For "what kind of building do you live in," I'm not sure any option reflects my living situation? I'm a college student, and I spend ~40 weeks/year in various sorts of dorms with roommates and 50+ people in the building, sharing a common kitchen and lounge/living spaces (not really a "large apartment building") and ~12 weeks/year in a single-family house with my parents. I have therefore left the question blank.
The building question seemed to focus on the building style, but my choice is largely based on more practical considerations, especially regarding roofs. I wouldn't choose a building with much in the way of flat roofs, because these inevitably spring leaks before long, and are expensive to fix. Conversely, I don't like houses with steep sloping roofs, "all roof" so to speak, such as Dutch roofs, as this means upstairs rooms all have sloping walls, which is inconvenient and a massive waste of space. (An exception to my "no flat roofs" rule is a railed off balcony.)
He separated “apartment” from “townhouse/condo/etc”, which seems to be more about ownership structure than style. It doesn’t distinguish whether you have upstairs and downstairs neighbors, or only neighbors attached on the sides, but does (largely) distinguish whether you own the unit or are renting it.
“Condo” is an ownership structure. It means ownership of one unit in a larger structure, usually a single building divided into apartments but sometimes a bunch of townhomes with some shared spaces or even single family homes with shared spaces that are co-owned.
A ten story building with four apartments on each floor can either be structured as a condo, where residents own each unit individually (with shared control of things like elevators and the building frame) or as what we usually refer to as an “apartment building”, where the building as a whole is owned by a single company, that rents out individual units to people.
The way Scott wrote things suggests different answers in those two cases, even though the building looks identical in those two cases.
Yes. Technically, I rent a condo in a 10 unit condo building, but I checked the < 10 unit apartment building box because I think that's what makes sense to check. Probably some split about # of shared walls/neighbors/whether you share an entrance/stairs would make more sense?
Agreed, practical considerations are important. I would be reluctant to buy a 2-storey house, regardless of its charm, because that would rule out me doing roof inspection and cleaning eavestroughs.
Agreed on flat roofs - water always finds a way. (It's moot for me; I don't like the look of most "architect" houses anyway.)
Similar problem but I went with my legal address where I can vote. I own a house in the surburbs of a big city. I'm currently working and living for a bit (probably a year) out in the unincorporated country up a dirt road.
Yeah, I live in a multi-family group house and the "group house" option specifically excludes living with family. Really couldn't figure out what to do.
Yeah I went with the one that didn't have the stupid lawn that would take forever to maintain. But like that's probably not what the question was about
I was sad to see the loss of the "Been here since it was a LiveJournal" option, but Catmint makes a good point that that data is probably inferrable from old surveys. Unless there's some weird unexpected pattern in which particular ages of old readers have/haven't stuck around this long.
Me! I found Less Wrong while looking into that whole LK-99 room temperature superconductor thing a while back (July 2023), and found Scott's writing there.
This is what happened to me too. I found specific SSC posts that interested me, eventually browsed through SSC, discovered the whole ACX stuff, and now read every ACX post. As such, I selected for only the best content while on SSC, so the quality did go down, but only because the nature of my reading changed. I ended up just saying I learned about it from a blog (got into rationalism through Gwern) and didn't do anything for quality.
Not to dunk, but I used to love intuiting the hypotheses you were going for when filling out these surveys, and I'm extremely disappointed this one was themed around criminality and the homeless, with a side of architecture (which is also politicized now!). The shift from a blog about science and curiosity to one about politics is basically completed now.
Yes, you're right, but most of the time it was but one of the topics Scott was curious and explorative about (hence his posts about his fictional country), not hot topics (again, most of the time). And yeah, I'm glad he's at least doing the research, but I'm still annoyed overall.
I am quite curious about criminal science, social science (homelessness), the future of architecture and many other things that also happen to be influenced by "politics". Hot or not - and "the poor will be always there with you", said some rabby 2000 years ago. The most popular post is still ivermectin - some may say that was/is a "hot political topic", too. I can do without news from Raikoth.
Yes. I worry that when I indicate that I’m “interested” in politics, many people assume that means I’m interested in party politics and individuals and Go Team! Whereas I am interested in political issues. I generally trust that Scott means the same.
I preferred SSC because Scott had less to lose at that time so he was more freewheeling and open, but the issues of homelessness and societal breakdown are pretty important ones.
If the link I saw (and mentioned in the immediate aftermath of Luigi's capture) was accurate and Luigi actually read ACX I understand completely why Scott didn't include questions grading his readers' sympathy for him (or related questions) but back in the SSC days I think he would have. Here we have an actual terrorist attack and a solid percent of Americans (and non-Americans) support him. That seems like a bigger issue to look at than whether people should be penalized for using the 10 items or less aisle.
The police haven't released much of what they have but they did release included a quote (which 3 minutes of search failed to find - of course - so here's the paraphrase) 'August 15th: Things are coming together, the target is insurance. It checks all the boxes..."
He's a freedom fighter or terrorist or revolutionary of a serious sort. No doubt he thinks the justice system is corrupt, and doesn't think very highly of either the president or the president-elect but he thought his actions through quite seriously. More seriously than he thought about his own escape plan.
He's not some guy who killed a rapist or a corrupt cop or a POS lobbyist or anyone of any fame whatsoever. He thought this shit through and he was right. He's got people deep in the culture wars rethinking who is actually waging war against them.
If Americans were literally any other people (save Canadians or Australians) the reaction would be On The Streets -- that's how much support he has.
Back in the SSC days I think Scott would have jumped into the fray. I don't hold his more "professional" and careful approach against him at all. He is incredibly brave, bold, and honest. One can not be all things to all people. I think this blog is great, but I hear where you're coming from.
Science and curiosity have long been political, and no one can control what things they care deeply about that also make other people in their society mad, which is what it really means for something to be political. I think that no one at all, not Scott Alexander nor anyone else, should have any qualms about blogging about things they care about that have political implications, out of some misguided feeling that there is something wrong with being about politics.
"In percent, what do you think is the profit margin of the average American company?"
This could do with more precision. Gross or net profit margin? Average how? Weighted by revenue or just a simple arithmetic mean? Publicly traded companies, or all businesses?
Many different reasonable ways this could be reasonably answered.
Another confused person here. Many companies with high gross margins have tiny net margins or make losses after depreciation and taxes. I answered as though the question was asking about net margins.
median profit margin in 2015 was xy% - for whatever that means. While "the public" seems to assume yx% - for whatever that means. "The Public Thinks the Average Company Makes a Profit Margin, Which Is About ... "
Speaking from total eco-science ignorance, this was very confusing in the “average company” aspect for me: I have no idea, so I’d like to imagine an “average company”, but… what does that mean? Sum all profit and divide by the number of companies? Sort the companies by their profit margins and choose the median one? Etc. Basically, this seems (to me, a total know-nothing) as unspecific as “average country” (what is the [any random economic measure like GDP growth% or unemployment rate] of an average country?).
I also struggled with this question, because I don't know what company is average. I know tech companies have significantly higher profit margins than many traditional companies, but I don't know what percent of companies fall under tech. I know a lot of standard companies like grocery stores have very low profit margins, but again don't know what percent of companies this encompasses.
I don't feel like my answer to this question is very useful or meaningful. Even to me. I suspect he doesn't care what the actual answer is, so much as perception, but if even I don't trust my own answer at all, I'm not sure how useful that is.
I suspected this question was kind of along the same lines as "when did you last think about the Roman empire?" It may be compared to an actual answer, and then you can see what your answer says about you.
I think net profit is the figure that captures the obvious reasonable interpretation of the question.
If a company is losing money, I expect its profit to be negative.
(I don't have strong views on the other questions, but don't think what you choose to answer to them should have all that big an impact on the answer).
The standard here is EBITDA. I’m quite confident Scott will end up using this.
What I’m less confident about how this would be weighted. Median profit margin of all listed stocks? Market cap weighted profit margin? Also, for the current year? Smoothed over the last 3 years? The business cycle and interest rates make this very noisy.
The answer was higher than I expected, when I looked it up (the search results appeared to be market cap weighted, but I’m not sure), but I’m predicting most people anchor on tech profit margins and will be surprised how low any reasonable “average” is.
Limiting it to publicly trade companies seems like much too harsh of a limit. There are on the order of tens of millions of businesses in the US, and only on the order of tens of thousands of publicly traded companies.
If we are going to go down this route (and I think your questions are reasonable!) then we also want to be clear on whether money LOSING companies are included in the average.
A negative business net profit margin is possible if we add in all the money losing businesses. Certainly in an industry (hello, restaurant industry!).
*) Net vs Gross matters
*) Including money losing businesses matters
*) Privately held (e.g. large law firms, family run restaurants) or not matters
I answered with my best guess for net profit for 'all' businesses. But many other interpretations are possible.
Especially with the US market being so heavily weighted towards the biggest tech companies (which are often unusually high margin) the number is radically different depending on whether it's listed, weighted by size, includes every incorporated entity (in which case the number will be very low). I gave a sort of generic number but the question is, I think, fundamentally broken and can't be used for analysis.
Yeah, I really wasn't sure about the weighting of various companies. Like I just figured many companies are running at a loss right now, and if I think of the set of companies relevant to be "a company that is started on America", then there are so many negative values in that average. But then... does Microsoft get weighted 10 million times as much as some guys food truck? Or is that just two companies whose margin percentages get averaged?
Is it the average profit margin of an American company? Averages of ratios are fairly meaningless, and companies of vastly different scales are a concern. Median profit margin quantified across American LLCs might make sense, but 90% of those are going to employ <10 people, and work across vastly different industries (net profit in legal companies is going to be quite a bit higher than retail).
I'm actually a bit confused why anyone would interpret it to mean anything other than net margin. That's the portion of total revenue that stockholders get to take home (or reinvest in the company). That's what the average "man on the street" thinks when he thinks profit margin. Why would internal accounting metrics like gross margin matter?
I think the HBD question is ambiguous in an actually-confusing way. e.g. if someone believes that such differences are an unfortunate inequality that must be rectified, are they supposed to answer "favorable" (since they believe that the differences exist), or "unfavorable" (since they're against this state of affairs)?
Agree. It is not at all clear whether favorable means 'believes there is some scientific evidence for it' or 'believes it is a good thing' or 'believes it should be used to inform policy' or 'opposes all mention of sex/race in laws or policies.'
I read that question as clarified, "eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?". You're favorable to the idea if you believe it's true, independent of if you believe it should be true, or if you believe that, if true, it should be corrected.
Yeah I agree that's a reasonable interpretation, but it's not clear. If someone asks me whether I'm "favorable to the idea of eugenics", I'm pretty sure they're asking whether I think it's a good idea, not whether I think it's possible.
I am pretty certain that, as expressed in the survey, "the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways", is pretty much an inevitable consequence.
Supposing the concept of "race" more or less points to a cluster of factors that are associated with each other (and thus recognizable as a cluster) and those factors being genetically determined (or at least, so much influenced by genetics as to be determined, in practical terms, let's say 80%/20% nature/nurture), and those factors being hereditary, thus (unless mixed with other races) they persist across generations. Unless you deny some or all of the preceding, you must admit to the existence of "race" as a concept, if a fuzzy one.
Then, supposing there are at least 2 different human groups, such as they can be distinguished by some of those clusters of factors, it would be strange if they, as groups, didn't have different means, distributions, etc. of values across several possible measures. E.g. height. Not all measures must differ, of course. Or be correlated. But some of them will, or else you don't really have different groups (or you're not correctly carving reality at the joints, see e.g. bleggs - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries). So, after accepting there are some measures that differ, it's not a stretch to postulate some of them are "socially relevant", since society measures us all in a dizzying amount of ways. Even if it's on the extremes of the outliers. E.g. Kenyan athletes are over-represented among Olympians in long distance running.
What you choose to do with those facts, of course, can be unfortunate. But I have problems to understand why is the fact itself unfortunate. Or rather, I understand that considering the mere fact "unfortunate" is a strong social signifier, but apart from social signalling, I don't really see why. That's part of the problem of making the definition almost maximally vague.
You might want to equalize outcomes. But even supposing you could (I don't mean it in terms of political capital, but as results of individual persons, all of this being the realm of averages and groups and standard deviations), the optimal amount of effort to equalize requires at least a reasonably close estimation of the types of differences and the amount of the differences. That's the strangest part. Seeing people who would like a certain result, but not able or willing to (even with great distaste) do the needed calculations to reach it. And I, for one, would really like to see it all out in the open. Anything else is just bickering about how to indirectly affect the reality without ever reaching a consensus of what even *is* the reality to be affected, much less when will we reach the desired result.
Race is just the phenotypically recognizable evidence of ancestry. Abilities and disabilities tend to cluster and persist for a while in families. Big deal. Nothing is permanent.
I think we may assume he means genetic relations; your third stepfather's cousin's second husband may be nutty as a fruitcake but that has no bearing on your mental health or propensity to develop mental problems.
Biological parents (if you know 'em), biological siblings (ditto), grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins - any of which developed problems or had them from the start. That gives the hereditary background from which you can say "yeah, there is X in my family and there were concerns that I would pass it on to my kids" or "developed Y but nobody else has it".
What about adopted children? I am a former foster parent who adopted 3 of my foster children, and needless to say, my answers would be very different if I were to include them.
I always answered genetically. I don't think he cares who my brother-in-law is or what conditions he may have, related to the rest of my answers on the survey. The lack of specifics (two generations with no details) and no details on number of people or severity makes it almost impossible that he would try to use it as a general survey of frequency or anything else other than genetics.
I sort of remember he commented in a previous year that he meant for it to be a genetic connection, but I might be conflating that with how I decided to answer it after reading the comments.
It would be nice to have that clarified on the survey. Though, since there's no distinction between people who have X and also have family with X vs people who have X without family who have X, I think we can safely interpret the family option as a low-but-nonzero probability that I have X without realizing it.
I wish it had clarified "big city" or maybe provided a an option for "Midsize city". I'm in St Pete FL, which is certainly no Chicago or LA, is also not a suburb, but certainly isn't a small town and it's in the midst of a huge metro area with suburbs of its own. Most places I've lived (Ann Arbor MI, Akron OH, Ft Lauderdale FL also) have been in this size range. Only lived in one big city (Baltimore-- I think it still qualifies although it's definitely the Poor Relation of east coast cities) and did suburbia briefly after college and spent an unhappy year and a half in a semi-rural but summer resort area.
I think that if it counts as a big city in its area (the most populous or important) then the literal size doesn't matter as much - no it's not going to be as big as New York city but it's a "big city" for Florida and that's the important distinction there.
Seems like a small city. Above a million is my personal cutoff.
Edit: I think of city size in a global context, and China has completely changed the context of cities over the last few decades. Population >1m used to be a very large city within living memory.
IMO, a small city would be like my home town of Ypsilanti MI (20K people, and another 30K in the township), or Salisbury MD or Jamestown NY. The sort of place you can comfortably bicycle across.
It depends also on the country; a city of a million is a big city if the entire population is around five million, but by comparison with a country population of fifty million, it's a small city or even a large town.
OECD doesn't say cities as such but rather urban areas:
I don't see a detailed explanation but it looks like OECD uses commuting patterns as part of their definition. For economic purposes that makes a lot of sense, but because the question in the survey specifically includes "suburb" as an option it feels skewed against this type of definition -- a suburb is basically just "a lower density area that functions economically as subsidiary housing for a nearby city" and so I would expect most suburbs to be part of the larger OECD metro by definition.
I still don't understand what Americans mean by the term "suburb". Like, is Beverly Hills a suburb or not? Is Sunset a suburb of San Franciso? Is Flushing a suburb of New York?
Generally we mean a region of predominately non-dense residential housing (not apartments) near but not in a city: Beverly Hills is a suburb, but Flushing is not.
If 50000 is a large city, what larger size categories do you use for cities in the millions and tens of millions? Because putting Tokyo (~37 million) in the same category as Buffalo NY seems...questionable.
Man, that is not at all what I would consider a large city. I live in a suburb that has 150,000 people in a metro area with 1.3 million people, and I chose the small city option.
The suburb I live in is touching the main city. I'm a ten minute drive from the Central Business District. That main city in my region though is less than 500,000 people, so I couldn't consider it a large city. In reality, I would call it a mid-sized city, but that wasn't an option.
Similarly if I live in a small city that's a suburb of a bigger city, should I have picked small city or suburb? Is the important distinction whether it's a self-contained community or an adjunct of a bigger city, or are we asking about single-family sprawl vs apartments and businesses and dense public transit?
Given that suburb is an option I would have gone with suburb, but there are definitely edge cases. What is Fort Worth in the DFW area? If the "suburb" is a 40 minute drive through countryside but is legally part of the metro?
As always, building discrete classifications for something on a continuous spectrum is hard.
My best guess is that the intent of the question is more along the lines of "how densely built/populated is it" which is why I chose small city but yeah it's pretty unclear.
And don't forget e.g. Fairfax County Virginia, which is almost fully urbanized, but in which the vast majority of the population lives in unincorporated ares (there are only 3 towns in the whole county, and cities are independent of counties in Virginia).
I wasn't sure what to answer for the kidney donation question. I ended up with "I haven't started the process," but in reality I started researching it, and I even emailed a couple of organizations, but kidney donation to a stranger is illegal where I live. So maybe I was rejected? But I don't think that's what you were getting at with that option, either.
I would have liked a "I'm open to it, but haven't done anything yet to start the process." I'm not against it, but had to answer Not Interested because the other answers were more incorrect.
As my long-term monogamous partner and I live together and have a child together but aren't legally or religiously married and don't plan to (which is not a particularly rare arrangement in Europe nowadays), I'm not really sure how to answer the "Married people:", "Single people:" and "People in a relationship other than marriage:" questions -- I answered the first two by interpreting "future spouse" broader than literally, skipped the following two, answered the following one by interpreting "marriage" broader than literally, and skipped the last two.
If two people are cohabiting, share finances (and benefits), are sleeping together and intend the situation to endure then they are de facto married. Until SSM became legal same sex couples generally thought of it that way and would refer to their partner as "husband" or "wife".
If you want to be married why not sign a document. Why is the state supposed to guess the status. Plenty of people might live together and not be in a relationship - with SSM it could be too blokes, or unrelated women.
People who want the state to guess their relationship and apply common law marriage seem to demand the state and society to see them as married after a while, while refusing to actually take 5 minutes at a registry office. That seems odd to me. It’s not consistent being anti marriage and being pro common law marriage.
Marriage is a financial arrangement as well as romantic one - it doesn’t have to be romantic at all. Yet people won’t sign something to clear it up.
An official marriage comes with some benefits (taxes, health care decision power, inheritance details) and some drawbacks (disadvantages when breaking up, loss of benefits from a previous marriage, (again) inheritance stuff). It's entirely possible and an actual occurrence in my social circle that some people live in a relationship that is, for all intents and purposes, a marriage, but, for various reasons, do not want it to be official for the state.
(edit: Fixed wrong phrasing for the marriage construct)
Common law marriage very much exists in Canada, for example, including many legal implications.
I've been officially married for two years but have been living with my current spouse for 13, and there is nothing particularly special about the last two years. There wasn't some drastic change in our relationship. I think the shift from "dating" to "common law" is far more significant than from "common law" to "married". It certainly was in our case.
It is a thing in Texas. And I interpreted myself as married because in Texas legally I am though no ceremony or paperwork was involved. In Texas you are legally married if the couple:
"agreed to be married"; and
"after the agreement they lived together in this state as husband and wife"; and they
Depending on which country you're in, and how many assets you have such as a house, your spouse may have to pay a shed load of inheritance tax if you pop your clogs, and v.v if your partner does. If that is a risk, it is better to sign a piece of paper saying you are legally married.
Also you might get problems if a partner gets very ill and medical decisions need to be made. Not being married might also cause big problems if issues occur while traveling internationally. IMO it's a bit irresponsible to not get married in situations like the one described.
If you're not married or in a civil union or domestic partnership or other registered relationship, then you're cohabitants which is treated as being single.
Depending on your country, there may or may not be legislation to cover the rights of cohabiting couples who separate:
"While couples living together now have certain rights in the event of the death of either partner, or the breakup of your relationship, cohabiting couples do not have the same legal rights and obligations as married couples or civil partnerships. This has a bearing on important life events, including buying property, having children and inheritance.
For example, if you are living with your partner and you die without a will, your partner has no automatic right to any share of your estate (property, money and possessions) no matter how long you have been together.
Even if your partner has provided for you in their will, cohabiting partners pay Capital Acquisitions Tax (CAT) at 33% on gifts/inheritance over €16,250. However, if you receive a gift or inheritance from your spouse (your husband or your wife) or your civil partner, you are exempt from Capital Acquisitions Tax (CAT).
...If you have been living with your partner and your relationship ends, you may be able to avail of the Redress scheme for cohabiting couples. The aim of the redress scheme is to protect a financially dependent member of the couple if the long-term cohabiting relationship ends (either through death or separation).
Under the redress scheme, cohabiting couples can get similar orders from the court as are available to married couples when they separate or divorce if the court is satisfied that one of you was financially dependent on the other. The types of orders you may apply for under the redress scheme include property adjustment orders, maintenance orders and pension adjustment orders.
To apply for court orders under the redress scheme, you must be a qualified cohabitant. This means you must have been:
- Living together in an intimate and committed relationship for at least 5 years, or
- Living together in an intimate and committed relationship for 2 years if you have had a child with your partner
You must apply for these orders within two years of your relationship ending, unless there are exceptional circumstances. "
So you are in a "relationship other than marriage" and those questions apply to you.
But there's a world of difference, both practically and emotionally, between being in a long term relationship (and living under one roof) and being truly single.
Yeah I had trouble with this one as well. By this definition I'm "single", but I'm also settled down in a relationship with someone I intend to be with forever. I wear a $1000 ring on my wedding finger and we're buying a house together this year... but we are not formally married or in a registered relationship.
> So you are in a "relationship other than marriage" and those questions apply to you.
That's what I would think after reading up to the colon, but when I made it to the end of the question and see no "WDYM, we are already settled down and already have a child" answer, it was clear to me that it probably just didn't occur to the author, like to most¹ Americans, that a couple might possibly ever settle down and have children without formally marrying.
___
¹though not all -- even Mencius f***ing Moldbug didn't legally marry his first wife until three months before their daughter was born
Similar, no kids. Not married for idiosyncratic reasons, open to getting married, not open to kids (these days mainly due to health issues but also never really felt drawn towards it).
I thought that whole section was poorly structured.
Related issue: my same-sex partner and I have been in a continuous rock-solid monogamous relationship for 28 years. Getting married didn't become a lawfully permissible option for us until year 15. This series of questions would have gotten a more accurate reading from me if they had asked about a "marriage or marriage-like relationship."
I wasn’t sure how to answer the long Covid question. I have Graves Disease, which is reputed to be associated with Covid-19 infection (ie. There are a bunch of papers on this in the medical literature) Was mine triggered by Covid, or would I have got it anyway? No idea.
Graves Disease was around before Covid, so I'd say that any relationship might be more "opportunistic" than "causation".
"Researchers do not know what specifically causes people to develop Graves’ disease, but it is thought to be triggered when an outside source such as a virus affects genetics."
So it's hard to say if you would have got it anyway or if the susceptibility was there but would have remained dormant until triggered by Covid infection.
I also wasn’t sure how to answer it because I have Covid *right now* (first tickle in throat on Monday negative test on Tuesday, international flight on Wednesday, when I started feeling worse, and then positive test after arrival) and am feeling more fatigued than I did at any point the other time I had it, but hopefully will recover soon.
Each time I had Covid (that's three times) it took longer to fully recover than it did from, say, the flu. Or even from the virulent pneumonia I suffered at age 14 which is still the sickest and closest to death I have ever been. Each time I bounced back to become basically functional but still had lingering shortness of breath for two weeks or so. But that's not long Covid.
I have commented about this before, but it hasn't been fixed so I'm commenting about it again. The left to right political spectrum is impossible to answer without context. Should I base it on American politics, the politics of my home country, or take a more global view? I would give different answers to all three of those.
Same, and also I feel obligated to point out that in addition to not having a reference point, the question compresses three axes down to one. I would want to see separate questions for cultural (anti-work <-> pro-social justice), economic (free market <-> redistributive), and political (authoritarian <-> libertarian) spectra.
In many places, the actual decision that matters ultimately boils down to "do you normally vote for the sole left of centre candidate that stands a chance of winning, the sole right of centre candidate that stands a chance of winning, or do you find yourself flipping which one your vote vote goes to unpredictably year on year?"
The political system has already forced the flattening; even though your actual views are more complex and nuanced, you have already had to do the flattening calculation in order to participate. Simply repeat that result here.
My objection is more about what this flattening does to Scott's analysis (and, potentially, third parties'). If 60% of ACX readers identify as far-right, does that mean that they're fascists, believers in free market economics, anti-woke, or simply Republican voters?
...If they live in the US, there really isn't a meaningful difference between any of those groups anymore. Except free market economics I guess, no politician gives a damn about that these days.
That's not right. There are lifelong Republicans after all who loathe Trumpian authoritarianism and voted for Hillary, Biden and Harris for that reason. And then there's the Bernie voters who switched to Trump because their top priority is to stick it to "the Man".
Definitely agreed. In particular, I care more about the authoritarian axis than the economic one, and I think the correlation between those has actually swapped over in relatively recent years, as discussed by this blogger with a delightful memorable cartoon: https://shadowoneboxing.wordpress.com/2024/07/02/liberal-at-20-conservativeish-at-40/
The progression of answers in the shoplifting question seems a bit off. It jumps from "a warning" to "20 hours of community service", which is pretty onerous for a busy person (I think that most employed people would rather pay a $2000 fine than do 20h community service). I chose "a warning" for the absence of something like a $200 fine.
I was tempted to choose "death" for the "caught ten times" shoplifter, because they are obviously incorrigible and a drain on society. But in the end I was merciful and opted for ten years instead. At least that will keep them out of mischief for a few years and give shop keepers a break.
I went for a month because yeah, ten previous means that this is habitual. A month is long enough to be punitive and gives them a chance, if things like addiction are involved, to get sober/clean, but not long enough to radically disrupt their life.
If after that they continue robbing and stealing, to the salt mines!
My problem with that is that a month in jail is long enough to lose your job and housing, which is radically disruptive. Once that happens, you might as well hold them for longer. I don’t know if a week would be doable. I think I really want a weekend, but with the condition that they are told one more time and it ramps up significantly. But then, I suppose we’re missing what the interventions would be on the second, third, fourth etc times.
Problem is, by the time we're talking "a month in jail", we mean people who are (1) repeat offenders (2) probably aren't in gainful employment (3) may be living in social housing (at least over here).
Like the example of the Cork woman in that link - given lots of second chances, out on temporary release so she can be with her family for Christmas, goes right back to shoplifting. These are not people who will benefit from "okay, a weekend in jail and a stern warning" and a month in jail clearly isn't disrupting their lives to the extent that "oh no if I go to jail/go back to jail, things will go worse for me than they already are".
First time offender? I'd be more lenient. 45 previous charges and already had three suspended sentences? Cross that invite to the Black and White Ball off your social calendar, you're doing porridge.
I assumed that they've already received at least month long sentences at some point during the previous 10 arrests, which means they've already gotten the month and kept doing it. I think it would be cruel to give someone 10 warnings to train them that shoplifting is not a big deal and then suddenly jump to 10 years in prison, but if they've been receiving increasingly harsh punishments each time then by the 10th offense it's obvious they're not going to stop.
Same choice here, but my rationale is that criminal behavior is more common among young people, and 10 years is long enough that a repeat offender might outgrow it.
Yeah, community service for stupid teenagers thinking shoplifting on a dare is cool, or someone making first tentative steps down the wrong path who can be steered straight, or someone with a good reason (e.g. really did need to steal baby formula).
People like this, on the other hand - no. At least a month in the slammer. Got her second (and more) chances, still re-offended. This is either extreme stupidity or criminality, and there have to be consequences.
"A woman given temporary release from jail very soon after she received a six-month prison sentence for thefts went shoplifting again when she got out and today she was given another prison sentence.
33-year-old Julianne O’Farrell of Marble Hall Park, Douglas Rd, Cork, also appeared at Cork District Court after her early release and was granted bail on the strict condition that she would not commit further offences.
Judge Mary Dorgan recalled that O’Farrell told her she wanted to spend Christmas with her family and would not commit any further offences if released.
However, she was arrested and brought before a special sitting of Cork District Court last Saturday. She was charged on that occasion with three new counts of shoplifting. They included stealing a gift set at Kilkenny design shop on Emmet Place on December 11 and stealing items at Claire’s Accessories in Cork city on December 13."
"She has 234 previous convictions — 85 of which were for theft."
That is not someone who is likely to be deterred by "but imagine if you serve ten years in jail, once you get out your job skills are now obsolete and your career is derailed".
I'm assuming that 20 hours of community service takes much more than 20 hours out of your life. It's probably spread over 5+ separate dates, you have to show up on time on penalty of going to jail.
I mean, if you want to argue that it’s a net of 30 hours lost instead of 20, fine, but I doubt it would reach the 100 or so needed to be more economically impactful to a low end worker.
Also, you're assuming too much about the demographics of shoplifters. Nowadays with self-checkout, any trivial mistake or lapse of attention technically turns you into a "shoplifter". This has happened to me for ADHD reasons (I "brazenly" walked out of the store without paying). I find this particularly perverse since the store gets rid of the human cashier to cut costs, while selling it to the customer as a *good* thing, and on top of that there's a shift in responsibilities towards the customer needing to execute the transaction correctly, with criminal penalties attached (I'm unaware of criminal penalties for when a cashier makes a mistake at the register).
There are also a bunch of countries with a weaker rule of law and where the population has a less favorable view of "the system". In such countries, you'll find middle class people committing trivial crimes while justifying it to themselves based on the business / government being out to get them, "it's so hard to get by with my salary", etc. The situation with self-checkout does incline me an epsilon more strongly towards that.
I can one up that even: I was rushing, scanned my my breakfast and flat out forgot to tap my card once. Reaction? 'hey, come back' - it probably helped that I was wearing a suit and clearly rushing to work.
At least in common law countries, not paying out of absentmindedness isn’t a crime; theft requires intent (mens rea).
I agree that petty theft among higher earners is likely more common in countries with a weaker rule of law, but I suspect this is less true for shoplifting than for more abstract or ostensibly victimless crimes like speeding or copyright infringement.
(1) If you know you're ADHD and tend to forget to pay when using self-checkout, my view is that you now have an ethical responsibility not to use self-checkout but to go to a manned till so you can't walk off without paying. Would you be happy if you didn't get paid for three weeks in a row because your boss pulled the "Sorry about that, my ADHD, forgot to run the payroll" excuse?
(2) Trivial crimes by those who justify it to themselves with "it's hard to get by" etc. mean that those people will also cheat and take advantage of *you*. Silly old ADHD Vitor walked off and left his wallet on the table? Free money for me! There is no honour among thieves.
(1) well, you've bought into the exact reframing I was complaining about. There are *two* parties involved in any contract. The store negligently lets any rando off the street walk in and take products they haven't paid yet into their grubby paws. In addition, the store often has 0 (ZERO) manned tills available.
Regarding my boss not paying me, this is not analogous because it's *the company* that owes me my salary, not this particular person. But yeah, if we assume that it's an owner-run small business, I would indeed let a one-off mistake like that slide out of courtesy. I don't think people with ADHD have an "ethical responsibility" to avoid owning small businesses.
If you're a busy person, why the fuck are you shoplifiting? In fact, I think if you're a busy person with a normal life, you should get a *heavier* penalty because you have no goddamn excuse for being an asshole.
EDIT: People like this, for instance. They *should* incur the reputational penalty rather than being able to quietly buy their way out via a fine:
Cerron Cade has been a trusted member of Gov. John Carney’s cabinet, serving as both labor secretary and currently budget director.
Carney, who will become Wilmington mayor next month, has so much faith in Cade that he appointed him as city chief of staff.
Cade’s political career is now in jeopardy. He’s been suspended with pay from his state post for what the governor, in a cryptic Saturday evening news release, called a “personal legal matter.”
But WHYY News has learned that Cade, who oversees the state’s $7.2 billion operating and capital budgets, was arrested last week by state police for what court records describe as serial petty shoplifting from Wilmington’s Home Depot store
...Cade, whose taxpayer-funded salary is $164,000, allegedly stole eight items valued at $394.32, court records obtained by WHYY News show. Attempts to reach Cade were unsuccessful.
The four-page arrest affidavit, provided by Delaware Justice of the Peace Court under a public records request, says Cade utilized a practice known as “skip scanning.”
That means Cade allegedly purchased items at the store’s self-checkout registers but didn’t scan one or more items on each of the six separate incidents that were outlined in the arrest warrant.."
The fact that he robbed petty items makes it even more egregious. This is "ah hell, if I can get away with it, why not?" stealing and not necessity. And this also leads to the suspicion "if he's doing this as a private person, what the hell is he stealing/embezzling/defrauding in his public position?"
"Eventually, a security camera recorded the two older women shoplifting. Footage showed them taking something off a shelf, putting it in a bag and covering it up with a scarf, Gwin said.
On Monday, Dec. 2, Placer County sheriff’s deputies arrested two women on suspicion of stealing more than $1,500 worth of goods from Parallel Mountain Sports.
Both suspects are 68 years old. One is from Hillsborough, and the other is from San Francisco. One of the suspects purchased a home in Incline Village in 2018 for $1.7 million, public records show. Both suspects were formerly licensed dentists in California, the Reno Gazette Journal reported."
Maybe it's not Chinese Cardiologists we should be suspecting, but Californian Dentists!
If you're that busy, then shop online for home delivery like the rest of us.
Why yes, I am still seething years later about the guy who, when I was working the till in a local store, just continued on chatting with his pal and didn't even look at me as he threw the coins for the purchase of a newspaper on the counter instead of handing them to me. Up yours too, pal, Jack is as good as his master and I'm a human being equal in dignity to yourself, even if you are High Human Capital I'm In A Job That Requires Me To Wear A Suit!
Catholic values - one-half 13th century theology, one-half social justice Workers' Movements and Distributism 😁
I like the community service answer because it's onerous in some ways (making it a deterrent) without breaking someone's life. Jail often means losing a job and similar long lasting problems, while CS can work around your schedule. It's also potentially doing something useful for society, rather than being a further drain of paying for jail.
For very minor offenses I've heard of jail sentences that can be scheduled on a person's non-working days. For example, a town I lived in had a mandatory two full days in jail or a rehab place for a first DUI, but that could be scheduled for certain days.
"A young man who verbally abused gardaí as “rat bastards” and committed a series of burglaries and other crimes has been given the opportunity to do community service instead of going to jail.
Ryan Kennefick, 22, of St Vincent’s Hostel, Anglesea Terrace, Cork, pleaded guilty to several offences at Cork District Court.
Now, Judge Mary Dorgan said she would adjourn sentencing until March 26 for a probation report on his suitability to do a community service order.
Defence solicitor Daithí Ó Donnaháin said Kennefick recently sustained a serious injury around his ear but had been trying to put his life on a better footing.
Adjourning the case for the report on his suitability for the community work, Judge Dorgan warned the young man that in the meantime: “No offending, no drink, no drugs. Attend at all probation appointments.”
The judge previously described the offences committed by Kennefick around Cork City as "messy"."
I find it more disturbing that there's nothing between one year (crime but not serious issue) and 10 years (very serious crime territory). How can you set up a poll varied between nothing, slap on the wrist, light punishment and then jump to 10+ years in jail or worse.
1. I think there really should have been an option for people who want to settle down with someone, but do not want children. Children are not definitional to settling down.
2. The questions about punishment, vis a vis shoplifting are hard. In a just society one would start with a warning, and escalate up to e.g. a few days in jail, community service etc. However, I hold that the existing socioeconomic order is radically illegitimate and property rights as recognized by the state are more or less totally non-binding. Until, for example, there is a reasonable welfare system I think people basically have the right to just take things from people who are substantially richer than yourself (my paper on political philosophy in relation to these issues, submitted to the journal for controversial ideas was desk rejected for not being controversial enough, making me think the whole think "controversial" here just means "unwoke"). This might sound like a minor point, but I believe it will be part of the thinking of a lot of people who propose no or extremely lenient sentences. As things stand, my response would be "no punishment at all, not even a warning" because there is no right to enforce these laws. Again, I don't think these considerations are as marginal as you might think.
3. Likewise the homeless shelter one is difficult clarity on what is meant by "harassing" passersby. If harassing means asking for money, and maybe yelling into the air in the vague vicinity of people, which is what a lot of people seem to mean by "harassing" in this context, then they shouldn't be arrested. If "harassing" means groping, threats at specific individuals, following people around after it's become clear that is not wanted, they arrest them, sure, but only to the degree this would be done to, say, a guy in a business suit as well. Likewise, there should be an option for people who think the mentally ill should be forcibly institutionalized, but "harassment" as usually understood in this context shouldn't lead to an arrest.
4. I know it's only a blunt instrument, and I know this is just vanity on my part, but as someone who works out 6 days a week, it pained me to put in my BMI without that context. Maybe a question on resistance training would serve as a good control if we're trying to separate out the overfat from the merely large.
> Until, for example, there is a reasonable welfare system I think people basically have the right to just take things from people who are substantially richer than yourself
Billionaires are substantially richer than everybody else, to the extent that the difference between a homeless person, a lawyer, a well paid IT worker on one side, and a billionaire on the other is about the same. Relative to the real rich there’s no difference between the rest of us.
Stealing from a local shopkeeper to the extent that he may go out of business isn’t moral, unless you are starving, isn’t moral. Stealing to fund a habit isn’t moral.
> from people who are substantially richer than yourself
> Stealing from a local shopkeeper to the extent that he may go out of business isn’t moral
I'm anti-shoplifting, but if the local shopkeeper is a few shopliftings away from going out of business, they probably aren't "substantially" richer than you. Besides, very few of the shops in my area are owned by locals, they're owned by giant merged conglomerates that drove the locals out of business (or bullied them until they were bought out) and are only consolidating more.
Curious: is there currently a country in the world which has a satisfactory welfare system? Only rule is that you cannot name a country unless you also know the median benefit amount (definition of median is left up to you) and the list of conditions for obtaining it and keeping it.
In a country about as rich as the US, I’d put the minimum standard somewhere between 350 and 500 US dollars a week guaranteed for all job seekers, regardless of age or previous employment status. Keep in mind that this may not be the only requirement of justice. I don’t put too much stock in the exact figure, it’s just my attempt to estimate the amount required for a standard of living adequate to survive off without indignity, assuming a few other measures I’d consider essential (healthcare free for the user, reasonable additional support for dependent children) are met.
There are many countries that reach the requirement in the amount, but fail in other ways. For example, the Danish system. Denmark reaches the required quantum fails in other ways (treating the benefit as a form of insurance for former workers, rather a guaranteed minimum income for anyone willing to work, and willing to demonstrate that willingness.)
The Australian system, my own, is inadequate in the amount, and a little too strict in the job active requirements, but if it were raised to 1100 AUS a fortnight, from about 800 AUS, I would consider it broadly correct.
So a number come pretty close but none I know of quite make it in all particulars. The scheme I propose- a guaranteed liveable wage for jobseekers- would impose substantial costs, but it is certainly endurable without a drastic decline in general standard of living. Our most important obligations, as always, are to those weaker and more vulnerable than ourselves.
A job guarantee would also suffice, so long as the pay and conditions were reasonable, and so long as allowances were made for the fact that not everyone can do every kind of work.
Exactly what the requirements of justice are I don’t have a complete theory but if this condition- every job seeker able to live with dignity- was met, I’d feel at least torn.
Would you support a system that required people to relocate from high cost of living areas in order to be eligible for benefits for more than 6 months - or if they want subsidized housing? So if you lose your job in SF, you have to move to Reno where you’ll get $500/week and a $100 apartment with 1 bedroom per person.
Currently, the bottom 2% of income earners in the U.S. receive about $50,000 of benefits per year. Granted, a lot of that is healthcare which you apparently are excluding from your number, but $500/wk is about what such people receive in the U.S. in addition to healthcare, and they do not have to be able or willing to work.
Are you excluding other benefits here, like housing? I imagine you are.
Shop lifting could just about be moral, if a starving family stole food, or a mother stole baby care etc and then only in the case where the shop itself could not go out or business and violence is not used. This isn’t most cases.
Switzerland pays for basic accommodation, health insurance and gives you roughly 1k USD in cash per month. Not a huge amount given local costs but definitely enough not to starve or go naked. Potentially a better deal than some low-paid jobs, TBH. .
In some sense, adulthood and legal residence is the only requirement for that.
But of course, refugees (of whatever legitimacy) also get (less) housing and cash.
FWIW, the specific deal varies across northern Europe but overall, starve or be homeless you generally won't.
I guess my biggest concern with your plan is that the people harmed by almost all shoplifting are not the people who have the power to solve it. Stealing from local stores with no consequences means there would be no local stores. Maybe a big chain with their own security can survive, but then only the "rich" can have stores. This seems far less than ideal and counter to your own stated goals. If it should be okay to steal from the rich, then you would want a system that doesn't create perverse incentives that actually benefit the rich while immiserating just about everyone else.
The claim that stores are closing due to shoplifting is largely specious (it may be true in some specific cases). Quite often chain stores (e.g., CVS) simply overbuilt with too many stores too close to each other so they cannibalize each other's sales. This is true of some fast food places too.
Quite plausible. On the other hand, if shoplifting were literally made legal, do you have reason at all to believe that small shops could survive?
A rule that you can only steal from certain shops that make enough money seems likely to result in significant issues. Like someone robbing from a store they think is rich to find out it doesn't meet the criteria, or perverse incentives for companies to make themselves poor, or all kinds of unintended consequences.
No one's going to make shoplifting legal. If people en masse come to the conclusion that in a society where some people have no alternative to poverty, shoplifting is permissible, they won't legalize shoplifting, they'll institute alternatives to poverty.
The people most directly harmed aren't the store chains (although many of their employees are, in various ways), they're the actual honest paying customers who have to pay more to cover for both the losses and the security to prevent further losses.
Felt the same way about #1. I definitely want to 'settle down', but it has nothing to do with either marrying or getting children; it has to do with moving to live together for me.
"Until, for example, there is a reasonable welfare system I think people basically have the right to just take things from people who are substantially richer than yourself "
Well throw open your front door then, Philosophy Bear, because I'm coming for the goodies! You are (I can presume) substantially richer than me, so that makes it okay for me to take your stuff!
We've got several categories of theft that we're talking about here:
(1) Necessity. Someone really does need baby formula and really doesn't have the money to pay for it. That should be treated sympathetically and given the benefit of the doubt.
(2) Opportunism. Stupid teenagers on a dare, who yeah are better treated with a slap on the wrist, and the likes of the Delaware state budget director and the Bay Area retired women who can well afford the goods and are stealing for personal gain or profit, and should be punished severely in line with "you have no reason to do this and you should know better".
(3) Crime - either as part of organised retail theft or just a pattern of criminality as a person. That's the prison squad, because even with a "reasonable welfare system" they will still steal (while claiming social welfare benefits to the maximum they can game out of the system).
Oh yeah, and if "property rights as recognized by the state are more or less totally non-binding" then gimme your house or other place of residence, because you have no right to it just because you pay for it and I don't. You have a deed or rental contract? Sorry, non-binding just like you said! If I'm strong enough to force you out and take it from you, then no crime has been committed: might makes right.
I don't know if you've ever been the victim of theft, but it's a whole different viewpoint on "no punishment at all, not even a warning" because there is no right to enforce these laws" when your money and bus ticket and all the contents of your purse have been stolen by one of these store pick-pockets, and you have no way of getting home and don't have any contacts in that city to say "hey, can you lend me money to buy a ticket home/let me crash at your place?" I was damn lucky this was in the days when there were still phone boxes on the streets and you could make a reverse-charge call so I could ring home for someone to come get me, but that did not make up for the money I had saved being stolen (and I was on unemployment benefit at the time, so no spare "oh well the sum total of happiness in the world has gone up, whistle a happy tune like Bike Theft Guy" capacity for me).
Well, I'm biased from my direct experience. "If I had a shotgun would I fire it in their general direction?" is my feelings towards such events now, not "property is theft".
Yes it damn well is theft - they're thieving *my* property to make it *their* property.
First, property in "property is theft" doesn't mean possession. (Surely, this is neither the original or the common meaning of the term "property", and it should probably always be prepended with "absentee" for clarity. But the full phrase - even not just taken as an idiomatic expression with its own separate meaning - is much more unambiguous, because:) Second, the very point and logic of comparing property to theft is the shared understanding that theft is bad, actually.
Basically, when you're equivocating [abolishing absentee property] with [legalization of theft] (and you do, the Bear did not invoke the phrase, you did), you're falling for the propertied classes' ruse that ownership of land, mine or factory is the same thing as your ownership of a wallet.
(That said, I'm not even sure the Bear actually supports decriminalization of theft qua theft either, rather than advocating for some kind of vastly expanded "Freedom to Roam" in an unnecessarily provocative and unhelpful way.)
Bear didn't make any such fine distinctions. If someone is stealing goods from a supermarket, that's not "possession of a building or land". The goods are the property of the supermarket until paid for, the same way that Bear would claim his money, his nice jacket, his TV etc. are his property - because he paid for them in a shop and the ownership of the goods was transferred from the shop to him, or the money is his because he swapped his labour for payment.
If Bear is saying the shop has no right to claim ownership of the goods and the thief is entitled to steal them, the thief is also entitled to steal Bear's TV and jacket and wallet since Bear has no right to them. He was quick off the draw to go "That's different!" when it was put to him about stealing *his* property. But it's really not. Theft is theft.
"Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don't they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, 'Thou shalt not steal.'"
If ownership of a factory that I built and paid for and filled with machinery and raw materials is not the same as ownership of a wallet I purchased and filled with my cards and money, pray tell me what kinds of ownership are we talking about?
I don't think you are, in fact, substantially poorer than me. Even if you are, it's very unlikely you could *know that*, so stealing from me would be immoral. You've not at all stuck to what I said. For starters, notice that what I spoke of was *shoplifting*. Of course nothing I said applied to you in that situation.
I've had stuff stolen, and sure that's a problem, but perhaps it hadn't occurred to you that people also cannot get home- or, for example, feed themselves- because they have no money.
"Oh yeah, and if "property rights as recognized by the state are more or less totally non-binding" then gimme your house or other place of residence, because you have no right to it just because you pay for it and I don't. You have a deed or rental contract? Sorry, non-binding just like you said! If I'm strong enough to force you out and take it from you, then no crime has been committed: might makes right."
Might doesn't make right, but neither do property rights. The reason you can't morally take money from people who are at your level, or lower, or slightly richer, or vulnerable in some way, isn't property rights, it's because it's not going to make things better, it's going to make them worse.
I don't particularly want open season on everything, but I'm bound to support it until not a single soul is involuntarily poor. Gregory of Nyssa, the first slavery abolitionist was right about this- poverty is immoral for more or less the same reason slavery is.
Oh, when it's a question of stealing from *you*, *now* it's about morals? The leopards weren't supposed to eat *your* face? Sorry pumpkin, youi made no such distinctions in your original claim:
"However, I hold that the existing socioeconomic order is radically illegitimate and property rights as recognized by the state are more or less totally non-binding. Until, for example, there is a reasonable welfare system I think people basically have the right to just take things from people who are substantially richer than yourself (my paper on political philosophy in relation to these issues, submitted to the journal for controversial ideas was desk rejected for not being controversial enough, making me think the whole think "controversial" here just means "unwoke")."
(1) If property rights are non-binding, that includes *your* rights to *your* property
(2) If the state cannot and should not recognise or enforce such rights, your property is now fair game for theft
(3) How do you know I am not substantially poorer than you? Do you require a Certificate of Poverty from every would-be thief? Who would issue those or enforce those?
On point #3 - And more that point, how is "poverty" even calculated?
After all, people earning well above the median wage can be paycheck to paycheck or even ever-sinking into debt under certain life circumstances (having a lot of dependents, etc). Is someone who purchased real estate but doesn't have $1000 in a cash emergency fund more or less "poor" than the debt-free renter with $10,000 in the bank? Etc.
Re: Until, for example, there is a reasonable welfare system I think people basically have the right to just take things from people who are substantially richer than yourself
In a true emergency, maybe? The law does recognize a necessity defense-- but it has to be a really serious need like breaking into a house to take shelter from violent, life-endangering weather. Even in the US, with its patchy safety net, the need to steal is rarely a matter of life and death.
That's the plea of necessity - a starving man can steal food and it's no crime (or sin). It's a lot different from "well property is theft ackshully, victimless crime, insurance pays out, ACAB, society is at fault ultimately" attitudes which the genuine criminals laugh at (while taking advantage of the suckers who promote such views).
Point 2 strikes me as a 'luxury belief'. If you stop enforcing property rights, or only selectively enforce them, you will not get a situation in which the commoner 'takes back' what is rightfully his from the rich bastard. What you will get is a further breakdown of social order in poor communities, making them even poorer and with less chance of crawling out of their poverty. The rich will use their wealth to insulate themselves from your policy, and anyone else is screwed as any apparent wealth over the lowest common denominator will be promptly stolen. The end result will be an even further hollowing out of the middle class, and a wave of crime rippling through communities spreading misery and tragedy. The lower classes will become dominated by gangs who band together to protect themselves, who will begin to enforce something like property rights with the threat of swift violence. The gang leaders will of course be strong-men who hoard the remaining wealth for themselves while the national GDP plummets because productive enterprise will be next to impossible. Your society will be defined by sharp wealth inequality, government corruption, mass poverty, patriarchal control, and omnipresent violence. (See for example, Venezuela) The politics of envy does not beget utopia, world history the past 100 years has shown that over and over and over.
Yeah, the ones stealing the most won't be the poorest, it will be the strongest and the most asocial. The poorest will have even their little taken away from them.
If the state cannot and will not enforce property rights, the rich will hire men with guns to enforce them for them. Under our current system of law, you have some chance of appealing against the state. Sweep away the law, and there's no appeal against a man with a gun shooting you for robbing Mr Moneybags.
Re 4, the BMI thing, I too sympathize with the desire to represent yourself accurately and add nuance in a way that the poll doesn't represent. Not specifically for BMI for me (I had more of an issue with the family history of religion one, where I didn't even learn my grandmother was religious until her funeral and I really feel like "none" would give a more accurate impression of how I was raised, but technically isn't correct because there is in fact some distant family history I now know of). I think it's just an unfortunately necessary part of collecting data to do statistics on that some individual details will be flattened out, and I console myself that when everything is binned and analyzed, things like this will mostly average out.
Re 3, I hadn't even considered that such minor things might be counted as harrassment (and as such answered that the harrassing ones should be arrested).
I did the same as you for the harassment one. I'm a bit annoyed now that Philosophy Bear has pointed out that some people might interpret "harassment" as just asking for money or aimless shouting. I feel like I've added to the "tough on crime" pile without meaning to.
Again, I wonder how Bear would feel about "aimless shouting" if it was a camp of homeless under his window yelling, shouting and getting into fights at all hours of the day and night. He was very fast to defend *his* right to *his* property against theft and that it would be immoral to steal from *him*. Once again, I feel he imagines "I just walk past to my own safe, quiet home far away from the homeless" and not "I am constantly hassled by them every time I step outside".
Seconded #3—I'm not sure blanket institutionalization is appropriate, but outpatient care at least. As for harassment, I think people are way too sensitive about that and should get over themselves; unless they're clearly dangerous, I don't think anyone needs to be arrested.
Jumping on this to say: the timeline on 'ready to settle down' is insanely short. I cannot imagine any scenario where, after 6 months of dating, I felt like I knew someone well enough to tie myself to them legally and financially - and that's even without considering the issue of kids.
My criteria for 'compatibility has been evaluated; ready to get engaged' looks kinda like:
- We line up on all the obvious dealbreakers (mono/poly, kids yes/no, how many and when, lifestyle, pets, religion, finances, etc)
- We've known each other for 2+ years through ups and downs; we each know how the other handles stress, boredom, big emotions, disagreements, compromise and change.
- We've lived together for at least a year and it's working; we don't have ongoing disagreements about stuff like cleanliness, routines, division of household labor
- We've spent significant time with each other's family and close friends, and we can get along well enough
A lot of friends around my age have gotten engaged or married in the last ~3 years, and I think the shortest timeframe from 'started dating' to 'got engaged' was around 2 years, with 3-4 years being more usual. I answered this question 'No I would not be willing to do that', even though I would like to meet a partner for marriage and consider myself 'ready to settle down', because 6 months is incomprehensible to me. I think the survey will probably systematically underestimate the number of people who are genuinely ready because the timeline is absurdly short. (In case any commenters would find my demographics interesting I'm 30, female, single, Australian.)
Even if utilitarianism is true, it’s obviously wrong to steal from the rich (even on the individual level). If it’s illegal, there’s a good chance you get caught and punished such that the disutility outweighs the utility. “Crime doesn’t pay” is correct. Crime is an irrational occupation because of this; high-level rich crime bosses are rare.
If you mean legality, then it’s even more obviously absurd. Without the ability to be rich, all entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, etc. quit and society collapses because there’s no incentive to be rich. The ones that somehow keep existing become mafia bosses who essentially shoot every poor thief on sight.
One thing that already bothered me last year: the questions on mental health disorders don't have an option like "I had this in the past, but I don't have this right now". If I had a severe depression 5 years ago, but have recovered and don't need medication anymore, what should I answer? That I have this condition? But that's not correct.
In such cases, I reply "I don't have this condition, and neither does anyone in my family", but this makes it hard for you to interpret the result.
I would recommend to either offer this option next year, or to rephrase the answers into something like "I have/had a formal diagnosis of this condition."
It’s been raised many times, but not changed. I assume Scott thinks this is nitpicking and that his intended interpretation is obvious. Since I don’t know which interpretation that is, I leave them blank unless I can answer ‘no’.
Just an extra data point--I answer the opposite way. Some of these categories may be in remission, and maybe they'll never come back, but I'm not sure anyone is every truly cured of them. I have depression even if I haven't had a depressive episode in a long time; my brother is an alcoholic even if he hasn't touched the stuff in years.
I really do not get those 2 social-interaction questions:
"Don't count interactions with people who you live with. Don't count interactions that take place as part of your job." That would be, dunno, two?
*Do* count social interactions that take place as part of child-rearing, hobbies, activism, or any other non-job task. I have three small kids in the house, thus: 30? 50? Suggestion: make it two questions.
But then: "Same as above, but now you can also count interactions with non-parent, non-children, non-romantic-partner people who you live with (eg roommates, siblings)." So, we WERE supposed to count parents/romantic-partners in the first question?!? - I do live with my wife, surprisingly. We even interact socially, I`d say. - I skip the question, not to spoil the numbers.
Suggestion: make it a dozen questions. How much time you interact with: kids you live with - romantic partner you live with - other family you live with - friends you live with - others you live with / kids you do not live with - romantic partner you do not live with - other family you do not live with - friends you do not live with - others you do not live with. Just 10, but the next issue covers 2 more: I have no idea why "social interaction" as part of my job should be any less "social interaction", unless it is mainly "mechanical". For most jobs, that interaction is intensely "social".
The first question excludes time spent with anyone you live or work with, including partners, kids, and roommates. For the second question you're allowed to count time spent with siblings and roommates, but still not allowed to count partners, parents, or kids.
In particular you have to exclude time with wife and kids from both questions. If your household is just your immediate family, then the answers to both questions should be the same.
My household is only members of my immediate family, indeed, no renting out a room to strangers. Considered this standard among adults. Why then ask 2 questions? - So: two hours for both, seriously? But, hey, my sister is in the house right now (xmas time) - she drops in several times a year, so let it be on average: two-and-a-half-hours social interaction a week for the 2nd question. Well, fun with analysing THAT. - I do get the logic, finally, so thank you! - But then the 2nd question could have just been: "IF you live with other people (but not parents, kids, romantic partners or co-workers): how many hours you spend with them socially interacting?"
"social interactions that take place as part of child-rearing" means going to toddler groups or chatting to other parents at the school gate; it doesn't mean your interactions with your own children, which are already excluded by the question.
Chatting with other parents at the school gate? Why should I ever? That would have never came to my mind when reading that question. Serves me right for being autistic and a father.
I see. As a non-native-speaker, I struggled with that phrase. (Ola, Alejandro!) - Otoh, the first part of the first question seems then the same as the second part: "Not those you live with, not those you work with. Count all those you do not live or work with." Why the repetition? - And why those categories: " going to toddler groups or chatting to other parents at the school gate" (add visits at the schools doctor+school activities+school consultations) are interactions that are exactly as obligatory and as much fun (to me: as little fun) as "social interactions at work".
Scott only knows. Well, he does seem to live in a house with several other friends. And his kids are still too young for kindergarten/school ...
I'm boycotting these two questions because I have no idea what "interaction" might mean. Does it mean talking to the bartender at lunch? Does it include the roughly 30 hours I've spent in the past week thinking through a long series of back and forth emails brainstorming the nuts and bolts of my brother's new tech startup on the other side of the country?
I agree a lot. What "interaction" is "social", anyways? And what kind? - "Social interaction" may be a bliss and save from isolation. Or make one run to a lonely place to be save from all those small-talking status-seeking chit-chatting shitheads. :D Merry xmas btw to all humans on earth - but pls, leave the room and close the door. Reading ACX and writing a comment every once in a while - I consider "social interaction, I`d rather have".
My issue with this question was that I wasn't sure if it counted only in-person interactions, or if things like online chatting, playing video games, or talking on the phone would count. I decided to go with in-person only, but the difference between the two is probably 50+ hours.
What number should I enter on the political spectrum test if I am a Socdem but believe that capitalism can really be phased out someday, like Olof Palme or the German SPD of the '30s ? I entered 3 but am unsure between 2 and 3
Good point - I'm reminded of an article about the frustration working-class British voters faced a few years ago.
They wanted a party that would protect their jobs with tariffs and government support for strong trade unions, but didn't want open borders and LGBTQ+ values taught in the schools.
This is a simplification, but Labour offered the economic platform they wanted, and the Tories the social platform, but neither party offered both.
Given today's Labour keeps backsliding on queer rights, perhaps this is who they're trying to win over. Politics is weird in the UK though, because FPTP makes political posturing for groups on the borderline more effective than just straightforwardly representing the majority viewpoint. (The same is true in the US).
Fwiw, my architectural preferences have more to do with things like layout, cost, maintenance, energy efficiency, etc rather than the aesthetics of the edifice. For example, I prefer a simpler (but still sloped) roof design over a more complicated one because it will be cheaper to build and potentially maintain. Flat roofs have more leaks, afaik. I ultimately picked the house with the porch because I like porches, even though I prefer those porches on a much simpler "American Farmhouse" style (which wasn't an option).
We've been house hunting for months... If I had massive gobs of money to build a house, I think I would build something Japanese-inspired with lots of porches and courtyards. As is, we're putting money down on a Farmhouse-style tomorrow.
ETA: I thought the questions about kids were weird. The thing stopping us from having more kids isn't income, but time. Kids take a lot of time. I already have 5 of them; I can't see a way to add another without taking away too much time from the others. By the time my youngest are self-sufficient enough to let me have more time, I'll be too old for more.
On the other hand, I'm happy with 5, so maybe the question was good enough?
Perhaps you have the same thing with houses that I have with cars - I don't feel like car models are aesthetically different, they are all equally ugly so I only care about function when choosing cars. Meanwhile, I hear other people saying things like: 'I took this model because it's the only good-looking all-wheel drive minibus on the market,' which doesn't make any sense to me. At the same time, I'm willing to sacrifice some function to get a better-looking house, garden, or a piece of furniture.
This is a quote from Mies van de Rohe. I can't speculate too much but based on that I think he's implying that good aesthetics are functional. This is the core tenet of modernism, the thing you guys like to rag on so much! (not to single you out)
OK, but it can be possible only if you don't have the feeling of aesthetics apart from function in some context (e.g. me and cars). We cannot easily change such feelings, or the lack of them. Btw getting hedonistic pleasure from beauty is quite functional, come to think of it, it's good for health. I claim that modernist houses (imagine Soviet 1970s residential areas) are dysfunctional because a large part of the population (probably the majority) has to fight depression when passing them.
I think I get what you're saying and agree -- there's no accounting for taste. If you got to replace a soviet style brutalist apartment complex, what would you look to for inspiration? You have to build on the same parcel of land (ie you can't do a long, squat, building, it has to be tall), and I think we'd agree it should have roughly the same number of apartments, because as depressing as brutalism is, homelessness is worse.
For the office architecture questions, I chose both of the older-looking buildings because I think they’re very nice to look at. However, since I know that style is defunct, I would be very happy to choose a basic box over not building anything.
For "Same as above, except now there *are* empty homeless shelter beds in your city. The homeless say the shelters are filthy and tyrannical; they prefer to camp on the street.", I would have liked an option of "Fix the shelters so they are not filthy or tyrannical",
Assume that "police force them to go to shelters" includes "and once in the shelters, they get directed to support services and put in contact with a social worker".
Does that change your view?
I do think that yes, there needs to be more than "sweep them off the streets" but sometimes the least worst option will be that.
There's also the issue of homeless people not wanting to live under even reasonable rules, like "you can't do hard drugs in the shelter" or "you can't bring a gun." I feel differently about the answer depending on the reason shelters were rejected in the first place.
"I would have liked an option of "Fix the shelters so they are not filthy or tyrannical"
That's an entire can of worms of its own. Sometimes shelters are filthy/tyrannical because they are not kept well and the people running them are incompetent or scammers. Sometimes they're considered tyrannical because "the people running it make the homeless listen to sermons or try to convert them to Christianity" (funnily enough, an element in the Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever")*
Sometimes they're 'tyrannical' because "they won't let me bring alcohol/drugs in". Because if they do let alcohol/drugs in, then the drunk/drugged homeless often rob, harass, and assault the other homeless in the shelter, which means the other homeless won't go into shelters because "they're filthy/tyrannical due to the dangerous homeless there".
There *are* "wet" shelters which allow people to drink, and again there are questions "do these really help or not?"
* In 1930 Great Depression New York, Edith Keeler runs the 21st Street Mission which serves the poor and homeless. Kirk and Spock end up there. From the transcript of the episode:
(Kirk and Spock collect their bowls of soup and pieces of bread, and sit at one of the long tables.)
EDITH: Good evening.
(She steps up onto a small stage with a piano.)
MAN: You'll be sorry.
KIRK: Why?
MAN: You expect to eat for free or something? You got to listen to Goody Two-shoes.
EDITH: Now, as I'm sure somebody out there has said, it's time to pay for the soup.
MAN: Not that she's a bad-looking broad, but if she really wanted to help out a fella in need
KIRK: Shut up. Shut up. I want to hear what she has to say.
SPOCK: Yes, of course, Captain.
EDITH: Now, let's start by getting one thing straight. I'm not a do-gooder. If you're a bum, if you can't break off of the booze or whatever it is that makes you a bad risk, then get out. Now I don't pretend to tell you how to find happiness and love when every day is just a struggle to survive, but I do insist that you do survive because the days and the years ahead are worth living for. One day soon man is going to be able to harness incredible energies, maybe even the atom. Energies that could ultimately hurl us to other worlds in some sort of spaceship. And the men that reach out into space will be able to find ways to feed the hungry millions of the world and to cure their diseases. They will be able to find a way to give each man hope and a common future, and those are the days worth living for. Our deserts will bloom. (She continues under the dialogue.)
...EDITH: Prepare for tomorrow. Get ready. Don't give up.
Though Edith Keeler's preaching, in addition to being unusually materialist and worldly for a missionary (unsurprising given the writer and showrunner), is very nearly a self-negating prophecy. If she's allowed to continue, we learn, the future will be *terrible* as a direct result of her success. She's only correct about the future if she's prevented from trying to contribute to it coming about.
I'm not sure if her institution is high barrier or low. She enforces rules and makes them listen to her sermons, but she also shelters Kirk & Spock from police pursuit for theft (followed by assaulting a police officer) despite Kirk lying to her about it.
1) work question doesn't deal with multiple applicable, eg I'm officially a full time student (remotely) on a degree course, but I'm also self employed freelance. At various times in my life I was employed and self employed at the same time. I marked self employed but was seriously considering "student".
2) socialising questions don't say if online/remote counts or do you just mean meat space. I didn't answer those questions for that reason.
3) I don't understand why I can't tell that my family's of origin background was atheist. In this way you're losing the potentially very interesting distinction between people who were brought up as atheists vs people who "lost" or left religion. In my observation there's a big difference in how those two categories operate. So the question is clear but I think it's badly conceived.
4) The length of marriage sequence is confusing because you're at times asking about first marriage even of people who have been married multiple times but then about current marriage, so why not have everyone who's ever been married answer those early ones and then filter by currently married or not? I am a widow and answered for my (only) marriage and when I realised I shouldn't have it was too late to go back.
5) the settling down questions don't apply for people past breeding age, AND assume that being in an unmarried LTR possibly with children is not settled down. I answered not ready to settle down to both but it's more that I've already produced all the offspring I ever might as I'm post menopausal.
3) Are there families where the previous generations were wholly atheist as far as anyone remembers? It seems unlikely, considering that only 4 generations ago most people had 16 different great-great-great-grandparents. Many of us were raised as atheists but that's usually only one or two generations.
I have no immediate family left unless I count my three step-siblings, only two of whom I keep in touch with. My extended family is all over the map religiously, ranging from Mormon to Catholic to never-darken-a-church door. I'm not even sure what value asking about extended family has in these sorts of questions. Maybe some immigrants have very tight knit clans, but most people are fairly distant from cousins and the like and even when they keep in touch (as I do) their more distant family isn't much of an influence on them in personal matters.
Ok, then I suppose you could use a general Christian label if that existed. It must be even harder for people who have Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist ancestors all at the same distance. In this case, it would be best to leave it unanswered so as not to muddle the test results that Scott is looking for, I guess.
Re 3, I've been commenting that on the survey for years.
A religious child of religious parents is different from a religious child of atheist parents and grandparents whose distant ancestors may have been religious once.
For crime: I wish there was an option for caning. I put community service instead.
And for the "What should be the punishment for 10 offences", in a world where they're let off with minimal consequences for the first 9 offences, I think jumping to life in prison the 10th time is unfair to the dumb kleptos. But in a world where they're given escalating punishments each time, e.g 20 hrs service/1 caning, then 30 hrs service/2 canings, etc... up to the 10th, and they're still committing crime, I'd be happy to throw them away for life.
For the homeless encampment question, I'd really want the city to just build more housing so the costs go down to a reasonable level. I think being heavy handed with police action against homelessness in a city where no cheap housing exists is cruel. Because it means very incompetent people who are bad at earning and keeping money will be perpetually homeless and perpetually beaten up by the police. If housing prices are reasonable however, it'd only be the people who you truly can't help who are still on the street, and fuck them.
Do you think it’s OK for police to move the homeless from a high Cost of Living place to a low Cost of Living place within a 100 mile radius? (Yes, I’m aware this often happens the other way around in the Western world).
I'd support them offering free bus tickets. I don't support forcibly doing it, separating someone from what limited network they have seems cruel and counter-productive.
By this, do you mean ALLOW more housing to be built? After all, in the US, governments don't build housing, but companies (for profit) and individuals (to use) do.
That one is tough. More housing would help but not everyone, because some people are too incapable of living independently/crazy/criminal to live even in government provided housing.
The homeless shelter question is valid, because some places are bad - due to other homeless people. A shelter that doesn't let you drink/take drugs may be seen as brutal by a subset of homeless people, but on the other hand letting drunk/drugged homeless intermingle with other homeless leads straight back to "I don't want to go to a shelter because I'm at risk of being robbed/assaulted by the other homeless there".
Unhappily, there is not - contra Philosophy Bear - one quick, obvious and easy solution to the problem.
Your comment on caning seems either ignorant or cruel. Many people unfamiliar with the process imagine something akin to a parent spanking a child, or maybe slightly more severe, but in the few countries that practice caning they're harsh enough that even a very low number of blows can cause permanent disfigurement, incontinence, organ damage, or even death. Higher numbers (but still below 10 strokes) can lead to flesh mulch splashing across the walls and ceiling.
In most cases the imagined severity is closer to reality if one mentally replaced all instances of "caning" with "stabbing" - i.e. should shoplifting $100 worth of goods be punished by being publicly stabbed a few times?
It's possible to cane people without causing permanent injury. Dismissing caning categorically because it's practiced in brutal ways in some countries is like dismissing incarceration categorically based on the worst totalitarian prison camps.
I completed the survey, but have comments on a few of the questions:
* Maybe the following two questions should have an option like "I haven't used or accessed them, although I know they exist" :
- Do you read the r/slatestarcodex subreddit?
- Do you read the SlateStarCodex Discord?
* The question "Have you ever had a cavity?" seemed to be bowled out of the blue among one or two questions on Covid and pigeon chests. I answered on the assumption it referred to a tooth cavity, but wondered if it might be some obscure pulmonary condition affecting the lungs or chest cavity! So I'd recommend expanding the question slightly to "Have you ever had a tooth cavity?" if that is the intended question.
Re: social interactions - do I count interactions that happen in the workplace and are with colleagues, but are unrelated to work (eg corporate social events, office gym)?
Other "blue collar"? I finally feel seen! Although of course I'd imagine that usually conjures up an association of The Trades or something else where sooner or later you're talking about real money. Not the wonderous world of retail..."it's called a service job cause you exist to serve Dangerous Professionals"
After taking the survey a few times, I kinda wish it were possible to auto-fill my answers from last year, for stuff like demographics that generally don't change much. Some small deviation on e.g. pretax income doesn't matter that much in the big picture, but It's The Principle Of The Thing. Same for all the spectrum choices, where it'd also be useful to see what Past Me answered, to assess subjective drift. (Maybe this is already possible by using old ACX Survey keys? But they never seem to work for me...plus Beware Trivial Inconveniences)
Eh, retail can be pink collar/very low white collar - think managers or even junior managers in supermarket chains and your own world of hotels. If you're mostly standing behind a desk dealing with paperwork/computer work and face-to-face customer interactions, it's not blue collar as such.
Signed, former (and never, as God is my witness, ever again) retail worker
I think a good Schelling point between blue and white collars for workers that don't work in the primary/secondary sectors is "will anyone notice and care if you have a bad day and do only half of what you usually do?"
If the answer is "yes, this is tracked and I will be reprimanded or paid less", you're blue collar.
I have family members (within two generations) with this condition
I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family"
I'm going to assume this only refers to *blood* relatives, though this is not made explicit. You might be trying to gauge the impact of depression, in which case relatives by marriage would matter. This ambiguity about types of 'family' impacts a lot of questions.
"Do you live within 50 miles of at least one of your parents?"
Also, blood parents? Or parents by marriage? I'll assume blood parents.
"Don't count interactions with people who you live with.
*Do* count social interactions that take place as part of child-rearing, hobbies, activism, or any other non-job task."
I'm going to assume interacting with my kids is social time for this question, even though I live with them, which is disqualifying.
"Same as above, but now you can also count interactions with non-parent"
Not really a nitpick because the question as posed is clear, but regarding the question of running over protesters, as an opponent of private car use in cities (conditional on well-designed city like Copenhagen or Amsterdam and with the usual caveats, which sum up to opposition of private car use in cities), I would be strongly against letting drivers running them over, but if the protest was blocking e.g. a tram line, I would support forcibly clearing them out and wouldn't feel sorry about any lethalities that might occur in the process.
I am categorically opposed to letting people take the law into their own hands, other than a narrow self defense exception- -and that needs to be A) a serious threat to life and limb not a mere inconvenience and B) must be limited to the minimum effective action.
Yeah, I wouldn't set it up as a principle that "you can run over protesters" because I think people do still have the obligation to be careful and even annoying stupid protests are not liable for a death sentence.
But if you're trying to get out of a protest and you accidentally hit someone, or if you are being pursued/surrounded by people who are violent (banging on car, trying to open the door or smash the window to get at you) and your only recourse is to drive through the crowd, I think you should get more lenience if you do injure or even kill someone.
I don't think there's any justification for injuring (let alone killing) innocent people simply to escape a dangerous situation. Some leniency-- yes, but you should still owe stiff restitution if you've hurt people who were not themselves breaking any laws or were any threat to you.
I think Deiseach started with the presumption that at least some of the protestors involved were not innocent (I.E. Were attacking the car and threatening the person inside.)
I agree that if someone wasn't involved with the protest *at all* and was just going about their day, then they may be truly innocent. But in the given scenario, none of the protestors likely are.
Being involved in a group committing criminal behavior typically makes a person guilty to a degree. I'm not a lawyer, but what prevents this from being, at least, conspiracy to commit false imprisonment and conspiracy to commit assault if other people in the protest were aware of the intent to impede movement and took meaningful action to further that goal, even if they were not, themselves, violent?
That is, we may be falling out on the definition of 'innocent' here. There's some history of cops arresting *everyone* in the street when things like this happen. I'm not sure how the judge would rule on that.
Physically blocking someone from leaving a dangerous situation is rarely an innocent action, especially if you're doing so by illegally occupying a vehicular right-of-way.
Interesting take. Would you be in favor of car drivers being allowed to run over protestors in non-cities? Like imagine some hypothetical place were cars are clearly better than alternative means of transportation: should car drivers be allowed to run over road-blocking protestors there?
I would say my rationale is mostly about aversion to actions destroying/harming the commons more so than anything else and here, through virtue of being so space-inefficient (and other harms from chemical and noise pollution, being the most dangerous form of transportation to other people in the city, endless lines of parked cars being an eyesore, etc), private car use, or more specifically car-dependent city design, is hurting the commons in its own right. However, this rationale of course applies just the same to e.g. blocking the car traffic in arterial roads or highways where cars are perfectly welcome. And I also feel strongly about other activities hurting the commons, not just blocking traffic, from littering to graffiti to political corruption.
Although I also have an objection to individual drivers, whether they are piloting a sedan or a passenger train, running over people: I am not averse to violence if violence is what it takes (the first action wouldn't be to break the protest guns blazing but tell the protesters go away, then drag them away, but if they get hurt in the process of being dragged away, or if they keep coming back or resist forcefully enough the police can't, THEN I have no objection to the protesters getting hurt), but I think there are strong reasons to restricting said violence exclusively to the purview of the Leviathan.
It seems that supporting "car running over protestors" implies supporting all of the following:
a) capital punishment for disruption of traffic
b) random individuals (drivers) acting as judge, jury and executioner
c) private car use
I feel that if you support a) and b) but not c) it would be within the spirit of the question to still answer supportive of it.
Specifically I would intuit that a) and b) are so much more essential for the nature of a society that c) vanishes in comparison but given the real impacts of private car use on society I will grant you that this is debatable.
Ironically, but this might be a local quirk, where I live the thing protesters would most likely be protesting in such a situation would be private car use.
I think a) and b) are a strawman. Alternative takes exist, such as "If someone runs into the road, refuses to move, and is struck by a car and killed, that person committed suicide. Because the protester was primarily responsible for his own death, the driver will not be prosecuted."
I don't believe that your suicide framing will convince many people who are ethically opposed to running over other people that they would be in fact doing a good deed by assisting the protester's suicide. It seems to be absolutely glaringly obvious that the protesters intent is not suicide and therefore the driver would in fact not be assisting them in accoplishing their goal.
In the other direction I also do not believe that many people who _would_ run over protesters explain this to themselves as "they were committing suicide".
Of course neither you nor I have a way to prove what "many people" think, so this is leading nowhere.
Had the same question. Also, I'm wary about the definition of 'spiritual', as everyone seems to use a different definition. Is 'having any interest in existential or philosophical questions' considered spiritual?
I think people feel that "atheist" is more definite or dogmatic about "I know there are no god(s)/I do not believe in god(s)" whereas "agnostic" leaves more nuance "maybe god(s) exist, I could be convinced on good evidence".
That implies atheists cannot be convinced by good evidence, which I think undermines atheism. Atheists think there is no god, but agnostics are unsure whether there is actually a god.
For this purpose, I don't see why not believing in a specific god but possibly believing in mystic forces of some sort wouldn't qualify as "atheist but spiritual". Would someone worshiping vague water, air, and forest spirits count as atheist?
"Would someone worshiping vague water, air, and forest spirits count as atheist?"
Interesting query. I imagine it would depend upon if the person felt those forces were personified in some form, as distinct from being natural energies? I think we're getting into Chaotic Magick territory here 😀
From the other side of it, Lewis' Materialist Magicians (as the end of disguised devil worship from "The Screwtape Letters") might be a form of 'atheist but spiritual':
"I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The "Life Force", the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work — the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits" — then the end of the war will be in sight."
(As an aside, this is why I love you guys and this place; I get to discuss the most interesting, not to say weird, questions!)
Buddhism is a non-theistic religion. A person can be a practicing Buddhist and believe in a god or gods, doubt whether such beings exist, or be fairly certain there's no God.
I wanted a "religious but not spiritual" option. I enjoy mass, and think that church is generally a good thing, but I don't believe in what they preach.
In many places in the US first time shoplifters will get a night or two in jail waiting for a hearing to decide bail or to be added to a plea docket. Then you'll often get time served plus restitution plus court fees. Sometimes that will be elevated to community service if you seem particularly incorrigible to the judge.
This seems fair to some first approximation, considering logistical constraints.
Time served seems like roughly a weekend in jail.
Community service is then added on top of time served, because instant hearings don't exist, so it seems worse than a weekend in jail, not like a lesser sentence.
So I think you are also asking us to imagine we flip to a summons only system for shoplifting. Maybe that's what they do in San Francisco, is it just like writing you a parking ticket?
In that case probably I'd change to community service but I'd have other concerns.
Somewhat related, I am surprised you left out the $100 threshold in the questions about personal experience, to avoid pollees saying "I'm pretty edgy I took a stick of gum as an unruly teen"
My politics have changed, but not so much in the past 10 years. I used to be more ancap, I've become more tolerant of government.
I still pretty much think of myself as white, but being light-skinned Jewish, I spent some years going for "person of liminality" and have since settled on "off-white".
I still believe disasters from incompetent human use of AI are more likely than the human race being wiped out by AI.
Possibly should be in another thread, but what's the likelihood that people will be able to produce AIs with the safety controls taken off?
My opinion of social justice is very mixed-- it both points at some real problems and is emotionally abusive.
Your mental health questions combine "I don't have the condition and neither does anyone in my family", but a person could not have the condition while having family members who do.
It would be nice to have a format for the income question-- I needed to take out a comma.
It might be worth asking about non-clinical depression.
I had what I guess was anomalous long covid. The obvious effect was on my sense of taste, and I took about three years to fully recover.
I live in a row house, which isn't on your list.
I consider phone calls with friends to be social interaction.
I feel like my own views have not changed that drastically but the Overton Window has shifted more to the left. Though to be honest, I have moved somewhat more rightward as well, as I've gotten older. So while I still consider myself centre-right, it's plainly a degree or two more to the right as compared with contemporary mores.
I'm the same with social justice - the original idea was not bad, but the wokescolds took it over and made it repugnant. It became more about "can you parrot off the correct shibboleths to avoid cancellation" than achieving a more equitable society.
Yes, the issue with the woke question is that the scolds and cancelling and quotas are clearly nonsense and harmful... But I do think racism and sexism are still major problems, and in the past 5 years or so have been seeing a dramatic step up in explicit racism (including antisemitism) and misogyny both online and off, which I don't think is unreasonable to partially attribute to the anti woke momentum.
I agree racism and sexism have definitely become a much more common problem in recent years, but I think that's more correlated with rather than attributable to the alt-right, anti-woke, etc movements. The main problem seems to be that there is no longer popular support for any true anti-bigotry movement, so now a lot of people are choosing the lesser of two evils between the "inclusive and diverse" left (which openly discriminates against men, whites, Asians, and recently Jews) and the "anti-woke" right (which is more subtly bigoted against everyone else).
Yes, I strongly agree here. One can have a naive version of colour/gender blindness
... But the basic principle is pretty good and is better than the alternatives when interacting with individuals / a general principle of elevating individual Vs group rights.
An individualist anti racist version of this looks like being opposed to ethnic profiling for stop and search, even if (for example) black people commit more crime on average in your city. This may be true, but it doesn't make it any less injust or degrading for innocent black men to be pulled aside when walking home (and for the record, the *only* colleagues (finance) who have ever been stopped and searched by the police are black).
I guess "simultaneously over- and under-" is the reasonable position on social justice / woke issues, and probably a consensus here. There are genuine problems, but the proposed solutions are often crazy, and their real purpose seems to be signaling loyalty to a political tribe instead of actually fixing the problems. Problematic opinions get punished. Genuinely bad actions, not that much.
I was annoyed at this question last year, because I fell into this category but at least 2 years was closer. The blog is almost 4 years old though, now, so "1 or 2 years" is woefully insufficient.
Clicked "No" on publicizing my data after checking that I'm the only one in my country who's answering these surveys and thus obviously identifiable. ;)
Would be great if there was a way to hide certain answers and release the rest to public, but I suppose that would mean a lot more job for Scott.
Just like last year I'm unsure about the attractiveness question. Do you want to use it for hypothesis testing, e.g. do attractive people have different opinions on this or that, are they more likely married, etc? In this case, I imagine that a middle-aged woman, who used to be very attractive but is now middle-aged, would muddle the results if she were honest and rated herself as low. I've been having this problem lately.
As far as I can tell an attractive person often stays attractive relative to their age cohort. I'm not sure how one would even start to disentangle relative attractiveness, absolute attractiveness, and shifting social norms around appropriate age gaps between people involved in relationships. For instance, if a taboo develops forbidding age gaps, then someone saying that they are no longer attractive messes up the correlations if they remained as sought after by people in their age cohort as when they were younger. Maybe the question should have specified whether absolute or age-relative attractiveness was intended.
This was a bit of a challenge for me actually; I was probably 4-5/10 as a youth relative to my cohort but have taken substantially better care of myself than my peers in the intervening decades.
> I imagine that a middle-aged woman, who used to be very attractive but is now middle-aged, would muddle the results if she were honest and rated herself as low.
Why would she muddle it? I understand the 1-10 ranking as "If a random stranger that is attracted to your sex has to choose between you and another random stranger of your sex as his or her next long-term sexual partner, what is the probability that he or she will pick you?" This ranking obviously takes ageing into account.
In theory yes. In practice, it will be extremely difficult to provide even a rough estimate of that, as even if you are honest about your chances, actual interactions will never be with random strangers but with people in your social circle, which are typically in your age range....Also, for older people, who probably have far less frequent occasion to check their successes (because they are in a relation, or assumed to be in, and have smaller social circles with even less celibate people in), it's almost inevitable memories of past success/failure will weight much more than current status. I expect most people to interpret the question as "relative to my age cohort", both for self-status-preserving reasons but also completely honest practical reasons.
Also, I suspect than rather that actual attractiveness w.r.t potential romantic partners, it's "reputation" attractiveness, the one you get hinted from friend without any romantic potential (for example same sex friend for heterosexuals). And this one is not necessarily the same, suffer from friend niceness bias and is even more linked to age cohort
I consider it very weird that the shoplifting penalties go from a month to a year when the recent ACX post talked specifically about 3-6 month stays in prison as the current misdemeanor amount (that doesn't get applied)
Given the suggestion that Plato is a wrestling nickname meaning "Broadshoulders", you may be more correct than you think 😁
"There is a traditional story that Plato is a nickname. According to Diogenes Laërtius, writing hundreds of years after Plato's death, his birth name was Aristocles (Ἀριστοκλῆς), meaning 'best reputation'. "Plátōn" (Ancient Greek: Πλάτων) sounds like "Platus" or "Platos", meaning "broad", and according to Diogenes' sources, Plato gained his nickname either from his wrestling coach, Ariston of Argos, who dubbed him "broad" on account of his chest and shoulders, or he gained it from the breadth of his eloquence, or his wide forehead. Philodemus, in extracts from the Herculaneum papyri, corroborates the claim that Plato was named for his "broad forehead". Seneca the Younger, writing hundreds of years after Plato's death, writes "His very name was given him because of his broad chest."
(Modern scholarship being all no-fun spoilsports, they reject this cool origin story).
I love it that all Ancient Greek names, when translated literally, sound like nicknames. Agamemnon = very steadfast. Pericles = far-famed. Aristotle = best of all. Phillip = horse-loving. Alexander = protector of all. Or maybe not so much nicknames as Native American names.
I hope Scott wouldn't throw away my 9/10 estimate of my own attractiveness as suspected lie, because I actually have evidence for this other than self-evaluation: strangers comment on my attractiveness unprompted, and last time I posted a selfie I got thirst posts (granted it was somewhat of a cheated angle).
"If you notice any problems, please ask yourself “Is this a real objection rather than a nitpick? Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?”
But Scott, now I'm confused about whether I'm supposed to complain or not! 😀
I liked the survey, just my perennial complaints: (1) no option for "are you not at all interested in sex/romance/relationships" and (2) hell and damnation, I *hate* being forced to pick 'I'm with the Tories' in the political parties question because they're nearer on some points to my positions BUT NOT ALL MY VALUES.
Still, you can't please everyone and I'm looking forward to the results!
Answer to shoplifting questions depends a lot on baseline of getting caught per shoplifting incident. I've answered as things stand now (which seems to be <10%), but would be way more lenient if that chance was over 50%.
“An office building is going up near you. Which of these styles do you prefer?” Not really objection/confusion/upset. But… if _a new office building_ is being built, and it would look like a 19th-century historicist house, I’d be _very_ suspicious of it and the kind of people who are building it. So, no, I don’t want anybody to build it near me. Which does not mean I don’t _like_ 19th-century historicist architecture, or that I like modern glass skyscrapers significantly more.
"if _a new office building_ is being built, and it would look like a 19th-century historicist house, I’d be _very_ suspicious of it and the kind of people who are building it"
Why? Suppose they are building it in an area predominantly 19th century and/or earlier buildings, and there is a government regulation requiring new buildings to fit the vernacular style of the area. Would you be suspicious then?
Just because someone doesn't like the glass dildo* style of building doesn't mean they are some cabal of traditionalist ideologues plotting to drag the world back to the 13th century (well, okay, if *I* were in a position to do so, but not everybody is like me!)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gherkin Admittedly, not *the* most horrible of the starchitect office buildings thrown up in such areas of cities, but not the most inspiring, either.
> Why? Suppose they are building it in an area predominantly 19th century and/or earlier buildings, and there is a government regulation requiring new buildings to fit the vernacular style of the area. Would you be suspicious then?
Sure, it’s fully cultural. _If_ there was such a government regulation here, it would be (obviously) completely normal. Now there is no such regulation, and basically nobody builds such “faux-historic” buildings. Sure, you need to comply with some zoning requirements, you obviously cannot just demolish a 19th century five-floor historicist house and build a glass skyscraper in its place; but when you have all necessary permits (and sometimes you don’t, and keep the facade and rebuild the house within, etc.), you’ll build something modern, not a replica; cf. e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q37419702 And I’d expect even people who are strictly against modern architecture in the historical city center to want _preservation_ of the old buildings, not just constructing new buildings which look like the old ones.
It definitely felt weird to me that the options for a new office building were basically a range of styles from the early to mid 20th century, but only one or two that are plausibly later than 1990! And not a single nice international style glass curtain wall building among them!
BMI question -- maybe add a line asking if you work out or something, as this is famously a weird construct that doesn't distinguish between fat people and weightlifters.
"Modern art" question -- does this mean modern art (mid 19th-mid 20th century, usually means stuff like Van Gogh or Picasso, isn't usually a term that is used to include weird stuff like urinals or bananas stuck to the wall) or contemporary/postmodern art? I would usually assume "modern art" means modern art, but asking people whether they like Van Gogh seems weird and asking about weird postmodern stuff seems more in line with ACX's aesthetic concerns.
I don’t think Scott has a very clear sense of artistic styles or genres, and his architecture discussion lately has made that very clear. It would be useful if he spent some time trying to actually learn about the identifying features and history of these styles, rather than making the one book he reads be one that just calls it a socialist conspiracy!
I’m convinced that a majority of non-artists do not know that modern =/= contemporary as I keep seeing people conflate the two online. Both the architecture discussion as well as the AI art Turing test and taste discussion have left me disheartened when it comes to art education.
The term "modern" in the visual arts refers to specific kinds of work (and not others) made since around the mid-20th century.
But maybe it's tough to frame this question if what you're trying to elicit is a preference for traditionalist-representational versus an unbounded range of expressive, theoretical, abstract, formalist or other contemporary art made mostly after 1940. Some of which can look pretty traditional, actually, so...
100%. Recently graduated with a minor in architectural history and a STEM degree. From my (limited) experience, this is probably the most approachable humanities topic for non-humanities people bc it mixes aesthetic and practical. Even if I'll never use it, I'm glad I got the minor bc understanding how architecture changed in response to different historical contexts is a great analogy that you can use to draw parallels to philosophy, politics, etc.
I'll say my piece on modern architecture here: The materials available to build the building and the resulting engineering constraints have always come before the aesthetic of the building. The modernists articulated this quite well. Since the mid 20th century those constraints are moreso financial than physical constraints. It's actually quite hard to imagine scenarios where someone is:
a) going to build a large building that will capture the public's attention
b) willing to give the architect free rein over the design even if it makes the project dramatically more expensive
Contrast this with the late 19th - early 20th century, the circumstances in which modernism arose, where a building could be aesthetically novel, functionally better, and financially cheaper by using materials that didn't exist a generation ago.
Athletic versus non-athletic is a difference of like 1-3 BMI points holding everything else equal unless you are talking about literal bodybuilders. That’s not totally insignificant, but on a population level it doesn’t really matter unless for some reason your population has a lot of Mr. Olympians.
It's more than that. I mean, more than 3 BMI points. But also, there are more problems with the BMI construct. It's built around the normal population, so very tall people (like me) or very short can't compare with "normal" mean.
See e.g. this comparison of NBA players (https://runrepeat.com/height-evolution-in-the-nba), which not only says, of top-shape athletes, "Only 43% of NBA players are overweight according to their BMI." but also helpfully differentiates by position, which is also heavily correlated to height, and taller players have also the highest BMIs, a 2-point average difference among equally trained athletes.
See also e.g. this study (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6690141/) for the difference in body fat between trained (not Olympians, but trained police officers), and normal people of approximately same height, weight and BMI,. My chosen highlight is that there was a -30% difference in total body fat. That's a lot.
(For those who don't want to click, the recommendations are a total of 150 minutes of aerobic exercise a week, and resistance exercise twice a week.)
Scott, would you add that next time?
Edit: Thought of two more things.
A good number for physical fitness that not many might have (but probably about as likely as an official IQ test?) is VO2max. That is also linked to many health outcomes.
And of course, some concrete numbers like "How much can you deadlift/squat/bench for 3x5 setsxrepetitions" or "What is your 5k time?" would be quite interesting to see as well.
5. Indeed, I only picked 5/5 on that question because of Scott's "no nitpicking" remark, interpreting "in favor" to mean "in favor of it being legal for people to abort pregnancies", rather than "in favor of pregnancies being aborted"
"No one is "in favor" of abortion. That's not what pro choice is!"
Asking seriously and not as a gotcha!, what is the parsing out of this here? If the meaning is "I support choice, not abortion" then I see what you're saying, but it does still mean being in favour of abortion being there to be chosen. It's not a choice if "you can have apples or oranges, but we only have apples".
You may not *want* people to get abortions, but you *do* want them to be *able* to get abortions, and for that to be so, abortion has to be there. So downstream you *are* in favour of abortion.
Maybe not you personally, but there are some people who are very much vocally "abortion is good and great and I love abortion!" - perhaps it's an over-reaction to the anti-abortion movement, but a few do give me the impression that it's the killing that they most adore, out of some kind of hatred of nature and what our biology imposes upon us. I don't know, I have only very inchoate impressions about this, but some of the very online on this topic honestly do come off as Moloch devotees for their enthusiasm about abortion at any time for any reason or even no reason. "Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done".
For the second one, I'm inclined (by personal circumstances) to say "yes". For the first, an army can be for defence as well as for waging aggressive war, so there's more room there for "pro-army but not pro-war".
In common usage, I think "pro-choice" does shake out as "pro-abortion". I haven't seen any, to my remembrance, people saying "I'm pro-choice but I really want women to go to pregnancy centres not abortion clinics and I don't think that abortion should be your first choice".
Such people may well exist! As do "I'm pro-life but I want abortion to be legal, especially if it's a question of threat to the life of the mother". Because of the heated debate and the "loudest shouting gets the most attention", such nuance doesn't get seen. From my point of view, even those people willing to concede on "abortion for rape, incest, life of the mother" get excoriated for not being no-restrictions, no-limits for abortion.
For a given pregnant woman the following are possible in principle:
1) You would rather she didn't abort, and if she wanted to abort you'd want the force of law to be used to stop her.
2) You would rather she didn't abort, but if she wanted to abort you aren't sure (or don't care either way) whether you'd want the force of law to be used to stop her.
3) You would rather she didn't abort, but if she wanted to abort you would *not* want the force of law to be used to stop her.
4) You don't care either way whether she aborts or not.
5) You would rather she aborted, but if she didn't want to, you would not want the force of law to be used to force her to.
6) You would rather she aborted, but if she didn't want to, you aren't sure (or don't care either way) whether you'd want the force of law to be used to force her to.
7) You would rather she aborted, and if she didn't want to abort, you'd want the force of law to be used to force her to.
Technically, "In favor" should mean between 5 and 7 whereas "pro-choice" should mean between 3 and 5, but given Scott's "no nitpicking" rule, since 5 and below aren't really in the Overton window, I took "In favor ("pro-choice")" in the survey to mean something like 4, and answered accordingly.
Thank you for your answer. When it comes to 5-7, I saw (back when Cherie Blair became unexpectedly pregnant with her son Leo), some media articles by lady journalists bemoaning the fact and wishing that she would have an abortion to be an example to girls and women that abortion is a good thing (I think too that the fact Cherie is at least notionally Catholic had a big part to play; they wanted a prominent Catholic woman to have an abortion as a defiance of Church teaching, though they never came out and said that).
So that sort of attitude is something like a 6.5 - they would rather she aborted, but if she didn't want to, the force of public opinion or duty to set an example should force her to.
Maybe also the notion that they were having a *fourth* child - this article describes three children as a "brood" (eyeroll emoji here) - was outraging the good liberal women! As well as the fact that she was in her mid-forties and both parents seemed happy at the news of an unexpected baby, instead of bemoaning how this would impinge on her career and free time?
(Myself, I'm somewhere around 3.5 in most typical cases; I'd go as far as 1.3 with healthy fetuses post-viability where the risks to the mother of an early C-section would be less than or comparable to those of an abortion and in countries with many more people looking for babies to adopt than babies "looking for" adoptive parents, but I'd only go as far as 5.2 when the baby would have an extremely severe health conditions. This makes me much more pro-life than pro-abortion in absolute terms but the other way around relative to where the Overton window in 2024 in western countries actually is, especially for second-semester pregnancies.)
Also on the race question, he didn’t have any option for multiracial! That seems like a very major oversight (unless I was supposed to select “other”). It at least should have been the US census checkboxes rather than a radio button.
I am very solidly pro-abortion. I am also pro-choice, but I want there to be zero stigma around abortion, I want Misoprostol available over the counter at near zero cost, and I am thrilled that despite Dobbs, abortion rates in the US are rising.
I honestly have no idea why you think no one is in favor of abortion.
"I honestly have no idea why you think no one is in favor of abortion."
Being fair to the pro-choice side, some people do not like abortion but do want it to be legal as they don't feel they can impose their personal morality on society. So they are not for abortion but they are for the ability to have a legal right to choose abortion if a person needs/wishes one.
This attitude can also be found on the pro-life side, though there it has been contaminated by the 'devout Catholic' politicians who took refuge in eating their cake and having it by "I am personally opposed to abortion, but..." subterfuge where they get to vote for (or at least not oppose) legal abortion and thus hold on to voters, while also holding on to their reputation for religious belief (see Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi on this issue). You see it less nowadays because there is less risk in being more openly secular on socially liberal issues. "Oh what, the ten people who still go to Mass on Sunday won't vote for me? Guess I'll just have to make do with the three thousand votes from those who haven't been to church since they were christened!"
I see from other comments in this thread that some people identify "pro-abortion" with "pro forced abortion" which... is so far beyond the Overton window in 21st century US politics that definition hadn't occurred to me.
But I retract my "honestly have no idea", I now have an idea!
I think a lot of folks in the pro-abortion movement have been moving *away* from pro-choice, because it feels mealy mouthed in just the way you're describing. So amongst my friends, I rarely hear pro-choice anymore.
But of course none of us are talking about forced abortions.
"White" is not a race. It's a color. And Caucasian is not a race. The Kafkaz is a small area in central Asia.
Just say "Western European ancestry".
And Zionism is a movement specifically of Jews seeking self determination in Israel, originating in the 1880s. The alt-right is an American movement from the past 20 years. It doesn't even cover French nationalism, the example given in the survey.
It's the color term for what was called more formally "Caucasoid" in the past. Of course the old 19th century racial classifications were pretty specious, and in some cases (e.g., classifying Negritos of Australasia with the Negroes of Africa because they look superficially alike) were completely wrong once we got to the level of examining population genomes.
I'm unironically in favor of abortion of severely deformed fetuses or fetuses with severe genetic disease. I wish people would always choose to abort these. I'm not pro forcing them to, but I very much want them to do so.
Why not? Obviously if the choice is between abortion and effective contraception one would have to be actively evil to choose the former. But between abortion and giving birth when someone is not fully on board with having a child or isn't actually ready to take up that responsibility by some reasonable objective metrics, I'm in favor of abortion.
I don’t like the scale because the issue combines two questions: How do you feel about the mortality of abortion? & How do you feel about the legality of abortion?
I said pro choice because that feels like a political label and therefore more about the legal question. On that point I’m strongly pro choice, but I also think it is killing a person which doesn’t seem to fit with the typical pro choice stance.
I'm willing to bite the bullet on that, so I think abortion is killing a person and that is immoral, which means I don't think it should be legal, either. Not that I necessarily think everything immoral should be illegal, but when it comes to what is murder, yeah.
Naturally I realise and accept this makes me a horrible misogynistic monster who hates women, hates the free expression of sexuality, wants little girls to be incestuously raped and forced to carry the rapist's baby to delivery, wants women to die of pregnancy-related diseases, etc. but that is the burden of consistency!
Consistency is vastly overrated. Most people recognize exceptions to general rules. In the discussion about shoplifting above people (myself included) opined that stealing can be sometimes justified in extreme necessity. Ditto when it comes to killing. Only an utterly dogmatic pacifist would refuse to allow for the category of Justifiable Homicide.
Whether you want all the things you said is irrelevant, if the policy you support will cause those things to happen.
I can take a stand against jailing criminals, and people could accuse me of being a do-gooder soft delusional tree-hugging snowflake liberal who wants criminals to have free reign and wants cars to be jacked, women to be raped, and teens addicted to fentanyl. And they'd be right. Doesn't matter if I "swear to Jesus I didn't want that" if more fentanyl overdoses end up happening.
Intention doesn't matter to me. Results do. Banning abortion will cause most people of average mental capacity and income to travel for abortion, or try to DIY it. The people who are punished most by anti-abortion laws are exactly those scenarios you claim: minors raped by family members, mentally disabled people who are raped, women in violent relationships, women in the middle of dying from miscarriages, etc.
But the embryos get to live, for the most part. If one believes that murdering a person is more immoral than causing some excess suffering to an incest victim, and makes a principled decision to not distinguish between a million-cells "person" and a human being capable of thinking, that's where they logically end up. However many tragic deaths caused by DIY abortions or doctors being too hesitant to terminate a pregnancy seriously endangering the mother's life there are, they are plausibly outnumbered --several-- many times over by the number of embryos that don't get conceived in the first place because people would be more careful with their contraception.
Do you really believe that banning abortion will cause more people to be careful with contraception? That logic does not really make sense to me. Irresponsible people tend not to consider the effects of their actions (see Scott's recent post about criminal behavior). Also rape happens and contraception often fails, no matter how careful one tries to be.
I think the people who are against abortion should instead be spending their time advocating for free, government-provided birth control, mandatory EXHAUSTIVE sex-ed starting at earliest puberty (8 years old), mandatory govt home visits to every home to screen for child sex abuse, govt-funded drug and alcohol rehabs so people make better decisions, increase welfare for single mothers to 40k a year, and increasing taxes 10% to provide group homes for unwanted babies that are given up. Because banning abortion simply isn't going to work. Banning it is like trying to ban anything else that people want. How is the war on drugs working out? Or prohibition in the 1920s? Or the war on terror, for that matter?
Also, if one believes that a pregnant woman should be forced to support a life, why stop there? You are also ending a life by not donating one of your kidneys. In places where women are forced to support a fetus, I think a man should also be forced to give a kidney to anyone who requests one from them (women should be exempt because they might need that kidney to support an unwanted fetus someday). That is only fair. And every adult should be forced to check in daily at their nearest hospital to make sure no one is currently in need of their blood type that day. If there are, then a police officer should force them at gunpoint to give their blood. And every person from a wealthy country must have their wages garnished to feed every single hungry person in a developing country, since failing to provide them food also causes loss of life. If life is more important than bodily autonomy, then one must not discriminate only against pregnant women.
> Do you really believe that banning abortion will cause more people to be careful with contraception?
Yes, certainly. Some people who normally consider abortion as "plan C" (plan A meaning regular contraception and plan B the contraception applied after the intercourse) will go from "already careful" to "maniacally careful". Some irresponsible people in fact consider abortion to be their plan A. From some discussions I've heard this behavior was quite common e.g. in the USSR. Probably a combination of abortion being free versus contraception cumbersome, bad, or expensive, ignorance, and widespread sexism. You may be right about irresponsible behavior in general (though it's probably more nuanced than that) but when one person gets to choose their responsibility level and the other bears the brunt of the costs, that's a specific situation with its own dynamic.
> Also rape happens
Ok, so? Some people don't get pregnant through their own choice, but hopefully not that many, and anyway not being able to choose for the embryo to stop living is lesser evil in that paradigm, so it pales in comparison to mass murders.
> and contraception often fails, no matter how careful one tries to be.
Excluding sexsomniacs and rape victims, abstinence should work 100% of the time. Ditto oral sex only. But this statement is misleading even for typical methods of contraception. (In fact, this should be the main argument for banning abortions if someone shares the premise of embryos having significant moral value.) The "plan A" contraceptive methods vary by orders of magnitude in their effectiveness. Meaning that just being a little extra careful (choosing a better method and actually following the instructions) can drop the number of unwanted pregnancies from ~0.1/uterus/year to ~0.01 easily. And one doesn't have to be just "a little" more careful: they could combine two or more methods. I can't tell you the numbers because the metric used is Pearl index which isn't the same as probability (they do use plain probability for "plan B" though), but even just adding coitus interruptus on top of some serious method should result in adding another zero at the least. The pill + condom for the people who don't relax their standards too much because of the safety should result in less than 1 unwanted pregnancy in 1000 years.
So, let's say 25% of females from 13 to 40 have regular sex with male partners (probably an underestimate). That's 7 years per woman, let's say 4 to account for low fertility cases and the people who actually want kids at the time. So if the normal level of precaution is "condom, regular use" (PI 13 according to current wikipedia), that's 0.52 unwanted pregnancies per woman per lifetime, whereas paranoid contraception corresponds to below 0.004. Probably not all unwanted pregnancies are terminated even if abortions are legal, but you only need to compel people to be somewhat extra careful to get a difference of 0.2, which corresponds to the murder rate of El Salvador in a bad year (0.2/woman/lifetime = 0.1/person/lifetime = 1/800 life years = 125 "murders"/100000 people/ year).
And that's definitely cheaper than your suggestions in the next paragraph. Especially considering that anti-abortion people who agree with you about sex ed would probably educate their children properly anyway, so you just have them pay for education of and control and help for other people with little personal gain. You're saying 10%?
> Also, if one believes that a pregnant woman should be forced to support a life, why stop there?
I'd suggest discussing it with them, but on a second thought, maybe don't give them ideas :-)
(The religious ones will probably say something something God's will, I imagine.)
Well, I guess the argument still ultimately comes down to whether you believe abortion is murder or not. I think it's patently insane to give a zygote the same moral and legal consideration as a living person with their own memories and consciousness. But those who do believe that, most of who desire to oppress others based on a text they never read (as the Bible endorses abortion), will never be convinced by reason anyways.
> From some discussions I've heard this behavior was quite common e.g. in the USSR.
Yes, because the USSR didn't have free, government-provided birth control, mandatory EXHAUSTIVE sex-ed starting at earliest puberty (8 years old) and so on. It had neither the pill nor the plan B pill, so your only forms of contraception were the calendar, pulling out, Soviet-made condoms (which were strongly associated with prostitution and VDs due to the lack of sex ed) and surgical abortion.
But continuing that thought: I've heard there was a cool guy, respected in certain circles, who said something about Saturdays' and people's relations to each other. Here it seems your Saturday is the definition of "people".
The 'Profession' question makes it really easy for normal software engineers to get it wrong and mark 'computer science' or 'engineering'. Assuming you're aggregating these this way on purpose, I would recommend rephrasing it as 'Computers (other academic, computer science research)' and 'Computers (practical: software engineering, IT, etc.)'. I honestly believe that a freshly minted low-grade developer would answer this wrong because they've just finished a degree called 'computer science' so clearly their job must be that.
I had problems with this one as well because I'm a data analyst, but more than half my job is just writing code/scripts, so I wasn't sure if that should count as statistics or the practical computers option.
1. The ACT has been ~as popular as the SAT in the US for quite some time now. The SAT is still better known among older people, but a lot of younger ones will have only taken the ACT. I would either add a question for it or link to a SAT conversion tool like this one: https://www.princetonreview.com/college-advice/act-to-sat-conversion.
2. For the mental disorder questions, I assume "family" means blood relatives (to look for genetic effects) and not spouses, adopted relatives, etc., but this should be clarified.
3. For architecture, one consideration you don't mention is what the interior in like. Having worked in both Deco-style buildings and contemporary glass boxes, the modern ones are almost always more pleasant from the inside - more light, more open spaces, higher ceilings. My understanding is that little of this is *necessarily* due to the architectural style, but there's a strong correlation in practice, mostly because giving an old building a modern look on the inside would require a total gut renovation.
4. What's an "average" American company? The archetypal one is a Fortune 500 megacorp. The median one is a sole prop or 2-3 member LLC. You could calculate a weighted average by valuation or revenue or number of employees. All of these are going to give quite different results.
I took the ACT, did not take the SAT, and don't remember exactly what my ACT score was.
I mentally had to basically average companies like Apple (high margin) with grocery stores (low margin). I'm dubious of the value of this answer, especially without any correlation of business/financial knowledge.
And some of us are not Americans so we took none of those and don't have an IQ score 😁
I'm in the same boat - some American companies are the FAANGs, some are one-man band operations, so some make huge margins and some are on very tight ones. I guesstimated and hoped for the best, then sneakily Googled afterwards and I *might* have over-estimated by twice the amount, at least according to the value that was given.
The size of the company shouldn't influence margins much. It's more a sign of how the business is run. One person could well have higher margins than a large company, simply because they are that good at their job that they are above the average productivity of a large company.
And anyway, what do I know? I guessed about half the average gross margin, after post-survey Googling.
Ditto as someone who took the ACT but not the SAT. Not that I remember my ACT score anyway, and I don't think I qualify as one of the "younger ones" either.
If some of the mental health conditions are culture-bound a la penis stealing, it might not matter if family is blood relatives or not. But I've answered as though Scott is looking for genetic links.
On the anthropogenic climate change, I take that a middle position (which I did) stands for "requires moderate action", but found the labeling confusing.
I think you're conflating several possible answers (requires/doesn't require action) vs (the action must be moderate/strong) vs (the action must be swift/sedated), which are thus garbled.
Then, I, for one, think that many current actions are actively misguided, and are only not being net detrimental because they are being implemented loosely and not very swiftly / intensely. So in fact I would argue for the axis to be extended to "current actions should be discontinued / reversed", with the middle ground reserved for "does not require action".
Political spectrum: I agree with other comments that the single dimension is often too reductive. Listing two dimension - for socially orientation and economic orientation would seem to be an improvement.
Mental health: Ambiguous about previous issues that resolved, as other users pointed out.
Attractiveness: Is that relative to other people your age and sex or the population as a whole?
Shoplifting: I agree with other comments that the issue is whether or not there have already been increasing penalties, or penalties at all, for prior offenses.
Also, the question references previous arrests. Should that be "previous offenses?" If someone shoplifted 99 times without arrest, we might want to treat their hundredth offense differently than someone who offended for the first time.
The questions leave this sort of ambiguous, as they contrast "no previous criminal history" with prior arrests.
A not atypical case involves a store pulling up surveillance footage showing the same person offending multiple times before they're arrested the first time. So they have known criminal histories, just no prior arrests.
Relatedly, are we talking about hypothetical people who actually did no other crimes before, or typical criminals who commit many more crimes than those for which they're arrested.
Homeless: encampment in the lot, who owns the lot? Are the homeless trespassing on private property? What do the owners want?
Also, the questions switch from them being in an empty lot to being in the street - which is it?
Protester question: Is law enforcement just not an option? That is, will drivers just be trapped indefinitely with no expectation of quick escape, unless they run over the protesters? Or will law enforcement quickly come and remove the protesters? If law enforcement would quickly remove them, will there be legal penalties for them, or will they be free to keep trapping drivers, until someone runs them over?
Marriage: Ambiguous if questions refer to prior marriages of widowed and divorced people.
E.g. "Married people: How many years have you been married?
If you've been married multiple times, answer for your current marriage only."
Do widowed / divorced people answer 0, leave it blank, or enter the length of their most recent marriage?
I hated the immigration question. It lumps illegal immigration (which I am strongly against) together with legal immigration (which I am strongly in favor of). I also hated the shoplifting question. The current penalty I favor strongly depends on what previous penalties have been applied.
For the shoplifting question, I read it as "assume penalties progress down the list over the first ten offences from the "no history " to the "10 case history" options you chose, but agree that's unclear.
Agreed, a strict reading implies the person was arrested ten previous times but never convicted, but that introduces more complications than a simpler reading of the question. I ended up choosing an answer that's approximately an average of answers I can imagine being appropriate for different ways the previous arrests might have gone.
I selected the middle option on that one as I'm strongly in favour of high-quality immigration and strongly opposed to low-quality immigration (whether legal or not). I think basically anyone who's willing to pay €20k/year (or whatever) for the privilege should be granted residence, regardless of country of origin, employment status and so on.
In "ever been homeless," people in NYC and some parts of MA (lots of SSC readers, I am guessing) have a 'right to shelter' (and it's very cold on the street). So anyone who really has been homeless in those places and doesn't answer the 'precarity' choice is likelier to have lived in the shelter system than physically on the street.
As is often the case with these sorts of things, the political questions had no room for nuance, so my answers can only reflect a sort of compromise approximation of my views on some of these.
I would have preferred more detail in the wording of the two questions about the proposed nearby office building. Being nearby, the functional aspects of the pictured buildings were much more important for me than the visual aspect, so that's how I answered. This relates mostly to how I live and nothing at all about my esthetic preferences.
If the question is just aiming to establish a visual facade preference then it might be worth tweaking the wording.
Why do you care about the functional aspects of a building near you (as long as they aren't horrendous)? Do you think it's likely you'll work there someday?
Imagine you live in a hilltop village in Tuscany, where the roads are too narrow for cars and everyone gets around on foot. Would you want an office building with restaurants and cafes at street level, or a building with a single entrance and blank walls?
I wouldn't necessarily want restaurants and cafés in an office building, ground floor or not. If it's a mixed-use development, fine. If it's the offices of Messrs. Spring, Sprang and Sprung, Solicitors then why would they need a restaurant on the premises? They're hardly reliant on coaxing in passing trade to avail of "have a cup of coffee and a consultation about suing your cousin for taking Granny's bone china tea set when it wasn't specifically left to her in the will!"
For residential buildings, people may not want to live "over the shop", as it were.
Besides, if it soothes your pedestrian soul, there are buildings in the Baroque Style which do have plenty of street level entrances and shops:
That bit of Arras looks lovely. At least one of Scott's examples seems similar, but for the others the ground floor isn't visible in the picture, alas.
I think the physical attractiveness question should more clearly define the scale. I get the impression some people interpret the range as essentially a percentile score (making 5/6 roughly median) and others interpret it more like a grade (giving 5 implied negative valence).
People who would be 30th percentile in my ranking just look normal to me, so I'd probably give them a "passing grade".
(I am reminded of a chart I saw going around twitter a while back supposedly showing that women rated most men "below average" on a 10 point scale. I could see that being true (selected sample in daily life etc.), but I suspect a big part of it is just that the women in this survey find most men to not be attractive, and they don't grade on a curve.)
I think it's probably just that everyone has gotten fat and most people don't find fatness attractive. Somewhat fat is now normal and average but most people find any notable amount of fatness to knock you into unattractive territory and thus below "average."
If attractiveness is distributed like income/wealth, you would indeed expect most men to be well below average. This works better with different units of attractiveness than scores from 1 to 10, but I can see how these units could make perfect sense. For example, "How many units of utility [e.g. hours of life] I'd give up to fuck/marry/have kids from this man".
Most places that ask about race in the past 25 years have followed the US Census and used checkboxes instead of radio buttons, though there are a few that just have “multiracial” as a generic option. This survey didn’t seem to have either - I already can’t remember whether I selected “other” or “south Asian” (because that is the non-white part and therefore the part that gets noticed when people racialize me, which actually seems weirdly infrequent).
Immigration question (more or less) seemed to me to be ambiguous as to whether it meant 'immigration law allows too many immigrants' and 'too many immigrants violate immigration law (or take advantage of the overloading of the asylum system) to enter illegally/in violation of the clear intent of the law.'
For "Speech", I think this unanswerable as-is partly because there really should be more than one axis. Many of the "pro free speech" crowd on the social right (e.g. TERFs) have a simplistic view of what "free speech" is, viewing it almost as "freedom to harrass" or "freedom from judgement", which makes it complicated to express being strongly pro free speech in the traditional sense (e.g. how John Stuart Mill expresses it in "On Liberty") without getting lumped in. You often can have both ends of the spectrum as you have presented it, e.g. in some cases by legally protecting a type of free speech while simultaneously imposing social judgement on it (yes, this is a massive quagmire, but this comment box is too small to get into any details)
Social power has limits in a way that legal and political power does not. Social groups are also a lot more heterogenous. Also, I don't see a way to actually limit social judgement without limiting either freedom of speech or freedom of association or both. We can disagree on how much social judgement is warranted, but I still maintain that the legal situation is important and quite separate.
I am intrigued that you think radical feminists are socially right wing, but unwilling to get into a discussion of the topic here (so discount my intrigue, if you must). Nonetheless, I offer that you might want to check that you understand what the actual position is, for your own edification.
I thoroughly understand the TERF position, as much as I wish I didn't have to. I am also unwilling to get into a thorough discussion, but for clarity on my position, I consider "TERF" to be a bad acronym and consider such views to not be feminist, much less radical.
Ah! So you are using it as a generic slur for “does not agree with specific set of views on gender identity” rather than “a set of women who are radical feminists (where ‘radical’ means ‘in reference to the root’, because they posit that the root of the system of gender (which they consider a bad thing) is sexed differences in human bodies and the exploitation of this)”.
I'd rather you didn't assign arguments to me which I haven't said, and I was under the impression you didn't want to get into discussion. I'm not taking the bait, thanks.
Okee doke. If I had characterised Marxists as economically right wing, and suggested that they were obsessed with marks, I would probably want a nudge to suggest I had misunderstood something somewhere (or was using words in a non-standard way), but such is the peril of “do as you would be done by”!
Yeah, this question bothered me too. I think free speech is one of the most important freedoms to preserve, but I think with competent execution of good policies you can achieve it and fight misinformation and harassment as well. It also annoys me that all the loudest members of the "pro free speech" crowd are... not people I want to align myself with. Probably makes me quieter about the issue than I would otherwise be.
I think I ticked the middle box. Or maybe I left the whole thing blank.
(By the way, I completely agree with your characterisation of TERFs being on the social right. I noticed the other commenter disagreeing with that, but since you both agreed not to discuss further I'm parenthetically bundling my "anecvote" in with my comment, rather than weighing in on the pre-terminated thread.)
Age of meeting/dating/marrying your first spouse are only "for the married". I met/dated/married my spouse, but we divorced, so I left these blank. Is this what you really wanted?
I am going to take advantage of the loose moderation to complain about the free speech question, even though I am not confident that anyone else will be upset with the wording.
Which do you think is more important: preserving free speech, or taking a stand against hate speech/misinformation/etc? This could include
1) pressuring social media sites to moderate their content,
2) enforcing hate speech laws
3) passing laws making it easier to sue people for spreading dangerous misinformation.
2 and 3 are government punishments for wrongspeak. I despise them, I do not support them.
1 is speech, full stop. Pressure is speech. I get to pressure companies if I want to.
Putting my approval of 1, 2, and 3 in the same box seems nuts.
Let me do my own nitpicking about what I found unsatisfactory about the survey.
1. What if one's preferred race is 'choose not to declare'? And why can't one tick multiple boxes? What is this, the DMV? (At least the DMV usually has 'Hispanic/Latin American', which is helpful if you still detest your least favorite conquistador.) Also, why one can't one give a more complicated and/or jocular answer? (Maybe that last bit makes one particularly Latino.)
2. The SAT question should come with the year or year period, since the test has been renormalized several times.
3. There was a question on "country" (country of origin?) - quite besides the fact that one should be able to tick more than one box, there's also the strange fact that we were never asked about our country of residence. For one thing, that makes the question about salaries hard to put in context!
4. I found the categories in "political affiliation" a little too coarse, but maybe that's just me.
5. The class question should probably be split into a class and an income question (where is the box for "family of intellectuals with no money, but then of course I was always aware that most people had even less money, not that money kept any worth for more than a couple of weeks back then"?)
6. I wish the office building and house questions allowed a ranking - first and second favorites are not enough.
(If I really wanted to nitpick, I would have to say that this question is rather context-dependent. Say - among the office buildings, 2 and 4 look good to me, but 2 in a 4 neighborhood would be a sore thumb, and vice versa.
Also, these are small photographs. How do we tell whether the build is legit or cheap and fake?)
Oh, and the homelessness question is culture-dependent. Having a place to be because your extended family took care of you may be a precarious situation, but it can be bad (if they see you as a moocher) or pretty good. Whether "homelessness" should be construed narrowly or broadly is a dicey question, but we can probably agree that there should be an additional box for "precarious in the sense of depending on someone else's good will, yet the person in question could call a place a home" - particularly where this is a common arrangement.
I took the SAT forty year ago. I don't remember my raw score at all, though I do know I did very well, getting 100% of the verbal questions right and missing only one math question.
IQ scores can vary a lot with each test. I only had one such test, when I was still in my early teens. I have no idea what I would score these days.
> I don't remember my raw score at all, though I do know I did very well, getting 100% of the verbal questions right and missing only one math question.
That is your raw score. The 200-800 scores are "scaled scores"; a count of how many questions you got right is a raw score.
Country of origin vs country of residence got to me too. In fact, I really hope it doesn't make Scott misread my answers to several questions, considering I moved from a poor to a significantly wealthier country
Right. I moved from a poor-ish (now theoretically high-middle income because of raw-material exports, but chaotic and with a collapsed public sector, manufacturing sector, etc.) country to a wealthy one, and then to a still-wealthy one with much smaller salaries (than country 2), so he must be thoroughly confused.
If there was a free text section in the survey, this is what I would.have wanted to add
* all the houses in the "which one would I qant ro buy" section are ugly (I very much want to live jn.the city centre!)
* for the shoplifting question, sth to separate "kid that was dared to do it" and "poor person that was forced to do it" would have been good
* why the hell do Americans don't consider "being able to say what you want *without being harassed/fired for it*" not part of free speech? (and "outing yourself as gay/poly/..." as a form of speech
Early on, for marital status, the choices (if memory serves) are single, married, partnered; no divorced or widowed options. Okay, so if you're divorced or widowed, you pick single. But later, there is a series of questions to be answered only if you're married, such as when you met your spouse. It seems to me that someone divorced or widowed should answer these, and I'm concerned that their responses may be deemed incorrect or invalid. Thus, I think there should be be divorced and widowed options for marital status.
I answered “no” to shoplifting, but I have occasionally noticed when a self checkout rings something up wrong in my favor and not corrected it. I consider the unpaid labor of ringing up my own groceries to be payment enough in those cases.
Just tell yourself that the price the machine gives you is, by definition, the correct price; if the package is mismarked on the shelves with a higher amount, that's on them. This doesn't apply in the other direction, OF COURSE.
It's useful in the distinction between sex and gender, which I was told was not at all the same thing when it came to giving trans people their rights. If you have people who are XXY or other matters, those go under "Other".
Note that XXX are pretty-normal women and XYY are pretty-normal men (most are never diagnosed unless a karyotype is done for other reasons), so I wouldn't characterise them as "other". It's Turner (monosomy X) and Klinefelter (XXY) that have notably-weird phenotypes (monosomy Y spontaneously aborts).
I remember when XYY males were discussed in the news media in the late 70s and there was a plethora of reporting that these were SUPER CRIMINALS, that the extra Y chromosome would make them more aggressive, more violent, more Toxic Masculinity (though that term was not in existence then) due to studies like this:
"IN 1965, Jacobs et al. published their preliminary findings of a chromosome survey conducted at a maximum security hospital, The State Hospital, Lanarkshire, Scotland1. The most remarkable finding in the completed survey was the discovery among 315 men of nine patients with an XYY sex chromosome constitution. Their behaviour, together with their pattern of crime, has now been closely studied. The full clinical details of this investigation will be published elsewhere by us, and this communication directs attention to the ways in which the XYY males differ from males with an XY sex chromosome complement at the same hospital."
"Some scholars believe that XYY is associated with a status of over-masculinization, because the existence of an extra Y chromosome and XYY individuals usually results in tall stature, impulsivity, and/or sex organ overdevelopment (macroorchidism and macropenis) (Bardsley et al., 2013; Jo et al., 2015). Several reports stated that some men institutionalized for antisocial behavior were found to have an increased frequency of the XYY karyotype, and males in prison with XYY had higher testosterone than healthy age-matched controls (Hook, 1973; Schiavi et al., 1984). For decades, the claim that XYY males tend to exhibit more aggressive, anti-social, and criminal behavior than XY males is controversial, but this hypothesis has never been substantiated (Lenroot et al., 2009)."
It causes tallness (in common with Klinefelter and IIRC even XXX) because of gene-dosage effects on the pseudoautosomal region (same reason Turner causes shortness). It can lower IQ, though not by much.
The initial assumption that it caused super-aggression is because the people who found a bunch in prison assumed it was rarer in the general population than it is (due to the fact that most XYYs are never detected because being tall and a couple of points of IQ lower than the counterfactual don't really stick out). Seems to be some effect on criminality from the lower average IQ, but that's all.
XYY is certainly the most likely of the four major sex chromosome anomalies to wind up in prison, but that's because they are men (XXX are women, Turner are intersex strongly leaning female, and Klinefelter are intersex leaning male) and men commit more violent crime than women (and get punished more harshly for it).
Chromosomal sex is useful when you do statistics on a large sample. The lone XX male who fills in this survey won't mess up the statistics more than the magnitude more trolls who fill it in randomly.
True, the exclusion of outliers on the bell curve as measured by chromosomes isn't unreasonable for statistics work on the vast majority of the population. But here, it just seems like an odd way of gathering the presumably desired informational elements versus, say, "at birth, were you visually noted as possessing a penis, or a vagina?" (which would, of course, also exclude the very small anatomically intersex minority).
People who have sufficient reason to be aware of their chromosomal makeup will be able to answer about such; the rest of us will go along with the "assigned at birth is linked with chromosomal sex".
If we're discussing trans issues (and we probably will be, as they're not going away) then the ratio of intersex and others to those with ordinary chromosomal sex will be valuable information. Intersex people get used *a lot* as support for "gender is a spectrum, sex is not a binary, it's not simple XX = woman and XY = man" by the trans community, along with "my brain *is* male (or female), I *am* a man (or woman) despite what sex I was assigned at birth" reporting from trans people. Getting any kind of data on "did you fill this out as trans and did you fill this out as what chromosomal sex" will be helpful.
> People who have sufficient reason to be aware of their chromosomal makeup will be able to answer about such
People who were visually intersex at birth (or were tested for some other reason) will, but plenty of cis people have different chromosomes to what they expect, and so the data will be incorrect (with over-reporting of simple XY and XX) if people guess based on their sex assigned at birth.
Yeah, and also, how many of us have been tested?! I certainly don't know my chromosomal sex. (I can guess with high probability based on my physical sexual characteristics, but at the point where I'm guessing, why not just make the question something more vague (but more measurable) like "biological sex" or "sex assigned at birth"?)
Or maybe getting genetic testing is more common around these parts than I guess...
I agree, but I would strongly caution against the "biological sex" phrasing if the intent is to be a proxy for sex assigned at birth or chromosomal sex -- binary trans people who have fully medically transitioned _are_ biologically their affirmed gender, especially if they transitioned young (pretty much to the same extent as equivalent intersex people such as XY cis women with androgen insensitivity)
1. Seconding the request for family’s religious background being strident atheist and/or agnostic. Not sure which of these I’d choose for my family, but it’s weird there’s an assumption our families weren’t actively anti- religion
2. My wife and I planned on/wanted two kids, but my wife’s first pregnancy was so difficult that we have opted for just one. I left this as how many we “want” because… that is how many we’re going to have, and your instructions are pretty explicit that if we’re done, we should just give the actual number. But the question is really combining us with folks who always wanted/or at least are very satisfied with one child.
Or "mild-mannered but unambiguous freethinkers", for that matter. Of course some will argue that nearly no family was like that five generations ago, but that confuses 'the family environment you grew up with' (how I interpreted the question) with 'the ancestral religion(s) of your family'.
Time for the traditional complaining/hedging/nitpicking/whatever :-)
*) How many children do you have?
------------------------------------
Note the present tense. Dead children do not count. Depending on the
purpose of the question 'How many children have you had?' might be
more relevant.
*) School choice
-----------------
I am in favor making it easier for people to home school (though it
is pretty easy in many states right now and legal in all 50). The examples
provided all include the *government* PAYING for a choice (charter, private, etc.)
Some folks may see a large difference between the government paying for:
a) charter schools (legally government run, but often w/o unionized employees),
b) private (possibly for profit), and
c) home schooling
I am one of those people :-)
*) Mental health.
When considering 'family members (within two generations)' I interpreted this as blood relation (so we share some DNA). I have a nephew with no shared DNA that, if considered, would result in different answers.
There are a number of, and a number of KINDS of, COVID vaccines, which have attracted various levels and types of distrust, blame, and skepticism. The protein subunit type (e.g. Novavax, which I was a Phase 3 clinical trial volunteer for) seems to attract a lot less negative attention/opinion than the mRNA type.
The "homeless encampment" questions are potentially inconsistent. The first says: "There is a homeless encampment in your city, about 20 tents in an empty lot." The second: "Same as above, except now there *are* empty homeless shelter beds in your city. The homeless say the shelters are filthy and tyrannical; they prefer to camp on the street." The second implies (it admittedly doesn't say so, but from how it's written I'd expect some people to assume so) that the encampment is on the street instead. This is a substantially different situation: an encampment on the street blocks traffic along the street, whereas an encampment on an empty lot is an inconvenience mainly to the lot's owner, plus (if the people encamped there are disruptive) to its neighbors & anyone who happens to be walking (not driving) by it. I am assuming that for the second question the encampment is still supposed to be on the empty lot & not on the street, but probably some people will interpret it the other way.
In the mental health questions, I'm not sure what option is best for "I was formally diagnosed with this in the past but no longer struggle with it." I suppose "I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family" might be most *literally* true, but given that the answers seem to be getting at something like "what is your proximity to this issue?" it seems like "i was literally diagnosed with it once" is relevant information that is not captured properly.
I'm going to go with "I have a formal diagnosis" as I think that's most in keeping with the spirit of the question but I'm not certain that's the desired choice.
I kind of think a "warning" is useless, too. That ought to be for people doing something they don't know is wrong but turns out to be basically harmless. I suppose that could apply to a few first time shoplifters.
I'm perfectly fine with stealing food to save one's life, most people are (I think?). But this doesn't mean that stealing isn't wrong *under normal circumstances.* You can say "lying is wrong" and not be a Kantian absolutist about it. Same here.
I don't think much of the conversation about shoplifting hinges on cases like this, most of the cases I've heard discussed concern people stealing technology or clothing.
EDIT: Fancy clothing. It would, of course, be permissible to steal a coat if it would keep your kid from freezing during winter.
The purpose of a warning can also be to let people know that they have been noticed, that they will get caught if they do it again, and that there will be worse consequences if caught doing it again. For a lot of people that can be quite effective, as it can all seem like silly, consequence-free fun that nobody really cares about. I suppose this goes back to the stuff about the importance of certainty of being caught and certainty of consequences.
I know someone who regularly shoplifted on accident because a no single use plastic mandate caused the local grocer store chain to switch to selling "reusable" plastic bags. But they put them where they used to put the free ones and it took over a year of her just taking them at self checkout before one of our friends went shopping with her and told her that they are supposed to cost money.
I predict Scott will be surprised at how many people sincerely like modern architecture. Like, of course if you like beautiful things, you will like beautiful things with a contemporary glass-and-metal as well as beautiful things with a more traditional aesthetic!
I like for skyscrapers, offices, large stores, and big infrastructure to look sleek and modern. I like houses, parks, churches, community centers, and small stores to look traditional. Museums depend on what kind of museum it is. Science museum > sleek and modern. Archives/library > traditional. Same with government buildings. IT office > sleek and modern. Courthouse > Traditional.
Maybe, I'm too much of a lawyer, but in the question that asked about shoplifting when someone had "ten previously arrests on similar charges," based on my perception of your intent, you might want to change that to "ten previous convictions on similar charges." If the shoplifter was only previously arrested but never convicted, I think the punishment should be the same as the previous question.
On (at least) free speech and inmigration questions, I know this may not be what you've intending to capture, but for those of us from other countries (Spaniard here), I think it would be useful to mark somehow that when we are marking "more open" or "more free speech", that is *from the point of reference of our surroundings*.
I, for one, would *love* if Spain's free speech situation was as free / protected as USA's, but if I were to answer that question while living in the USA, mi answer would be a tad more moderate. On the contrary, inmigration is fine or if something, a little too loose here, but if I were to answer like if I lived in USA, it would be "open the gates!"
For the house/office building questions, if I don't have an opinion about local architecture, should I leave the question blank, or force myself to pick one, even if I don't actually care?
When you ask about my "family's religious background," do you mean the family I grew up in (my parents and me) or my current family (my wife and me and our child)?
For fun, I went through the top level responses to this thread thus far. Using a pure objective metric free from personal bias:
42 responses were nitpicks where no person in the world would be genuinely confused or upset about the wording.
11 responses were real objections.
26 were other kinds of comments.
Many nitpickers seem to be uncomfortable with not being able to portray the exact nuances of their situation in their answer. Being annoyed when not able to give a 100% "correct" answer seems like a trait that comes with the shape-rotator package, so it's not surprising that we get it here. I think takers should remember that the goal of surveys isn't close-up psychical profiling but statistics.
A tip to avoid nitpicking is to include a constructive proposal for what the question should look like instead in your comment. If you want to increase the complexity of the question, argue that the value added by the increase is worth the extra complexity.
I always have some nitpicks like this I ignore. This is when I wanted to be able to pick some option from left field that wasn't there at all. ("If you could have cake or cookies, which would you pick?" But I want pie!)
But I'll complain if the answer I want to give should be present from the logic of the question: "Which would you pick? 1. Cake 2. Cookies 3. Pie 4. Cake and Cookies 5 Cookies and Pie" Why can't I choose Cake and Pie? If I can pick two of them, why can't I pick all three?
It might be that the survey-maker has missed the option you want to select. But it's more likely that adding a sixth and seventh option increases complexity without adding value to the thing the survey-maker wants to study (e.g. "Will extroverted people more often pick options with pie?" or whatever). Again, the goal of surveys isn't close-up psychical profiling but statistics.
The survey differentiates between {married, single, relationship other than marriage} and targets some questions to those groups.
The question to the relationship group is "are you ready to settle down" which is defined as "marry and start trying for children immediately".
My personal situation is that I have children with my current relationship partner whom I neither plan to ever marry, nor ever leave.
It seems to me that
a) I have already "settled down" in any meaningful interpretation of the phrase.
b) Ignoring a), I have no way of telling if I should answer based on "ready to get married" or answer based on "ready to try for children" which will yield the polar opposite result.
So, in your enlightend opinion:
Am I being a "shape-rotator" here and upset that I do not find an option exactly matching my special snowflake profile. Or is there perhaps any chance that you might entertain the possibility that this question leaves out so much of the potential answer space that it is useless even for "statistics"?
If the former, can you please give an indication how common or rare you think my case is, globally?
Also note that the issue here is not, as you seem to presume, the lack of more options for answers but the question itself.
The minimal repair that somewhat preserves the structure of the original question seems to be to ask separately:
- I have settled down (totally disagree - totally agree)
- I am ready to get married (totally disagree - totally agree)
- I am ready to have children (totally disagree - totally agree)
Now of course I can immediately think of nits to pick with that, but at least this version can be plausibly answered while ignoring the nits in good faith. Example: Someone who already has children could say "yes" to "I am ready to have children" in good faith even though strictly logically that is not perfect.
When I clicked submit, I got 0 indication of any kind that the submission was a success and it took me back to the front of the survey as if nothing had been saved.
Issue #2 Complaint
On the "what to do about homeless encampment" question there was no option to do anything with the "normal" homeless people once the harassers and unwell ones were rounded up. In other words, I wanted this option:
1. arrest the harassers
2. institutionalize the unwell ones
3. disperse the remainder so they go somewhere else regardless of presence of shelters
I don't want to just disperse the unwell and harassers. I don't want to just leave the "normals" once the harassers and unwell are rounded up. I chose for police to just break it up because my biggest concern is this ruining my neighborhood. However, I don't really want to disperse violent people or people who might OD in a puddle of their own pee without treatment.
You should have included a question about waist circumference along with the BMI. I know not many readers of ACT are athletic enough for this to matter but still...
It feels a little silly and immature, but I do enjoy when I'm answering a poll and one of the answers is something I like about myself. My highest level of education achieved for instance has increased recently, and I finally get to change my answer after years of answering previous ACX polls with the reservation that there's one I was studying for that I hadn't actually finished yet.
> A sentence between 1 year and 10 for the serial shoplifter
Yep. I spent a couple minutes on this question alone because of that. Come to think of it, that was an easy one: come up with your own sentence length and see if it's greater than 10^0.5 ~ π years. But somehow I only put it like this explicitly now, so perhaps including this in instructions would be helpful.
How many children do you have is ambiguous. I have one biological daughter and two stepdaughters whom I consider to be part of my family and whom I consider to be my daughters. I'm sure many other people have a similar arrangement. I'm indifferent to which is the right answer I just want to know whether I should include my stepdaughters are not. In the form I included them because they're my daughters
Re: "Do you own cryptocurrency?", it might make sense to instead ask if people own more than some minimum amount, either in dollars or as a percentage of their net worth. I think I have a small amount in a Coinbase account but I never think about it.
first degree relative homelessness question refers to them as "them" in the 2nd point and as "me" in the third. (hmm "lived out of my car", kind of a specific circumstance. maybe change in both questions to "a car")
(edit 2: I'm a dogmatic depth first search orderist and wrote these comments while doing the survey, before reading the nitpicking advice which is after the survey link)
On the "are you currently ready to "settle down"" questions, how integral to the question is the, "immediately start trying for children," part? I imagine there are some people who would be ecstatic about the rest of the prompt, but would balk at concept of having kids because, for whatever reason, they don't want to have kids.
The homeless question needs an option for - arrest the harassers, institutionalize the unwell, and send the rest to homeless shelters. You added 'send the rest to shelters' in the second question, but there's no option to combine the two.
More for you than for me - it may be useful to you to collect current email in addition to previous emails. I know which email(s) I would have used to answer between 2017 and 2023, but I had to switch to a new domain this year, so you won't be able to link my response to previous years.
Fuck me, those were some ugly houses/office blocks! Were they deliberately chosen to all be horrible, or are my tastes really so far from Scott's idea of the Overton Window?
"Have you ever had long COVID?" Yes, but I don't have it anymore.
"How bad is it?" uhh, I don't have it anymore.
I could imagine you meant "how bad was it?", but it was ruining my life, then it was very bad, then it was bad, then it was tolerable, then it was barely noticeable. Which do I pick? I left the question blank.
I would say about 3 or 4 months of the worst phase, where I struggled to have the energy for more than a 5 minute walk every day and a 10 minute shower every other day. (I was unemployed and living with my parents - I don't know what would have happened if I'd been trying to cook, clean, and do a job.) As well as being limiting, the subjective feeling of extreme fatigue was very unpleasant, and pretty much always present.
Then there was about a year of gradual recovery where I could live a relatively normal life, including working (at home), but I was still living with my parents and I couldn't do any of my active hobbies. At times I was still occasionally hit with serious fatigue that would leave me needing to lie down. At the end of this period I was able to do a moderately strenuous walk (2 hours with some uphill) provided I rested before and after.
Then over the next 9 months or so I started living independently and started easing myself back into my active hobbies. I still felt far from normal, and was often very tired, but I think my life probably looked normal from the outside.
I had a bunch of minor things that lingered after that, but I would say from the 2 year mark onwards it's in the "barely noticeable" category. (It was still very noticeable to me that I'd lost all my strength and fitness, but I don't think it's fair to count that!)
I'm trying not to overthink the climate change question and guess the genericized spirit in which it is being asked, but it's an area of professional interest for me, and where on the scale my answer goes depends on *by whom* we're saying action is needed, and whether we're asking if said action should be compelled/required.
Excellent survey! Mild nitpick - sometimes I don't fit the options, for instance, I would love to give a kidney, but because of my medical conditions, that is not an option.
When discussing social interaction, I am retired but employed, and my employ is by design a major source of my social interaction - I think there are others in that situation, i.e., our employment is our social interaction.
But these are minor quibbles. The survey is unusually well done. Thank you.
I tried filling out an earlier survey once. It's ordinarily the kind of thing I like doing. I don't know if it would have been an ACX survey or an SSC survey.
I had to abandon it because it seemed to be entirely bizarre, intrusive questions on topics of absolutely no interest.
So I leave this comment to note that the survey results are probably not all that representative even of ACX readers.
More commentary than complaint: on the questions about house styling, it was challenging to disentangle my opinion of the styles themselves from my opinion of the regions/climates in which each style is prevalent/appropriate.
I have not taken the survey yet. On the question about IQ, is the SAT still the only test the survey asks for scores on? If so, I think Scott should also ask for scores on GRE, LSAT & GMAT (and any other standardized test of intellectual skills made by the big test companies, who have the means to develop good-quality tests). All these scores become comparable to each other and to SAT and IQ scores if you convert everything to population percentile scores, and then there would be more and more recent data about this measure.
At least for Americans, basically everyone takes the SAT. GRE scores would be confounded by only selecting for people that apply to grad school, and the other tests would be even more specific.
The SAT has been structurally re-designed a few times since I took it, which isn't a huge deal near the middle of the distribution but has significant tail effects. I wonder if it would be worth adding a "When did you take this test" follow-up question to those ones, though probably not worth the complication...
Do hate speech and misinformation have to be bundled together? On the "allow free speech" vs "stop/punish hate speech" scale, I'm more in free speech corner. On the "allow free speech" vs "stop/punish misinformation" one, I'm at least in the middle and mostly stopped from going all the way to the right by the questions of how it's going to be implemented and applied, and "whose truth?" in particular. But at some point the damage from allowing lies is probably going to exceed that from misapplication of any semi-reasonable anti-misinformation laws. In fact, Trump's second term is quite likely to become that point (the lies in question being about the "stolen" 2020 election).
Update: Also, is there a way to edit my submitted responses without filling the form anew? If not, can I resubmit the survey (with the same e-mail) to replace my previous one? (It's mostly one question, so I could also simply ask you to edit it manually if that's an option.)
As you note, one person's 'misinformation' is another person's 'inconvenient truths They don't want you to know'.
It's always going to be politicised and politically biased, so better to allow some wiggle room for it than a blanket ban, and concentrate on refuting the wrong claims.
Your example of the lies about the 2020 election now has a counterpart in those who believe this election was stolen, by the same means that the allegations of 2020 claimed, and what made me personally laugh was Maricopa County being singled out - that seems to be a place that is always debatable, it flipped blue from red in 2020 and had the Trump supporters at that time claiming it was stolen. Now it's flipped back red, and the Harris supporters are claiming that proves it was stolen. Last time I bothered to look at the place back in 2020 comparing the results from 2016 and 2020, it became evident that only a small number of voters flipping was sufficient to turn the place from red to blue (or blue to red), so no jiggery-pokery needed.
I don't disagree but my attitude is still different. If there were safe ways to ban misinformation without giving the state the wrong kind of power, I'd probably vote for it. If there were safe ways to do that to hate speech my opinion would probably range from lukewarm approval to disapproval depending on how strict the proposed restrictions were.
> Your example of the lies about the 2020 election now has a counterpart
That's not a new development too, I read an LJ blog whose author thinks it's plausible Trump stole 2016 elections. Based mostly on how often people throw accusations of what they're actually doing themselves. She doesn't seem conspiracy theorist-serious about it, but it's a thought she entertains.
1) The question about my "religious beliefs" has options including "atheist but spiritual" and "atheist and not spiritual." I'm an atheist with what I would call spiritual _feelings_ , but no spiritual (in the sense of non-naturalistic) _beliefs_ . So I'm not sure which response would be more accurate relative to your definitions.
2) None of the options in the question about my living situation covers staying at a shelter. The same applies to one of the questions in the supplemental part of the survey.
One small complaint: I looked in vain for 'school teacher' in the job list and ended up picking the subject I teach. If that's intentional, no problem.
If you teach in a government school, I expect you were supposed to answer that you work for the government. I always just find the list interesting as an insight into the demographics of this community but also, presumably, the categories Scott thinks in. In other contexts, “education” is generally on offer as a broad category.
Did anybody else lose the whole survey after going to the BMI calculator? Couldn't find a way back. Probably shouldn't have done survey on phone. Likely me being a dumb ass.
Good God, so much autistic gigapedantry, we need to take time out of teaching AI models generalisation and context-extrapolation and teach it to ACX comments section humans
Including me. Gross or net profit margin, Scott? You can’t not specify
The "political affiliation" one always has me umming and ahhing, since I'm an economic socialist/civil libertarian/cultural moderate leaning conservative. Doesn't really need a fix, though, since people like me seem pretty rare.
"How many hours a week do you spend in social interaction?" question should specify whether it includes internet social activity. Personally not sure.
>Have you ever been homeless?
>Answer yes only if you've been homeless because you couldn't afford a place to live, not if you were doing it for the "experience" or to save money.
What about if you got zero-notice evicted and thus were involuntarily homeless despite being able to afford a place to live (because you hadn't been able to arrange long-term accommodation yet)? Happened to me personally (stayed in motels; still was not fun due to frequently having to change motel), personally not sure about correct response.
Haven't completed survey yet due to latter two issues; have read it all.
Given that the vast majority of people have no way to know their chromosomal sex and can only infer it from their sex assigned at birth, perhaps the latter would be a better question? The percentage of people with different chromosomes to what they expect (e.g. XY people with androgen insensitivity) is quite considerable. Certainly there will be a handful of people in this dataset who answer that question incorrectly without knowing.
I don't know what the data will be used for, but if it's to investigate things where chromosomal sex actually is the relevant variable, the survey might as well give anyone who happens to know that information independently an opportunity to give it, rather than giving up early just for the sake of making it more likely that the question asked matches the answers people give.
1. Regarding the question of which race one identifies with. I am a mix, but I mainly identify with the majority race of the place where I was born and live, even though I am brown and not immediately recognized as belonging to that group by others. This creates a dissonance that prevents me from fully identifying with them, as there remains a distance between us. Sorry if I am knit picking.
2. Regarding the question of time spent on socializing. One is not supposed to include time spent socializing with those you live with, but at the same time, time spent on child-rearing should be included. I live with my children and spend a significant part of the day with them. Should this time be counted or excluded? The answer to this question makes a significant difference in the total number of hours.
(next year I will have to answer that I am no longer only a lurker)
I hope this isn't a nitpick. For the question: "Do you usually wear a face mask when going out to stores or restaurants?" my answer is yes, because I live in Delhi, and the pollution is terrible, but the question is obviously being asked in the context of Covid, so I have chosen to leave it, instead of answering.
Profit margin is very ambiguous and could lead to variation of orders of magnitude. Are we talking net income, operating profit or what? Having worked in accounting, when someone just says "profit margin" I would think operating profit or EBIT which is 13%. Average net income is half of that. Not unusual to also to use profit to refer to EBITDA which is way higher than 13%.
Maybe this is obvious to others, but I also wonder about "average" does each firm/company get the same weight, or are the weighted by revenue? I think it would drastically change the correct answer
In addition to the L-R question, it would be nice to clarify your position with an 'Authoritarian -Libertarian' scale, with the Authoritarian side being identified as (belief in achieving social/economic goals through formal government intervention), vs Libertarian (belief in achieving social/economic goals through market/social/cultural interventions).
Gosh! My only quibble is that "How I Found. . . " ACX didn't list, "Jerry Pournelle's old Chaos Manor blog often cited SSC and shares several frequent commenters. "
Jerry also posted when SSC was taken down and when the comprehensive archive was posted, for awhile the only way to get Scott's content. I suppose that makes me a relative dinosaur.
For "sexual orientation," if you are interested in analyzing any data from trans readers that relates to orientation, it would be clearer for us if you were put "Attracted to men" "Attracted to women" "Bisexual" "Other" as opposed to hetero/homo/bi/other, because of the questions right before it asking about biological sex and gender identity. I, at least, cannot tell whether we are meant to answer based on our birth sex or our current lived role.
For "what area do you work or study in", I am a teacher. I don't see education or academia as an option, so I guess I have to put other white collar? Seems to be like it would be a category worth adding.
Related case: I work at a research lab that has deep ties to a specific neighboring university, is technically structured as a non-profit, and does an increasing amount of in-house manufacturing of devices that are then sold on to commercial clients. I put "Employed at a business" for my work status, but I could have put down any of the first three options with a straight face.
The office building aesthetics question had a mixture of older-style buildings that I liked and newer ones that I considered fairly boring and bland and didn't have strong views on either way.
It didn't have any of the modern ones that I consider actively hideous, but that I infer some people actually like, that are springing up all over my town (Cambridge, UK). It would have been more interesting to include them. Currently it's like a pH scale with nothing beyond about 8.
Here are some examples:
Future Business Centre: with the bare concrete and the protruding metal window frames, I thought it was still waiting for another layer of some kind of cladding, but no, it's complete. I also hate the random asymmetric placement of windows, the hodgepodge of different materials (concrete, wood, glass), and the overhang. https://www.saundersboston.co.uk/ugc-1/fullnews/news/83/444_square.jpg
This is terribly stereotypically UU of me, but…on "Which best describes the religion you believe?" I'm actually kind of confused. Does the "believe" you're trying to get at mean "agree with tenets and practices" or "the stories about sky daddy literally happened"?
I was raised UU and I still agree with much of the tenets and practices, and plan to raise my kid with the UU church, but I wouldn't say I "believe" the church's agnostic approach to spirituality, which still affords room for supernatural phenomena. I also consider myself Christian insofar as I think Jesus had a lot of good ideas for how to treat your fellow man and think WWJD is a pretty good philosophy to live by, but not insofar as believing that he was the literal son of (a) god, or having belief in any sort of life beyond death.
By my best guess I think all this questioning means I should just shut up and smash the UU button.
Some reason you haven't included a 'socially conservative, economically liberal' option? It covers basic populism and Catholic social thought, which I think at least one prominent commenter follows. You've got the other three quadrants of the political compass, and some extreme stuff.
The Jhana question frustrated me, because I am experienced in mediation and stress management (Benson method) but my goal is usually something like "being in the groove" or hyperalertness without anxiety, which I frequently achieve. But that didn't sound anything like "Jhana", so I had to click "Never tried".
When you do your yearly predictions (which I hope are coming soon!) I'm not sure that I know why you include *things that you have massive control over* but I assume that in some way you feel that predicting their likelihood will help you.
In a somewhat similar vein, I imagine that mamy people will not want to define themselves in some way that they regard as negative (whether in regards to finances or mental health, etc) lest it affect their own judgement of themselves and therefore potentially their future. I can even imagine people wildly exaggerating their wealth (or downplaying something they regard as unwanted) to the point that between the false answers, and the *far greater* number of "blank answers" many of those questions will produce responses that aren't very informative about your readership.
In any case, I liked the building/house questions the most even though I didn't read the most recent relevant article on the subject. One thing it may have pointed out is that the more modernist office buildings may be unsightly (for some) from the outside but are perhaps nice places to work if their glass exterior bespeaks floor-to-ceiling windows. 🤔
Anyhow, thanks for your blog. You're a great fellow.
Asked what country I identified with, so I answered none/dath ilan. I hope this wasn't supposed to be the country I live in.
"Children Wanted"
Since this question specifies an 80th percentile outcome for my preferences, I guess we managed to align superintelligence and not die, so <10^20 or something I guess? Not sure there'd necessarily be a "spouse" involved, but surely I'd be making new minds in that situation eventually. Or do they only count as children if they start out mostly randomly initialised and experience a "childhood" where they slowly learn things, rather than being transhuman minds smart and coherent enough to be legal adults right from the start? If so, that seems like an unnecessarily cruel way to make a mind. So under that definition, possibly 0?
Left this one blank. I'm not clear enough on what qualifies as a child here.
"Physical Attractiveness
Rate your physical attractiveness. DON'T LIE!"
Left this unanswered because the description implies correctness is important and I don't trust my assessment enough to have high confidence on the granularity level of a ten point scale.
"In percent, what do you think is the profit margin of the average American company?"
It doesn't say I'm not supposed to just look it up, so I just looked it up.
For whatever it is worth, I am told by people who should know, that the stereotypical "cradle to grave social security" is no longer a thing in "scandinavian countries".
I am sure scandinavian countries still have more comprehensive social security than the US "we cannot figure out health insurance" of A and maybe this was meant here, but overall I think this "clarification" is too messy to be useful.
I live in scandinavia, and have no idea what you are talking about. We absolutely have "cradle to grave" type social security, and nothing much have changed to that lately. The only thing I can think of is lots of people are discussing difficulty dealing with the bureaucracy when recieving said social security.
For the question "What do you think is the profit margin of the average American company?" is this weighted by revenue (i.e. so the average profit margin would be total profits / total revenue) or is it an equal weighting by company?
In other words, if there are a total of 101 companies:
1 of which has $100 million of profits on $1 billion of revenue
and 100 of which have $5,000 of profits on $10,000 of revenue
do you want to compute $100,500,000 / $1,001,000,000, which would be a tiny bit over 10%, or would we compute (10% + (100 * 50%))/101, or about 49.5%
There is probably a big difference between these, because if you don't weight by revenue (or at least restrict it to Fortune 500 companies or something) then the average will likely be dominated by a large number of very small companies, or companies like startups that have a profit margin of like -10,000% or something because they have lots of costs but almost no revenue.
For years I've been put off from taking the survey after seeing the comments pointing out problems with many of the questions. (Writing good survey questions is Hard.) But this year I've abandoned scrupulosity and taken the attitude that it's OK to leave some unanswered. My nitpicks:
> Relationship style
> What is your preferred relationship style?
Suggest also asking what is your actual relationship style.
> In what area do you currently work or study?
What do I do if I'm retired?
> Which best describes the religion you believe?
What do I do if I believe in many religions?
> Have you ever shoplifted?
Suggest instead - Have you ever deliberately/knowingly shoplifted?
Strong agree with "deliberately/knowingly shoplifted". That one got me wondering for a good while. In the end, I went with "no nitpicks" and said "never".
Re: "What do I do if I'm retired?", I also struggled with having no option to say "independently wealthy, could retire at any moment" + "still working, for Reasons". Or for the matter, "working for another while working for myself"
At the risk of nitpicking, I don't think the questions for those in a relationship or single are going to yield very useful data. The data is terribly compromised by the definition of "settled down" meaning "have kids" Getting married is a reasonable (nitpicking: though not perfect) overlap with settling down but you've left anybody who would get married but doesn't want kids in a bind when it comes to answering the question.
Probably not the first to ask: about the margin of the average US company, do we include failing companies (companies that failed during the current year)?
Are there any people who identify as "otherkin" or "therian" among SSC/ACX crowd? If yes, ping me at thesolarinbox@gmail.com, I'd like to interview you in near future for the purposes of amateur research
Many people have previously been diagnosed with mental health conditions but have fully recovered. Feels like this should be an option for the mental health questions.
I agree. I experimented with antidepressants for 2 months, gave them up and recovered cca a year later as the time and events passed. I chose that I don't have clinical depression.
I hope this isn't a nitpick. But on the mental health questions, I wasn't sure if "family" meant biological or also included in-laws. If you're interested in biology only obviously only biological family would count, but if one has some life experience with some conditions because some of your in-laws have them, it would give you social, cultural, experiential familiarity, which might be important for different contexts.
(In general for the illness/generation questions, I found "within two generations" to be slightly ambiguous: did only direct ancestors/descendants count? What about aunts, uncles, cousins?)
- on the "are you ready to settle down" question, my answer would be squarely inbetween "I might do it if I really liked them and they said it was a deal-breaker, but I would be skeptical and they would have to push pretty hard" and "I would be actively excited about this" such that neither of those is particularly close to correct
- "Do you think dating these days is harder for men or for women?" - I think casual dating is definitely easier for women than for men, but finding a serious long-term relationship seems pretty similarly hard across genders; on a strict reading this means my answer should be "men" but I'm concerned the answer may end up used to endorse a claim I would not endorse
For a few questions the button I clicked on wouldn't select no matter how many times I tried. All other options worked, but not the one representing my answer. So Ieft it unselected.
1. ACX became Slate Star Codex in January 2021, about 4 years ago. I found the blog later in 2021, maybe 3.5 years ago. But there is no option on the survey for that, so I had to choose between:
• One to two years
• Since it was Slate Star Codex
2. You ask for a favorability rating for Donald Trump, but not for anyone else. You should probably include a Democratic politician (e.g., Kamala Harris or Joe Biden) as well. Otherwise you cannot distinguish between people who dislike Trump and support the Democrats, people who hate both sides equally, and people who dislike him but see him as the lesser of two evils.
FYI, if you take this survey in the Substack iOS app, then click out for the BMI calculator, when you click back the survey will be wiped. Slight selection effect here, knocked me out.
On the political affiliations question, you have no option for anarchism. Anarchism is not Marxist or liberal. There are Marxist and liberal strains of anarchism, but lots of anarchists regard those as not really anarchisms but instead anti-state Marxism and anti-state liberalism. I am not the only ex-rat anarchist I know, there should be an option listed.
There is also no option for "My beliefs reject/cannot fit into the left/right spectrum."
I prefer modern architecture, but I thought the examples given in "what kind of office building/house would you prefer" were very ugly, which predisposes us to the older styles.
Also, in the "settling down" question, is "immediately begin trying for children" an intended and obligatory part of the question? Because otherwise I think it might scare off some people who are ready to otherwise settle down, but don't want kids.
> "what kind of office building/house would you prefer" were very ugly, which predisposes us to the older styles.
Honestly the survey images seem very typical of the difference in quality between new and old stuff. In that almost all new stuff looks awful or mediocre. If the new images weren't ugly than they wouldn't reflect reality.
I don't think looking at past arrests in any way would be appropriate for shoplifting, or any other offense. Looking at past convictions would be a reasonable. I expect there are others like me, but I didn't see a way to say that to the question and it wasn't clear how to round the answer I would have had based on convictions to an answer to the question that was asked.
Kinda late, but I'm unsure how to count online socialization towards social interaction time. I went with video calls yes, and messaging/emailing at 50% of time spent.
I am unmarried, but in a stable relationship with the father of my two children aged 7 and 9. Such arrangement is quite common in my bubble. The questions about marriage and settling down did not have good options for me.
Not sure if there is anything you can do about this, but I was unable to select the "yes" option to the "can I email you" question, and unable to select the "no" response in the "do you have a tatoo" in the survey form. Everything else functioned normally. I was using a Google Chrome browser, on an Android 13 OS.
Adding another flag that "In percent, what do you think is the profit margin of the average American company?" is an unanswerable question. "profit margin" at least has a handful of clustered meanings, but "average" has a lot of very different meanings, even to the same person.
Median of all companies ordered by profit margin?
Mean of all companies ordered by profit margin?
Weighted mean, by employees? By market cap?
The "most typical" company, based on vibes?
"average" is one of those words that, if I'm reading it in a news article or social media post, is a big red flag that "the number that comes next is worse than useless"
Honestly I think you're worrying too much. Since the point of the question is probably just to see how many people here have a wildly inflated idea of the average companies profitability (like most people do).
One thing that isn't captured by the survey is that you can think McMansions look bad and still think a lot of modern architecture is even worse.
A poorly implemented building that's *trying* to look good but failing, is still better than a building which does a good job of successfully capturing an architects absolutely hideous artistic vision!
Possible technical issue: on the School Choice question, I was unable to select option "5". I didn't have this problem with any other question in the survey.
For "what kind of building do you live in," I'm not sure any option reflects my living situation? I'm a college student, and I spend ~40 weeks/year in various sorts of dorms with roommates and 50+ people in the building, sharing a common kitchen and lounge/living spaces (not really a "large apartment building") and ~12 weeks/year in a single-family house with my parents. I have therefore left the question blank.
The building question seemed to focus on the building style, but my choice is largely based on more practical considerations, especially regarding roofs. I wouldn't choose a building with much in the way of flat roofs, because these inevitably spring leaks before long, and are expensive to fix. Conversely, I don't like houses with steep sloping roofs, "all roof" so to speak, such as Dutch roofs, as this means upstairs rooms all have sloping walls, which is inconvenient and a massive waste of space. (An exception to my "no flat roofs" rule is a railed off balcony.)
He separated “apartment” from “townhouse/condo/etc”, which seems to be more about ownership structure than style. It doesn’t distinguish whether you have upstairs and downstairs neighbors, or only neighbors attached on the sides, but does (largely) distinguish whether you own the unit or are renting it.
He never asked about ownership and none of the options reflect ownership at all, plenty of people rent townhouses/condos/etc.
He also distinguished between smaller apartment buildings and larger apartment buildings, so I'm pretty sure he was focused on the types of buildings.
“Condo” is an ownership structure. It means ownership of one unit in a larger structure, usually a single building divided into apartments but sometimes a bunch of townhomes with some shared spaces or even single family homes with shared spaces that are co-owned.
A ten story building with four apartments on each floor can either be structured as a condo, where residents own each unit individually (with shared control of things like elevators and the building frame) or as what we usually refer to as an “apartment building”, where the building as a whole is owned by a single company, that rents out individual units to people.
The way Scott wrote things suggests different answers in those two cases, even though the building looks identical in those two cases.
I stand corrected, thanks for the explanation.
Yes. Technically, I rent a condo in a 10 unit condo building, but I checked the < 10 unit apartment building box because I think that's what makes sense to check. Probably some split about # of shared walls/neighbors/whether you share an entrance/stairs would make more sense?
Agreed, practical considerations are important. I would be reluctant to buy a 2-storey house, regardless of its charm, because that would rule out me doing roof inspection and cleaning eavestroughs.
Agreed on flat roofs - water always finds a way. (It's moot for me; I don't like the look of most "architect" houses anyway.)
Sounds like the nearest thing to your situation would be "group living" as that's the majority of your time (in student accommodation).
I also split my time between a dorm and my parents.
Similar problem but I went with my legal address where I can vote. I own a house in the surburbs of a big city. I'm currently working and living for a bit (probably a year) out in the unincorporated country up a dirt road.
Yeah, I live in a multi-family group house and the "group house" option specifically excludes living with family. Really couldn't figure out what to do.
Being in a semi and being relegated to the condo/townhouse/whatever category hurt
Yeah I went with the one that didn't have the stupid lawn that would take forever to maintain. But like that's probably not what the question was about
It saddens me a bit that LessWrong isn't even an option for 'How did you find ACX?' anymore.
Sonnet 12
When I do count the clock that tells the time
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,
When I behold the violet past prime
And sable curls all silvered o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defense
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
How many people weren't around for Slate Star Codex but have found ACX through Less Wrong? Can't be many?
Really, I also don't like that all of us from before ACX are lumped together and don't matter in these questions anymore.
Presumably he still has our answers from previous surveys.
I was sad to see the loss of the "Been here since it was a LiveJournal" option, but Catmint makes a good point that that data is probably inferrable from old surveys. Unless there's some weird unexpected pattern in which particular ages of old readers have/haven't stuck around this long.
I came in through his tabletop roleplaying games, I don't think I've ever had a survey question ask about that XD
Me! I found Less Wrong while looking into that whole LK-99 room temperature superconductor thing a while back (July 2023), and found Scott's writing there.
I got into Lesswrong just a few months ago (but learned of it 1.3 years before that). Then I went
Lesswrong -> SSC -> ACX
It's good to hear that while the old pipeline might be rusty it is still functional.
This is what happened to me too. I found specific SSC posts that interested me, eventually browsed through SSC, discovered the whole ACX stuff, and now read every ACX post. As such, I selected for only the best content while on SSC, so the quality did go down, but only because the nature of my reading changed. I ended up just saying I learned about it from a blog (got into rationalism through Gwern) and didn't do anything for quality.
I did. Learned about Less Wrong while going down an AI rabbit hole, stumbled upon Meditations on Moloch, read through most of Scott's old posts.
Not to dunk, but I used to love intuiting the hypotheses you were going for when filling out these surveys, and I'm extremely disappointed this one was themed around criminality and the homeless, with a side of architecture (which is also politicized now!). The shift from a blog about science and curiosity to one about politics is basically completed now.
Shift? It's always been a blog "about" politics. Plenty of anti-SJ stuff back in 2014 and 2015. The anti-reactionary FAQ is from 2013!
Also, while criminality and homelessness are politicised, they're also somewhat scientific, and I think Scott explores that scientific angle.
Yes, you're right, but most of the time it was but one of the topics Scott was curious and explorative about (hence his posts about his fictional country), not hot topics (again, most of the time). And yeah, I'm glad he's at least doing the research, but I'm still annoyed overall.
I am quite curious about criminal science, social science (homelessness), the future of architecture and many other things that also happen to be influenced by "politics". Hot or not - and "the poor will be always there with you", said some rabby 2000 years ago. The most popular post is still ivermectin - some may say that was/is a "hot political topic", too. I can do without news from Raikoth.
Yes. I worry that when I indicate that I’m “interested” in politics, many people assume that means I’m interested in party politics and individuals and Go Team! Whereas I am interested in political issues. I generally trust that Scott means the same.
Human psychology, health, genetics, and behavior isn't science? Haven't the surveys always been about that?
I'm looking forward to finding out how architectural tastes are correlated with pectus excavatum.
I suspect that spending any time at all in the bay area, while simultaneously having children, sort of forces the mind to reorient its priorities
I preferred SSC because Scott had less to lose at that time so he was more freewheeling and open, but the issues of homelessness and societal breakdown are pretty important ones.
If the link I saw (and mentioned in the immediate aftermath of Luigi's capture) was accurate and Luigi actually read ACX I understand completely why Scott didn't include questions grading his readers' sympathy for him (or related questions) but back in the SSC days I think he would have. Here we have an actual terrorist attack and a solid percent of Americans (and non-Americans) support him. That seems like a bigger issue to look at than whether people should be penalized for using the 10 items or less aisle.
The police haven't released much of what they have but they did release included a quote (which 3 minutes of search failed to find - of course - so here's the paraphrase) 'August 15th: Things are coming together, the target is insurance. It checks all the boxes..."
He's a freedom fighter or terrorist or revolutionary of a serious sort. No doubt he thinks the justice system is corrupt, and doesn't think very highly of either the president or the president-elect but he thought his actions through quite seriously. More seriously than he thought about his own escape plan.
He's not some guy who killed a rapist or a corrupt cop or a POS lobbyist or anyone of any fame whatsoever. He thought this shit through and he was right. He's got people deep in the culture wars rethinking who is actually waging war against them.
If Americans were literally any other people (save Canadians or Australians) the reaction would be On The Streets -- that's how much support he has.
Back in the SSC days I think Scott would have jumped into the fray. I don't hold his more "professional" and careful approach against him at all. He is incredibly brave, bold, and honest. One can not be all things to all people. I think this blog is great, but I hear where you're coming from.
Science and curiosity have long been political, and no one can control what things they care deeply about that also make other people in their society mad, which is what it really means for something to be political. I think that no one at all, not Scott Alexander nor anyone else, should have any qualms about blogging about things they care about that have political implications, out of some misguided feeling that there is something wrong with being about politics.
"In percent, what do you think is the profit margin of the average American company?"
This could do with more precision. Gross or net profit margin? Average how? Weighted by revenue or just a simple arithmetic mean? Publicly traded companies, or all businesses?
Many different reasonable ways this could be reasonably answered.
I second this. I really am confused as to the gross/net profit.
Another confused person here. Many companies with high gross margins have tiny net margins or make losses after depreciation and taxes. I answered as though the question was asking about net margins.
median profit margin in 2015 was xy% - for whatever that means. While "the public" seems to assume yx% - for whatever that means. "The Public Thinks the Average Company Makes a Profit Margin, Which Is About ... "
Agreed, this confused me (I went with net, publically traded - I didn't even think of different kinds of weighting, to my shame!)
Speaking from total eco-science ignorance, this was very confusing in the “average company” aspect for me: I have no idea, so I’d like to imagine an “average company”, but… what does that mean? Sum all profit and divide by the number of companies? Sort the companies by their profit margins and choose the median one? Etc. Basically, this seems (to me, a total know-nothing) as unspecific as “average country” (what is the [any random economic measure like GDP growth% or unemployment rate] of an average country?).
Exactly: does each company count as one company, or are we weighting by the size of the company?
I also struggled with this question, because I don't know what company is average. I know tech companies have significantly higher profit margins than many traditional companies, but I don't know what percent of companies fall under tech. I know a lot of standard companies like grocery stores have very low profit margins, but again don't know what percent of companies this encompasses.
I don't feel like my answer to this question is very useful or meaningful. Even to me. I suspect he doesn't care what the actual answer is, so much as perception, but if even I don't trust my own answer at all, I'm not sure how useful that is.
I suspected this question was kind of along the same lines as "when did you last think about the Roman empire?" It may be compared to an actual answer, and then you can see what your answer says about you.
There is no actual answer! The question is too vague for that.
I think net profit is the figure that captures the obvious reasonable interpretation of the question.
If a company is losing money, I expect its profit to be negative.
(I don't have strong views on the other questions, but don't think what you choose to answer to them should have all that big an impact on the answer).
The standard here is EBITDA. I’m quite confident Scott will end up using this.
What I’m less confident about how this would be weighted. Median profit margin of all listed stocks? Market cap weighted profit margin? Also, for the current year? Smoothed over the last 3 years? The business cycle and interest rates make this very noisy.
The answer was higher than I expected, when I looked it up (the search results appeared to be market cap weighted, but I’m not sure), but I’m predicting most people anchor on tech profit margins and will be surprised how low any reasonable “average” is.
Limiting it to publicly trade companies seems like much too harsh of a limit. There are on the order of tens of millions of businesses in the US, and only on the order of tens of thousands of publicly traded companies.
If we are going to go down this route (and I think your questions are reasonable!) then we also want to be clear on whether money LOSING companies are included in the average.
A negative business net profit margin is possible if we add in all the money losing businesses. Certainly in an industry (hello, restaurant industry!).
*) Net vs Gross matters
*) Including money losing businesses matters
*) Privately held (e.g. large law firms, family run restaurants) or not matters
I answered with my best guess for net profit for 'all' businesses. But many other interpretations are possible.
Also, does this include unprofitable companies? What about sole-proprietor/pass-through LLCs?
Especially with the US market being so heavily weighted towards the biggest tech companies (which are often unusually high margin) the number is radically different depending on whether it's listed, weighted by size, includes every incorporated entity (in which case the number will be very low). I gave a sort of generic number but the question is, I think, fundamentally broken and can't be used for analysis.
Yep, gross / net is a huge difference.
Yeah, I really wasn't sure about the weighting of various companies. Like I just figured many companies are running at a loss right now, and if I think of the set of companies relevant to be "a company that is started on America", then there are so many negative values in that average. But then... does Microsoft get weighted 10 million times as much as some guys food truck? Or is that just two companies whose margin percentages get averaged?
I ended up putting 0 as my answer.
Is it the average profit margin of an American company? Averages of ratios are fairly meaningless, and companies of vastly different scales are a concern. Median profit margin quantified across American LLCs might make sense, but 90% of those are going to employ <10 people, and work across vastly different industries (net profit in legal companies is going to be quite a bit higher than retail).
I'm actually a bit confused why anyone would interpret it to mean anything other than net margin. That's the portion of total revenue that stockholders get to take home (or reinvest in the company). That's what the average "man on the street" thinks when he thinks profit margin. Why would internal accounting metrics like gross margin matter?
"Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?"
must... resist... the temptation to meta-nitpick *that* question itself
don’t fight it. be a pedant. i’ll be rooting for you.
Whatever, Deiseach already made the exact point I had in mind anyway
There is always going to be at least one person who will be confused/upset about something, no matter what that thing is.
Perhaps, but maybe not one person currently reading this blog who is engaged enough to take the survey!
No, there won't.
😁
It would not be an ACX Survey without pedants, nit-pickers, contrarians, and the awkward squad despite all the Rightful Caliph's exhortations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awkward_squad
❤️
I think the HBD question is ambiguous in an actually-confusing way. e.g. if someone believes that such differences are an unfortunate inequality that must be rectified, are they supposed to answer "favorable" (since they believe that the differences exist), or "unfavorable" (since they're against this state of affairs)?
Agree. It is not at all clear whether favorable means 'believes there is some scientific evidence for it' or 'believes it is a good thing' or 'believes it should be used to inform policy' or 'opposes all mention of sex/race in laws or policies.'
Strong agree here. Ambiguous and I struggled to answer this question.
I read that question as clarified, "eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?". You're favorable to the idea if you believe it's true, independent of if you believe it should be true, or if you believe that, if true, it should be corrected.
Then the wording be a more neutral like 'agree with the proposition'.
What to do after that agreement is a wholly separate thing, really.
Yeah I agree that's a reasonable interpretation, but it's not clear. If someone asks me whether I'm "favorable to the idea of eugenics", I'm pretty sure they're asking whether I think it's a good idea, not whether I think it's possible.
Yeah, I think it's a very unfortunate but likely true hypothesis about the state of the universe.
I am pretty certain that, as expressed in the survey, "the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways", is pretty much an inevitable consequence.
Supposing the concept of "race" more or less points to a cluster of factors that are associated with each other (and thus recognizable as a cluster) and those factors being genetically determined (or at least, so much influenced by genetics as to be determined, in practical terms, let's say 80%/20% nature/nurture), and those factors being hereditary, thus (unless mixed with other races) they persist across generations. Unless you deny some or all of the preceding, you must admit to the existence of "race" as a concept, if a fuzzy one.
Then, supposing there are at least 2 different human groups, such as they can be distinguished by some of those clusters of factors, it would be strange if they, as groups, didn't have different means, distributions, etc. of values across several possible measures. E.g. height. Not all measures must differ, of course. Or be correlated. But some of them will, or else you don't really have different groups (or you're not correctly carving reality at the joints, see e.g. bleggs - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries). So, after accepting there are some measures that differ, it's not a stretch to postulate some of them are "socially relevant", since society measures us all in a dizzying amount of ways. Even if it's on the extremes of the outliers. E.g. Kenyan athletes are over-represented among Olympians in long distance running.
What you choose to do with those facts, of course, can be unfortunate. But I have problems to understand why is the fact itself unfortunate. Or rather, I understand that considering the mere fact "unfortunate" is a strong social signifier, but apart from social signalling, I don't really see why. That's part of the problem of making the definition almost maximally vague.
You might want to equalize outcomes. But even supposing you could (I don't mean it in terms of political capital, but as results of individual persons, all of this being the realm of averages and groups and standard deviations), the optimal amount of effort to equalize requires at least a reasonably close estimation of the types of differences and the amount of the differences. That's the strangest part. Seeing people who would like a certain result, but not able or willing to (even with great distaste) do the needed calculations to reach it. And I, for one, would really like to see it all out in the open. Anything else is just bickering about how to indirectly affect the reality without ever reaching a consensus of what even *is* the reality to be affected, much less when will we reach the desired result.
Race is just the phenotypically recognizable evidence of ancestry. Abilities and disabilities tend to cluster and persist for a while in families. Big deal. Nothing is permanent.
The mental health questions about what conditions my "family" has are unclear as to whether they mean only people who are genetically related to me.
After 3 years of this he still hasn't clarified that?
I think we may assume he means genetic relations; your third stepfather's cousin's second husband may be nutty as a fruitcake but that has no bearing on your mental health or propensity to develop mental problems.
Biological parents (if you know 'em), biological siblings (ditto), grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins - any of which developed problems or had them from the start. That gives the hereditary background from which you can say "yeah, there is X in my family and there were concerns that I would pass it on to my kids" or "developed Y but nobody else has it".
What about adopted children? I am a former foster parent who adopted 3 of my foster children, and needless to say, my answers would be very different if I were to include them.
I always answered genetically. I don't think he cares who my brother-in-law is or what conditions he may have, related to the rest of my answers on the survey. The lack of specifics (two generations with no details) and no details on number of people or severity makes it almost impossible that he would try to use it as a general survey of frequency or anything else other than genetics.
I sort of remember he commented in a previous year that he meant for it to be a genetic connection, but I might be conflating that with how I decided to answer it after reading the comments.
It would be nice to have that clarified on the survey. Though, since there's no distinction between people who have X and also have family with X vs people who have X without family who have X, I think we can safely interpret the family option as a low-but-nonzero probability that I have X without realizing it.
Just curious if I selected the way other people would: I live in a city of ~560,000. Is that a small city or a large city?
I grew up half in the middle of Dallas and half in a little town of ~14,000 so my sense of scale is all over the map.
that's on the lower end of a large city. I would put the boundary at maybe 200k.
I wish it had clarified "big city" or maybe provided a an option for "Midsize city". I'm in St Pete FL, which is certainly no Chicago or LA, is also not a suburb, but certainly isn't a small town and it's in the midst of a huge metro area with suburbs of its own. Most places I've lived (Ann Arbor MI, Akron OH, Ft Lauderdale FL also) have been in this size range. Only lived in one big city (Baltimore-- I think it still qualifies although it's definitely the Poor Relation of east coast cities) and did suburbia briefly after college and spent an unhappy year and a half in a semi-rural but summer resort area.
I think that if it counts as a big city in its area (the most populous or important) then the literal size doesn't matter as much - no it's not going to be as big as New York city but it's a "big city" for Florida and that's the important distinction there.
For that I think the better term is perhaps "regional hub". That defines the town in relation to the area rather than in terms of size.
Our regional hub is definitely Tampa. But St Pete is no mere suburb of Tampa.
Seems like a small city. Above a million is my personal cutoff.
Edit: I think of city size in a global context, and China has completely changed the context of cities over the last few decades. Population >1m used to be a very large city within living memory.
IMO, a small city would be like my home town of Ypsilanti MI (20K people, and another 30K in the township), or Salisbury MD or Jamestown NY. The sort of place you can comfortably bicycle across.
I would call it a town
Two comments, half an order of magnitude of disagreement. I at least feel vindicated in my uncertainty!
It depends also on the country; a city of a million is a big city if the entire population is around five million, but by comparison with a country population of fifty million, it's a small city or even a large town.
OECD doesn't say cities as such but rather urban areas:
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/urban-population-by-city-size.html
"Urban areas in OECD countries are classified as:
large metropolitan areas if they have a population of 1.5 million or more;
metropolitan areas if their population is between 500 000 and 1.5 million;
medium-size urban areas if their population is between 200 000 and 500 000; and,
small urban areas if their population is between 50 000 and 200 000."
So a city of 560,000 would be a big(gish) city; not the largest, but not a small city either.
I thought about using the population of my metropolitan statistical area rather than the city proper, but the MSA here is ridiculous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_metropolitan_area); it's 80-90% uninhabited land.
I don't see a detailed explanation but it looks like OECD uses commuting patterns as part of their definition. For economic purposes that makes a lot of sense, but because the question in the survey specifically includes "suburb" as an option it feels skewed against this type of definition -- a suburb is basically just "a lower density area that functions economically as subsidiary housing for a nearby city" and so I would expect most suburbs to be part of the larger OECD metro by definition.
I still don't understand what Americans mean by the term "suburb". Like, is Beverly Hills a suburb or not? Is Sunset a suburb of San Franciso? Is Flushing a suburb of New York?
Generally we mean a region of predominately non-dense residential housing (not apartments) near but not in a city: Beverly Hills is a suburb, but Flushing is not.
Anything bigger than 50,000 is a large city. So Buffalo NY is a large city, while Jamestown NY is a small city.
If 50000 is a large city, what larger size categories do you use for cities in the millions and tens of millions? Because putting Tokyo (~37 million) in the same category as Buffalo NY seems...questionable.
You could say that about Tokyo and most cities. Berlin for instance.
If we decide a large city is a reasonable fraction of the worlds biggest city then most of what is thought of as large cities wouldn’t make the grade.
I'd say that 50K to 100K is a large town, 100K-500K is a small city.
Man, that is not at all what I would consider a large city. I live in a suburb that has 150,000 people in a metro area with 1.3 million people, and I chose the small city option.
Perhaps distance to the nearest larger city is a more important factor than absolute number of people?
The suburb I live in is touching the main city. I'm a ten minute drive from the Central Business District. That main city in my region though is less than 500,000 people, so I couldn't consider it a large city. In reality, I would call it a mid-sized city, but that wasn't an option.
Similarly if I live in a small city that's a suburb of a bigger city, should I have picked small city or suburb? Is the important distinction whether it's a self-contained community or an adjunct of a bigger city, or are we asking about single-family sprawl vs apartments and businesses and dense public transit?
Given that suburb is an option I would have gone with suburb, but there are definitely edge cases. What is Fort Worth in the DFW area? If the "suburb" is a 40 minute drive through countryside but is legally part of the metro?
As always, building discrete classifications for something on a continuous spectrum is hard.
My best guess is that the intent of the question is more along the lines of "how densely built/populated is it" which is why I chose small city but yeah it's pretty unclear.
That will depend on the country as well.
For China, 1 million isn't a large city. For Czechia, 250 thousand is a large city.
I live in a city that size and I said small after hesitation. It feels big to me, but I guessed that Scott would consider it small.
And don't forget e.g. Fairfax County Virginia, which is almost fully urbanized, but in which the vast majority of the population lives in unincorporated ares (there are only 3 towns in the whole county, and cities are independent of counties in Virginia).
I wasn't sure what to answer for the kidney donation question. I ended up with "I haven't started the process," but in reality I started researching it, and I even emailed a couple of organizations, but kidney donation to a stranger is illegal where I live. So maybe I was rejected? But I don't think that's what you were getting at with that option, either.
I would have liked a "I'm open to it, but haven't done anything yet to start the process." I'm not against it, but had to answer Not Interested because the other answers were more incorrect.
Good point. I wasn't sure how to answer as it's something I would seriously consider, but am medically not eligible.
As my long-term monogamous partner and I live together and have a child together but aren't legally or religiously married and don't plan to (which is not a particularly rare arrangement in Europe nowadays), I'm not really sure how to answer the "Married people:", "Single people:" and "People in a relationship other than marriage:" questions -- I answered the first two by interpreting "future spouse" broader than literally, skipped the following two, answered the following one by interpreting "marriage" broader than literally, and skipped the last two.
I think it’s clearly people in a relationship other than marriage, common law marriage being not a thing anymore.
All ambiguity is out the window if you pop down to the registry office and sign a document.
Re: common law marriage
IMO, it should be.
If two people are cohabiting, share finances (and benefits), are sleeping together and intend the situation to endure then they are de facto married. Until SSM became legal same sex couples generally thought of it that way and would refer to their partner as "husband" or "wife".
If you want to be married why not sign a document. Why is the state supposed to guess the status. Plenty of people might live together and not be in a relationship - with SSM it could be too blokes, or unrelated women.
People who want the state to guess their relationship and apply common law marriage seem to demand the state and society to see them as married after a while, while refusing to actually take 5 minutes at a registry office. That seems odd to me. It’s not consistent being anti marriage and being pro common law marriage.
Marriage is a financial arrangement as well as romantic one - it doesn’t have to be romantic at all. Yet people won’t sign something to clear it up.
An official marriage comes with some benefits (taxes, health care decision power, inheritance details) and some drawbacks (disadvantages when breaking up, loss of benefits from a previous marriage, (again) inheritance stuff). It's entirely possible and an actual occurrence in my social circle that some people live in a relationship that is, for all intents and purposes, a marriage, but, for various reasons, do not want it to be official for the state.
(edit: Fixed wrong phrasing for the marriage construct)
Why is it not a thing?
Common law marriage very much exists in Canada, for example, including many legal implications.
I've been officially married for two years but have been living with my current spouse for 13, and there is nothing particularly special about the last two years. There wasn't some drastic change in our relationship. I think the shift from "dating" to "common law" is far more significant than from "common law" to "married". It certainly was in our case.
It is a thing in Texas. And I interpreted myself as married because in Texas legally I am though no ceremony or paperwork was involved. In Texas you are legally married if the couple:
"agreed to be married"; and
"after the agreement they lived together in this state as husband and wife"; and they
"represented to others that they were married."
https://guides.sll.texas.gov/common-law-marriage
Common law marriage or something similar is a thing in Australia
Depending on which country you're in, and how many assets you have such as a house, your spouse may have to pay a shed load of inheritance tax if you pop your clogs, and v.v if your partner does. If that is a risk, it is better to sign a piece of paper saying you are legally married.
Also you might get problems if a partner gets very ill and medical decisions need to be made. Not being married might also cause big problems if issues occur while traveling internationally. IMO it's a bit irresponsible to not get married in situations like the one described.
If you're not married or in a civil union or domestic partnership or other registered relationship, then you're cohabitants which is treated as being single.
Depending on your country, there may or may not be legislation to cover the rights of cohabiting couples who separate:
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/birth-family-relationships/cohabiting-couples/rights-of-cohabiting-couples/
"While couples living together now have certain rights in the event of the death of either partner, or the breakup of your relationship, cohabiting couples do not have the same legal rights and obligations as married couples or civil partnerships. This has a bearing on important life events, including buying property, having children and inheritance.
For example, if you are living with your partner and you die without a will, your partner has no automatic right to any share of your estate (property, money and possessions) no matter how long you have been together.
Even if your partner has provided for you in their will, cohabiting partners pay Capital Acquisitions Tax (CAT) at 33% on gifts/inheritance over €16,250. However, if you receive a gift or inheritance from your spouse (your husband or your wife) or your civil partner, you are exempt from Capital Acquisitions Tax (CAT).
...If you have been living with your partner and your relationship ends, you may be able to avail of the Redress scheme for cohabiting couples. The aim of the redress scheme is to protect a financially dependent member of the couple if the long-term cohabiting relationship ends (either through death or separation).
Under the redress scheme, cohabiting couples can get similar orders from the court as are available to married couples when they separate or divorce if the court is satisfied that one of you was financially dependent on the other. The types of orders you may apply for under the redress scheme include property adjustment orders, maintenance orders and pension adjustment orders.
To apply for court orders under the redress scheme, you must be a qualified cohabitant. This means you must have been:
- Living together in an intimate and committed relationship for at least 5 years, or
- Living together in an intimate and committed relationship for 2 years if you have had a child with your partner
You must apply for these orders within two years of your relationship ending, unless there are exceptional circumstances. "
So you are in a "relationship other than marriage" and those questions apply to you.
But there's a world of difference, both practically and emotionally, between being in a long term relationship (and living under one roof) and being truly single.
Yeah I had trouble with this one as well. By this definition I'm "single", but I'm also settled down in a relationship with someone I intend to be with forever. I wear a $1000 ring on my wedding finger and we're buying a house together this year... but we are not formally married or in a registered relationship.
> So you are in a "relationship other than marriage" and those questions apply to you.
That's what I would think after reading up to the colon, but when I made it to the end of the question and see no "WDYM, we are already settled down and already have a child" answer, it was clear to me that it probably just didn't occur to the author, like to most¹ Americans, that a couple might possibly ever settle down and have children without formally marrying.
___
¹though not all -- even Mencius f***ing Moldbug didn't legally marry his first wife until three months before their daughter was born
I treated my situation as marriage for the questions of when I met and started dating my partner, but not for when we got married.
Similar, no kids. Not married for idiosyncratic reasons, open to getting married, not open to kids (these days mainly due to health issues but also never really felt drawn towards it).
I thought that whole section was poorly structured.
At 57 I would not be open to kids-- just too old, even though I'm healthy as a horse.
Related issue: my same-sex partner and I have been in a continuous rock-solid monogamous relationship for 28 years. Getting married didn't become a lawfully permissible option for us until year 15. This series of questions would have gotten a more accurate reading from me if they had asked about a "marriage or marriage-like relationship."
I wasn’t sure how to answer the long Covid question. I have Graves Disease, which is reputed to be associated with Covid-19 infection (ie. There are a bunch of papers on this in the medical literature) Was mine triggered by Covid, or would I have got it anyway? No idea.
I am currently ponder a joke along the lines of “if I must die of something, at least let it be something fashionable”.
Graves Disease was around before Covid, so I'd say that any relationship might be more "opportunistic" than "causation".
"Researchers do not know what specifically causes people to develop Graves’ disease, but it is thought to be triggered when an outside source such as a virus affects genetics."
So it's hard to say if you would have got it anyway or if the susceptibility was there but would have remained dormant until triggered by Covid infection.
I also wasn’t sure how to answer it because I have Covid *right now* (first tickle in throat on Monday negative test on Tuesday, international flight on Wednesday, when I started feeling worse, and then positive test after arrival) and am feeling more fatigued than I did at any point the other time I had it, but hopefully will recover soon.
Each time I had Covid (that's three times) it took longer to fully recover than it did from, say, the flu. Or even from the virulent pneumonia I suffered at age 14 which is still the sickest and closest to death I have ever been. Each time I bounced back to become basically functional but still had lingering shortness of breath for two weeks or so. But that's not long Covid.
I have commented about this before, but it hasn't been fixed so I'm commenting about it again. The left to right political spectrum is impossible to answer without context. Should I base it on American politics, the politics of my home country, or take a more global view? I would give different answers to all three of those.
Same, and also I feel obligated to point out that in addition to not having a reference point, the question compresses three axes down to one. I would want to see separate questions for cultural (anti-work <-> pro-social justice), economic (free market <-> redistributive), and political (authoritarian <-> libertarian) spectra.
In many places, the actual decision that matters ultimately boils down to "do you normally vote for the sole left of centre candidate that stands a chance of winning, the sole right of centre candidate that stands a chance of winning, or do you find yourself flipping which one your vote vote goes to unpredictably year on year?"
The political system has already forced the flattening; even though your actual views are more complex and nuanced, you have already had to do the flattening calculation in order to participate. Simply repeat that result here.
My objection is more about what this flattening does to Scott's analysis (and, potentially, third parties'). If 60% of ACX readers identify as far-right, does that mean that they're fascists, believers in free market economics, anti-woke, or simply Republican voters?
...If they live in the US, there really isn't a meaningful difference between any of those groups anymore. Except free market economics I guess, no politician gives a damn about that these days.
That's not right. There are lifelong Republicans after all who loathe Trumpian authoritarianism and voted for Hillary, Biden and Harris for that reason. And then there's the Bernie voters who switched to Trump because their top priority is to stick it to "the Man".
Well, those people aren't "Republican voters" anymore, are they? The party they supported no longer exists.
Definitely agreed. In particular, I care more about the authoritarian axis than the economic one, and I think the correlation between those has actually swapped over in relatively recent years, as discussed by this blogger with a delightful memorable cartoon: https://shadowoneboxing.wordpress.com/2024/07/02/liberal-at-20-conservativeish-at-40/
The progression of answers in the shoplifting question seems a bit off. It jumps from "a warning" to "20 hours of community service", which is pretty onerous for a busy person (I think that most employed people would rather pay a $2000 fine than do 20h community service). I chose "a warning" for the absence of something like a $200 fine.
I was tempted to choose "death" for the "caught ten times" shoplifter, because they are obviously incorrigible and a drain on society. But in the end I was merciful and opted for ten years instead. At least that will keep them out of mischief for a few years and give shop keepers a break.
I went for a month because yeah, ten previous means that this is habitual. A month is long enough to be punitive and gives them a chance, if things like addiction are involved, to get sober/clean, but not long enough to radically disrupt their life.
If after that they continue robbing and stealing, to the salt mines!
My problem with that is that a month in jail is long enough to lose your job and housing, which is radically disruptive. Once that happens, you might as well hold them for longer. I don’t know if a week would be doable. I think I really want a weekend, but with the condition that they are told one more time and it ramps up significantly. But then, I suppose we’re missing what the interventions would be on the second, third, fourth etc times.
Problem is, by the time we're talking "a month in jail", we mean people who are (1) repeat offenders (2) probably aren't in gainful employment (3) may be living in social housing (at least over here).
Like the example of the Cork woman in that link - given lots of second chances, out on temporary release so she can be with her family for Christmas, goes right back to shoplifting. These are not people who will benefit from "okay, a weekend in jail and a stern warning" and a month in jail clearly isn't disrupting their lives to the extent that "oh no if I go to jail/go back to jail, things will go worse for me than they already are".
First time offender? I'd be more lenient. 45 previous charges and already had three suspended sentences? Cross that invite to the Black and White Ball off your social calendar, you're doing porridge.
I assumed that they've already received at least month long sentences at some point during the previous 10 arrests, which means they've already gotten the month and kept doing it. I think it would be cruel to give someone 10 warnings to train them that shoplifting is not a big deal and then suddenly jump to 10 years in prison, but if they've been receiving increasingly harsh punishments each time then by the 10th offense it's obvious they're not going to stop.
Same choice here, but my rationale is that criminal behavior is more common among young people, and 10 years is long enough that a repeat offender might outgrow it.
The sort of person who commits a crime punishable by community service is very unlikely to be making $100+ an hour.
Yeah, community service for stupid teenagers thinking shoplifting on a dare is cool, or someone making first tentative steps down the wrong path who can be steered straight, or someone with a good reason (e.g. really did need to steal baby formula).
People like this, on the other hand - no. At least a month in the slammer. Got her second (and more) chances, still re-offended. This is either extreme stupidity or criminality, and there have to be consequences.
https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41540267.html
"A woman given temporary release from jail very soon after she received a six-month prison sentence for thefts went shoplifting again when she got out and today she was given another prison sentence.
33-year-old Julianne O’Farrell of Marble Hall Park, Douglas Rd, Cork, also appeared at Cork District Court after her early release and was granted bail on the strict condition that she would not commit further offences.
Judge Mary Dorgan recalled that O’Farrell told her she wanted to spend Christmas with her family and would not commit any further offences if released.
However, she was arrested and brought before a special sitting of Cork District Court last Saturday. She was charged on that occasion with three new counts of shoplifting. They included stealing a gift set at Kilkenny design shop on Emmet Place on December 11 and stealing items at Claire’s Accessories in Cork city on December 13."
"She has 234 previous convictions — 85 of which were for theft."
That is not someone who is likely to be deterred by "but imagine if you serve ten years in jail, once you get out your job skills are now obsolete and your career is derailed".
I'm assuming that 20 hours of community service takes much more than 20 hours out of your life. It's probably spread over 5+ separate dates, you have to show up on time on penalty of going to jail.
I mean, if you want to argue that it’s a net of 30 hours lost instead of 20, fine, but I doubt it would reach the 100 or so needed to be more economically impactful to a low end worker.
My point still stands for $500.
Also, you're assuming too much about the demographics of shoplifters. Nowadays with self-checkout, any trivial mistake or lapse of attention technically turns you into a "shoplifter". This has happened to me for ADHD reasons (I "brazenly" walked out of the store without paying). I find this particularly perverse since the store gets rid of the human cashier to cut costs, while selling it to the customer as a *good* thing, and on top of that there's a shift in responsibilities towards the customer needing to execute the transaction correctly, with criminal penalties attached (I'm unaware of criminal penalties for when a cashier makes a mistake at the register).
There are also a bunch of countries with a weaker rule of law and where the population has a less favorable view of "the system". In such countries, you'll find middle class people committing trivial crimes while justifying it to themselves based on the business / government being out to get them, "it's so hard to get by with my salary", etc. The situation with self-checkout does incline me an epsilon more strongly towards that.
To me the forgetting thing is not shoplifting.
I can one up that even: I was rushing, scanned my my breakfast and flat out forgot to tap my card once. Reaction? 'hey, come back' - it probably helped that I was wearing a suit and clearly rushing to work.
At least in common law countries, not paying out of absentmindedness isn’t a crime; theft requires intent (mens rea).
I agree that petty theft among higher earners is likely more common in countries with a weaker rule of law, but I suspect this is less true for shoplifting than for more abstract or ostensibly victimless crimes like speeding or copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement is omnipresent in most Western countries, even ones I'd categorise as having a "strong rule of law".
(1) If you know you're ADHD and tend to forget to pay when using self-checkout, my view is that you now have an ethical responsibility not to use self-checkout but to go to a manned till so you can't walk off without paying. Would you be happy if you didn't get paid for three weeks in a row because your boss pulled the "Sorry about that, my ADHD, forgot to run the payroll" excuse?
(2) Trivial crimes by those who justify it to themselves with "it's hard to get by" etc. mean that those people will also cheat and take advantage of *you*. Silly old ADHD Vitor walked off and left his wallet on the table? Free money for me! There is no honour among thieves.
(1) well, you've bought into the exact reframing I was complaining about. There are *two* parties involved in any contract. The store negligently lets any rando off the street walk in and take products they haven't paid yet into their grubby paws. In addition, the store often has 0 (ZERO) manned tills available.
Regarding my boss not paying me, this is not analogous because it's *the company* that owes me my salary, not this particular person. But yeah, if we assume that it's an owner-run small business, I would indeed let a one-off mistake like that slide out of courtesy. I don't think people with ADHD have an "ethical responsibility" to avoid owning small businesses.
Wouldn't 20 hours make the relevant ratio $5 hourly?
If you're a busy person, why the fuck are you shoplifiting? In fact, I think if you're a busy person with a normal life, you should get a *heavier* penalty because you have no goddamn excuse for being an asshole.
EDIT: People like this, for instance. They *should* incur the reputational penalty rather than being able to quietly buy their way out via a fine:
https://whyy.org/articles/delaware-cerron-cade-shoplifting-home-depot/
Cerron Cade has been a trusted member of Gov. John Carney’s cabinet, serving as both labor secretary and currently budget director.
Carney, who will become Wilmington mayor next month, has so much faith in Cade that he appointed him as city chief of staff.
Cade’s political career is now in jeopardy. He’s been suspended with pay from his state post for what the governor, in a cryptic Saturday evening news release, called a “personal legal matter.”
But WHYY News has learned that Cade, who oversees the state’s $7.2 billion operating and capital budgets, was arrested last week by state police for what court records describe as serial petty shoplifting from Wilmington’s Home Depot store
...Cade, whose taxpayer-funded salary is $164,000, allegedly stole eight items valued at $394.32, court records obtained by WHYY News show. Attempts to reach Cade were unsuccessful.
The four-page arrest affidavit, provided by Delaware Justice of the Peace Court under a public records request, says Cade utilized a practice known as “skip scanning.”
That means Cade allegedly purchased items at the store’s self-checkout registers but didn’t scan one or more items on each of the six separate incidents that were outlined in the arrest warrant.."
The fact that he robbed petty items makes it even more egregious. This is "ah hell, if I can get away with it, why not?" stealing and not necessity. And this also leads to the suspicion "if he's doing this as a private person, what the hell is he stealing/embezzling/defrauding in his public position?"
https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/bay-area-duo-nabbed-tahoe-heist-19989033.php
"Eventually, a security camera recorded the two older women shoplifting. Footage showed them taking something off a shelf, putting it in a bag and covering it up with a scarf, Gwin said.
On Monday, Dec. 2, Placer County sheriff’s deputies arrested two women on suspicion of stealing more than $1,500 worth of goods from Parallel Mountain Sports.
Both suspects are 68 years old. One is from Hillsborough, and the other is from San Francisco. One of the suspects purchased a home in Incline Village in 2018 for $1.7 million, public records show. Both suspects were formerly licensed dentists in California, the Reno Gazette Journal reported."
Maybe it's not Chinese Cardiologists we should be suspecting, but Californian Dentists!
>If you're a busy person, why the fuck are you shoplifiting?
Maybe they were too busy to stand in line to pay?
[Should go without saying, this is an attempt to imagine a reason, not anything I find anywhere near the level of justifying the act]
If you're that busy, then shop online for home delivery like the rest of us.
Why yes, I am still seething years later about the guy who, when I was working the till in a local store, just continued on chatting with his pal and didn't even look at me as he threw the coins for the purchase of a newspaper on the counter instead of handing them to me. Up yours too, pal, Jack is as good as his master and I'm a human being equal in dignity to yourself, even if you are High Human Capital I'm In A Job That Requires Me To Wear A Suit!
Catholic values - one-half 13th century theology, one-half social justice Workers' Movements and Distributism 😁
I like the community service answer because it's onerous in some ways (making it a deterrent) without breaking someone's life. Jail often means losing a job and similar long lasting problems, while CS can work around your schedule. It's also potentially doing something useful for society, rather than being a further drain of paying for jail.
For very minor offenses I've heard of jail sentences that can be scheduled on a person's non-working days. For example, a town I lived in had a mandatory two full days in jail or a rehab place for a first DUI, but that could be scheduled for certain days.
Ah yes, the busy life of gainful employment that would be interrupted by community service for this specimen:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-41538593.html
"A young man who verbally abused gardaí as “rat bastards” and committed a series of burglaries and other crimes has been given the opportunity to do community service instead of going to jail.
Ryan Kennefick, 22, of St Vincent’s Hostel, Anglesea Terrace, Cork, pleaded guilty to several offences at Cork District Court.
Now, Judge Mary Dorgan said she would adjourn sentencing until March 26 for a probation report on his suitability to do a community service order.
Defence solicitor Daithí Ó Donnaháin said Kennefick recently sustained a serious injury around his ear but had been trying to put his life on a better footing.
Adjourning the case for the report on his suitability for the community work, Judge Dorgan warned the young man that in the meantime: “No offending, no drink, no drugs. Attend at all probation appointments.”
The judge previously described the offences committed by Kennefick around Cork City as "messy"."
I find it more disturbing that there's nothing between one year (crime but not serious issue) and 10 years (very serious crime territory). How can you set up a poll varied between nothing, slap on the wrist, light punishment and then jump to 10+ years in jail or worse.
Okay, comments:
1. I think there really should have been an option for people who want to settle down with someone, but do not want children. Children are not definitional to settling down.
2. The questions about punishment, vis a vis shoplifting are hard. In a just society one would start with a warning, and escalate up to e.g. a few days in jail, community service etc. However, I hold that the existing socioeconomic order is radically illegitimate and property rights as recognized by the state are more or less totally non-binding. Until, for example, there is a reasonable welfare system I think people basically have the right to just take things from people who are substantially richer than yourself (my paper on political philosophy in relation to these issues, submitted to the journal for controversial ideas was desk rejected for not being controversial enough, making me think the whole think "controversial" here just means "unwoke"). This might sound like a minor point, but I believe it will be part of the thinking of a lot of people who propose no or extremely lenient sentences. As things stand, my response would be "no punishment at all, not even a warning" because there is no right to enforce these laws. Again, I don't think these considerations are as marginal as you might think.
3. Likewise the homeless shelter one is difficult clarity on what is meant by "harassing" passersby. If harassing means asking for money, and maybe yelling into the air in the vague vicinity of people, which is what a lot of people seem to mean by "harassing" in this context, then they shouldn't be arrested. If "harassing" means groping, threats at specific individuals, following people around after it's become clear that is not wanted, they arrest them, sure, but only to the degree this would be done to, say, a guy in a business suit as well. Likewise, there should be an option for people who think the mentally ill should be forcibly institutionalized, but "harassment" as usually understood in this context shouldn't lead to an arrest.
4. I know it's only a blunt instrument, and I know this is just vanity on my part, but as someone who works out 6 days a week, it pained me to put in my BMI without that context. Maybe a question on resistance training would serve as a good control if we're trying to separate out the overfat from the merely large.
> Until, for example, there is a reasonable welfare system I think people basically have the right to just take things from people who are substantially richer than yourself
Billionaires are substantially richer than everybody else, to the extent that the difference between a homeless person, a lawyer, a well paid IT worker on one side, and a billionaire on the other is about the same. Relative to the real rich there’s no difference between the rest of us.
Stealing from a local shopkeeper to the extent that he may go out of business isn’t moral, unless you are starving, isn’t moral. Stealing to fund a habit isn’t moral.
> from people who are substantially richer than yourself
> Stealing from a local shopkeeper to the extent that he may go out of business isn’t moral
I'm anti-shoplifting, but if the local shopkeeper is a few shopliftings away from going out of business, they probably aren't "substantially" richer than you. Besides, very few of the shops in my area are owned by locals, they're owned by giant merged conglomerates that drove the locals out of business (or bullied them until they were bought out) and are only consolidating more.
I think the point is that the people doing the shoplifting aren't discriminating between big companies and small owners when they steal.
Curious: is there currently a country in the world which has a satisfactory welfare system? Only rule is that you cannot name a country unless you also know the median benefit amount (definition of median is left up to you) and the list of conditions for obtaining it and keeping it.
Not a troll question, genuinely curious.
In a country about as rich as the US, I’d put the minimum standard somewhere between 350 and 500 US dollars a week guaranteed for all job seekers, regardless of age or previous employment status. Keep in mind that this may not be the only requirement of justice. I don’t put too much stock in the exact figure, it’s just my attempt to estimate the amount required for a standard of living adequate to survive off without indignity, assuming a few other measures I’d consider essential (healthcare free for the user, reasonable additional support for dependent children) are met.
There are many countries that reach the requirement in the amount, but fail in other ways. For example, the Danish system. Denmark reaches the required quantum fails in other ways (treating the benefit as a form of insurance for former workers, rather a guaranteed minimum income for anyone willing to work, and willing to demonstrate that willingness.)
The Australian system, my own, is inadequate in the amount, and a little too strict in the job active requirements, but if it were raised to 1100 AUS a fortnight, from about 800 AUS, I would consider it broadly correct.
So a number come pretty close but none I know of quite make it in all particulars. The scheme I propose- a guaranteed liveable wage for jobseekers- would impose substantial costs, but it is certainly endurable without a drastic decline in general standard of living. Our most important obligations, as always, are to those weaker and more vulnerable than ourselves.
A job guarantee would also suffice, so long as the pay and conditions were reasonable, and so long as allowances were made for the fact that not everyone can do every kind of work.
Exactly what the requirements of justice are I don’t have a complete theory but if this condition- every job seeker able to live with dignity- was met, I’d feel at least torn.
Would you support a system that required people to relocate from high cost of living areas in order to be eligible for benefits for more than 6 months - or if they want subsidized housing? So if you lose your job in SF, you have to move to Reno where you’ll get $500/week and a $100 apartment with 1 bedroom per person.
Currently, the bottom 2% of income earners in the U.S. receive about $50,000 of benefits per year. Granted, a lot of that is healthcare which you apparently are excluding from your number, but $500/wk is about what such people receive in the U.S. in addition to healthcare, and they do not have to be able or willing to work.
Do you have a breakdown for that?
Are you excluding other benefits here, like housing? I imagine you are.
Shop lifting could just about be moral, if a starving family stole food, or a mother stole baby care etc and then only in the case where the shop itself could not go out or business and violence is not used. This isn’t most cases.
Switzerland pays for basic accommodation, health insurance and gives you roughly 1k USD in cash per month. Not a huge amount given local costs but definitely enough not to starve or go naked. Potentially a better deal than some low-paid jobs, TBH. .
In some sense, adulthood and legal residence is the only requirement for that.
But of course, refugees (of whatever legitimacy) also get (less) housing and cash.
FWIW, the specific deal varies across northern Europe but overall, starve or be homeless you generally won't.
I guess my biggest concern with your plan is that the people harmed by almost all shoplifting are not the people who have the power to solve it. Stealing from local stores with no consequences means there would be no local stores. Maybe a big chain with their own security can survive, but then only the "rich" can have stores. This seems far less than ideal and counter to your own stated goals. If it should be okay to steal from the rich, then you would want a system that doesn't create perverse incentives that actually benefit the rich while immiserating just about everyone else.
The claim that stores are closing due to shoplifting is largely specious (it may be true in some specific cases). Quite often chain stores (e.g., CVS) simply overbuilt with too many stores too close to each other so they cannibalize each other's sales. This is true of some fast food places too.
Quite plausible. On the other hand, if shoplifting were literally made legal, do you have reason at all to believe that small shops could survive?
A rule that you can only steal from certain shops that make enough money seems likely to result in significant issues. Like someone robbing from a store they think is rich to find out it doesn't meet the criteria, or perverse incentives for companies to make themselves poor, or all kinds of unintended consequences.
No one's going to make shoplifting legal. If people en masse come to the conclusion that in a society where some people have no alternative to poverty, shoplifting is permissible, they won't legalize shoplifting, they'll institute alternatives to poverty.
The people most directly harmed aren't the store chains (although many of their employees are, in various ways), they're the actual honest paying customers who have to pay more to cover for both the losses and the security to prevent further losses.
Felt the same way about #1. I definitely want to 'settle down', but it has nothing to do with either marrying or getting children; it has to do with moving to live together for me.
"Until, for example, there is a reasonable welfare system I think people basically have the right to just take things from people who are substantially richer than yourself "
Well throw open your front door then, Philosophy Bear, because I'm coming for the goodies! You are (I can presume) substantially richer than me, so that makes it okay for me to take your stuff!
We've got several categories of theft that we're talking about here:
(1) Necessity. Someone really does need baby formula and really doesn't have the money to pay for it. That should be treated sympathetically and given the benefit of the doubt.
(2) Opportunism. Stupid teenagers on a dare, who yeah are better treated with a slap on the wrist, and the likes of the Delaware state budget director and the Bay Area retired women who can well afford the goods and are stealing for personal gain or profit, and should be punished severely in line with "you have no reason to do this and you should know better".
(3) Crime - either as part of organised retail theft or just a pattern of criminality as a person. That's the prison squad, because even with a "reasonable welfare system" they will still steal (while claiming social welfare benefits to the maximum they can game out of the system).
Oh yeah, and if "property rights as recognized by the state are more or less totally non-binding" then gimme your house or other place of residence, because you have no right to it just because you pay for it and I don't. You have a deed or rental contract? Sorry, non-binding just like you said! If I'm strong enough to force you out and take it from you, then no crime has been committed: might makes right.
I don't know if you've ever been the victim of theft, but it's a whole different viewpoint on "no punishment at all, not even a warning" because there is no right to enforce these laws" when your money and bus ticket and all the contents of your purse have been stolen by one of these store pick-pockets, and you have no way of getting home and don't have any contacts in that city to say "hey, can you lend me money to buy a ticket home/let me crash at your place?" I was damn lucky this was in the days when there were still phone boxes on the streets and you could make a reverse-charge call so I could ring home for someone to come get me, but that did not make up for the money I had saved being stolen (and I was on unemployment benefit at the time, so no spare "oh well the sum total of happiness in the world has gone up, whistle a happy tune like Bike Theft Guy" capacity for me).
Brilliantly put, Deiseach.
The "property is theft" folks just don't think things through.
Well, I'm biased from my direct experience. "If I had a shotgun would I fire it in their general direction?" is my feelings towards such events now, not "property is theft".
Yes it damn well is theft - they're thieving *my* property to make it *their* property.
Well, this is silly.
First, property in "property is theft" doesn't mean possession. (Surely, this is neither the original or the common meaning of the term "property", and it should probably always be prepended with "absentee" for clarity. But the full phrase - even not just taken as an idiomatic expression with its own separate meaning - is much more unambiguous, because:) Second, the very point and logic of comparing property to theft is the shared understanding that theft is bad, actually.
Basically, when you're equivocating [abolishing absentee property] with [legalization of theft] (and you do, the Bear did not invoke the phrase, you did), you're falling for the propertied classes' ruse that ownership of land, mine or factory is the same thing as your ownership of a wallet.
(That said, I'm not even sure the Bear actually supports decriminalization of theft qua theft either, rather than advocating for some kind of vastly expanded "Freedom to Roam" in an unnecessarily provocative and unhelpful way.)
Bear didn't make any such fine distinctions. If someone is stealing goods from a supermarket, that's not "possession of a building or land". The goods are the property of the supermarket until paid for, the same way that Bear would claim his money, his nice jacket, his TV etc. are his property - because he paid for them in a shop and the ownership of the goods was transferred from the shop to him, or the money is his because he swapped his labour for payment.
If Bear is saying the shop has no right to claim ownership of the goods and the thief is entitled to steal them, the thief is also entitled to steal Bear's TV and jacket and wallet since Bear has no right to them. He was quick off the draw to go "That's different!" when it was put to him about stealing *his* property. But it's really not. Theft is theft.
"Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don't they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, 'Thou shalt not steal.'"
If ownership of a factory that I built and paid for and filled with machinery and raw materials is not the same as ownership of a wallet I purchased and filled with my cards and money, pray tell me what kinds of ownership are we talking about?
I don't think you are, in fact, substantially poorer than me. Even if you are, it's very unlikely you could *know that*, so stealing from me would be immoral. You've not at all stuck to what I said. For starters, notice that what I spoke of was *shoplifting*. Of course nothing I said applied to you in that situation.
I've had stuff stolen, and sure that's a problem, but perhaps it hadn't occurred to you that people also cannot get home- or, for example, feed themselves- because they have no money.
"Oh yeah, and if "property rights as recognized by the state are more or less totally non-binding" then gimme your house or other place of residence, because you have no right to it just because you pay for it and I don't. You have a deed or rental contract? Sorry, non-binding just like you said! If I'm strong enough to force you out and take it from you, then no crime has been committed: might makes right."
Might doesn't make right, but neither do property rights. The reason you can't morally take money from people who are at your level, or lower, or slightly richer, or vulnerable in some way, isn't property rights, it's because it's not going to make things better, it's going to make them worse.
I don't particularly want open season on everything, but I'm bound to support it until not a single soul is involuntarily poor. Gregory of Nyssa, the first slavery abolitionist was right about this- poverty is immoral for more or less the same reason slavery is.
Oh, when it's a question of stealing from *you*, *now* it's about morals? The leopards weren't supposed to eat *your* face? Sorry pumpkin, youi made no such distinctions in your original claim:
"However, I hold that the existing socioeconomic order is radically illegitimate and property rights as recognized by the state are more or less totally non-binding. Until, for example, there is a reasonable welfare system I think people basically have the right to just take things from people who are substantially richer than yourself (my paper on political philosophy in relation to these issues, submitted to the journal for controversial ideas was desk rejected for not being controversial enough, making me think the whole think "controversial" here just means "unwoke")."
(1) If property rights are non-binding, that includes *your* rights to *your* property
(2) If the state cannot and should not recognise or enforce such rights, your property is now fair game for theft
(3) How do you know I am not substantially poorer than you? Do you require a Certificate of Poverty from every would-be thief? Who would issue those or enforce those?
On point #3 - And more that point, how is "poverty" even calculated?
After all, people earning well above the median wage can be paycheck to paycheck or even ever-sinking into debt under certain life circumstances (having a lot of dependents, etc). Is someone who purchased real estate but doesn't have $1000 in a cash emergency fund more or less "poor" than the debt-free renter with $10,000 in the bank? Etc.
Re: Until, for example, there is a reasonable welfare system I think people basically have the right to just take things from people who are substantially richer than yourself
In a true emergency, maybe? The law does recognize a necessity defense-- but it has to be a really serious need like breaking into a house to take shelter from violent, life-endangering weather. Even in the US, with its patchy safety net, the need to steal is rarely a matter of life and death.
That's the plea of necessity - a starving man can steal food and it's no crime (or sin). It's a lot different from "well property is theft ackshully, victimless crime, insurance pays out, ACAB, society is at fault ultimately" attitudes which the genuine criminals laugh at (while taking advantage of the suckers who promote such views).
Point 2 strikes me as a 'luxury belief'. If you stop enforcing property rights, or only selectively enforce them, you will not get a situation in which the commoner 'takes back' what is rightfully his from the rich bastard. What you will get is a further breakdown of social order in poor communities, making them even poorer and with less chance of crawling out of their poverty. The rich will use their wealth to insulate themselves from your policy, and anyone else is screwed as any apparent wealth over the lowest common denominator will be promptly stolen. The end result will be an even further hollowing out of the middle class, and a wave of crime rippling through communities spreading misery and tragedy. The lower classes will become dominated by gangs who band together to protect themselves, who will begin to enforce something like property rights with the threat of swift violence. The gang leaders will of course be strong-men who hoard the remaining wealth for themselves while the national GDP plummets because productive enterprise will be next to impossible. Your society will be defined by sharp wealth inequality, government corruption, mass poverty, patriarchal control, and omnipresent violence. (See for example, Venezuela) The politics of envy does not beget utopia, world history the past 100 years has shown that over and over and over.
+1000 well said
Yeah, the ones stealing the most won't be the poorest, it will be the strongest and the most asocial. The poorest will have even their little taken away from them.
If the state cannot and will not enforce property rights, the rich will hire men with guns to enforce them for them. Under our current system of law, you have some chance of appealing against the state. Sweep away the law, and there's no appeal against a man with a gun shooting you for robbing Mr Moneybags.
Reminds me of that famous quote from A Man for All Seasons about giving the devil the benefit of the law...
God. Damn.
This was great.
Re 4, the BMI thing, I too sympathize with the desire to represent yourself accurately and add nuance in a way that the poll doesn't represent. Not specifically for BMI for me (I had more of an issue with the family history of religion one, where I didn't even learn my grandmother was religious until her funeral and I really feel like "none" would give a more accurate impression of how I was raised, but technically isn't correct because there is in fact some distant family history I now know of). I think it's just an unfortunately necessary part of collecting data to do statistics on that some individual details will be flattened out, and I console myself that when everything is binned and analyzed, things like this will mostly average out.
Re 3, I hadn't even considered that such minor things might be counted as harrassment (and as such answered that the harrassing ones should be arrested).
I did the same as you for the harassment one. I'm a bit annoyed now that Philosophy Bear has pointed out that some people might interpret "harassment" as just asking for money or aimless shouting. I feel like I've added to the "tough on crime" pile without meaning to.
Again, I wonder how Bear would feel about "aimless shouting" if it was a camp of homeless under his window yelling, shouting and getting into fights at all hours of the day and night. He was very fast to defend *his* right to *his* property against theft and that it would be immoral to steal from *him*. Once again, I feel he imagines "I just walk past to my own safe, quiet home far away from the homeless" and not "I am constantly hassled by them every time I step outside".
Seconded #3—I'm not sure blanket institutionalization is appropriate, but outpatient care at least. As for harassment, I think people are way too sensitive about that and should get over themselves; unless they're clearly dangerous, I don't think anyone needs to be arrested.
Jumping on this to say: the timeline on 'ready to settle down' is insanely short. I cannot imagine any scenario where, after 6 months of dating, I felt like I knew someone well enough to tie myself to them legally and financially - and that's even without considering the issue of kids.
My criteria for 'compatibility has been evaluated; ready to get engaged' looks kinda like:
- We line up on all the obvious dealbreakers (mono/poly, kids yes/no, how many and when, lifestyle, pets, religion, finances, etc)
- We've known each other for 2+ years through ups and downs; we each know how the other handles stress, boredom, big emotions, disagreements, compromise and change.
- We've lived together for at least a year and it's working; we don't have ongoing disagreements about stuff like cleanliness, routines, division of household labor
- We've spent significant time with each other's family and close friends, and we can get along well enough
A lot of friends around my age have gotten engaged or married in the last ~3 years, and I think the shortest timeframe from 'started dating' to 'got engaged' was around 2 years, with 3-4 years being more usual. I answered this question 'No I would not be willing to do that', even though I would like to meet a partner for marriage and consider myself 'ready to settle down', because 6 months is incomprehensible to me. I think the survey will probably systematically underestimate the number of people who are genuinely ready because the timeline is absurdly short. (In case any commenters would find my demographics interesting I'm 30, female, single, Australian.)
Even if utilitarianism is true, it’s obviously wrong to steal from the rich (even on the individual level). If it’s illegal, there’s a good chance you get caught and punished such that the disutility outweighs the utility. “Crime doesn’t pay” is correct. Crime is an irrational occupation because of this; high-level rich crime bosses are rare.
If you mean legality, then it’s even more obviously absurd. Without the ability to be rich, all entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, etc. quit and society collapses because there’s no incentive to be rich. The ones that somehow keep existing become mafia bosses who essentially shoot every poor thief on sight.
For depression, if I had it before but don't have it now, do I have a formal diagnosis or not? Sorry if the question is dumb.
I took those questions to be historical-- Have I ever had...
Likewise, I took the "family" answer to those questions to mean "have ever" rather than "have now", so I also counted deceased ones.
Yes, I too would like a "Used to have it" option.
One thing that already bothered me last year: the questions on mental health disorders don't have an option like "I had this in the past, but I don't have this right now". If I had a severe depression 5 years ago, but have recovered and don't need medication anymore, what should I answer? That I have this condition? But that's not correct.
In such cases, I reply "I don't have this condition, and neither does anyone in my family", but this makes it hard for you to interpret the result.
I would recommend to either offer this option next year, or to rephrase the answers into something like "I have/had a formal diagnosis of this condition."
It’s been raised many times, but not changed. I assume Scott thinks this is nitpicking and that his intended interpretation is obvious. Since I don’t know which interpretation that is, I leave them blank unless I can answer ‘no’.
Just an extra data point--I answer the opposite way. Some of these categories may be in remission, and maybe they'll never come back, but I'm not sure anyone is every truly cured of them. I have depression even if I haven't had a depressive episode in a long time; my brother is an alcoholic even if he hasn't touched the stuff in years.
I really do not get those 2 social-interaction questions:
"Don't count interactions with people who you live with. Don't count interactions that take place as part of your job." That would be, dunno, two?
*Do* count social interactions that take place as part of child-rearing, hobbies, activism, or any other non-job task. I have three small kids in the house, thus: 30? 50? Suggestion: make it two questions.
But then: "Same as above, but now you can also count interactions with non-parent, non-children, non-romantic-partner people who you live with (eg roommates, siblings)." So, we WERE supposed to count parents/romantic-partners in the first question?!? - I do live with my wife, surprisingly. We even interact socially, I`d say. - I skip the question, not to spoil the numbers.
Suggestion: make it a dozen questions. How much time you interact with: kids you live with - romantic partner you live with - other family you live with - friends you live with - others you live with / kids you do not live with - romantic partner you do not live with - other family you do not live with - friends you do not live with - others you do not live with. Just 10, but the next issue covers 2 more: I have no idea why "social interaction" as part of my job should be any less "social interaction", unless it is mainly "mechanical". For most jobs, that interaction is intensely "social".
The first question excludes time spent with anyone you live or work with, including partners, kids, and roommates. For the second question you're allowed to count time spent with siblings and roommates, but still not allowed to count partners, parents, or kids.
In particular you have to exclude time with wife and kids from both questions. If your household is just your immediate family, then the answers to both questions should be the same.
That one confused me as well, and I came the same conclusion you did and put the same answer for both.
My household is only members of my immediate family, indeed, no renting out a room to strangers. Considered this standard among adults. Why then ask 2 questions? - So: two hours for both, seriously? But, hey, my sister is in the house right now (xmas time) - she drops in several times a year, so let it be on average: two-and-a-half-hours social interaction a week for the 2nd question. Well, fun with analysing THAT. - I do get the logic, finally, so thank you! - But then the 2nd question could have just been: "IF you live with other people (but not parents, kids, romantic partners or co-workers): how many hours you spend with them socially interacting?"
"social interactions that take place as part of child-rearing" means going to toddler groups or chatting to other parents at the school gate; it doesn't mean your interactions with your own children, which are already excluded by the question.
Chatting with other parents at the school gate? Why should I ever? That would have never came to my mind when reading that question. Serves me right for being autistic and a father.
I see. As a non-native-speaker, I struggled with that phrase. (Ola, Alejandro!) - Otoh, the first part of the first question seems then the same as the second part: "Not those you live with, not those you work with. Count all those you do not live or work with." Why the repetition? - And why those categories: " going to toddler groups or chatting to other parents at the school gate" (add visits at the schools doctor+school activities+school consultations) are interactions that are exactly as obligatory and as much fun (to me: as little fun) as "social interactions at work".
Scott only knows. Well, he does seem to live in a house with several other friends. And his kids are still too young for kindergarten/school ...
I chose to interpret the question as "count time interacting with your kids, but not other adults". What else is child-rearing meant to mean?
I'm boycotting these two questions because I have no idea what "interaction" might mean. Does it mean talking to the bartender at lunch? Does it include the roughly 30 hours I've spent in the past week thinking through a long series of back and forth emails brainstorming the nuts and bolts of my brother's new tech startup on the other side of the country?
I agree a lot. What "interaction" is "social", anyways? And what kind? - "Social interaction" may be a bliss and save from isolation. Or make one run to a lonely place to be save from all those small-talking status-seeking chit-chatting shitheads. :D Merry xmas btw to all humans on earth - but pls, leave the room and close the door. Reading ACX and writing a comment every once in a while - I consider "social interaction, I`d rather have".
My issue with this question was that I wasn't sure if it counted only in-person interactions, or if things like online chatting, playing video games, or talking on the phone would count. I decided to go with in-person only, but the difference between the two is probably 50+ hours.
What number should I enter on the political spectrum test if I am a Socdem but believe that capitalism can really be phased out someday, like Olof Palme or the German SPD of the '30s ? I entered 3 but am unsure between 2 and 3
Good point - I'm reminded of an article about the frustration working-class British voters faced a few years ago.
They wanted a party that would protect their jobs with tariffs and government support for strong trade unions, but didn't want open borders and LGBTQ+ values taught in the schools.
This is a simplification, but Labour offered the economic platform they wanted, and the Tories the social platform, but neither party offered both.
Given today's Labour keeps backsliding on queer rights, perhaps this is who they're trying to win over. Politics is weird in the UK though, because FPTP makes political posturing for groups on the borderline more effective than just straightforwardly representing the majority viewpoint. (The same is true in the US).
Fwiw, my architectural preferences have more to do with things like layout, cost, maintenance, energy efficiency, etc rather than the aesthetics of the edifice. For example, I prefer a simpler (but still sloped) roof design over a more complicated one because it will be cheaper to build and potentially maintain. Flat roofs have more leaks, afaik. I ultimately picked the house with the porch because I like porches, even though I prefer those porches on a much simpler "American Farmhouse" style (which wasn't an option).
We've been house hunting for months... If I had massive gobs of money to build a house, I think I would build something Japanese-inspired with lots of porches and courtyards. As is, we're putting money down on a Farmhouse-style tomorrow.
ETA: I thought the questions about kids were weird. The thing stopping us from having more kids isn't income, but time. Kids take a lot of time. I already have 5 of them; I can't see a way to add another without taking away too much time from the others. By the time my youngest are self-sufficient enough to let me have more time, I'll be too old for more.
On the other hand, I'm happy with 5, so maybe the question was good enough?
I think it obviously means that only aesthetics matters in this question - Scott has tried to make all other aspects equal.
Form follows function.
Perhaps you have the same thing with houses that I have with cars - I don't feel like car models are aesthetically different, they are all equally ugly so I only care about function when choosing cars. Meanwhile, I hear other people saying things like: 'I took this model because it's the only good-looking all-wheel drive minibus on the market,' which doesn't make any sense to me. At the same time, I'm willing to sacrifice some function to get a better-looking house, garden, or a piece of furniture.
This is a quote from Mies van de Rohe. I can't speculate too much but based on that I think he's implying that good aesthetics are functional. This is the core tenet of modernism, the thing you guys like to rag on so much! (not to single you out)
OK, but it can be possible only if you don't have the feeling of aesthetics apart from function in some context (e.g. me and cars). We cannot easily change such feelings, or the lack of them. Btw getting hedonistic pleasure from beauty is quite functional, come to think of it, it's good for health. I claim that modernist houses (imagine Soviet 1970s residential areas) are dysfunctional because a large part of the population (probably the majority) has to fight depression when passing them.
I think I get what you're saying and agree -- there's no accounting for taste. If you got to replace a soviet style brutalist apartment complex, what would you look to for inspiration? You have to build on the same parcel of land (ie you can't do a long, squat, building, it has to be tall), and I think we'd agree it should have roughly the same number of apartments, because as depressing as brutalism is, homelessness is worse.
For the office architecture questions, I chose both of the older-looking buildings because I think they’re very nice to look at. However, since I know that style is defunct, I would be very happy to choose a basic box over not building anything.
For "Same as above, except now there *are* empty homeless shelter beds in your city. The homeless say the shelters are filthy and tyrannical; they prefer to camp on the street.", I would have liked an option of "Fix the shelters so they are not filthy or tyrannical",
Me, too. And a "connect people with services" option that's not the police.
And "get a team of social workers help the ones who would actually prefer to not be homeless". Seems to work in some countries.
Assume that "police force them to go to shelters" includes "and once in the shelters, they get directed to support services and put in contact with a social worker".
Does that change your view?
I do think that yes, there needs to be more than "sweep them off the streets" but sometimes the least worst option will be that.
Yes, that changes it for me. I think I did pick this option, hoping that the poor devils don't have to stay in the filthy shelters forever.
There's also the issue of homeless people not wanting to live under even reasonable rules, like "you can't do hard drugs in the shelter" or "you can't bring a gun." I feel differently about the answer depending on the reason shelters were rejected in the first place.
The whole point is "let's say you can't do it (or at least not easily), what's the least bad option out of remaining ones?"
Might as well say "I want the option to eliminate all homelessness in the first place".
"I would have liked an option of "Fix the shelters so they are not filthy or tyrannical"
That's an entire can of worms of its own. Sometimes shelters are filthy/tyrannical because they are not kept well and the people running them are incompetent or scammers. Sometimes they're considered tyrannical because "the people running it make the homeless listen to sermons or try to convert them to Christianity" (funnily enough, an element in the Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever")*
Sometimes they're 'tyrannical' because "they won't let me bring alcohol/drugs in". Because if they do let alcohol/drugs in, then the drunk/drugged homeless often rob, harass, and assault the other homeless in the shelter, which means the other homeless won't go into shelters because "they're filthy/tyrannical due to the dangerous homeless there".
There *are* "wet" shelters which allow people to drink, and again there are questions "do these really help or not?"
https://rehabs.com/blog/are-wet-house-facilities-really-helping-alcoholics/
A fancier name is "low barrier versus high barrier shelters":
https://blog.uniongospelmission.org/stories/low-barrier-vs.-high-barrier-shelter
* In 1930 Great Depression New York, Edith Keeler runs the 21st Street Mission which serves the poor and homeless. Kirk and Spock end up there. From the transcript of the episode:
(Kirk and Spock collect their bowls of soup and pieces of bread, and sit at one of the long tables.)
EDITH: Good evening.
(She steps up onto a small stage with a piano.)
MAN: You'll be sorry.
KIRK: Why?
MAN: You expect to eat for free or something? You got to listen to Goody Two-shoes.
EDITH: Now, as I'm sure somebody out there has said, it's time to pay for the soup.
MAN: Not that she's a bad-looking broad, but if she really wanted to help out a fella in need
KIRK: Shut up. Shut up. I want to hear what she has to say.
SPOCK: Yes, of course, Captain.
EDITH: Now, let's start by getting one thing straight. I'm not a do-gooder. If you're a bum, if you can't break off of the booze or whatever it is that makes you a bad risk, then get out. Now I don't pretend to tell you how to find happiness and love when every day is just a struggle to survive, but I do insist that you do survive because the days and the years ahead are worth living for. One day soon man is going to be able to harness incredible energies, maybe even the atom. Energies that could ultimately hurl us to other worlds in some sort of spaceship. And the men that reach out into space will be able to find ways to feed the hungry millions of the world and to cure their diseases. They will be able to find a way to give each man hope and a common future, and those are the days worth living for. Our deserts will bloom. (She continues under the dialogue.)
...EDITH: Prepare for tomorrow. Get ready. Don't give up.
Though Edith Keeler's preaching, in addition to being unusually materialist and worldly for a missionary (unsurprising given the writer and showrunner), is very nearly a self-negating prophecy. If she's allowed to continue, we learn, the future will be *terrible* as a direct result of her success. She's only correct about the future if she's prevented from trying to contribute to it coming about.
I'm not sure if her institution is high barrier or low. She enforces rules and makes them listen to her sermons, but she also shelters Kirk & Spock from police pursuit for theft (followed by assaulting a police officer) despite Kirk lying to her about it.
1) work question doesn't deal with multiple applicable, eg I'm officially a full time student (remotely) on a degree course, but I'm also self employed freelance. At various times in my life I was employed and self employed at the same time. I marked self employed but was seriously considering "student".
2) socialising questions don't say if online/remote counts or do you just mean meat space. I didn't answer those questions for that reason.
3) I don't understand why I can't tell that my family's of origin background was atheist. In this way you're losing the potentially very interesting distinction between people who were brought up as atheists vs people who "lost" or left religion. In my observation there's a big difference in how those two categories operate. So the question is clear but I think it's badly conceived.
4) The length of marriage sequence is confusing because you're at times asking about first marriage even of people who have been married multiple times but then about current marriage, so why not have everyone who's ever been married answer those early ones and then filter by currently married or not? I am a widow and answered for my (only) marriage and when I realised I shouldn't have it was too late to go back.
5) the settling down questions don't apply for people past breeding age, AND assume that being in an unmarried LTR possibly with children is not settled down. I answered not ready to settle down to both but it's more that I've already produced all the offspring I ever might as I'm post menopausal.
3) Are there families where the previous generations were wholly atheist as far as anyone remembers? It seems unlikely, considering that only 4 generations ago most people had 16 different great-great-great-grandparents. Many of us were raised as atheists but that's usually only one or two generations.
I have no immediate family left unless I count my three step-siblings, only two of whom I keep in touch with. My extended family is all over the map religiously, ranging from Mormon to Catholic to never-darken-a-church door. I'm not even sure what value asking about extended family has in these sorts of questions. Maybe some immigrants have very tight knit clans, but most people are fairly distant from cousins and the like and even when they keep in touch (as I do) their more distant family isn't much of an influence on them in personal matters.
Ok, then I suppose you could use a general Christian label if that existed. It must be even harder for people who have Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist ancestors all at the same distance. In this case, it would be best to leave it unanswered so as not to muddle the test results that Scott is looking for, I guess.
Re 3, I've been commenting that on the survey for years.
A religious child of religious parents is different from a religious child of atheist parents and grandparents whose distant ancestors may have been religious once.
For crime: I wish there was an option for caning. I put community service instead.
And for the "What should be the punishment for 10 offences", in a world where they're let off with minimal consequences for the first 9 offences, I think jumping to life in prison the 10th time is unfair to the dumb kleptos. But in a world where they're given escalating punishments each time, e.g 20 hrs service/1 caning, then 30 hrs service/2 canings, etc... up to the 10th, and they're still committing crime, I'd be happy to throw them away for life.
For the homeless encampment question, I'd really want the city to just build more housing so the costs go down to a reasonable level. I think being heavy handed with police action against homelessness in a city where no cheap housing exists is cruel. Because it means very incompetent people who are bad at earning and keeping money will be perpetually homeless and perpetually beaten up by the police. If housing prices are reasonable however, it'd only be the people who you truly can't help who are still on the street, and fuck them.
Do you think it’s OK for police to move the homeless from a high Cost of Living place to a low Cost of Living place within a 100 mile radius? (Yes, I’m aware this often happens the other way around in the Western world).
I am. Seems critical, really.
I'd support them offering free bus tickets. I don't support forcibly doing it, separating someone from what limited network they have seems cruel and counter-productive.
No, it needs to be outside that radius.
"really want the city to just build more housing"
By this, do you mean ALLOW more housing to be built? After all, in the US, governments don't build housing, but companies (for profit) and individuals (to use) do.
That one is tough. More housing would help but not everyone, because some people are too incapable of living independently/crazy/criminal to live even in government provided housing.
The homeless shelter question is valid, because some places are bad - due to other homeless people. A shelter that doesn't let you drink/take drugs may be seen as brutal by a subset of homeless people, but on the other hand letting drunk/drugged homeless intermingle with other homeless leads straight back to "I don't want to go to a shelter because I'm at risk of being robbed/assaulted by the other homeless there".
Unhappily, there is not - contra Philosophy Bear - one quick, obvious and easy solution to the problem.
Your comment on caning seems either ignorant or cruel. Many people unfamiliar with the process imagine something akin to a parent spanking a child, or maybe slightly more severe, but in the few countries that practice caning they're harsh enough that even a very low number of blows can cause permanent disfigurement, incontinence, organ damage, or even death. Higher numbers (but still below 10 strokes) can lead to flesh mulch splashing across the walls and ceiling.
In most cases the imagined severity is closer to reality if one mentally replaced all instances of "caning" with "stabbing" - i.e. should shoplifting $100 worth of goods be punished by being publicly stabbed a few times?
I was caned several times at school. It hurt a lot but there was no way it was going to be disfiguring. That's the caning that I imagined.
Locking someone up for 6 months is really cruel too. We need some sort of nasty punishment to prevent people from doing crimes.
It's possible to cane people without causing permanent injury. Dismissing caning categorically because it's practiced in brutal ways in some countries is like dismissing incarceration categorically based on the worst totalitarian prison camps.
I completed the survey, but have comments on a few of the questions:
* Maybe the following two questions should have an option like "I haven't used or accessed them, although I know they exist" :
- Do you read the r/slatestarcodex subreddit?
- Do you read the SlateStarCodex Discord?
* The question "Have you ever had a cavity?" seemed to be bowled out of the blue among one or two questions on Covid and pigeon chests. I answered on the assumption it referred to a tooth cavity, but wondered if it might be some obscure pulmonary condition affecting the lungs or chest cavity! So I'd recommend expanding the question slightly to "Have you ever had a tooth cavity?" if that is the intended question.
Same, that threw me but I assumed tooth cavity.
+1, also assumed "tooth cavity", but would appreciate that being clarified
I took the "I don't want to use them" answer as being equivalent to "I know they're there, but don't use them".
I'm interested in the world where a reasonable survey question is "Have you ever had a chest cavity?"
Where the target audience is disabled war veterans?
Re: social interactions - do I count interactions that happen in the workplace and are with colleagues, but are unrelated to work (eg corporate social events, office gym)?
Other "blue collar"? I finally feel seen! Although of course I'd imagine that usually conjures up an association of The Trades or something else where sooner or later you're talking about real money. Not the wonderous world of retail..."it's called a service job cause you exist to serve Dangerous Professionals"
After taking the survey a few times, I kinda wish it were possible to auto-fill my answers from last year, for stuff like demographics that generally don't change much. Some small deviation on e.g. pretax income doesn't matter that much in the big picture, but It's The Principle Of The Thing. Same for all the spectrum choices, where it'd also be useful to see what Past Me answered, to assess subjective drift. (Maybe this is already possible by using old ACX Survey keys? But they never seem to work for me...plus Beware Trivial Inconveniences)
Eh, retail can be pink collar/very low white collar - think managers or even junior managers in supermarket chains and your own world of hotels. If you're mostly standing behind a desk dealing with paperwork/computer work and face-to-face customer interactions, it's not blue collar as such.
Signed, former (and never, as God is my witness, ever again) retail worker
I think a good Schelling point between blue and white collars for workers that don't work in the primary/secondary sectors is "will anyone notice and care if you have a bad day and do only half of what you usually do?"
If the answer is "yes, this is tracked and I will be reprimanded or paid less", you're blue collar.
Regarding clinical depression, the choices are:
I have a formal diagnosis of this condition
I think I might have this condition, although I have never been formally diagnosed
I have family members (within two generations) with this condition
I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family
How ought one to answer if one has a formal diagnosis, but has since been cured?
"Regarding clinical depression...
I have family members (within two generations) with this condition
I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family"
I'm going to assume this only refers to *blood* relatives, though this is not made explicit. You might be trying to gauge the impact of depression, in which case relatives by marriage would matter. This ambiguity about types of 'family' impacts a lot of questions.
"Do you live within 50 miles of at least one of your parents?"
Also, blood parents? Or parents by marriage? I'll assume blood parents.
"Don't count interactions with people who you live with.
*Do* count social interactions that take place as part of child-rearing, hobbies, activism, or any other non-job task."
I'm going to assume interacting with my kids is social time for this question, even though I live with them, which is disqualifying.
"Same as above, but now you can also count interactions with non-parent"
Again, blood parents or parents in law?
I think interactions with people you love with are explicitly excluded. All those board games with my wife and kids don't count (apparently).
Not really a nitpick because the question as posed is clear, but regarding the question of running over protesters, as an opponent of private car use in cities (conditional on well-designed city like Copenhagen or Amsterdam and with the usual caveats, which sum up to opposition of private car use in cities), I would be strongly against letting drivers running them over, but if the protest was blocking e.g. a tram line, I would support forcibly clearing them out and wouldn't feel sorry about any lethalities that might occur in the process.
Ditto.
I am categorically opposed to letting people take the law into their own hands, other than a narrow self defense exception- -and that needs to be A) a serious threat to life and limb not a mere inconvenience and B) must be limited to the minimum effective action.
Yeah, I wouldn't set it up as a principle that "you can run over protesters" because I think people do still have the obligation to be careful and even annoying stupid protests are not liable for a death sentence.
But if you're trying to get out of a protest and you accidentally hit someone, or if you are being pursued/surrounded by people who are violent (banging on car, trying to open the door or smash the window to get at you) and your only recourse is to drive through the crowd, I think you should get more lenience if you do injure or even kill someone.
I don't think there's any justification for injuring (let alone killing) innocent people simply to escape a dangerous situation. Some leniency-- yes, but you should still owe stiff restitution if you've hurt people who were not themselves breaking any laws or were any threat to you.
I think Deiseach started with the presumption that at least some of the protestors involved were not innocent (I.E. Were attacking the car and threatening the person inside.)
I agree that if someone wasn't involved with the protest *at all* and was just going about their day, then they may be truly innocent. But in the given scenario, none of the protestors likely are.
Being involved in a group committing criminal behavior typically makes a person guilty to a degree. I'm not a lawyer, but what prevents this from being, at least, conspiracy to commit false imprisonment and conspiracy to commit assault if other people in the protest were aware of the intent to impede movement and took meaningful action to further that goal, even if they were not, themselves, violent?
That is, we may be falling out on the definition of 'innocent' here. There's some history of cops arresting *everyone* in the street when things like this happen. I'm not sure how the judge would rule on that.
Physically blocking someone from leaving a dangerous situation is rarely an innocent action, especially if you're doing so by illegally occupying a vehicular right-of-way.
Interesting take. Would you be in favor of car drivers being allowed to run over protestors in non-cities? Like imagine some hypothetical place were cars are clearly better than alternative means of transportation: should car drivers be allowed to run over road-blocking protestors there?
I would say my rationale is mostly about aversion to actions destroying/harming the commons more so than anything else and here, through virtue of being so space-inefficient (and other harms from chemical and noise pollution, being the most dangerous form of transportation to other people in the city, endless lines of parked cars being an eyesore, etc), private car use, or more specifically car-dependent city design, is hurting the commons in its own right. However, this rationale of course applies just the same to e.g. blocking the car traffic in arterial roads or highways where cars are perfectly welcome. And I also feel strongly about other activities hurting the commons, not just blocking traffic, from littering to graffiti to political corruption.
Although I also have an objection to individual drivers, whether they are piloting a sedan or a passenger train, running over people: I am not averse to violence if violence is what it takes (the first action wouldn't be to break the protest guns blazing but tell the protesters go away, then drag them away, but if they get hurt in the process of being dragged away, or if they keep coming back or resist forcefully enough the police can't, THEN I have no objection to the protesters getting hurt), but I think there are strong reasons to restricting said violence exclusively to the purview of the Leviathan.
What about crashing into them with an electric bicycle?
It seems that supporting "car running over protestors" implies supporting all of the following:
a) capital punishment for disruption of traffic
b) random individuals (drivers) acting as judge, jury and executioner
c) private car use
I feel that if you support a) and b) but not c) it would be within the spirit of the question to still answer supportive of it.
Specifically I would intuit that a) and b) are so much more essential for the nature of a society that c) vanishes in comparison but given the real impacts of private car use on society I will grant you that this is debatable.
Ironically, but this might be a local quirk, where I live the thing protesters would most likely be protesting in such a situation would be private car use.
I think a) and b) are a strawman. Alternative takes exist, such as "If someone runs into the road, refuses to move, and is struck by a car and killed, that person committed suicide. Because the protester was primarily responsible for his own death, the driver will not be prosecuted."
I don't believe that your suicide framing will convince many people who are ethically opposed to running over other people that they would be in fact doing a good deed by assisting the protester's suicide. It seems to be absolutely glaringly obvious that the protesters intent is not suicide and therefore the driver would in fact not be assisting them in accoplishing their goal.
In the other direction I also do not believe that many people who _would_ run over protesters explain this to themselves as "they were committing suicide".
Of course neither you nor I have a way to prove what "many people" think, so this is leading nowhere.
Why no "agnostic but spiritual" option?
Had the same question. Also, I'm wary about the definition of 'spiritual', as everyone seems to use a different definition. Is 'having any interest in existential or philosophical questions' considered spiritual?
Why won't "atheist but spiritual" work for this? Yes, they're slightly different, but I don't see how the difference is relevant for this.
I think people feel that "atheist" is more definite or dogmatic about "I know there are no god(s)/I do not believe in god(s)" whereas "agnostic" leaves more nuance "maybe god(s) exist, I could be convinced on good evidence".
That implies atheists cannot be convinced by good evidence, which I think undermines atheism. Atheists think there is no god, but agnostics are unsure whether there is actually a god.
For this purpose, I don't see why not believing in a specific god but possibly believing in mystic forces of some sort wouldn't qualify as "atheist but spiritual". Would someone worshiping vague water, air, and forest spirits count as atheist?
"Would someone worshiping vague water, air, and forest spirits count as atheist?"
Interesting query. I imagine it would depend upon if the person felt those forces were personified in some form, as distinct from being natural energies? I think we're getting into Chaotic Magick territory here 😀
From the other side of it, Lewis' Materialist Magicians (as the end of disguised devil worship from "The Screwtape Letters") might be a form of 'atheist but spiritual':
"I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The "Life Force", the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work — the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits" — then the end of the war will be in sight."
(As an aside, this is why I love you guys and this place; I get to discuss the most interesting, not to say weird, questions!)
Buddhism is a non-theistic religion. A person can be a practicing Buddhist and believe in a god or gods, doubt whether such beings exist, or be fairly certain there's no God.
I wanted a "religious but not spiritual" option. I enjoy mass, and think that church is generally a good thing, but I don't believe in what they preach.
In many places in the US first time shoplifters will get a night or two in jail waiting for a hearing to decide bail or to be added to a plea docket. Then you'll often get time served plus restitution plus court fees. Sometimes that will be elevated to community service if you seem particularly incorrigible to the judge.
This seems fair to some first approximation, considering logistical constraints.
Time served seems like roughly a weekend in jail.
Community service is then added on top of time served, because instant hearings don't exist, so it seems worse than a weekend in jail, not like a lesser sentence.
So I think you are also asking us to imagine we flip to a summons only system for shoplifting. Maybe that's what they do in San Francisco, is it just like writing you a parking ticket?
In that case probably I'd change to community service but I'd have other concerns.
Somewhat related, I am surprised you left out the $100 threshold in the questions about personal experience, to avoid pollees saying "I'm pretty edgy I took a stick of gum as an unruly teen"
Maybe that's the idea though. To see if people who stole small things as unruly teens are more likely to sympathize with shoplifters nevertheless
Thank you for running the survey.
I was reading Scott back in the squid314 days.
My politics have changed, but not so much in the past 10 years. I used to be more ancap, I've become more tolerant of government.
I still pretty much think of myself as white, but being light-skinned Jewish, I spent some years going for "person of liminality" and have since settled on "off-white".
I still believe disasters from incompetent human use of AI are more likely than the human race being wiped out by AI.
Possibly should be in another thread, but what's the likelihood that people will be able to produce AIs with the safety controls taken off?
My opinion of social justice is very mixed-- it both points at some real problems and is emotionally abusive.
Your mental health questions combine "I don't have the condition and neither does anyone in my family", but a person could not have the condition while having family members who do.
It would be nice to have a format for the income question-- I needed to take out a comma.
It might be worth asking about non-clinical depression.
I had what I guess was anomalous long covid. The obvious effect was on my sense of taste, and I took about three years to fully recover.
I live in a row house, which isn't on your list.
I consider phone calls with friends to be social interaction.
I feel like my own views have not changed that drastically but the Overton Window has shifted more to the left. Though to be honest, I have moved somewhat more rightward as well, as I've gotten older. So while I still consider myself centre-right, it's plainly a degree or two more to the right as compared with contemporary mores.
I'm the same with social justice - the original idea was not bad, but the wokescolds took it over and made it repugnant. It became more about "can you parrot off the correct shibboleths to avoid cancellation" than achieving a more equitable society.
Yes, the issue with the woke question is that the scolds and cancelling and quotas are clearly nonsense and harmful... But I do think racism and sexism are still major problems, and in the past 5 years or so have been seeing a dramatic step up in explicit racism (including antisemitism) and misogyny both online and off, which I don't think is unreasonable to partially attribute to the anti woke momentum.
I agree racism and sexism have definitely become a much more common problem in recent years, but I think that's more correlated with rather than attributable to the alt-right, anti-woke, etc movements. The main problem seems to be that there is no longer popular support for any true anti-bigotry movement, so now a lot of people are choosing the lesser of two evils between the "inclusive and diverse" left (which openly discriminates against men, whites, Asians, and recently Jews) and the "anti-woke" right (which is more subtly bigoted against everyone else).
Yes, I strongly agree here. One can have a naive version of colour/gender blindness
... But the basic principle is pretty good and is better than the alternatives when interacting with individuals / a general principle of elevating individual Vs group rights.
An individualist anti racist version of this looks like being opposed to ethnic profiling for stop and search, even if (for example) black people commit more crime on average in your city. This may be true, but it doesn't make it any less injust or degrading for innocent black men to be pulled aside when walking home (and for the record, the *only* colleagues (finance) who have ever been stopped and searched by the police are black).
I guess "simultaneously over- and under-" is the reasonable position on social justice / woke issues, and probably a consensus here. There are genuine problems, but the proposed solutions are often crazy, and their real purpose seems to be signaling loyalty to a political tribe instead of actually fixing the problems. Problematic opinions get punished. Genuinely bad actions, not that much.
>>Length of Time
How long have you been reading ACX?
Uh, what option is there for late 2021 starters?
I was annoyed at this question last year, because I fell into this category but at least 2 years was closer. The blog is almost 4 years old though, now, so "1 or 2 years" is woefully insufficient.
Clicked "No" on publicizing my data after checking that I'm the only one in my country who's answering these surveys and thus obviously identifiable. ;)
Would be great if there was a way to hide certain answers and release the rest to public, but I suppose that would mean a lot more job for Scott.
Just like last year I'm unsure about the attractiveness question. Do you want to use it for hypothesis testing, e.g. do attractive people have different opinions on this or that, are they more likely married, etc? In this case, I imagine that a middle-aged woman, who used to be very attractive but is now middle-aged, would muddle the results if she were honest and rated herself as low. I've been having this problem lately.
As far as I can tell an attractive person often stays attractive relative to their age cohort. I'm not sure how one would even start to disentangle relative attractiveness, absolute attractiveness, and shifting social norms around appropriate age gaps between people involved in relationships. For instance, if a taboo develops forbidding age gaps, then someone saying that they are no longer attractive messes up the correlations if they remained as sought after by people in their age cohort as when they were younger. Maybe the question should have specified whether absolute or age-relative attractiveness was intended.
This was a bit of a challenge for me actually; I was probably 4-5/10 as a youth relative to my cohort but have taken substantially better care of myself than my peers in the intervening decades.
> I imagine that a middle-aged woman, who used to be very attractive but is now middle-aged, would muddle the results if she were honest and rated herself as low.
Why would she muddle it? I understand the 1-10 ranking as "If a random stranger that is attracted to your sex has to choose between you and another random stranger of your sex as his or her next long-term sexual partner, what is the probability that he or she will pick you?" This ranking obviously takes ageing into account.
In theory yes. In practice, it will be extremely difficult to provide even a rough estimate of that, as even if you are honest about your chances, actual interactions will never be with random strangers but with people in your social circle, which are typically in your age range....Also, for older people, who probably have far less frequent occasion to check their successes (because they are in a relation, or assumed to be in, and have smaller social circles with even less celibate people in), it's almost inevitable memories of past success/failure will weight much more than current status. I expect most people to interpret the question as "relative to my age cohort", both for self-status-preserving reasons but also completely honest practical reasons.
Also, I suspect than rather that actual attractiveness w.r.t potential romantic partners, it's "reputation" attractiveness, the one you get hinted from friend without any romantic potential (for example same sex friend for heterosexuals). And this one is not necessarily the same, suffer from friend niceness bias and is even more linked to age cohort
I consider it very weird that the shoplifting penalties go from a month to a year when the recent ACX post talked specifically about 3-6 month stays in prison as the current misdemeanor amount (that doesn't get applied)
Scott is aware of the bloodthirstiness of some of us in the commentariat so he's giving us the option to let our base appetites have free rein.
"Translated obviously okay"
😂
I love this community because it puts you through this though and I'm also sorry you have to put up with us. Thank you.
Can one be said to have read Plato, though, if not in the original Greek? 😁 I haven't even read it in the unoriginal English, so I can't throw stones!
You haven't really read Plato until you've read him in the original Klingon
:)
Given the suggestion that Plato is a wrestling nickname meaning "Broadshoulders", you may be more correct than you think 😁
"There is a traditional story that Plato is a nickname. According to Diogenes Laërtius, writing hundreds of years after Plato's death, his birth name was Aristocles (Ἀριστοκλῆς), meaning 'best reputation'. "Plátōn" (Ancient Greek: Πλάτων) sounds like "Platus" or "Platos", meaning "broad", and according to Diogenes' sources, Plato gained his nickname either from his wrestling coach, Ariston of Argos, who dubbed him "broad" on account of his chest and shoulders, or he gained it from the breadth of his eloquence, or his wide forehead. Philodemus, in extracts from the Herculaneum papyri, corroborates the claim that Plato was named for his "broad forehead". Seneca the Younger, writing hundreds of years after Plato's death, writes "His very name was given him because of his broad chest."
(Modern scholarship being all no-fun spoilsports, they reject this cool origin story).
I love it that all Ancient Greek names, when translated literally, sound like nicknames. Agamemnon = very steadfast. Pericles = far-famed. Aristotle = best of all. Phillip = horse-loving. Alexander = protector of all. Or maybe not so much nicknames as Native American names.
Slavic names work in a similar way.
Ironically, Vladimir is "one who rules in peace", but also possibly "one who rules the world", which is a bit contradictory.
I hope Scott wouldn't throw away my 9/10 estimate of my own attractiveness as suspected lie, because I actually have evidence for this other than self-evaluation: strangers comment on my attractiveness unprompted, and last time I posted a selfie I got thirst posts (granted it was somewhat of a cheated angle).
"If you notice any problems, please ask yourself “Is this a real objection rather than a nitpick? Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?”
But Scott, now I'm confused about whether I'm supposed to complain or not! 😀
I liked the survey, just my perennial complaints: (1) no option for "are you not at all interested in sex/romance/relationships" and (2) hell and damnation, I *hate* being forced to pick 'I'm with the Tories' in the political parties question because they're nearer on some points to my positions BUT NOT ALL MY VALUES.
Still, you can't please everyone and I'm looking forward to the results!
Answer to shoplifting questions depends a lot on baseline of getting caught per shoplifting incident. I've answered as things stand now (which seems to be <10%), but would be way more lenient if that chance was over 50%.
“An office building is going up near you. Which of these styles do you prefer?” Not really objection/confusion/upset. But… if _a new office building_ is being built, and it would look like a 19th-century historicist house, I’d be _very_ suspicious of it and the kind of people who are building it. So, no, I don’t want anybody to build it near me. Which does not mean I don’t _like_ 19th-century historicist architecture, or that I like modern glass skyscrapers significantly more.
"if _a new office building_ is being built, and it would look like a 19th-century historicist house, I’d be _very_ suspicious of it and the kind of people who are building it"
Why? Suppose they are building it in an area predominantly 19th century and/or earlier buildings, and there is a government regulation requiring new buildings to fit the vernacular style of the area. Would you be suspicious then?
Just because someone doesn't like the glass dildo* style of building doesn't mean they are some cabal of traditionalist ideologues plotting to drag the world back to the 13th century (well, okay, if *I* were in a position to do so, but not everybody is like me!)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gherkin Admittedly, not *the* most horrible of the starchitect office buildings thrown up in such areas of cities, but not the most inspiring, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emporis_Skyscraper_Award
> Why? Suppose they are building it in an area predominantly 19th century and/or earlier buildings, and there is a government regulation requiring new buildings to fit the vernacular style of the area. Would you be suspicious then?
Sure, it’s fully cultural. _If_ there was such a government regulation here, it would be (obviously) completely normal. Now there is no such regulation, and basically nobody builds such “faux-historic” buildings. Sure, you need to comply with some zoning requirements, you obviously cannot just demolish a 19th century five-floor historicist house and build a glass skyscraper in its place; but when you have all necessary permits (and sometimes you don’t, and keep the facade and rebuild the house within, etc.), you’ll build something modern, not a replica; cf. e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q37419702 And I’d expect even people who are strictly against modern architecture in the historical city center to want _preservation_ of the old buildings, not just constructing new buildings which look like the old ones.
It definitely felt weird to me that the options for a new office building were basically a range of styles from the early to mid 20th century, but only one or two that are plausibly later than 1990! And not a single nice international style glass curtain wall building among them!
BMI question -- maybe add a line asking if you work out or something, as this is famously a weird construct that doesn't distinguish between fat people and weightlifters.
"Modern art" question -- does this mean modern art (mid 19th-mid 20th century, usually means stuff like Van Gogh or Picasso, isn't usually a term that is used to include weird stuff like urinals or bananas stuck to the wall) or contemporary/postmodern art? I would usually assume "modern art" means modern art, but asking people whether they like Van Gogh seems weird and asking about weird postmodern stuff seems more in line with ACX's aesthetic concerns.
I don’t think Scott has a very clear sense of artistic styles or genres, and his architecture discussion lately has made that very clear. It would be useful if he spent some time trying to actually learn about the identifying features and history of these styles, rather than making the one book he reads be one that just calls it a socialist conspiracy!
I’m convinced that a majority of non-artists do not know that modern =/= contemporary as I keep seeing people conflate the two online. Both the architecture discussion as well as the AI art Turing test and taste discussion have left me disheartened when it comes to art education.
I had no idea what you meant by "modern art."
The term "modern" in the visual arts refers to specific kinds of work (and not others) made since around the mid-20th century.
But maybe it's tough to frame this question if what you're trying to elicit is a preference for traditionalist-representational versus an unbounded range of expressive, theoretical, abstract, formalist or other contemporary art made mostly after 1940. Some of which can look pretty traditional, actually, so...
100%. Recently graduated with a minor in architectural history and a STEM degree. From my (limited) experience, this is probably the most approachable humanities topic for non-humanities people bc it mixes aesthetic and practical. Even if I'll never use it, I'm glad I got the minor bc understanding how architecture changed in response to different historical contexts is a great analogy that you can use to draw parallels to philosophy, politics, etc.
I'll say my piece on modern architecture here: The materials available to build the building and the resulting engineering constraints have always come before the aesthetic of the building. The modernists articulated this quite well. Since the mid 20th century those constraints are moreso financial than physical constraints. It's actually quite hard to imagine scenarios where someone is:
a) going to build a large building that will capture the public's attention
b) willing to give the architect free rein over the design even if it makes the project dramatically more expensive
Contrast this with the late 19th - early 20th century, the circumstances in which modernism arose, where a building could be aesthetically novel, functionally better, and financially cheaper by using materials that didn't exist a generation ago.
I think the BMI question is fine, although I would like for my own pride to also be able to submit my powerlifting totals.
As a fat person who is also a weightlifter, the BMI question leaves me feeling particularly conflicted
Athletic versus non-athletic is a difference of like 1-3 BMI points holding everything else equal unless you are talking about literal bodybuilders. That’s not totally insignificant, but on a population level it doesn’t really matter unless for some reason your population has a lot of Mr. Olympians.
It's more than that. I mean, more than 3 BMI points. But also, there are more problems with the BMI construct. It's built around the normal population, so very tall people (like me) or very short can't compare with "normal" mean.
See e.g. this comparison of NBA players (https://runrepeat.com/height-evolution-in-the-nba), which not only says, of top-shape athletes, "Only 43% of NBA players are overweight according to their BMI." but also helpfully differentiates by position, which is also heavily correlated to height, and taller players have also the highest BMIs, a 2-point average difference among equally trained athletes.
See also e.g. this study (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6690141/) for the difference in body fat between trained (not Olympians, but trained police officers), and normal people of approximately same height, weight and BMI,. My chosen highlight is that there was a -30% difference in total body fat. That's a lot.
I agree about the BMI, or rather the missing questions regarding physical fitness.
I think the following would be great questions, as there are many studies linking these numbers to health outcomes:
- "How many minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity are you doing per week?"
- "How many days a week are you doing aerobic exercise?" and
- "How many days a week are you doing resistance exercise?"
See e.g. the WHO guidelines on physical activity at https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240015128.
(For those who don't want to click, the recommendations are a total of 150 minutes of aerobic exercise a week, and resistance exercise twice a week.)
Scott, would you add that next time?
Edit: Thought of two more things.
A good number for physical fitness that not many might have (but probably about as likely as an official IQ test?) is VO2max. That is also linked to many health outcomes.
And of course, some concrete numbers like "How much can you deadlift/squat/bench for 3x5 setsxrepetitions" or "What is your 5k time?" would be quite interesting to see as well.
A LOT of your questions are horrible. This is not a nitpick. It's really bad.
1. "White" is not a race. Outside the US it's not a thing.
2. The subreddit and discord questions should have a "no, I want to but I haven't got around to it".
3. The politics thing. I'm an Israeli Zionist. So I'm alt-right now? Good to know. Sheesh!
4. AI X-risk. The X is doing a lot of work here. If we have 50 percent unemployment in 10 years is that X?
5. The abortion question: No one is "in favor" of abortion. That's not what pro choice is!
5. Indeed, I only picked 5/5 on that question because of Scott's "no nitpicking" remark, interpreting "in favor" to mean "in favor of it being legal for people to abort pregnancies", rather than "in favor of pregnancies being aborted"
"No one is "in favor" of abortion. That's not what pro choice is!"
Asking seriously and not as a gotcha!, what is the parsing out of this here? If the meaning is "I support choice, not abortion" then I see what you're saying, but it does still mean being in favour of abortion being there to be chosen. It's not a choice if "you can have apples or oranges, but we only have apples".
You may not *want* people to get abortions, but you *do* want them to be *able* to get abortions, and for that to be so, abortion has to be there. So downstream you *are* in favour of abortion.
Maybe not you personally, but there are some people who are very much vocally "abortion is good and great and I love abortion!" - perhaps it's an over-reaction to the anti-abortion movement, but a few do give me the impression that it's the killing that they most adore, out of some kind of hatred of nature and what our biology imposes upon us. I don't know, I have only very inchoate impressions about this, but some of the very online on this topic honestly do come off as Moloch devotees for their enthusiasm about abortion at any time for any reason or even no reason. "Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done".
If you think the US needs an army are you pro-war? If you don't support banning snoking are you pro-cigarettes?
For the second one, I'm inclined (by personal circumstances) to say "yes". For the first, an army can be for defence as well as for waging aggressive war, so there's more room there for "pro-army but not pro-war".
In common usage, I think "pro-choice" does shake out as "pro-abortion". I haven't seen any, to my remembrance, people saying "I'm pro-choice but I really want women to go to pregnancy centres not abortion clinics and I don't think that abortion should be your first choice".
Such people may well exist! As do "I'm pro-life but I want abortion to be legal, especially if it's a question of threat to the life of the mother". Because of the heated debate and the "loudest shouting gets the most attention", such nuance doesn't get seen. From my point of view, even those people willing to concede on "abortion for rape, incest, life of the mother" get excoriated for not being no-restrictions, no-limits for abortion.
Hi, yes that's me, I am in favor of abortion being legal but still want women to try adoption instead :)
For a given pregnant woman the following are possible in principle:
1) You would rather she didn't abort, and if she wanted to abort you'd want the force of law to be used to stop her.
2) You would rather she didn't abort, but if she wanted to abort you aren't sure (or don't care either way) whether you'd want the force of law to be used to stop her.
3) You would rather she didn't abort, but if she wanted to abort you would *not* want the force of law to be used to stop her.
4) You don't care either way whether she aborts or not.
5) You would rather she aborted, but if she didn't want to, you would not want the force of law to be used to force her to.
6) You would rather she aborted, but if she didn't want to, you aren't sure (or don't care either way) whether you'd want the force of law to be used to force her to.
7) You would rather she aborted, and if she didn't want to abort, you'd want the force of law to be used to force her to.
Technically, "In favor" should mean between 5 and 7 whereas "pro-choice" should mean between 3 and 5, but given Scott's "no nitpicking" rule, since 5 and below aren't really in the Overton window, I took "In favor ("pro-choice")" in the survey to mean something like 4, and answered accordingly.
Thank you for your answer. When it comes to 5-7, I saw (back when Cherie Blair became unexpectedly pregnant with her son Leo), some media articles by lady journalists bemoaning the fact and wishing that she would have an abortion to be an example to girls and women that abortion is a good thing (I think too that the fact Cherie is at least notionally Catholic had a big part to play; they wanted a prominent Catholic woman to have an abortion as a defiance of Church teaching, though they never came out and said that).
So that sort of attitude is something like a 6.5 - they would rather she aborted, but if she didn't want to, the force of public opinion or duty to set an example should force her to.
Maybe also the notion that they were having a *fourth* child - this article describes three children as a "brood" (eyeroll emoji here) - was outraging the good liberal women! As well as the fact that she was in her mid-forties and both parents seemed happy at the news of an unexpected baby, instead of bemoaning how this would impinge on her career and free time?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3748947.stm
(Myself, I'm somewhere around 3.5 in most typical cases; I'd go as far as 1.3 with healthy fetuses post-viability where the risks to the mother of an early C-section would be less than or comparable to those of an abortion and in countries with many more people looking for babies to adopt than babies "looking for" adoptive parents, but I'd only go as far as 5.2 when the baby would have an extremely severe health conditions. This makes me much more pro-life than pro-abortion in absolute terms but the other way around relative to where the Overton window in 2024 in western countries actually is, especially for second-semester pregnancies.)
Seconded! There may be people in favor of abortion, but pro-choice should not be summarized as in favor of abortion!
Also on the race question, he didn’t have any option for multiracial! That seems like a very major oversight (unless I was supposed to select “other”). It at least should have been the US census checkboxes rather than a radio button.
I am very solidly pro-abortion. I am also pro-choice, but I want there to be zero stigma around abortion, I want Misoprostol available over the counter at near zero cost, and I am thrilled that despite Dobbs, abortion rates in the US are rising.
I honestly have no idea why you think no one is in favor of abortion.
"I honestly have no idea why you think no one is in favor of abortion."
Being fair to the pro-choice side, some people do not like abortion but do want it to be legal as they don't feel they can impose their personal morality on society. So they are not for abortion but they are for the ability to have a legal right to choose abortion if a person needs/wishes one.
This attitude can also be found on the pro-life side, though there it has been contaminated by the 'devout Catholic' politicians who took refuge in eating their cake and having it by "I am personally opposed to abortion, but..." subterfuge where they get to vote for (or at least not oppose) legal abortion and thus hold on to voters, while also holding on to their reputation for religious belief (see Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi on this issue). You see it less nowadays because there is less risk in being more openly secular on socially liberal issues. "Oh what, the ten people who still go to Mass on Sunday won't vote for me? Guess I'll just have to make do with the three thousand votes from those who haven't been to church since they were christened!"
Sure! And I'm happy to caucus with those folks.
I see from other comments in this thread that some people identify "pro-abortion" with "pro forced abortion" which... is so far beyond the Overton window in 21st century US politics that definition hadn't occurred to me.
But I retract my "honestly have no idea", I now have an idea!
I think a lot of folks in the pro-abortion movement have been moving *away* from pro-choice, because it feels mealy mouthed in just the way you're describing. So amongst my friends, I rarely hear pro-choice anymore.
But of course none of us are talking about forced abortions.
> 1. "White" is not a race. Outside the US it's not a thing.
...What? Even Japan uses the word 白人, which literally means "white person".
> 3. The politics thing. I'm an Israeli Zionist. So I'm alt-right now? Good to know. Sheesh!
What did you think you were?
What do you mean "even Japan"? Why "even"?
"White" is not a race. It's a color. And Caucasian is not a race. The Kafkaz is a small area in central Asia.
Just say "Western European ancestry".
And Zionism is a movement specifically of Jews seeking self determination in Israel, originating in the 1880s. The alt-right is an American movement from the past 20 years. It doesn't even cover French nationalism, the example given in the survey.
Re: "White" is not a race.
It's the color term for what was called more formally "Caucasoid" in the past. Of course the old 19th century racial classifications were pretty specious, and in some cases (e.g., classifying Negritos of Australasia with the Negroes of Africa because they look superficially alike) were completely wrong once we got to the level of examining population genomes.
I'm unironically in favor of abortion of severely deformed fetuses or fetuses with severe genetic disease. I wish people would always choose to abort these. I'm not pro forcing them to, but I very much want them to do so.
> No one is "in favor" of abortion.
Why not? Obviously if the choice is between abortion and effective contraception one would have to be actively evil to choose the former. But between abortion and giving birth when someone is not fully on board with having a child or isn't actually ready to take up that responsibility by some reasonable objective metrics, I'm in favor of abortion.
Abortion
I don’t like the scale because the issue combines two questions: How do you feel about the mortality of abortion? & How do you feel about the legality of abortion?
I said pro choice because that feels like a political label and therefore more about the legal question. On that point I’m strongly pro choice, but I also think it is killing a person which doesn’t seem to fit with the typical pro choice stance.
I'm willing to bite the bullet on that, so I think abortion is killing a person and that is immoral, which means I don't think it should be legal, either. Not that I necessarily think everything immoral should be illegal, but when it comes to what is murder, yeah.
Naturally I realise and accept this makes me a horrible misogynistic monster who hates women, hates the free expression of sexuality, wants little girls to be incestuously raped and forced to carry the rapist's baby to delivery, wants women to die of pregnancy-related diseases, etc. but that is the burden of consistency!
Consistency is vastly overrated. Most people recognize exceptions to general rules. In the discussion about shoplifting above people (myself included) opined that stealing can be sometimes justified in extreme necessity. Ditto when it comes to killing. Only an utterly dogmatic pacifist would refuse to allow for the category of Justifiable Homicide.
Whether you want all the things you said is irrelevant, if the policy you support will cause those things to happen.
I can take a stand against jailing criminals, and people could accuse me of being a do-gooder soft delusional tree-hugging snowflake liberal who wants criminals to have free reign and wants cars to be jacked, women to be raped, and teens addicted to fentanyl. And they'd be right. Doesn't matter if I "swear to Jesus I didn't want that" if more fentanyl overdoses end up happening.
Intention doesn't matter to me. Results do. Banning abortion will cause most people of average mental capacity and income to travel for abortion, or try to DIY it. The people who are punished most by anti-abortion laws are exactly those scenarios you claim: minors raped by family members, mentally disabled people who are raped, women in violent relationships, women in the middle of dying from miscarriages, etc.
https://www.propublica.org/article/porsha-ngumezi-miscarriage-death-texas-abortion-ban
https://www.propublica.org/article/elizabeth-nakagawa-miscarriage-military-tricare-abortion-policy
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ohio-minors-sought-abortions-state-sexually-assaulted-affidavits-say-rcna49797
But the embryos get to live, for the most part. If one believes that murdering a person is more immoral than causing some excess suffering to an incest victim, and makes a principled decision to not distinguish between a million-cells "person" and a human being capable of thinking, that's where they logically end up. However many tragic deaths caused by DIY abortions or doctors being too hesitant to terminate a pregnancy seriously endangering the mother's life there are, they are plausibly outnumbered --several-- many times over by the number of embryos that don't get conceived in the first place because people would be more careful with their contraception.
Do you really believe that banning abortion will cause more people to be careful with contraception? That logic does not really make sense to me. Irresponsible people tend not to consider the effects of their actions (see Scott's recent post about criminal behavior). Also rape happens and contraception often fails, no matter how careful one tries to be.
I think the people who are against abortion should instead be spending their time advocating for free, government-provided birth control, mandatory EXHAUSTIVE sex-ed starting at earliest puberty (8 years old), mandatory govt home visits to every home to screen for child sex abuse, govt-funded drug and alcohol rehabs so people make better decisions, increase welfare for single mothers to 40k a year, and increasing taxes 10% to provide group homes for unwanted babies that are given up. Because banning abortion simply isn't going to work. Banning it is like trying to ban anything else that people want. How is the war on drugs working out? Or prohibition in the 1920s? Or the war on terror, for that matter?
Also, if one believes that a pregnant woman should be forced to support a life, why stop there? You are also ending a life by not donating one of your kidneys. In places where women are forced to support a fetus, I think a man should also be forced to give a kidney to anyone who requests one from them (women should be exempt because they might need that kidney to support an unwanted fetus someday). That is only fair. And every adult should be forced to check in daily at their nearest hospital to make sure no one is currently in need of their blood type that day. If there are, then a police officer should force them at gunpoint to give their blood. And every person from a wealthy country must have their wages garnished to feed every single hungry person in a developing country, since failing to provide them food also causes loss of life. If life is more important than bodily autonomy, then one must not discriminate only against pregnant women.
> Do you really believe that banning abortion will cause more people to be careful with contraception?
Yes, certainly. Some people who normally consider abortion as "plan C" (plan A meaning regular contraception and plan B the contraception applied after the intercourse) will go from "already careful" to "maniacally careful". Some irresponsible people in fact consider abortion to be their plan A. From some discussions I've heard this behavior was quite common e.g. in the USSR. Probably a combination of abortion being free versus contraception cumbersome, bad, or expensive, ignorance, and widespread sexism. You may be right about irresponsible behavior in general (though it's probably more nuanced than that) but when one person gets to choose their responsibility level and the other bears the brunt of the costs, that's a specific situation with its own dynamic.
> Also rape happens
Ok, so? Some people don't get pregnant through their own choice, but hopefully not that many, and anyway not being able to choose for the embryo to stop living is lesser evil in that paradigm, so it pales in comparison to mass murders.
> and contraception often fails, no matter how careful one tries to be.
Excluding sexsomniacs and rape victims, abstinence should work 100% of the time. Ditto oral sex only. But this statement is misleading even for typical methods of contraception. (In fact, this should be the main argument for banning abortions if someone shares the premise of embryos having significant moral value.) The "plan A" contraceptive methods vary by orders of magnitude in their effectiveness. Meaning that just being a little extra careful (choosing a better method and actually following the instructions) can drop the number of unwanted pregnancies from ~0.1/uterus/year to ~0.01 easily. And one doesn't have to be just "a little" more careful: they could combine two or more methods. I can't tell you the numbers because the metric used is Pearl index which isn't the same as probability (they do use plain probability for "plan B" though), but even just adding coitus interruptus on top of some serious method should result in adding another zero at the least. The pill + condom for the people who don't relax their standards too much because of the safety should result in less than 1 unwanted pregnancy in 1000 years.
So, let's say 25% of females from 13 to 40 have regular sex with male partners (probably an underestimate). That's 7 years per woman, let's say 4 to account for low fertility cases and the people who actually want kids at the time. So if the normal level of precaution is "condom, regular use" (PI 13 according to current wikipedia), that's 0.52 unwanted pregnancies per woman per lifetime, whereas paranoid contraception corresponds to below 0.004. Probably not all unwanted pregnancies are terminated even if abortions are legal, but you only need to compel people to be somewhat extra careful to get a difference of 0.2, which corresponds to the murder rate of El Salvador in a bad year (0.2/woman/lifetime = 0.1/person/lifetime = 1/800 life years = 125 "murders"/100000 people/ year).
And that's definitely cheaper than your suggestions in the next paragraph. Especially considering that anti-abortion people who agree with you about sex ed would probably educate their children properly anyway, so you just have them pay for education of and control and help for other people with little personal gain. You're saying 10%?
> Also, if one believes that a pregnant woman should be forced to support a life, why stop there?
I'd suggest discussing it with them, but on a second thought, maybe don't give them ideas :-)
(The religious ones will probably say something something God's will, I imagine.)
Well, I guess the argument still ultimately comes down to whether you believe abortion is murder or not. I think it's patently insane to give a zygote the same moral and legal consideration as a living person with their own memories and consciousness. But those who do believe that, most of who desire to oppress others based on a text they never read (as the Bible endorses abortion), will never be convinced by reason anyways.
> From some discussions I've heard this behavior was quite common e.g. in the USSR.
Yes, because the USSR didn't have free, government-provided birth control, mandatory EXHAUSTIVE sex-ed starting at earliest puberty (8 years old) and so on. It had neither the pill nor the plan B pill, so your only forms of contraception were the calendar, pulling out, Soviet-made condoms (which were strongly associated with prostitution and VDs due to the lack of sex ed) and surgical abortion.
I agree this is consistent: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/take-the-2025-acx-survey/comment/82472629
But continuing that thought: I've heard there was a cool guy, respected in certain circles, who said something about Saturdays' and people's relations to each other. Here it seems your Saturday is the definition of "people".
The 'Profession' question makes it really easy for normal software engineers to get it wrong and mark 'computer science' or 'engineering'. Assuming you're aggregating these this way on purpose, I would recommend rephrasing it as 'Computers (other academic, computer science research)' and 'Computers (practical: software engineering, IT, etc.)'. I honestly believe that a freshly minted low-grade developer would answer this wrong because they've just finished a degree called 'computer science' so clearly their job must be that.
I had problems with this one as well because I'm a data analyst, but more than half my job is just writing code/scripts, so I wasn't sure if that should count as statistics or the practical computers option.
Some comments:
1. The ACT has been ~as popular as the SAT in the US for quite some time now. The SAT is still better known among older people, but a lot of younger ones will have only taken the ACT. I would either add a question for it or link to a SAT conversion tool like this one: https://www.princetonreview.com/college-advice/act-to-sat-conversion.
2. For the mental disorder questions, I assume "family" means blood relatives (to look for genetic effects) and not spouses, adopted relatives, etc., but this should be clarified.
3. For architecture, one consideration you don't mention is what the interior in like. Having worked in both Deco-style buildings and contemporary glass boxes, the modern ones are almost always more pleasant from the inside - more light, more open spaces, higher ceilings. My understanding is that little of this is *necessarily* due to the architectural style, but there's a strong correlation in practice, mostly because giving an old building a modern look on the inside would require a total gut renovation.
4. What's an "average" American company? The archetypal one is a Fortune 500 megacorp. The median one is a sole prop or 2-3 member LLC. You could calculate a weighted average by valuation or revenue or number of employees. All of these are going to give quite different results.
I took the ACT, did not take the SAT, and don't remember exactly what my ACT score was.
I mentally had to basically average companies like Apple (high margin) with grocery stores (low margin). I'm dubious of the value of this answer, especially without any correlation of business/financial knowledge.
And some of us are not Americans so we took none of those and don't have an IQ score 😁
I'm in the same boat - some American companies are the FAANGs, some are one-man band operations, so some make huge margins and some are on very tight ones. I guesstimated and hoped for the best, then sneakily Googled afterwards and I *might* have over-estimated by twice the amount, at least according to the value that was given.
The size of the company shouldn't influence margins much. It's more a sign of how the business is run. One person could well have higher margins than a large company, simply because they are that good at their job that they are above the average productivity of a large company.
And anyway, what do I know? I guessed about half the average gross margin, after post-survey Googling.
Ditto as someone who took the ACT but not the SAT. Not that I remember my ACT score anyway, and I don't think I qualify as one of the "younger ones" either.
If some of the mental health conditions are culture-bound a la penis stealing, it might not matter if family is blood relatives or not. But I've answered as though Scott is looking for genetic links.
On the anthropogenic climate change, I take that a middle position (which I did) stands for "requires moderate action", but found the labeling confusing.
I think you're conflating several possible answers (requires/doesn't require action) vs (the action must be moderate/strong) vs (the action must be swift/sedated), which are thus garbled.
Then, I, for one, think that many current actions are actively misguided, and are only not being net detrimental because they are being implemented loosely and not very swiftly / intensely. So in fact I would argue for the axis to be extended to "current actions should be discontinued / reversed", with the middle ground reserved for "does not require action".
Political spectrum: I agree with other comments that the single dimension is often too reductive. Listing two dimension - for socially orientation and economic orientation would seem to be an improvement.
Mental health: Ambiguous about previous issues that resolved, as other users pointed out.
Attractiveness: Is that relative to other people your age and sex or the population as a whole?
Shoplifting: I agree with other comments that the issue is whether or not there have already been increasing penalties, or penalties at all, for prior offenses.
Also, the question references previous arrests. Should that be "previous offenses?" If someone shoplifted 99 times without arrest, we might want to treat their hundredth offense differently than someone who offended for the first time.
The questions leave this sort of ambiguous, as they contrast "no previous criminal history" with prior arrests.
A not atypical case involves a store pulling up surveillance footage showing the same person offending multiple times before they're arrested the first time. So they have known criminal histories, just no prior arrests.
Relatedly, are we talking about hypothetical people who actually did no other crimes before, or typical criminals who commit many more crimes than those for which they're arrested.
Homeless: encampment in the lot, who owns the lot? Are the homeless trespassing on private property? What do the owners want?
Also, the questions switch from them being in an empty lot to being in the street - which is it?
Protester question: Is law enforcement just not an option? That is, will drivers just be trapped indefinitely with no expectation of quick escape, unless they run over the protesters? Or will law enforcement quickly come and remove the protesters? If law enforcement would quickly remove them, will there be legal penalties for them, or will they be free to keep trapping drivers, until someone runs them over?
Marriage: Ambiguous if questions refer to prior marriages of widowed and divorced people.
E.g. "Married people: How many years have you been married?
If you've been married multiple times, answer for your current marriage only."
Do widowed / divorced people answer 0, leave it blank, or enter the length of their most recent marriage?
I hated the immigration question. It lumps illegal immigration (which I am strongly against) together with legal immigration (which I am strongly in favor of). I also hated the shoplifting question. The current penalty I favor strongly depends on what previous penalties have been applied.
For the shoplifting question, I read it as "assume penalties progress down the list over the first ten offences from the "no history " to the "10 case history" options you chose, but agree that's unclear.
Yes, this is how I interpreted it as well, although if it was an X strikes system my answer wouldn't have been materially different.
Strongly agree on the immigration question. Unsure how to answer this one.
Agreed, a strict reading implies the person was arrested ten previous times but never convicted, but that introduces more complications than a simpler reading of the question. I ended up choosing an answer that's approximately an average of answers I can imagine being appropriate for different ways the previous arrests might have gone.
I selected the middle option on that one as I'm strongly in favour of high-quality immigration and strongly opposed to low-quality immigration (whether legal or not). I think basically anyone who's willing to pay €20k/year (or whatever) for the privilege should be granted residence, regardless of country of origin, employment status and so on.
Neither objection nor nitpick: for the corporate profit question, I think you should specify that you mean net profit.
The link to covert to centimeters is broken... of course I just multiplied inches by 2.5... close enough
In "ever been homeless," people in NYC and some parts of MA (lots of SSC readers, I am guessing) have a 'right to shelter' (and it's very cold on the street). So anyone who really has been homeless in those places and doesn't answer the 'precarity' choice is likelier to have lived in the shelter system than physically on the street.
As is often the case with these sorts of things, the political questions had no room for nuance, so my answers can only reflect a sort of compromise approximation of my views on some of these.
That's the point. This is a survey to enable statistics, not an in-depth study of the nuances of the political positions of a thousand randos.
I would have preferred more detail in the wording of the two questions about the proposed nearby office building. Being nearby, the functional aspects of the pictured buildings were much more important for me than the visual aspect, so that's how I answered. This relates mostly to how I live and nothing at all about my esthetic preferences.
If the question is just aiming to establish a visual facade preference then it might be worth tweaking the wording.
Why do you care about the functional aspects of a building near you (as long as they aren't horrendous)? Do you think it's likely you'll work there someday?
I don't want buildings built near me that are hostile to people walking past.
I still don't get it.
Imagine you live in a hilltop village in Tuscany, where the roads are too narrow for cars and everyone gets around on foot. Would you want an office building with restaurants and cafes at street level, or a building with a single entrance and blank walls?
I wouldn't necessarily want restaurants and cafés in an office building, ground floor or not. If it's a mixed-use development, fine. If it's the offices of Messrs. Spring, Sprang and Sprung, Solicitors then why would they need a restaurant on the premises? They're hardly reliant on coaxing in passing trade to avail of "have a cup of coffee and a consultation about suing your cousin for taking Granny's bone china tea set when it wasn't specifically left to her in the will!"
For residential buildings, people may not want to live "over the shop", as it were.
Besides, if it soothes your pedestrian soul, there are buildings in the Baroque Style which do have plenty of street level entrances and shops:
https://www.arraspaysdartois.com/en/the-essentials/the-squares-of-arras-la-dolce-vita/
That bit of Arras looks lovely. At least one of Scott's examples seems similar, but for the others the ground floor isn't visible in the picture, alas.
I feel like I just took last years survey, and now there's already another one? Time flies when you're reading good posts I guess
Last survey was just 9 months ago: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/take-the-2024-acx-survey.
I think the physical attractiveness question should more clearly define the scale. I get the impression some people interpret the range as essentially a percentile score (making 5/6 roughly median) and others interpret it more like a grade (giving 5 implied negative valence).
People who would be 30th percentile in my ranking just look normal to me, so I'd probably give them a "passing grade".
(I am reminded of a chart I saw going around twitter a while back supposedly showing that women rated most men "below average" on a 10 point scale. I could see that being true (selected sample in daily life etc.), but I suspect a big part of it is just that the women in this survey find most men to not be attractive, and they don't grade on a curve.)
I think it's probably just that everyone has gotten fat and most people don't find fatness attractive. Somewhat fat is now normal and average but most people find any notable amount of fatness to knock you into unattractive territory and thus below "average."
If attractiveness is distributed like income/wealth, you would indeed expect most men to be well below average. This works better with different units of attractiveness than scores from 1 to 10, but I can see how these units could make perfect sense. For example, "How many units of utility [e.g. hours of life] I'd give up to fuck/marry/have kids from this man".
Most places that ask about race in the past 25 years have followed the US Census and used checkboxes instead of radio buttons, though there are a few that just have “multiracial” as a generic option. This survey didn’t seem to have either - I already can’t remember whether I selected “other” or “south Asian” (because that is the non-white part and therefore the part that gets noticed when people racialize me, which actually seems weirdly infrequent).
Weather conditions and framing in the pictures probably biased my answers on the architecture questions significantly.
Immigration question (more or less) seemed to me to be ambiguous as to whether it meant 'immigration law allows too many immigrants' and 'too many immigrants violate immigration law (or take advantage of the overloading of the asylum system) to enter illegally/in violation of the clear intent of the law.'
"Town/small city" vs "Big city" is very unclear to me. I imagine what is classified as a city differs somewhat between countries as well?
Social interaction questions should probably specify whether the interaction has to be in-person or talking to people on Discord counts.
Do ACX comments count? Those people are crazy.
only if they get a reply within 4 minutes.
is that better or worse than chiming in on week-old comments with self-referential jokes?
Dear god, I hope it includes Discord otherwise my number is close to 0
Came here to ask about this. In-person: 0 hr/wk. +online with video and voice: 2.5 hr/wk. +text chat with online friends? idk, lots.
For "Speech", I think this unanswerable as-is partly because there really should be more than one axis. Many of the "pro free speech" crowd on the social right (e.g. TERFs) have a simplistic view of what "free speech" is, viewing it almost as "freedom to harrass" or "freedom from judgement", which makes it complicated to express being strongly pro free speech in the traditional sense (e.g. how John Stuart Mill expresses it in "On Liberty") without getting lumped in. You often can have both ends of the spectrum as you have presented it, e.g. in some cases by legally protecting a type of free speech while simultaneously imposing social judgement on it (yes, this is a massive quagmire, but this comment box is too small to get into any details)
But what's the point of technically having "free speech" if you get socially exiled for saying what you believe? You can't have freedom without power.
Social power has limits in a way that legal and political power does not. Social groups are also a lot more heterogenous. Also, I don't see a way to actually limit social judgement without limiting either freedom of speech or freedom of association or both. We can disagree on how much social judgement is warranted, but I still maintain that the legal situation is important and quite separate.
> crowd on the social right (e.g. TERFs)
I am intrigued that you think radical feminists are socially right wing, but unwilling to get into a discussion of the topic here (so discount my intrigue, if you must). Nonetheless, I offer that you might want to check that you understand what the actual position is, for your own edification.
I thoroughly understand the TERF position, as much as I wish I didn't have to. I am also unwilling to get into a thorough discussion, but for clarity on my position, I consider "TERF" to be a bad acronym and consider such views to not be feminist, much less radical.
Ah! So you are using it as a generic slur for “does not agree with specific set of views on gender identity” rather than “a set of women who are radical feminists (where ‘radical’ means ‘in reference to the root’, because they posit that the root of the system of gender (which they consider a bad thing) is sexed differences in human bodies and the exploitation of this)”.
I'd rather you didn't assign arguments to me which I haven't said, and I was under the impression you didn't want to get into discussion. I'm not taking the bait, thanks.
Okee doke. If I had characterised Marxists as economically right wing, and suggested that they were obsessed with marks, I would probably want a nudge to suggest I had misunderstood something somewhere (or was using words in a non-standard way), but such is the peril of “do as you would be done by”!
So we are doing blatant false equivalences now, are we? Besides, you are incorrect about what "radical" means in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_politics
Not that TERFs are actually radical by-and-large.
Yeah, this question bothered me too. I think free speech is one of the most important freedoms to preserve, but I think with competent execution of good policies you can achieve it and fight misinformation and harassment as well. It also annoys me that all the loudest members of the "pro free speech" crowd are... not people I want to align myself with. Probably makes me quieter about the issue than I would otherwise be.
I think I ticked the middle box. Or maybe I left the whole thing blank.
(By the way, I completely agree with your characterisation of TERFs being on the social right. I noticed the other commenter disagreeing with that, but since you both agreed not to discuss further I'm parenthetically bundling my "anecvote" in with my comment, rather than weighing in on the pre-terminated thread.)
Thanks, I appreciate the anecvote :)
Age of meeting/dating/marrying your first spouse are only "for the married". I met/dated/married my spouse, but we divorced, so I left these blank. Is this what you really wanted?
I am going to take advantage of the loose moderation to complain about the free speech question, even though I am not confident that anyone else will be upset with the wording.
Which do you think is more important: preserving free speech, or taking a stand against hate speech/misinformation/etc? This could include
1) pressuring social media sites to moderate their content,
2) enforcing hate speech laws
3) passing laws making it easier to sue people for spreading dangerous misinformation.
2 and 3 are government punishments for wrongspeak. I despise them, I do not support them.
1 is speech, full stop. Pressure is speech. I get to pressure companies if I want to.
Putting my approval of 1, 2, and 3 in the same box seems nuts.
Because 1 as written is speech, I interepreted it as "the government" pressuring social media sites to moderate their content.
Let me do my own nitpicking about what I found unsatisfactory about the survey.
1. What if one's preferred race is 'choose not to declare'? And why can't one tick multiple boxes? What is this, the DMV? (At least the DMV usually has 'Hispanic/Latin American', which is helpful if you still detest your least favorite conquistador.) Also, why one can't one give a more complicated and/or jocular answer? (Maybe that last bit makes one particularly Latino.)
2. The SAT question should come with the year or year period, since the test has been renormalized several times.
3. There was a question on "country" (country of origin?) - quite besides the fact that one should be able to tick more than one box, there's also the strange fact that we were never asked about our country of residence. For one thing, that makes the question about salaries hard to put in context!
4. I found the categories in "political affiliation" a little too coarse, but maybe that's just me.
5. The class question should probably be split into a class and an income question (where is the box for "family of intellectuals with no money, but then of course I was always aware that most people had even less money, not that money kept any worth for more than a couple of weeks back then"?)
6. I wish the office building and house questions allowed a ranking - first and second favorites are not enough.
(If I really wanted to nitpick, I would have to say that this question is rather context-dependent. Say - among the office buildings, 2 and 4 look good to me, but 2 in a 4 neighborhood would be a sore thumb, and vice versa.
Also, these are small photographs. How do we tell whether the build is legit or cheap and fake?)
Oh, and the homelessness question is culture-dependent. Having a place to be because your extended family took care of you may be a precarious situation, but it can be bad (if they see you as a moocher) or pretty good. Whether "homelessness" should be construed narrowly or broadly is a dicey question, but we can probably agree that there should be an additional box for "precarious in the sense of depending on someone else's good will, yet the person in question could call a place a home" - particularly where this is a common arrangement.
I concur with asking when you took the SAT. Otherwise, not statistically useful.
2: I just renormalized my score to the 1600 scale, since I took it during the 2400 era. A note on that question would not be out of place.
I took the SAT forty year ago. I don't remember my raw score at all, though I do know I did very well, getting 100% of the verbal questions right and missing only one math question.
IQ scores can vary a lot with each test. I only had one such test, when I was still in my early teens. I have no idea what I would score these days.
> I don't remember my raw score at all, though I do know I did very well, getting 100% of the verbal questions right and missing only one math question.
That is your raw score. The 200-800 scores are "scaled scores"; a count of how many questions you got right is a raw score.
> I just renormalized my score to the 1600 scale, since I took it during the 2400 era.
You don't want to renormalize a 2400-point score. The correct thing to do is add the math and verbal subscores. Just throw the writing score out.
Country of origin vs country of residence got to me too. In fact, I really hope it doesn't make Scott misread my answers to several questions, considering I moved from a poor to a significantly wealthier country
Right. I moved from a poor-ish (now theoretically high-middle income because of raw-material exports, but chaotic and with a collapsed public sector, manufacturing sector, etc.) country to a wealthy one, and then to a still-wealthy one with much smaller salaries (than country 2), so he must be thoroughly confused.
After the question about the subreddit and discord I was looking forward to answering in the positive that, yes, I visit DSL... but alas.
I had the same expectation...... and the same disappointment.
If there was a free text section in the survey, this is what I would.have wanted to add
* all the houses in the "which one would I qant ro buy" section are ugly (I very much want to live jn.the city centre!)
* for the shoplifting question, sth to separate "kid that was dared to do it" and "poor person that was forced to do it" would have been good
* why the hell do Americans don't consider "being able to say what you want *without being harassed/fired for it*" not part of free speech? (and "outing yourself as gay/poly/..." as a form of speech
Age when you shoplifted (or how many years ago you most recently shoplifted) would be interesting, too.
Early on, for marital status, the choices (if memory serves) are single, married, partnered; no divorced or widowed options. Okay, so if you're divorced or widowed, you pick single. But later, there is a series of questions to be answered only if you're married, such as when you met your spouse. It seems to me that someone divorced or widowed should answer these, and I'm concerned that their responses may be deemed incorrect or invalid. Thus, I think there should be be divorced and widowed options for marital status.
I answered “no” to shoplifting, but I have occasionally noticed when a self checkout rings something up wrong in my favor and not corrected it. I consider the unpaid labor of ringing up my own groceries to be payment enough in those cases.
Just tell yourself that the price the machine gives you is, by definition, the correct price; if the package is mismarked on the shelves with a higher amount, that's on them. This doesn't apply in the other direction, OF COURSE.
"What is your chromosomal sex?" doesn't seem like a very clear/useful question, since there exist XX males, XY females, and trisomies.
It's useful in the distinction between sex and gender, which I was told was not at all the same thing when it came to giving trans people their rights. If you have people who are XXY or other matters, those go under "Other".
Note that XXX are pretty-normal women and XYY are pretty-normal men (most are never diagnosed unless a karyotype is done for other reasons), so I wouldn't characterise them as "other". It's Turner (monosomy X) and Klinefelter (XXY) that have notably-weird phenotypes (monosomy Y spontaneously aborts).
I remember when XYY males were discussed in the news media in the late 70s and there was a plethora of reporting that these were SUPER CRIMINALS, that the extra Y chromosome would make them more aggressive, more violent, more Toxic Masculinity (though that term was not in existence then) due to studies like this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/213815a0
"IN 1965, Jacobs et al. published their preliminary findings of a chromosome survey conducted at a maximum security hospital, The State Hospital, Lanarkshire, Scotland1. The most remarkable finding in the completed survey was the discovery among 315 men of nine patients with an XYY sex chromosome constitution. Their behaviour, together with their pattern of crime, has now been closely studied. The full clinical details of this investigation will be published elsewhere by us, and this communication directs attention to the ways in which the XYY males differ from males with an XY sex chromosome complement at the same hospital."
It seems to have hung around up to the 2010s:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8072476/
"Some scholars believe that XYY is associated with a status of over-masculinization, because the existence of an extra Y chromosome and XYY individuals usually results in tall stature, impulsivity, and/or sex organ overdevelopment (macroorchidism and macropenis) (Bardsley et al., 2013; Jo et al., 2015). Several reports stated that some men institutionalized for antisocial behavior were found to have an increased frequency of the XYY karyotype, and males in prison with XYY had higher testosterone than healthy age-matched controls (Hook, 1973; Schiavi et al., 1984). For decades, the claim that XYY males tend to exhibit more aggressive, anti-social, and criminal behavior than XY males is controversial, but this hypothesis has never been substantiated (Lenroot et al., 2009)."
Now its "pretty-normal men" 😁
It causes tallness (in common with Klinefelter and IIRC even XXX) because of gene-dosage effects on the pseudoautosomal region (same reason Turner causes shortness). It can lower IQ, though not by much.
The initial assumption that it caused super-aggression is because the people who found a bunch in prison assumed it was rarer in the general population than it is (due to the fact that most XYYs are never detected because being tall and a couple of points of IQ lower than the counterfactual don't really stick out). Seems to be some effect on criminality from the lower average IQ, but that's all.
XYY is certainly the most likely of the four major sex chromosome anomalies to wind up in prison, but that's because they are men (XXX are women, Turner are intersex strongly leaning female, and Klinefelter are intersex leaning male) and men commit more violent crime than women (and get punished more harshly for it).
Chromosomal sex is useful when you do statistics on a large sample. The lone XX male who fills in this survey won't mess up the statistics more than the magnitude more trolls who fill it in randomly.
True, the exclusion of outliers on the bell curve as measured by chromosomes isn't unreasonable for statistics work on the vast majority of the population. But here, it just seems like an odd way of gathering the presumably desired informational elements versus, say, "at birth, were you visually noted as possessing a penis, or a vagina?" (which would, of course, also exclude the very small anatomically intersex minority).
People who have sufficient reason to be aware of their chromosomal makeup will be able to answer about such; the rest of us will go along with the "assigned at birth is linked with chromosomal sex".
If we're discussing trans issues (and we probably will be, as they're not going away) then the ratio of intersex and others to those with ordinary chromosomal sex will be valuable information. Intersex people get used *a lot* as support for "gender is a spectrum, sex is not a binary, it's not simple XX = woman and XY = man" by the trans community, along with "my brain *is* male (or female), I *am* a man (or woman) despite what sex I was assigned at birth" reporting from trans people. Getting any kind of data on "did you fill this out as trans and did you fill this out as what chromosomal sex" will be helpful.
> People who have sufficient reason to be aware of their chromosomal makeup will be able to answer about such
People who were visually intersex at birth (or were tested for some other reason) will, but plenty of cis people have different chromosomes to what they expect, and so the data will be incorrect (with over-reporting of simple XY and XX) if people guess based on their sex assigned at birth.
Yeah, and also, how many of us have been tested?! I certainly don't know my chromosomal sex. (I can guess with high probability based on my physical sexual characteristics, but at the point where I'm guessing, why not just make the question something more vague (but more measurable) like "biological sex" or "sex assigned at birth"?)
Or maybe getting genetic testing is more common around these parts than I guess...
I agree, but I would strongly caution against the "biological sex" phrasing if the intent is to be a proxy for sex assigned at birth or chromosomal sex -- binary trans people who have fully medically transitioned _are_ biologically their affirmed gender, especially if they transitioned young (pretty much to the same extent as equivalent intersex people such as XY cis women with androgen insensitivity)
What do you mean? All people care about is whether they have a penis or not. Surgery doesn't count; you can't erase the past.
1. Seconding the request for family’s religious background being strident atheist and/or agnostic. Not sure which of these I’d choose for my family, but it’s weird there’s an assumption our families weren’t actively anti- religion
2. My wife and I planned on/wanted two kids, but my wife’s first pregnancy was so difficult that we have opted for just one. I left this as how many we “want” because… that is how many we’re going to have, and your instructions are pretty explicit that if we’re done, we should just give the actual number. But the question is really combining us with folks who always wanted/or at least are very satisfied with one child.
Or "mild-mannered but unambiguous freethinkers", for that matter. Of course some will argue that nearly no family was like that five generations ago, but that confuses 'the family environment you grew up with' (how I interpreted the question) with 'the ancestral religion(s) of your family'.
Time for the traditional complaining/hedging/nitpicking/whatever :-)
*) How many children do you have?
------------------------------------
Note the present tense. Dead children do not count. Depending on the
purpose of the question 'How many children have you had?' might be
more relevant.
*) School choice
-----------------
I am in favor making it easier for people to home school (though it
is pretty easy in many states right now and legal in all 50). The examples
provided all include the *government* PAYING for a choice (charter, private, etc.)
Some folks may see a large difference between the government paying for:
a) charter schools (legally government run, but often w/o unionized employees),
b) private (possibly for profit), and
c) home schooling
I am one of those people :-)
*) Mental health.
When considering 'family members (within two generations)' I interpreted this as blood relation (so we share some DNA). I have a nephew with no shared DNA that, if considered, would result in different answers.
"*) How many children do you have?
------------------------------------
Note the present tense. Dead children do not count. Depending on the
purpose of the question 'How many children have you had?' might be
more relevant."
I see you are a proponent of the "We Are Seven" school?
We Are Seven
By William Wordsworth
———
A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
—Her beauty made me glad.
“Sisters and brothers, little Maid,
How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.
“And where are they? I pray you tell.”
She answered, “Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.
“Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.”
“You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven! I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be.”
Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree.”
“You run about, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.”
“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little Maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.
“My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.
“And often after sun-set, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.
“The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.
“So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
“And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.”
“How many are you, then,” said I,
“If they two are in heaven?”
Quick was the little Maid’s reply,
“O Master! we are seven.”
“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
’Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
Is "Children Wanted" strictly biological or can we include adopted?
*I* would interpret "wanted" to include adopted as I read the question as one of desire and one doesn't have an 'oops' adoption :-)
This is Scott's questionnaire, of course ...
"Have you gotten the COVID vaccine."
There are a number of, and a number of KINDS of, COVID vaccines, which have attracted various levels and types of distrust, blame, and skepticism. The protein subunit type (e.g. Novavax, which I was a Phase 3 clinical trial volunteer for) seems to attract a lot less negative attention/opinion than the mRNA type.
The "homeless encampment" questions are potentially inconsistent. The first says: "There is a homeless encampment in your city, about 20 tents in an empty lot." The second: "Same as above, except now there *are* empty homeless shelter beds in your city. The homeless say the shelters are filthy and tyrannical; they prefer to camp on the street." The second implies (it admittedly doesn't say so, but from how it's written I'd expect some people to assume so) that the encampment is on the street instead. This is a substantially different situation: an encampment on the street blocks traffic along the street, whereas an encampment on an empty lot is an inconvenience mainly to the lot's owner, plus (if the people encamped there are disruptive) to its neighbors & anyone who happens to be walking (not driving) by it. I am assuming that for the second question the encampment is still supposed to be on the empty lot & not on the street, but probably some people will interpret it the other way.
In the mental health questions, I'm not sure what option is best for "I was formally diagnosed with this in the past but no longer struggle with it." I suppose "I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family" might be most *literally* true, but given that the answers seem to be getting at something like "what is your proximity to this issue?" it seems like "i was literally diagnosed with it once" is relevant information that is not captured properly.
I'm going to go with "I have a formal diagnosis" as I think that's most in keeping with the spirit of the question but I'm not certain that's the desired choice.
I wonder how strongly unemployed/self-employed/retired correlates with "Completed survey quickly/during normal work hours"
I am officially on Christmas holidays starting this week so I was able to be virtuous and fill it out in my own free time.
I felt moderately annoyed at the shoplifting question because I wanted to impose fines on the first offense.
I kind of think a "warning" is useless, too. That ought to be for people doing something they don't know is wrong but turns out to be basically harmless. I suppose that could apply to a few first time shoplifters.
Yeah, I think everyone is perfectly aware that shoplifting us wrong.
Literal children often aren't, though I suppose they get stuff from stores less often than they used to.
That's fair, I was thinking of adults.
So I take it you never have heard popular slogans along the lines of "if you see somebody stealing bread: no you didn't"?
There are people who earnestly belive that stealing to cover your most basic needs is not unethical.
You might consider this wrong, but pretending that this is an opinion that does not even exist is not a good way to make that point.
The purpose of a warning is not to inform the stealer about the ethics of their action it is to inform them that you are onto them.
I'm perfectly fine with stealing food to save one's life, most people are (I think?). But this doesn't mean that stealing isn't wrong *under normal circumstances.* You can say "lying is wrong" and not be a Kantian absolutist about it. Same here.
I don't think much of the conversation about shoplifting hinges on cases like this, most of the cases I've heard discussed concern people stealing technology or clothing.
EDIT: Fancy clothing. It would, of course, be permissible to steal a coat if it would keep your kid from freezing during winter.
The purpose of a warning can also be to let people know that they have been noticed, that they will get caught if they do it again, and that there will be worse consequences if caught doing it again. For a lot of people that can be quite effective, as it can all seem like silly, consequence-free fun that nobody really cares about. I suppose this goes back to the stuff about the importance of certainty of being caught and certainty of consequences.
I know someone who regularly shoplifted on accident because a no single use plastic mandate caused the local grocer store chain to switch to selling "reusable" plastic bags. But they put them where they used to put the free ones and it took over a year of her just taking them at self checkout before one of our friends went shopping with her and told her that they are supposed to cost money.
>Length of Time
>How long have you been reading ACX?
...
>One to two years
>Since it was Slate Star Codex
ACX is nearly 4 years old now. These answers were out of date last year, it definitely needs an update at this point
I predict Scott will be surprised at how many people sincerely like modern architecture. Like, of course if you like beautiful things, you will like beautiful things with a contemporary glass-and-metal as well as beautiful things with a more traditional aesthetic!
I like for skyscrapers, offices, large stores, and big infrastructure to look sleek and modern. I like houses, parks, churches, community centers, and small stores to look traditional. Museums depend on what kind of museum it is. Science museum > sleek and modern. Archives/library > traditional. Same with government buildings. IT office > sleek and modern. Courthouse > Traditional.
Maybe, I'm too much of a lawyer, but in the question that asked about shoplifting when someone had "ten previously arrests on similar charges," based on my perception of your intent, you might want to change that to "ten previous convictions on similar charges." If the shoplifter was only previously arrested but never convicted, I think the punishment should be the same as the previous question.
On (at least) free speech and inmigration questions, I know this may not be what you've intending to capture, but for those of us from other countries (Spaniard here), I think it would be useful to mark somehow that when we are marking "more open" or "more free speech", that is *from the point of reference of our surroundings*.
I, for one, would *love* if Spain's free speech situation was as free / protected as USA's, but if I were to answer that question while living in the USA, mi answer would be a tad more moderate. On the contrary, inmigration is fine or if something, a little too loose here, but if I were to answer like if I lived in USA, it would be "open the gates!"
For the house/office building questions, if I don't have an opinion about local architecture, should I leave the question blank, or force myself to pick one, even if I don't actually care?
When you ask about my "family's religious background," do you mean the family I grew up in (my parents and me) or my current family (my wife and me and our child)?
For fun, I went through the top level responses to this thread thus far. Using a pure objective metric free from personal bias:
42 responses were nitpicks where no person in the world would be genuinely confused or upset about the wording.
11 responses were real objections.
26 were other kinds of comments.
Many nitpickers seem to be uncomfortable with not being able to portray the exact nuances of their situation in their answer. Being annoyed when not able to give a 100% "correct" answer seems like a trait that comes with the shape-rotator package, so it's not surprising that we get it here. I think takers should remember that the goal of surveys isn't close-up psychical profiling but statistics.
A tip to avoid nitpicking is to include a constructive proposal for what the question should look like instead in your comment. If you want to increase the complexity of the question, argue that the value added by the increase is worth the extra complexity.
I always have some nitpicks like this I ignore. This is when I wanted to be able to pick some option from left field that wasn't there at all. ("If you could have cake or cookies, which would you pick?" But I want pie!)
But I'll complain if the answer I want to give should be present from the logic of the question: "Which would you pick? 1. Cake 2. Cookies 3. Pie 4. Cake and Cookies 5 Cookies and Pie" Why can't I choose Cake and Pie? If I can pick two of them, why can't I pick all three?
It might be that the survey-maker has missed the option you want to select. But it's more likely that adding a sixth and seventh option increases complexity without adding value to the thing the survey-maker wants to study (e.g. "Will extroverted people more often pick options with pie?" or whatever). Again, the goal of surveys isn't close-up psychical profiling but statistics.
On the other hand, we're expecting thousands of respondents, so 42 nitpicks maybe isn't so bad.
Reality check:
The survey differentiates between {married, single, relationship other than marriage} and targets some questions to those groups.
The question to the relationship group is "are you ready to settle down" which is defined as "marry and start trying for children immediately".
My personal situation is that I have children with my current relationship partner whom I neither plan to ever marry, nor ever leave.
It seems to me that
a) I have already "settled down" in any meaningful interpretation of the phrase.
b) Ignoring a), I have no way of telling if I should answer based on "ready to get married" or answer based on "ready to try for children" which will yield the polar opposite result.
So, in your enlightend opinion:
Am I being a "shape-rotator" here and upset that I do not find an option exactly matching my special snowflake profile. Or is there perhaps any chance that you might entertain the possibility that this question leaves out so much of the potential answer space that it is useless even for "statistics"?
If the former, can you please give an indication how common or rare you think my case is, globally?
Also note that the issue here is not, as you seem to presume, the lack of more options for answers but the question itself.
Please suggest how the question should be rewritten to enable a fair judgement of your nitpickyness.
The minimal repair that somewhat preserves the structure of the original question seems to be to ask separately:
- I have settled down (totally disagree - totally agree)
- I am ready to get married (totally disagree - totally agree)
- I am ready to have children (totally disagree - totally agree)
Now of course I can immediately think of nits to pick with that, but at least this version can be plausibly answered while ignoring the nits in good faith. Example: Someone who already has children could say "yes" to "I am ready to have children" in good faith even though strictly logically that is not perfect.
Issue #1 Possible bug, possibly I'm a dummy
When I clicked submit, I got 0 indication of any kind that the submission was a success and it took me back to the front of the survey as if nothing had been saved.
Issue #2 Complaint
On the "what to do about homeless encampment" question there was no option to do anything with the "normal" homeless people once the harassers and unwell ones were rounded up. In other words, I wanted this option:
1. arrest the harassers
2. institutionalize the unwell ones
3. disperse the remainder so they go somewhere else regardless of presence of shelters
I don't want to just disperse the unwell and harassers. I don't want to just leave the "normals" once the harassers and unwell are rounded up. I chose for police to just break it up because my biggest concern is this ruining my neighborhood. However, I don't really want to disperse violent people or people who might OD in a puddle of their own pee without treatment.
I have the same complaint as issue #2. I wanted the same option, so I didn't pick any.
I dont think I have enough dopamine for that.
You should have included a question about waist circumference along with the BMI. I know not many readers of ACT are athletic enough for this to matter but still...
I am a Person of Amplitude, nobody needs to know my exact BMI 😀
I am a Person of Phase; maybe we should wave at each other.
It feels a little silly and immature, but I do enjoy when I'm answering a poll and one of the answers is something I like about myself. My highest level of education achieved for instance has increased recently, and I finally get to change my answer after years of answering previous ACX polls with the reservation that there's one I was studying for that I hadn't actually finished yet.
Nice one!
(I also get enjoyment from this sort of thing. :) )
A couple of questions where's I'd have liked other options:
:- A sentence between 1 year and 10 for the serial shoplifter.
:- An "I would be very excited about the prospect of settling down and getting married, but don't want children" option.
> A sentence between 1 year and 10 for the serial shoplifter
Yep. I spent a couple minutes on this question alone because of that. Come to think of it, that was an easy one: come up with your own sentence length and see if it's greater than 10^0.5 ~ π years. But somehow I only put it like this explicitly now, so perhaps including this in instructions would be helpful.
How many children do you have is ambiguous. I have one biological daughter and two stepdaughters whom I consider to be part of my family and whom I consider to be my daughters. I'm sure many other people have a similar arrangement. I'm indifferent to which is the right answer I just want to know whether I should include my stepdaughters are not. In the form I included them because they're my daughters
Re: "Do you own cryptocurrency?", it might make sense to instead ask if people own more than some minimum amount, either in dollars or as a percentage of their net worth. I think I have a small amount in a Coinbase account but I never think about it.
shaking and crying every time there is a question where I'm not supposed to enter anything
unclear if the "etc" in the you're building a house question includes maintenance costs (I'm assuming yes).
first degree relative homelessness question refers to them as "them" in the 2nd point and as "me" in the third. (hmm "lived out of my car", kind of a specific circumstance. maybe change in both questions to "a car")
(edit 2: I'm a dogmatic depth first search orderist and wrote these comments while doing the survey, before reading the nitpicking advice which is after the survey link)
On the "are you currently ready to "settle down"" questions, how integral to the question is the, "immediately start trying for children," part? I imagine there are some people who would be ecstatic about the rest of the prompt, but would balk at concept of having kids because, for whatever reason, they don't want to have kids.
The homeless question needs an option for - arrest the harassers, institutionalize the unwell, and send the rest to homeless shelters. You added 'send the rest to shelters' in the second question, but there's no option to combine the two.
More for you than for me - it may be useful to you to collect current email in addition to previous emails. I know which email(s) I would have used to answer between 2017 and 2023, but I had to switch to a new domain this year, so you won't be able to link my response to previous years.
Fuck me, those were some ugly houses/office blocks! Were they deliberately chosen to all be horrible, or are my tastes really so far from Scott's idea of the Overton Window?
"arrests" are not the same as "convictions" and will skew your results based on people's perception of the accuracy of an arrest.
Not clear if you wanted divorced people to answer the married questions or not.
The long COVID questions have confusing tenses.
"Have you ever had long COVID?" Yes, but I don't have it anymore.
"How bad is it?" uhh, I don't have it anymore.
I could imagine you meant "how bad was it?", but it was ruining my life, then it was very bad, then it was bad, then it was tolerable, then it was barely noticeable. Which do I pick? I left the question blank.
How long approximately did each of these phases last? (If you don't mind me asking, ofc.)
I would say about 3 or 4 months of the worst phase, where I struggled to have the energy for more than a 5 minute walk every day and a 10 minute shower every other day. (I was unemployed and living with my parents - I don't know what would have happened if I'd been trying to cook, clean, and do a job.) As well as being limiting, the subjective feeling of extreme fatigue was very unpleasant, and pretty much always present.
Then there was about a year of gradual recovery where I could live a relatively normal life, including working (at home), but I was still living with my parents and I couldn't do any of my active hobbies. At times I was still occasionally hit with serious fatigue that would leave me needing to lie down. At the end of this period I was able to do a moderately strenuous walk (2 hours with some uphill) provided I rested before and after.
Then over the next 9 months or so I started living independently and started easing myself back into my active hobbies. I still felt far from normal, and was often very tired, but I think my life probably looked normal from the outside.
I had a bunch of minor things that lingered after that, but I would say from the 2 year mark onwards it's in the "barely noticeable" category. (It was still very noticeable to me that I'd lost all my strength and fitness, but I don't think it's fair to count that!)
The first months sound brutal. Congratulations on mostly recovering.
Thank you for the detailed reply!
I'm trying not to overthink the climate change question and guess the genericized spirit in which it is being asked, but it's an area of professional interest for me, and where on the scale my answer goes depends on *by whom* we're saying action is needed, and whether we're asking if said action should be compelled/required.
Spaniards are not Hispanic according to your definition?!? Did you mean Latino?
Excellent survey! Mild nitpick - sometimes I don't fit the options, for instance, I would love to give a kidney, but because of my medical conditions, that is not an option.
When discussing social interaction, I am retired but employed, and my employ is by design a major source of my social interaction - I think there are others in that situation, i.e., our employment is our social interaction.
But these are minor quibbles. The survey is unusually well done. Thank you.
I tried filling out an earlier survey once. It's ordinarily the kind of thing I like doing. I don't know if it would have been an ACX survey or an SSC survey.
I had to abandon it because it seemed to be entirely bizarre, intrusive questions on topics of absolutely no interest.
So I leave this comment to note that the survey results are probably not all that representative even of ACX readers.
More commentary than complaint: on the questions about house styling, it was challenging to disentangle my opinion of the styles themselves from my opinion of the regions/climates in which each style is prevalent/appropriate.
I have not taken the survey yet. On the question about IQ, is the SAT still the only test the survey asks for scores on? If so, I think Scott should also ask for scores on GRE, LSAT & GMAT (and any other standardized test of intellectual skills made by the big test companies, who have the means to develop good-quality tests). All these scores become comparable to each other and to SAT and IQ scores if you convert everything to population percentile scores, and then there would be more and more recent data about this measure.
At least for Americans, basically everyone takes the SAT. GRE scores would be confounded by only selecting for people that apply to grad school, and the other tests would be even more specific.
Yes but the avg IQ of those taking
GRE is known. I believe it’s 115. That makes it possible to convert
GRE score percentile to population score percentile. It’s likely the
same info is available for those taking LSAT and GMAT, so for them too percentile rank among
test-takers can be converted
to population percentile rank.
The SAT has been structurally re-designed a few times since I took it, which isn't a huge deal near the middle of the distribution but has significant tail effects. I wonder if it would be worth adding a "When did you take this test" follow-up question to those ones, though probably not worth the complication...
Do hate speech and misinformation have to be bundled together? On the "allow free speech" vs "stop/punish hate speech" scale, I'm more in free speech corner. On the "allow free speech" vs "stop/punish misinformation" one, I'm at least in the middle and mostly stopped from going all the way to the right by the questions of how it's going to be implemented and applied, and "whose truth?" in particular. But at some point the damage from allowing lies is probably going to exceed that from misapplication of any semi-reasonable anti-misinformation laws. In fact, Trump's second term is quite likely to become that point (the lies in question being about the "stolen" 2020 election).
Update: Also, is there a way to edit my submitted responses without filling the form anew? If not, can I resubmit the survey (with the same e-mail) to replace my previous one? (It's mostly one question, so I could also simply ask you to edit it manually if that's an option.)
As you note, one person's 'misinformation' is another person's 'inconvenient truths They don't want you to know'.
It's always going to be politicised and politically biased, so better to allow some wiggle room for it than a blanket ban, and concentrate on refuting the wrong claims.
Your example of the lies about the 2020 election now has a counterpart in those who believe this election was stolen, by the same means that the allegations of 2020 claimed, and what made me personally laugh was Maricopa County being singled out - that seems to be a place that is always debatable, it flipped blue from red in 2020 and had the Trump supporters at that time claiming it was stolen. Now it's flipped back red, and the Harris supporters are claiming that proves it was stolen. Last time I bothered to look at the place back in 2020 comparing the results from 2016 and 2020, it became evident that only a small number of voters flipping was sufficient to turn the place from red to blue (or blue to red), so no jiggery-pokery needed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/
I don't disagree but my attitude is still different. If there were safe ways to ban misinformation without giving the state the wrong kind of power, I'd probably vote for it. If there were safe ways to do that to hate speech my opinion would probably range from lukewarm approval to disapproval depending on how strict the proposed restrictions were.
> Your example of the lies about the 2020 election now has a counterpart
That's not a new development too, I read an LJ blog whose author thinks it's plausible Trump stole 2016 elections. Based mostly on how often people throw accusations of what they're actually doing themselves. She doesn't seem conspiracy theorist-serious about it, but it's a thought she entertains.
I'd like to point out that Question N needs another option that reflects what my personal idiosyncratic answer would have been.
Can't believe Scott didn't put it in.
A couple questions were difficult to interpret.
1) The question about my "religious beliefs" has options including "atheist but spiritual" and "atheist and not spiritual." I'm an atheist with what I would call spiritual _feelings_ , but no spiritual (in the sense of non-naturalistic) _beliefs_ . So I'm not sure which response would be more accurate relative to your definitions.
2) None of the options in the question about my living situation covers staying at a shelter. The same applies to one of the questions in the supplemental part of the survey.
Thank you, that was fun.
One small complaint: I looked in vain for 'school teacher' in the job list and ended up picking the subject I teach. If that's intentional, no problem.
If you teach in a government school, I expect you were supposed to answer that you work for the government. I always just find the list interesting as an insight into the demographics of this community but also, presumably, the categories Scott thinks in. In other contexts, “education” is generally on offer as a broad category.
Did anybody else lose the whole survey after going to the BMI calculator? Couldn't find a way back. Probably shouldn't have done survey on phone. Likely me being a dumb ass.
No, I recovered the whole survey after two interruptions.
The section PART NINE: INCOME AND CHARITY had nothing in it about charity, were you missing a question?
(Also lol, I just said I never comment, and here I am commenting)
Good God, so much autistic gigapedantry, we need to take time out of teaching AI models generalisation and context-extrapolation and teach it to ACX comments section humans
Including me. Gross or net profit margin, Scott? You can’t not specify
The "political affiliation" one always has me umming and ahhing, since I'm an economic socialist/civil libertarian/cultural moderate leaning conservative. Doesn't really need a fix, though, since people like me seem pretty rare.
"How many hours a week do you spend in social interaction?" question should specify whether it includes internet social activity. Personally not sure.
>Have you ever been homeless?
>Answer yes only if you've been homeless because you couldn't afford a place to live, not if you were doing it for the "experience" or to save money.
What about if you got zero-notice evicted and thus were involuntarily homeless despite being able to afford a place to live (because you hadn't been able to arrange long-term accommodation yet)? Happened to me personally (stayed in motels; still was not fun due to frequently having to change motel), personally not sure about correct response.
Haven't completed survey yet due to latter two issues; have read it all.
Given that the vast majority of people have no way to know their chromosomal sex and can only infer it from their sex assigned at birth, perhaps the latter would be a better question? The percentage of people with different chromosomes to what they expect (e.g. XY people with androgen insensitivity) is quite considerable. Certainly there will be a handful of people in this dataset who answer that question incorrectly without knowing.
I don't know what the data will be used for, but if it's to investigate things where chromosomal sex actually is the relevant variable, the survey might as well give anyone who happens to know that information independently an opportunity to give it, rather than giving up early just for the sake of making it more likely that the question asked matches the answers people give.
Yes, I would think that in that case it would be best to ask two questions:
"What sex were you assigned at birth?"
"If you have ever been genetically tested, what are your sex chromosomes?"
There's also the case where it's possible to infer the chromosomal sex from other genetic conditions.
Two comments:
1. Regarding the question of which race one identifies with. I am a mix, but I mainly identify with the majority race of the place where I was born and live, even though I am brown and not immediately recognized as belonging to that group by others. This creates a dissonance that prevents me from fully identifying with them, as there remains a distance between us. Sorry if I am knit picking.
2. Regarding the question of time spent on socializing. One is not supposed to include time spent socializing with those you live with, but at the same time, time spent on child-rearing should be included. I live with my children and spend a significant part of the day with them. Should this time be counted or excluded? The answer to this question makes a significant difference in the total number of hours.
(next year I will have to answer that I am no longer only a lurker)
I hope this isn't a nitpick. For the question: "Do you usually wear a face mask when going out to stores or restaurants?" my answer is yes, because I live in Delhi, and the pollution is terrible, but the question is obviously being asked in the context of Covid, so I have chosen to leave it, instead of answering.
Profit margin is very ambiguous and could lead to variation of orders of magnitude. Are we talking net income, operating profit or what? Having worked in accounting, when someone just says "profit margin" I would think operating profit or EBIT which is 13%. Average net income is half of that. Not unusual to also to use profit to refer to EBITDA which is way higher than 13%.
Maybe this is obvious to others, but I also wonder about "average" does each firm/company get the same weight, or are the weighted by revenue? I think it would drastically change the correct answer
In addition to the L-R question, it would be nice to clarify your position with an 'Authoritarian -Libertarian' scale, with the Authoritarian side being identified as (belief in achieving social/economic goals through formal government intervention), vs Libertarian (belief in achieving social/economic goals through market/social/cultural interventions).
Gosh! My only quibble is that "How I Found. . . " ACX didn't list, "Jerry Pournelle's old Chaos Manor blog often cited SSC and shares several frequent commenters. "
Jerry also posted when SSC was taken down and when the comprehensive archive was posted, for awhile the only way to get Scott's content. I suppose that makes me a relative dinosaur.
For "sexual orientation," if you are interested in analyzing any data from trans readers that relates to orientation, it would be clearer for us if you were put "Attracted to men" "Attracted to women" "Bisexual" "Other" as opposed to hetero/homo/bi/other, because of the questions right before it asking about biological sex and gender identity. I, at least, cannot tell whether we are meant to answer based on our birth sex or our current lived role.
For "what area do you work or study in", I am a teacher. I don't see education or academia as an option, so I guess I have to put other white collar? Seems to be like it would be a category worth adding.
Related case: I work at a research lab that has deep ties to a specific neighboring university, is technically structured as a non-profit, and does an increasing amount of in-house manufacturing of devices that are then sold on to commercial clients. I put "Employed at a business" for my work status, but I could have put down any of the first three options with a straight face.
Profit margin can be defined as a percentage of sales or as a percentage of capital.
What answer to you want from someone who is both retired and independently wealthy?
The office building aesthetics question had a mixture of older-style buildings that I liked and newer ones that I considered fairly boring and bland and didn't have strong views on either way.
It didn't have any of the modern ones that I consider actively hideous, but that I infer some people actually like, that are springing up all over my town (Cambridge, UK). It would have been more interesting to include them. Currently it's like a pH scale with nothing beyond about 8.
Here are some examples:
Future Business Centre: with the bare concrete and the protruding metal window frames, I thought it was still waiting for another layer of some kind of cladding, but no, it's complete. I also hate the random asymmetric placement of windows, the hodgepodge of different materials (concrete, wood, glass), and the overhang. https://www.saundersboston.co.uk/ugc-1/fullnews/news/83/444_square.jpg
Hills Road Travelodge: it's a grid of rectangles with no symmetry or pattern as to which are metal, which are pale wood, and which are dark wood. Some contain windows, and the left-right position of each window within its rectangle seems random, and whether it has a dark blue or pale blue bit sticking out, and whether it has the same or different materials filling in its rectangle to the right and left. https://foto.hrsstatic.com/fotos/0/2/600/430/80/000000/http%3A%2F%2Ffoto-origin.hrsstatic.com%2Ffoto%2Fdms%2F367166%2FAMADEUS%2Fc8140373385a4e11bd898546ed7b1191.jpeg/ac9e2c6adab83bf44c8f6932cbd37830/512%2C384/6/TRAVELODGE_CAMBRIDGE_CENTRAL-Cambridge-Aussenansicht-3-367166.jpg
There are loads more examples. These are what I particularly dislike about modern architecture, rather than boring but inoffensive square boxes.
This is terribly stereotypically UU of me, but…on "Which best describes the religion you believe?" I'm actually kind of confused. Does the "believe" you're trying to get at mean "agree with tenets and practices" or "the stories about sky daddy literally happened"?
I was raised UU and I still agree with much of the tenets and practices, and plan to raise my kid with the UU church, but I wouldn't say I "believe" the church's agnostic approach to spirituality, which still affords room for supernatural phenomena. I also consider myself Christian insofar as I think Jesus had a lot of good ideas for how to treat your fellow man and think WWJD is a pretty good philosophy to live by, but not insofar as believing that he was the literal son of (a) god, or having belief in any sort of life beyond death.
By my best guess I think all this questioning means I should just shut up and smash the UU button.
Point of confusion: "When you were a child, how would you describe the socioeconomic class of the family you were raised in?"
Does this mean:
- what did child-me think about my family? (lower-middle)
- how would current-me describe my then-family in retrospect? (upper-middle)
Some reason you haven't included a 'socially conservative, economically liberal' option? It covers basic populism and Catholic social thought, which I think at least one prominent commenter follows. You've got the other three quadrants of the political compass, and some extreme stuff.
The Jhana question frustrated me, because I am experienced in mediation and stress management (Benson method) but my goal is usually something like "being in the groove" or hyperalertness without anxiety, which I frequently achieve. But that didn't sound anything like "Jhana", so I had to click "Never tried".
I just completed the survey, and it was really disappointing to discover that I had thought about the Roman Empire for nothing.
When you do your yearly predictions (which I hope are coming soon!) I'm not sure that I know why you include *things that you have massive control over* but I assume that in some way you feel that predicting their likelihood will help you.
In a somewhat similar vein, I imagine that mamy people will not want to define themselves in some way that they regard as negative (whether in regards to finances or mental health, etc) lest it affect their own judgement of themselves and therefore potentially their future. I can even imagine people wildly exaggerating their wealth (or downplaying something they regard as unwanted) to the point that between the false answers, and the *far greater* number of "blank answers" many of those questions will produce responses that aren't very informative about your readership.
In any case, I liked the building/house questions the most even though I didn't read the most recent relevant article on the subject. One thing it may have pointed out is that the more modernist office buildings may be unsightly (for some) from the outside but are perhaps nice places to work if their glass exterior bespeaks floor-to-ceiling windows. 🤔
Anyhow, thanks for your blog. You're a great fellow.
Some questions that particularly confused me:
"Country"
Asked what country I identified with, so I answered none/dath ilan. I hope this wasn't supposed to be the country I live in.
"Children Wanted"
Since this question specifies an 80th percentile outcome for my preferences, I guess we managed to align superintelligence and not die, so <10^20 or something I guess? Not sure there'd necessarily be a "spouse" involved, but surely I'd be making new minds in that situation eventually. Or do they only count as children if they start out mostly randomly initialised and experience a "childhood" where they slowly learn things, rather than being transhuman minds smart and coherent enough to be legal adults right from the start? If so, that seems like an unnecessarily cruel way to make a mind. So under that definition, possibly 0?
Left this one blank. I'm not clear enough on what qualifies as a child here.
"Physical Attractiveness
Rate your physical attractiveness. DON'T LIE!"
Left this unanswered because the description implies correctness is important and I don't trust my assessment enough to have high confidence on the granularity level of a ten point scale.
"In percent, what do you think is the profit margin of the average American company?"
It doesn't say I'm not supposed to just look it up, so I just looked it up.
Total time to fill out the survey: 86 minutes
For whatever it is worth, I am told by people who should know, that the stereotypical "cradle to grave social security" is no longer a thing in "scandinavian countries".
I am sure scandinavian countries still have more comprehensive social security than the US "we cannot figure out health insurance" of A and maybe this was meant here, but overall I think this "clarification" is too messy to be useful.
I live in scandinavia, and have no idea what you are talking about. We absolutely have "cradle to grave" type social security, and nothing much have changed to that lately. The only thing I can think of is lots of people are discussing difficulty dealing with the bureaucracy when recieving said social security.
I guess I stand corrected then.
For the question "What do you think is the profit margin of the average American company?" is this weighted by revenue (i.e. so the average profit margin would be total profits / total revenue) or is it an equal weighting by company?
In other words, if there are a total of 101 companies:
1 of which has $100 million of profits on $1 billion of revenue
and 100 of which have $5,000 of profits on $10,000 of revenue
do you want to compute $100,500,000 / $1,001,000,000, which would be a tiny bit over 10%, or would we compute (10% + (100 * 50%))/101, or about 49.5%
There is probably a big difference between these, because if you don't weight by revenue (or at least restrict it to Fortune 500 companies or something) then the average will likely be dominated by a large number of very small companies, or companies like startups that have a profit margin of like -10,000% or something because they have lots of costs but almost no revenue.
It occurs to me that the ACX Survey wouldn't be a terrible starting point if you wanted to reconstruct the useful versions of OKCupid from scratch.
For years I've been put off from taking the survey after seeing the comments pointing out problems with many of the questions. (Writing good survey questions is Hard.) But this year I've abandoned scrupulosity and taken the attitude that it's OK to leave some unanswered. My nitpicks:
> Relationship style
> What is your preferred relationship style?
Suggest also asking what is your actual relationship style.
> In what area do you currently work or study?
What do I do if I'm retired?
> Which best describes the religion you believe?
What do I do if I believe in many religions?
> Have you ever shoplifted?
Suggest instead - Have you ever deliberately/knowingly shoplifted?
Strong agree with "deliberately/knowingly shoplifted". That one got me wondering for a good while. In the end, I went with "no nitpicks" and said "never".
Re: "What do I do if I'm retired?", I also struggled with having no option to say "independently wealthy, could retire at any moment" + "still working, for Reasons". Or for the matter, "working for another while working for myself"
At the risk of nitpicking, I don't think the questions for those in a relationship or single are going to yield very useful data. The data is terribly compromised by the definition of "settled down" meaning "have kids" Getting married is a reasonable (nitpicking: though not perfect) overlap with settling down but you've left anybody who would get married but doesn't want kids in a bind when it comes to answering the question.
Interesting how this comment is repeated. We have it other way round. No marriage, 2 kids. And in our social circles, we are not an exception.
Probably not the first to ask: about the margin of the average US company, do we include failing companies (companies that failed during the current year)?
Are there any people who identify as "otherkin" or "therian" among SSC/ACX crowd? If yes, ping me at thesolarinbox@gmail.com, I'd like to interview you in near future for the purposes of amateur research
Many people have previously been diagnosed with mental health conditions but have fully recovered. Feels like this should be an option for the mental health questions.
I agree. I experimented with antidepressants for 2 months, gave them up and recovered cca a year later as the time and events passed. I chose that I don't have clinical depression.
I hope this isn't a nitpick. But on the mental health questions, I wasn't sure if "family" meant biological or also included in-laws. If you're interested in biology only obviously only biological family would count, but if one has some life experience with some conditions because some of your in-laws have them, it would give you social, cultural, experiential familiarity, which might be important for different contexts.
(In general for the illness/generation questions, I found "within two generations" to be slightly ambiguous: did only direct ancestors/descendants count? What about aunts, uncles, cousins?)
Minor nitpicks:
- on the "are you ready to settle down" question, my answer would be squarely inbetween "I might do it if I really liked them and they said it was a deal-breaker, but I would be skeptical and they would have to push pretty hard" and "I would be actively excited about this" such that neither of those is particularly close to correct
- "Do you think dating these days is harder for men or for women?" - I think casual dating is definitely easier for women than for men, but finding a serious long-term relationship seems pretty similarly hard across genders; on a strict reading this means my answer should be "men" but I'm concerned the answer may end up used to endorse a claim I would not endorse
For a few questions the button I clicked on wouldn't select no matter how many times I tried. All other options worked, but not the one representing my answer. So Ieft it unselected.
“ I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family”. I think this is a genetic family?
Suggested changes to the survey:
1. ACX became Slate Star Codex in January 2021, about 4 years ago. I found the blog later in 2021, maybe 3.5 years ago. But there is no option on the survey for that, so I had to choose between:
• One to two years
• Since it was Slate Star Codex
2. You ask for a favorability rating for Donald Trump, but not for anyone else. You should probably include a Democratic politician (e.g., Kamala Harris or Joe Biden) as well. Otherwise you cannot distinguish between people who dislike Trump and support the Democrats, people who hate both sides equally, and people who dislike him but see him as the lesser of two evils.
FYI, if you take this survey in the Substack iOS app, then click out for the BMI calculator, when you click back the survey will be wiped. Slight selection effect here, knocked me out.
On the political affiliations question, you have no option for anarchism. Anarchism is not Marxist or liberal. There are Marxist and liberal strains of anarchism, but lots of anarchists regard those as not really anarchisms but instead anti-state Marxism and anti-state liberalism. I am not the only ex-rat anarchist I know, there should be an option listed.
There is also no option for "My beliefs reject/cannot fit into the left/right spectrum."
Have you considered adding sleep self report questions?
For "Have you ever used an ACX Classifieds Thread?" you should probably make that "select all that apply" for those of us who both post and reply
Borderline nitpicking- the average profit margin should specify which (gross, ebitda, net) - I assumed net profit margin
and what unit. i assumed percentages based on the validation rule.
I prefer modern architecture, but I thought the examples given in "what kind of office building/house would you prefer" were very ugly, which predisposes us to the older styles.
Also, in the "settling down" question, is "immediately begin trying for children" an intended and obligatory part of the question? Because otherwise I think it might scare off some people who are ready to otherwise settle down, but don't want kids.
> "what kind of office building/house would you prefer" were very ugly, which predisposes us to the older styles.
Honestly the survey images seem very typical of the difference in quality between new and old stuff. In that almost all new stuff looks awful or mediocre. If the new images weren't ugly than they wouldn't reflect reality.
I don't think looking at past arrests in any way would be appropriate for shoplifting, or any other offense. Looking at past convictions would be a reasonable. I expect there are others like me, but I didn't see a way to say that to the question and it wasn't clear how to round the answer I would have had based on convictions to an answer to the question that was asked.
Kinda late, but I'm unsure how to count online socialization towards social interaction time. I went with video calls yes, and messaging/emailing at 50% of time spent.
Seems like option #2 in the office question is a Stable Diffusion image:
https://stablediffusionweb.com/image/6482828-brutalist-vocational-school-building-visualization
Seems a little unfair to compare it to real buildings...
I am unmarried, but in a stable relationship with the father of my two children aged 7 and 9. Such arrangement is quite common in my bubble. The questions about marriage and settling down did not have good options for me.
Not sure if there is anything you can do about this, but I was unable to select the "yes" option to the "can I email you" question, and unable to select the "no" response in the "do you have a tatoo" in the survey form. Everything else functioned normally. I was using a Google Chrome browser, on an Android 13 OS.
For income, should it include equity, retirement contributions, ect or just cash?
Adding another flag that "In percent, what do you think is the profit margin of the average American company?" is an unanswerable question. "profit margin" at least has a handful of clustered meanings, but "average" has a lot of very different meanings, even to the same person.
Median of all companies ordered by profit margin?
Mean of all companies ordered by profit margin?
Weighted mean, by employees? By market cap?
The "most typical" company, based on vibes?
"average" is one of those words that, if I'm reading it in a news article or social media post, is a big red flag that "the number that comes next is worse than useless"
Honestly I think you're worrying too much. Since the point of the question is probably just to see how many people here have a wildly inflated idea of the average companies profitability (like most people do).
It still bothers me that there's no intermediate option between "been reading for up to 2yrs" and "since SSC"
One thing that isn't captured by the survey is that you can think McMansions look bad and still think a lot of modern architecture is even worse.
A poorly implemented building that's *trying* to look good but failing, is still better than a building which does a good job of successfully capturing an architects absolutely hideous artistic vision!
I am surprised that "How happy are you with your health" is not one of the questions in Part Eleven
Possible technical issue: on the School Choice question, I was unable to select option "5". I didn't have this problem with any other question in the survey.
Aww, I missed the survey :(