Overview

The LessWrong Community Census is an entertaining site tradition that doubles as a useful way to answer various questions about what the userbase looks like. This is a request for comments, constructive criticism, careful consideration, and silly jokes on the census.

Here's the draft.

I'm posting this request for comments on November 1st. I'm planning to incorporate feedback throughout November, then on December 1st I'll update the census to remove the "DO NOT TAKE" warning at the top, and make a new post asking people to take the census. I plan to let it run throughout all December, close it in the first few days of January, and then get the public data and analysis out sometime in late January.

How Was The Draft Composed?

I copied the question set from 2023. Last year, there were a lot of questions and the overall sentiment was that there should be fewer questions, so I removed a lot of things that either didn't seem interesting to me or didn't have much history with the census plus collapsed some of the answer variety that doesn't get used much. This included gutting all but one question in the detailed politics section, though I mean to put a few new ones there. Then I changed some things that change every year like the Calibration question, and swapped around the questions in the Indulging My Curiosity section.

Changes I'm Interested In

No seriously, I want to keep the question count down this year. Right now I think we're a little below 100 (down from ~150 last year) and I plan to keep things under 100. This should be the current arrangement, at 95:

`Number`	`Section`	`Question Budget 2024`
`0`	`Population`	`3`
`1`	`Demographics`	`5`
`2`	`Sex and gender`	`10`
`3`	`Work and education`	`3`
`4`	`Politics`	`7`
`5`	`Intellect`	`5`
`6`	`LessWrong Basics`	`7`
`7`	`LessWrong Community`	`7`
`8`	`Probability`	`15`
`9`	`Traditional`	`5`
`10`	`LW Team`	`5`
`11`	`Adjacent Communities`	`5`
`12`	`My Curiosity`	`5`
`13`	`Detailed past questions`	`5`
`14`	`Bonus Politics`	`5`
`15`	`Wrapup`	`3`

I currently have zero actual questions in the Questions From Adjacent Communities section. Ideally I'd like to get, say, a question from the Forecasting community, a question from the Glowfic community, a question from EA, etc, and add up to 5 questions there. I'll be actively reaching out to organizers and managers of those groups, but if anyone wants proactively step forward in the comments please do!

I currently have only one question in Bonus Politics. I don't find politics interesting, lots of people do, so here's an open invitation to make some suggestions. Last year Tailcalled had an array they wanted to use, and I don't think it's worth repeating that whole set every year but I'm happy to have run it once.

I think there's probably another ten questions I can cut out that either aren't getting us useful information or aren't very interesting. Right now, the first politics section and the Intellect section are looking like good targets for some trimming, but it might also turn out that we don't use the Adjacent Communities section. The Probability section is the biggest, but most of those questions have been around in almost every incarnation of the survey and putting probabilities on odd events seems a core skill for rationalists so I'm reluctant to cut them.

This year, the thing I want most is to figure out a way to evaluate foundational rationalist skills on the census. Last year I tried checking the conjunction fallacy, but I did it in a kind of clumsy way and don't think I got a good signal. If you have ideas on how to do that I'd be delighted, and (other than trimming) that's the place I'm planning to focus on. Speaking of which: Does anyone have a better list of foundational lessons to check than I'm using in Internalized Lessons?

My best compilation of previous versions is in this google sheet.