you are.
More generally: it is a _good thing_ for a question about a controversial topic not to make controversial assumptions that it doesn't need to, and it is a _good thing_ for its answer to be interpretable without knowledge of what controversial assumptions the person answering makes.
So if Scott had just asked "What sex are you?" he wouldn't be able to tell whether any given respondent is answering "what are your chromosomes?", "what was your gross anatomy at birth?", "what is your gross anatomy now?", "what do you feel like you are?", or something else.
He could have asked something like "What is your chromosomal sex?" but then some people -- probably more than have a problem with the question as it is now -- would have said "well, strictly I don't know because I've never had that tested" or something.
And if he'd asked something like "What sex are you? This is determined by your chromosomes, your natural hormone levels and the genitalia you were born with." then some participants would have said "bah, no it isn't" and refused to answer. Again, probably more than will refuse to answer because he used the phrase "assigned at birth".
It seems I was unclear; I didn't mean "decide" in the sense of "make it so" but in the sense of "come to a decision". Again, whether they do that or whether they merely observe it is a controversial question; but it is not controversial that they do look at you, come to a decision about what sex you are, and write it down.
There is probably a way of describing this that is unambiguous and gives less appearance of question-begging than using the phrase "assigned at birth", but I don't think there is any that isn't clumsy and cumbersome. "When you were born, what sex did your parents and doctors consider you to be?" or something.
(I take it that you would prefer a question that unashamedly assumes that what they were doing was simply observing the Objective Fact Of What Sex You Are. Again, I think that is a mistake regardless of whether you are completely right or completely wrong about what sex is and how it's determined. Some ACX readers will disagree with you about that, and they should be able to take the survey and give answers that will be correctly interpreted.)
That depends on why the question is included at all. If Scott wants to do a scientific evaluation of male vs female responses then he needs to know the actual, objective sex of the responder.
What is the difference between (1) the thing you consider the actual, objective sex of the responder, and (2) the thing that is "assigned at birth"? (I guess those differ in the case of some intersex conditions, but from the rest of the discussion here it seems clear that that's not your objection.)
I appreciate that you dislike the term "assigned at birth", but that's a separate matter.
No, the phrase "assigned at birth" is the whole matter. It is objectively wrong.
If there is one thing that rationalists have going for them, it is precision. Precision even in the face of social hostility is what makes rationalism valuable, without that they are just a group of nerds with odd hobbies.
"If Scott wants to do a scientific evaluation of male vs female responses then he needs to know the actual, objective sex of the responder."
To truly know that for sure, he would have to insist that every single respondent gets a full genetic screening.
It seems like what you really want him to be asking is basically "Did you have a penis or a vagina when you came out of your mother's womb?", but that's a rather crude framing. And even that isn't something that people always know for certain: intersex babies with mixed or ambiguous genitalia are often subjected to "corrective" surgery during infancy, and grow up without ever realizing that their current genitalia configuration isn't the one they were born with! So asking "What did the doctors write on your birth certificate?" makes sense, as that question can be answered with a greater degree of accuracy.
A random PubMed google suggests the frequency of chromosomal intersex conditions (genitalia do not match chromosomes) is 0.018%. For there to be even 1 respondent who has this quandary there would need to be ~5000 or more respondents.
Should the survey be careful to be straightforwardly answerable by all other people who have assorted conditions or situations at the 0.018% probability level? One imagines this would make for a rather complicated and verbiose instrument.
What makes you think Scott wants to do a scientific evaluation of responses differentiated by some specific biological marker? The fact that he uses "assigned at birth" suggests he's looking to differentiate people who were raised under a set of assumptions commonly associated with one gender or another. Likely whatever answer he gets will correlate strongly with whatever biological marker you want to associate with gender, and probably more closely on average than answers he would get asking for Marker A would correlate against answers he would get asking for Marker B (especially since not everybody knows all their biological markers, so he wouldn't get as many responses). Given that he didn't ask for Marker A or Marker B, I don't think that difference is meaningful enough for his purposes here.
God help Scott, this entire sub-thread is worse than a combination of herding cats *and* minding mice at a crossroads. If he temp-banned the entire lot of us participating in this quarrel, he'd be within his rights (of the Reign of Terror).
I have no idea when this whole gender identity problem will cool down, but it's not going to happen in the next ten minutes, that's for sure.
"There is probably a way of describing this that is unambiguous and gives less appearance of question-begging than using the phrase "assigned at birth", but I don't think there is any that isn't clumsy and cumbersome."
There is a completely unambiguous and non-question-begging way of asking the question which isn't clumsy at all, which is the way I proposed in the message you were responding to. "What sex were you IDENTIFIED as at birth?"
That solves all of the problems that you raised about chromosomes and the like; it even allows for the possibility that the identification was wrong. All it does is report the identification made at the time, without implying that it was some kind of arbitrary non-biological choice in the way that "assigned" (or related words like "decided") does.
I don't see how you think identification is more fluid than assignment. If you were assigned X earlier and later assigned Y, you can still say you were assigned X. If you were "identified as" X earlier and later identified as Y, then you can no longer say you were identified as X, rather that you were misidentified as X. There is exactly one identity.
This particular survey question is not about your identity. It is about how you were classified when you were born. If your classification at birth was wrong, it doesn't matter, the survey just wants what classification you were assigned when you were born. Hence, "assigned at birth".
"If you were "identified as" X earlier and later identified as Y, then you can no longer say you were identified as X, rather that you were misidentified as X."
Of course you can say you were "identified as X" in those circumstances! "I was identified as a girl at birth, but the doctors were wrong, I'm in fact male" is a perfectly meaningful and comprehensible statement.
And I wasn't claiming that "identification" was "more fluid" (I'm not even totally sure what that would mean). I am claiming that "assignment" is misleading, because IN PRACTICE the way in which people's sex is identified at birth* is by observation, and we don't generally use the term "assign" for observed phenomena (even when the observation is sometimes mistaken). If I look in the sky at the planets, I don't say "I assign that planet as Saturn", I say "I identify that planet as Saturn" - and even if I'm a lousy astronomer and the planet is actually Jupiter, I've still "identified" the celestial object in question, not "assigned" it.
(*NOTE: I say "at birth", but actually it often happens before birth nowadays. When my wife was pregnant with my daughter and we went for an ultrasound, the doctor asked "Do you want to know the sex of the baby?" [note "know", implying the observation of a factual matter]. We replied "Yes", the doctor looked at the ultrasound and announced "It's a girl"[again as an observation of a fact]. I respectfully submit that "assign" is a really really misleading way of describing that process - and would still be misleading, even if it turned out that the doctor had misread the ultrasound and had got it wrong ... And if she HAD got it wrong, the correction would still have been made by observation at the time of the birth.)
I can't believe we're fighting over this thanks to the survey, but I suppose that is Culture War for you. I wish it weren't.
Though I do want people to apply this language to race: "no, see, your parents came to a decision at birth that you were [whatever]". I could see that in cases like Meghan Markle, who is mixed-race and the African-American quotient of her genetics diluted down enough that it would make sense to go "I/we/they decided Meghan is black, not white".
I do think there would be some table-flipping over "if your classification at birth was wrong, then you can correct it" or "you were identified as X but now you identify as Y so you were misidentified at birth" when it comes to race, though 😁
"I take it that you would prefer a question that unashamedly assumes that what they were doing was simply observing the Objective Fact Of What Sex You Are"
Because that is what is happening with your biological sex at birth, save in the cases of actual physical/physiological divergence.
When you're old enough to have an opinion on the matter and understand the words, you can decide your gender for yourself. But your sex at birth *is* objective fact, just as it is objective fact that you (probably) had two arms and two legs and one head. Nobody "comes to a decision" about the number of limbs on the upper trunk.
Saying "well my sex and my gender are the same thing, and I am female sex (because I got my dick inverted, have fake boobs and am on HRT)" is not the physical reality. Your natal sex is one fact. Your current self-identified gender is another fact. The alteration to a greater or lesser degree of your anatomy to fit in with the observable physical attributes associated with a particular sex is another. It seems now in some places you can identify as legally female with no changes at all, but whether that is to be taken as "female gender" or "female sex" is a question I'll leave up to the lawyers to parse:
"Let’s back up a second. Should we be using male or female pronouns with you? How do you identify?
I’m very neutral, like non-binary, although I don’t like that word. I’m legally female. But I have facial hair. I have a penis. I have no breasts. I don’t have a feminine voice. I don’t wear makeup or dress up like a female. So imagine you’re a grocery store [clerk] and you’re bagging my groceries and you say, “Excuse me, sir . . . ” I mean, am I supposed to be offended? That’d be ridiculous. How would this person know? But technically, for legal terms, I am she/her. I put “female” on my driver’s license. But I’ve had to struggle my whole life fitting into traditional society.
...When did you get your driver’s license changed?
The license came in January 2019 [the month that the California Gender Recognition Act took effect]. But there’s a discrepancy in California, you can go through your doctor. But it’s very easy to get it. You can go in and sign a piece of paper. So I just waited until January to do it. And that was the first month that it was available. Basically, anybody could walk in and get one."
Here's another objective fact: Not everyone agrees with you about all that. It seems sensible to write questions like this one in ways that don't produce wrong answers or needless upset in the presence of people who disagree with you.
What would you prefer the question to say? If someone taking the survey thinks that their sex and their gender are the same thing, and that for them neither of those matches what is on their birth certificate, what answer will they give to the question as posed and what answer to your preferred version?
(By the way, something seems to have gone wrong in your edit; you've quoted a bit from the article you linked to but it's cut off partway.)
Not everyone agrees the Earth is round. Should we be careful to teach geography classes in ways that don't offend those who think differently?
If your answer is "Of course not! That's different!" then the issue of whether some fraction of people think differently is not the core of your disagreement: you disagree about the underlying facts, in particular about whether disagreement on this point is rational or not. And if that's the case, it's a bit disingenuous to present the objection as if it's just not about offending people. It isn't. It's a powerful disagreement about what is classified as objective fact and what is classified as opinion about which reasonable men may differ.
This is something guaranteed to get everyone hot under the collar. One set thinks that striving for the most accurate agreement with how they perceive the topic is the best, the other set resents what seems like imposition and dictation to them as to how they should perceive reality.
As to the article, yes I cut bits out, I only wanted to show how easy it was to be declared "legally female" and have that on your driver's licence in California, without doing one single thing towards transition/passing socially or any other way. If you really want to know the intervening details of how he (or she, to be legally in agreement) has sex, you can read the linked article for yourself.
How would I prefer the question? "What was your natal sex? Is your current sex the same?" I think that leaves it open for "boy/still boy/ now girl/non-binary/twelve genders" options. without having to go into detail that gets everyone in each other's faces.
Natal sex: Female
Still the same? Yes/No (simple, doesn't ask about what your consider your sex/gender to be. Maybe you identify as 'same sex, different gender', maybe you think 'I was always a boy but they mislabelled me at birth', maybe you think 'my sex and gender are different now, baby!')
For trans people the sex on their birth certificate and the sex assigned at birth can differ. Many jurisdictions allow you to amend the sex or other details on a birth certificate. Heck, my mom had to have her NAME amended on her birth certificate after getting married because that’s the way her jurisdiction does things.
Rejecting the normal convention for asking someone what their presumed anatomical sex was at birth and replacing it with a new phrasing to satisfy a niche crowd that is extremely sensitive to issues around gender nonconformity seems itself to be controversial.
Oh to hell with it, just go with "what was your natal sex? is it the same as your current sex?"
Gender is its own separate special little oil fire, but we shouldn't have to dance around "your parents decided you were a boy when you were born", or why not say "your parents decided you were human", "your parents decided your eyes were blue", "your parents decided you had five fingers on each hand" - okay, for polydactyly there is an exception, as for intersex. But most people it's "five fingers, boy or girl". That this has become an arena for grievance posturing by all sides is ridiculous.
I think that's precisely the disagreement, though. From your (and mine) point of view, natal sex is a biological fact, just like the number of fingers on hands and whatnot. But Social Justice is essentially postmodernist; they believe that all facts, from sex to finger counts are entirely socially constructed. According to this view, there is no underlying reality that we can reliably access in order to determine what sex anyone or anything is; or even how many objects there are in a set -- at the end these are all social conventions, and all social conventions are only relevant insofar as they perpetuate or oppose structures of oppression.
But then there is no such thing to base any feelings of "this is not what I am meant to be" on. If sex, just like gender, is a social construct, then we can't refer to "trans woman", what we have is "assigned male at birth who prefers to select behaviours from the bundle associated with those assigned female at birth".
So you're not a woman, you're a man who behaves, dresses, names himself, and refers to himself in this set of attributes, not those. There is no "man", there is no "woman" and asking to be called a woman is as incorrect as asking to be called a pine tree (or as correct, if we can assign sexes and genders based on "this is how I feel I am" why not other elements?)
I can't validate your femininity because that has no existence, all I can do is congratulate you on a performance (and hence the prevalence of drag queens now associated with the trans movement? drag queens are the most trans of all, because they perform the most highly mannered version of the bundle of assigned traits with the label "female"?)
I believe (though I could be wrong) that the canonical answer to this is that social constructs are the only things that matter; arguably, the only things that can truly be said to exist. Some Social Justice proponents do indeed advocate for the abolition of gender (and thus, sex) as a social construct altogether; under this model, there would be no such thing as "male" or "female", just people doing things. However, AFAICT that is not the majority opinion.
One opposing faction agrees with gender abolitionists in principle. However, they argue that in practice misgendering does great harm to people *now*; and thus we can't afford to wait for a blessed genderless world to come along, we need to solve or at least ameliorate the problem to stop human suffering. And one way to do that would be to fully enable people to choose their own gender (and therefore sex), thus alleviating their suffering; fortunately, this move will also move us closer to gender abolition.
Another school of thought is of the opinion that, if people feel very strongly about being "male" or "female", then it would be wrong to work towards abolishing such feelings; after all, personal experiences are all we have, and arguably all that we could *ever* have. According to this view, self-identification must be exalted above any other goals, and if you wish to truly identify as a pine tree (or whatever), you must be celebrated for doing so.
Is that really the case? It's been quite a while since I was a new parent, but I thought quite a lot of people, maybe even most, now had some amnio done in utero, to rule out Down's et cetera, and all of those people have the sex chromosomes observed as a matter of course. I'd be a little surprised if in most or almost all cases the sex of infants is only known at birth.
Amnio is not common as it carries a small but measurable risk of miscarriage, but cell-free testing (NIPT) does look at fetal (/placental) DNA that is circulating in the mother's bloodstream and is routine in many places.
I think "assign" can mean different things. For example, you are assigned a name at birth, which (in the western world) has very different meanings for the first name and the last name. The first name is arbitrarily decided by the parents while the last name is at picked out of a set of less than three and often less than two options.
We commonly say "the last name of the family was assigned to the child" while not saying "the person who gave birth was assigned as the mother on the birth certificate", even though the amount of bits in either process may in fact be zero.
A more neutral way would be "my birth certificate gives my sex as ...", which would sidestep the issues of sex, gender, biological determination and social construction completely.
Or one could directly ask for the Y chromosome, which is what xkcd did in their color survey.
It's probably only worth asking for the chromosome if your results are useless without it, because of the people who will go 'well I _could_ have androgen insensitivity, nobody has bothered to find out'.
Birth certificate sex seems to be what this question actually wants to know.
Ugh how asking basic questions has turned into a minefield. I'd imagine Scott used that phrasing because it is the standard AMA phrasing or something like that. If I were him, I would have probably used the same phrasing and not for lack of "belief" in biological sex.
One might worry about the linguistic hegemony of it all, and that isn't without basis. But polarization is its own hegemonic force - as in, more extreme views and norms arise as the result of polarization (at least, I think this is the case). It might be that if less mindshare is given to this fight about gender/sex that everyone just quietly gets a lot more reasonable about it.
Fair point, and I freely admit that this is something that I get annoyed about to a degree that is disproportionate to its actual importance ... I suppose because I see it so often (which supports your point about why Scott used that wording in the first place!), and it grates more on me every time.
Giving into it is why Matt Walsh can make "What is a woman?" in the first place, a proposition that would be utterly absurd to almost every human who has ever lived, but is somehow a tough question in today's clown world.
Because if he didn't phrase it that way, there would be other people yelling at him for presuming everyone is cis, or ignoring trans people, or that sex is a spectrum, or what about intersex people huh?
My own opinion is that I wasn't "assigned" anything, I was *identified*. But I'm not mad enough at Scott to yell at him about this, particularly since I'm seeing more and more people in my work sphere sticking their pronouns in the bottom (or even body) of emails, something I thought would take another ten years to seep in over here.
(People I am mad enough at, I will yell at them about it).
The SSC/ACX community has been around and around and around on this question from year to year. Whatever question is chosen, *someone* always has a hairy fit about it, and starts a giant discussion about how the question should be in their preferred form, and is obviously intended to produce some specific detail that's meaningful to them.
Decided to go one way or the other on voice in head judgement because it's not a category error, sometimes it is positive and sometimes negative, but no real overall skew, and there wasn't really an option for that
There was an "evenly balanced between positive and negative" option, separate from the "category error" option (unless it was added in after your comment, but there's no reply from Scott saying that, unlike some of the other corrections in response to comments)
I don't recall that being there when I was filling it in, maybe it was added as a response to other feedback between me filling it in and you doing so.
Yes, that was tricky for me too. I went with category error because neither mainly negative nor mainly positive seemed right, though it can be judgemental (You idiot! but also Good! Good! You didn't want to do it but you did, and now it's done!) or encouraging (We'll just take out the recycling) or despondent (I can't do this anymore)
Oh thank you for mentioning "we'll" because since Scott asked I've been listening to see what I do and it seems to be a mix of "I" and "you" though "you" more rare. But "we" or "let's" is definitely in their too which is so interesting because in using it I definitely have this sense of there being two parts of myself teaming up for something. Though I can't tell yet if my "we" is more snarky than helpful.
Is this "inner voice" supposed to be different than "me?" That category seems to imply that it is. So, I put it down as category error, since any time I'm having an inner dialogue or psyching myself up or whatever, there isn't any pretense I'm not talking to myself.
I don't think there needs to be any pretense that you're not the one doing the talking. Maybe you only use "I" when you narrate your experience to yourself? Or if you get exasperated with yourself, do you have a "Ugh, you're so dumb!" response? (your inner voice may not say unkind things like that)
Not who you responded to but had the same thought they did.
Since my inner voice is me talking to myself it don't need words like "you" or "I" - when I'm thinking/talking to myself I already know it's about me.
So instead of "Ugh, you're so dumb!" I might think "Well, that was pretty dumb" or "Not one of my brightest moments".
The only instances that I can think of right now where I'd be "I" in my head are one meta level up: "Hm, maybe if I'd done X instead of Y then the result would've been different". But that's talking to myself about myself. And you need words like "I" or "You" when talking about someone.
I also found this question difficult to respond to. My "inner voice" (not even sure that's the right phrase) is mostly me talking with interlocutors. These are typically real people that I know. I have discussions with them. They're not really positive or negative, just people I'm talking to. It's often my trying to convince the interlocutor of something, though I don't always "win" the debate.
No idea how to map that onto the questions about "inner voice".
LSD: I had an extremely strong and unpleasant physical reaction at a dose where the mental effects were barely perceptible (mostly improved mood/sort of 'inner glow', right up until all my muscles started contracting/vibrating uncontrollably and I spent the next several hours trying to stay calm and avoid going to the hospital). Very similar to my experience with serotonin syndrome, but without the mental/emotional disturbance.
Inner voice: I had trouble answering these questions. I have inner speech (I can imagine speaking, and I can imagine a dialogue by playing each side of it in turn) but I don't have "an inner voice" in the sense of an entity separate from my conscious self that produces verbal thoughts without conscious effort. The first question seemed to be asking about the first thing, so I picked the middle "I can if I want to" option, but then the second question seemed to be asking about the second thing. I picked the middle "this question seems weird" response but wasn't sure if I should be picking the "I don't have one" option instead.
Can we have next year more variety for the country you identify most with? It was surprisingly hard to choose this year, as somebody who is close to be a dual-citizen.
On the same vane, can we have a way to identify ourselves by the city? Myself and my friends would rather identify as Londoners/NY-ers rather than the country we reside in.
I was off on the moscow distance question by many KM then when I answered again I gave an answer that was off by the same amount in the opposite direction! :(
Ah, I gave a dramatic underestimate to the initial question and then halved it for the follow up question, becoming even more wrong! Unfortunately there was no question about confidence, of which I had essentially none :)
I was spot on for my initial guess (dumb luck as I really have only a vague idea of where those two cities are) but then for the second answer I overestimated by 50%
I guessed without very many significant figures, so I took the prompt to mean I was off by a factor of at least 1.5 - and I'm proud to say I had one guess on each side of the actual answer!
In the glasses question there is also an option «my vision does not count as good, but I still do not correct it». Including blind people who use screen readers to use your blog, I guess.
Corneal damage (or other non-refractionary issues) is also not too likely to be corrected by glasses.
Some people have asymmetry between eyes making correction both more annoying and less necessary; some have similar issues on both eyes that are simply hard to correct in any way and reasonably livable uncorrected.
I am not blind, but I would not say either of the offered options applies to me. I would add options:
«My vision is not good but I do not correct it, and still navigate using it.»
No option for "I used to need glasses/contact lenses but after cataract surgery I have the equivalent of contact lenses inside my eyes, and I have monovision so one eye is corrected to distance (for driving) and the other for reading."
Fascinating, as always! The "previous guess was incorrect" question was a delightful insight into the epistemic process, and I found it very hard to decide whether I should change my answer up or down. (Also, typo: extra "how" in that question.)
Unread emails: this was consistently zero for me until less than a year ago and now it's in 4 digits, and I've no idea why. Some kind of unexplained drop in executive function? (Idk whether that question is in there in its own right or just for anchoring, but I'm kind of curious what it correlates with.)
Re COVID fatigue, there were options for "no fatigue" and "fatigue for a few weeks after" but no option for "fatigue only while actually ill with it and not after". I ticked "no fatigue" as I figured that was the intended meaning, but it felt a bit wrong.
The urbanisation questions seemed inconsistent: the first was on a scale from urban to suburban, and the second on a scale from urban to rural. I prefer suburban to urban, but I prefer both over rural (so would pick urban over rural if those were the only options), and the questions seemed to be conflating suburban with rural.
As always, I think the "family member has this condition" and "I suspect I have this condition" questions should be checkboxes with multiple options allowed, or at least if they're radio buttons it should be explicitly stated which of those trumps the other in cases where both are true.
My e-mails were consistently at single or low-double digits until about seven years ago, and then they ballooned to the high hundreds, which I attribute to just giving less of a fuck about having an empty inbox (or about unsubscribing from things) more than any drop in executive function. I went through all of my unread e-mails one afternoon a few months ago, when it was approaching 1000, and I was surprised to see that I had missed less than five e-mails that might have been important at the time. Everything that I hadn't marked as read was something I might have been interested in reading at some point but didn't actually matter.
The problem I have with the "previous guess was incorrect" question was that I was pretty sure I was roughly correct the first time around, I only resisted the urge to answer "no, I'm pretty sure I was right the first time around" because I interpreted the question as "simulate how'd you react if someone you'd assume to know the right answer told you you were wrong", and then I checked and it turns out I was spot on (down to a really small rounding error), and now I feel bad for not going "fuck you, I'm confident in my knowledge of the world around me", but I'd probably feel equally bad if I did that, because it'd be indistinguishable from me cheating and looking the answer up or just knowing it beforehand.
I don't get a ton of email in a given day and can easily spot important things, so I never bothered to set very strong email filters or categories. I have had my gmail account this way for years, so my "unread" number is in the tens of thousands. But most of it is just promotional emails I simply haven't declared as spam. I don't read every email I get from Amazon, and I don't bother deleting them, so they just sit there.
There's ambiguity on the question "How much do you trust the mainstream media? For example, the New York Times and Washington Post". The word "trust," and what it may mean in the context.
The answer "mostly mistrust" might be chosen by the person who considers that NYT/WaPo publish "false facts," yes. And it may also be chosen by the person who considers them to be the mouthpieces of a social-engineering agenda, publishing facts that are not "false per se" but rather very particularly preselected and spun. The latter also translates to a level of trust which is not zero, but negative.
Perhaps it'd have been great to have separate questions addressing the former and the latter. It's probably too late to split them now, but maybe some wording could be added to the question to clarify the intended meaning of the single question.
Isn't false facts version also negative trust? Doesn't seem to be much of a trust distinction.
Now, there are separate dimensions of cluelessness and malice, and both differ between different topics, and then the baselines for default cluelessness also differ between different topics…
(I guess my attitude is that I try to have a model of how they usually falsify the context and how their clueless mistakes usually look like, somewhat trusting them not to be innovative in their mistakes and bias?)
Trust is a very fundamental human thing which I cannot sum up in a single sentence, and this makes it no less fundamental.
It doesn't matter what Merriam-Webster, the self-styled "most trusted online dictionary" defines trust to be, when I do not trust Merriam-Webster.
And if you ask me the followup question (as Scott's survey does) "What is the particular word whose definition Merriam-Webster has decided to change in the last few years, which has most made you distrust Merriam-Webster? You are to pick a single word from this arbitrary incomplete list of words whose definition they've changed:" -- then that follow-up question has missed the point to a degree that is hard to express.
Not that their definition of "trust" is that wrong, for that matter -- "reliance on the character of someone or something" -- it's just how they themselves flunk at upholding that definition, as much as they love to call themselves "the most trusted".
I can only judge the mainstream media in comparison to things I know something about. My consistent experience is that when the mainstream media reports touch on an area where I have some specialized knowledge, every word is wrong, including “and” and “the.” Given their lack of reliability on information I DO know, I’ve no basis on which to trust them concerning information I do not. This is true for every version of “Mainstream Media” you care to name.
There are lots of ambiguities in that question! I put myself down for the highest level of trust even though I notice central mistakes in a large fraction of articles even on topics I’m not expert on.
Yeah. I "trust" these sources more than the alternatives even thought I know they're going to have a high error rate and have some known biases. So if I know they're consistently going to have a few failure modes but are still better than basically anyone else doing a similar thing... do I "trust" them or not? I ended up going with the second-highest rating, but that's probably just mood affiliation, right?
Wait, why would an inner voice narrate what I do instead whe I do something trivial, instead of going through something I plan to do afterwards? (My answer would be: it narrates all the time, usually not the thing I am currently doing)
How would you not know? Even if I didn't have experience with friends of the same sex, I talk about orgasms with friends! I know of many people how much or how often they struggle with orgasm, whether they reach it sooner or later or less reliable than they want to. And then there's writing on the subject, internet comments, thinkpieces, actual research, general stats on anorgasmia, of ejaculatio praecox etc. Not everyone knows all that well, but "how the hell would I know" seems like you're unusually uninformed?
For one, unless you got intimate with a few people of your gender, this is a bit of a "how do you see the color blue?"-type of question. Without going into details, it's hard to estimate whether you can orgasm easier than others.
Also, a lot of people I know will either not talk about this at all or not go into sufficient detail to give and estimate to this question. I'm lucky enough to have some open friends to have somewhat of a comparison, but I can easily imagine many people don't.
Because some people don't get into that level of detail even with close friends, or may not wish to discuss it at all even if all their friends are chatting frankly about the topic.
And what is "easy/hard" for one person might be "hard/easy" for another. Is A who says "takes me a while but I get there" having an easy or a hard time? How about comparing that with someone who is "I get warmed up straight away and have several orgasms in a bout" - so A should put down "it is difficult for me (compared to B)" and with someone who is "no matter what I do/my partner does, seldom or never happens" - so A should put down "it is easy for me (compared with C)".
Writing on the subject - well, again, unless I go looking for studies on "how easy is it for average woman of this, this and this characteristic", I won't know. And why would I go looking for such studies, unless I had a reason to do so? And what reason would that be, if I wasn't filling in a survey on my sex life?
"General stats" are subjective, how to compare them to your own experience and say "yes/no"?
As I man I have almost no idea. For me it is much harder at 41 to orgasm, than 16, but still pretty easy. How many times I have orgasmed recently matters a lot too. If I don't orgasm for several days then I nearly start having wet dreams, and get very aroused very easily. But mostly that isn't a problem...
I remember being in a conversation where a not-that-close friend started discussing her sex life, and I was very surprised and slightly offended on behalf of her boyfriend. People have very different levels of openness about their sex lives.
I don't think anyone is sitting down on either side of a table like "Hello, friend, tell me about your orgasms", but it's not too unusual for people to make comments or jokes about premature ejaculation, impotence, being unable to orgasm during sex, etc, which could give you an idea of the range of common experiences.
How will you account for the different SAT scoring systems that have been used? Now it's out of 1600 again, but wasn't it out of 2400 or something for a bit?
I was thinking about that. The change took place in 2016, so lots of adults have scores out of 1600 now.
Also, ACT scores might be interesting to look at as well. My classmates and I were encouraged to take the SAT and ACT, and then repeat the one we did better on for the maximum possible score. The ACT tends to be a more straightforward test, and easier to study for, so maybe the whole point of the question is "What is your score on this IQ-like test" and not "how good are you at studying for a standardize test."
(Also, if you went to look your SAT scores up because you can no longer find your paper copies, College Board has changed their website yet again to make it even more annoying! They will *call you* to verify it's you when you sign in.)
Not to mention that the test has been "recentered" several times (but I suppose the question about age helps a bit with that). 700 in 1993 does not equal 700 in 1995, or 700 now.
Just noting that I'm interested to hear what the results of the survey RE: imaginary friends are, but I'm a bit sceptical of the reliability of the results. I left that blank because while I have been informed by my parents that I did have an imaginary friend, I honestly can't recall anything beyond the name, so I have no idea if it was a hallucination, a delusion or just an pretense.
I may be unusually bad at remembering my childhood, but I am doubtful that is the kind of thing people can reliably recall decades later - there's a risk of projecting back an adult level of skepticism, but there's also a risk of incorrectly assuming children are incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality.
I only remember two tidbits about my imaginary friend: their name and a conversation with my mother in which she asked me to draw them and I thought to myself "Draw? But it's *imaginary*! Oh well, silly adults asking silly questions, I'll just make something up" and drew a generic girl [maybe relevant to note that I don't think in images at all, so obviously-for-me imaginary implied non-visual]. That memory feels surprisingly clear, I can see where we were and some details about my drawing. Maybe I should ask my mother whether she remembers and check it against her memory.
LSD: Nobody ever told me and my friends what doses we bought. I decided to write an absurdly high number, which seemed to be the most truthful workable option.
It was so many decades ago I didn't even remember what the units were, so I entered 0 and that isn't true. There were just no other options other than to make something up.
It would have been helpful for that question to include information about the standard range being 75-150. I was going to put a number at about one tenth of that based on misremembering what I thought were standard doses.
Thanks for this. Had same problem! Haha, its a sign of progress if the baseline assumption nowadays is 1) LSD is readily available and 2) youre obtaining it in a context where the exact mcg dose is known. We’ve come a long way, baby.
For the mental disorders question, does "family" only include blood relations or should it include one's spouse, in-laws, adopted siblings, etc? My brother-in-law has one of these disorders and I consider him family, but obviously his having the disorder doesn't genetically predispose me toward having it.
I'd be very interested to know correlation between mental disorders among (close) social family vs. (removed) biological family. Maybe being exposed to it makes it easier for a person to recognize and seek formal diagnosis, whether or not they are genetically predisposed?
My question too. I'm guessing blood relations for genetics rather than marriage for familiarity, since a question interested in familiarity might have included "close friends".
I wish the political questions had at least a cultural and economic axis. As an economically left (social democratic) but culturally conservative (monoculturalism, etc.) person, it's really difficult to find a package that suits me.
I also wish you had better warned to not look up the Paris to Moscow distance before answering the last question, as the first thing I did was to check my answer.
Same. I was hoping for some option like 'Christian Democrat' on the political beliefs question. I wanted to check 'Social Democrat' but the definition included something like "permissive social liberalism" so I had to check 'conservative' despite disagreeing with the given economic principles
It is interesting that neo-reactionary and alt-right get 2 of a relatively limited group of categories given how politically close they are. You can slice up the options in more fine-grain ways or less depending on what you're interested in learning, but I found being particular about the distinction there compared to the other options interesting. I understand why that would matter to someone seeped in the rationalist community given the political disputes that are salient there, but it's odd when trying to classify people generally.
I had a similar problem and had to leave the question blank. A few more options, or better yet, some more questions on specific issues (taxes, welfare, social norms etc.) instead of the package deal, might have worked better for me.
But I'm not sure if this can be evaluated in the way Scotts intends to do it.
I was a bit unsure about the left-right politics question since my answer is wildly different depending on which country you base it on - I would consider myself center-right for Sweden, but far left in American politics. The minimum wage question ended up even harder, since we don't even have a minimum wage here (never needed it because of strong unions). I guess to some extent things like these are inevitable, since you can't account for all the cultural differences around the world in a questionnaire, but it's still frustrating.
Left-right depends on more than just okay, country is relatively this or that. Organizations and people can want to take the country in a left- or rightward direction, especially if it feels like they don't have a definite spot where they want to end up at (eg. Cthulhu keeps swimming left). I'd also try to avoid doing stuff like picking say, welfare and anchoring off that since the actual differences are legion.
It is true that right and left are very clumsy terms especially nowadays. I don't know what particular political views you have, but in general, I think it's a misconception that center right in Sweden (like Moderaterna?) (let alone any other Nordic country) corresponds to far left in America.
If you mean "far left" in the traditional socialism vs. capitalism sense, well, center right parties in Sweden are pro-business, and there are actual Marxists or Socialists in America (they don't hold office but they exist, and what are you going to call them if they aren't far left?). Taxes in Sweden are much higher than in America, but that's only one indicator. Taxes on rich people used to be much higher in America too, but it would be odd to say that this means America has moved to the right in the last 50 years.
The survey in its current form characterizes Scandinavian countries as an example of "social democracy" and "heavily regulated market economy" but Finland, Denmark and Sweden score pretty high on measures of "economic freedom" (e.g. the Heritage Foundation's) (they got ranks 9 to 11 in 2022). I don't really understand these things, but isn't that at odds with "heavily regulated"? Anyway, center right parties in any case are enthusiastic about capitalism, even in Scandinavia, where they just accept taxing people for a welfare state.
If you mean "left" in the sense of "socially progressive": Very "progressive" people ("woke") in America have views on e.g. transgenderism, open borders, drug use, abortion (remember that in America, the left is against any restrictions on abortion), or even prostitution that I don't think the typical center right voter in Sweden would share.
"Taxes on rich people used to be much higher in America too"
Probably true of marginal tax rates, but I think the share of taxes paid by rich people has become higher, and by poor people much lower, over the past forty or fifty years.
Pretty easy to check that it is true. On federal income tax for 2019, the bottom 50% pay an average of 3.5% of their income, the top 1% pay 25.6% of theirs.
I noticed there was no "Green" in 'Political Affiliation. With which of these political descriptions do you most identify?'
I regret I can't easily survey my German acquaintances on this. But starting with the German example, the Green party in Germany is both in national government and in a majority of state governments. Which should somehow be reflected in what persons would choose as their 'Political Affiliation'.
There is also the forth-largest parlamentary group in the European Parliament, which is Green/EFA. And smaller Green parties in many European countries.
I guess I should ask someone for a proper self-identification, nevertheless I assume: "Green: taking actions against climate change, being friendly to the natural environment & animals", would do for such a list (maybe also without the animals). My friends would kill me for leaving out all the pro-democracy, etc., etc. ;)
Are Greens not simply a subset of social democrats? Like, I don't know of any mainstream Green party that thinks the current system of government is incompatible with the goals they want to achieve.
I admit I don't fully understand your second sentence and what it has to do with your question.
In Germany, all *democratic parties* from conservative over liberal to green believe the current system of government is compatible with the goals they want to achieve. A party that doesn't believe that - and would openly claim it doesn't - would be regarded to stand outside the democratic order and (some additional conditions in place) could be forbidden from entering elections. But maybe we are talking about different things here?
PS: Maybe more to your question, in Germany often one used to think in terms of a red-green camp (socialdemocrats + green) and a black-yellow camp (conservatives and liberals); those were also the parties that most often would form coalitions (if they could).
There are counterexamples however, like the time, where liberals and social democrats were governing together in a coalition (federal state), and several cases where black-green (conservatives and greens) is the preferred option (in regional entities), even if other options are feasable.
Even if you assume that the political camps still hold, and that the parties in a political camp agree on more issues, green is not a subset of socialdemocrat as much as liberal is not a subset of conservative.
Edit: I'm using the example I know best, but you could find evidence for the destinction also in different contexts & countries.
What I'm trying to say is, if you included Greens among Libertarians, Conservatives, Liberals, Social Democrats, Marxists, Neoreactionaries and Alt-Right, do you think that distinction would have added value for this survey compared to the case where you split the people who would otherwise pick Social Democrat into Greens too? Like, do people exist who think "I was going to pick the Greens option if it was there, but since it's not, I'll go with Alt-Right instead"?
Yes, I believe this would be significant value added. I mentioned different examples to show that 'Green' is a political affiliation of significant relevance to real-world-politics (okay, talking mostly about EU, which I know better compared to other places, but still).
I believe there are persons who would look through the list, and say, hm, weird, seven options, and mine is not here, I can't answer. Though maybe less common among ACX readers, but it would be interested to check.
Also, if you think 'Liberals' and 'Libertarians' would feel weird to pick 'Conservative', you should understand that 'Greens' would feel weird to pick 'Social Democrat'.
If there was a list of three or four options without Greens I wouldn't complain. In a list of seven or eight options, I think it's a serious omission. That's why I looked up government participation. An affiliation which results being represented with a distinct party in government in six EU member states should be more important (and rather be on the list) than those affiliations on the list that don't find such a representation. Of course EU is not the world, but here I'm trying to make the focus broader in terms of 'western world', rather than smaller.
I don't know if the list was inspired by 'those are the most relevant US / bay area / traditional readership/ ...' options? None of this is irrelevant; but I also don't think it's a good idea to ignore political trends.
Also, since yesterday I've been wondering what a globally adjusted or democracies-world-wide adjusted list would look like ... but that's a different topic.
A lot of Greens would choose Liberal or Social Democrat from among the choices given. So, yes, I think it would change the survey results to include Greens.
I think your point may be obscured by the fact that there is a Social Democratic Party in Germany, so no German Green would ever describe themselves as a Social Democrat, and would take pains to point out their political differences with that party.
Near as I can tell, Green politics are essentially social democratic politics, but with a primary emphasis on environmental concerns and sustainability.
A mini-search reveals that Greens apparantly are currently part of six national governments in EU: Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg. (Took the first source I found and didn't verify.)
Under the job categorization, you distinguish AI and broader CS research from “Practical” computer science, lumping IT professionals in with application developers, operating systems developers, and embedded systems types. While my favorite baristo might think we both “do something with computers,” the skill sets couldn’t be more different. The US government puts me in the “Computer/Mathematical” bucket most of the time, which is still imprecise, but a closer match, IMO.
On the subreddit and discord questions, I was missing a 'haven't been there yet, maybe somewhen' or a 'potentially interested, but not enough to currently spend time on' option.
I don't read those, I knew they existed, so three options don't work. 'No, I don't want to read it' suggests a clear and conscious rejection. In my case it's more a mixture of habits, time, priorities, and that nobody has convinced me yet to give it a try.
I strongly suspect the phrasing and limited options are a deliberate psychological nudge to get people to recognize that passive choices are still expressions of preference. If you're not doing it now, it's because you don't want it hard enough to do it.
The nudge part is that by forcing the dichotomy, people who want to identify as the sort of person who would do something will have to get off their asses and actually do it to avoid being classified as the sort of person who won't.
Likewise; I have more than enough stuff to read, so it's more "It is not the case that I want to read reddit/discord" than it is "I want not to read r/d" which, because of the weird way negation works in English, is not the same thing as "I don't want to read r/d."
None of these are errors, just things that made me feel incapable of answering correctly:
I struggle every time I have to decide between being a student and self-employed, and to decide on a profession - I used to work in software development, am self-employed in card-game publishing and am now studying Philosophy/Neuroscience/Cognition. That's all over the map. I went with Philosophy because that's my B.A. but I feel that's not really accurate.
My family has an atheist religious background. There was presumably some Christian somewhat back somewhere, but I don't know which kind and anyway, the last generations have been committed atheist and I feel that should be an option.
Selecting a class is hard for someone who read Bourdieu. Poverty + high education does not make me working-class.
I have an out-of-date formal diagnosis of depression, i.e. I was clinically depressed for much of my youth and well into my early adult life, but haven't been for years. Family members used to have this but don't anymore, too (for death reasons and for getting better reasons).
I also have a very out of date PTSD diagnosis that I don't believe was ever accurate.
How happy am I with my job? Which one? I chose to interpret that as "the job sphere of my life", which includes my studies.
"If you're a student, answer "No, I don't work"" - but the vast majority of students do work! I work 5-20 hours a week, why do I need to select "I don't work"?
Thank you for "in the spirit in which you predict it was intended on the questionnaire" - that changed my answer.
Not being able to answer questions without lying is my #1 reason of abandoning surveys.
What I did like: the "option for people who [question doesn't apply to]". I don't like leaving questions out.
I found myself in a similar situation on the religious background question. I vaguely remember hearing that one of my grandparents was baptised and "protestant" would technically be the correct answer, but as far as I know the only people in my family who have actually been religious during my lifetime are two who converted to other religions as adults so it feels like "atheist" would morally be the most correct.
Also atheist family background; choosing "Other" feels wrong, because it seems to imply that atheism is another religion. Scott, please include "None" next time!
- There's such a thing as an "atheist/agnostic/freethinker" background, as in, parents that are such, with at least one actively advocating one of those labels. (That's probably more or less a plausible standard for other religious categories, in practice, at least when people talk about their backgrounds to people not of the same background.)
- What about class-income mismatches, where "class" is given be it by educational background (as it often is in the states) or whatever else? Also, is this category meant to be in relation to the local environment at the time, or to current US standards? My parents were state-sector college teachers in the Third World, with tiny salaries, at a time of high inflation (reaching 5000% at one point); I've put "middle class" because that's what we called ourselves, but "upper-middle class that was impoverished even by local standards, which were low" might be more how a native-born US person would make sense of us. (I'm sure there's a starving count somewhere who is reading this and saying "ha, total beginner.")
I used to have a similar difficulty with surveys, and then I realized that the questions are not language. Or at least, not the kind of language that you say to another person, and they think about it and evaluate it for truthfulness. Rather, the questions are labels on giant bins, and we're all tossing tennis balls into the bins to see how many balls end up in each bin. It's not correct to think of them as accurate or inaccurate; just as a rough-and-ready label.
The context is always part of the communication. In this case, the context is not, "click the correct option"; it's "of these many incorrect labels, click the most correct one".
I could be curious to see a mission driven for-profit option, answering with for profit since that's closest.
Re Religious Views
How would you describe your religious views?
Hard for me to answer, I am spiritual and neither pantheist nor atheist. I am undecided and I don't feel a need to decide, nor am I agnostic. I am happy with my spiritual practices and don't need more. I'm probably the minorty here so I'm leaving it unanswered.
Re Discord/Subreddit/Discord/Subscriber
The Yes/No binary doesn't capture deltas. e.g. I do, I don't, I did but now I don't
Deltas are interesting imo, but not necessary
Re: Do you wear glasses?
I stopped wearing them 2 years ago when I began doing somatic experiencing work and noticed increases in my stress levels. My vision has improved since. Saying I have naturally good vision for this, even though I'm not 20/20 yet.
Re: What effect did this dose of LSD have on you?
I've had different experiences at the same dose, can't answer this one accurately so I'm choosing the most common.
Re: Do you have seizures?
At times I have somatic seizures (Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures) when doing somatic work. Answering once or a few times, in exceptional situations
Re: Answer only if you feel completely comfortable doing so: which of the following forms of trauma did you experience as a young child, ie before the age of 10?
Would you consider chronic neglect to be emotional abuse or abandonment? I did not check abandonment as I'm interpreting it to be permanent.
That was a frustrating experience. Most answer ranges were way too binary. The only way to say "neither left nor right" was to put oneself in the mushy middle, which is inaccurate. I do not remember my SAT scores from 1963 and I do not remember the results of my last (if any) officially given IQ test. I couldn't describe my status as a new, unpaid ACX reader or my reason for being unpaid (just getting acquainted) or how I discovered ACX (by being put onto SSC by someone and binge-reading it for a short time a few or several years ago). Possibly by this age (mid-70s) one has taken a lumpy one-off shape that doesn't come close to fitting any mold.
I'd like that. Also, on the question about how much you are aware of politics, I'd like an option for "way more than I want to be, or would be if I didn't have to worry about what fresh new idiocy has become fashionable."
Also, "politics" in that context could mean electoral politics, it could mean ideologies. I am not very aware of the former, very much involved in the latter.
I wanted an option on a BUNCH of these to answer something like, "This question's framework is irrelevant and/or inaccurate in describing me and/or the issue in question."
I'm the only one who can't pull up the survey? I've tried both Firefox and Chrome, and the explanation I get is this:
"Firefox does not trust forms.gle because its certificate issuer is unknown, the certificate is self-signed, or the server is not sending the correct intermediate certificates."
It’s very unlikely they’re actually serving an invalid certificate. If you want to debug the issue, check the information on the certificate you are being served — it’s possibly a web portal/Wi-Fi login screen/employer internet proxy man-in-the-middle-ing you.
> Compared to other people of your same sex, how hard is it for you to orgasm?
How do you want trans people to handle this one? (Going on FTM HRT made it much easier for me to orgasm; I hear this from a fair number of people, and the inverse going the other direction.)
this is true for me also. Though I wasn't paying attention at the time, the change seems to correlate with change from negative to neutral/positive. Is there any relationship like this for you?
I Now Have Additional Questions! (but already submitted, so this is just for calibration purposes...sorry about poorly-formatted bulleted list, the actual questions aren't numbered or anything)
*Industry - made me snort in $EMOTION that every specific answer is white collar, and then the bulk of all other jobs historically and globally gets rounded off to "other blue collar".
*Education Complete? is a weirdly-phrased question, I assume you meant "do you ever want to achieve a higher degree" as opposed to "are you currently a student"? School isn't in the cards for me, hasn't been for a long time, but continued shame over amassing like 150 credits without a Real Bachelor's Degree still smarts. I consider that incomplete.
*Denomination - no love for Daoism? I think it's importantly different from Buddhism, even for an agnostic-dabbler like me that finds bits and pieces of Light in many different religions.
*SSC Subreddit - no option for "used to read". I feel like the value-add went way down after the migration to ACX and subsequent community splintering, have basically never touched it after that.
*Income status - terms are in tension. I'm a "veteran" at my job, with a statistically anomalous length of continuous employment for the branch, but not quite at the pay cap yet for my org chart position. And that's not even considering getting vertically promoted into entire other wage tiers. So it's definitely comfortably into my "career", yet also still entry-level retail, due to unusually few levels of formal hierarchy in the company.
*Depression - weird edge case, I have a diagnosis of Chronic Depression which goes untreated, but is functionally in remission. Not really comfortable saying I got cured or better, cause the blues can strike again quick, but the options are fairly binary and everything else seemed less accurate.
*Vegetarianism - the way it's worded, one can only choose to go halfway and reduce meat "for moral reasons", which strikes me as a weird assumption? I largely don't do it for morality, I do it because it seems like an Unfair Traide, and strongly prefer goods to be priced according to their full externalities as a Platonic ideal. Meat is, uh, not that, most of the time.
*Glasses - no option for "I don't wear glasses because I don't want to, despite vision being bad". Seems inaccurate to round that off to Naturally Good Vision - I wouldn't have three pairs of glasses and an optometry prescription if it was naturally good!
*Orgasm - it would have been so simple to change the scale to "Very Difficult <-> Very Easy". I see what you did there.
*ASMR - unspecified term. I experience frisson pretty strongly from particular auditory patterns; the "Ragnarok" album by Wardruna, Irish folk songs, "Karma" by Kamelot, "The Felt" and "Medium" albums from Homestuck, throat singing...those all do it for me. But this seems like a qualitively different qualia than what people mean when they say ASMR. I think there might be some overlap, but they seem to be different experiences.
*Psychotherapy - had to give a perfectly middle response, since it was Absolutely Useless for one set of ailments, but Totally Life-Changing for others. Reversion to the mean, I guess.
*Group Harm/Divorce - assumed here you didn't mean the technial legal definition of "divorce" etc, with all the paperwork and courts involved, but rather the consequentialist effects of Broken Household and so on. It really doesn't make much difference to the kids if Mommy and Daddy still do weird things during tax season because otherwise the house would be gone, yet are functionally divorced all other times of the year.
*Wireheading - seems like a fairly specific scenario? I'm strongly opposed to that particular iteration, but not the general principle; there are near-analouges that I'd readily slip into. Certain videogames or shows that feel so powerfully compelling, I'd willingly give up Living For Real to LARP them forever. Like the entire premise behind Sword Art Online...
*Media trust - I notice that no one's explicitly prompted me to disaggregate which parts of covid news coverage most made me distrust media, and this is an interesting frame! It's tricky cause my brain screams epistemic foul play for each option, so assigning degree-weights is actually difficult. Plus of course they're strongly correlated news angles...
*Flashing elements - am reminded of Zvi's woes with watching football on TV, and needing to physically block the "stock ticker"-type scroll which commonly accompanies sports coverage now. Plus users with animated .gif usericons which...distract me. (Not specific to ACX.) This is more than half the reason I hate video content vs. text.
*Tabs/emails - hope I'm not the only one who uses "unread email" in lieu of formal reminder systems, and open tabs in lieu of actual bookmarks. Either that have been left unaddressed too long get removed, because - no, I won't actually do that thing/read that post. This also means keeping browsing history permanently, and relying on memory to call up half-remembered posts...thus the first action for any given browsing is "Restore previous session". To keep continuity.
Anyway, that was interesting, and I'm happy to have finally gotten to participate in this august tradition. Looking forward to weird results in January.
"SSC Subreddit - no option for "used to read". I feel like the value-add went way down after the migration to ACX and subsequent community splintering, have basically never touched it after that."
And the SSC Discord question didn't have an option for "got banned over something that I ended up being proven correct about 4 years later," so I just chose the option that said "I don't want to read it."
"Wireheading - seems like a fairly specific scenario? I'm strongly opposed to that particular iteration, but not the general principle; there are near-analouges that I'd readily slip into. Certain videogames or shows that feel so powerfully compelling, I'd willingly give up Living For Real to LARP them forever. Like the entire premise behind Sword Art Online..."
I think, at least for me, the two big differentiating factors between wireheading and permanent full-immersion virtual reality are:
1. Whether real or virtual, there would need to be some kind of events that were taking place, external stimuli to respond to. An essential part of conscious experience is that you're actually *experiencing* things, so that the sensations and emotions you're feeling correspond to some sort of external context. If you replace all of those things with a neverending stream of pure, undifferentiated, decontextualized sensation-emotion, then that's barely a step above not existing at all, no matter how positive that sensation-emotion is.
2. There would have to be other real people there to interact with, i.e. other flesh-and-blood humans plugged into the same shared virtual space, or at the very least, A.I. that had the same level of consciousness and complexity as true humans. I wouldn't want to live in a world of NPCs, I'd want to know that I was interacting with actual people who had their own thoughts and their own feelings.
Yes, I think the (1) distinction is the real crux. The point of existing isn't to selfishly experience pleasure, if I got to that mind-state I'd honestly rather just be dead and reboot somewhere-somewhen-someone else. The doing of and reacting to things is the essential stuff of life. Variants of wireheading that are Life+, where all the experiences are Exciting and Novel and High Stakes and all that...is very appealing! That's half the fun of good fiction, being able to leave the quotidian behind and imagine oneself in another universe. Which isn't to say Real Life sucks a lot as baseline. But it's, well, inconsistent and annoyingly often zero-sum? Hardly optimized for the individual experiencer's utilityfunction. And many such profits that make it a lot more comfortable, require payments in pain that meaningfully reduce the EV. Getting to cheat past all that is really tempting. The whole "gamification" phenomenon tries to do this, paper over IRL frictions with the veneer of fun...but it doesn't work very well. I'd rather bet on a game turned into life, than life turned into a game.
"Industry - made me snort in $EMOTION that every specific answer is white collar, and then the bulk of all other jobs historically and globally gets rounded off to "other blue collar"."
Well you know, us working-class/lower middle class types, we're not PRODUCTIVE and CREATIVE and WEALTH-MAXIMISING, we don't CONTRIBUTE, we're not at all as IMPORTANT AND VITAL TO THE ECONOMY as somebody making a new app to sell gluten-free baked beans to polar bears in bi-coastal wildlife sanctuaries 😄
Same here with "used to read SSC subreddit, never went back after the Great Trek To The Sunlit Uplands of Substack".
Also same with the ASMR - I have experienced "chills" and "tingles" but I don't even know if that's properly what is defined as 'frisson', and often aesthetic overwhelm takes me in the middle of the chest and makes my head loll back. Sort of like this except not so much ecstasy, Gian Lorenzo, and no (visible) angels:
A really late comment (I'm bad at checking replies-to-replies) that this made me smile and is going on my work playlist. It's strange how little actually-made-in-the-90s music I have in my repertoire, despite actually growing up in that decade. Li'l AG grew up to Weird Al, not indie rock. (The appropriate counterpoint would be, I guess, This Is The Life. Underrated!)
It just made me think about the whole whiplash-inducing "Essential Worker(tm)" dichotomy that got trotted out for convenience's sake during covid, briefly, and then everyone forgot and my coworkers and I became disreputable low-class grunt cogs again. Who needs grocery stores when restaurants are open again? I am happy to see we're not actually as rare here as is often implied though. Something something benefits of diversity in truth-seeking. Call it bitterness more than anger; it was nice for a brief moment to have the tables turned, respect and pay slightly more commensurate with actual societal usefulness.
"Aesthetic overwhelm" is a great way to put it, I'll be borrowing that. Art is just occasionally so divinely (lower-case d) beautiful...the things that make my heart tremble. It's not really a specific sensation of pleasure in a specific area of the body, more like an unconscious awe and appreciation of...being in the presence of Something Greater? Feeling small and insignificant in the face of Power.
"Art is just occasionally so divinely (lower-case d) beautiful...the things that make my heart tremble."
Yes, exactly. I've never had the full-on Stendhal Syndrome experience, but some pieces of art (and that is everything including the plastic arts, music, poetry and prose) have made me physically weak with their effect on me. Same with elements of beauty and grandeur and wonder in the natural world.
(Part of why I was grousing over what counts as "mystic experience" is that I do consider such experiences "the strange, the numinous and the beautiful" but I would not categorise them as "mystic" or "mystical").
Even better, there are THREE subclasses for "computers"... none of which have to do with the physical hardware. Code is "technology," microchips aren't.
I flubbed the Paris-Moscow question. I had what would have been a really close guess based on knowing the circumference of the Earth and the number of timezones that separate them, but forgot to account that timezones are closer together at mid-latitudes than they are at the equator.
Nice way of estimating! My first guess was pretty good, although my second guess went in the wrong direction, so overall not great. I used flight duration and previously known distances between other cities to estimate, but I fly a lot in Europe and in particular have been to Moscow before (although not from Paris). If the question had been about non-European cities I would have been completely lost.
You shouldn't expect your second guess to be better than your first, and you should usually expect it to be worse! If you could expect your second guess to be better, then you ought just to be taking what would be your second guess and making it your first.
Suppose I'm trying to estimate the value of a Bernoulli-distributed random variable, i.e. it comes up 1 with probability p and 0 with probability 1-p, and let's suppose p is 2/3. If I'm trying to minimize my mean-squared error, my first guess will be 2/3 and my mean-squared error will be 2/9; if I'm trying to minimize my probability of making any non-zero error, my first guess will be 1 and my error probability will be 1/3. Suppose that "significantly wrong" means I've made an absolute error of more than 1/2, in which case no matter my estimation method I would then know with certainty that my second guess should be 0. But 0 would clearly be a terrible choice for a first guess!
But I think the point of including the question in the survey is that there's some evidence that in fact you _should_ (outside-view) expect your second guess to be better than the first! That is, that when you ask people "estimate X" and then "suppose you learned that that estimate was substantially wrong; what would your revised estimate be?", the second answer ends up being closer on average, or closer in most cases, or less often badly wrong, or something.
I don't know how good the evidence for this is. For what it's worth, on the Moscow question my second answer _was_ somewhat better than my first, but when I tried the same question on my daughter her second answer was substantially worse than her first. Hopefully the survey results will have something a bit larger than n=2 to work with :-).
I should have thought of that! I just went by my knowledge of North American distances and trying to map those to Europe, rather than using my knowledge of the dimensions of the world!
I have an inner voice, but it's because I'm thinking in words pretty constantly. It isn't narrating my life. It never occurred to me that people might have inner narrators.
I also have what I call an attack voice telling me I'm an awful person, but it's rarely a narrator.
I used to have migraines, but something like 50 years ago, so I answered no. I didn't do anything to make them stop, they just went away.
Bonus question: Did you look up the distance from Paris to Moscow as soon as you finished the survey?
More bonus questions: Do you like rereading your own writing? Do you correct old typos?
I interpret inner narrator broadly to include any kind of self-talk. I don't know if that's how Scott meant it. So the voice that says "I'm an awful person" or "you're an awful person" would qualify I would think.
I did look up the distance as soon as I finished and had to resist the urge to look before and cheat because my inner narrator tells me this is the kind of thing I really SHOULD know and that I'm a pretty inferior kind of person if I get it really far off. My guess was pretty far off, my second guess got me closer.
I notice a couple others have brought it up already, but I feel like the urbanization question was either incomplete or poorly worded due to not properly accounting for rural/country as an option. I strongly prefer urban to suburban, but strongly prefer rural to either, so answering the question literally as-asked I would put maximally urban (since I strongly prefer that to suburban, which is the only other option there), but then this feels untrue since I would much rather live in the country than the city.
I felt exactly the same. I slightly prefer urban to suburban, but massively prefer rural to either. I went with "suburban", though, as that felt closer to my ideal living conditions (lowest concentration of people possible).
Still felt weird, though, given it's actually my least favorite option if I were given all three to choose from.
"Rural" seems to cover a lot of ground too. Living in a small town of five thousand people is "rural", and so is living in a village of two hundred, and so is living on a sheep station ten hours drive from the nearest other person.
I'm never really clear on the American distinction between "city" and "suburbs" anyway. How do I tell where one ends and the other begins?
I'm also confused about the distinction. In the city I group up in, everyone knew that anything within the old city tolls is the inner city and anything outside them is the suburbs, but where I live now, most of the country lives in one big pluricentric conurbation, with no clear distinctions. The definition I ended up with is that suburbs have residential ground floors whereas the city has commercial ground floors, which puts me in the suburbs.
I was going to say "count half-siblings but not step-siblings" but then it dawned on me that you could have half-siblings you never lived with (one parent has kids from previous liaisons who are living with different family, divorce and re-marriage/cohabiting with new partner and new child(ren), and step-siblings that you did live with from a young age. So the influence would be different there.
I suppose just count 'em all up and put 'em all in, regardless of step, half, lived with, never saw? Just for raw numbers?
I do too; I think I answered with "a mix of first and third person" but it's 90% "we". Weirdly, this switched from second person several years ago at around the time my mental health was rapidly improving.
I haven't taken the SAT, but I have taken the PSAT (for sophomores and juniors as prep) and the ACT, I feel like I remember that there'd be questions about those?
How about "I reject racial categories and am a special and unique combination of ancestry from many long forgotten tribes across Northern Europe, it's insulting to put me into a bucket with some Dutchman just because we have similar shades of skin"?
I think all of these are worded very carefully and sensibly.
People have some degree of freedom about how to identify racially. That goes especially for mixed, but also shades of brown that can "pass" as this or that. People then identify with their community, often.
The sex question is phrased like that because many intersex people don't know they're intersex, so most people don't really know their own sex for sure. They do know what was put down for them in their documents.
And the gender thing asks for "primarily" because it gives limited options, to prevent having to deal with a large number of genders with few responses each.
"Regardless of how you feel about it politically, how did COVID lockdown affect your life?
Ignore the direct effect of getting COVID, and focus on things like economic changes, decreased interaction with other people, and getting to switch from office to remote work."
Got a problem with this one. Economic changes and restrictions to my liberty were negative, while the remote work was very liberating. I finally settled on a "3" for balance, but would have appreciated two switches, one for the negative and one for the positive changes.
As for the Bitcoin value question, I think mentioning a number in the question will have anchoring effects, no matter how close the number is to the current valuation. Unless that's precisely what you're trying to measure.
The whole "Questions About Cities" is vexing me for amusing reasons. I basically switch cities every couple of weeks and walk to work out of my location in one of them. It's a pretty exact 50/50 split, so I'm struggling to pick which place to answer for with some of the questions - especially "How long, in years, have you lived in your current neighbourhood?", which might either be around 10 years or 2 years depending on which one I pick! :)
Not a criticism of the survey, just wanted to share my amusement at my situation.
I decided to try to guess based on miles in my head before making some attempt to convert to km (because I have no idea of that translation). But then I forgot to translate both times the question was asked! I nailed it in miles on my second attempt, but was off by 1000km.
Scott, you might get some misleading data because the questions about earining, saving, and spending don't clarify household income vs. personal income
I would like the "okay, now put in your score from the rubbish online IQ tests (name of test optional)" in order to see how that matches up with the Official Carried Out By Trained Professional So It Proves I'm Smart test, and to accommodate those of us where routine IQ testing is not a thing and we don't have SAT or GRU or LSE 😁
My IQ score is from high school records that one of the students got a copy of and shared. I went to the same school for most of K-12, so they could be from when I was seven. I put the figure in but I don't trust it.
Yeah. I also have a sometimes-third-person voice, which wasn't an option.
And as for the moral views, I rolled my eyes, neglected to look up any of them yet again, and either skipped the question or answered "other," depending what was available.
Unrelated observation/questions: I see visual snow and notice that if I have just awoken from REM, it has a kaleidoscopic pattern (vs standard random noise). It's kind of like a grid of kaleidoscopic views, maybe 500x500, each with near-identical constantly evolving patterns. I've noticed this 20+ times. I only assume that it is REM - it is strongly correlated with awakening from a dream, but that does not necessarily entail REM. As of recently, I have sleep data (Apple Watch) and confirmed that last night's observation corresponds to awakening from what my watch determined to be REM.
As far as the questions:
- Does anyone else experience this?
- Does anyone experience this who doesn't have visual snow?
- Does anyone know of an explanation of this phenomenon? It seems like it could be an epiphenomenon arising from REM activity in the visual cortex.
I have gotten the kaleidoscopic pattern when waking up in the middle of the night a couple of times, but I don't otherwise see visual snow. I think they are called hypnopompic hallucinations.
I experience kaleidoscopic visual noise during panic attacks, vasovagal syncope (fainting), and orthostatic hypotension. I figure it's a symptom of low blood pressure or oxygen deprivation
Couple of answers that don't fit the provided options:
- I rarely remember dreams, though I think I remember enough to answer the questions. They're not exactly 'in color' or 'in black and white'. I may have some sort of moderate aphantasia, and my dreams are more conceptual, like reading a story without trying to picture it. (Apples vary in how well I can visualize them. Some days they're pure concept, or almost like wireframe, today I can do an imperfect attempts at some texture/color and I hold almost the whole apple 'visible' at once, instead of it having 'out of focus' parts that usually tend to fade out of existence very easily)
- My inner voice usually uses the royal We, so not exactly first or second person! (I may have picked that up from trying to sound more professional when doing projects by myself. I usually write about things I do in the third person, when I'm not directly talking about myself to someone else)
I'm married and combine finances with my spouse; what should I put for the income questions? I initially tried to answer for just me, but then I got to the savings question and realized that the presence of his income affects our collective savings in ways it's hard to separate out. Should I just go back to the first page and answer everything as though we're a single person with two jobs?
Hurrah, it is the annual "you designed this terribly, why didn't you ask this question/include that option" open season on Scott's survey!
I thought it was interesting, but given that it will be "tabulated by computer", I feel that has definitely cut down the choices to something that can be simply marked into "yes/no" bins by machine.
I never know how to answer the sexuality/relationship questions, and would dearly love an option for "Not interested in/do not want [love/romance/marriage/banging sixty different people of all genders every weekend]". For instance, in the "relationship style" do I answer "prefer monogamous" (because were I interested, that would be my preference) or "other", because I don't want any relationship at all?
The "profession" one always amuses me - God help us if any of us are cleaning ladies, I guess we'll have to go under "other - blue collar", right? 😁
Mostly it's okay, though my permanent gripe remains: Political Affiliation. I *would* like to go with "Liberal, for example the US Democratic Party : market economy plus social welfare, socially permissive multiculturalism" except nix on the "socially permissive", so were I American I suppose I'd be one of the Reagan Democrats.
Second choice would be "Social democratic, for example Scandinavian countries: heavily-regulated market economy, cradle-to-grave social safety net, socially permissive multiculturalism" except, you know, that "socially permissive multiculturalism" again (not so much the multiculturalism but let's not start a battle here).
This forces me to choose "Conservative, for example the US Republican Party and UK Tories: low taxes, low redistribution of wealth, traditional values" and do you know why I am bleeding from the eyes with the wailing of the damned arising from the bowels of Hell as I select this option, hmmmm? Because I am being lumped in with the freakin' TORIES. The party of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Margaret Thatcher (I haven't formed a strong impression of Rishi Sunak yet, except that he gives faint indications of being 'oh, another one of them'*).
Not even the old-fashioned House of Stuart supporting Tories, no, the blinkin' present-day boiling. I would even prefer the "robber that is noted for outrages and cruelty" connotations than *that*:
One of these days, I swear, I will crack and select "Alt-right, for example France's National Front: nationalist revival with an ethnic/racial component" and then I will cackle maniacally as the men in white coats drag me off "See what you made me do! Seeeeee!!!!!"
*Partygate - rules for thee but not for me, not registering the interests of the wife's family's money - see rules for thee but not for me. He did resign over the Pincher sex scandal but it's hard to say how much was principle and how much was rats deserting the sinking ship. Apologies to any rats offended by the comparison. He hasn't done anything out of the ordinary above the common venality of wealthy Tory politicians so either there aren't any more scandals to come, or if there are it will be a doozy (seems very unlikely but who can say?). He did ban (again) fracking, so depending on your views on fracking this was a good/bad decision.
FINALLY, I am fascinated as to how I am supposed to answer this question:
"Compared to other people of your same sex, how hard is it for you to orgasm?"
Are we supposed to be in a group with a stopwatch and everyone times themselves? Watch porn on our own and compare our performance with that onscreen? Be gay and see what our partner(s) achieve versus what we achieve? Sidle on to some subreddit and leave a coy enquiry as to how people there feel they do in 'ease of getting your rocks off'? What?
I think that's much more Truman Democrat than Reagan Democrat. Truman Democrats think government has a strong and important role to play on taming the excesses of the free market, strongly support unions and public education, but are also pretty conservative socially (and patriotic and believe in a strong national defense if that matters). My grandfather the steelworker without a college degree who bought war bonds, went to church every Sunday without fail, and reared his children without sparing the rod qualifies. (He was indeed a lifelong Democrat.) Reagan Democrats are people who started off (in the 50s) as Truman Democrats but thought the Democratic Party by the 70s had gone too far, and government had become a parasitic burden.
there's a thread in detail about the orgasm question somewhere above....but for me it was pretty simple to answer just based on having talked with a few close friends about sex over the years, and having read 1-2 books about sex where I am hearing other people's experiences. (ie. I could answer this question having only had a small amount of engagement with the subject. My answer can't be perfect, but I think it's as accurate as any answer would be where I am rating my inner experience compared to someone else's)
I miss having odd questions to test weird hypotheses. I don't know whether they were important, but they added flavor.
Scott, is this a change of policy (maybe testing the weird hypotheses wasn't worth the trouble) or just not having a weird hypothesis to test this year, or what?
I am wondering if an "I know what you mean by this question but am upset by the phrasing" checkbox for each question would be useful (for future questionnaires). Reading these comments there seems to be a split between "the question didn't cover my situation" (I have one of those) and folks who know what Scott meant but are unhappy with the way he phrased the question.
Would it satisfy survey takers who want each question to conform to their worldview and include options that exactly represent them? Yes. Would it be useful? No. If you truly cared you'd leave the question blank and in the end, 'blank' and 'I choose not to answer this because of [objection]' are thrown out of the analysis anyhow.
Totally agree, I was extremely depressed, and near suicide and had some treatment (that was ineffective) from ~11-20 or so. But that was 20 years ago now. And I have had minor bouts with depression into my 20s. Still to this day if things are going very bad with something one of my go to thoughts is "well I could just kill myself", despite the fact I would never do that, and I love my wife/kids, but it is just a go to solution for my mind and emotional states.
Except mostly I have managed to construct a life that is great and insulate myself from most stressors and problems. So I think I am mostly better, but not 100% better, and have mainly solved my problem by eliminating most of the things I had to be depressed about.
So am I depressed? "No" I would guess. But I definitely have some parts of whatever "condition" it is depressed people have, or are on that spectrum or whatever.
This. I struggled a bit with whether to mark "I have" for any diagnosis I've been given, but decided against it because it is present-tense and there were present-tense life satisfaction questions. (It would be weird to mark "I have depression" and then give stellar life satisfaction marks.) But given the family history questions, self-history should be even more important!
SUBREDDIT QUESTION: There should be an option for: "I was banned from the subreddit over nonsense so I don't go there".
I honestly don't even remember the particulars anymore, might have been a year or more ago, but I want to say that the gist of it from my perspective is I was arguing in good faith with one of the mod's friends and we were both being uncharitable, and the mod for some reason banned me despite the interaction being very symmetrical. I want to say I also had the more controversial side of the debate, but I was put off by how out of step the mod's behavior was with what I perceive as the norms of this community. Plus I am not a huge fan of reddit and trying to curtail use.
DISCORD QUESTION: There should be a comment for "other", none of the 4 answers really matches my response. Which would be something like "sure I knew it existed, and in theory I would like to participate, but I simply don't use discord for much (other than online board gaming) and so don't bother. "No I don't want to read it" is definitely not right. But I don't have infinite time.
POLITICAL AFFILIATION QUESTION: This REALLY needs an "other". I am some sort of radical centrist.
Left of the Democrats on some things, right of Republicans on others, a big fan of markets except where they don't work, then I think there should be strong government intervention.
I am also pretty down on voting and pro merit-based civil service. I would like to run the government more like a corporation, but less in terms of there being a powerful "CEO", and more in terms of the departments being professionally staffed and lead without much pressure from electorate. IDK none of the political philosophies are a good one size fits all idea. They are like tools and you need different solutions for different problems.
Asking which of those political philosophies I affiliate with is similar to asking if I think hammers screwdrivers or saws are the best tool. What is the task at hand?
I don’t know the context of the question about weight loss and some weight gain back (and I also may be enough of an outlier not to care), but I felt it to be somewhat unfair in not giving an identifier of fat to muscle ratio of the weight gain back.
I had to write down that I had gained a decent amount of the weight back, but also have weight trained 5/6 days per week and done cardio multiple times per week in the four years since, implying that a large amount of the weight gain (obviously not all) back towards that original number is muscle tissue.
I think it is individual but it’s definitely a bit confusing. Actual researchers on this issue probably have some standard methodology of getting at both.
Yeah, it's just going to get a weird result as I as an individual make a relatively small amount of income at the moment but I'm marking my lifestyle as middle to upper middle class.
1. I have an inner voice in the sense that I often clearly visualize words in my head and play them out, have a monolog about my planned actions or whatever. I'm like very much the opposite of the verbal equivalent of aphantasic. Most of my thoughts are in words. But I have no sense of dialog or of the "inner voice" being a separate individual from "me." Wasn't sure if the question about "inner voice" implied separation from "me." I initially confidently answered yes, I have an inner voice, but the follow up questions implied to me that maybe I meant something different by that.
2. The question about childhood trauma should probably have an option for "I experienced none of these; I am not skipping this question," and possibly one for, "I want to be clear that I am neither confirming nor denying that I have had some childhood trauma, so you don't take my skipping this question to mean that I do have childhood trauma and don't want to talk about it."
3. I find masks so uncomfortable that I will skip LONG events that I otherwise want to do if I have to be masked, but they aren't too bad for stuff under like 30 minutes.
Maybe Scott can clarify -- I understood inner voice as any form of self-talk that we do, not as necessarily experiencing a separate individual inside of us.
I would like a future question about misanthropy, since I was just annoyed yet again by someone who assumes that superior aliens would hate the human race. The question about whether you think people are trustworthy comes close, but that frames it as personal.
What I'm curious about is the people who apparently think they cab accurately estimate the views of morally/scientifically superior entities, and those views are going to be strongly negative. I suppose the same question applies to anyone who thinks God basically doesn't like people.
Maybe this correlates with depression? Narcissism? Strict religious upbringing, and maybe the upbringing for parents and grandparents matters too?
I'm surprised about people who have generally positive views on humans. Humanity did the Holocaust, slavery, wars, etc... Just taking one of those: Holocaust. Do you think German people are inferior to other peoples? Personally I think the people of countries arent that different, hence on Earth no large group of people have sufficient moral character to not do incredible acts of evil if the conditions are right.
This said I'm unsure about the alien question and would have to make assumptions to answer it.
I answered that people are basically trustworth (unsure about the specific value) as they rarely do things which are immoral according to them/their surrounding culture (these two things are mostly the same which is the primary flaw of humans imo) and when they do them its only after severe rationalisations for a big incentive.
I don't think I'm narcissist. I don't have depression nor had strict religious upbringing.
I'm not sure I completely understand this squaring. As they say "you fuck one goat..". To me if an entity does a little holocaust in some situation, even if that situation is uncommon or not "normal" for some value of normal, I would still call that entity evil.
Probably 99% or more of the people involved in the Holocaust didn’t do anything as explicit as one goat-fucking! They’re much more like people who sometimes acknowledge that sweatshops and butchering are involved in their clothes and meat, and do it anyway, even though they would never think to instigate anything like that.
Sorry, I probably should have been more clear: by entity I mean humanity, ie humans collectively which I understood the original question to be about. My view on individual people has very high variance (really hate violent criminals, really love my close friends/family), but would probably average out to somewhat positive, they are adorable after all: https://www.boredpanda.com/12-reasons-humans-are-adorable/
Furthermore, my hatred of humanity is not necessarily constant, it might possibly change in the future if it improves on its flaws. I really liked this possible future state of humanity: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lom9cb/kindness_to_kin/
“But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”
Admittedly I am not a native speaker, my English is passable at best, so some deeper poetic meaning of this quote might be lost on me, however, (to me) this is very unconvincing and I wonder how would people react if I used the same standards for an individual: Sure, they might have killed a family of four while enjoying their cries for help, but they loved their mothers so deeply and wrote some really beautiful poems.
They also loved nature. Both are evidence that they were human. That is the disturbing part. Human beings are capable of horrible things. Hannah Arendt made a career out of this (correct) observation.
It's not saying "Humans commit violence, but they also produce symphonies, so that makes it OK." It's saying "Humans evolved from lower animals in a violent struggle for survival, so it's only to be expected that they commit violence, but it's a cause for surprise and wonder that they produce symphonies."
I am not too adept at expressing my thoughts and I thank you for your helpful intentions! Compare your summary of the quote with this: "This specific serial killer comes from a line of animals in a violent struggle for survival, so it's only to be expected that they commit violence, but it's a cause for surprise and wonder that they produce poems.". This sentence is analogous to your summary: The difference being that instead of talking about humans collectively, it talks about one specific individual. Let's call your sentence A and my sentence B. My hope is that everyone sees how ridiculous B as a defense of a specific serial killer is without further argument and I did not intend with it to defend serial killers. Given this, my desire to understand your point of view (ie that A is not ridiculous as a defense of humanity) compells me to try to understand what the specific relevant difference is between the individual serial killer and humanity collectively which breaks the analogy. From my point of view I currently believe that the analogy is correct (ie. there is no analogy-breaking relevant difference between individual humans and humanity) and I avoid the contradiction by also rejecting A as a defense of humanity.
I put "3" for the ASMR question. I'm not sure what I experience is ASMR but I have misophonia and hate, with an extra burning passion, the things that give other people ASMR. So am I getting ASMR and I just hate it? Or do I just hate those types of sounds?
Same here, hate ASMR sounds. I put "no" since I assume the normal connotation behind the term is that it's pleasurable. Maybe there will be a misophonia option next year.
Same. I have read that there's allegedly a *correlation* between ASMR and misophonia, but that's not exactly what any of us seem to mean here (and I have trouble believing that it could be true.)
Then my guess is that you simply lack the fundamental type of experience that people describe with ASMR. I'm not sure I do or not, ASMR is completely neutral for me, but the description of that sensation matches with what I sometimes experience from music, so there's probably something there, but I'm not wired the same as the ASMR people.
Not the person you asked, but I also have a very strongly negative response to ASMR stimuli.
I get frisson often and easily from music, and can sometimes trigger it voluntarily without any external stimulus. It's a profoundly, unmistakably different sensation from the feelings triggered by ASMR stimuli, to the point that I really don't understand why people would think there was a connection. (It's like if we were saying "poison ivy makes me itch" and you asked "do you ever orgasm?")
This suggests to me that there's a fundamental difference in experience between people who enjoy ASMR stimuli and people who hate it, not that they are the same experience and people either like or dislike it.
Miscellaneous notes on questions that I didn't feel captured my response well:
- Several questions were framed as "Relative to other people, how good/bad are you at something?" Hard to be sure sometimes without a good intuition for where other people are on average.
- No way specify "I don't have any close friends." (Or "Mostly some other gender," I suppose.)
- On the plane-flying question, there might be a difference between "I don't fly as much because I personally feel less safe flying" versus "I don't fly as much even though I want to, because my employer/family/government/lizard people told me not to." The wording of the question kind of seems to assume the former.
- The "What undermined your trust" question had three different options about COVID coverage. That makes it hard to convey "The flip-floppiness and political expedience of COVID coverage in general."
- Does using a calculator on the "distance" question count as using an outside reference? (I didn't, but it might have helped a little.)
- On the plane-flying question, there might be a difference between "I don't fly as much because I personally feel less safe flying" versus "I don't fly as much even though I want to, because my employer/family/government/lizard people told me not to." The wording of the question kind of seems to assume the former.
Indeed. I didn't fly all last year mostly because my daughter turned two right after two year olds were expected to wear masks on flights, but she was not the kind of two year who could manage to wear a mask, even when she agreed to do it, and was highly motivated to do it because something she really wanted to do depended on it. Most non-airline people seemed to just look at her and intuitively understand the situation, but it didn't sound like that would work on airlines.
I know this is a losing battle, but I'm once again impelled to point out that "Hispanic" is an ethnicity, not a race. My Hispanic father's ancestry is almost 100% Iberian (i.e. white European).
Correct and if you look at previous survey results, you'll see many Latin American nationals picking white instead of Hispanic. The framing is probably wrong here - either it should be defined as an ethnicity or replaced with "mestizo/indigenous American" if that's what it's going for.
Similar problems exist for disaggregating Middle East from white; Middle Eastern (at least in an American context) isn't considered a separate "race" and is going to result in unclear selections between mixed European/Middle Eastern people (many in America, Israelis, etc.), skewing the numbers.
Also, surprising you can't multi-select options which is standard in US data collection.
The "Hispanic" classification is a strange one, since every place that uses it does point out "this is not a race" but then they use it alongside "white, black, Asian, etc." I imagine it's because of historical accident; people from Central and South American countries will have some mixture of European, indigenous and maybe even African ancestry, depending in what admixture and degree.
So you can't call them "white" (exactly, except now for "Non-Hispanic White" being a subdivision) and you can't call them "Native American" (exactly) and then of course there's the Spanish-speaking versus Portuguese-speaking division, and the islands, and - oh heck, just say "Latin American" or "Hispanic".
The American mashup of race/ethnicity is so weird. As a many generations white American, I have a hard time answering that question because my English/German/French ancestry is hundreds of years in the past. I would like to have an ethnicity that comes with good food, music, holidays, attire, pleasing and distinctive hair texture (I don't care what kind) -- where can I get some of that?
I'm always really confused about this - should I be marking my son, whose grandfather is from Spain, as Hispanic on forms that ask the question? My husband certainly doesn't identify as Hispanic.
You will be technically correct if you say "Hispanic", but you will confuse people. And you might offend a few who prefer a more exclusionary definition, but probably not too seriously. Nobody will give you any grief if you just say "White".
Weirdly enough it kind of is in the US, since almost all our "Hispanics" come from Mexico and Central America and have a substantial Mesoamerican genetic component (probably mostly Mayan). I say "weirdly" because it has zilch to do with any Spanish inheritance, as you correctly observe, and stems instead from (long-ago) intermarriage of white Europeans with Native (Central) Americans, so it *should* be classified as some variation on Native American.
And having an option for "any whites except Hispanic whites" and then not having a separate option for "Hispanic whites" is real weird. And only excluding Hispanics from the white category but not from any of the others (millions of Hispanic blacks and Asians out there) smells pretty funky to me.
As a retired person, I found the Profession question a bit hard to answer. "In what area do you _currently_ work or study?" I worked 40+ years in one of these fields, and am happily NOT doing that any more... It was also interesting to notice the absence of "homemaker", or for that matter anything pink collar. I can't even select "other" to reflect my new status as "idle rich" ;-)
I think using pre-tax income for anything would be weird, as then it would depend on how one's government divides labour taxation between income tax (included in pre-tax income) and payroll tax (not included in pre-tax income), which varies enormously. E.g. payroll tax used to be about half the tax on my labour, but after I moved, it's about one tenth.
Is it not possible next time to make a choice of several options in the issue of employment? I am a graduate student and part-timer (at the same research institute where I study), and I am missing one option. In a EA survey I took recently, this possibility was.
On the question about your SAT score, your coastal bias is showing. The ACT score is much more common in the Midwest USA than the SAT score. There are a large number of people from midwestern america who have never taken the SAT.
Can you add an option for "I have never taken the SAT".
Same question for the scientific IQ test, I didnt quite know what to do since I have never taken a real IQ test.
I would have liked an "I have never taken" response for all of those tests. Despite going to college, I have never taken SAT, ACT, nor IQ. I just skipped those, but thought the same on the previous surveys, since there are "does not apply" options for other questions. (There may be a meaningful difference between non-Americans who took a different test instead, and Americans who did not take any large standardized tests).
But it seems like you should answer yes to that even if only one of your parents abandoned you. I ended up answering yes, just because it seemed the closest equivalent to "one of my parents stopped being there."
That would be the only fair way to handle it. By my informal measurement, the majority of anarchists don't consider ancaps to be anarchists, but there's no way to stop them from calling themselves that.
Reddit/Discord had no answers that worked for me: I do know of them and am interested, but that haven't so far bubbled up to action. May well do so in the future. AI x-risk was weird for me: I gave 1% and think the probability of extinction by 2100 is low, but am extremely concerned about other massive consequences and spend a lot of my time on AF etc. You might think about more Qs on this topic. I mostly trust MSM but simultaneously think there's been serious deterioration. I answered the 'what has shaken your trust' Q despite its being scoped to people who answered the 'do you trust' question differently.
I had a problem with the lack of an anarchist option too. It seems like such an obvious hole in the data - even more so than the lack of a Green option, when the Greens are a significant political party in some countries. The only way I could see rationalizing it would be if you identify politics as exclusively an electoral and parliamentary activity, which could be seen as an electoralist bias in the survey.
@Scott, if your primary interest is how people vote, you could say that. Obviously there are no anarchist candidates for government, but anarchists often do vote nonetheless. We just don't see voting as the most important form of political action.
A few of the questions seem to be ambiguous or otherwise sub-optimal.
1) The meetup question includes not attending since not interested and not attending but planning on attending.
A useful additional option would be "not attended but interested in attending.
This would include anyone who is neither committed to not attending nor committed to attending.
2) The political spectrum doesn't accommodate libertarians, like a 4 quadrant political compass would.
3) The human biodiversity question is phrased oddly. It asks whether one has a "favorable opinion on an idea." This is ambiguous and could mean to ask how likely the idea is to be true, or how valuable or "good" the idea is.
4) The mental health question gives two options for yourself - diagnosed with a condition, and think you might have a condition. But it lacks the second option for family members.
If one suspects that a family member has / had a condition without knowing whether they were formally diagnosed, there is no option for it.
5) The mood and anxiety question ask about usual mood rated 1-10, which is fine, but it may have made sense, especially for the anxiety question to ask how often someone feels anxious, as it is not clear whether one should average their moods, or state the modal mood.
Assuming the latter, then the question as is, does not distinguish between someone who experiences anxiety / bad mood 49% of the time and 0% of the time, as long as the rest of the time, they feel fine.
6) The NIMBY / YIMBY questions includes two distinct axes of definition. A) Is the main priority protecting exiting homeowners or making enough housing. B) Thinking that new housing will have various negative effects vs. various positive effects.
One can think that the main priority is protecting existing homeowners, and still think that e.g. new housing will bring down prices (NIMBY on A, YIMBY on B). In fact, in the interest of protecting existing homeowners, one may oppose new housing precisely because it will bring down housing prices.
One could also conceivable effectively be YIMBY on A and NIMBY on B, if they think that owners should have the right to build more housing on their property (strong property rights) while thinking that the results (traffic, etc.) would be negative.
It might be simpler to just ask whether more housing should be generally permitted or restricted.
7) The ASMR question doesn't distinguish between those who have encountered stimuli that are supposed to cause the feeling, but failed to feel it, and those who have not encountered the stimuli in the first place.
8) As others have pointed out, the savings question is ambiguous in whether it is asking for total cumulative savings or annual savings. I.e. if someone earned 100k each year for 10 years, and saved 10k for each of those years, do they answer 10% or 100%.
9) For the geography question, you may want to clarify whether people are allowed to look up the conversion rate for km and mi.
10) The question about flying and COVID conflates the past and the present. The title asks whether behavior changed (i.e. at any time in the past) but the answer options refer exclusively to the present.
11) The question about reguessing the answer to geography question is ambiguous in that it does not define the objective. If the objective is to get very close to the true answer, without no difference between moderately off and very off, then one would never repeat the same answer.
If the goal is to minimize the error, where a very wrong answer is much worse than a moderately wrong answer, then one would probably choose the exact same answer.
12) I realize it isn't your wording, but for the question about hearing voices, I wonder what someone with hypnagogic hallucinations is supposed to answer.
13) Some questions use 1-5 rating and some 1-10. It seems hard to think of an advantage of the former except for consistency with prior studies which potentially used the same scale.
14) For the price of Bitcoin, you give the example entry of '20,000' but it appears that the actual entry cannot include a comma. That is, it should be '20000'
I notice the survey asked a lot of questions about psychosis but then (iirc) didn't actually ask whether I'd suffered from psychosis? This seems too bad; I would have liked to provide this info.
Also, every year I wish the mental illness questions had an answer for "I used to have this but don't anymore".
Mental health: there’s no “I had a formal diagnosis, but I consider I don’t have it now, and nor does any medical professional” option. Are you trying to find current rates, or tendencies? What do you want me to pick? And does this suggest that you don’t think these disorders can ever be ‘cured’?
(I realise that you have a grab bag of things in that section, and some of them generally *aren’t* expected to change, but some of them are!)
> Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID?
Options: No change; Yes, COVID made me fly less.
COVID switched me to fully-remote work. I can fly somewhere and work remotely for a few weeks. I've probably flown 2-3x this year as in any year previously.
So...the answer to the *question* is yes, but the "yes" option is explicitly the opposite of my yes. How seriously should I take the "explanation" part of the answer?
Yes, I assumed that was the intent. I fly somewhat less because I now often work from home on days when I would have flown to the office or whatever, but rounded to "not a significant change, at least not of the sort I think you are thinking about".
yeah I put I fly less, but that is all due to me providing in person trainings to some clients and during COVID I was providing none of these. My personal vacation oriented flying went up actually.
For questions that clearly want a number, but I don't have the recollection/exact knowledge to give one, is it better to leave it blank or put in some explanatory text?
For example, the "largest LSD dose" question, my answer would be "I don't remember the number but it was a medium-low dose." Would it be more helpful if I put that in the box or leave it blank?
EDIT: Never mind, I see the form will only accept a number.
Took the whole survey, then signed into Gmail for the number of emails question, then upon hitting "submit" instead of a submission confirmation, it appeared to reload the first page of the docs form with the address I signed into (not the one I put for the survey) treating the page as if my intent were to re-fill the form but signed in to Google.
This may have just been a waste of 20 minutes of my life because Google can't help itself when it comes to pretending that I want to be part of its ecosystem.
For "What person does your inner voice talk in?" I put down not really either since there wasn't a good option. But for reference it's almost always in terms of 'we'. E.g. 'we should do ...' or 'we could do ...' etc.
I had this same question and settled on just reading as written. So I guessed in what I figured were 2030 dollars, which are presumably going to be worth somewhat less than today's dollars.
I interpreted it as "There exists a time in the year 2030 T and a spot Bitcoin exchange B where you can exchange 1 BTC at T on B for $[response] dollars", with the assumption that B is legitimate (i.e. you can and do receive $[response] dollars).
"Did you work remotely during the pandemic?" I was temporarily mostly-unemployed during the pandemic specifically because of the pandemic, which there didn't seem to be an option for (there was something like "I don't work", but that seems to imply that you didn't work before the pandemic either).
"You thought your country's COVID response was:" I really appreciate your explicitly distinguishing between the strictness of a response and the competence of a response, though I was still a bit unsure how to answer this. I was basically satisfied with the *degree* of restrictiveness in the COVID response of my country (the US) but I think the restrictions should have started significantly *earlier* so I answered that I thought our response was moderately too lax.
I would have preferred the two Paris-to-Moscow questions being adjacent. After answering the first one and seeing that the question after it was not a related follow-up question, I Googled the correct answer to see how far off I was, so then I couldn't really give an unbiased answer to the second question, so I just skipped it.
The distance estimation question should ask half the Americans to answer in miles and half in km to see just how bad we are at casual use of metric. I got reasonably close but didn’t mentally convert miles to km as well as I should have.
I wonder if the ethnic group checkboxes were chosen using what we have from previous population genomics studies.
It feels odd to have Pakistani be an ethnic cluster, when it constitutes 5+ distinct ethnic groups. Namely : Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Baloch, Kashmiri? & post-partition Indians. The Indian ethnic group choices are pretty weird. Tamil shows up despite being a fairly small group, but there are no options for other Indians. Bengali makes some sense, since it covers 1 Indian state + 1 country.
I added a generic "northwestern Indian" (Since west Indian would have been confusing). But, having a few other options there would've been nice.
It’s confusing because Tamil and Bengali (and Pakistani) were listed as options (but no other south Asian ethnicities, and no catchall option). CF if instead of ‘white’ the question gave options ‘italian,’ ‘French’ or ‘Norwegian’ (but no others, and no catchall white option).
It continues being weird from my European point of view that Hispanic (which often (although not in this survey) explicitly includes Spanish origin) is different from White. I would intuitively say Spanish people are White, and I certainly have a hard time telling them apart from, say, Portuguese or Italian, but somehow the latter two count as White and Spanish as Hispanic? Or is a light-skin-in-the-winter-and-very-tanned-skin-in-the-summer West European supposed to count as not White? What then?
That's why "Hispanic? Yes/No" is usually asked separately from race. Someone might be white hispanic or mestizo Hispanic, or some other combinations, and it's often specified by asking the questions separately.
Missing an option "No, although I probably should". The existing options assume that whoever has a problem with vision is doing something about it.
> ... as a child?
Please add "I don't remember" option.
> Inner voice
Please explain a bit what you mean? Like, voluntary talking to myself, or involuntary? Considering the latter "what is your inner voice's attitude" question I assume it means involuntary.
> Prediction question
The provided examples are anchoring, at least in my case very strongly because I do not have a strong opinion.
Maybe include also a question about how confident I am about the predictions. My confidence is low, but hey, I can still make a guess if you want me to, but without stating the low confidence I feel a little like an idiot.
Hi! I answered 3 a lot to the likerts, meaning "dunno" or "no opinion", and this might conflate with ambivalence/neutrality. If this is an issue, maybe consider adding a sixth option for us people who don't simply know about the topic to have an idea.
In those cases I simply skipped the question, although I agree that an option to clearly state "don't know / no opinion / no answer" would have been more satisfying.
Your 'Race' section is non-ideal. Hispanic yes/no should be a separate ethnicity question and mixed race people would appreciate multiple check boxes over single boxes.
I didn't find my philosophical orientation, which is humanist, so I answered "other." But I imagine one of those big words correlates pretty well with humanism.
Could you please change the question about circumcision? As currently written has an 'option for women' and that was just an awful dysphoria twinge as a MTF transperson.
For the question: What person does your inner voice talk in?
I don't think it likely deserves its own option, but my primary mode is 'we' (and no, I don't do tulpas or any of that weirdness). Just curious if anyone else had been doing that from a young age.
Where do you think you fall on a classic political spectrum?" What do you mean Left/Right? Are you asking about social or economic views? What about being split on social and economic views? There's no way to select this answer.
I know some people have issues with it, too, but the venerable quadrant system designed by politicalcompass.org (now celebrating 22 years on the Internet!) is far superior to a simple left-right scale.
Certainly over short distances, but I was worried about the roundoff multiplying into a pretty substantial error if I just went with a × 5/3 conversion
Pro tip: You can use any two consecutive elements of the Fibonacci sequence and get pretty good precision. And by Zeckendorf's theorem you can write every natural number as the sum of non consecutive, distinct Fibonacci numbers (uniquely, greedy works)
I was interested in participating until I saw "What sex were you assigned at birth?" and "With what gender do you primarily identify?" The second is perhaps understandable from an anthropological perspective, to see which if your readers have taken up the gender religion, as long as there is a true nullo option to signify that the survey-taker does not share the religious belief in gender identity that the other options imply. But to have these two questions as a standard for everyone, in the form they now exist, is nonsense -- the equivalent of mandatorily asking which church your readers belonged to as children, and then asking if they identify as Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist (converted from Presbyterian), Mormon (converted from Mennonite), or Other (Christian).
There are an enormous number of people taking the survey to whom these questions do not actually apply, and for whom "Other" gives the false impression of fellow-travelling in the genderist religion.
To state it plainly, nobody was "assigned" a sex at birth -- there are a very small number of males with very specific DSDs who until recently (one hopes) would have their penises and testes removed as infants and who were mostly-unsuccessfully socialised as females; even in these cases, the unsuccessful socialisation is good evidence that the operation and socialisation were not "assignments" so much as medical and social experimentation that mostly didn't pan out. Except for these rare instances, sex at birth was observed, not assigned. Therefore the first question gives you no actual information; perhaps "Other" here could be dominated by people who understand this reality, but I somehow doubt it.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "gender identity", except as a self-referential concept -- like chakras, or Calvinism, or Communism. It only exists insofar as someone can be conned or blackmailed into saying it exists and behaving as though it does. Therefore the second question only informs you which of your readers explicitly claim to be transgender -- here, "Other" will almost certainly be dominated by people who claim to believe in gender identity and who claim to identify as some gender other than exclusively male or female.
I strongly suggest you modify the answers to these questions to include those who do not believe in the genderist religion (like your questions about more conventional religions do not assume Christianity) if you want to get a fuller picture of how your readers actually feel about the subject.
Agree. I hate the term "cis", and would never describe myself as "cis". Answering a question where that's the only true option is like sticking my hand in slime.
I didn't really understand what that cis part of the option in parenthesis meant, but seemed like it was applying to me. I didn't look it up on wikipedia like the philosophy options though.
It's a simple fact that (practically) everyone was assigned a sex at birth, the same way most people were assigned a blood type the first time they had a blood test.
It's a matter of opinion whether these assignments are acknowledgements of obvious and immutable metaphysical truths, or theory-laden decisions to impose simplified categorization schemata onto spectra of natural variation. But this is frankly an irrationally histrionic reaction to one of the most objective and widely-used ways to cut the Gordian knot of edge cases and incommensurable paradigms surrounding this question.
It is also a matter of opinion if the Earth is flat or round and whether it revolves around the Sun and the reverse. Also a matter of opinion if the sky is blue or pink.
Maybe I've been a biologist for too long, but it's fascinating to me that someone could accept this framing and still disagree about which option is obvious.
Do you also think species assignment of a given organism is a similarly paradigm-neutral process of observing a timeless and objective fact? Or are you agreeing with me that _obviously_ the map is not the territory and _obviously_ contingent interpretive choices will have to be made in the process of establishing a correspondence between them?
If we had seventeen different sexes and there was always the possibility of confusing type IX with type XII and so forth, then "assigned at birth type XIII, turns out to be type VIII" would be a use of language we might not quibble over because this would be a common, happens a lot of times, a lot of people were mis-assigned, problem.
But we've got two sexes in humans, even if we also have intersex and chromosomal disorders and the rest of it, so barring rare exceptions, there is "this is a biological male/this is a biological female" fact at birth. There has been argument that "nobody puts 'assigned human' on a birth certificate" and yeah, exactly. But humans are animals! There is the term "non-human animal" in vogue! So why are we not "assigned human at birth"? Because nobody (as yet) is trying to argue that there is a decision taken of observations made that the parents and/or doctors conclude that this is indeed a human and not a chimpanzee, gazelle or sloth. (Give furries and otherkin time to work on this one).
So the whole "assigned Z at birth" language *is* attempting to muddy the waters. Oh well, how can we possibly tell if Baby is indeed a boy or a girl, maybe they are kinnar or two-spirit or enby or agender? So we 'assign' something as a placeholder to them until they can be sure of what they are (funny how there is no corresponding "assigned female at transition" talk, no, now Older Born Person just *is* what they have legally changed their birth cert to say).
I think everyone agrees on the following: practically every baby is examined at birth and that, on the basis of this examination (and sometimes some follow-up surgeries), the people around it agree to treat it as belonging to a certain sex category, typically following the medical and societal norms dominant in their community.
The meaning of "assign" (Latin ad+signare, "to add a mark [to]") is "to attribute or sort something to a specific category," which is a precisely what happens in this process regardless of whether you believe the categories in question are objective changeless truths or not. Anything beyond this is up for endless debate: whether these categories are pre-theoretic facts written into the universe at its creation or imperfect human approximations thereto or useful simplifications of irreducibly complex spectra or arbitrarily constructed language-games, whether it's possible for this initial consensus to be wrong and what kind of further data is needed to establish that it was, etc.
Now, some people might be fine with rounding this off to "all babies are biological males or females, and let's not worry about the rare edge cases even though we know this will mess up about 5% of our data." But I've been told that Scott aims to be less wrong than the average bear, so it makes perfect sense that he'd use the version of this question that minimizes ambiguity, classifies edge cases the way most comparable datasets do, and asks for an objective fact instead of a messy and theory-dependent argument that his respondents will disagree on how to interpret.
I am very interested in the basis you have used for deciding that anywhere near 5% of babies are born with their sex sufficiently ambiguous that we could say their sex was not immeditately apparent to everyone involved in the birth. The only time I have seen numbers anywhere near that for the term ‘intersex’, people were including various hormone disorders that don’t have anything like this impact, and even included things like PCOS!
If you were looking at it affecting closer to 0.02% of your data (2 in every 10000), would that change your view of how the data should be collected?
What about if most people identifying with the term ‘intersex’ had no ambiguity in their sex observed at birth, and most people who did did not identify with the term ‘intersex’ and considered that they could easily answer a question that simply asked their sex? Would that make a difference to what this question is actually doing?
While it’s hell for researchers to try to find forms of questions that people will give the ‘right’ answer to, past a certain point where people are determined to give the ‘wrong’ answer you’re just playing games. I understand why Scott phrased this question the way he did, but it’s not phrased this way for the benefit of people whose sex was actually ambiguous at birth.
"the version of this question that minimizes ambiguity, classifies edge cases the way most comparable datasets do, and asks for an objective fact instead of a messy and theory-dependent argument"
Well, alrighty then! If we're going to be so careful about including edge case data, then let's add in a question about "are you intersex/were you identified as intersex at birth or at some point afterwards/do you have a DSD?" just to be sure because while trans people like to use "but what about intersex?" in this discussion, I feel there are not good data on what proportion of trans people are intersex.
Indeed, let's go further. If "assigned" or "identified" is just harmless neutral observing-the-facts usage about a decision taken at birth, then let's keep it for the same kind of decision taken afterwards. So Euphoria can be AMAB (assigned male at birth) but now she is AFAB (assigned female after birth). Surely nobody can object to this inoffensive term, given that it is just a description of a decision taken after observing a cluster of categories?
And if you object to being identified as AFAB on the basis of it might cause confusion, well we can change that last letter, make it P (for puberty) or L (for legal identify) or T (for transition, social and/or medical and/or surgical).
Scott can then phrase his next set of survey questions inoffensively to all:
(1) what was your assigned sex at birth?
AFAB
AMAB
(2) what is your assigned sex after puberty/legal identity change/transition now?
AFAT
AMAT
I'm certain everyone advocating for the "assigned at birth" phraseology will logically accept the other terminology, on the same grounds as they are claiming about use of "assigned".
"Assigned" -- you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.
In particular, it does not mean "identify", except perhaps in the modern reflexive use of that verb. When someone tests their blood, that blood's type is *identified* (in the traditional sense) as belonging to one of a few categories; it was not "assigned" this category by the test. The category to which your blood belongs is not an arbitrary social invention -- absent a blood test showing compatible categories, you take a random person's blood transfusion at the risk of serious physical consequences. We can quibble over the number and boundaries of these categories, as well as the fidelity of our still-arguably-too-blunt instruments in measuring them, but the categories themselves are a matter of fact that would be true even if every last human being in the Universe ceased to exist.
The simple fact is that essentially everyone's sex is identified at birth, and essentially all of these identifications are correct. Aside from the few cases of surgical interventions to remove partially-formed male sex organs and a conspiracy of doctors and parents to raise the child as a female (which are the only cases of an attempt at "assignment" near birth, and which do not work in any case), there are cases of androgyne insensitivity where a male develops apparently-female traits, and in these cases misidentification is possible (though given the ubiquity and fidelity of screenings, these cases are now almost always correctly-identified). For the vast majority of people with DSDs, sex is unambiguous and easily identifiable with visual inspection or standard blood tests; for everyone who lacks a DSD, sex is always identifiable by visual inspection. And, in any case, none of these "edge cases" of a child's sex have anything at all to do with the belief system promulgated by trans activists and their allies -- the "incommensurable paradigm" you mention.
My reaction here is neither irrational nor histrionic; rather, it is sceptical, in the sense that it does not grant the premises of the opposing argument. It only seems irrational and histrionic to those who take these premises as a matter of course and who cannot imagine a rhetorical universe in which they do not hold -- in precisely the same way that a fundamentalist Christian views anyone who publicly claims to be an atheist as an irrational, hysterical fool, no matter the tone or content of the purported atheist's public statements. (See: how virtually everyone responded to Richard Dawkins from the early 90's to the mid 2000's, and also somewhat ironically since 2015 or so when he first articulated his scepticism in the genderist religion).
And my point remains that if Scott wishes to actually understand the number of people who subscribe to trans activists' incommensurable paradigm, he should word these questions differently and provide unambiguous answers so that the vast majority of people who do not subscribe to this paradigm do not have to choose an answer which implies that they do.
> there are cases of androgyne insensitivity where a male develops apparently-female traits
It doesn't seem right to talk about "male" without any further comment here. We are talking about *chromosomal* males, who would, in the natural course of events, look female, be socialized as female, develop much like a typical chromosomal female (albeit a sterile one), amd most likely see themselves as female.
The context is the sexual identification of infants. It is a matter of fact that these cases are males with a sexual development disorder which may lead them to develop female-like traits. Calling such an infant "female" counts as a misidentification, and approaches the "assignment" that organoid insists occurs as a matter of course.
It is relevant to the individuals themselves and their doctors to have a full picture of their medical condition and how it may impact their lives; it is also relevant to society that we do not conspire to ignore a complicated truth in favour of a belief system offering a simple falsehood.
That does not mean we should force males with these particular DSDs to be socialised as other males; in my opinion we shouldn't *force* children of either sex to be socialised any particular way. But the truth matters, both as a practical matter and as an ideal.
The truth that their chromosomes are XY is relevant to the individuals - and to whoever may have wanted to have children with them, I suppose. We are not doing them or anybody a favor by insisting that it is somehow an objective truth that they are *really* male, and that they are only apparently female. Their external organs and appearance is female, and I would venture that androgen insensitivity means that, say, the influence of sex on their brain development is a female influence. The only neutral way to describe them is as *chromosomal* males, who are generally assigned to the female gender at birth, and socialized as women.
I suppose we are simply at a disagreement as to what "neutral" and "assignment" (versus misidentification) mean, but for the sake of argument, let us take as read that the vanishingly small number of males with extreme androgyne insensitivity are indeed "assigned" female at (or near) birth, and that this population together with the population of males with lesser forms of androgyne insensitivity or other DSDs which led their doctors and parents to surgically and socially and later hormonally intervene to trick them into thinking they were females (often with extremely negative psychological consequences) are also "assigned" female at birth, it is still inappropriate to frame general sex-identification as an assignment. It simply is not.
It's an objective fact whether a given human's erythrocytes present agglutinogen A on their surface (modulo de novo mutations, modified epitopes, etc), but which of the 33 blood type systems recognized by the International Society of Blood Transfusion will be used to *assign* a person's blood to a specific category is very much a socially and historically contingent choice. Similarly, it's an observable fact whether a given baby's urethral opening is near the tip of its erectile nubbin, caudal to the whole structure, or somewhere on the caudal side of it; but it's a socially and historically contingent choice whether this character will be used to *assign* the baby to one of two or three sex categories, and whether this assignment will be revised if it conflicts with later karyotype or sequencing data.
This is basic critical thinking about how iteratively refined, induction-based scientific categories work, and you don't need to accept any controversial claims about the validity of trans identity to understand it. That said, if your normative position on trans rights requires you to defend the position that biological epistemology is supposed to work the same way as mathematical proofs, it's not a very rational one.
You keep using the word "assign" where I would expect you to use "identify". And of course I cannot go round-for-round with you about biologically epistemological minutiae, whether of blood or of various genetic or karyotypic DSDs -- though part of me is morbidly curious whether you actually admit that genetic and karyotypic data exist independently of social construction, and where you draw the line between a category's identification criteria and the existence of the category itself. But that threatens to derail us even deeper into the interminable Platonic argument that you dismiss as "mathematical proofs". (After all, from an abstract-enough philosophical standpoint, all rhetorical facts exist in an environment in which "biological epistemology" and "mathematical proofs" [really mathematical constructions] are simply categories to which those facts are "assigned", at least by your logic, and who the hell are we to assume an idea's philosophical category anyway?)
So rather than go round and round with you, I will lay my cards on the table and give you every point you may hope to extract from that sort of discussion. Yes, scientific categories are messy; not everything is amenable to categorisation, and of the things which are amenable, sometimes categories will overlap; for every category, there will be some ambiguous cases which are difficult or impossible to categorise. Different peoples at different times and places have understood more or less about certain scientific categories, and people often assert that certain social categories are really scientific ones in order to imply a false sense of immutability or naturalistic justification of them. Sometimes there is a paradigm shift which causes us to recategorise, or even decategorise, entire domains; this is fairly common in palaeontology, and even in archaeology, owing to the scarcity of evidence and the extreme difficulty of its interpretation. As you allude elsewhere, even firm categorisation of macroorganisms into distinct species can sometimes be tricky, with no universal set of general inclusion criteria. Hell, I'll even go you one better and admit that biologists have a difficult time clearly delineating precisely what counts (or rather what doesn't count) as a living thing at all.
To hone in on the point: Some societies do or did indeed have separate social roles for individuals who could not fit the (usually hyper-masculine, almost always extremely rigid) social roles associated with the sexes in their particular societies -- usually these are men who cannot be masculine enough to fulfil a hypermasculinised male social role but who are clearly not female, so they must fulfil some other social function (often whether they wish to or not). Every society has also had individuals who either by choice or by nature go against the social expectations of their sex -- for example, every society that has ever existed has had women who have fought in combat and men who never would do so.
But using these contingent historical facts to imply that human sex is an arbitrary social construct to which individuals are assigned ultimately amounts to sophistry, special pleading, and epistemological self-sabotage in service to a newly-fashionable religious dogma. In all but a vanishing minority of cases, human sex is identified (and identified correctly, even in the vast majority of DSD cases) as one of either male or female, regardless of the social roles associated with these sexes or the mystical tenets of "gender identity" that modern gender theologians foist upon them.
Furthermore, the existence of people with DSDs is entirely orthogonal to the psychosocial phenomenon of transgenderism and has little to do with the religious tenets of trans activism (except as smokescreen fodder to smuggle these tenets under the cloud of philosophical obfuscation generated by discussions of this very kind, which many people with DSDs do not appreciate, to say the least).
Lastly, there is no such thing as a gender identity outside of a bunch of people who have been hoodwinked or press-ganged into pontificating upon it as though it existed, and who will yell at you or argue with you until blue in the face exactly like a religious fundamentalist if you say you don't believe in it.
Therefore virtually nobody who has taken this survey was "assigned" a sex (unless there is a vast disproportion of people with very specific and advanced DSDs among Scott's poll-answering readership), and precisely nobody has a "gender identity" except as a story they have learnt to tell themselves, any more than anyone actually has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ except as an imaginary friend.
Thus my reasons for suggesting ditching the first question and refining the answer set of the second; the second question (if it were better-posed) would be useful to get an idea of how many of the audience believe in some form of the genderist religion, but as it stands, it falsely ranks (dare I say assigns?) everyone into that category.
"The category to which your blood belongs is not an arbitrary social invention"
It very much is. Other systems of blood typing have been developed and used. Being "assigned" Type A or whatever is more arguable for the definitions we are arguing over than the sex one:
Sure, blood and the question of transfusion compatibility is much more complicated than that of human sex, and different systems have different opinions about how many categories there are, where exactly the boundaries lie, and what the precise criteria for category identification should be. In other words, the science of blood-transfusion compatibility has not been completely characterised, so we do not yet have a complete understanding of whose blood will harm or kill you if we put it into your veins.
But that doesn't make these systems, or the categories within them, *arbitrary social inventions* -- if that were so, two blood samples "assigned" incompatible types in one system could be "assigned" compatible types in another *and* whether or not you faced life-threatening consequences of a transfusion would depend on the test you selected. That is, there would be no correlation between blood group identification in one system versus blood group identification in the other systems (which is kind of the definition of "arbitrary").
But this is obviously absurd. One system may be more refined than another, or focus on different chemicals to make their determinations of compatibility, but if one system says two samples are compatible and another system says two samples are incompatible, both of them cannot be right about the samples. Whether or not a particular bag of blood will kill you or make you ill is a fact, and the various categorisation systems we have developed to try and predict this fact are not the same kinds of systems we have developed for, say, the appropriate way to prepare a particular meal or dress oneself for work versus for a concert or how to politely address a stranger versus a close friend or whether you get feel self-righteous about yelling at someone for owning a personal vehicle.
Those are arbitrary social inventions (and conventions), which change according to taste and time and location. Saying that blood typing is a phenomenon of that kind simply because it is messy and complicated is giving away too much and receiving nothing in return but more ammunition for gender theologians' specious implications upon the supposedly-socially-constructed nature of biological sex and the supposed-primacy of "gender identity".
If you think of Scott as a psychiatrist working in the US and using part of this data for research and that his use of "assigned at birth" is the current approved way to ask this question in the context of doing medical or psychological research in the US, does that change this for you? He's not waging on some front of the culture war when he asks the question with those words, he's operating from within the norms of his professional field. I totally get you may object to the norms of his field, but that seems like a different issue.
Assuming that is the case, at best it makes Scott a fellow-traveller of the genderist religion who supports a reality-denying religious dogma being in control of his profession to such an extent that he uses these standards even in his own private research, and at worst it makes him a coward who is so afraid of the inmates who've taken control of the asylum that he won't stop kowtowing even in his own private research. (If I had to bet, I'd say it were the former based on a few essays I've read of his that touch the topic, but the latter isn't dismissable out of hand.)
An analogy with higher, and hopefully morally clearer, immediate stakes: many rural hospital complexes in the US have been taken over by Catholic organisations and have adopted Catholic doctrine as part of their standards of care; semi-regularly doctors who work at these hospitals let women die of sepsis after stillbirth rather than performing intact DnX's on already-doomed-but-not-technically-dead foetuses, because Catholic doctrine forbids evacuating a foetus before its heart has stopped beating.
Say Scott were such a doctor who worked mainly at such a hospital but worked part-time at his own private clinic with no hospital affiliation, and say he refused to perform a life-saving abortion even at his private practise because doing so would contravene the standards of his hospital base of operations. Would you think he were "not waging on some front of the culture war" and were "operating within the norms of his professional field", or would you think he were at best a supporter of those standards or at worst a coward who places his own professional position over the well-being of his patients?
The stakes here are arguably not quite so dramatic, but the ideology underpinning these professional standards is just as bogus as Catholic doctrine; furthermore, the stakes are also far from nothing for the individuals caught up in this movement who have been lied to and experimented on, often to terrible results with lifelong negative consequences. And while I do truly have empathy for the true believers and the cowards alike, my empathy does not allow me to excuse their decisions to further an insipid and reality-denying ideology.
If this verbiage is the teachers' password to operating within psychology, then psychology has been captured. It is no longer a scientific discipline, but a religious order. You are correct that this is a different issue, but to answer your question, it does not improve my opinion of Scott for the better.
" semi-regularly doctors who work at these hospitals let women die of sepsis after stillbirth rather than performing intact DnX's on already-doomed-but-not-technically-dead foetuses, because Catholic doctrine forbids evacuating a foetus before its heart has stopped beating."
You had damn well better give me facts, figures and reputable cases on *that* one, bunky. "Citation needed", indeed!
"I read this on some atheist website" is not good enough. "Somebody tweeted a headline from some news report" ditto. Nor am I going to be hugely convinced by "This pro-abortion organisation and/or website are using this as a way to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions". Have you got a concrete example, and not "In 1980 this happened in one hospital in Upper Lower Middleton"?
Give me "In 2020, in sixteen hospitals alone, Catholic doctors let two hundred women die of sepsis instead of removing dead foetuses and here are my sources to back up that claim", i.e. put up or shut up.
Here, let me start you off: a 2016 newspaper report on this topic featuring a photo of a very much still alive woman suing a Catholic hospital:
"Doctors decided they would delay until the woman showed signs of sepsis – a life-threatening response to an advanced infection – or the fetal heart stopped on its own.
In the end, it was sepsis. When the woman delivered, at 1.41am, doctors had been watching her temperature climb for more than eight hours. Her infant lived for 65 minutes.
This story is just one example of how a single Catholic hospital risked the health of five different women in a span of 17 months, according to a new report leaked to the Guardian.
The report, by a former Muskegon County health official, Faith Groesbeck, accuses Mercy Health Partners of forcing five women between August 2009 and December 2010 to undergo dangerous miscarriages by giving them no other option.
All five women, the report says, had symptoms indicating that it would be safest for them to deliver immediately. But instead of informing the women of their options, the report says, or offering to transfer them to a different hospital, doctors – apparently out of deference to the Mercy Health Partners’ strict ban on abortion – unilaterally decided to subject the women to prolonged miscarriages."
Is this still happening, since you used present tense? Oh, and none of the five women in that case died, if you're wondering. Ms. Means, who is the woman in the photo, took a case against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, had her case dismissed by the judge, and lodged an appeal which was denied by the appeals court:
"The district court dismissed Means's complaint for lack of personal jurisdiction over USCCB and failure to state a claim against the CHM defendants. We AFFIRM."
And since we're getting into the weeds here, the appeal was denied not just on a technical point of law, but that Means (or her lawyers) had failed to establish negligence:
"Means asks us to recognize a duty under Michigan law on the part of a religious organization to a specific patient to adopt ethical directives that do not contradict the medical standard of care. Whether such a duty exists is far from certain, especially if the standard of care violates the organization's religious beliefs. Nevertheless, even if the CHM defendants had such a duty, Means's factual allegations do not create the plausible inference that any breach of that duty proximately caused any injury to Means within the strictures of Michigan negligence law.
...her complaint suffers from another deficiency.
Means alleges—and we do not doubt—that she suffered physical and mental pain, emotional injuries, a riskier delivery, shock and emotional trauma from making funeral arrangements for her dead child, and other “discomforts and pain.” But these allegations are not sufficient to state an injury under Michigan negligence law."
Okay, after a quick sanity check, I misremembered some implicating articles I had read a few years ago about this court case along with the Irish and Italian fatalities of living memory; after more searching through news sources which would shout such deaths from the rooftops, I must admit that in this case an absence of evidence is most likely evidence of absence.
Nevertheless, I find the details of the linked case a fitting analogy; that the stakes are (somewhat) lower is perhaps even better. Catholic bishops have no business deciding that women should be forced to stillbirth dead foetuses and risk sepsis (even if American doctors so far have been more successful in treating septic women than Irish and Italian ones in these cases), and find that doctors who do so are either deeply misguided about moral action or they are careerist cowards.
Do you mean Irish and Italian fatalities in the USA or in Ireland and Italy respectively?
Measuring maternal mortality rates differs from country to country; some measure deaths within the first 42 days, some (like the US) measure deaths within the first year, and some do it on a three-year basis (as in this report):
Even taking the worst measure, where they say the maternal mortality rate was 6.7 per 100,000 maternities in the period 2017-2019 unlike the reported rate of 0 in 2017, pre-abortion Ireland still did pretty well:
"The World Health Organization (2019) showed that the average rate of maternal death in 2017 for Europe and North America is 12 per 100,000 while it is 7 (per 100,000) in Australia and New Zealand.
The Confidential Maternal Death Enquiry (CMDE) in the UK and Ireland analyses maternal death for each triennium (a period of three years). For the years 2017- 2019, Knight et al. (2021) showed that Black women in the UK have more than five times the risk of maternal death compared with White women, while Asian women have almost twice the risk of maternal death of White women. Using the Index of area-level Multiple Deprivation, the most deprived quintile is shown to have the highest rate of maternal deaths.
...As noted, the number of maternal deaths recorded by the CMDE generally exceeds that from the CSO given the proactive approach to case ascertainment employed by the CMDE; consequently, in this report, only data from the CMDE are reported.
For the years 2017 to 2019, 12 maternal deaths were recorded as occurring during or within 42 days of pregnancy end from 179,376 maternities, giving a maternal mortality rate of 6.7 per 100,000 maternities (O’Hare et al., 2021). This marked a decrease from the observed maternal mortality rate of 8.6 over the period 2009-2011; however, the decrease was not statistically significant (O’Hare et al., 2021).
Given the small number of maternal deaths in Ireland, further disaggregation by SES or ethnicity/nationality/country of birth for each triennium is not possible. However, previous analysis has shown that for the period 2009-2018, of the 54 maternal deaths recorded, 30 per cent occurred in women born outside of Ireland, while these women accounted for 23.4 per cent of all maternities in Ireland for that time period (O’Hare et al., 2020). While this suggests over-representation of non Irish-born in Irish maternal deaths, the difference in the rate of maternal death between Irish- and non Irish-born mothers was not statistically significant, most likely due to small numbers (O’Hare et al., 2020)."
So the highest risk for maternal mortality is to be poor, black, and less educated, living in a deprived area.
In fact, Irish maternal mortality rates were so good, the pro-abortion campaign had to do a *lot* of "well ackshully" when pushing to get abortion legalised, and trying to do so by asserting that "no abortion = dead women!!!!"
The big case that helped them, and the one I imagine you are thinking of, is Savita Halappanavar:
Pro-abortion groups rapidly arranged to publicise and politicise this death internationally, and used it as pressure on the government to introduce abortion. The claim was that if this woman, who was undergoing a miscarriage, had had a Dilation and Evacuation carried out, she would have lived. The medical report was more critical of the failure of the hospital to recognise and manage the sepsis as the primary cause:
"The report indicates the first key causal factor was inadequate assessment and monitoring. This would have allowed medical staff to recognise and respond to indicators that the infection was causing a deterioration in Halappanavar's condition. Additionally, staff failed to devise a plan of care recognising that (1) the infection was the most likely cause of the patient's miscarriage, and (2) with increase in time following admission, and the rupture of the patient's membranes, the risk of infection and sepsis increases.
The panel identified the hospital's failure to offer all management options to a patient was a second key causal factor. The panel points out that the patient was "experiencing inevitable miscarriage of an early second trimester pregnancy where the risk to the mother increased with time from the time that membranes were ruptured."
The panel found that hospital staff failed to adhere to clinical guidelines which relate to severe sepsis and septic shock. These relate to timely and effective management of sepsis when it is diagnosed.
The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) published a report into the incident on 9 October 2013. It found "following the rupture of her membranes, four-hourly observations including temperature, heart rate, respiration and blood pressure did not appear to have been carried out at the required intervals", noting "that though UHG [University Hospital Galway] had a guideline in place for the management of suspected sepsis and sepsis in obstetric care, the clinical governance arrangements were "not robust enough to ensure adherence to this guideline"."
Well, now we have (limited) legal abortion, and many feel that it is still too limited. It's not that women will die, you understand, it's that they have to go to England to abort their Down's Syndrome pregnancies:
I can't speak for the situation in Italy, or for Irish and Italian women in the USA.
Anyway, who do you think is more likely to be an ally with you on the "genderist religion who supports a reality-denying religious dogma "? The American bishops, or the 'abortion is juuuuust peachy' side? The "abortion is health care, women's rights are human rights" set are also the "trans rights are human rights, trans genocide, 41% suicide rate!" set.
My comments on Irish and Italian deaths were indeed about deaths within Ireland and Italy.
Yes, Savita Halappanavar's tragic and almost-certainly avoidable death is the template for why abortion should be provided as a standard of care in miscarriages, and you have correctly identified it as the case I had in mind when thinking of the example. I don't particularly want to litigate that case here, but I find it interesting that your quoted source's two points imply a potential contradiction -- that a pre-existing (pre-septic?) infection led to the miscarriage, and the mismanaged miscarriage (i.e., the refusal to abort the doomed foetus) increased the risk of new infection or a pre-existing infection turning septic.
In any case, "it wasn't (mostly) the hospital's refusal to abort the doomed foetus, it was (mostly) their failure to take a female patient seriously enough to provide life-saving care in the case of sepsis (and only a little bit their refusal to abort the doomed foetus, perhaps before she became septic in the first place) what actually killed her" is not exactly a biting rebuttal to the traditional feminist analysis of the case.
As to "allies", I agree it is a rather lonely road I find myself upon. I mean nobody ill will in general, and even understand how other people can come to different conclusions from me about what I view are blindingly obvious moral questions (such as whether abortions should be routinely carried out as early as possible in an inevitable miscarriage).
But my understanding of how someone can honestly come by an incorrect moral conclusion, and even be good friends with people I view as confused or hoodwinked by bad ideas, has not equipped me with the ability to "ally" myself with any group in particular. Indeed, the modern conception of "allies" has always been weird and alienating to me, even when I still called myself a feminist and some species of progressive.
If I have to choose my fellow-travellers between bishops and radical feminists, I will respectfully keep walking my path alone.
Income box wouldn't let me put my income, said it had to be a number greater than 0 even though it was.
Does a half-brother count as "at least one brother"? I think one can argue that it doesn't. Also are you assuming close contact with those siblings? I saw my half-brothers about once a decade.
The question about main gender of friends has no "I have no friends" option.
The "how long have you read the blog" question is complicated by reading off and on; I was here for Slate Star Codex and then only recently returned, so that could be both Since Slate Star and Past Six Months.
Good survey overall, but I think the question about remote work completely erased me and that there's also many other working-class people it will similarly fail to detect.
No, my job (jobs, actually - I have more than one) didn't go remote. No, I didn't keep working at my normal job site(s). *I got furloughed.* I spent months unemployed.
The options offered amount to "nothing changed" or "yes, I kept working but differently." These are not the only thing that happened to people.
I didn't find that it captured my experience either ("worked from home" but really didn't work for a month, then unemployed, then another month of "work from home," but very low workload, then fully in person, but with less work than usual, now with a full in person workload, starting about a year ago.)
"I would say that an apprenticeship, useful and respectable as it may be, is not a degree and so is irrelevant to this question."
The survey question asks:
"Degree
What is your highest degree earned?
None
High school
2 year degree
Bachelor's
Master's
Ph D.
MD
JD
Other professional degree"
A Level 5 apprenticeship in Europe seems like it would be the equivalent of 2 year or associate's degree. If you object to this being deemed a degree, then take it up with whatever American education body decided to call this a degree instead of a higher certificate or diploma.
"A three-year course of vocational education and training is, for example, aligned to level 4, whereas a Bachelor, Masters or technician qualification is localised at level 6."
It seems a bit complicated trying to translate the German system to the European (and then from the general European to the American) version, but a quick'n'dirty approximation seems like:
(1) if you go to vocational school, this would be the equivalent of secondary school (ages 12-18 more or less) - in Irish context, you'd come out with the EQF equivalent of level 4 certificate.
(2) post-secondary school vocational training - again, depending on how long this takes (1 year, 2 years) you end up with level 5 certificate.
(3) further training - going on to master craftsman, etc. 3 years would be (formerly) a diploma in Ireland, now it's an ordinary Bachelor's degree. Level 6 on the EQF. 4 years is the traditional university degree, now Honours Bachelor degree - still under Level 6 on the EQF.
Now we have to try and translate that into American. An "Associate's Degree" is the (old) diploma (2-3 years post-secondary school study) and would be Level 5 on the EQF. Bachelor's degree would be the 4 years honours degree and equivalent to EQF Level 6.
So if you went to a vocational school in Germany, left at age 18 and didn't get a trade apprenticeship, that would be the equivalent of "High school". If you went on to do an apprenticeship, then it depends on how many years of study (e.g. 4 year electrical apprenticeship would be Level 6/Bachelor's degree). More years, higher qualifications.
I hope I haven't confused you *too* badly.
EDIT: An online tool to translate German qualifications into relevant EQF levels. From there, hopefully, translate that into American equivalent:
"Atheist but spiritual" can mean far too many things unless you define "spiritual". If you just let people use their own definition, you have no idea what they mean, but most likely they mean something like these people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRujuE-GIY4
I suspect that "atheist and not spiritual", as wrong as it feels to me, is probably the most appropriate answer for me in this context.
Some of the questions would benefit from "None of the above" as an option, e.g. Political Affiliation. I just left those questions blank, which I suppose amounts to the same thing.
Some questions are difficult to answer because they ask for a one-dimensional good/bad or more/less opinion about a word that has more than one meaning or that might vary in more than one way. E.g. what kind of feminism are you talking about? If it's left unspecified, then again, the answer could mean anything.
My inner voice uses "we" or "let's", as in, "let's try this another way". There wasn't an "other" option on the survey so I couldn't really answer that.
OK I searched for some discussion of the 'moral view' question. First off I had to go look all the terms up. And I'm still confused about some (natural law and contractualism..) If someone wanted to give a two sentence definition of each that would be great. I think my moral view might be closest to virtue ethics. But I'm not sure. Why isn't there some box(es) for morals that follow a religion. (Or is that contractual?) I would describe my moral view, as living life as if there was a (Christian) God, even though I'm not sure there is one. Is there a box for that?
I think many or all of the moral philosophies can fit under Christianity. Say a Christian know an atheist has had a baby. A Christian consequentialist might think they should kidnap the baby and raise it Christian. Even if kidnapping is wrong, it could save the child from going to hell. A Christian deontologist would think following the rule to not kidnap someone is the right thing to do, even if it means the child might go to hell.
(I picked an extreme example, and simplistic. I could make a more complex argument for why the consequentialist also shouldn't be kidnapping, 'cause he could get arrested, would make Christianity seem bad etc.)
Scott, I'm really interested in the question you ask about inner voices and what grammatical person one speaks to oneself with. I'd love to know the intent behind that question -- will you share it with us at some point?
There seems some confusion among respondents here about whether you meant essentially any form of self talk in asking about that or were intending only to ask about people who experience an inner voice that is perceived to be "not themselves."
It's the first time I've ever been asked that question or heard anyone ask that question -- about whether the internal narrator speaks in "I" or "you" or some people say they hear "we" (which I do as well).
I'm curious if people who hear "you" more to themselves have more overbearing inner critics and does that correlate to depression or anxiety. It raises a new possibly fruitful way to work with that inner voice if that's the case. I'm pretty sure for me my "I" voice is the one that experiences things, my "you" voice is generally the critic, and there's a "we" voice that's more parental and kind. I'd never noticed this before, so thank you for that!
I love the inner voice question! When you read do you hear what you are reading as inner voice? Would that be enough to conclude that the inner voice is “not yourself”? Try not to think “pink elephant”. On the other hand what is the inner voice if it is not yourself and what is yourself if it is not the inner voice? Who is listening to the inner voice? I hope we get a post with the results of this part of the survey
> When you read do you hear what you are reading as inner voice? Would that be enough to conclude that the inner voice is “not yourself”?
How would it be "not yourself" in that case? When I read that way it is certainly myself, performing the action of reading aloud—just without the 'aloud' part. (Or are you expecting the first question to be self-evidently 'no' instead of self-evidently 'yes'?)
I had to put down that it felt like a category error because the meaning of inner voice seems to be essentially just that—the action of thinking aloud, without the "aloud" part—and ascribing it as having an "attitude" towards me is as weird as saying my ordinary, throat-produced voice has an attitude towards me. If it's saying things that express an attitude towards me, that's not its own fault, it's the fault of the brain that operates it.
What I mean is that the inner voice is mechanically reproducing the sounds implied by the text that is being read. If you stare at text you basically can’t help reading it. That the inner reading voice would feel different from the voice spontaneously narrating your day (as the question had it) is not obvious. Mine does not feel different at all. But in one case it’s basically just an external stimulus pouring in, in the other case there seems to be an intentional quality to the voice, as if it’s choosing what to say.
Yeah, I still either am not getting it or I'm living a different experience. I don't notice any functional or qualitative difference between using internal voice to read your text and using my internal voice to compose phrases for this reply, for example. *I* might be thinking about what to say with it, but I understand that as something *I'm* doing, not something being outsourced to a subprocess with agency of its own.
This may have something to do with the (anti)correlation between mystical experiences and mental health discussed a few posts back. Have you ever had intrusive thoughts, i.e. thoughts you do not want to have but still present themselves? I used to, so it was very easy to notice that I am not those thoughts (not that I am the other thoughts either, but that’s a story for another time). Maybe those who never had to fight their own thoughts never end up dissociating from them in this way. You report a persistent feeling of owning/being directly associated to a thought no matter what its content is. But does this feeling of ownership arise together with the thought, before or after? Does this question even make sense in your experience?
Yeah, I have intrusive thoughts occasionally, generally pretty specifically traceable to metaphorical "bad training data". (Not all of them are inner voice though—many, maybe most? are images.) But, like, I can trip over my tongue when I talk out loud sometimes too, or I can stumble over my feet and fall—anything we do comes with a chance of doing it wrong, but it's still us doing it. (Closer examples: I've had to deal with "intrusive" speech in the form of tourette's-like tics, and muscle tremors might be a better fit for "intrusive" movements.) I recognize those thoughts as errors that aren't what I intended to think and retry them better (when it's an extremely persistent thought I explicitly use a mental image of rewinding/resetting back to before it happened, sometimes it takes a few tries).
I wouldn't say "ownership", that doesn't sound right. There just isn't anyone else to ascribe "ownership" to. There's just me thinking, and I don't see why I would look at that 'me' as something doing the thinking that isn't 'me'.
(edit: At least, for my own mind. I don't doubt the premise of the original question that others are having that experience.)
My inner monologue often talks in the first person plural: “let’s do this” “now we have to park inside” etc… I selected mixed first and second person singular for lack of a more accurate option. Note that there is no sense of being more than one person, multiple personalities, headmates or anything of the sort. It’s just the way it comes up.
Same. Or at least, either the first person plural (when addressing me) or the third person singular (when addressing "the audience"). I put first person, because it certainly never addresses "me" as if I were a different person. Although it might say something like, "Don't forget, we need to put the bins out," where strictly speaking the first verb is in the second person.
On "Do you have migraines?" it's not clear whether it's intended to include retinal or ocular migraines, or only migraine headaches. I guessed only headaches, so put "no" even though I get retinal ones, but it would be good to clarify on the question.
By cracky, if the trans respondents are going to be picky over using "assigned at birth", then I'm just contrary enough to insist that "cisgender" gets included too.
Happy New Year to one and all, I'm strongly contemplating throwing myself out the window but hey, such is life, is it not?
EDIT: Nobody be alarmed, I'm not going to do anything untoward, it's just my brain at me again. Best of luck, all!
With the urban/suburban preference and actuality--the first question asks which you prefer urban or suburban. I put urban over suburban. The second question lumps rural with suburban. I live VERY rurally, like 4 miles up a dirt road surrounded by national forest an hour from the closest grocery store, which I prefer over urban. But the wording makes it look like I'm living the opposite of my preference.
I assume, perhaps wrongly, that some of questions are slated for the most likely reader--urban, white collar/computer workers. I wonder if it would change the results at all to give more options to the people who don't fit those categories. Here I'm thinking of the above questions of urban/rural as well as the job question. I don't fit in any of those categories, so I just picked one that is only marginally accurate but that keeps me out of "blue collar"
Possibly interesting note: My inner voice used to be extremely negative (and when it was that way it was always in 3rd person). Having worked on it significantly, it's now overwhelmingly neutral /positive and almost always in first person.
For the "hearing voices" question I assumed you didn't want to know about the hallucinations I had one time after taking Imovane. Given you ask about LSD in the same survey, you may want to crosstab those results - some people may report auditory hallucinations during a trip, especially given "at any time" in the question.
1) Re: "What religion do you believe?" This seems carefully worded to exclude "cultural X", which I'm pretty sure you considered, but I'm asking anyway. What should an atheist who engages in religious observance put for this? (Not just marking holidays, but actually holding to stuff like kashrus and Shabbos.) I put "Other" and wrote the details, I hope that's what you were going for.
2) Re: Paris to Moscow, are you also intending for your embarrassingly American readers to guess at the miles-km conversion, or is looking that up in the spirit of the question? I hope it is, because I did. (Also I'm pretty pleased with my guess, though I adjusted in the wrong direction at the end.)
There's an ethnic group missing - Romanian. Not at all the same thing as Roma (aka gypsies). I'm mentioning this because, since you seem to have added most European nationalities, it seems likely that you've conflated the two, like everybody else :)
I tried to take this survey but when I click next it takes me back to income and says must be greater than o when I did put an income in, then I lose the whole thing. Three times is enough!
Yeah that sound closer. The inner voice says, "Dang, that was a good day." which it was, and I say yeah! and think more about my day. (or the negative of that.)
> How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways? Very unfavorable - Very favorable
This is very ambiguous question. It could mean any of:
* Do I believe it's true?
* Conditional on it being true, am I glad that it's true?
* Regardless of whether it's true, am I glad that the theory exists?
These all seem like reasonable interpretations, and I'm not sure which one you meant. Which interpretation people pick could easily mean the difference between a 1 and a 5.
People who don’t like HBD as a topic tend to also find reasons it must be untrue, in my experience. So probably this question doesn’t miss out on much.
How would you describe your opinion of the idea of "climate change", eg the belief that humans are causing the global temperate of the world to increase?
Please answer on a scale of 1 - 5, where 1 is "Very unfavorable" and 5 is "Very favorable".
The first one I think. I hate this question, because I could answer more easily if human biodiversity was replaced with genes. Do you think people have different genes? (I recently read "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins, recommended, though getting near 50 years old.)
I’d even go so far as to say various genetic populations, but I wouldn’t describe that as ‘race’ because I think it maps poorly to the varied concepts of race people have generally held to. I tried to guess what Scott was really asking, but I think “races differ genetically in socially relevant ways” is actually very different to “various populations differ genetically in socially relevant ways”.
Also, I wasn’t really sure what “socially relevant” meant. Like, it should make a difference to how people introduce themselves and who they choose to spend time with? Or, it might impact some things, on a population scale, that governments might pay attention to? Certainly, it has medical implications. If you’re in a social democracy, is that socially relevant?
Yeah race is a dumb word, here in the USA it's a mixing pot and race disappears into the general genetic pool. Though if you want you can trace the path of genes to past populations. We (which includes all life to the bacterial level.) are just meat bags made to put our genes into the future. I'm still trying to get use to the idea, that this unique person who is me, is mostly meaningless, only my kids have importance.
The race question isn't great. Main thing for me is that Hispanic (you mean Latino, by the way, Hispanic excludes Brazil and includes Spain) is orthogonal to race. I'm white, and Hispanic. If I choose Hispanic, it makes it sound like I'm not white, and if I choose white, it's explicitly saying I'm not Hispanic. This is why the Census has a separate question for race and latinidad. For next year, I guess.
I'm not sure if "do you watch a lot of old movies" means as a portion of movies I watch or relative to other people. I watched 6 movies this year and 2 of them were before 1960. So it's not a lot, but it is 1/3 of what I watched.
There are people who just NEVER watch old movies, a stunning amount in fact never watch anything predating their own adolescence. The question likely captures what it means to, if you watch a handful of flicks on TCM every year you’re “frequently”.
As an aside, I was born at the end of the 70s and have always been fascinated with all forms of 70s culture *except* the movies which I find bizarre for their intriguing premises but oddly abrupt endings (Chinatown, French Connection etc). I’ve always liked ‘45-late 60’s much better.
Clarification on the "ethnic groups" question: is it about identification or genetics? It's quite possible to strongly identify with a country and culture while knowing that your great-grandparents were immigrants to it.....
Also my thought. Not to mention that one may have good reasons *not* to identify as "ethnic X" simply because of being descended from X, partly or mostly. Take, say, X = German: people may know full well that they are of partial (or total) German descent, and still strongly object to the label "ethnic German" - and that can be true whether they have no interest in German culture, or, on the contrary, a strong interest in German literature, say. The same is true of just about any group that has traditionally made strong claims (of whatever political coloring) on people who happen to be descended from it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR link is not active. I highlighted and clicked to search. This threw me out of the survey. Unwilling to redo whole deal.
I felt a lot like trying to hammer the square peg down the round hole on some of these questions. In particular the one about inner voices. It's something I can use as a tool sometimes, almost like a second person in the room, to create a back-and-forth dialogue which helps me discuss problems with myself and come up with good answers. I know I'm doing this, I can choose not to do the voice thing if I don't want to. But all the responses felt like uncontrollable, judging voices. Some questions were similar in being sort of off. I tried to answer as accurately as I felt applied to me, but at some level I'm worried I'm throwing off the dataset by picking choices that don't make much sense.
Re 'Do you identify as an effective altruist?'. I think there was a point that it is wrong to call EA people effective altruists (rather than e.g. aspiring effective altruists) because you can e.g. subscribe to the ideology, but not donate any money yet, or be an altruist and be effective in that without having heard of the movement (so limiting the phrase 'effective altruist' only to the movement is pretentious). So I would say that I sorta identify as an effective altruist, while I would say that I strongly identify with EA movement if the question was asked that way.
Re: 'How much do you trust the mainstream media?' I think it should specify that this question is oriented towards Americans. For me, the mainstream media would be Russian propaganda which I obviously don't trust, but I am not sure this is relevant. I am leaving this and related questions unanswered.
After getting all the way to the health part, I clicked the link to calculate my BMI, then I hit “done” (upper left) to go back to the survey. It was gone!
I’ve opened hundreds of links within posts that I’ve read on my Substack app. In every instance I’ve been returned to the post when I’ve clicked “done”, not so in this case. But yeah, I’m sure you’re right that our internet experiences are very different based on this case.
Me too - or, rather, on the first guess, I thought "my confidence in this is low enough that making the conversation probably won't make a significant difference", and on my second guess I forgot about it and just estimated in miles. And my second guess was actually pretty close to the correct value *in miles*.
One thing I wanted to mention in regard to the "inner voice": I grew up speaking both English and French in the US. My French is good but not native (level B2 on the CEFR language proficiency scale). I find that my inner voice in English is sporadic and fragmented, rarely speaking in full sentences. My inner voice when I think in French is in full sentences and is much clearer and consciously noticeable. Would be interested to hear if any other multilingual readers have similar experiences between thinking in different languages!
I only became fluent in English as an adult, and yet it seems like some times English is more accessible than my first language. Though for me it really varies.
I also felt cornered by the question s related to subreddit and Discord. I don’t read them but it’s not because I don’t want to those two things are inextricably linked in the available answer.
Yeah, you need answers that have a slider bar or something between choices. You feel trapped, but I pick whatever is closest. Or don't answer, I think I did that for the city/ suburbia question. I would choose the city over suburbia, but choose the country (rural) over the city. So how do I answer? I guess just more choices.
My most recent weight loss attempt was utterly trivial in comparison to the first one years ago, I assume there’s some reason the most recent is important to you but if your assumption is that people never lose much weight and so any of these attempts is roughly as meaningful as any other, then you’d be wrong. My first one was life changing and substantial (over 33% of my weight) and has mostly sustained.
Those of us who went from disgustingly obese to okay-ish at some point in life have an interesting relationship with diets. It’s sort of a constant struggle of “what is the circuit breaker point”, where you hit a number that induced panic again and you fix it, because being obese was so awful.
I just completed your survey, and I have some (potentially nitpicky and annoying) comments and suggestions for you!
1. questions of the format "how often in the last month have you XYZ (burped, had acid reflux, had sexual intercourse)" are pretty much unanswerable, because I just don't use my brain to remember such things. I don't care enough to keep track of all the times I've burped or whatever *and* to map these times onto a calendar unit such as a month. I answer these questions by pulling a number out of my rear end and hoping for the best. The only way you'll get an accurate answer to such questions is if there's a significant life event, e.g., "Let's see, I started dating this guy 3 weeks ago and we had sex for the first time last night, and that was my only time having sex this past month, so that's my answer."
2. Ditto questions of the format "Are you better/worse than the average person at spatial orientation/having an orgasm/whatever." You'll either get the respondent to shrug and say "I have no idea, I'll pick the middle of the range" (that's what I did) or you'll run headlong into the Dunning-Krueger effect, with people who suck at spatial orientation going "Why yes, I'm an absolute whiz at finding my way around!" Sometimes it's obvious that you're better/worse than most at a given skill (you struggle with something that seems to come easily to all your friends, or conversely, your friends keep complimenting you on your skill), but that's a rare outlier.
3. Questions like "how satisfied are you with your life?" are fiendishly difficult to answer, because I have to define and calibrate what "satisfied" means. For example, I have a truly wonderful life (an amazing, loving husband, an adorable child, high-paying and prestigious career, financial security, mostly good health), but at the same time I often feel guilty about not making more of the opportunities that I've been given, and I feel scared of failing at my job and not living up to all my responsibilities. So what does this average out to? I ended up picking a mid-high number, but it felt very arbitrary.
I offer these comments in the spirit of helpfulness. I enjoyed taking the survey, and now I know how far it is from Moscow to Paris. Happy New Year to you!
The hardest question was gauging how much the average person likes bread. I assumed the answer was "will eat it if it's on a table, it's sometimes good, but I don't really care about it."
Is the question regarding multiple personalities/tulpas specifically asking about "multiple personalities AND hallucinatory voices", or asking about multiple personalities in and of themselves? The "voice in your head" framing is confusing me since hallucinatory voices aren't generally observed in DID.
(Don't have DID, but have/had two distinct personalities.)
ETA: Also, what counts as a seizure? Is loss of motor control ("locked-in") a seizure?
I want to note that the question about childhood social class seemed impossible to answer for me. My dad was a professor, so I couldn't really choose 'working class/poor', but it was the nineties in the post-Soviet Eastern Europe so we were somewhat less wealthy than the barmen or security guards or the like. I finally chose "middle class", though it seems like not quite right.
This is a classic example of class not being determined by income alone. Many so-called white collar workers are paid much less than people who work in the trades. High school and elementary teachers in the US are paid a shockingly low starting wage, but teachers are still considered middle class.
I like the IWW's inclusive definition best: if you work for a wage or salary, and do not have the power to hire and fire other workers, then you are working class, no matter what color your collar is. This would include most people in academia, but would exclude business owners.
The proviso on the weight loss questions ("have you ever lost 10% of your weight [...] without it being for medical reasons like a chronic disease") seems to be ambiguous between "my weight was associated with a chronic disease, so I decided to lose weight" and "my chronic disease is associated with weight loss, which helped me realize my weight loss intentions", and it's hard to tell if this is intentional or which is intended. The former reading seems to be the more likely reading from the context of the rest of the question, but the latter reading describes the group that is more reasonably removed from this kind of question.
(My case is the former and I didn't answer these questions.)
Currently in the middle of a >half-year sick leave, but since there were no choices perfectly applicable for this kind of a situation, answered the work-related questions as if I was currently working.
Also, at least some of the remote work questions seemed to assume that I would either be forced to go to my workplace XOR be remote working. I go to the office some of the time because I want to, not because I'm required to do so.
And a question: I answered that I'm not interested in buying a subscription, am I still entered for the one-year raffle? The "would buy if it was cheaper" felt wrong as I avoid all subscription payment services even if they seem cheap, having seen monthly service payments sneakily stack up on some people.
I've been in a recent discussion (guess with who) about the amount of violence people generally experience. I suppose it's middleclass or higher people in developed countries. I estimate it as pretty low, the other person estimates it as pretty high, I think.
I'm thinking about possible survey questions on the subject. For example, "Have you ever moved house to get away from (non-government?) violence? Other possible questions?
Risks from government violence are important, but I'd like to get at what's missing from public knowledge.
Maybe there should be a discussion (on the survey?) about how important organized crime is in world history.
Re: Dose of LSD in micrograms -- Maybe my experience is atypical, but I never heard any claims about how many micrograms of LSD were on tabs offered for sale. The survey required a number (or no answer), so I gave a number (one).
You don't include Anarchist in your political options, and you should. A person who identifies as an anarchist or libertarian socialist will have significant differences with the other options.
I have a PhD, but I am taking classes currently and will probably end up with another degree. Is my formal education complete or not? I guessed that it is complete, but can be embellished after completion. I am puzzled about exactly what the question seeks to reveal, and why this would be interesting . What counts as complete? What counts as formal? Many persons who get a bachelors think thei education is complete,but some don’t count it as complete until they have a PhD, or some are satisfied with high school. I realize I am overthinking it, because I am an academia addict, but I can’t even predict what other people would think counts as complete.
I think he's just trying to distinguish e.g. people who left high school and started working from people whose highest qualification is high school because they're currently partway through their undergrad degree.
Left/right spectrum… I never thought this abstract one dimensional measure had a definite meaning, as it is at beast a projection from a multidimensional space. Events over the past few years have made its meaninglessness even more apparent. I have extreme views that might make me average out as centrist, depending on how the projection is performed. So I don’t think my answer is informative.
Absolutely! At the very least I think there should be an alternative option along the lines of 'my views -- when I even have any -- do not coherently fall anywhere on this one-dimensional "spectrum".' In fact I don't think I even know anyone whose views could be described as left, right or centrist, democrat or republican, labour or conservative. Though I do know people (myself included) who at one time rather liked Bernie and still like Jeremy Corbyn.
Maybe I've missed it, but where were the previous survey results published, or weren't they? It was a collection of 10-20 surveys if I remember correctly, and respondents were supposed to come up with a unique identifier to use.
"Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID?"
I wonder if this answer should have three options: more, less, or no, as opposed to just two. I can maybe think of a contrived example for the "more" option - more companies have started to offer remote work, but will fly employees to HQ or offsites, etc.
I wish you had separated the immigration question into legal and illegal. Big proponent of the former and of the many reforms needed. Proponent of actual enforcement of the latter.
Note for the "mental voice" question, my mental voice mostly uses "us" / "we", and that wasn't quite an option. I answered "I" since it's still first person but it's not quite accurate.
for the working remotely question, i worked in person and then during the lockdowns i was furloughed so stopped going into work but still got paid as part of a government program, rather than working from home or continuing to go into the office. I did go back to the office at certain points during the pandemic so i put continued to go into the office but i think maybe something like 'i stopped working during the pandemic' should be an option?
I wasn’t assigned a sex at birth. I’m a mammal. Mammals are born male or female unless there’s a birth defect involving the in utero formation/development of the genitalia. Want to ask what my gender might be? Fine.
Of course, I flubbed the BMI question. Got distracted converting my weight into pounds even though there is a metric tab (sigh). Enjoy the 200 BMI (I'm 28.4 in reality).
"8. Will a nuclear weapon be detonated (including tests and accidents)?"
I interpret this to mean anywhere in the world, not just in relation to Ukraine. Perhaps that should be specified after numerous priming questions about Ukraine.
FYI, some of your money questions are going to show distorted data for folks who work in finance, because of asking them about "right now" at the end of the year, and because of your inconsistent use of "salary" vs "income". Finance types tend to have normal-to-low "salaries" but very large "bonuses" that arrive at the end of the year.
Wow, what a great set of questions this year! I especially appreciated the Qs about "how much/what kind of inner voice?" and "what is your estimate of the probability of AI-driven extinction?" I have spent a lot of time wondering what others think about those and am rapt to see where the results end up.
This is my yearly reminder to you that the "Country" question is really poorly formulated. You should split it between "country/ies you grew up in", "current country of residence", and "country/ies of cultural background/affinity", and allow multiple answers on each.
As a benefit, it would help you get more clarity into the questions of "race", which currently uses the god-awful American system of racial divisions, allowing you to get more clarity on whether "racial" things you're investigating are cultural vs. biological.
IMO conflating these things is almost as egregious as conflating "sex assigned at birth" with "gender identity".
Okay, just got to the "ethnic groups" question, and I'll agree that it's an improvement in this vein. Still, I think you should either bring it up to the top of the survey alongside the main "Country" and "Race" questions, or clarify what specifically you're looking for under "Country".
My pet peeve in all of this was that the "ethnicity" question insists that any American whose ancestors lived in Europe, must have an ethnicity based on which *specific* country their ancestors lived in a hundred and fifty years ago (or whenever).
I happen to know which countries (plural) my ancestors lived in 150 years ago, but only in the sense that I know what my astrological sign is - that datum was "in the water" at the time I was growing up, to the extent that it was impossible to not know it. But neither one is at all significant to my identity, my sense of self, or my interaction with society.
If I were a culture warrior, I might suspect a deliberate attempt to play divide-and-conquer against the largest ethnic group in the contemporary United States, as we enter an age of increasingly strident identity politics.
For the survey question about LSD dosage I feel like there should’ve been an option for I don’t know the dosage. Back when I took it Street drugs were all of highly uncertain potency.
I'm finding the orgasm question surprisingly difficult. I'm a gay man with plenty of experience, but... I guess I've never really compared myself to my partners along that particular axis?
Also, surprised to learn that there are people who talk about this sort of thing with their friends. Although in retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised -- human behavior is always more diverse than I expect, I should update...
Re "Work Status": I have a research position in a (quasi-non-)government research institute where I am allowed (but not required) to teach classes at the university it shares a building with, but I'm not currently teaching any. I still picked "Academics (on the teaching side)" -- should I have picked "Government work" instead?
Re "Subreddit": do you mean "Do you regularly read" or "Do you ever read"? (I answered assuming the former.)
Re "Meetup": it depends on what you mean by "want to" and "make it to any" -- I might attend one if it was within walking distance of me and at a time when I had nothing else to do. Still picked "I don't want to" because it'd feel dishonest to answer "can't make it to any" when there is one a one-hour train ride away.
Re "Immigration": do you mean de jure or de facto? Someone might think more people should be legally allowed to immigrate but we should spend more effort on keeping everybody else out, or conversely that it should be technically illegal for most people to immigrate so we can kick them out if need be without having to bother with due process but so long as they behave themselves we should generally turn a blind eye to them. (I can't remember anyone stating the latter position on immigration specifically, but I can on e.g. recreational drugs.) I picked the average of my replies to the de facto and de jure questions.
Re COVID: I assumed you mean "smell-/taste-related symptoms any more serious than due to the clogged nose" and "fatigue problems any more serious than due to the fever and poor sleep". Or did you mean any noticeable such symptoms at all?
Re "Have you gotten any doses of a COVID vaccine?": you mean by now, not by the time I got COVID, right? Was that deliberate? I'd assume the latter to anti-correlate with whether people get long COVID a lot more than the former (though I *have* heard about a few people where a vaccine seemed to heal their long COVID symptoms).
Re "your country's COVID response": ¿por qué no los dos? I don't think my country (or almost any other country) was even on the Pareto frontier of permissiveness and effectiveness, so it could have been both more permissive and more effective...
Re "mask mandate on flights": Do you mean during taxiing and takeoff or throughout the flight except for meals? (I picked the average of the two answers.) At cruise altitudes hospital-grade HEPA filters are active but I've heard of flights with delayed takeoff ending up being flu superspreader events before the filters were turned on.
Re "Do you work remotely now": a confounding factor is that until one year ago I lived a one-hour train ride away from my office (1 h 30 min door-to-door including walking from my place to the station and from the station to the office) and now I like within a 20-minute bike ride of my office. You might want to discard people who answered 3 or less to the "How long, in years, have you lived in your current neighborhood?" question when analyzing answers to questions like this.
Re "Where do you live now": you might want to give examples for each point of the scale. I live in downtown Turin, which is probably more dense than anywhere in the US ex. NY and NJ, but I still picked 2 rather than 1 because it's no Manila or Dhaka or Shanghai or even Milan or Naples, but I'm not quite sure this is what you have in mind.
Re "how hard is it for you to orgasm", do you mean "other people of your same sex *and age*"?
Re "psychotherapy", what about if I tried it but as a young child and don't quite know how well it worked anymore? (I skipped the question.)
Re "Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID": what if it *had* changed but is now back to late-2019 levels? (I picked "No".)
Re "Your close friends", do you mean right now or ever? (I assumed the latter because I don't have that many of the former)
Re "flashing or changing elements" -- they annoy me but not because they are distracting, just because they're gaudy (static unchanging e.g. Comic Sans annoys me just the same way). Does that still count?
Re "(off by a non-trivial amount)": what's a non-trivial amount? In this context I'd consider 30% "trivial" (unless I was talking to someone who has personally traveled from Paris to Moscow and/or back before), but I'm not sure you would...
I find it kind of funny that "philosophy" is a profession option, but literally the entire goddamned service sector (travel, restaurants, retail, etc) is relegated to "other - white collar" and "other - blue collar".
Yes. I quit when I realized it was google docs, you had to be logged in even if you didn't share your email address, and there were questions I am very careful about where and how I share the answers online. It is not a good combination for me.
Surely if I am not alone in this, that will skew the results, both for general caution level and for certain types of information people tend to be more careful with.
I'm still trying to figure out what an inner voice is and whether I have one or not.
I frequently talk to *other people* in my head, including about things I've done or seen, but I virtually never talk to *myself*. It seems like other people have the opposite experience?
I can simulate a human voice in my head, and often a very specific human voice, just like I can recall the memory of a song I’ve heard before. But I don’t have compulsive autobiographical monologues or dialogues with it.
totally agree. If i talked about race in German, you´d instantly see what I´m doing and decide it´s going into the wrong direction. It´s the anglosphere´s most alien concept to me. Atavistic.
I've lost about 2 inches out of 70 as a age. Did I get 3% fatter? I mean, maybe, if they same external fat is squished shorter...but is it relevant to anything?
And how to define "beaten" anyway? "Parents used corporal punishment" could mean anything from smacking to "punched in the face and bones broken" (some pondscum have tried getting off abuse charges by using the 'corporal punishment is legal' defence).
Even smacking is now defined as physical abuse, something I disagree with. Basically, if you're beating your kid out of anger and frustration, and badly enough to leave marks, it's abusive*. If you're doing it at a mild level as discipline, and will stop once the kid is old enough to reason with/old enough that they should know themselves how to behave, it's not.
https://www.nicswell.co.uk/health-news/smacking-children-linked-to-psychological-problems-in-adulthood
So - 'yes my parents slapped me when I misbehaved badly, no I don't think that was physical abuse', how to answer?
*Leaving out exceptions like post-natal depression, extreme loss of control, etc. that are not something the person would normally do
When I was seven the school principal beat me badly enough that lawyers were involved and there was a court order forbidding any more physical discipline of me. I was not informed of any of this so that I wouldn't abuse my impunity -- I only found out decades later after the principal in question died. But I lived in a time/place where physical pain/injury was considered a normal part of growing up (boys fought, we fell out of trees, dogs bit) so the incident didn't seem extraordinary at the time.
Yes I wanted that “none of the above” option!
I can see how some people would still be uncomfortable leaving that question blank if there were a 'none of the above' answer, because that's tantamount to saying 'some of the above'. If you truly wanted to give people an option to withhold that information, leaving it ambiguous is the way to do it.
Then there's the whole "I had [incident x] happen to me, but I don't consider it traumatic."
Both times it was mainly because nobody around me acted like I should consider it traumatic.
Actually it's 40 megameters in circumference, and this is not an accident. The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator on a line passing through Paris.
Which is proof that anecdote is false.
A system purporting to base itself on physical nature would not choose 1/4 of something, and since the rest of the system is multiples of 10^3, using 10^7 makes no sense. Especially since you could easily get a human-scale measurement unit without breaking the conventions of the system.
But if the goal was to make the new system more palatable, you'd want something already familiar.
https://www.glibertarians2017.link/2017/09/22/why-i-hate-the-metric-system-and-you-should-too-an-uninformed-rant-based-on-no-research-whatsoever/
If the people who created the metric system had been trying to make their new units nearly the same as old units, as that article suggests, then they would have made e.g. the kilogramme something different.
There _is_ some evidence that they were trying to make a unit approximately equal to something else, but the something-else wasn't the yard, it was the length of a pendulum with period 1 second, which had been proposed as a unit of length some years before. They liked the idea but preferred something that wasn't based on the somewhat-arbitrary value of "1 second", and they thought basing the unit on the size of the earth was more objective.
[EDITED to add:] Weirdly, the author of that article _knows_ about the pendulum thing, but then goes on in the very next paragraph to say that _obviously_ the definition in terms of the circumference of the earth was fudged to make the result approximately equal to ... one yard.
(It's hard to tell how seriously the article is intended to be taken. Obviously not entirely seriously, but I get a vibe of "humour for plausible deniability" about it, like the real point of the article is to be rude about the French and the metric system and Europe, but the author knows they don't really have a very good case, so they make deliberately silly arguments and write in a slightly silly voice so that they can say "oh, come on, can't you take a joke?" if anyone complains.)
I read it as less CYA and more amping up the outrage for comedic reasonings.
I think they're using the pendulum as a counterexample of how it would have been done if they were "really" about objectivity. But I think it's also pretty obvious that the naming convention was done for convenience/acceptability sake rather than naturalness. His example of 1 cubic DECImeter = 1 KILOgram = 1 (non-modifier) liter is pretty obvious. And making the base unit require a prefix? In what world does that make sense?
I also agree that the desire to decimalize everything is more arbitrary than "scientific" fwiw.
The Revolutionary-era French did a lot of things that made no sense and the metric system was actually one of their rare exceptions. The meter was, at one time, defined as 1/10,000 of the way from the North Pole to the equator on the meridian of Paris. Dividing the polar circumference into quarters isn't arbitrary; nature does it for us. The poles and the equator would exist whether we existed to observe them or not.
I agree with the rat that dozenalizing everything rather than decimializing everything would have been a more useful revolution.
The catastrophic failure of metric time is a pretty good example of trying to cram an idea into human reality.
Of course the length to be subdivided is arbitrary. The Earth isn't a sphere.
You can't be serious. The Earth is close enough to a sphere to give a measure of distance that was useful to the Revolutionary-period French. Actually, it's good enough for most purposes right now (not GPS or satellite launches).
Re 'What is your highest degree earned?' the structure of the answers implies both MD and JD are higher than PhD or Masters, and that JD is higher than MD - but maybe you just put JD/MD at the end because they are professional degrees. I would rank them Masters < JD < MD < PhD.
don't think ranking incomparable degrees is appropriate
Re: "What is your approximate annual income..." - is this meant to be gross income or net income? I think it should be explicitly stated.
I've added the clarification "pretax", does that address this concern?
Thanks, it does!
(you can now delete this comment chain if you want)
How about "At the end of an average year, what percent of your income will you have saved?"?
For me after-tax/net income would make more sense, as I instinctively compare savings to what I could have actually spent, but not sure if the same is true for others.
I don't know mine so I took a guess.
Also, I interpreted the question as "wage income," but dividends and bond coupon payments are "income," too [so says the IRS]. For "wage income" I used pre-tax. This comes up ALL THE TIME on the Bogleheads personal finance site :-)
This is an issue for many older people. I spend all of my wage income. I save all of my investment income (because essentially all of it is in tax-deferred retirement accounts that I can't touch without a penalty.) The two income sources are of the same order of magnitude.
I'd be interested in this question too, but I imagine a lot of people don't know (and those who do know probably save more than average)
Most of my "income" is in "required minimum distributions, which is compulsory and confiscatory dis-saving (beyond what I would need to withdraw to cover expenses). Almost all the rest is Social Security, so the answers aren't really comparable over the life cycle. When working, I put the legal maximum into retirement accounts, and I would leave it there (and to my heirs) if I could.
No, nothing is stopping me, and I do that; however, the marginal income tax rate, state and local, on that forced "income" is 25% to30%; also, any income from those new accounts is subject to income tax in the year that it is earned, so the balance grows at a much reduced rate. And I am not paying lower fees in the new accounts (why would you imagine that I would?). If the assets were still in tax-sheltered retirement accounts, my heirs would not have to pay income taxes on the income from those assets until they were, in turn, forced to sell.
In the interest of confusing things even more, I will note that 'part-time' work doesn't seem to be covered :-)
I consider myself to be working part-time (20 hours/week), many of my co-workers refer to me as semi-retired. I don't know if this is common enough to be worth breaking out. I answered employed/for-profit.
Note that this might matter when computing average/median/whatever incomes, too.
Individual or family? Not sure whether to include wife’s income.
same for percent income saved?
I have income from rental properties that I own, manage, and report on my taxes. Does this count as part of my annual income? If so is it the revenue or the net income? (~50k vs ~10k).
It also probably should distinguish between individual and household income. I answered assuming individual.
On the mental illness question, after mindlessly checking the bottom box for almost all of them, I initially did the same for "Suicide", only to notice afterward that, oops, the bottom box means something very different there! I don't know if there's any good way to edit this now, but in the future I would suggest making it more obvious that those aren't parallel so that people don't make the same mistake.
Thanks. I felt weird starting with "Yes I attempted suicide and wish it succeeded", so I moved it to a slightly different part of the survey where people hopefully wouldn't have the same muscle memory patterns going.
I haven’t looked at the questions yet but “succeeded” is language you want to avoid when describing suicide. Died by suicide is more appropriate.
Disagree. It makes perfect sense paired with “attempted”. It's perfectly possible to succeed at other things that people might consider bad, such as hiding evidence of a crime or conquering an unwilling city-state.
I think what you mean is that it's insensitive, but because words are weird I think "succeeded" is appropriate to get the point across in this context.
When you ask for my country, do you mean country of residence or country where I was born and raised?
Whichever you most identify with.
I'm outraged that you've excluded all the (digital) nomads :D
With regard to the covid questions and whether my country was too strict (etc) I very much enjoyed watching all the ways the mostly European countries varied in their approaches.
My favourite Covid experience was going by train from Copenhagen to Stockholm to get a visa and crossing the bridge into Sweden they announced that we could now take our masks off (this was European Summer 2020).
France curfewing people (6am - 6pm), and making it so you can only get in one entrance of a department store (yay, lets queue outside too close together). That aside, in general, I actually liked a bunch of France's approach -- getting tested was so easy.
This makes me worried that my answers in income, politics and covid sections will be misinterpreted, as economical situation, politics and covid management are quite different between Russia (what I answered) and Germany (where I live)
Re: "At the end of an average year, what percent of your income will you have saved?"
To clarify: This is how many percent of your income you have saved (verb)? It could also be interpreted as how many percent of your income you have saved (adjective); compare "I have not saved a lot this year, but I have a lot saved".
I was assuming it was percentage this year, but it is ambiguous. If Scott gets any >100% answers, we can assume some people misinterpreted it.
I also assumed, especially in view of the question after it, that it meant something like "what fraction of your income this year did you put into savings/investments and not take out?". I think the "still have it" phrasing currently in the question may be suboptimal; suppose I put in 50%, all into the stock market, and then the market crashed by 50%; it's not clear whether in that situation I should say 50 or 25. (The stock market _hasn't_ crashed by 50% this year, but some people might invest in very volatile things.)
Also pre tax or post tax both are common ways to look at it.
I had to make a *lot* of assumptions (and do a lot of digging!) to get my savings rate -
I ended up counting stock grants I hadn't cashed out as pure savings based on the FMV at vest, but that could be done in a number of different ways (current stock price, stock price at grant), and for us folks whose compensation is largely in stock can make a huge difference in how it's calculated. I did a comparison of net worth YoY to compare but obviously that's all over the place based on the markets.
I ended up including the company 401k match because it was a big chunk, 50% of contributions with no limit ~$10k. I didn't include the company HSA contribution.
I also only ended up including explicit savings (transferred out from main checking to designated savings) rather than cash left over because I ran out of ADHD hyperfocus and wanted to just finish.
damn. after reading this I did some digging too and realised that I've been saving about double the amount I answered in the survey )-:
I interpreted it as "of the money you have earned in a given year, how much have you saved?"
I find the financial questions hard to answer. I’m mostly a homemaker with little kids and I work part-time. My income is piddly but doesn’t reflect household income. Depending what you’re measuring about us that might skew things. I contribute 1/4 of what I make to an IRA but it’s peanuts. Husband also contributes a more robust sum to my retirement. So it’s his income but technically my savings; who should count it?
Re: Prediction question: What do you think one Bitcoin will be worth, in dollars, in 2030?
Please give your answer as a number, eg 20,000. If you believe it will be worthless, answer 0.
Question rejects 0 as an answer ("Must be greater than...")
Thanks, fixed.
If I believe that in 2029–2031 it will have times of both <10 000 and > 20 000, should I take expected log-average of high and low?
Also, "I have no idea" wasn't an option. I left it blank, which I hope serves the same purpose.
Despite the wording of the question it's very unlikely to go to 0. If you look at other failed coins, they sit at ~$0.00001. I'm not even sure it would be possible for it to go all the way to 0.
Since there are only 21 million coins in total, this would imply that you can't even find 200k people to keep it above 0.01. Or some fraction of 200k holding multiple.
About the depression question:
One of the options is "I think I might have this condition, although I have never been formally diagnosed", and another option is "I have family members (within two generations) with this condition".
Shouldn't there be an option for when you strongly suspect that a family member has depression, but you are not aware of any formal diagnosis?
When I had family members that probably had condition xxx, I just answered that I had family members with that condition. Plenty of family members would not have told me about any formal diagnoses they might have had. I also ignored diagnoses given to family members who seemed to have *something* wrong with them, and got a new and different diagnosis every year or two, most of which seem ridiculous in retrospect.
I selected "3" on the YIMBY/NIMBY question because there wasn't a "I reject this dichotomy" answer.
maybe in my backyard?
Yes in some other guy's backyard
Backyards are a government hoax designed to make you think there's anything outside your house except the great yawning void that consumes you for 8+ hours each day and returns you home with fake memories.
Our opinion on housing doesn't matter because we don't get to pick where new houses go, they seem to sprout from the void overnight.
for me the dichotomy doesn't make sense because being NIMBY (as my area tends to be) most strongly hurts current and lifelong residents. So I want everyone to have housing, and in this case that is in order to protect the people who already live there. New residents can overwhelmingly afford available housing and most new development (YIMBY) is being geared towards them (yes, brings money in) And many more people who have lived here for generations are meeting the criteria for homelessness (couch surfing, living in a camper, etc)
I don't understand how you think that's rejecting the dichotomy. That's a clear YIMBY position.
not that clear to me. looks more like "YIMBY but they're doing it wrong" (i.e. new housing unaffordable for current residents and drives prices up, which is bad, but NIMBY wouldn't make things better either)
I did that for the climate change question, for similar reasons. It both does and doesn't "require" strong action, depending on what we are willing to give up, or will give up anyway, because we don't get around to taking (vigorous) action. It's a thing; we're doing it; but almost all possible future trajectories are livable.
I'm not sure where you object to a dichtomy there.
What answer should I have given on the scale, then?
I don't know, I'm just saying I don't see how your position falls outside the scale.
A thing that encompasses the whole of a second thing, and more besides, is necessarily outside that second thing.
I used three a lot for those types of questions.
I object to it, although I answered (2). I am an ecomodernist/ecopragmatist, and I think climate change requires strong action but not the kind that most people think will be effective. http://www.ecomodernism.org
Also, "strong action" could mean building dikes, farmers switching crop varieties, and the like. I think most people will interpret it as "strong action to reduce climate change," but that isn't the only sort of action nor the most obviously justified.
You missed the word impact there, no?
I don't think so. If you reduce the amount of climate change you reduce its impact. If you prevent flooding by diking you also reduce the impact of the climate change that occurs.
I had a similar thought, which was "intellectually: 100% YIMBY; in actuality: probably more NIMBY than I'd care to admit." Like, if I felt that YIMBY reduced my property values or enjoyment of my neighborhood, I'd have to override my NIMBY urges by sheer force of will / self-guilting (but luckily I have scrupulosity OCD which gives me superpowers in self-guilt).
Pretty much this.
1) I am against building things I don't like in my backyard (or the backyard of anyone who doesn't want it). I am for building things I like in my backyard (and the backyards of other people, unless they genuinely mind).
2) I want more housing so that people have better living options. I want neighborhoods protected from uncontrolled development so that people have better living options. Those aren't contradictory. The whole conflict feels limited to an extremely specific historical era in an extremely specific place (parts of the US), and plenty of places in the world could provide a blueprint for solving it without taking either the "limit housing so property values rise" or the "just let developers do anything they want, anywhere they want" option, of which both seem extremely unappealing.
Other questions of the sections aren't any clearer.
"Do you prefer the big city or the suburbs?" - both are great for some reasons and awful for others, and my preferred living environment would merge the good aspects of both.
"Where do you live now?" - right now, I live in a townhouse at a town square. On one hand, for European standards, this is as urban as it gets (as in, the environment really does not differ much from historical centres of bigger cities), on the other, it's a small town in the extended suburb system of a bigger city to which I commute to work. So, urban or suburban? Earlier, I lived in a residential tower block neighborhood in the aforementioned bigger city. When you consider their design and architecture, they may be the single most "urban" environments you get around here. But in terms of urban planning and the city's historical development, they're THE suburbs.
Re: "Do you usually wear a face mask when going out to stores or restaurants?"
I think this question will depend on a lot on the current status of COVID waves in the answerer's geographical area. Personally I wear masks only when there's a recent surge, when there's a mandate, or when I'm sick. I think the question should be split or phrased in a way that informs you of the personality/habits of the answerer, rather than the current crisis level.
Agreed. I interpreted it to mean "…when there is no consensus on whether it is or is not appropriate.", e.g., there is no local mandate, but businesses still have signs posted and/or 6-ft markers on the floor.
The two adjacent questions about ACX meetups and SSC meetups really mean the same thing, SSC/ACX meetups depending on the time they have happened?
Thanks, that was just me failing to change a question since the old survey. Fixed.
Wasn't there a unique ID you were supposed to remember from previous years survey so you could compare them? Did you drop that idea or maybe forget about it?
Thanks, added.
I seem to have two of these by the way. I put the more recent ACX one but I have another one from SSC.
Question about why you distrust the media says has "Option for people who put 1, 2, or 3 in questions above"; this is clearly intended to say "3, 4, or 5".
Thanks, I reversed that and forgot to reverse the answer.
Related, the question required picking one item that was the "most" relevant to the lack of trust. I did not feel like any of them constituted a single moment that I went from trust to no trust, but I still lost a lot of trust in the same time period due to a mixture of several of those news stories.
I've been reading since SSC but still consider myself a n00b. Has there been that much growth between the transition from SSC to ACX?
The debacle with the NYT doxxing Scott hit a lot of high-traffic areas of the 'Net; it pulled in a lot more readers.
‘Since SSC also covers a lot of ground! When in SSCs history? I think i started reading SSC in 2013 but I know there were others who were even earlier to the party, including those who were reading Scott before SSC
Correct, which is why I was surprised that the length of time reading available in the poll was only two years or more
Judging by the comments on ACX, very much so - it's a new group, with a new set of consensus views and positions. I read it less than I read SSC, and fairly confidently expect that any comments I make will be ignored as coming from someone who doesn't "get" the things "we" all agree on, unlike with SSC.
You might try DSL. I find myself posting much more there.
Sorry. What is DSL?
The bulletin board Data Secrets Lox, linked in the sidebar on the homepage under "Community".
Bitcoin value question. You say if you think it'll be worthless enter 0, but 0 is disallowed (has to be greater than)
I'm missing "Retired" under Work Status. Should I choose "Homemaker" instead, or "Independently wealthy"? I don't really feel *wealthy*, I just have a pension and some savings....
Sorry, I don't know what happened that that one. I've added it in, but you can just skip that for now.
Hi Scott,
I wish you would add "academic research" or some such to the list of work options. I do mostly scientific research at an R1 institution in the US, and there was no good option for me. I ended up choosing "Government" because technically that's what my university is. "Academia - mostly teaching" doesn't fit me, nor does "nonprofit" (although my research is certainly not for profit) or "student" (not anymore).
Suppose one took the SAT during the brief period where there were three sections (Math, Reading, and Writing) and it was scored up to 2400. What should they give as their Verbal/Reading score? Reading, Writing, or (Reading + Writing) / 2?
I used Reading only. It is my understanding that the Writing section was an add-on.
Just the reading one
You really need to know if the score was before or after the tests were renormed. You could put in the date of that and ask.
My second guess for the Moscow distance question was almost exactly my number of unread emails (off by 4), but I swear this wasn't anchoring (I actually answered them in reverse order, I was too lazy to look up my inbox number until I went back).
You must have so many unread emails. I hope you can read some of them this year.
Why no option for (East) Indian / South Asian in the ethnic group question? There's options for Bengali and Tamil but most Indians are not covered in these groups.
I went off some list of large/common ethnic groups and I guess those weren't in there. Are there any very large Indian subethnicities not in there which I should include?
Among the diaspora the other groups with substantial representation are Punjabis and Gujaratis. If you have a significant readership in India proper though then even those four groups will only cover a small minority. You may just want a catchall option like ‘ other Indian.’
Depends on what the goal is.
Drawing from Razib's work, I would atleast add the following clusters:
* Add South Indian as an options ( Telugus dominate as the biggest tech Indian demographic)
* Western Indian (Marathi, Gujju - both big US disasporas & likely to be ACX readers)
* Add Rajasthani/ Punjabi / Pakistani should be 1 genetic cluster. But no self-respecting Indian would tick Pakistani irrespective of how similar they area. North-western Indian / Pakistani is probably a good middle ground.
What about people from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, or Odisha? Given their large population there are probably some ACX readers from there. Also, NW Indian is confusing. Is a person from Central UP belongs to NW Indian?
It gets messy really fast [1] [2]
I say NW-Indians because they all have a significant presence of steppe ancestry.
For UP/Bihar ---> the Yadavs, Jats, Kshatriyas and Gangetic Brahmins would comfortably fit into the NW-indian mega-cluster with significant steppe ancestry. This covers most UP/Bihar diasapora (upper class) in the US
Nepal, Jharkhand, NE Indian, Orissa, Bengal & Bihar have noticeable east-asian ancestry.
Generally though, the whole thing is a spectrum and geographical & linguistic identities don't map neatly onto genetic backgrounds. So, I can see why anyone would struggle with getting the categories right when it comes to India.
[1] https://www.brownpundits.com/2022/07/09/global-25-is-good-but-a-minor-issue/
[2] https://www.brownpundits.com/2022/04/11/against-blood-quantum-as-a-measure-of-indigeneity/
(Linking these sources because the detailed work by Razib is behind paywall)
Bengalis and Tamils constitute only about 12% of India's population, so the vast majority of Indians are not covered. A large portion of Indian tech employees in the US are Telugu, they're not covered even though I'm pretty sure quite a few of them are your readers. That's probably true of many other Indian sub-ethnicities. Similarly, Sri Lankans or Nepalis are not included either. You should add a category for Indian / South Asian to take these into account.
The question about Meetups doesn't include an option that you want to go a meetup but haven't yet. The no options are:
No, I don't want to
No, I don't know of any, or can't make it to any
Thanks, fixed.
Abortion question: this is a legality question, right? I.e. it's enough for highly pro-choice that abortion services are as accessible as any other medical services and this fact is well-known and not hidden, and even informal stigmatisation is considered bad. Propaganda and state support for child-rearing do not count against this.
I wonder if on policy questions like immigration it would be useful next time to ask «the axes of current thresholds are somewhat reasonably chosen/oriented, independently of thresholds themselves being too high or too low»
I think it's important to distinguish legal and illegal immigration; I put middle because I want illegal immigration stopped to the greatest extent possible and punished when discovered. But broader legal immigration is desirable, and the backlog for legal immigrants is a disgrace.
Agree that this question was unclear for the above reasons.
Adding another "agreed" here. I'd be down for *some forms* of much more immigration, there's no attempt to differentiate even in broad ways which ones I'd be down for.
legal/illegal and/or skilled/unskilled - think the question loses all informativeness as asked.
yes to brain-draining China/Russia no to more latinos would seem like a not unpopular position for the community to me?..
Strongly agree. I put middle as well for the same reasons. If there were two choices, one for illegal and one for legal, I would have been at the extremes of both, in opposite directions.
Did you abandon the idea of the ACX survey ID that you had us all generate last time?
EDIT: ninjaed.
This has been re-added after another similar question.
This survey was a lot of fun! There are two things that might make sense to change.
1. It seems to me like the race category should allow people to write in a custom option. In particular, the "other" category in the race question mixes multi-racial people with unlisted races (like Native American, African, Pacific Islander) and I think those should be separate categories. A "check all that apply" box could be used too.
2. I opened a new to the BMI calculator when answering the BMI question and that tab stayed open by the time I reached "how many tabs do you have open" question even though I had no intention of returning to the BMI tab later. I think the open tabs data should take place early in the survey, to avoid contamination by the survey itself.
1. I hate including custom options because if I do, a pretty sizeable percent of people who fit into one of the real options will use it, eg instead of checking "Black" they will write in "I am Black although I don't know for sure if I have some White ancestry somewhere", and then it isn't machine readable. I get thousands of responses and so anything that isn't machine-readable isn't getting processed.
2. If you chose not to close the BMI tab, that's useful information!
I also wanted the multiple checkbox option (or at least a separate radio button for “multiple” than for “other”).
I had to skip a lot of questions, or give non-committal answers, because they didn't make sense. The most salient one was about giving my political views on a spectrum from left to right. Like many people I don't accept or identify with 'left' or 'right' politically. The term 'right' as used in politics is effectively libellous because it defines extreme forms of conservatism, or anti-socialism, as fascist.
Minor points:
City versus suburban living was impossible to answer because there is a third alternative, living in the country, which is different from both the other options; and it's probably not a single dimension.
Class background is (obviously, because the questionnaire is mainly for Americans) defined in American terms and doesn't suit my experience as an Englishman, so I had to translate, with some uncertainty. Specifically, US middle class is equivalent to UK lower middle class. For historical reasons the UK middle classes are taken to be well above the median income and social status.
I had to look up all the philosophical terms: consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, contractualism and natural law. That was embarrassing, because I think of myself as having a broad range of general knowledge, but obviously not as broad as I thought.
Yeah, having "suburban" as the extreme option didn't make much sense to me. Suburban is such a broad category that it doesn't really describe a specific level of density to me. Using "rural" as the extreme option would have made more sense, but I guess very few ACXers live in rural areas. Maybe extend it to a seven-point scale too?
I thought the class questions were confusing because I think of class and income as being different if correlated things.
Exactly. I think of class as being primarily defined by one's relationship to capital, not by income, education, or tastes.
huh?
thought class is usually defined in social terms.
english phd scraping buy is still upper-middle class and has social capital to get real and start earning well whenever they want - or think harvard dropout.
I take the survey every year, but ran into an issue for the jobs question. "Other white-collar" and "other blue-collar" are the only listed options for people with an unmentioned job, but many positions don't slot well into those frameworks, and there's no option to actually write-in your profession. As it stands, I can't progress any further in the survey (I assume the question is optional, but it's a big enough one I'd *like* to answer it).
What job do you have?
I don't know about Vat but when I was a musician, I would not have known how to answer the question.
Orchestra? White collar. Bar gigs? Blue. Coffee house? White.
I think «income» question would benefit from an extra country field (especially when changing EU contries too much to identify with a single one more than the country of origin…)
Hmm, my estimation that my viral cold was CoViD is based on once-in-a-lifetime smell distortion symptoms, but they went away within a few days, not a full week (while some weak effect — not sure if heart of lungs — lingered for more than a year)…
"What sex were you assigned at birth?".
Come on Scott, that isn't how it works! Your sex is determined at the moment of fertilisation. I really hope that this was just an oversight from a cut and paste job.
Some intersex conditions cause your sex assigned at birth to differ from your genetic sex - they don't generally do a genetic test to assign sex at birth, they just look at external genitals.
Then the question could ask: "Is your sex male, female or do you have an intersex condition?"
It is easy to be very sure what is written in your documents. Knowing that you don't have a condition where your apparent sex differs from genetic _to the same level_ of being sure probably requires either a genetic test (including a chimerism check). You probably can get quite sure — but still not as sure as about reading a document — if you have children.
So if you want a question where everyone has the same availability of an answer, you use documented observations.
The number of illiterates might be more than a 1000 times larger.
Well, the survey asks for participation of those who _read_ Astral Codex Ten.
True. Thousands of illiterates peeping over the shoulder of someone checking the intersex box make for a funny picture but not a good argument XD
Many intersex people don't know they're intersex! The sex assigned at birth is the best phrasing here because that's what the question is asking for. What did people put down for you when you were born?
Everything else is hard to be sure about and statistically probably doesn't matter.
No. Assigned means 'to allocate'. It isn't right. Sex is observed.
̶O̶̶n̶̶ ̶t̶̶h̶̶e̶̶ ̶o̶̶f̶̶f̶̶-̶̶c̶̶h̶̶a̶̶n̶̶c̶̶e̶̶ ̶y̶̶o̶̶u̶̶'̶r̶̶e̶̶ ̶n̶̶o̶̶t̶̶ ̶t̶̶r̶̶o̶̶l̶̶l̶̶i̶̶n̶̶g̶̶…̶ (sorry)
ETA: It looks like this may be a simple misunderstanding of vocabulary.
"Assigned" also means "to fix or specify in correspondence or relationship"; in this context, your sex is being specified and fixed on your birth certificate.
The phrase "assigned at birth" is commonly used to distinguish "biological sex" from a self-identified gender, since in English we use the same terms for biological sex classifications and the social constructs commonly associated with them.
Yes, they know. I imagine they object to the tone the assigned at birth wording has, which implies a certain arbitrariness, like it's just a doctor's whim, that sex very much does not have.
I have the same objection and would rather not speak woke if possible.
Is there a social construct?
I think the phrase is used by leftists to suggest that sex is arbitrary and changeable.
That one bothered me as well. I usually refuse to answer questions framed in this form, though I did this one, because it's Scott. I think that talking about "assignment" is a really creepy way of instilling gender ideology, by implying that biology has nothing to do with what sex I am.
What I always tell people is that my sex was not ASSIGNED at birth - it was IDENTIFIED at birth. In a very small handful of cases, such as those mentioned by Michelle below, it is MISidentified, but a misidentification is still a form of identification, not assignment.
I just skipped the question as it is nonsensical.
> by implying that biology has nothing to do with what sex I am
Classifying a person by a social group associated with biology and using the one as a proxy for the other is exactly the opposite of implying that they have nothing to do with each other. I'm glad you agree that instilling gender ideology based on someone's genitals is creepy, but it's common enough in western culture that it is generally socially accepted. I would prefer to decouple the two, but that's proving really difficult because of how deeply the association is ingrained in public social constructs (so much that people commonly mistake one for the other!) But unless I've totally missed something, the creepiness of a person's sexual assignment is not what the survey is trying to measure, as it only asks about social sex assignment, not biological sex traits.
I believe by gender ideology he is referring to the claim that sex is a social construct and not biological. I don't know what you are thinking of when you use the term.
I don't think anybody is claiming that there is not such a thing as biological sex characteristics.
"sex is a social construct" is not an ideology; it's a definition. A modern definition, perhaps, and more commonly ascribed to "gender" (which uses the same categorical terminology), but a definition. An ideology ("a system of ideas and ideals" or "the ideas and manner of thinking characteristic of a group") would be something like "as someone of gender X, you should behave/be treated this way". That ideology is absolutely instilled from birth based on people's genitals.
It's "a definition" for a tiny sliver of activists at best; it is not THE definition accepted by the majority of the population throughout the centuries that English has been spoken.
"Sex roles" (/"gender roles") are a social construct, if you wish. "Sex" is biology.
Whether or not your sex is _determined_ at fertilization, there is also a thing that happens at or around birth where your parents/doctors decide what sex you are.
More generally: it is a _good thing_ for a question about a controversial topic not to make controversial assumptions that it doesn't need to, and it is a _good thing_ for its answer to be interpretable without knowledge of what controversial assumptions the person answering makes.
So if Scott had just asked "What sex are you?" he wouldn't be able to tell whether any given respondent is answering "what are your chromosomes?", "what was your gross anatomy at birth?", "what is your gross anatomy now?", "what do you feel like you are?", or something else.
He could have asked something like "What is your chromosomal sex?" but then some people -- probably more than have a problem with the question as it is now -- would have said "well, strictly I don't know because I've never had that tested" or something.
And if he'd asked something like "What sex are you? This is determined by your chromosomes, your natural hormone levels and the genitalia you were born with." then some participants would have said "bah, no it isn't" and refused to answer. Again, probably more than will refuse to answer because he used the phrase "assigned at birth".
"there is also a thing that happens at or around birth where your parents/doctors decide what sex you are."
No. They observe it.
It seems I was unclear; I didn't mean "decide" in the sense of "make it so" but in the sense of "come to a decision". Again, whether they do that or whether they merely observe it is a controversial question; but it is not controversial that they do look at you, come to a decision about what sex you are, and write it down.
There is probably a way of describing this that is unambiguous and gives less appearance of question-begging than using the phrase "assigned at birth", but I don't think there is any that isn't clumsy and cumbersome. "When you were born, what sex did your parents and doctors consider you to be?" or something.
(I take it that you would prefer a question that unashamedly assumes that what they were doing was simply observing the Objective Fact Of What Sex You Are. Again, I think that is a mistake regardless of whether you are completely right or completely wrong about what sex is and how it's determined. Some ACX readers will disagree with you about that, and they should be able to take the survey and give answers that will be correctly interpreted.)
That depends on why the question is included at all. If Scott wants to do a scientific evaluation of male vs female responses then he needs to know the actual, objective sex of the responder.
What is the difference between (1) the thing you consider the actual, objective sex of the responder, and (2) the thing that is "assigned at birth"? (I guess those differ in the case of some intersex conditions, but from the rest of the discussion here it seems clear that that's not your objection.)
I appreciate that you dislike the term "assigned at birth", but that's a separate matter.
No, the phrase "assigned at birth" is the whole matter. It is objectively wrong.
If there is one thing that rationalists have going for them, it is precision. Precision even in the face of social hostility is what makes rationalism valuable, without that they are just a group of nerds with odd hobbies.
"If Scott wants to do a scientific evaluation of male vs female responses then he needs to know the actual, objective sex of the responder."
To truly know that for sure, he would have to insist that every single respondent gets a full genetic screening.
It seems like what you really want him to be asking is basically "Did you have a penis or a vagina when you came out of your mother's womb?", but that's a rather crude framing. And even that isn't something that people always know for certain: intersex babies with mixed or ambiguous genitalia are often subjected to "corrective" surgery during infancy, and grow up without ever realizing that their current genitalia configuration isn't the one they were born with! So asking "What did the doctors write on your birth certificate?" makes sense, as that question can be answered with a greater degree of accuracy.
But the question wasn't "What did the doctors write on your birth certificate?".
A random PubMed google suggests the frequency of chromosomal intersex conditions (genitalia do not match chromosomes) is 0.018%. For there to be even 1 respondent who has this quandary there would need to be ~5000 or more respondents.
Should the survey be careful to be straightforwardly answerable by all other people who have assorted conditions or situations at the 0.018% probability level? One imagines this would make for a rather complicated and verbiose instrument.
What makes you think Scott wants to do a scientific evaluation of responses differentiated by some specific biological marker? The fact that he uses "assigned at birth" suggests he's looking to differentiate people who were raised under a set of assumptions commonly associated with one gender or another. Likely whatever answer he gets will correlate strongly with whatever biological marker you want to associate with gender, and probably more closely on average than answers he would get asking for Marker A would correlate against answers he would get asking for Marker B (especially since not everybody knows all their biological markers, so he wouldn't get as many responses). Given that he didn't ask for Marker A or Marker B, I don't think that difference is meaningful enough for his purposes here.
There is a later question dealing with gender, so I think that your assumption here is wrong.
God help Scott, this entire sub-thread is worse than a combination of herding cats *and* minding mice at a crossroads. If he temp-banned the entire lot of us participating in this quarrel, he'd be within his rights (of the Reign of Terror).
I have no idea when this whole gender identity problem will cool down, but it's not going to happen in the next ten minutes, that's for sure.
"There is probably a way of describing this that is unambiguous and gives less appearance of question-begging than using the phrase "assigned at birth", but I don't think there is any that isn't clumsy and cumbersome."
There is a completely unambiguous and non-question-begging way of asking the question which isn't clumsy at all, which is the way I proposed in the message you were responding to. "What sex were you IDENTIFIED as at birth?"
That solves all of the problems that you raised about chromosomes and the like; it even allows for the possibility that the identification was wrong. All it does is report the identification made at the time, without implying that it was some kind of arbitrary non-biological choice in the way that "assigned" (or related words like "decided") does.
Yes, as a synonym for 'observed', 'identified' works perfectly well in this case.
As a synonym for "classified", "assigned" works perfectly well in this case.
Pedantic note: it was not in the message I was responding to that you made that proposal.
(I agree that "identified as" is not bad. It's a bit question-begging, but maybe no more so than "assigned" is in the other direction.)
I don't see how you think identification is more fluid than assignment. If you were assigned X earlier and later assigned Y, you can still say you were assigned X. If you were "identified as" X earlier and later identified as Y, then you can no longer say you were identified as X, rather that you were misidentified as X. There is exactly one identity.
This particular survey question is not about your identity. It is about how you were classified when you were born. If your classification at birth was wrong, it doesn't matter, the survey just wants what classification you were assigned when you were born. Hence, "assigned at birth".
"If you were "identified as" X earlier and later identified as Y, then you can no longer say you were identified as X, rather that you were misidentified as X."
Of course you can say you were "identified as X" in those circumstances! "I was identified as a girl at birth, but the doctors were wrong, I'm in fact male" is a perfectly meaningful and comprehensible statement.
And I wasn't claiming that "identification" was "more fluid" (I'm not even totally sure what that would mean). I am claiming that "assignment" is misleading, because IN PRACTICE the way in which people's sex is identified at birth* is by observation, and we don't generally use the term "assign" for observed phenomena (even when the observation is sometimes mistaken). If I look in the sky at the planets, I don't say "I assign that planet as Saturn", I say "I identify that planet as Saturn" - and even if I'm a lousy astronomer and the planet is actually Jupiter, I've still "identified" the celestial object in question, not "assigned" it.
(*NOTE: I say "at birth", but actually it often happens before birth nowadays. When my wife was pregnant with my daughter and we went for an ultrasound, the doctor asked "Do you want to know the sex of the baby?" [note "know", implying the observation of a factual matter]. We replied "Yes", the doctor looked at the ultrasound and announced "It's a girl"[again as an observation of a fact]. I respectfully submit that "assign" is a really really misleading way of describing that process - and would still be misleading, even if it turned out that the doctor had misread the ultrasound and had got it wrong ... And if she HAD got it wrong, the correction would still have been made by observation at the time of the birth.)
I can't believe we're fighting over this thanks to the survey, but I suppose that is Culture War for you. I wish it weren't.
Though I do want people to apply this language to race: "no, see, your parents came to a decision at birth that you were [whatever]". I could see that in cases like Meghan Markle, who is mixed-race and the African-American quotient of her genetics diluted down enough that it would make sense to go "I/we/they decided Meghan is black, not white".
I do think there would be some table-flipping over "if your classification at birth was wrong, then you can correct it" or "you were identified as X but now you identify as Y so you were misidentified at birth" when it comes to race, though 😁
"I take it that you would prefer a question that unashamedly assumes that what they were doing was simply observing the Objective Fact Of What Sex You Are"
Because that is what is happening with your biological sex at birth, save in the cases of actual physical/physiological divergence.
When you're old enough to have an opinion on the matter and understand the words, you can decide your gender for yourself. But your sex at birth *is* objective fact, just as it is objective fact that you (probably) had two arms and two legs and one head. Nobody "comes to a decision" about the number of limbs on the upper trunk.
Saying "well my sex and my gender are the same thing, and I am female sex (because I got my dick inverted, have fake boobs and am on HRT)" is not the physical reality. Your natal sex is one fact. Your current self-identified gender is another fact. The alteration to a greater or lesser degree of your anatomy to fit in with the observable physical attributes associated with a particular sex is another. It seems now in some places you can identify as legally female with no changes at all, but whether that is to be taken as "female gender" or "female sex" is a question I'll leave up to the lawyers to parse:
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/exclusive-transgender-fugitive-who-spurred-wi-spa-riots-bares-all/
"Let’s back up a second. Should we be using male or female pronouns with you? How do you identify?
I’m very neutral, like non-binary, although I don’t like that word. I’m legally female. But I have facial hair. I have a penis. I have no breasts. I don’t have a feminine voice. I don’t wear makeup or dress up like a female. So imagine you’re a grocery store [clerk] and you’re bagging my groceries and you say, “Excuse me, sir . . . ” I mean, am I supposed to be offended? That’d be ridiculous. How would this person know? But technically, for legal terms, I am she/her. I put “female” on my driver’s license. But I’ve had to struggle my whole life fitting into traditional society.
...When did you get your driver’s license changed?
The license came in January 2019 [the month that the California Gender Recognition Act took effect]. But there’s a discrepancy in California, you can go through your doctor. But it’s very easy to get it. You can go in and sign a piece of paper. So I just waited until January to do it. And that was the first month that it was available. Basically, anybody could walk in and get one."
Here's another objective fact: Not everyone agrees with you about all that. It seems sensible to write questions like this one in ways that don't produce wrong answers or needless upset in the presence of people who disagree with you.
What would you prefer the question to say? If someone taking the survey thinks that their sex and their gender are the same thing, and that for them neither of those matches what is on their birth certificate, what answer will they give to the question as posed and what answer to your preferred version?
(By the way, something seems to have gone wrong in your edit; you've quoted a bit from the article you linked to but it's cut off partway.)
Not everyone agrees the Earth is round. Should we be careful to teach geography classes in ways that don't offend those who think differently?
If your answer is "Of course not! That's different!" then the issue of whether some fraction of people think differently is not the core of your disagreement: you disagree about the underlying facts, in particular about whether disagreement on this point is rational or not. And if that's the case, it's a bit disingenuous to present the objection as if it's just not about offending people. It isn't. It's a powerful disagreement about what is classified as objective fact and what is classified as opinion about which reasonable men may differ.
This is something guaranteed to get everyone hot under the collar. One set thinks that striving for the most accurate agreement with how they perceive the topic is the best, the other set resents what seems like imposition and dictation to them as to how they should perceive reality.
As to the article, yes I cut bits out, I only wanted to show how easy it was to be declared "legally female" and have that on your driver's licence in California, without doing one single thing towards transition/passing socially or any other way. If you really want to know the intervening details of how he (or she, to be legally in agreement) has sex, you can read the linked article for yourself.
How would I prefer the question? "What was your natal sex? Is your current sex the same?" I think that leaves it open for "boy/still boy/ now girl/non-binary/twelve genders" options. without having to go into detail that gets everyone in each other's faces.
Natal sex: Female
Still the same? Yes/No (simple, doesn't ask about what your consider your sex/gender to be. Maybe you identify as 'same sex, different gender', maybe you think 'I was always a boy but they mislabelled me at birth', maybe you think 'my sex and gender are different now, baby!')
Whether it's assigned at birth or assumed is controversial – how about "recorded"?
Works for me.
Fine by me. Up to the individual how they want to interpret that.
Yes, very suitable.
How about "What sex is on your birth certificate?".
For trans people the sex on their birth certificate and the sex assigned at birth can differ. Many jurisdictions allow you to amend the sex or other details on a birth certificate. Heck, my mom had to have her NAME amended on her birth certificate after getting married because that’s the way her jurisdiction does things.
I think "what sex was on your original birthday certificate" is the least controversial way to ask this question.
Rejecting the normal convention for asking someone what their presumed anatomical sex was at birth and replacing it with a new phrasing to satisfy a niche crowd that is extremely sensitive to issues around gender nonconformity seems itself to be controversial.
Oh to hell with it, just go with "what was your natal sex? is it the same as your current sex?"
Gender is its own separate special little oil fire, but we shouldn't have to dance around "your parents decided you were a boy when you were born", or why not say "your parents decided you were human", "your parents decided your eyes were blue", "your parents decided you had five fingers on each hand" - okay, for polydactyly there is an exception, as for intersex. But most people it's "five fingers, boy or girl". That this has become an arena for grievance posturing by all sides is ridiculous.
I think that's precisely the disagreement, though. From your (and mine) point of view, natal sex is a biological fact, just like the number of fingers on hands and whatnot. But Social Justice is essentially postmodernist; they believe that all facts, from sex to finger counts are entirely socially constructed. According to this view, there is no underlying reality that we can reliably access in order to determine what sex anyone or anything is; or even how many objects there are in a set -- at the end these are all social conventions, and all social conventions are only relevant insofar as they perpetuate or oppose structures of oppression.
But then there is no such thing to base any feelings of "this is not what I am meant to be" on. If sex, just like gender, is a social construct, then we can't refer to "trans woman", what we have is "assigned male at birth who prefers to select behaviours from the bundle associated with those assigned female at birth".
So you're not a woman, you're a man who behaves, dresses, names himself, and refers to himself in this set of attributes, not those. There is no "man", there is no "woman" and asking to be called a woman is as incorrect as asking to be called a pine tree (or as correct, if we can assign sexes and genders based on "this is how I feel I am" why not other elements?)
I can't validate your femininity because that has no existence, all I can do is congratulate you on a performance (and hence the prevalence of drag queens now associated with the trans movement? drag queens are the most trans of all, because they perform the most highly mannered version of the bundle of assigned traits with the label "female"?)
I believe (though I could be wrong) that the canonical answer to this is that social constructs are the only things that matter; arguably, the only things that can truly be said to exist. Some Social Justice proponents do indeed advocate for the abolition of gender (and thus, sex) as a social construct altogether; under this model, there would be no such thing as "male" or "female", just people doing things. However, AFAICT that is not the majority opinion.
One opposing faction agrees with gender abolitionists in principle. However, they argue that in practice misgendering does great harm to people *now*; and thus we can't afford to wait for a blessed genderless world to come along, we need to solve or at least ameliorate the problem to stop human suffering. And one way to do that would be to fully enable people to choose their own gender (and therefore sex), thus alleviating their suffering; fortunately, this move will also move us closer to gender abolition.
Another school of thought is of the opinion that, if people feel very strongly about being "male" or "female", then it would be wrong to work towards abolishing such feelings; after all, personal experiences are all we have, and arguably all that we could *ever* have. According to this view, self-identification must be exalted above any other goals, and if you wish to truly identify as a pine tree (or whatever), you must be celebrated for doing so.
Is that really the case? It's been quite a while since I was a new parent, but I thought quite a lot of people, maybe even most, now had some amnio done in utero, to rule out Down's et cetera, and all of those people have the sex chromosomes observed as a matter of course. I'd be a little surprised if in most or almost all cases the sex of infants is only known at birth.
Amnio is not common as it carries a small but measurable risk of miscarriage, but cell-free testing (NIPT) does look at fetal (/placental) DNA that is circulating in the mother's bloodstream and is routine in many places.
I think "assign" can mean different things. For example, you are assigned a name at birth, which (in the western world) has very different meanings for the first name and the last name. The first name is arbitrarily decided by the parents while the last name is at picked out of a set of less than three and often less than two options.
We commonly say "the last name of the family was assigned to the child" while not saying "the person who gave birth was assigned as the mother on the birth certificate", even though the amount of bits in either process may in fact be zero.
A more neutral way would be "my birth certificate gives my sex as ...", which would sidestep the issues of sex, gender, biological determination and social construction completely.
Or one could directly ask for the Y chromosome, which is what xkcd did in their color survey.
It's probably only worth asking for the chromosome if your results are useless without it, because of the people who will go 'well I _could_ have androgen insensitivity, nobody has bothered to find out'.
Birth certificate sex seems to be what this question actually wants to know.
Ugh how asking basic questions has turned into a minefield. I'd imagine Scott used that phrasing because it is the standard AMA phrasing or something like that. If I were him, I would have probably used the same phrasing and not for lack of "belief" in biological sex.
One might worry about the linguistic hegemony of it all, and that isn't without basis. But polarization is its own hegemonic force - as in, more extreme views and norms arise as the result of polarization (at least, I think this is the case). It might be that if less mindshare is given to this fight about gender/sex that everyone just quietly gets a lot more reasonable about it.
Fair point, and I freely admit that this is something that I get annoyed about to a degree that is disproportionate to its actual importance ... I suppose because I see it so often (which supports your point about why Scott used that wording in the first place!), and it grates more on me every time.
Giving into it is why Matt Walsh can make "What is a woman?" in the first place, a proposition that would be utterly absurd to almost every human who has ever lived, but is somehow a tough question in today's clown world.
Because if he didn't phrase it that way, there would be other people yelling at him for presuming everyone is cis, or ignoring trans people, or that sex is a spectrum, or what about intersex people huh?
My own opinion is that I wasn't "assigned" anything, I was *identified*. But I'm not mad enough at Scott to yell at him about this, particularly since I'm seeing more and more people in my work sphere sticking their pronouns in the bottom (or even body) of emails, something I thought would take another ten years to seep in over here.
(People I am mad enough at, I will yell at them about it).
What he wants to know is whether your parents said "it's a boy" or "it's a girl".
The SSC/ACX community has been around and around and around on this question from year to year. Whatever question is chosen, *someone* always has a hairy fit about it, and starts a giant discussion about how the question should be in their preferred form, and is obviously intended to produce some specific detail that's meaningful to them.
I also found this quite disturbing. Blank slate nonsense.
Wasn't quite sure how to answer on friend gender - most of my close friends are nonbinary
Decided to go one way or the other on voice in head judgement because it's not a category error, sometimes it is positive and sometimes negative, but no real overall skew, and there wasn't really an option for that
There was an "evenly balanced between positive and negative" option, separate from the "category error" option (unless it was added in after your comment, but there's no reply from Scott saying that, unlike some of the other corrections in response to comments)
I don't recall that being there when I was filling it in, maybe it was added as a response to other feedback between me filling it in and you doing so.
That must have been introduced after I started.
Yes, that was tricky for me too. I went with category error because neither mainly negative nor mainly positive seemed right, though it can be judgemental (You idiot! but also Good! Good! You didn't want to do it but you did, and now it's done!) or encouraging (We'll just take out the recycling) or despondent (I can't do this anymore)
Oh thank you for mentioning "we'll" because since Scott asked I've been listening to see what I do and it seems to be a mix of "I" and "you" though "you" more rare. But "we" or "let's" is definitely in their too which is so interesting because in using it I definitely have this sense of there being two parts of myself teaming up for something. Though I can't tell yet if my "we" is more snarky than helpful.
Is this "inner voice" supposed to be different than "me?" That category seems to imply that it is. So, I put it down as category error, since any time I'm having an inner dialogue or psyching myself up or whatever, there isn't any pretense I'm not talking to myself.
I don't think there needs to be any pretense that you're not the one doing the talking. Maybe you only use "I" when you narrate your experience to yourself? Or if you get exasperated with yourself, do you have a "Ugh, you're so dumb!" response? (your inner voice may not say unkind things like that)
Not who you responded to but had the same thought they did.
Since my inner voice is me talking to myself it don't need words like "you" or "I" - when I'm thinking/talking to myself I already know it's about me.
So instead of "Ugh, you're so dumb!" I might think "Well, that was pretty dumb" or "Not one of my brightest moments".
The only instances that I can think of right now where I'd be "I" in my head are one meta level up: "Hm, maybe if I'd done X instead of Y then the result would've been different". But that's talking to myself about myself. And you need words like "I" or "You" when talking about someone.
I also found this question difficult to respond to. My "inner voice" (not even sure that's the right phrase) is mostly me talking with interlocutors. These are typically real people that I know. I have discussions with them. They're not really positive or negative, just people I'm talking to. It's often my trying to convince the interlocutor of something, though I don't always "win" the debate.
No idea how to map that onto the questions about "inner voice".
LSD: I had an extremely strong and unpleasant physical reaction at a dose where the mental effects were barely perceptible (mostly improved mood/sort of 'inner glow', right up until all my muscles started contracting/vibrating uncontrollably and I spent the next several hours trying to stay calm and avoid going to the hospital). Very similar to my experience with serotonin syndrome, but without the mental/emotional disturbance.
Inner voice: I had trouble answering these questions. I have inner speech (I can imagine speaking, and I can imagine a dialogue by playing each side of it in turn) but I don't have "an inner voice" in the sense of an entity separate from my conscious self that produces verbal thoughts without conscious effort. The first question seemed to be asking about the first thing, so I picked the middle "I can if I want to" option, but then the second question seemed to be asking about the second thing. I picked the middle "this question seems weird" response but wasn't sure if I should be picking the "I don't have one" option instead.
Can we have next year more variety for the country you identify most with? It was surprisingly hard to choose this year, as somebody who is close to be a dual-citizen.
On the same vane, can we have a way to identify ourselves by the city? Myself and my friends would rather identify as Londoners/NY-ers rather than the country we reside in.
I was off on the moscow distance question by many KM then when I answered again I gave an answer that was off by the same amount in the opposite direction! :(
Ah, I gave a dramatic underestimate to the initial question and then halved it for the follow up question, becoming even more wrong! Unfortunately there was no question about confidence, of which I had essentially none :)
I was off by a factor of two on my guess, even as someone who is very into maps and distances! (My revision was only by a smaller factor.)
I was spot on for my initial guess (dumb luck as I really have only a vague idea of where those two cities are) but then for the second answer I overestimated by 50%
I guessed without very many significant figures, so I took the prompt to mean I was off by a factor of at least 1.5 - and I'm proud to say I had one guess on each side of the actual answer!
Why does Scott not give a miles alternative? Isn't he American?
Miles are defined using meters anyway (since 1959), so why not cut out the middleman? ;-)
In the glasses question there is also an option «my vision does not count as good, but I still do not correct it». Including blind people who use screen readers to use your blog, I guess.
Corneal damage (or other non-refractionary issues) is also not too likely to be corrected by glasses.
Some people have asymmetry between eyes making correction both more annoying and less necessary; some have similar issues on both eyes that are simply hard to correct in any way and reasonably livable uncorrected.
I am not blind, but I would not say either of the offered options applies to me. I would add options:
«My vision is not good but I do not correct it, and still navigate using it.»
«I am blind.»
No option for "I used to need glasses/contact lenses but after cataract surgery I have the equivalent of contact lenses inside my eyes, and I have monovision so one eye is corrected to distance (for driving) and the other for reading."
More 0-hating numeric inputs: years in the current neighbourhood.
Just add the appropriate number of decimals. :)
Fascinating, as always! The "previous guess was incorrect" question was a delightful insight into the epistemic process, and I found it very hard to decide whether I should change my answer up or down. (Also, typo: extra "how" in that question.)
Unread emails: this was consistently zero for me until less than a year ago and now it's in 4 digits, and I've no idea why. Some kind of unexplained drop in executive function? (Idk whether that question is in there in its own right or just for anchoring, but I'm kind of curious what it correlates with.)
Re COVID fatigue, there were options for "no fatigue" and "fatigue for a few weeks after" but no option for "fatigue only while actually ill with it and not after". I ticked "no fatigue" as I figured that was the intended meaning, but it felt a bit wrong.
The urbanisation questions seemed inconsistent: the first was on a scale from urban to suburban, and the second on a scale from urban to rural. I prefer suburban to urban, but I prefer both over rural (so would pick urban over rural if those were the only options), and the questions seemed to be conflating suburban with rural.
As always, I think the "family member has this condition" and "I suspect I have this condition" questions should be checkboxes with multiple options allowed, or at least if they're radio buttons it should be explicitly stated which of those trumps the other in cases where both are true.
My e-mails were consistently at single or low-double digits until about seven years ago, and then they ballooned to the high hundreds, which I attribute to just giving less of a fuck about having an empty inbox (or about unsubscribing from things) more than any drop in executive function. I went through all of my unread e-mails one afternoon a few months ago, when it was approaching 1000, and I was surprised to see that I had missed less than five e-mails that might have been important at the time. Everything that I hadn't marked as read was something I might have been interested in reading at some point but didn't actually matter.
The problem I have with the "previous guess was incorrect" question was that I was pretty sure I was roughly correct the first time around, I only resisted the urge to answer "no, I'm pretty sure I was right the first time around" because I interpreted the question as "simulate how'd you react if someone you'd assume to know the right answer told you you were wrong", and then I checked and it turns out I was spot on (down to a really small rounding error), and now I feel bad for not going "fuck you, I'm confident in my knowledge of the world around me", but I'd probably feel equally bad if I did that, because it'd be indistinguishable from me cheating and looking the answer up or just knowing it beforehand.
I don't get a ton of email in a given day and can easily spot important things, so I never bothered to set very strong email filters or categories. I have had my gmail account this way for years, so my "unread" number is in the tens of thousands. But most of it is just promotional emails I simply haven't declared as spam. I don't read every email I get from Amazon, and I don't bother deleting them, so they just sit there.
There's ambiguity on the question "How much do you trust the mainstream media? For example, the New York Times and Washington Post". The word "trust," and what it may mean in the context.
The answer "mostly mistrust" might be chosen by the person who considers that NYT/WaPo publish "false facts," yes. And it may also be chosen by the person who considers them to be the mouthpieces of a social-engineering agenda, publishing facts that are not "false per se" but rather very particularly preselected and spun. The latter also translates to a level of trust which is not zero, but negative.
Perhaps it'd have been great to have separate questions addressing the former and the latter. It's probably too late to split them now, but maybe some wording could be added to the question to clarify the intended meaning of the single question.
Isn't false facts version also negative trust? Doesn't seem to be much of a trust distinction.
Now, there are separate dimensions of cluelessness and malice, and both differ between different topics, and then the baselines for default cluelessness also differ between different topics…
(I guess my attitude is that I try to have a model of how they usually falsify the context and how their clueless mistakes usually look like, somewhat trusting them not to be innovative in their mistakes and bias?)
Trust is a very fundamental human thing which I cannot sum up in a single sentence, and this makes it no less fundamental.
It doesn't matter what Merriam-Webster, the self-styled "most trusted online dictionary" defines trust to be, when I do not trust Merriam-Webster.
And if you ask me the followup question (as Scott's survey does) "What is the particular word whose definition Merriam-Webster has decided to change in the last few years, which has most made you distrust Merriam-Webster? You are to pick a single word from this arbitrary incomplete list of words whose definition they've changed:" -- then that follow-up question has missed the point to a degree that is hard to express.
Not that their definition of "trust" is that wrong, for that matter -- "reliance on the character of someone or something" -- it's just how they themselves flunk at upholding that definition, as much as they love to call themselves "the most trusted".
I can only judge the mainstream media in comparison to things I know something about. My consistent experience is that when the mainstream media reports touch on an area where I have some specialized knowledge, every word is wrong, including “and” and “the.” Given their lack of reliability on information I DO know, I’ve no basis on which to trust them concerning information I do not. This is true for every version of “Mainstream Media” you care to name.
Ditto.
It´s like listening to GPT-3´s take on the world after prompting it to 'raise concern' and training it on twitter instead of wikipedia.
There are lots of ambiguities in that question! I put myself down for the highest level of trust even though I notice central mistakes in a large fraction of articles even on topics I’m not expert on.
Yeah. I "trust" these sources more than the alternatives even thought I know they're going to have a high error rate and have some known biases. So if I know they're consistently going to have a few failure modes but are still better than basically anyone else doing a similar thing... do I "trust" them or not? I ended up going with the second-highest rating, but that's probably just mood affiliation, right?
Why would you expect to be able to trust anyone? They might be better than alternatives, but still low on some "absolute" scale.
Wait, why would an inner voice narrate what I do instead whe I do something trivial, instead of going through something I plan to do afterwards? (My answer would be: it narrates all the time, usually not the thing I am currently doing)
Same here. It discusses stuff but does not narrate.
Re: PART 9: INCOME AND CHARITY, there actually weren’t any questions about charity so kind of a misnomer.
Re: orgasm question, skipped; how the hell would I know??
How would you not know? Even if I didn't have experience with friends of the same sex, I talk about orgasms with friends! I know of many people how much or how often they struggle with orgasm, whether they reach it sooner or later or less reliable than they want to. And then there's writing on the subject, internet comments, thinkpieces, actual research, general stats on anorgasmia, of ejaculatio praecox etc. Not everyone knows all that well, but "how the hell would I know" seems like you're unusually uninformed?
I would say you are unusually well informed, but I agree there are ways of finding out, although I personally also have no idea.
> How would you not know?
For one, unless you got intimate with a few people of your gender, this is a bit of a "how do you see the color blue?"-type of question. Without going into details, it's hard to estimate whether you can orgasm easier than others.
Also, a lot of people I know will either not talk about this at all or not go into sufficient detail to give and estimate to this question. I'm lucky enough to have some open friends to have somewhat of a comparison, but I can easily imagine many people don't.
"How would you not know?"
Because some people don't get into that level of detail even with close friends, or may not wish to discuss it at all even if all their friends are chatting frankly about the topic.
And what is "easy/hard" for one person might be "hard/easy" for another. Is A who says "takes me a while but I get there" having an easy or a hard time? How about comparing that with someone who is "I get warmed up straight away and have several orgasms in a bout" - so A should put down "it is difficult for me (compared to B)" and with someone who is "no matter what I do/my partner does, seldom or never happens" - so A should put down "it is easy for me (compared with C)".
Writing on the subject - well, again, unless I go looking for studies on "how easy is it for average woman of this, this and this characteristic", I won't know. And why would I go looking for such studies, unless I had a reason to do so? And what reason would that be, if I wasn't filling in a survey on my sex life?
"General stats" are subjective, how to compare them to your own experience and say "yes/no"?
As I man I have almost no idea. For me it is much harder at 41 to orgasm, than 16, but still pretty easy. How many times I have orgasmed recently matters a lot too. If I don't orgasm for several days then I nearly start having wet dreams, and get very aroused very easily. But mostly that isn't a problem...
>I talk about orgasms with friends!
The idea of discussing orgasms with my friends is literally unimaginable to me.
I remember being in a conversation where a not-that-close friend started discussing her sex life, and I was very surprised and slightly offended on behalf of her boyfriend. People have very different levels of openness about their sex lives.
I don't think anyone is sitting down on either side of a table like "Hello, friend, tell me about your orgasms", but it's not too unusual for people to make comments or jokes about premature ejaculation, impotence, being unable to orgasm during sex, etc, which could give you an idea of the range of common experiences.
I'd add "the opinions of sex partners" to that list of sources.
How will you account for the different SAT scoring systems that have been used? Now it's out of 1600 again, but wasn't it out of 2400 or something for a bit?
I was thinking about that. The change took place in 2016, so lots of adults have scores out of 1600 now.
Also, ACT scores might be interesting to look at as well. My classmates and I were encouraged to take the SAT and ACT, and then repeat the one we did better on for the maximum possible score. The ACT tends to be a more straightforward test, and easier to study for, so maybe the whole point of the question is "What is your score on this IQ-like test" and not "how good are you at studying for a standardize test."
I think for the specific test mentioned it has always been out of 800. 1600 or 2400 is the sum for two tests (verbal and math) or three (+writing?).
Oh yeah, you're right!
Seconding the ACT comment!
(Also, if you went to look your SAT scores up because you can no longer find your paper copies, College Board has changed their website yet again to make it even more annoying! They will *call you* to verify it's you when you sign in.)
I took the ACT instead of the SAT, and used a concordance table to convert the score I got to an equivalent SAT score, which I think is okay?
Not to mention that the test has been "recentered" several times (but I suppose the question about age helps a bit with that). 700 in 1993 does not equal 700 in 1995, or 700 now.
Just noting that I'm interested to hear what the results of the survey RE: imaginary friends are, but I'm a bit sceptical of the reliability of the results. I left that blank because while I have been informed by my parents that I did have an imaginary friend, I honestly can't recall anything beyond the name, so I have no idea if it was a hallucination, a delusion or just an pretense.
I may be unusually bad at remembering my childhood, but I am doubtful that is the kind of thing people can reliably recall decades later - there's a risk of projecting back an adult level of skepticism, but there's also a risk of incorrectly assuming children are incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality.
I only remember two tidbits about my imaginary friend: their name and a conversation with my mother in which she asked me to draw them and I thought to myself "Draw? But it's *imaginary*! Oh well, silly adults asking silly questions, I'll just make something up" and drew a generic girl [maybe relevant to note that I don't think in images at all, so obviously-for-me imaginary implied non-visual]. That memory feels surprisingly clear, I can see where we were and some details about my drawing. Maybe I should ask my mother whether she remembers and check it against her memory.
Ah, yes, the famous third sex. Are we still supposed to live in reality?
Scott is trying to figure out how crazy we are and how much money we have...maybe he's going to start an MLM with this info!
LSD: Nobody ever told me and my friends what doses we bought. I decided to write an absurdly high number, which seemed to be the most truthful workable option.
It was so many decades ago I didn't even remember what the units were, so I entered 0 and that isn't true. There were just no other options other than to make something up.
It would have been helpful for that question to include information about the standard range being 75-150. I was going to put a number at about one tenth of that based on misremembering what I thought were standard doses.
Thanks for this. Had same problem! Haha, its a sign of progress if the baseline assumption nowadays is 1) LSD is readily available and 2) youre obtaining it in a context where the exact mcg dose is known. We’ve come a long way, baby.
No third person option for inner voice :(
For the mental disorders question, does "family" only include blood relations or should it include one's spouse, in-laws, adopted siblings, etc? My brother-in-law has one of these disorders and I consider him family, but obviously his having the disorder doesn't genetically predispose me toward having it.
I'd be very interested to know correlation between mental disorders among (close) social family vs. (removed) biological family. Maybe being exposed to it makes it easier for a person to recognize and seek formal diagnosis, whether or not they are genetically predisposed?
My question too. I'm guessing blood relations for genetics rather than marriage for familiarity, since a question interested in familiarity might have included "close friends".
Was hoping to see an answer to this, I have the same question.
I wish the political questions had at least a cultural and economic axis. As an economically left (social democratic) but culturally conservative (monoculturalism, etc.) person, it's really difficult to find a package that suits me.
I also wish you had better warned to not look up the Paris to Moscow distance before answering the last question, as the first thing I did was to check my answer.
Same. I was hoping for some option like 'Christian Democrat' on the political beliefs question. I wanted to check 'Social Democrat' but the definition included something like "permissive social liberalism" so I had to check 'conservative' despite disagreeing with the given economic principles
It is interesting that neo-reactionary and alt-right get 2 of a relatively limited group of categories given how politically close they are. You can slice up the options in more fine-grain ways or less depending on what you're interested in learning, but I found being particular about the distinction there compared to the other options interesting. I understand why that would matter to someone seeped in the rationalist community given the political disputes that are salient there, but it's odd when trying to classify people generally.
I had a similar problem and had to leave the question blank. A few more options, or better yet, some more questions on specific issues (taxes, welfare, social norms etc.) instead of the package deal, might have worked better for me.
But I'm not sure if this can be evaluated in the way Scotts intends to do it.
I was a bit unsure about the left-right politics question since my answer is wildly different depending on which country you base it on - I would consider myself center-right for Sweden, but far left in American politics. The minimum wage question ended up even harder, since we don't even have a minimum wage here (never needed it because of strong unions). I guess to some extent things like these are inevitable, since you can't account for all the cultural differences around the world in a questionnaire, but it's still frustrating.
Left-right depends on more than just okay, country is relatively this or that. Organizations and people can want to take the country in a left- or rightward direction, especially if it feels like they don't have a definite spot where they want to end up at (eg. Cthulhu keeps swimming left). I'd also try to avoid doing stuff like picking say, welfare and anchoring off that since the actual differences are legion.
It is true that right and left are very clumsy terms especially nowadays. I don't know what particular political views you have, but in general, I think it's a misconception that center right in Sweden (like Moderaterna?) (let alone any other Nordic country) corresponds to far left in America.
If you mean "far left" in the traditional socialism vs. capitalism sense, well, center right parties in Sweden are pro-business, and there are actual Marxists or Socialists in America (they don't hold office but they exist, and what are you going to call them if they aren't far left?). Taxes in Sweden are much higher than in America, but that's only one indicator. Taxes on rich people used to be much higher in America too, but it would be odd to say that this means America has moved to the right in the last 50 years.
The survey in its current form characterizes Scandinavian countries as an example of "social democracy" and "heavily regulated market economy" but Finland, Denmark and Sweden score pretty high on measures of "economic freedom" (e.g. the Heritage Foundation's) (they got ranks 9 to 11 in 2022). I don't really understand these things, but isn't that at odds with "heavily regulated"? Anyway, center right parties in any case are enthusiastic about capitalism, even in Scandinavia, where they just accept taxing people for a welfare state.
If you mean "left" in the sense of "socially progressive": Very "progressive" people ("woke") in America have views on e.g. transgenderism, open borders, drug use, abortion (remember that in America, the left is against any restrictions on abortion), or even prostitution that I don't think the typical center right voter in Sweden would share.
"Taxes on rich people used to be much higher in America too"
Probably true of marginal tax rates, but I think the share of taxes paid by rich people has become higher, and by poor people much lower, over the past forty or fifty years.
If that is true, it is because rich people's share of income has also dramatically increased over the past forty or fifty years.
Pretty easy to check that it is true. On federal income tax for 2019, the bottom 50% pay an average of 3.5% of their income, the top 1% pay 25.6% of theirs.
https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/
Checking another source, the top 50% of the income distribution pays 97.6% of federal personal income tax. The top 1% pay 37.4%.
https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/tax-burden-across-varying-income-percentiles
Media trustworthiness needs an all of the above option.
I noticed there was no "Green" in 'Political Affiliation. With which of these political descriptions do you most identify?'
I regret I can't easily survey my German acquaintances on this. But starting with the German example, the Green party in Germany is both in national government and in a majority of state governments. Which should somehow be reflected in what persons would choose as their 'Political Affiliation'.
There is also the forth-largest parlamentary group in the European Parliament, which is Green/EFA. And smaller Green parties in many European countries.
I guess I should ask someone for a proper self-identification, nevertheless I assume: "Green: taking actions against climate change, being friendly to the natural environment & animals", would do for such a list (maybe also without the animals). My friends would kill me for leaving out all the pro-democracy, etc., etc. ;)
Are Greens not simply a subset of social democrats? Like, I don't know of any mainstream Green party that thinks the current system of government is incompatible with the goals they want to achieve.
They are not a subset.
I admit I don't fully understand your second sentence and what it has to do with your question.
In Germany, all *democratic parties* from conservative over liberal to green believe the current system of government is compatible with the goals they want to achieve. A party that doesn't believe that - and would openly claim it doesn't - would be regarded to stand outside the democratic order and (some additional conditions in place) could be forbidden from entering elections. But maybe we are talking about different things here?
PS: Maybe more to your question, in Germany often one used to think in terms of a red-green camp (socialdemocrats + green) and a black-yellow camp (conservatives and liberals); those were also the parties that most often would form coalitions (if they could).
There are counterexamples however, like the time, where liberals and social democrats were governing together in a coalition (federal state), and several cases where black-green (conservatives and greens) is the preferred option (in regional entities), even if other options are feasable.
Even if you assume that the political camps still hold, and that the parties in a political camp agree on more issues, green is not a subset of socialdemocrat as much as liberal is not a subset of conservative.
Edit: I'm using the example I know best, but you could find evidence for the destinction also in different contexts & countries.
What I'm trying to say is, if you included Greens among Libertarians, Conservatives, Liberals, Social Democrats, Marxists, Neoreactionaries and Alt-Right, do you think that distinction would have added value for this survey compared to the case where you split the people who would otherwise pick Social Democrat into Greens too? Like, do people exist who think "I was going to pick the Greens option if it was there, but since it's not, I'll go with Alt-Right instead"?
Yes, I believe this would be significant value added. I mentioned different examples to show that 'Green' is a political affiliation of significant relevance to real-world-politics (okay, talking mostly about EU, which I know better compared to other places, but still).
I believe there are persons who would look through the list, and say, hm, weird, seven options, and mine is not here, I can't answer. Though maybe less common among ACX readers, but it would be interested to check.
Also, if you think 'Liberals' and 'Libertarians' would feel weird to pick 'Conservative', you should understand that 'Greens' would feel weird to pick 'Social Democrat'.
If there was a list of three or four options without Greens I wouldn't complain. In a list of seven or eight options, I think it's a serious omission. That's why I looked up government participation. An affiliation which results being represented with a distinct party in government in six EU member states should be more important (and rather be on the list) than those affiliations on the list that don't find such a representation. Of course EU is not the world, but here I'm trying to make the focus broader in terms of 'western world', rather than smaller.
I don't know if the list was inspired by 'those are the most relevant US / bay area / traditional readership/ ...' options? None of this is irrelevant; but I also don't think it's a good idea to ignore political trends.
Also, since yesterday I've been wondering what a globally adjusted or democracies-world-wide adjusted list would look like ... but that's a different topic.
Fair enough. Ultimately it only matters whether Scott agrees but you make a good case for including it.
Thanks, I appreciate!
Yes, I fully acknowlegde Scott's right to design his survey however he wants.
A lot of Greens would choose Liberal or Social Democrat from among the choices given. So, yes, I think it would change the survey results to include Greens.
I think your point may be obscured by the fact that there is a Social Democratic Party in Germany, so no German Green would ever describe themselves as a Social Democrat, and would take pains to point out their political differences with that party.
Near as I can tell, Green politics are essentially social democratic politics, but with a primary emphasis on environmental concerns and sustainability.
A mini-search reveals that Greens apparantly are currently part of six national governments in EU: Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg. (Took the first source I found and didn't verify.)
Under the job categorization, you distinguish AI and broader CS research from “Practical” computer science, lumping IT professionals in with application developers, operating systems developers, and embedded systems types. While my favorite baristo might think we both “do something with computers,” the skill sets couldn’t be more different. The US government puts me in the “Computer/Mathematical” bucket most of the time, which is still imprecise, but a closer match, IMO.
On the subreddit and discord questions, I was missing a 'haven't been there yet, maybe somewhen' or a 'potentially interested, but not enough to currently spend time on' option.
I don't read those, I knew they existed, so three options don't work. 'No, I don't want to read it' suggests a clear and conscious rejection. In my case it's more a mixture of habits, time, priorities, and that nobody has convinced me yet to give it a try.
I strongly suspect the phrasing and limited options are a deliberate psychological nudge to get people to recognize that passive choices are still expressions of preference. If you're not doing it now, it's because you don't want it hard enough to do it.
The nudge part is that by forcing the dichotomy, people who want to identify as the sort of person who would do something will have to get off their asses and actually do it to avoid being classified as the sort of person who won't.
Likewise; I have more than enough stuff to read, so it's more "It is not the case that I want to read reddit/discord" than it is "I want not to read r/d" which, because of the weird way negation works in English, is not the same thing as "I don't want to read r/d."
Okay, if only four options, why not make it sth. like No, I'm currently not reading R/S.
None of these are errors, just things that made me feel incapable of answering correctly:
I struggle every time I have to decide between being a student and self-employed, and to decide on a profession - I used to work in software development, am self-employed in card-game publishing and am now studying Philosophy/Neuroscience/Cognition. That's all over the map. I went with Philosophy because that's my B.A. but I feel that's not really accurate.
My family has an atheist religious background. There was presumably some Christian somewhat back somewhere, but I don't know which kind and anyway, the last generations have been committed atheist and I feel that should be an option.
Selecting a class is hard for someone who read Bourdieu. Poverty + high education does not make me working-class.
I have an out-of-date formal diagnosis of depression, i.e. I was clinically depressed for much of my youth and well into my early adult life, but haven't been for years. Family members used to have this but don't anymore, too (for death reasons and for getting better reasons).
I also have a very out of date PTSD diagnosis that I don't believe was ever accurate.
How happy am I with my job? Which one? I chose to interpret that as "the job sphere of my life", which includes my studies.
"If you're a student, answer "No, I don't work"" - but the vast majority of students do work! I work 5-20 hours a week, why do I need to select "I don't work"?
Thank you for "in the spirit in which you predict it was intended on the questionnaire" - that changed my answer.
Not being able to answer questions without lying is my #1 reason of abandoning surveys.
What I did like: the "option for people who [question doesn't apply to]". I don't like leaving questions out.
I found myself in a similar situation on the religious background question. I vaguely remember hearing that one of my grandparents was baptised and "protestant" would technically be the correct answer, but as far as I know the only people in my family who have actually been religious during my lifetime are two who converted to other religions as adults so it feels like "atheist" would morally be the most correct.
Family religious background should absolutely have a "none" option by default.
Also atheist family background; choosing "Other" feels wrong, because it seems to imply that atheism is another religion. Scott, please include "None" next time!
Right - I had much the same objections.
- There's such a thing as an "atheist/agnostic/freethinker" background, as in, parents that are such, with at least one actively advocating one of those labels. (That's probably more or less a plausible standard for other religious categories, in practice, at least when people talk about their backgrounds to people not of the same background.)
- What about class-income mismatches, where "class" is given be it by educational background (as it often is in the states) or whatever else? Also, is this category meant to be in relation to the local environment at the time, or to current US standards? My parents were state-sector college teachers in the Third World, with tiny salaries, at a time of high inflation (reaching 5000% at one point); I've put "middle class" because that's what we called ourselves, but "upper-middle class that was impoverished even by local standards, which were low" might be more how a native-born US person would make sense of us. (I'm sure there's a starving count somewhere who is reading this and saying "ha, total beginner.")
I used to have a similar difficulty with surveys, and then I realized that the questions are not language. Or at least, not the kind of language that you say to another person, and they think about it and evaluate it for truthfulness. Rather, the questions are labels on giant bins, and we're all tossing tennis balls into the bins to see how many balls end up in each bin. It's not correct to think of them as accurate or inaccurate; just as a rough-and-ready label.
The context is always part of the communication. In this case, the context is not, "click the correct option"; it's "of these many incorrect labels, click the most correct one".
Some notes on question/responses
Re: Work Status - What do you currently do?
I could be curious to see a mission driven for-profit option, answering with for profit since that's closest.
Re Religious Views
How would you describe your religious views?
Hard for me to answer, I am spiritual and neither pantheist nor atheist. I am undecided and I don't feel a need to decide, nor am I agnostic. I am happy with my spiritual practices and don't need more. I'm probably the minorty here so I'm leaving it unanswered.
Re Discord/Subreddit/Discord/Subscriber
The Yes/No binary doesn't capture deltas. e.g. I do, I don't, I did but now I don't
Deltas are interesting imo, but not necessary
Re: Do you wear glasses?
I stopped wearing them 2 years ago when I began doing somatic experiencing work and noticed increases in my stress levels. My vision has improved since. Saying I have naturally good vision for this, even though I'm not 20/20 yet.
Re: What effect did this dose of LSD have on you?
I've had different experiences at the same dose, can't answer this one accurately so I'm choosing the most common.
Re: Do you have seizures?
At times I have somatic seizures (Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures) when doing somatic work. Answering once or a few times, in exceptional situations
Re: Answer only if you feel completely comfortable doing so: which of the following forms of trauma did you experience as a young child, ie before the age of 10?
Would you consider chronic neglect to be emotional abuse or abandonment? I did not check abandonment as I'm interpreting it to be permanent.
That was a frustrating experience. Most answer ranges were way too binary. The only way to say "neither left nor right" was to put oneself in the mushy middle, which is inaccurate. I do not remember my SAT scores from 1963 and I do not remember the results of my last (if any) officially given IQ test. I couldn't describe my status as a new, unpaid ACX reader or my reason for being unpaid (just getting acquainted) or how I discovered ACX (by being put onto SSC by someone and binge-reading it for a short time a few or several years ago). Possibly by this age (mid-70s) one has taken a lumpy one-off shape that doesn't come close to fitting any mold.
As for right and left, we needed a "plague o' both your houses" option.
Here here.
I'd like that. Also, on the question about how much you are aware of politics, I'd like an option for "way more than I want to be, or would be if I didn't have to worry about what fresh new idiocy has become fashionable."
Amen!!
Exactly. "I don't want to be, and wouldn't be, save for some tomfool notion gets everyone riled up and intrudes on my life".
Also, "politics" in that context could mean electoral politics, it could mean ideologies. I am not very aware of the former, very much involved in the latter.
I wanted an option on a BUNCH of these to answer something like, "This question's framework is irrelevant and/or inaccurate in describing me and/or the issue in question."
The "How many tabs do you have open?" question includes options "2 - 5" and "5 - 10". I happened to have exactly 5 open tabs.
I'm the only one who can't pull up the survey? I've tried both Firefox and Chrome, and the explanation I get is this:
"Firefox does not trust forms.gle because its certificate issuer is unknown, the certificate is self-signed, or the server is not sending the correct intermediate certificates."
forms.gle is the Google Forms link shortener. Here is the expanded link:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScHznuYU9nWqDyNvZ8fQySdWHk5rrj2IdEDMgarf3s34bSPrA/viewform
It’s very unlikely they’re actually serving an invalid certificate. If you want to debug the issue, check the information on the certificate you are being served — it’s possibly a web portal/Wi-Fi login screen/employer internet proxy man-in-the-middle-ing you.
Thank you, pulling it up at work was the problem. It seems to be working at home just fine!
> What person does your inner voice talk in?
Mine talks in a mix of first and third person -- used to be primarily third! :)
> Compared to other people of your same sex, how hard is it for you to orgasm?
How do you want trans people to handle this one? (Going on FTM HRT made it much easier for me to orgasm; I hear this from a fair number of people, and the inverse going the other direction.)
> Men: are you circumcised?
[nitpicky trans voice] well,
As a trans woman, this was uncomfortable for me too. I still gave an answer, but I disliked responding to a question framed that way.
I wonder if any circumcised females who identify as men answered this survey.
> Answer with the straight line distance, ie "as the crow flies".
[slightly ridiculous voice] technically "as the crow flies" is great circle distance, unless this is some kind of tunneling crow,
this is the kind of pedantry I'm here for
this is true for me also. Though I wasn't paying attention at the time, the change seems to correlate with change from negative to neutral/positive. Is there any relationship like this for you?
I Now Have Additional Questions! (but already submitted, so this is just for calibration purposes...sorry about poorly-formatted bulleted list, the actual questions aren't numbered or anything)
*Industry - made me snort in $EMOTION that every specific answer is white collar, and then the bulk of all other jobs historically and globally gets rounded off to "other blue collar".
*Education Complete? is a weirdly-phrased question, I assume you meant "do you ever want to achieve a higher degree" as opposed to "are you currently a student"? School isn't in the cards for me, hasn't been for a long time, but continued shame over amassing like 150 credits without a Real Bachelor's Degree still smarts. I consider that incomplete.
*Denomination - no love for Daoism? I think it's importantly different from Buddhism, even for an agnostic-dabbler like me that finds bits and pieces of Light in many different religions.
*SSC Subreddit - no option for "used to read". I feel like the value-add went way down after the migration to ACX and subsequent community splintering, have basically never touched it after that.
*Income status - terms are in tension. I'm a "veteran" at my job, with a statistically anomalous length of continuous employment for the branch, but not quite at the pay cap yet for my org chart position. And that's not even considering getting vertically promoted into entire other wage tiers. So it's definitely comfortably into my "career", yet also still entry-level retail, due to unusually few levels of formal hierarchy in the company.
*Depression - weird edge case, I have a diagnosis of Chronic Depression which goes untreated, but is functionally in remission. Not really comfortable saying I got cured or better, cause the blues can strike again quick, but the options are fairly binary and everything else seemed less accurate.
*Vegetarianism - the way it's worded, one can only choose to go halfway and reduce meat "for moral reasons", which strikes me as a weird assumption? I largely don't do it for morality, I do it because it seems like an Unfair Traide, and strongly prefer goods to be priced according to their full externalities as a Platonic ideal. Meat is, uh, not that, most of the time.
*Glasses - no option for "I don't wear glasses because I don't want to, despite vision being bad". Seems inaccurate to round that off to Naturally Good Vision - I wouldn't have three pairs of glasses and an optometry prescription if it was naturally good!
*Orgasm - it would have been so simple to change the scale to "Very Difficult <-> Very Easy". I see what you did there.
*ASMR - unspecified term. I experience frisson pretty strongly from particular auditory patterns; the "Ragnarok" album by Wardruna, Irish folk songs, "Karma" by Kamelot, "The Felt" and "Medium" albums from Homestuck, throat singing...those all do it for me. But this seems like a qualitively different qualia than what people mean when they say ASMR. I think there might be some overlap, but they seem to be different experiences.
*Psychotherapy - had to give a perfectly middle response, since it was Absolutely Useless for one set of ailments, but Totally Life-Changing for others. Reversion to the mean, I guess.
*Group Harm/Divorce - assumed here you didn't mean the technial legal definition of "divorce" etc, with all the paperwork and courts involved, but rather the consequentialist effects of Broken Household and so on. It really doesn't make much difference to the kids if Mommy and Daddy still do weird things during tax season because otherwise the house would be gone, yet are functionally divorced all other times of the year.
*Wireheading - seems like a fairly specific scenario? I'm strongly opposed to that particular iteration, but not the general principle; there are near-analouges that I'd readily slip into. Certain videogames or shows that feel so powerfully compelling, I'd willingly give up Living For Real to LARP them forever. Like the entire premise behind Sword Art Online...
*Media trust - I notice that no one's explicitly prompted me to disaggregate which parts of covid news coverage most made me distrust media, and this is an interesting frame! It's tricky cause my brain screams epistemic foul play for each option, so assigning degree-weights is actually difficult. Plus of course they're strongly correlated news angles...
*Flashing elements - am reminded of Zvi's woes with watching football on TV, and needing to physically block the "stock ticker"-type scroll which commonly accompanies sports coverage now. Plus users with animated .gif usericons which...distract me. (Not specific to ACX.) This is more than half the reason I hate video content vs. text.
*Tabs/emails - hope I'm not the only one who uses "unread email" in lieu of formal reminder systems, and open tabs in lieu of actual bookmarks. Either that have been left unaddressed too long get removed, because - no, I won't actually do that thing/read that post. This also means keeping browsing history permanently, and relying on memory to call up half-remembered posts...thus the first action for any given browsing is "Restore previous session". To keep continuity.
Anyway, that was interesting, and I'm happy to have finally gotten to participate in this august tradition. Looking forward to weird results in January.
"SSC Subreddit - no option for "used to read". I feel like the value-add went way down after the migration to ACX and subsequent community splintering, have basically never touched it after that."
And the SSC Discord question didn't have an option for "got banned over something that I ended up being proven correct about 4 years later," so I just chose the option that said "I don't want to read it."
"Wireheading - seems like a fairly specific scenario? I'm strongly opposed to that particular iteration, but not the general principle; there are near-analouges that I'd readily slip into. Certain videogames or shows that feel so powerfully compelling, I'd willingly give up Living For Real to LARP them forever. Like the entire premise behind Sword Art Online..."
I think, at least for me, the two big differentiating factors between wireheading and permanent full-immersion virtual reality are:
1. Whether real or virtual, there would need to be some kind of events that were taking place, external stimuli to respond to. An essential part of conscious experience is that you're actually *experiencing* things, so that the sensations and emotions you're feeling correspond to some sort of external context. If you replace all of those things with a neverending stream of pure, undifferentiated, decontextualized sensation-emotion, then that's barely a step above not existing at all, no matter how positive that sensation-emotion is.
2. There would have to be other real people there to interact with, i.e. other flesh-and-blood humans plugged into the same shared virtual space, or at the very least, A.I. that had the same level of consciousness and complexity as true humans. I wouldn't want to live in a world of NPCs, I'd want to know that I was interacting with actual people who had their own thoughts and their own feelings.
Yes, I think the (1) distinction is the real crux. The point of existing isn't to selfishly experience pleasure, if I got to that mind-state I'd honestly rather just be dead and reboot somewhere-somewhen-someone else. The doing of and reacting to things is the essential stuff of life. Variants of wireheading that are Life+, where all the experiences are Exciting and Novel and High Stakes and all that...is very appealing! That's half the fun of good fiction, being able to leave the quotidian behind and imagine oneself in another universe. Which isn't to say Real Life sucks a lot as baseline. But it's, well, inconsistent and annoyingly often zero-sum? Hardly optimized for the individual experiencer's utilityfunction. And many such profits that make it a lot more comfortable, require payments in pain that meaningfully reduce the EV. Getting to cheat past all that is really tempting. The whole "gamification" phenomenon tries to do this, paper over IRL frictions with the veneer of fun...but it doesn't work very well. I'd rather bet on a game turned into life, than life turned into a game.
"Industry - made me snort in $EMOTION that every specific answer is white collar, and then the bulk of all other jobs historically and globally gets rounded off to "other blue collar"."
Well you know, us working-class/lower middle class types, we're not PRODUCTIVE and CREATIVE and WEALTH-MAXIMISING, we don't CONTRIBUTE, we're not at all as IMPORTANT AND VITAL TO THE ECONOMY as somebody making a new app to sell gluten-free baked beans to polar bears in bi-coastal wildlife sanctuaries 😄
Same here with "used to read SSC subreddit, never went back after the Great Trek To The Sunlit Uplands of Substack".
Also same with the ASMR - I have experienced "chills" and "tingles" but I don't even know if that's properly what is defined as 'frisson', and often aesthetic overwhelm takes me in the middle of the chest and makes my head loll back. Sort of like this except not so much ecstasy, Gian Lorenzo, and no (visible) angels:
https://www.analisidellopera.it/estasi-di-santa-teresa-davila-di-gian-lorenzo-bernini/
The person making gluten free baked beans probably doesn’t fit into those industries either.
Well of course not! That's making *physical* things, like, you know, cavemen did or the people who worked on assembly lines in the 50s.
We've moved on so far from that, now we outsource working on assembly lines to foreign cheap labour.
Sorry you're mad, but so far the"blue collar" category is 16th out of 20 options in number of respondents (ie close to last).
I will immediately commence to grow a forelock especially to be tugged in the presence of my betters on here, so! 🧐
Sing along with me, avalancheGenesis!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTMWgOduFM
For some reason I think the William Shatner version would be better in this circumstance.
A really late comment (I'm bad at checking replies-to-replies) that this made me smile and is going on my work playlist. It's strange how little actually-made-in-the-90s music I have in my repertoire, despite actually growing up in that decade. Li'l AG grew up to Weird Al, not indie rock. (The appropriate counterpoint would be, I guess, This Is The Life. Underrated!)
It just made me think about the whole whiplash-inducing "Essential Worker(tm)" dichotomy that got trotted out for convenience's sake during covid, briefly, and then everyone forgot and my coworkers and I became disreputable low-class grunt cogs again. Who needs grocery stores when restaurants are open again? I am happy to see we're not actually as rare here as is often implied though. Something something benefits of diversity in truth-seeking. Call it bitterness more than anger; it was nice for a brief moment to have the tables turned, respect and pay slightly more commensurate with actual societal usefulness.
"Aesthetic overwhelm" is a great way to put it, I'll be borrowing that. Art is just occasionally so divinely (lower-case d) beautiful...the things that make my heart tremble. It's not really a specific sensation of pleasure in a specific area of the body, more like an unconscious awe and appreciation of...being in the presence of Something Greater? Feeling small and insignificant in the face of Power.
"Art is just occasionally so divinely (lower-case d) beautiful...the things that make my heart tremble."
Yes, exactly. I've never had the full-on Stendhal Syndrome experience, but some pieces of art (and that is everything including the plastic arts, music, poetry and prose) have made me physically weak with their effect on me. Same with elements of beauty and grandeur and wonder in the natural world.
(Part of why I was grousing over what counts as "mystic experience" is that I do consider such experiences "the strange, the numinous and the beautiful" but I would not categorise them as "mystic" or "mystical").
Kant called this the Sublime and talks about it in the Critique of Judgment.
Actually with ASMR I would have replied yes to "does it make you feel like nails on a chalkboard?"
Even better, there are THREE subclasses for "computers"... none of which have to do with the physical hardware. Code is "technology," microchips aren't.
More egregious to me than the blue collar thing was only including Philosophy for humanities - not even "Other 'humanities.'"
I flubbed the Paris-Moscow question. I had what would have been a really close guess based on knowing the circumference of the Earth and the number of timezones that separate them, but forgot to account that timezones are closer together at mid-latitudes than they are at the equator.
Nice way of estimating! My first guess was pretty good, although my second guess went in the wrong direction, so overall not great. I used flight duration and previously known distances between other cities to estimate, but I fly a lot in Europe and in particular have been to Moscow before (although not from Paris). If the question had been about non-European cities I would have been completely lost.
You shouldn't expect your second guess to be better than your first, and you should usually expect it to be worse! If you could expect your second guess to be better, then you ought just to be taking what would be your second guess and making it your first.
Suppose I'm trying to estimate the value of a Bernoulli-distributed random variable, i.e. it comes up 1 with probability p and 0 with probability 1-p, and let's suppose p is 2/3. If I'm trying to minimize my mean-squared error, my first guess will be 2/3 and my mean-squared error will be 2/9; if I'm trying to minimize my probability of making any non-zero error, my first guess will be 1 and my error probability will be 1/3. Suppose that "significantly wrong" means I've made an absolute error of more than 1/2, in which case no matter my estimation method I would then know with certainty that my second guess should be 0. But 0 would clearly be a terrible choice for a first guess!
But I think the point of including the question in the survey is that there's some evidence that in fact you _should_ (outside-view) expect your second guess to be better than the first! That is, that when you ask people "estimate X" and then "suppose you learned that that estimate was substantially wrong; what would your revised estimate be?", the second answer ends up being closer on average, or closer in most cases, or less often badly wrong, or something.
I don't know how good the evidence for this is. For what it's worth, on the Moscow question my second answer _was_ somewhat better than my first, but when I tried the same question on my daughter her second answer was substantially worse than her first. Hopefully the survey results will have something a bit larger than n=2 to work with :-).
I should have thought of that! I just went by my knowledge of North American distances and trying to map those to Europe, rather than using my knowledge of the dimensions of the world!
Does the question about how many children we have include children born from donated sperm/eggs?
I don't know. I would say yes if you think of them as your children, no otherwise.
I have an inner voice, but it's because I'm thinking in words pretty constantly. It isn't narrating my life. It never occurred to me that people might have inner narrators.
I also have what I call an attack voice telling me I'm an awful person, but it's rarely a narrator.
I used to have migraines, but something like 50 years ago, so I answered no. I didn't do anything to make them stop, they just went away.
Bonus question: Did you look up the distance from Paris to Moscow as soon as you finished the survey?
More bonus questions: Do you like rereading your own writing? Do you correct old typos?
I interpret inner narrator broadly to include any kind of self-talk. I don't know if that's how Scott meant it. So the voice that says "I'm an awful person" or "you're an awful person" would qualify I would think.
I did look up the distance as soon as I finished and had to resist the urge to look before and cheat because my inner narrator tells me this is the kind of thing I really SHOULD know and that I'm a pretty inferior kind of person if I get it really far off. My guess was pretty far off, my second guess got me closer.
I notice a couple others have brought it up already, but I feel like the urbanization question was either incomplete or poorly worded due to not properly accounting for rural/country as an option. I strongly prefer urban to suburban, but strongly prefer rural to either, so answering the question literally as-asked I would put maximally urban (since I strongly prefer that to suburban, which is the only other option there), but then this feels untrue since I would much rather live in the country than the city.
I agree, lumping rural and suburban seemed strange
I felt exactly the same. I slightly prefer urban to suburban, but massively prefer rural to either. I went with "suburban", though, as that felt closer to my ideal living conditions (lowest concentration of people possible).
Still felt weird, though, given it's actually my least favorite option if I were given all three to choose from.
Yup. My preferences are also Rural > Urban > Suburban.
"Rural" seems to cover a lot of ground too. Living in a small town of five thousand people is "rural", and so is living in a village of two hundred, and so is living on a sheep station ten hours drive from the nearest other person.
I'm never really clear on the American distinction between "city" and "suburbs" anyway. How do I tell where one ends and the other begins?
I'm also confused about the distinction. In the city I group up in, everyone knew that anything within the old city tolls is the inner city and anything outside them is the suburbs, but where I live now, most of the country lives in one big pluricentric conurbation, with no clear distinctions. The definition I ended up with is that suburbs have residential ground floors whereas the city has commercial ground floors, which puts me in the suburbs.
In this part of the US, a description could be:
Urban: Neighbors within visual distance, probably closer, definitely city government, walking distance to food and public transportation
Suburban: Detached homes are common, driving distance to food. City government common, HOAs are common.
Rural: can have livestock and/or shoot on your property, neighbors may not be visible. Probably the county is the most local form of government.
I'd like instructions for when my prediction of the AI risk is less than 1 but not 0.
Use a decimal? 0.3 or whatever?
Not sure if AJKamper meant to refer to the survey question, but it asks percent chance (e.g. 30).
Yes, but that doesn't mean it needs to be a whole number. I meant that 0.3% exists.
That would be my preferred solution, but it wouldn’t let me
Huh, sorry, I've had a lot of number validator problems this survey. Have other people had this same issue?
I put 0.2 and it let me.
Does "brother" and "sister" include half-siblings (or step-siblings)? (This has been a problem in previous years too.)
I was going to say "count half-siblings but not step-siblings" but then it dawned on me that you could have half-siblings you never lived with (one parent has kids from previous liaisons who are living with different family, divorce and re-marriage/cohabiting with new partner and new child(ren), and step-siblings that you did live with from a young age. So the influence would be different there.
I suppose just count 'em all up and put 'em all in, regardless of step, half, lived with, never saw? Just for raw numbers?
In some earlier surveys I divided my half-siblings by 2. But I'll wait a bit to see if Scott responds.
I counted those half/step siblings I was raised with, and not those not raised in the same household.
> Inner voice pronouns
am I the only one whose uses 'we'?
Someone else above thread also does and I do sometimes too.
I do too; I think I answered with "a mix of first and third person" but it's 90% "we". Weirdly, this switched from second person several years ago at around the time my mental health was rapidly improving.
yep, came here to say I wish that was an option. My inner voice almost exclusively uses "we"
I haven't taken the SAT, but I have taken the PSAT (for sophomores and juniors as prep) and the ACT, I feel like I remember that there'd be questions about those?
Rather than skipping it would be nice to have a “none” or “n/a” option to easily fill things out. For example I am retired but I used to work in IT.
"With what race do you most identify?"
"What sex were you assigned at birth?"
"With what gender do you primarily identify?"
The wording of these questions implies that race is a chosen identity like gender. I don't "identify" with any race.
How about "I reject racial categories and am a special and unique combination of ancestry from many long forgotten tribes across Northern Europe, it's insulting to put me into a bucket with some Dutchman just because we have similar shades of skin"?
I think that would go in 'other'.
I think this was to cover mixed race people who might be more connected with one than the other?
I think all of these are worded very carefully and sensibly.
People have some degree of freedom about how to identify racially. That goes especially for mixed, but also shades of brown that can "pass" as this or that. People then identify with their community, often.
The sex question is phrased like that because many intersex people don't know they're intersex, so most people don't really know their own sex for sure. They do know what was put down for them in their documents.
And the gender thing asks for "primarily" because it gives limited options, to prevent having to deal with a large number of genders with few responses each.
"Regardless of how you feel about it politically, how did COVID lockdown affect your life?
Ignore the direct effect of getting COVID, and focus on things like economic changes, decreased interaction with other people, and getting to switch from office to remote work."
Got a problem with this one. Economic changes and restrictions to my liberty were negative, while the remote work was very liberating. I finally settled on a "3" for balance, but would have appreciated two switches, one for the negative and one for the positive changes.
As for the Bitcoin value question, I think mentioning a number in the question will have anchoring effects, no matter how close the number is to the current valuation. Unless that's precisely what you're trying to measure.
The whole "Questions About Cities" is vexing me for amusing reasons. I basically switch cities every couple of weeks and walk to work out of my location in one of them. It's a pretty exact 50/50 split, so I'm struggling to pick which place to answer for with some of the questions - especially "How long, in years, have you lived in your current neighbourhood?", which might either be around 10 years or 2 years depending on which one I pick! :)
Not a criticism of the survey, just wanted to share my amusement at my situation.
There is no option for "I dream, but without any visuals/imagery at all"
Within a factor of 10 on Paris-Moscow, so that’s a win.
Strange that there are no questions about exercise
Over-estimated first because I have no notion of distance, but second, adjusted, guess was very near the true distance, so huzzah!
Yeah I underestimated initially, but knew I was maybe a bit low, then when the second question came around I almost nailed it.
Pretty much everywhere on earth is within a factor of 10 if you guess 2000km
I decided to try to guess based on miles in my head before making some attempt to convert to km (because I have no idea of that translation). But then I forgot to translate both times the question was asked! I nailed it in miles on my second attempt, but was off by 1000km.
Just my humanities brain at work, I suppose.
Scott, you might get some misleading data because the questions about earining, saving, and spending don't clarify household income vs. personal income
Three points so far.
1) There should be an option for lsat for intelligence measuring stat.
2)The inner voice Q--my inner voice respectfully addresses me in the third person.
3) Completely pegged my bitcoin value guess to the numerical example in the question.
4) I had no idea of what are the technical definitions of most of the moral views-can that be an option?
I would like the "okay, now put in your score from the rubbish online IQ tests (name of test optional)" in order to see how that matches up with the Official Carried Out By Trained Professional So It Proves I'm Smart test, and to accommodate those of us where routine IQ testing is not a thing and we don't have SAT or GRU or LSE 😁
My IQ score is from high school records that one of the students got a copy of and shared. I went to the same school for most of K-12, so they could be from when I was seven. I put the figure in but I don't trust it.
Yeah. I also have a sometimes-third-person voice, which wasn't an option.
And as for the moral views, I rolled my eyes, neglected to look up any of them yet again, and either skipped the question or answered "other," depending what was available.
Oh man, I have bad intuitions about distance.
Unrelated observation/questions: I see visual snow and notice that if I have just awoken from REM, it has a kaleidoscopic pattern (vs standard random noise). It's kind of like a grid of kaleidoscopic views, maybe 500x500, each with near-identical constantly evolving patterns. I've noticed this 20+ times. I only assume that it is REM - it is strongly correlated with awakening from a dream, but that does not necessarily entail REM. As of recently, I have sleep data (Apple Watch) and confirmed that last night's observation corresponds to awakening from what my watch determined to be REM.
As far as the questions:
- Does anyone else experience this?
- Does anyone experience this who doesn't have visual snow?
- Does anyone know of an explanation of this phenomenon? It seems like it could be an epiphenomenon arising from REM activity in the visual cortex.
I have gotten the kaleidoscopic pattern when waking up in the middle of the night a couple of times, but I don't otherwise see visual snow. I think they are called hypnopompic hallucinations.
I experience kaleidoscopic visual noise during panic attacks, vasovagal syncope (fainting), and orthostatic hypotension. I figure it's a symptom of low blood pressure or oxygen deprivation
Couple of answers that don't fit the provided options:
- I rarely remember dreams, though I think I remember enough to answer the questions. They're not exactly 'in color' or 'in black and white'. I may have some sort of moderate aphantasia, and my dreams are more conceptual, like reading a story without trying to picture it. (Apples vary in how well I can visualize them. Some days they're pure concept, or almost like wireframe, today I can do an imperfect attempts at some texture/color and I hold almost the whole apple 'visible' at once, instead of it having 'out of focus' parts that usually tend to fade out of existence very easily)
- My inner voice usually uses the royal We, so not exactly first or second person! (I may have picked that up from trying to sound more professional when doing projects by myself. I usually write about things I do in the third person, when I'm not directly talking about myself to someone else)
I'm married and combine finances with my spouse; what should I put for the income questions? I initially tried to answer for just me, but then I got to the savings question and realized that the presence of his income affects our collective savings in ways it's hard to separate out. Should I just go back to the first page and answer everything as though we're a single person with two jobs?
Hurrah, it is the annual "you designed this terribly, why didn't you ask this question/include that option" open season on Scott's survey!
I thought it was interesting, but given that it will be "tabulated by computer", I feel that has definitely cut down the choices to something that can be simply marked into "yes/no" bins by machine.
I never know how to answer the sexuality/relationship questions, and would dearly love an option for "Not interested in/do not want [love/romance/marriage/banging sixty different people of all genders every weekend]". For instance, in the "relationship style" do I answer "prefer monogamous" (because were I interested, that would be my preference) or "other", because I don't want any relationship at all?
The "profession" one always amuses me - God help us if any of us are cleaning ladies, I guess we'll have to go under "other - blue collar", right? 😁
Mostly it's okay, though my permanent gripe remains: Political Affiliation. I *would* like to go with "Liberal, for example the US Democratic Party : market economy plus social welfare, socially permissive multiculturalism" except nix on the "socially permissive", so were I American I suppose I'd be one of the Reagan Democrats.
Second choice would be "Social democratic, for example Scandinavian countries: heavily-regulated market economy, cradle-to-grave social safety net, socially permissive multiculturalism" except, you know, that "socially permissive multiculturalism" again (not so much the multiculturalism but let's not start a battle here).
This forces me to choose "Conservative, for example the US Republican Party and UK Tories: low taxes, low redistribution of wealth, traditional values" and do you know why I am bleeding from the eyes with the wailing of the damned arising from the bowels of Hell as I select this option, hmmmm? Because I am being lumped in with the freakin' TORIES. The party of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Margaret Thatcher (I haven't formed a strong impression of Rishi Sunak yet, except that he gives faint indications of being 'oh, another one of them'*).
Not even the old-fashioned House of Stuart supporting Tories, no, the blinkin' present-day boiling. I would even prefer the "robber that is noted for outrages and cruelty" connotations than *that*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tory#Etymology
One of these days, I swear, I will crack and select "Alt-right, for example France's National Front: nationalist revival with an ethnic/racial component" and then I will cackle maniacally as the men in white coats drag me off "See what you made me do! Seeeeee!!!!!"
*Partygate - rules for thee but not for me, not registering the interests of the wife's family's money - see rules for thee but not for me. He did resign over the Pincher sex scandal but it's hard to say how much was principle and how much was rats deserting the sinking ship. Apologies to any rats offended by the comparison. He hasn't done anything out of the ordinary above the common venality of wealthy Tory politicians so either there aren't any more scandals to come, or if there are it will be a doozy (seems very unlikely but who can say?). He did ban (again) fracking, so depending on your views on fracking this was a good/bad decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rishi_Sunak#Other_actions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rishi_Sunak#Resignation_as_Chancellor
FINALLY, I am fascinated as to how I am supposed to answer this question:
"Compared to other people of your same sex, how hard is it for you to orgasm?"
Are we supposed to be in a group with a stopwatch and everyone times themselves? Watch porn on our own and compare our performance with that onscreen? Be gay and see what our partner(s) achieve versus what we achieve? Sidle on to some subreddit and leave a coy enquiry as to how people there feel they do in 'ease of getting your rocks off'? What?
Clearly, that orgasm question was an invitation to participate in a circle-jerk. I've seen them on occasion in the comments section here.
I think that's much more Truman Democrat than Reagan Democrat. Truman Democrats think government has a strong and important role to play on taming the excesses of the free market, strongly support unions and public education, but are also pretty conservative socially (and patriotic and believe in a strong national defense if that matters). My grandfather the steelworker without a college degree who bought war bonds, went to church every Sunday without fail, and reared his children without sparing the rod qualifies. (He was indeed a lifelong Democrat.) Reagan Democrats are people who started off (in the 50s) as Truman Democrats but thought the Democratic Party by the 70s had gone too far, and government had become a parasitic burden.
there's a thread in detail about the orgasm question somewhere above....but for me it was pretty simple to answer just based on having talked with a few close friends about sex over the years, and having read 1-2 books about sex where I am hearing other people's experiences. (ie. I could answer this question having only had a small amount of engagement with the subject. My answer can't be perfect, but I think it's as accurate as any answer would be where I am rating my inner experience compared to someone else's)
I miss having odd questions to test weird hypotheses. I don't know whether they were important, but they added flavor.
Scott, is this a change of policy (maybe testing the weird hypotheses wasn't worth the trouble) or just not having a weird hypothesis to test this year, or what?
Some people might have said the urbanism questions and orgasm questions and lsd questions were odd, but apparently others don’t!
You didn't think "Do you burp?" was an odd question?
I am wondering if an "I know what you mean by this question but am upset by the phrasing" checkbox for each question would be useful (for future questionnaires). Reading these comments there seems to be a split between "the question didn't cover my situation" (I have one of those) and folks who know what Scott meant but are unhappy with the way he phrased the question.
Would it satisfy survey takers who want each question to conform to their worldview and include options that exactly represent them? Yes. Would it be useful? No. If you truly cared you'd leave the question blank and in the end, 'blank' and 'I choose not to answer this because of [objection]' are thrown out of the analysis anyhow.
I mean, a Californian has to speak woke, more or less. It's disappointing is all.
For fun, imagine the question asking "were you created man or woman?" (people would intentionally answer that wrong, but whatever)
I think the questions about mental health conditions should have an option for "I had this in the past."
Totally agree, I was extremely depressed, and near suicide and had some treatment (that was ineffective) from ~11-20 or so. But that was 20 years ago now. And I have had minor bouts with depression into my 20s. Still to this day if things are going very bad with something one of my go to thoughts is "well I could just kill myself", despite the fact I would never do that, and I love my wife/kids, but it is just a go to solution for my mind and emotional states.
Except mostly I have managed to construct a life that is great and insulate myself from most stressors and problems. So I think I am mostly better, but not 100% better, and have mainly solved my problem by eliminating most of the things I had to be depressed about.
So am I depressed? "No" I would guess. But I definitely have some parts of whatever "condition" it is depressed people have, or are on that spectrum or whatever.
This. I struggled a bit with whether to mark "I have" for any diagnosis I've been given, but decided against it because it is present-tense and there were present-tense life satisfaction questions. (It would be weird to mark "I have depression" and then give stellar life satisfaction marks.) But given the family history questions, self-history should be even more important!
SUBREDDIT QUESTION: There should be an option for: "I was banned from the subreddit over nonsense so I don't go there".
I honestly don't even remember the particulars anymore, might have been a year or more ago, but I want to say that the gist of it from my perspective is I was arguing in good faith with one of the mod's friends and we were both being uncharitable, and the mod for some reason banned me despite the interaction being very symmetrical. I want to say I also had the more controversial side of the debate, but I was put off by how out of step the mod's behavior was with what I perceive as the norms of this community. Plus I am not a huge fan of reddit and trying to curtail use.
DISCORD QUESTION: There should be a comment for "other", none of the 4 answers really matches my response. Which would be something like "sure I knew it existed, and in theory I would like to participate, but I simply don't use discord for much (other than online board gaming) and so don't bother. "No I don't want to read it" is definitely not right. But I don't have infinite time.
POLITICAL AFFILIATION QUESTION: This REALLY needs an "other". I am some sort of radical centrist.
Left of the Democrats on some things, right of Republicans on others, a big fan of markets except where they don't work, then I think there should be strong government intervention.
I am also pretty down on voting and pro merit-based civil service. I would like to run the government more like a corporation, but less in terms of there being a powerful "CEO", and more in terms of the departments being professionally staffed and lead without much pressure from electorate. IDK none of the political philosophies are a good one size fits all idea. They are like tools and you need different solutions for different problems.
Asking which of those political philosophies I affiliate with is similar to asking if I think hammers screwdrivers or saws are the best tool. What is the task at hand?
I don’t know the context of the question about weight loss and some weight gain back (and I also may be enough of an outlier not to care), but I felt it to be somewhat unfair in not giving an identifier of fat to muscle ratio of the weight gain back.
I had to write down that I had gained a decent amount of the weight back, but also have weight trained 5/6 days per week and done cardio multiple times per week in the four years since, implying that a large amount of the weight gain (obviously not all) back towards that original number is muscle tissue.
On the "what is your income" question, is that supposed to be about individual or household income?
I think it is individual but it’s definitely a bit confusing. Actual researchers on this issue probably have some standard methodology of getting at both.
Yeah, it's just going to get a weird result as I as an individual make a relatively small amount of income at the moment but I'm marking my lifestyle as middle to upper middle class.
Actual researchers set definitions for what they mean in advance, and articulate them in the surveys they write.
Three comments:
1. I have an inner voice in the sense that I often clearly visualize words in my head and play them out, have a monolog about my planned actions or whatever. I'm like very much the opposite of the verbal equivalent of aphantasic. Most of my thoughts are in words. But I have no sense of dialog or of the "inner voice" being a separate individual from "me." Wasn't sure if the question about "inner voice" implied separation from "me." I initially confidently answered yes, I have an inner voice, but the follow up questions implied to me that maybe I meant something different by that.
2. The question about childhood trauma should probably have an option for "I experienced none of these; I am not skipping this question," and possibly one for, "I want to be clear that I am neither confirming nor denying that I have had some childhood trauma, so you don't take my skipping this question to mean that I do have childhood trauma and don't want to talk about it."
3. I find masks so uncomfortable that I will skip LONG events that I otherwise want to do if I have to be masked, but they aren't too bad for stuff under like 30 minutes.
Maybe Scott can clarify -- I understood inner voice as any form of self-talk that we do, not as necessarily experiencing a separate individual inside of us.
The second and third questions imply that though, which is what is so confusing.
I would like a future question about misanthropy, since I was just annoyed yet again by someone who assumes that superior aliens would hate the human race. The question about whether you think people are trustworthy comes close, but that frames it as personal.
What I'm curious about is the people who apparently think they cab accurately estimate the views of morally/scientifically superior entities, and those views are going to be strongly negative. I suppose the same question applies to anyone who thinks God basically doesn't like people.
Maybe this correlates with depression? Narcissism? Strict religious upbringing, and maybe the upbringing for parents and grandparents matters too?
I'm surprised about people who have generally positive views on humans. Humanity did the Holocaust, slavery, wars, etc... Just taking one of those: Holocaust. Do you think German people are inferior to other peoples? Personally I think the people of countries arent that different, hence on Earth no large group of people have sufficient moral character to not do incredible acts of evil if the conditions are right.
This said I'm unsure about the alien question and would have to make assumptions to answer it.
I answered that people are basically trustworth (unsure about the specific value) as they rarely do things which are immoral according to them/their surrounding culture (these two things are mostly the same which is the primary flaw of humans imo) and when they do them its only after severe rationalisations for a big incentive.
I don't think I'm narcissist. I don't have depression nor had strict religious upbringing.
The way I square generally positive views of humans with those awful things is just that societies and structures are hard and sometimes go bad!
I'm not sure I completely understand this squaring. As they say "you fuck one goat..". To me if an entity does a little holocaust in some situation, even if that situation is uncommon or not "normal" for some value of normal, I would still call that entity evil.
Probably 99% or more of the people involved in the Holocaust didn’t do anything as explicit as one goat-fucking! They’re much more like people who sometimes acknowledge that sweatshops and butchering are involved in their clothes and meat, and do it anyway, even though they would never think to instigate anything like that.
Sorry, I probably should have been more clear: by entity I mean humanity, ie humans collectively which I understood the original question to be about. My view on individual people has very high variance (really hate violent criminals, really love my close friends/family), but would probably average out to somewhat positive, they are adorable after all: https://www.boredpanda.com/12-reasons-humans-are-adorable/
Furthermore, my hatred of humanity is not necessarily constant, it might possibly change in the future if it improves on its flaws. I really liked this possible future state of humanity: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lom9cb/kindness_to_kin/
> I'm surprised about people who have generally positive views on humans. Humanity did the Holocaust, slavery, wars, etc
Yeah but who did they do them to? Other humans. If humans suck do bad then they pretty much had it coming.
“But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”
― Robert Ardrey
Admittedly I am not a native speaker, my English is passable at best, so some deeper poetic meaning of this quote might be lost on me, however, (to me) this is very unconvincing and I wonder how would people react if I used the same standards for an individual: Sure, they might have killed a family of four while enjoying their cries for help, but they loved their mothers so deeply and wrote some really beautiful poems.
It's a result of the "our" referring to different people in the different clauses. Nobody's morally impressed that the Nazis loved music.
They also loved nature. Both are evidence that they were human. That is the disturbing part. Human beings are capable of horrible things. Hannah Arendt made a career out of this (correct) observation.
It's not saying "Humans commit violence, but they also produce symphonies, so that makes it OK." It's saying "Humans evolved from lower animals in a violent struggle for survival, so it's only to be expected that they commit violence, but it's a cause for surprise and wonder that they produce symphonies."
I am not too adept at expressing my thoughts and I thank you for your helpful intentions! Compare your summary of the quote with this: "This specific serial killer comes from a line of animals in a violent struggle for survival, so it's only to be expected that they commit violence, but it's a cause for surprise and wonder that they produce poems.". This sentence is analogous to your summary: The difference being that instead of talking about humans collectively, it talks about one specific individual. Let's call your sentence A and my sentence B. My hope is that everyone sees how ridiculous B as a defense of a specific serial killer is without further argument and I did not intend with it to defend serial killers. Given this, my desire to understand your point of view (ie that A is not ridiculous as a defense of humanity) compells me to try to understand what the specific relevant difference is between the individual serial killer and humanity collectively which breaks the analogy. From my point of view I currently believe that the analogy is correct (ie. there is no analogy-breaking relevant difference between individual humans and humanity) and I avoid the contradiction by also rejecting A as a defense of humanity.
It certainly seems to correlate with feeling superior to other people.
I put "3" for the ASMR question. I'm not sure what I experience is ASMR but I have misophonia and hate, with an extra burning passion, the things that give other people ASMR. So am I getting ASMR and I just hate it? Or do I just hate those types of sounds?
Same here, hate ASMR sounds. I put "no" since I assume the normal connotation behind the term is that it's pleasurable. Maybe there will be a misophonia option next year.
Same. Is it generally known that there's another group of people who hate ASMR sounds?
Same. I have read that there's allegedly a *correlation* between ASMR and misophonia, but that's not exactly what any of us seem to mean here (and I have trouble believing that it could be true.)
If there's a song you like and it gets to a particularly good bit, does it ever give you chills?
Maybe EXTREMELY rarely.
Then my guess is that you simply lack the fundamental type of experience that people describe with ASMR. I'm not sure I do or not, ASMR is completely neutral for me, but the description of that sensation matches with what I sometimes experience from music, so there's probably something there, but I'm not wired the same as the ASMR people.
Not the person you asked, but I also have a very strongly negative response to ASMR stimuli.
I get frisson often and easily from music, and can sometimes trigger it voluntarily without any external stimulus. It's a profoundly, unmistakably different sensation from the feelings triggered by ASMR stimuli, to the point that I really don't understand why people would think there was a connection. (It's like if we were saying "poison ivy makes me itch" and you asked "do you ever orgasm?")
This suggests to me that there's a fundamental difference in experience between people who enjoy ASMR stimuli and people who hate it, not that they are the same experience and people either like or dislike it.
Why is 'low sugar' not one of the diet options?
Miscellaneous notes on questions that I didn't feel captured my response well:
- Several questions were framed as "Relative to other people, how good/bad are you at something?" Hard to be sure sometimes without a good intuition for where other people are on average.
- No way specify "I don't have any close friends." (Or "Mostly some other gender," I suppose.)
- On the plane-flying question, there might be a difference between "I don't fly as much because I personally feel less safe flying" versus "I don't fly as much even though I want to, because my employer/family/government/lizard people told me not to." The wording of the question kind of seems to assume the former.
- The "What undermined your trust" question had three different options about COVID coverage. That makes it hard to convey "The flip-floppiness and political expedience of COVID coverage in general."
- Does using a calculator on the "distance" question count as using an outside reference? (I didn't, but it might have helped a little.)
- On the plane-flying question, there might be a difference between "I don't fly as much because I personally feel less safe flying" versus "I don't fly as much even though I want to, because my employer/family/government/lizard people told me not to." The wording of the question kind of seems to assume the former.
Indeed. I didn't fly all last year mostly because my daughter turned two right after two year olds were expected to wear masks on flights, but she was not the kind of two year who could manage to wear a mask, even when she agreed to do it, and was highly motivated to do it because something she really wanted to do depended on it. Most non-airline people seemed to just look at her and intuitively understand the situation, but it didn't sound like that would work on airlines.
I know this is a losing battle, but I'm once again impelled to point out that "Hispanic" is an ethnicity, not a race. My Hispanic father's ancestry is almost 100% Iberian (i.e. white European).
Correct and if you look at previous survey results, you'll see many Latin American nationals picking white instead of Hispanic. The framing is probably wrong here - either it should be defined as an ethnicity or replaced with "mestizo/indigenous American" if that's what it's going for.
Similar problems exist for disaggregating Middle East from white; Middle Eastern (at least in an American context) isn't considered a separate "race" and is going to result in unclear selections between mixed European/Middle Eastern people (many in America, Israelis, etc.), skewing the numbers.
Also, surprising you can't multi-select options which is standard in US data collection.
Ah well, American racial categories *shrug*
The "Hispanic" classification is a strange one, since every place that uses it does point out "this is not a race" but then they use it alongside "white, black, Asian, etc." I imagine it's because of historical accident; people from Central and South American countries will have some mixture of European, indigenous and maybe even African ancestry, depending in what admixture and degree.
So you can't call them "white" (exactly, except now for "Non-Hispanic White" being a subdivision) and you can't call them "Native American" (exactly) and then of course there's the Spanish-speaking versus Portuguese-speaking division, and the islands, and - oh heck, just say "Latin American" or "Hispanic".
The American mashup of race/ethnicity is so weird. As a many generations white American, I have a hard time answering that question because my English/German/French ancestry is hundreds of years in the past. I would like to have an ethnicity that comes with good food, music, holidays, attire, pleasing and distinctive hair texture (I don't care what kind) -- where can I get some of that?
Can't help with the hair texture, but am from the American Southwest and joined a Greek church, and had as much as I wanted of the other things.
On the other hand, most of my grandparents spoke Spanish, but I am not Hispanic. American ethnicity is indeed weird.
I'm always really confused about this - should I be marking my son, whose grandfather is from Spain, as Hispanic on forms that ask the question? My husband certainly doesn't identify as Hispanic.
A Spaniard is white, unless he has spent at least three hours in the Americas, at which point he becomes Hispanic.
You will be technically correct if you say "Hispanic", but you will confuse people. And you might offend a few who prefer a more exclusionary definition, but probably not too seriously. Nobody will give you any grief if you just say "White".
Weirdly enough it kind of is in the US, since almost all our "Hispanics" come from Mexico and Central America and have a substantial Mesoamerican genetic component (probably mostly Mayan). I say "weirdly" because it has zilch to do with any Spanish inheritance, as you correctly observe, and stems instead from (long-ago) intermarriage of white Europeans with Native (Central) Americans, so it *should* be classified as some variation on Native American.
And having an option for "any whites except Hispanic whites" and then not having a separate option for "Hispanic whites" is real weird. And only excluding Hispanics from the white category but not from any of the others (millions of Hispanic blacks and Asians out there) smells pretty funky to me.
Well, "white" is an ever-expanding meta-ethnicity rather than a race, so...
As a retired person, I found the Profession question a bit hard to answer. "In what area do you _currently_ work or study?" I worked 40+ years in one of these fields, and am happily NOT doing that any more... It was also interesting to notice the absence of "homemaker", or for that matter anything pink collar. I can't even select "other" to reflect my new status as "idle rich" ;-)
Percent income saved: I used after-tax income for this question.
What is your approximate annual income: I use pre-tax income.
I hope this is ok.
I think using pre-tax income for anything would be weird, as then it would depend on how one's government divides labour taxation between income tax (included in pre-tax income) and payroll tax (not included in pre-tax income), which varies enormously. E.g. payroll tax used to be about half the tax on my labour, but after I moved, it's about one tenth.
Is it not possible next time to make a choice of several options in the issue of employment? I am a graduate student and part-timer (at the same research institute where I study), and I am missing one option. In a EA survey I took recently, this possibility was.
On the question about your SAT score, your coastal bias is showing. The ACT score is much more common in the Midwest USA than the SAT score. There are a large number of people from midwestern america who have never taken the SAT.
Can you add an option for "I have never taken the SAT".
Same question for the scientific IQ test, I didnt quite know what to do since I have never taken a real IQ test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_(test)#/media/File:SAT-ACT-Preference-Map.svg
Map of which test is more common in which part of the country.
I would have liked an "I have never taken" response for all of those tests. Despite going to college, I have never taken SAT, ACT, nor IQ. I just skipped those, but thought the same on the previous surveys, since there are "does not apply" options for other questions. (There may be a meaningful difference between non-Americans who took a different test instead, and Americans who did not take any large standardized tests).
For the question around childhood trauma, would the death of a parent count as "abandonment?"
I would imagine that would depend on how one was treated by whoever was left to care for one.
But it seems like you should answer yes to that even if only one of your parents abandoned you. I ended up answering yes, just because it seemed the closest equivalent to "one of my parents stopped being there."
That makes sense
Not including an "anarchist" option in the political affiliation question feels like an oversight
Probably at least two, one for ancaps and one for the other kind.
That would be the only fair way to handle it. By my informal measurement, the majority of anarchists don't consider ancaps to be anarchists, but there's no way to stop them from calling themselves that.
Reddit/Discord had no answers that worked for me: I do know of them and am interested, but that haven't so far bubbled up to action. May well do so in the future. AI x-risk was weird for me: I gave 1% and think the probability of extinction by 2100 is low, but am extremely concerned about other massive consequences and spend a lot of my time on AF etc. You might think about more Qs on this topic. I mostly trust MSM but simultaneously think there's been serious deterioration. I answered the 'what has shaken your trust' Q despite its being scoped to people who answered the 'do you trust' question differently.
Lack of options I struggled with:
1. No anarchist political category
2. No category for part time or seasonal work
3. No job category for skilled crafts, which in my experience differ strongly in prestige from the trades.
I had a problem with the lack of an anarchist option too. It seems like such an obvious hole in the data - even more so than the lack of a Green option, when the Greens are a significant political party in some countries. The only way I could see rationalizing it would be if you identify politics as exclusively an electoral and parliamentary activity, which could be seen as an electoralist bias in the survey.
@Scott, if your primary interest is how people vote, you could say that. Obviously there are no anarchist candidates for government, but anarchists often do vote nonetheless. We just don't see voting as the most important form of political action.
A few of the questions seem to be ambiguous or otherwise sub-optimal.
1) The meetup question includes not attending since not interested and not attending but planning on attending.
A useful additional option would be "not attended but interested in attending.
This would include anyone who is neither committed to not attending nor committed to attending.
2) The political spectrum doesn't accommodate libertarians, like a 4 quadrant political compass would.
3) The human biodiversity question is phrased oddly. It asks whether one has a "favorable opinion on an idea." This is ambiguous and could mean to ask how likely the idea is to be true, or how valuable or "good" the idea is.
4) The mental health question gives two options for yourself - diagnosed with a condition, and think you might have a condition. But it lacks the second option for family members.
If one suspects that a family member has / had a condition without knowing whether they were formally diagnosed, there is no option for it.
5) The mood and anxiety question ask about usual mood rated 1-10, which is fine, but it may have made sense, especially for the anxiety question to ask how often someone feels anxious, as it is not clear whether one should average their moods, or state the modal mood.
Assuming the latter, then the question as is, does not distinguish between someone who experiences anxiety / bad mood 49% of the time and 0% of the time, as long as the rest of the time, they feel fine.
6) The NIMBY / YIMBY questions includes two distinct axes of definition. A) Is the main priority protecting exiting homeowners or making enough housing. B) Thinking that new housing will have various negative effects vs. various positive effects.
One can think that the main priority is protecting existing homeowners, and still think that e.g. new housing will bring down prices (NIMBY on A, YIMBY on B). In fact, in the interest of protecting existing homeowners, one may oppose new housing precisely because it will bring down housing prices.
One could also conceivable effectively be YIMBY on A and NIMBY on B, if they think that owners should have the right to build more housing on their property (strong property rights) while thinking that the results (traffic, etc.) would be negative.
It might be simpler to just ask whether more housing should be generally permitted or restricted.
7) The ASMR question doesn't distinguish between those who have encountered stimuli that are supposed to cause the feeling, but failed to feel it, and those who have not encountered the stimuli in the first place.
8) As others have pointed out, the savings question is ambiguous in whether it is asking for total cumulative savings or annual savings. I.e. if someone earned 100k each year for 10 years, and saved 10k for each of those years, do they answer 10% or 100%.
9) For the geography question, you may want to clarify whether people are allowed to look up the conversion rate for km and mi.
10) The question about flying and COVID conflates the past and the present. The title asks whether behavior changed (i.e. at any time in the past) but the answer options refer exclusively to the present.
11) The question about reguessing the answer to geography question is ambiguous in that it does not define the objective. If the objective is to get very close to the true answer, without no difference between moderately off and very off, then one would never repeat the same answer.
If the goal is to minimize the error, where a very wrong answer is much worse than a moderately wrong answer, then one would probably choose the exact same answer.
12) I realize it isn't your wording, but for the question about hearing voices, I wonder what someone with hypnagogic hallucinations is supposed to answer.
13) Some questions use 1-5 rating and some 1-10. It seems hard to think of an advantage of the former except for consistency with prior studies which potentially used the same scale.
14) For the price of Bitcoin, you give the example entry of '20,000' but it appears that the actual entry cannot include a comma. That is, it should be '20000'
I notice the survey asked a lot of questions about psychosis but then (iirc) didn't actually ask whether I'd suffered from psychosis? This seems too bad; I would have liked to provide this info.
Also, every year I wish the mental illness questions had an answer for "I used to have this but don't anymore".
I ran into that myself. I agree it would be a good option.
Mental health: there’s no “I had a formal diagnosis, but I consider I don’t have it now, and nor does any medical professional” option. Are you trying to find current rates, or tendencies? What do you want me to pick? And does this suggest that you don’t think these disorders can ever be ‘cured’?
(I realise that you have a grab bag of things in that section, and some of them generally *aren’t* expected to change, but some of them are!)
> Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID?
Options: No change; Yes, COVID made me fly less.
COVID switched me to fully-remote work. I can fly somewhere and work remotely for a few weeks. I've probably flown 2-3x this year as in any year previously.
So...the answer to the *question* is yes, but the "yes" option is explicitly the opposite of my yes. How seriously should I take the "explanation" part of the answer?
I would probably interpret the question as "Do you fly less in order to avoid COVID?"
Yes, I assumed that was the intent. I fly somewhat less because I now often work from home on days when I would have flown to the office or whatever, but rounded to "not a significant change, at least not of the sort I think you are thinking about".
Same boat here, I'm nomadic in part due to covid, which has meant many more flights than usual to get back home for holidays/weddings
yeah I put I fly less, but that is all due to me providing in person trainings to some clients and during COVID I was providing none of these. My personal vacation oriented flying went up actually.
For questions that clearly want a number, but I don't have the recollection/exact knowledge to give one, is it better to leave it blank or put in some explanatory text?
For example, the "largest LSD dose" question, my answer would be "I don't remember the number but it was a medium-low dose." Would it be more helpful if I put that in the box or leave it blank?
EDIT: Never mind, I see the form will only accept a number.
Took the whole survey, then signed into Gmail for the number of emails question, then upon hitting "submit" instead of a submission confirmation, it appeared to reload the first page of the docs form with the address I signed into (not the one I put for the survey) treating the page as if my intent were to re-fill the form but signed in to Google.
This may have just been a waste of 20 minutes of my life because Google can't help itself when it comes to pretending that I want to be part of its ecosystem.
For questions referring to ACX, such as the one about ACX meetups, should I assume this includes meetups from the SSC era as well?
This was really fun, thanks so much for putting it together. I look forward to seeing the results.
For "What person does your inner voice talk in?" I put down not really either since there wasn't a good option. But for reference it's almost always in terms of 'we'. E.g. 'we should do ...' or 'we could do ...' etc.
The question on Bitcoin price needs clarification: are we talking present-day dollars, or inflation-adjusted ?
I had this same question and settled on just reading as written. So I guessed in what I figured were 2030 dollars, which are presumably going to be worth somewhat less than today's dollars.
I interpreted it as "There exists a time in the year 2030 T and a spot Bitcoin exchange B where you can exchange 1 BTC at T on B for $[response] dollars", with the assumption that B is legitimate (i.e. you can and do receive $[response] dollars).
A few points of hopefully-constructive criticism:
"Did you work remotely during the pandemic?" I was temporarily mostly-unemployed during the pandemic specifically because of the pandemic, which there didn't seem to be an option for (there was something like "I don't work", but that seems to imply that you didn't work before the pandemic either).
"You thought your country's COVID response was:" I really appreciate your explicitly distinguishing between the strictness of a response and the competence of a response, though I was still a bit unsure how to answer this. I was basically satisfied with the *degree* of restrictiveness in the COVID response of my country (the US) but I think the restrictions should have started significantly *earlier* so I answered that I thought our response was moderately too lax.
I would have preferred the two Paris-to-Moscow questions being adjacent. After answering the first one and seeing that the question after it was not a related follow-up question, I Googled the correct answer to see how far off I was, so then I couldn't really give an unbiased answer to the second question, so I just skipped it.
The distance estimation question should ask half the Americans to answer in miles and half in km to see just how bad we are at casual use of metric. I got reasonably close but didn’t mentally convert miles to km as well as I should have.
This would be interesting. I checked afterwards and my first answer was actually extremely close - in miles. Way off in metric terms.
Nautical or statute miles? A person traveling a great-circle route from Paris to Moscow might very well use nautical miles for the purpose.
I wonder if the ethnic group checkboxes were chosen using what we have from previous population genomics studies.
It feels odd to have Pakistani be an ethnic cluster, when it constitutes 5+ distinct ethnic groups. Namely : Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Baloch, Kashmiri? & post-partition Indians. The Indian ethnic group choices are pretty weird. Tamil shows up despite being a fairly small group, but there are no options for other Indians. Bengali makes some sense, since it covers 1 Indian state + 1 country.
I added a generic "northwestern Indian" (Since west Indian would have been confusing). But, having a few other options there would've been nice.
Shit man if you think Pakistanis have it bad, think of all the ethnic groups who got compressed into "white". Or "black" for that matter.
It’s confusing because Tamil and Bengali (and Pakistani) were listed as options (but no other south Asian ethnicities, and no catchall option). CF if instead of ‘white’ the question gave options ‘italian,’ ‘French’ or ‘Norwegian’ (but no others, and no catchall white option).
It continues being weird from my European point of view that Hispanic (which often (although not in this survey) explicitly includes Spanish origin) is different from White. I would intuitively say Spanish people are White, and I certainly have a hard time telling them apart from, say, Portuguese or Italian, but somehow the latter two count as White and Spanish as Hispanic? Or is a light-skin-in-the-winter-and-very-tanned-skin-in-the-summer West European supposed to count as not White? What then?
That's why "Hispanic? Yes/No" is usually asked separately from race. Someone might be white hispanic or mestizo Hispanic, or some other combinations, and it's often specified by asking the questions separately.
In the US, "hispanic" refers to people from Latin America, usually with substantial indigenous ancestry and brown skin color.
> Do you wear glasses?
Missing an option "No, although I probably should". The existing options assume that whoever has a problem with vision is doing something about it.
> ... as a child?
Please add "I don't remember" option.
> Inner voice
Please explain a bit what you mean? Like, voluntary talking to myself, or involuntary? Considering the latter "what is your inner voice's attitude" question I assume it means involuntary.
> Prediction question
The provided examples are anchoring, at least in my case very strongly because I do not have a strong opinion.
Maybe include also a question about how confident I am about the predictions. My confidence is low, but hey, I can still make a guess if you want me to, but without stating the low confidence I feel a little like an idiot.
Hi! I answered 3 a lot to the likerts, meaning "dunno" or "no opinion", and this might conflate with ambivalence/neutrality. If this is an issue, maybe consider adding a sixth option for us people who don't simply know about the topic to have an idea.
In those cases I simply skipped the question, although I agree that an option to clearly state "don't know / no opinion / no answer" would have been more satisfying.
Oh. Good point. I'm an iidjit.
In the previous survey, there was a really interesting philosophy (or metaphysics) survey. Did no results come of it?
Your 'Race' section is non-ideal. Hispanic yes/no should be a separate ethnicity question and mixed race people would appreciate multiple check boxes over single boxes.
These are fun. I remembered to save my ID from 2021. And I don't have to look up "deontologist" any more.
I didn't find my philosophical orientation, which is humanist, so I answered "other." But I imagine one of those big words correlates pretty well with humanism.
Small note: My inner voice usually speaks in third person, and only occasionally second. I answered second person.
Could you please change the question about circumcision? As currently written has an 'option for women' and that was just an awful dysphoria twinge as a MTF transperson.
For the question: What person does your inner voice talk in?
I don't think it likely deserves its own option, but my primary mode is 'we' (and no, I don't do tulpas or any of that weirdness). Just curious if anyone else had been doing that from a young age.
I don't know how to answer "Political Spectrum:
Where do you think you fall on a classic political spectrum?" What do you mean Left/Right? Are you asking about social or economic views? What about being split on social and economic views? There's no way to select this answer.
I know some people have issues with it, too, but the venerable quadrant system designed by politicalcompass.org (now celebrating 22 years on the Internet!) is far superior to a simple left-right scale.
I hope it wasn't cheating to use a miles-> km calculator because I have no concept of metric unit distances other than that a 5k is about 3 miles
Isn't that all you need?
Certainly over short distances, but I was worried about the roundoff multiplying into a pretty substantial error if I just went with a × 5/3 conversion
Unless you're unusually knowledgeable, the rounding errors are the least of your worries.
Pro tip: You can use any two consecutive elements of the Fibonacci sequence and get pretty good precision. And by Zeckendorf's theorem you can write every natural number as the sum of non consecutive, distinct Fibonacci numbers (uniquely, greedy works)
Oops. For some reason I thought 1 mile was about 2.5 km. Still a wild guess, but on the high side due to that.
I just use mile ~1.6km. But it's only ballpark estimates anyway. e.g. if you think it's probably over 1000 miles but not that much more, guess 2000km.
I was thinking about why I converted 1 mile as 2.5 km, and realized it was probably because 1 inch = 2.5 cm. Oops.
I was interested in participating until I saw "What sex were you assigned at birth?" and "With what gender do you primarily identify?" The second is perhaps understandable from an anthropological perspective, to see which if your readers have taken up the gender religion, as long as there is a true nullo option to signify that the survey-taker does not share the religious belief in gender identity that the other options imply. But to have these two questions as a standard for everyone, in the form they now exist, is nonsense -- the equivalent of mandatorily asking which church your readers belonged to as children, and then asking if they identify as Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist (converted from Presbyterian), Mormon (converted from Mennonite), or Other (Christian).
There are an enormous number of people taking the survey to whom these questions do not actually apply, and for whom "Other" gives the false impression of fellow-travelling in the genderist religion.
To state it plainly, nobody was "assigned" a sex at birth -- there are a very small number of males with very specific DSDs who until recently (one hopes) would have their penises and testes removed as infants and who were mostly-unsuccessfully socialised as females; even in these cases, the unsuccessful socialisation is good evidence that the operation and socialisation were not "assignments" so much as medical and social experimentation that mostly didn't pan out. Except for these rare instances, sex at birth was observed, not assigned. Therefore the first question gives you no actual information; perhaps "Other" here could be dominated by people who understand this reality, but I somehow doubt it.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "gender identity", except as a self-referential concept -- like chakras, or Calvinism, or Communism. It only exists insofar as someone can be conned or blackmailed into saying it exists and behaving as though it does. Therefore the second question only informs you which of your readers explicitly claim to be transgender -- here, "Other" will almost certainly be dominated by people who claim to believe in gender identity and who claim to identify as some gender other than exclusively male or female.
I strongly suggest you modify the answers to these questions to include those who do not believe in the genderist religion (like your questions about more conventional religions do not assume Christianity) if you want to get a fuller picture of how your readers actually feel about the subject.
Agree. I hate the term "cis", and would never describe myself as "cis". Answering a question where that's the only true option is like sticking my hand in slime.
I didn't really understand what that cis part of the option in parenthesis meant, but seemed like it was applying to me. I didn't look it up on wikipedia like the philosophy options though.
It's a simple fact that (practically) everyone was assigned a sex at birth, the same way most people were assigned a blood type the first time they had a blood test.
It's a matter of opinion whether these assignments are acknowledgements of obvious and immutable metaphysical truths, or theory-laden decisions to impose simplified categorization schemata onto spectra of natural variation. But this is frankly an irrationally histrionic reaction to one of the most objective and widely-used ways to cut the Gordian knot of edge cases and incommensurable paradigms surrounding this question.
It is also a matter of opinion if the Earth is flat or round and whether it revolves around the Sun and the reverse. Also a matter of opinion if the sky is blue or pink.
Maybe I've been a biologist for too long, but it's fascinating to me that someone could accept this framing and still disagree about which option is obvious.
Do you also think species assignment of a given organism is a similarly paradigm-neutral process of observing a timeless and objective fact? Or are you agreeing with me that _obviously_ the map is not the territory and _obviously_ contingent interpretive choices will have to be made in the process of establishing a correspondence between them?
If we had seventeen different sexes and there was always the possibility of confusing type IX with type XII and so forth, then "assigned at birth type XIII, turns out to be type VIII" would be a use of language we might not quibble over because this would be a common, happens a lot of times, a lot of people were mis-assigned, problem.
But we've got two sexes in humans, even if we also have intersex and chromosomal disorders and the rest of it, so barring rare exceptions, there is "this is a biological male/this is a biological female" fact at birth. There has been argument that "nobody puts 'assigned human' on a birth certificate" and yeah, exactly. But humans are animals! There is the term "non-human animal" in vogue! So why are we not "assigned human at birth"? Because nobody (as yet) is trying to argue that there is a decision taken of observations made that the parents and/or doctors conclude that this is indeed a human and not a chimpanzee, gazelle or sloth. (Give furries and otherkin time to work on this one).
So the whole "assigned Z at birth" language *is* attempting to muddy the waters. Oh well, how can we possibly tell if Baby is indeed a boy or a girl, maybe they are kinnar or two-spirit or enby or agender? So we 'assign' something as a placeholder to them until they can be sure of what they are (funny how there is no corresponding "assigned female at transition" talk, no, now Older Born Person just *is* what they have legally changed their birth cert to say).
I think everyone agrees on the following: practically every baby is examined at birth and that, on the basis of this examination (and sometimes some follow-up surgeries), the people around it agree to treat it as belonging to a certain sex category, typically following the medical and societal norms dominant in their community.
The meaning of "assign" (Latin ad+signare, "to add a mark [to]") is "to attribute or sort something to a specific category," which is a precisely what happens in this process regardless of whether you believe the categories in question are objective changeless truths or not. Anything beyond this is up for endless debate: whether these categories are pre-theoretic facts written into the universe at its creation or imperfect human approximations thereto or useful simplifications of irreducibly complex spectra or arbitrarily constructed language-games, whether it's possible for this initial consensus to be wrong and what kind of further data is needed to establish that it was, etc.
Now, some people might be fine with rounding this off to "all babies are biological males or females, and let's not worry about the rare edge cases even though we know this will mess up about 5% of our data." But I've been told that Scott aims to be less wrong than the average bear, so it makes perfect sense that he'd use the version of this question that minimizes ambiguity, classifies edge cases the way most comparable datasets do, and asks for an objective fact instead of a messy and theory-dependent argument that his respondents will disagree on how to interpret.
> this will mess up about 5% of our data.
I am very interested in the basis you have used for deciding that anywhere near 5% of babies are born with their sex sufficiently ambiguous that we could say their sex was not immeditately apparent to everyone involved in the birth. The only time I have seen numbers anywhere near that for the term ‘intersex’, people were including various hormone disorders that don’t have anything like this impact, and even included things like PCOS!
If you were looking at it affecting closer to 0.02% of your data (2 in every 10000), would that change your view of how the data should be collected?
What about if most people identifying with the term ‘intersex’ had no ambiguity in their sex observed at birth, and most people who did did not identify with the term ‘intersex’ and considered that they could easily answer a question that simply asked their sex? Would that make a difference to what this question is actually doing?
While it’s hell for researchers to try to find forms of questions that people will give the ‘right’ answer to, past a certain point where people are determined to give the ‘wrong’ answer you’re just playing games. I understand why Scott phrased this question the way he did, but it’s not phrased this way for the benefit of people whose sex was actually ambiguous at birth.
"the version of this question that minimizes ambiguity, classifies edge cases the way most comparable datasets do, and asks for an objective fact instead of a messy and theory-dependent argument"
Well, alrighty then! If we're going to be so careful about including edge case data, then let's add in a question about "are you intersex/were you identified as intersex at birth or at some point afterwards/do you have a DSD?" just to be sure because while trans people like to use "but what about intersex?" in this discussion, I feel there are not good data on what proportion of trans people are intersex.
Let Scientific American lead the way here!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/
Indeed, let's go further. If "assigned" or "identified" is just harmless neutral observing-the-facts usage about a decision taken at birth, then let's keep it for the same kind of decision taken afterwards. So Euphoria can be AMAB (assigned male at birth) but now she is AFAB (assigned female after birth). Surely nobody can object to this inoffensive term, given that it is just a description of a decision taken after observing a cluster of categories?
And if you object to being identified as AFAB on the basis of it might cause confusion, well we can change that last letter, make it P (for puberty) or L (for legal identify) or T (for transition, social and/or medical and/or surgical).
Scott can then phrase his next set of survey questions inoffensively to all:
(1) what was your assigned sex at birth?
AFAB
AMAB
(2) what is your assigned sex after puberty/legal identity change/transition now?
AFAT
AMAT
I'm certain everyone advocating for the "assigned at birth" phraseology will logically accept the other terminology, on the same grounds as they are claiming about use of "assigned".
"Assigned" -- you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.
In particular, it does not mean "identify", except perhaps in the modern reflexive use of that verb. When someone tests their blood, that blood's type is *identified* (in the traditional sense) as belonging to one of a few categories; it was not "assigned" this category by the test. The category to which your blood belongs is not an arbitrary social invention -- absent a blood test showing compatible categories, you take a random person's blood transfusion at the risk of serious physical consequences. We can quibble over the number and boundaries of these categories, as well as the fidelity of our still-arguably-too-blunt instruments in measuring them, but the categories themselves are a matter of fact that would be true even if every last human being in the Universe ceased to exist.
The simple fact is that essentially everyone's sex is identified at birth, and essentially all of these identifications are correct. Aside from the few cases of surgical interventions to remove partially-formed male sex organs and a conspiracy of doctors and parents to raise the child as a female (which are the only cases of an attempt at "assignment" near birth, and which do not work in any case), there are cases of androgyne insensitivity where a male develops apparently-female traits, and in these cases misidentification is possible (though given the ubiquity and fidelity of screenings, these cases are now almost always correctly-identified). For the vast majority of people with DSDs, sex is unambiguous and easily identifiable with visual inspection or standard blood tests; for everyone who lacks a DSD, sex is always identifiable by visual inspection. And, in any case, none of these "edge cases" of a child's sex have anything at all to do with the belief system promulgated by trans activists and their allies -- the "incommensurable paradigm" you mention.
My reaction here is neither irrational nor histrionic; rather, it is sceptical, in the sense that it does not grant the premises of the opposing argument. It only seems irrational and histrionic to those who take these premises as a matter of course and who cannot imagine a rhetorical universe in which they do not hold -- in precisely the same way that a fundamentalist Christian views anyone who publicly claims to be an atheist as an irrational, hysterical fool, no matter the tone or content of the purported atheist's public statements. (See: how virtually everyone responded to Richard Dawkins from the early 90's to the mid 2000's, and also somewhat ironically since 2015 or so when he first articulated his scepticism in the genderist religion).
And my point remains that if Scott wishes to actually understand the number of people who subscribe to trans activists' incommensurable paradigm, he should word these questions differently and provide unambiguous answers so that the vast majority of people who do not subscribe to this paradigm do not have to choose an answer which implies that they do.
> there are cases of androgyne insensitivity where a male develops apparently-female traits
It doesn't seem right to talk about "male" without any further comment here. We are talking about *chromosomal* males, who would, in the natural course of events, look female, be socialized as female, develop much like a typical chromosomal female (albeit a sterile one), amd most likely see themselves as female.
The context is the sexual identification of infants. It is a matter of fact that these cases are males with a sexual development disorder which may lead them to develop female-like traits. Calling such an infant "female" counts as a misidentification, and approaches the "assignment" that organoid insists occurs as a matter of course.
It is relevant to the individuals themselves and their doctors to have a full picture of their medical condition and how it may impact their lives; it is also relevant to society that we do not conspire to ignore a complicated truth in favour of a belief system offering a simple falsehood.
That does not mean we should force males with these particular DSDs to be socialised as other males; in my opinion we shouldn't *force* children of either sex to be socialised any particular way. But the truth matters, both as a practical matter and as an ideal.
The truth that their chromosomes are XY is relevant to the individuals - and to whoever may have wanted to have children with them, I suppose. We are not doing them or anybody a favor by insisting that it is somehow an objective truth that they are *really* male, and that they are only apparently female. Their external organs and appearance is female, and I would venture that androgen insensitivity means that, say, the influence of sex on their brain development is a female influence. The only neutral way to describe them is as *chromosomal* males, who are generally assigned to the female gender at birth, and socialized as women.
I suppose we are simply at a disagreement as to what "neutral" and "assignment" (versus misidentification) mean, but for the sake of argument, let us take as read that the vanishingly small number of males with extreme androgyne insensitivity are indeed "assigned" female at (or near) birth, and that this population together with the population of males with lesser forms of androgyne insensitivity or other DSDs which led their doctors and parents to surgically and socially and later hormonally intervene to trick them into thinking they were females (often with extremely negative psychological consequences) are also "assigned" female at birth, it is still inappropriate to frame general sex-identification as an assignment. It simply is not.
It's an objective fact whether a given human's erythrocytes present agglutinogen A on their surface (modulo de novo mutations, modified epitopes, etc), but which of the 33 blood type systems recognized by the International Society of Blood Transfusion will be used to *assign* a person's blood to a specific category is very much a socially and historically contingent choice. Similarly, it's an observable fact whether a given baby's urethral opening is near the tip of its erectile nubbin, caudal to the whole structure, or somewhere on the caudal side of it; but it's a socially and historically contingent choice whether this character will be used to *assign* the baby to one of two or three sex categories, and whether this assignment will be revised if it conflicts with later karyotype or sequencing data.
This is basic critical thinking about how iteratively refined, induction-based scientific categories work, and you don't need to accept any controversial claims about the validity of trans identity to understand it. That said, if your normative position on trans rights requires you to defend the position that biological epistemology is supposed to work the same way as mathematical proofs, it's not a very rational one.
You keep using the word "assign" where I would expect you to use "identify". And of course I cannot go round-for-round with you about biologically epistemological minutiae, whether of blood or of various genetic or karyotypic DSDs -- though part of me is morbidly curious whether you actually admit that genetic and karyotypic data exist independently of social construction, and where you draw the line between a category's identification criteria and the existence of the category itself. But that threatens to derail us even deeper into the interminable Platonic argument that you dismiss as "mathematical proofs". (After all, from an abstract-enough philosophical standpoint, all rhetorical facts exist in an environment in which "biological epistemology" and "mathematical proofs" [really mathematical constructions] are simply categories to which those facts are "assigned", at least by your logic, and who the hell are we to assume an idea's philosophical category anyway?)
So rather than go round and round with you, I will lay my cards on the table and give you every point you may hope to extract from that sort of discussion. Yes, scientific categories are messy; not everything is amenable to categorisation, and of the things which are amenable, sometimes categories will overlap; for every category, there will be some ambiguous cases which are difficult or impossible to categorise. Different peoples at different times and places have understood more or less about certain scientific categories, and people often assert that certain social categories are really scientific ones in order to imply a false sense of immutability or naturalistic justification of them. Sometimes there is a paradigm shift which causes us to recategorise, or even decategorise, entire domains; this is fairly common in palaeontology, and even in archaeology, owing to the scarcity of evidence and the extreme difficulty of its interpretation. As you allude elsewhere, even firm categorisation of macroorganisms into distinct species can sometimes be tricky, with no universal set of general inclusion criteria. Hell, I'll even go you one better and admit that biologists have a difficult time clearly delineating precisely what counts (or rather what doesn't count) as a living thing at all.
To hone in on the point: Some societies do or did indeed have separate social roles for individuals who could not fit the (usually hyper-masculine, almost always extremely rigid) social roles associated with the sexes in their particular societies -- usually these are men who cannot be masculine enough to fulfil a hypermasculinised male social role but who are clearly not female, so they must fulfil some other social function (often whether they wish to or not). Every society has also had individuals who either by choice or by nature go against the social expectations of their sex -- for example, every society that has ever existed has had women who have fought in combat and men who never would do so.
But using these contingent historical facts to imply that human sex is an arbitrary social construct to which individuals are assigned ultimately amounts to sophistry, special pleading, and epistemological self-sabotage in service to a newly-fashionable religious dogma. In all but a vanishing minority of cases, human sex is identified (and identified correctly, even in the vast majority of DSD cases) as one of either male or female, regardless of the social roles associated with these sexes or the mystical tenets of "gender identity" that modern gender theologians foist upon them.
Furthermore, the existence of people with DSDs is entirely orthogonal to the psychosocial phenomenon of transgenderism and has little to do with the religious tenets of trans activism (except as smokescreen fodder to smuggle these tenets under the cloud of philosophical obfuscation generated by discussions of this very kind, which many people with DSDs do not appreciate, to say the least).
Lastly, there is no such thing as a gender identity outside of a bunch of people who have been hoodwinked or press-ganged into pontificating upon it as though it existed, and who will yell at you or argue with you until blue in the face exactly like a religious fundamentalist if you say you don't believe in it.
Therefore virtually nobody who has taken this survey was "assigned" a sex (unless there is a vast disproportion of people with very specific and advanced DSDs among Scott's poll-answering readership), and precisely nobody has a "gender identity" except as a story they have learnt to tell themselves, any more than anyone actually has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ except as an imaginary friend.
Thus my reasons for suggesting ditching the first question and refining the answer set of the second; the second question (if it were better-posed) would be useful to get an idea of how many of the audience believe in some form of the genderist religion, but as it stands, it falsely ranks (dare I say assigns?) everyone into that category.
"The category to which your blood belongs is not an arbitrary social invention"
It very much is. Other systems of blood typing have been developed and used. Being "assigned" Type A or whatever is more arguable for the definitions we are arguing over than the sex one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4260296/
Sure, blood and the question of transfusion compatibility is much more complicated than that of human sex, and different systems have different opinions about how many categories there are, where exactly the boundaries lie, and what the precise criteria for category identification should be. In other words, the science of blood-transfusion compatibility has not been completely characterised, so we do not yet have a complete understanding of whose blood will harm or kill you if we put it into your veins.
But that doesn't make these systems, or the categories within them, *arbitrary social inventions* -- if that were so, two blood samples "assigned" incompatible types in one system could be "assigned" compatible types in another *and* whether or not you faced life-threatening consequences of a transfusion would depend on the test you selected. That is, there would be no correlation between blood group identification in one system versus blood group identification in the other systems (which is kind of the definition of "arbitrary").
But this is obviously absurd. One system may be more refined than another, or focus on different chemicals to make their determinations of compatibility, but if one system says two samples are compatible and another system says two samples are incompatible, both of them cannot be right about the samples. Whether or not a particular bag of blood will kill you or make you ill is a fact, and the various categorisation systems we have developed to try and predict this fact are not the same kinds of systems we have developed for, say, the appropriate way to prepare a particular meal or dress oneself for work versus for a concert or how to politely address a stranger versus a close friend or whether you get feel self-righteous about yelling at someone for owning a personal vehicle.
Those are arbitrary social inventions (and conventions), which change according to taste and time and location. Saying that blood typing is a phenomenon of that kind simply because it is messy and complicated is giving away too much and receiving nothing in return but more ammunition for gender theologians' specious implications upon the supposedly-socially-constructed nature of biological sex and the supposed-primacy of "gender identity".
If you think of Scott as a psychiatrist working in the US and using part of this data for research and that his use of "assigned at birth" is the current approved way to ask this question in the context of doing medical or psychological research in the US, does that change this for you? He's not waging on some front of the culture war when he asks the question with those words, he's operating from within the norms of his professional field. I totally get you may object to the norms of his field, but that seems like a different issue.
Exactly.
Assuming that is the case, at best it makes Scott a fellow-traveller of the genderist religion who supports a reality-denying religious dogma being in control of his profession to such an extent that he uses these standards even in his own private research, and at worst it makes him a coward who is so afraid of the inmates who've taken control of the asylum that he won't stop kowtowing even in his own private research. (If I had to bet, I'd say it were the former based on a few essays I've read of his that touch the topic, but the latter isn't dismissable out of hand.)
An analogy with higher, and hopefully morally clearer, immediate stakes: many rural hospital complexes in the US have been taken over by Catholic organisations and have adopted Catholic doctrine as part of their standards of care; semi-regularly doctors who work at these hospitals let women die of sepsis after stillbirth rather than performing intact DnX's on already-doomed-but-not-technically-dead foetuses, because Catholic doctrine forbids evacuating a foetus before its heart has stopped beating.
Say Scott were such a doctor who worked mainly at such a hospital but worked part-time at his own private clinic with no hospital affiliation, and say he refused to perform a life-saving abortion even at his private practise because doing so would contravene the standards of his hospital base of operations. Would you think he were "not waging on some front of the culture war" and were "operating within the norms of his professional field", or would you think he were at best a supporter of those standards or at worst a coward who places his own professional position over the well-being of his patients?
The stakes here are arguably not quite so dramatic, but the ideology underpinning these professional standards is just as bogus as Catholic doctrine; furthermore, the stakes are also far from nothing for the individuals caught up in this movement who have been lied to and experimented on, often to terrible results with lifelong negative consequences. And while I do truly have empathy for the true believers and the cowards alike, my empathy does not allow me to excuse their decisions to further an insipid and reality-denying ideology.
If this verbiage is the teachers' password to operating within psychology, then psychology has been captured. It is no longer a scientific discipline, but a religious order. You are correct that this is a different issue, but to answer your question, it does not improve my opinion of Scott for the better.
"Arguably not quite so dramatic."
On the one hand, letting women die because the alternative is performing an abortion.
On the other hand, using the phrase "assigned at birth" when asking a survey question.
"_Arguably_ not _quite_ so dramatic."
" semi-regularly doctors who work at these hospitals let women die of sepsis after stillbirth rather than performing intact DnX's on already-doomed-but-not-technically-dead foetuses, because Catholic doctrine forbids evacuating a foetus before its heart has stopped beating."
You had damn well better give me facts, figures and reputable cases on *that* one, bunky. "Citation needed", indeed!
"I read this on some atheist website" is not good enough. "Somebody tweeted a headline from some news report" ditto. Nor am I going to be hugely convinced by "This pro-abortion organisation and/or website are using this as a way to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions". Have you got a concrete example, and not "In 1980 this happened in one hospital in Upper Lower Middleton"?
Give me "In 2020, in sixteen hospitals alone, Catholic doctors let two hundred women die of sepsis instead of removing dead foetuses and here are my sources to back up that claim", i.e. put up or shut up.
Here, let me start you off: a 2016 newspaper report on this topic featuring a photo of a very much still alive woman suing a Catholic hospital:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/18/michigan-catholic-hospital-women-miscarriage-abortion-mercy-health-partners
"Doctors decided they would delay until the woman showed signs of sepsis – a life-threatening response to an advanced infection – or the fetal heart stopped on its own.
In the end, it was sepsis. When the woman delivered, at 1.41am, doctors had been watching her temperature climb for more than eight hours. Her infant lived for 65 minutes.
This story is just one example of how a single Catholic hospital risked the health of five different women in a span of 17 months, according to a new report leaked to the Guardian.
The report, by a former Muskegon County health official, Faith Groesbeck, accuses Mercy Health Partners of forcing five women between August 2009 and December 2010 to undergo dangerous miscarriages by giving them no other option.
All five women, the report says, had symptoms indicating that it would be safest for them to deliver immediately. But instead of informing the women of their options, the report says, or offering to transfer them to a different hospital, doctors – apparently out of deference to the Mercy Health Partners’ strict ban on abortion – unilaterally decided to subject the women to prolonged miscarriages."
Is this still happening, since you used present tense? Oh, and none of the five women in that case died, if you're wondering. Ms. Means, who is the woman in the photo, took a case against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, had her case dismissed by the judge, and lodged an appeal which was denied by the appeals court:
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-6th-circuit/1747776.html
"The district court dismissed Means's complaint for lack of personal jurisdiction over USCCB and failure to state a claim against the CHM defendants. We AFFIRM."
And since we're getting into the weeds here, the appeal was denied not just on a technical point of law, but that Means (or her lawyers) had failed to establish negligence:
"Means asks us to recognize a duty under Michigan law on the part of a religious organization to a specific patient to adopt ethical directives that do not contradict the medical standard of care. Whether such a duty exists is far from certain, especially if the standard of care violates the organization's religious beliefs. Nevertheless, even if the CHM defendants had such a duty, Means's factual allegations do not create the plausible inference that any breach of that duty proximately caused any injury to Means within the strictures of Michigan negligence law.
...her complaint suffers from another deficiency.
Means alleges—and we do not doubt—that she suffered physical and mental pain, emotional injuries, a riskier delivery, shock and emotional trauma from making funeral arrangements for her dead child, and other “discomforts and pain.” But these allegations are not sufficient to state an injury under Michigan negligence law."
Okay, after a quick sanity check, I misremembered some implicating articles I had read a few years ago about this court case along with the Irish and Italian fatalities of living memory; after more searching through news sources which would shout such deaths from the rooftops, I must admit that in this case an absence of evidence is most likely evidence of absence.
Nevertheless, I find the details of the linked case a fitting analogy; that the stakes are (somewhat) lower is perhaps even better. Catholic bishops have no business deciding that women should be forced to stillbirth dead foetuses and risk sepsis (even if American doctors so far have been more successful in treating septic women than Irish and Italian ones in these cases), and find that doctors who do so are either deeply misguided about moral action or they are careerist cowards.
Do you mean Irish and Italian fatalities in the USA or in Ireland and Italy respectively?
Measuring maternal mortality rates differs from country to country; some measure deaths within the first 42 days, some (like the US) measure deaths within the first year, and some do it on a three-year basis (as in this report):
https://www.esri.ie/system/files/publications/RS145_3.pdf
Even taking the worst measure, where they say the maternal mortality rate was 6.7 per 100,000 maternities in the period 2017-2019 unlike the reported rate of 0 in 2017, pre-abortion Ireland still did pretty well:
"The World Health Organization (2019) showed that the average rate of maternal death in 2017 for Europe and North America is 12 per 100,000 while it is 7 (per 100,000) in Australia and New Zealand.
The Confidential Maternal Death Enquiry (CMDE) in the UK and Ireland analyses maternal death for each triennium (a period of three years). For the years 2017- 2019, Knight et al. (2021) showed that Black women in the UK have more than five times the risk of maternal death compared with White women, while Asian women have almost twice the risk of maternal death of White women. Using the Index of area-level Multiple Deprivation, the most deprived quintile is shown to have the highest rate of maternal deaths.
...As noted, the number of maternal deaths recorded by the CMDE generally exceeds that from the CSO given the proactive approach to case ascertainment employed by the CMDE; consequently, in this report, only data from the CMDE are reported.
For the years 2017 to 2019, 12 maternal deaths were recorded as occurring during or within 42 days of pregnancy end from 179,376 maternities, giving a maternal mortality rate of 6.7 per 100,000 maternities (O’Hare et al., 2021). This marked a decrease from the observed maternal mortality rate of 8.6 over the period 2009-2011; however, the decrease was not statistically significant (O’Hare et al., 2021).
Given the small number of maternal deaths in Ireland, further disaggregation by SES or ethnicity/nationality/country of birth for each triennium is not possible. However, previous analysis has shown that for the period 2009-2018, of the 54 maternal deaths recorded, 30 per cent occurred in women born outside of Ireland, while these women accounted for 23.4 per cent of all maternities in Ireland for that time period (O’Hare et al., 2020). While this suggests over-representation of non Irish-born in Irish maternal deaths, the difference in the rate of maternal death between Irish- and non Irish-born mothers was not statistically significant, most likely due to small numbers (O’Hare et al., 2020)."
So the highest risk for maternal mortality is to be poor, black, and less educated, living in a deprived area.
In fact, Irish maternal mortality rates were so good, the pro-abortion campaign had to do a *lot* of "well ackshully" when pushing to get abortion legalised, and trying to do so by asserting that "no abortion = dead women!!!!"
The big case that helped them, and the one I imagine you are thinking of, is Savita Halappanavar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar
Pro-abortion groups rapidly arranged to publicise and politicise this death internationally, and used it as pressure on the government to introduce abortion. The claim was that if this woman, who was undergoing a miscarriage, had had a Dilation and Evacuation carried out, she would have lived. The medical report was more critical of the failure of the hospital to recognise and manage the sepsis as the primary cause:
"The report indicates the first key causal factor was inadequate assessment and monitoring. This would have allowed medical staff to recognise and respond to indicators that the infection was causing a deterioration in Halappanavar's condition. Additionally, staff failed to devise a plan of care recognising that (1) the infection was the most likely cause of the patient's miscarriage, and (2) with increase in time following admission, and the rupture of the patient's membranes, the risk of infection and sepsis increases.
The panel identified the hospital's failure to offer all management options to a patient was a second key causal factor. The panel points out that the patient was "experiencing inevitable miscarriage of an early second trimester pregnancy where the risk to the mother increased with time from the time that membranes were ruptured."
The panel found that hospital staff failed to adhere to clinical guidelines which relate to severe sepsis and septic shock. These relate to timely and effective management of sepsis when it is diagnosed.
The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) published a report into the incident on 9 October 2013. It found "following the rupture of her membranes, four-hourly observations including temperature, heart rate, respiration and blood pressure did not appear to have been carried out at the required intervals", noting "that though UHG [University Hospital Galway] had a guideline in place for the management of suspected sepsis and sepsis in obstetric care, the clinical governance arrangements were "not robust enough to ensure adherence to this guideline"."
Well, now we have (limited) legal abortion, and many feel that it is still too limited. It's not that women will die, you understand, it's that they have to go to England to abort their Down's Syndrome pregnancies:
https://www.irishtimes.com/health/2022/12/26/rotunda-master-says-95-of-parents-of-babies-diagnosed-with-down-syndrome-choose-abortion/
I can't speak for the situation in Italy, or for Irish and Italian women in the USA.
Anyway, who do you think is more likely to be an ally with you on the "genderist religion who supports a reality-denying religious dogma "? The American bishops, or the 'abortion is juuuuust peachy' side? The "abortion is health care, women's rights are human rights" set are also the "trans rights are human rights, trans genocide, 41% suicide rate!" set.
My comments on Irish and Italian deaths were indeed about deaths within Ireland and Italy.
Yes, Savita Halappanavar's tragic and almost-certainly avoidable death is the template for why abortion should be provided as a standard of care in miscarriages, and you have correctly identified it as the case I had in mind when thinking of the example. I don't particularly want to litigate that case here, but I find it interesting that your quoted source's two points imply a potential contradiction -- that a pre-existing (pre-septic?) infection led to the miscarriage, and the mismanaged miscarriage (i.e., the refusal to abort the doomed foetus) increased the risk of new infection or a pre-existing infection turning septic.
In any case, "it wasn't (mostly) the hospital's refusal to abort the doomed foetus, it was (mostly) their failure to take a female patient seriously enough to provide life-saving care in the case of sepsis (and only a little bit their refusal to abort the doomed foetus, perhaps before she became septic in the first place) what actually killed her" is not exactly a biting rebuttal to the traditional feminist analysis of the case.
As to "allies", I agree it is a rather lonely road I find myself upon. I mean nobody ill will in general, and even understand how other people can come to different conclusions from me about what I view are blindingly obvious moral questions (such as whether abortions should be routinely carried out as early as possible in an inevitable miscarriage).
But my understanding of how someone can honestly come by an incorrect moral conclusion, and even be good friends with people I view as confused or hoodwinked by bad ideas, has not equipped me with the ability to "ally" myself with any group in particular. Indeed, the modern conception of "allies" has always been weird and alienating to me, even when I still called myself a feminist and some species of progressive.
If I have to choose my fellow-travellers between bishops and radical feminists, I will respectfully keep walking my path alone.
Income box wouldn't let me put my income, said it had to be a number greater than 0 even though it was.
Does a half-brother count as "at least one brother"? I think one can argue that it doesn't. Also are you assuming close contact with those siblings? I saw my half-brothers about once a decade.
The question about main gender of friends has no "I have no friends" option.
The "how long have you read the blog" question is complicated by reading off and on; I was here for Slate Star Codex and then only recently returned, so that could be both Since Slate Star and Past Six Months.
Did you put a comma into your income? I had to remove the comma then it was fine.
Good survey overall, but I think the question about remote work completely erased me and that there's also many other working-class people it will similarly fail to detect.
No, my job (jobs, actually - I have more than one) didn't go remote. No, I didn't keep working at my normal job site(s). *I got furloughed.* I spent months unemployed.
The options offered amount to "nothing changed" or "yes, I kept working but differently." These are not the only thing that happened to people.
I didn't find that it captured my experience either ("worked from home" but really didn't work for a month, then unemployed, then another month of "work from home," but very low workload, then fully in person, but with less work than usual, now with a full in person workload, starting about a year ago.)
"What is your highest degree earned?" seems too US centric.
I have no idea what level a German apprenticeship is on. Is that similar to a "2 year degree" or more similar to "High school"? Or something else?
I would say that an apprenticeship, useful and respectable as it may be, is not a degree and so is irrelevant to this question.
"I would say that an apprenticeship, useful and respectable as it may be, is not a degree and so is irrelevant to this question."
The survey question asks:
"Degree
What is your highest degree earned?
None
High school
2 year degree
Bachelor's
Master's
Ph D.
MD
JD
Other professional degree"
A Level 5 apprenticeship in Europe seems like it would be the equivalent of 2 year or associate's degree. If you object to this being deemed a degree, then take it up with whatever American education body decided to call this a degree instead of a higher certificate or diploma.
If you can place your apprenticeship on the European Qualification Framework, you can work it out:
https://www.bibb.de/en/596.php
"A three-year course of vocational education and training is, for example, aligned to level 4, whereas a Bachelor, Masters or technician qualification is localised at level 6."
It seems a bit complicated trying to translate the German system to the European (and then from the general European to the American) version, but a quick'n'dirty approximation seems like:
(1) if you go to vocational school, this would be the equivalent of secondary school (ages 12-18 more or less) - in Irish context, you'd come out with the EQF equivalent of level 4 certificate.
(2) post-secondary school vocational training - again, depending on how long this takes (1 year, 2 years) you end up with level 5 certificate.
(3) further training - going on to master craftsman, etc. 3 years would be (formerly) a diploma in Ireland, now it's an ordinary Bachelor's degree. Level 6 on the EQF. 4 years is the traditional university degree, now Honours Bachelor degree - still under Level 6 on the EQF.
Now we have to try and translate that into American. An "Associate's Degree" is the (old) diploma (2-3 years post-secondary school study) and would be Level 5 on the EQF. Bachelor's degree would be the 4 years honours degree and equivalent to EQF Level 6.
So if you went to a vocational school in Germany, left at age 18 and didn't get a trade apprenticeship, that would be the equivalent of "High school". If you went on to do an apprenticeship, then it depends on how many years of study (e.g. 4 year electrical apprenticeship would be Level 6/Bachelor's degree). More years, higher qualifications.
I hope I haven't confused you *too* badly.
EDIT: An online tool to translate German qualifications into relevant EQF levels. From there, hopefully, translate that into American equivalent:
https://www.dqr.de/SiteGlobals/Forms/dqr/de/qualifikationssuche/suche_formular.html?nn=365830
"Atheist but spiritual" can mean far too many things unless you define "spiritual". If you just let people use their own definition, you have no idea what they mean, but most likely they mean something like these people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRujuE-GIY4
I suspect that "atheist and not spiritual", as wrong as it feels to me, is probably the most appropriate answer for me in this context.
"Whenever the word 'spiritual' is used, cosmic horseshit often follows swiftly behind." -- Robert Fripp, from https://www.facebook.com/robertfrippofficial/posts/pfbid02MDzR7YGbMGBeMrjin4AoWr1Q2JMLont4VMJBjVr6SYQCnns29eMAjgqxqCFn75RPl
Some of the questions would benefit from "None of the above" as an option, e.g. Political Affiliation. I just left those questions blank, which I suppose amounts to the same thing.
Some questions are difficult to answer because they ask for a one-dimensional good/bad or more/less opinion about a word that has more than one meaning or that might vary in more than one way. E.g. what kind of feminism are you talking about? If it's left unspecified, then again, the answer could mean anything.
My inner voice uses "we" or "let's", as in, "let's try this another way". There wasn't an "other" option on the survey so I couldn't really answer that.
Second this, I've always used first-person plural (we/us/our) to refer to myself using my inner voice. Not sure why, but it feels more natural to me.
OK I searched for some discussion of the 'moral view' question. First off I had to go look all the terms up. And I'm still confused about some (natural law and contractualism..) If someone wanted to give a two sentence definition of each that would be great. I think my moral view might be closest to virtue ethics. But I'm not sure. Why isn't there some box(es) for morals that follow a religion. (Or is that contractual?) I would describe my moral view, as living life as if there was a (Christian) God, even though I'm not sure there is one. Is there a box for that?
I think many or all of the moral philosophies can fit under Christianity. Say a Christian know an atheist has had a baby. A Christian consequentialist might think they should kidnap the baby and raise it Christian. Even if kidnapping is wrong, it could save the child from going to hell. A Christian deontologist would think following the rule to not kidnap someone is the right thing to do, even if it means the child might go to hell.
(I picked an extreme example, and simplistic. I could make a more complex argument for why the consequentialist also shouldn't be kidnapping, 'cause he could get arrested, would make Christianity seem bad etc.)
Scott, I'm really interested in the question you ask about inner voices and what grammatical person one speaks to oneself with. I'd love to know the intent behind that question -- will you share it with us at some point?
There seems some confusion among respondents here about whether you meant essentially any form of self talk in asking about that or were intending only to ask about people who experience an inner voice that is perceived to be "not themselves."
It's the first time I've ever been asked that question or heard anyone ask that question -- about whether the internal narrator speaks in "I" or "you" or some people say they hear "we" (which I do as well).
I'm curious if people who hear "you" more to themselves have more overbearing inner critics and does that correlate to depression or anxiety. It raises a new possibly fruitful way to work with that inner voice if that's the case. I'm pretty sure for me my "I" voice is the one that experiences things, my "you" voice is generally the critic, and there's a "we" voice that's more parental and kind. I'd never noticed this before, so thank you for that!
I love the inner voice question! When you read do you hear what you are reading as inner voice? Would that be enough to conclude that the inner voice is “not yourself”? Try not to think “pink elephant”. On the other hand what is the inner voice if it is not yourself and what is yourself if it is not the inner voice? Who is listening to the inner voice? I hope we get a post with the results of this part of the survey
> When you read do you hear what you are reading as inner voice? Would that be enough to conclude that the inner voice is “not yourself”?
How would it be "not yourself" in that case? When I read that way it is certainly myself, performing the action of reading aloud—just without the 'aloud' part. (Or are you expecting the first question to be self-evidently 'no' instead of self-evidently 'yes'?)
I had to put down that it felt like a category error because the meaning of inner voice seems to be essentially just that—the action of thinking aloud, without the "aloud" part—and ascribing it as having an "attitude" towards me is as weird as saying my ordinary, throat-produced voice has an attitude towards me. If it's saying things that express an attitude towards me, that's not its own fault, it's the fault of the brain that operates it.
What I mean is that the inner voice is mechanically reproducing the sounds implied by the text that is being read. If you stare at text you basically can’t help reading it. That the inner reading voice would feel different from the voice spontaneously narrating your day (as the question had it) is not obvious. Mine does not feel different at all. But in one case it’s basically just an external stimulus pouring in, in the other case there seems to be an intentional quality to the voice, as if it’s choosing what to say.
Yeah, I still either am not getting it or I'm living a different experience. I don't notice any functional or qualitative difference between using internal voice to read your text and using my internal voice to compose phrases for this reply, for example. *I* might be thinking about what to say with it, but I understand that as something *I'm* doing, not something being outsourced to a subprocess with agency of its own.
This may have something to do with the (anti)correlation between mystical experiences and mental health discussed a few posts back. Have you ever had intrusive thoughts, i.e. thoughts you do not want to have but still present themselves? I used to, so it was very easy to notice that I am not those thoughts (not that I am the other thoughts either, but that’s a story for another time). Maybe those who never had to fight their own thoughts never end up dissociating from them in this way. You report a persistent feeling of owning/being directly associated to a thought no matter what its content is. But does this feeling of ownership arise together with the thought, before or after? Does this question even make sense in your experience?
Yeah, I have intrusive thoughts occasionally, generally pretty specifically traceable to metaphorical "bad training data". (Not all of them are inner voice though—many, maybe most? are images.) But, like, I can trip over my tongue when I talk out loud sometimes too, or I can stumble over my feet and fall—anything we do comes with a chance of doing it wrong, but it's still us doing it. (Closer examples: I've had to deal with "intrusive" speech in the form of tourette's-like tics, and muscle tremors might be a better fit for "intrusive" movements.) I recognize those thoughts as errors that aren't what I intended to think and retry them better (when it's an extremely persistent thought I explicitly use a mental image of rewinding/resetting back to before it happened, sometimes it takes a few tries).
I wouldn't say "ownership", that doesn't sound right. There just isn't anyone else to ascribe "ownership" to. There's just me thinking, and I don't see why I would look at that 'me' as something doing the thinking that isn't 'me'.
(edit: At least, for my own mind. I don't doubt the premise of the original question that others are having that experience.)
My inner monologue often talks in the first person plural: “let’s do this” “now we have to park inside” etc… I selected mixed first and second person singular for lack of a more accurate option. Note that there is no sense of being more than one person, multiple personalities, headmates or anything of the sort. It’s just the way it comes up.
Same. Or at least, either the first person plural (when addressing me) or the third person singular (when addressing "the audience"). I put first person, because it certainly never addresses "me" as if I were a different person. Although it might say something like, "Don't forget, we need to put the bins out," where strictly speaking the first verb is in the second person.
Interesting. I don't think I've ever experienced a voice saying that kind of thing. I guess different people can have very different experiences!
Not to mention that at least in my case there is thinking in images/intentions/scenarios that do not always immediately get translated to words.
On "Do you have migraines?" it's not clear whether it's intended to include retinal or ocular migraines, or only migraine headaches. I guessed only headaches, so put "no" even though I get retinal ones, but it would be good to clarify on the question.
"Cisgender" isn't a thing
Isn’t it just synonymous with “not transgender”?
The same way "heathen" is a synonym for "not Christian".
By cracky, if the trans respondents are going to be picky over using "assigned at birth", then I'm just contrary enough to insist that "cisgender" gets included too.
Happy New Year to one and all, I'm strongly contemplating throwing myself out the window but hey, such is life, is it not?
EDIT: Nobody be alarmed, I'm not going to do anything untoward, it's just my brain at me again. Best of luck, all!
As an impression, felt a significant bias in this survey by having missing options.
With the urban/suburban preference and actuality--the first question asks which you prefer urban or suburban. I put urban over suburban. The second question lumps rural with suburban. I live VERY rurally, like 4 miles up a dirt road surrounded by national forest an hour from the closest grocery store, which I prefer over urban. But the wording makes it look like I'm living the opposite of my preference.
I assume, perhaps wrongly, that some of questions are slated for the most likely reader--urban, white collar/computer workers. I wonder if it would change the results at all to give more options to the people who don't fit those categories. Here I'm thinking of the above questions of urban/rural as well as the job question. I don't fit in any of those categories, so I just picked one that is only marginally accurate but that keeps me out of "blue collar"
Possibly interesting note: My inner voice used to be extremely negative (and when it was that way it was always in 3rd person). Having worked on it significantly, it's now overwhelmingly neutral /positive and almost always in first person.
My inner monologue often uses "we"
Yes, same.
For the "hearing voices" question I assumed you didn't want to know about the hallucinations I had one time after taking Imovane. Given you ask about LSD in the same survey, you may want to crosstab those results - some people may report auditory hallucinations during a trip, especially given "at any time" in the question.
Sorry if these have been asked already.
1) Re: "What religion do you believe?" This seems carefully worded to exclude "cultural X", which I'm pretty sure you considered, but I'm asking anyway. What should an atheist who engages in religious observance put for this? (Not just marking holidays, but actually holding to stuff like kashrus and Shabbos.) I put "Other" and wrote the details, I hope that's what you were going for.
2) Re: Paris to Moscow, are you also intending for your embarrassingly American readers to guess at the miles-km conversion, or is looking that up in the spirit of the question? I hope it is, because I did. (Also I'm pretty pleased with my guess, though I adjusted in the wrong direction at the end.)
There's an ethnic group missing - Romanian. Not at all the same thing as Roma (aka gypsies). I'm mentioning this because, since you seem to have added most European nationalities, it seems likely that you've conflated the two, like everybody else :)
I tried to take this survey but when I click next it takes me back to income and says must be greater than o when I did put an income in, then I lose the whole thing. Three times is enough!
The 'inner voice' question needs a 'royal we' option.
Yeah that sound closer. The inner voice says, "Dang, that was a good day." which it was, and I say yeah! and think more about my day. (or the negative of that.)
This exactly!
> How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways? Very unfavorable - Very favorable
This is very ambiguous question. It could mean any of:
* Do I believe it's true?
* Conditional on it being true, am I glad that it's true?
* Regardless of whether it's true, am I glad that the theory exists?
These all seem like reasonable interpretations, and I'm not sure which one you meant. Which interpretation people pick could easily mean the difference between a 1 and a 5.
People who don’t like HBD as a topic tend to also find reasons it must be untrue, in my experience. So probably this question doesn’t miss out on much.
How would you describe your opinion of the idea of "climate change", eg the belief that humans are causing the global temperate of the world to increase?
Please answer on a scale of 1 - 5, where 1 is "Very unfavorable" and 5 is "Very favorable".
The first one I think. I hate this question, because I could answer more easily if human biodiversity was replaced with genes. Do you think people have different genes? (I recently read "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins, recommended, though getting near 50 years old.)
I’d even go so far as to say various genetic populations, but I wouldn’t describe that as ‘race’ because I think it maps poorly to the varied concepts of race people have generally held to. I tried to guess what Scott was really asking, but I think “races differ genetically in socially relevant ways” is actually very different to “various populations differ genetically in socially relevant ways”.
Also, I wasn’t really sure what “socially relevant” meant. Like, it should make a difference to how people introduce themselves and who they choose to spend time with? Or, it might impact some things, on a population scale, that governments might pay attention to? Certainly, it has medical implications. If you’re in a social democracy, is that socially relevant?
Yeah race is a dumb word, here in the USA it's a mixing pot and race disappears into the general genetic pool. Though if you want you can trace the path of genes to past populations. We (which includes all life to the bacterial level.) are just meat bags made to put our genes into the future. I'm still trying to get use to the idea, that this unique person who is me, is mostly meaningless, only my kids have importance.
> Though if you want you can trace the path of genes to past populations.
But even so, ideas of race like ‘black’ and ‘white’ don’t map well to the actual genetic populations and diversity. Even if we ignored America itself.
The race question isn't great. Main thing for me is that Hispanic (you mean Latino, by the way, Hispanic excludes Brazil and includes Spain) is orthogonal to race. I'm white, and Hispanic. If I choose Hispanic, it makes it sound like I'm not white, and if I choose white, it's explicitly saying I'm not Hispanic. This is why the Census has a separate question for race and latinidad. For next year, I guess.
I'm not sure if "do you watch a lot of old movies" means as a portion of movies I watch or relative to other people. I watched 6 movies this year and 2 of them were before 1960. So it's not a lot, but it is 1/3 of what I watched.
There are people who just NEVER watch old movies, a stunning amount in fact never watch anything predating their own adolescence. The question likely captures what it means to, if you watch a handful of flicks on TCM every year you’re “frequently”.
As an aside, I was born at the end of the 70s and have always been fascinated with all forms of 70s culture *except* the movies which I find bizarre for their intriguing premises but oddly abrupt endings (Chinatown, French Connection etc). I’ve always liked ‘45-late 60’s much better.
Well then I probably answered that one wrong. I put 2/5
I'm going to say 1/3 is a lot. maybe the bottom of a lot is at 1/5. 20%, but IDK.
My bet is that this was asked to pair with the "do you dream in color" question, looking for correlation.
Oh yeah, no option for "Almost never, but 40 years ago I watched most of the ones you're thinking of".
Clarification on the "ethnic groups" question: is it about identification or genetics? It's quite possible to strongly identify with a country and culture while knowing that your great-grandparents were immigrants to it.....
Also my thought. Not to mention that one may have good reasons *not* to identify as "ethnic X" simply because of being descended from X, partly or mostly. Take, say, X = German: people may know full well that they are of partial (or total) German descent, and still strongly object to the label "ethnic German" - and that can be true whether they have no interest in German culture, or, on the contrary, a strong interest in German literature, say. The same is true of just about any group that has traditionally made strong claims (of whatever political coloring) on people who happen to be descended from it.
Couldn't answer "race I identified with" and then was stopped cold by "sex assigned at birth".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR link is not active. I highlighted and clicked to search. This threw me out of the survey. Unwilling to redo whole deal.
Similar for me; I clicked the link to calculate BMI and the survey disappeared when I tried to go back to it. (I think I clicked “done” upper left).
I had a strong desire to answer that I had been institutionalized as a child because of attending public school, which I resisted.
I felt a lot like trying to hammer the square peg down the round hole on some of these questions. In particular the one about inner voices. It's something I can use as a tool sometimes, almost like a second person in the room, to create a back-and-forth dialogue which helps me discuss problems with myself and come up with good answers. I know I'm doing this, I can choose not to do the voice thing if I don't want to. But all the responses felt like uncontrollable, judging voices. Some questions were similar in being sort of off. I tried to answer as accurately as I felt applied to me, but at some level I'm worried I'm throwing off the dataset by picking choices that don't make much sense.
Re 'Do you identify as an effective altruist?'. I think there was a point that it is wrong to call EA people effective altruists (rather than e.g. aspiring effective altruists) because you can e.g. subscribe to the ideology, but not donate any money yet, or be an altruist and be effective in that without having heard of the movement (so limiting the phrase 'effective altruist' only to the movement is pretentious). So I would say that I sorta identify as an effective altruist, while I would say that I strongly identify with EA movement if the question was asked that way.
Re: 'How much do you trust the mainstream media?' I think it should specify that this question is oriented towards Americans. For me, the mainstream media would be Russian propaganda which I obviously don't trust, but I am not sure this is relevant. I am leaving this and related questions unanswered.
It should be easily possible for Scott to stratify the answers by country, supposing we all answered that truthfully
After getting all the way to the health part, I clicked the link to calculate my BMI, then I hit “done” (upper left) to go back to the survey. It was gone!
Do you not automatically open links in a new tab?
Your experience of using the internet must be very different from mine.
I’ve opened hundreds of links within posts that I’ve read on my Substack app. In every instance I’ve been returned to the post when I’ve clicked “done”, not so in this case. But yeah, I’m sure you’re right that our internet experiences are very different based on this case.
Not sure if it's worth changing - I answered the Paris - Moscow question in miles and forgot to convert to km.
Me too - or, rather, on the first guess, I thought "my confidence in this is low enough that making the conversation probably won't make a significant difference", and on my second guess I forgot about it and just estimated in miles. And my second guess was actually pretty close to the correct value *in miles*.
Possible typo: Political Affiliation question - Libertarian includes "minimal/no distribution of wealth"
I assume this should be "minimal/no redistribution of wealth".
One thing I wanted to mention in regard to the "inner voice": I grew up speaking both English and French in the US. My French is good but not native (level B2 on the CEFR language proficiency scale). I find that my inner voice in English is sporadic and fragmented, rarely speaking in full sentences. My inner voice when I think in French is in full sentences and is much clearer and consciously noticeable. Would be interested to hear if any other multilingual readers have similar experiences between thinking in different languages!
I only became fluent in English as an adult, and yet it seems like some times English is more accessible than my first language. Though for me it really varies.
I just came down with Covid in the last ten days, so could not answer the covid -related questions. Edge case I suppose.
I also felt cornered by the question s related to subreddit and Discord. I don’t read them but it’s not because I don’t want to those two things are inextricably linked in the available answer.
Yeah, you need answers that have a slider bar or something between choices. You feel trapped, but I pick whatever is closest. Or don't answer, I think I did that for the city/ suburbia question. I would choose the city over suburbia, but choose the country (rural) over the city. So how do I answer? I guess just more choices.
My most recent weight loss attempt was utterly trivial in comparison to the first one years ago, I assume there’s some reason the most recent is important to you but if your assumption is that people never lose much weight and so any of these attempts is roughly as meaningful as any other, then you’d be wrong. My first one was life changing and substantial (over 33% of my weight) and has mostly sustained.
Those of us who went from disgustingly obese to okay-ish at some point in life have an interesting relationship with diets. It’s sort of a constant struggle of “what is the circuit breaker point”, where you hit a number that induced panic again and you fix it, because being obese was so awful.
Hi Scott,
I just completed your survey, and I have some (potentially nitpicky and annoying) comments and suggestions for you!
1. questions of the format "how often in the last month have you XYZ (burped, had acid reflux, had sexual intercourse)" are pretty much unanswerable, because I just don't use my brain to remember such things. I don't care enough to keep track of all the times I've burped or whatever *and* to map these times onto a calendar unit such as a month. I answer these questions by pulling a number out of my rear end and hoping for the best. The only way you'll get an accurate answer to such questions is if there's a significant life event, e.g., "Let's see, I started dating this guy 3 weeks ago and we had sex for the first time last night, and that was my only time having sex this past month, so that's my answer."
2. Ditto questions of the format "Are you better/worse than the average person at spatial orientation/having an orgasm/whatever." You'll either get the respondent to shrug and say "I have no idea, I'll pick the middle of the range" (that's what I did) or you'll run headlong into the Dunning-Krueger effect, with people who suck at spatial orientation going "Why yes, I'm an absolute whiz at finding my way around!" Sometimes it's obvious that you're better/worse than most at a given skill (you struggle with something that seems to come easily to all your friends, or conversely, your friends keep complimenting you on your skill), but that's a rare outlier.
3. Questions like "how satisfied are you with your life?" are fiendishly difficult to answer, because I have to define and calibrate what "satisfied" means. For example, I have a truly wonderful life (an amazing, loving husband, an adorable child, high-paying and prestigious career, financial security, mostly good health), but at the same time I often feel guilty about not making more of the opportunities that I've been given, and I feel scared of failing at my job and not living up to all my responsibilities. So what does this average out to? I ended up picking a mid-high number, but it felt very arbitrary.
I offer these comments in the spirit of helpfulness. I enjoyed taking the survey, and now I know how far it is from Moscow to Paris. Happy New Year to you!
If you're taking SAT scores, why not ACT as well?
The hardest question was gauging how much the average person likes bread. I assumed the answer was "will eat it if it's on a table, it's sometimes good, but I don't really care about it."
Option 4 on support for feminism didn’t work
The NYT drug test by self reporting thing crosses the line into outright lying in my opinion. That's no one's definition of a drug test.
I think you posted in the wrong thread.
Is the question regarding multiple personalities/tulpas specifically asking about "multiple personalities AND hallucinatory voices", or asking about multiple personalities in and of themselves? The "voice in your head" framing is confusing me since hallucinatory voices aren't generally observed in DID.
(Don't have DID, but have/had two distinct personalities.)
ETA: Also, what counts as a seizure? Is loss of motor control ("locked-in") a seizure?
I want to note that the question about childhood social class seemed impossible to answer for me. My dad was a professor, so I couldn't really choose 'working class/poor', but it was the nineties in the post-Soviet Eastern Europe so we were somewhat less wealthy than the barmen or security guards or the like. I finally chose "middle class", though it seems like not quite right.
This is a classic example of class not being determined by income alone. Many so-called white collar workers are paid much less than people who work in the trades. High school and elementary teachers in the US are paid a shockingly low starting wage, but teachers are still considered middle class.
I like the IWW's inclusive definition best: if you work for a wage or salary, and do not have the power to hire and fire other workers, then you are working class, no matter what color your collar is. This would include most people in academia, but would exclude business owners.
The proviso on the weight loss questions ("have you ever lost 10% of your weight [...] without it being for medical reasons like a chronic disease") seems to be ambiguous between "my weight was associated with a chronic disease, so I decided to lose weight" and "my chronic disease is associated with weight loss, which helped me realize my weight loss intentions", and it's hard to tell if this is intentional or which is intended. The former reading seems to be the more likely reading from the context of the rest of the question, but the latter reading describes the group that is more reasonably removed from this kind of question.
(My case is the former and I didn't answer these questions.)
I think I mistakenly put down atheist I'm assuming there isn't a way to correct this
Currently in the middle of a >half-year sick leave, but since there were no choices perfectly applicable for this kind of a situation, answered the work-related questions as if I was currently working.
Also, at least some of the remote work questions seemed to assume that I would either be forced to go to my workplace XOR be remote working. I go to the office some of the time because I want to, not because I'm required to do so.
And a question: I answered that I'm not interested in buying a subscription, am I still entered for the one-year raffle? The "would buy if it was cheaper" felt wrong as I avoid all subscription payment services even if they seem cheap, having seen monthly service payments sneakily stack up on some people.
I've been in a recent discussion (guess with who) about the amount of violence people generally experience. I suppose it's middleclass or higher people in developed countries. I estimate it as pretty low, the other person estimates it as pretty high, I think.
I'm thinking about possible survey questions on the subject. For example, "Have you ever moved house to get away from (non-government?) violence? Other possible questions?
Risks from government violence are important, but I'd like to get at what's missing from public knowledge.
Maybe there should be a discussion (on the survey?) about how important organized crime is in world history.
Re: Dose of LSD in micrograms -- Maybe my experience is atypical, but I never heard any claims about how many micrograms of LSD were on tabs offered for sale. The survey required a number (or no answer), so I gave a number (one).
You don't include Anarchist in your political options, and you should. A person who identifies as an anarchist or libertarian socialist will have significant differences with the other options.
I’ll just do that right away / yup love surveys
I have a PhD, but I am taking classes currently and will probably end up with another degree. Is my formal education complete or not? I guessed that it is complete, but can be embellished after completion. I am puzzled about exactly what the question seeks to reveal, and why this would be interesting . What counts as complete? What counts as formal? Many persons who get a bachelors think thei education is complete,but some don’t count it as complete until they have a PhD, or some are satisfied with high school. I realize I am overthinking it, because I am an academia addict, but I can’t even predict what other people would think counts as complete.
I think he's just trying to distinguish e.g. people who left high school and started working from people whose highest qualification is high school because they're currently partway through their undergrad degree.
When exactly do we get to take the survey ?
Left/right spectrum… I never thought this abstract one dimensional measure had a definite meaning, as it is at beast a projection from a multidimensional space. Events over the past few years have made its meaninglessness even more apparent. I have extreme views that might make me average out as centrist, depending on how the projection is performed. So I don’t think my answer is informative.
Absolutely! At the very least I think there should be an alternative option along the lines of 'my views -- when I even have any -- do not coherently fall anywhere on this one-dimensional "spectrum".' In fact I don't think I even know anyone whose views could be described as left, right or centrist, democrat or republican, labour or conservative. Though I do know people (myself included) who at one time rather liked Bernie and still like Jeremy Corbyn.
Maybe I've missed it, but where were the previous survey results published, or weren't they? It was a collection of 10-20 surveys if I remember correctly, and respondents were supposed to come up with a unique identifier to use.
'How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?'
Should that be 'ie' instead of 'eg'?
"Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID?"
I wonder if this answer should have three options: more, less, or no, as opposed to just two. I can maybe think of a contrived example for the "more" option - more companies have started to offer remote work, but will fly employees to HQ or offsites, etc.
Question about work during COVID had no option for people who were laid off during the lockdowns.
I wish you had separated the immigration question into legal and illegal. Big proponent of the former and of the many reforms needed. Proponent of actual enforcement of the latter.
Note for the "mental voice" question, my mental voice mostly uses "us" / "we", and that wasn't quite an option. I answered "I" since it's still first person but it's not quite accurate.
for the working remotely question, i worked in person and then during the lockdowns i was furloughed so stopped going into work but still got paid as part of a government program, rather than working from home or continuing to go into the office. I did go back to the office at certain points during the pandemic so i put continued to go into the office but i think maybe something like 'i stopped working during the pandemic' should be an option?
“What sex were you assigned at birth?”
I wasn’t assigned a sex at birth. I’m a mammal. Mammals are born male or female unless there’s a birth defect involving the in utero formation/development of the genitalia. Want to ask what my gender might be? Fine.
Of course, I flubbed the BMI question. Got distracted converting my weight into pounds even though there is a metric tab (sigh). Enjoy the 200 BMI (I'm 28.4 in reality).
"8. Will a nuclear weapon be detonated (including tests and accidents)?"
I interpret this to mean anywhere in the world, not just in relation to Ukraine. Perhaps that should be specified after numerous priming questions about Ukraine.
Re "Traumata": I lost a sibling, there was no option for something like that.
FYI, some of your money questions are going to show distorted data for folks who work in finance, because of asking them about "right now" at the end of the year, and because of your inconsistent use of "salary" vs "income". Finance types tend to have normal-to-low "salaries" but very large "bonuses" that arrive at the end of the year.
Wow, what a great set of questions this year! I especially appreciated the Qs about "how much/what kind of inner voice?" and "what is your estimate of the probability of AI-driven extinction?" I have spent a lot of time wondering what others think about those and am rapt to see where the results end up.
This is my yearly reminder to you that the "Country" question is really poorly formulated. You should split it between "country/ies you grew up in", "current country of residence", and "country/ies of cultural background/affinity", and allow multiple answers on each.
As a benefit, it would help you get more clarity into the questions of "race", which currently uses the god-awful American system of racial divisions, allowing you to get more clarity on whether "racial" things you're investigating are cultural vs. biological.
IMO conflating these things is almost as egregious as conflating "sex assigned at birth" with "gender identity".
Okay, just got to the "ethnic groups" question, and I'll agree that it's an improvement in this vein. Still, I think you should either bring it up to the top of the survey alongside the main "Country" and "Race" questions, or clarify what specifically you're looking for under "Country".
My pet peeve in all of this was that the "ethnicity" question insists that any American whose ancestors lived in Europe, must have an ethnicity based on which *specific* country their ancestors lived in a hundred and fifty years ago (or whenever).
I happen to know which countries (plural) my ancestors lived in 150 years ago, but only in the sense that I know what my astrological sign is - that datum was "in the water" at the time I was growing up, to the extent that it was impossible to not know it. But neither one is at all significant to my identity, my sense of self, or my interaction with society.
If I were a culture warrior, I might suspect a deliberate attempt to play divide-and-conquer against the largest ethnic group in the contemporary United States, as we enter an age of increasingly strident identity politics.
Agreed, a lot of this test is very biased in a way I haven't expected from Scott.
I wrote in "American"
For the survey question about LSD dosage I feel like there should’ve been an option for I don’t know the dosage. Back when I took it Street drugs were all of highly uncertain potency.
I'm finding the orgasm question surprisingly difficult. I'm a gay man with plenty of experience, but... I guess I've never really compared myself to my partners along that particular axis?
Also, surprised to learn that there are people who talk about this sort of thing with their friends. Although in retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised -- human behavior is always more diverse than I expect, I should update...
Sorry, I don't answer scientifically invalid questions like "sex assigned at birth". My sex was DETERMINED at birth, not "assigned".
Re "Work Status": I have a research position in a (quasi-non-)government research institute where I am allowed (but not required) to teach classes at the university it shares a building with, but I'm not currently teaching any. I still picked "Academics (on the teaching side)" -- should I have picked "Government work" instead?
Re "Subreddit": do you mean "Do you regularly read" or "Do you ever read"? (I answered assuming the former.)
Re "Meetup": it depends on what you mean by "want to" and "make it to any" -- I might attend one if it was within walking distance of me and at a time when I had nothing else to do. Still picked "I don't want to" because it'd feel dishonest to answer "can't make it to any" when there is one a one-hour train ride away.
Re "Immigration": do you mean de jure or de facto? Someone might think more people should be legally allowed to immigrate but we should spend more effort on keeping everybody else out, or conversely that it should be technically illegal for most people to immigrate so we can kick them out if need be without having to bother with due process but so long as they behave themselves we should generally turn a blind eye to them. (I can't remember anyone stating the latter position on immigration specifically, but I can on e.g. recreational drugs.) I picked the average of my replies to the de facto and de jure questions.
Re COVID: I assumed you mean "smell-/taste-related symptoms any more serious than due to the clogged nose" and "fatigue problems any more serious than due to the fever and poor sleep". Or did you mean any noticeable such symptoms at all?
Re "Have you gotten any doses of a COVID vaccine?": you mean by now, not by the time I got COVID, right? Was that deliberate? I'd assume the latter to anti-correlate with whether people get long COVID a lot more than the former (though I *have* heard about a few people where a vaccine seemed to heal their long COVID symptoms).
Re "your country's COVID response": ¿por qué no los dos? I don't think my country (or almost any other country) was even on the Pareto frontier of permissiveness and effectiveness, so it could have been both more permissive and more effective...
Re "mask mandate on flights": Do you mean during taxiing and takeoff or throughout the flight except for meals? (I picked the average of the two answers.) At cruise altitudes hospital-grade HEPA filters are active but I've heard of flights with delayed takeoff ending up being flu superspreader events before the filters were turned on.
Re "Do you work remotely now": a confounding factor is that until one year ago I lived a one-hour train ride away from my office (1 h 30 min door-to-door including walking from my place to the station and from the station to the office) and now I like within a 20-minute bike ride of my office. You might want to discard people who answered 3 or less to the "How long, in years, have you lived in your current neighborhood?" question when analyzing answers to questions like this.
Re "Where do you live now": you might want to give examples for each point of the scale. I live in downtown Turin, which is probably more dense than anywhere in the US ex. NY and NJ, but I still picked 2 rather than 1 because it's no Manila or Dhaka or Shanghai or even Milan or Naples, but I'm not quite sure this is what you have in mind.
Re "how hard is it for you to orgasm", do you mean "other people of your same sex *and age*"?
Re "psychotherapy", what about if I tried it but as a young child and don't quite know how well it worked anymore? (I skipped the question.)
Re "Did your plane-flying behavior change because of COVID": what if it *had* changed but is now back to late-2019 levels? (I picked "No".)
Re "Your close friends", do you mean right now or ever? (I assumed the latter because I don't have that many of the former)
Re "flashing or changing elements" -- they annoy me but not because they are distracting, just because they're gaudy (static unchanging e.g. Comic Sans annoys me just the same way). Does that still count?
Re "(off by a non-trivial amount)": what's a non-trivial amount? In this context I'd consider 30% "trivial" (unless I was talking to someone who has personally traveled from Paris to Moscow and/or back before), but I'm not sure you would...
I find it kind of funny that "philosophy" is a profession option, but literally the entire goddamned service sector (travel, restaurants, retail, etc) is relegated to "other - white collar" and "other - blue collar".
I thought this too! what kind of philosopher isn't an academic?
Readership may include those inclined to paranoia, or maybe just cautious.
Have you taken steps to ensure that responses and identifying information are read and accessible only by you?
Can you represent that you have defenses in force that are current and robust?
Yes. I quit when I realized it was google docs, you had to be logged in even if you didn't share your email address, and there were questions I am very careful about where and how I share the answers online. It is not a good combination for me.
Surely if I am not alone in this, that will skew the results, both for general caution level and for certain types of information people tend to be more careful with.
I'm still trying to figure out what an inner voice is and whether I have one or not.
I frequently talk to *other people* in my head, including about things I've done or seen, but I virtually never talk to *myself*. It seems like other people have the opposite experience?
I can simulate a human voice in my head, and often a very specific human voice, just like I can recall the memory of a song I’ve heard before. But I don’t have compulsive autobiographical monologues or dialogues with it.