LessWrong Diaspora Jargon Origins Survey
Filer - namespace
Project Name - LessWrong Diaspora Jargon Origins Survey
Principal(s) - namespace
Contact Email - jd@fortforecast.com
Homepage - https://namespace.obormot.net/Main/JargonSurvey
What is the project - In this survey I propose to take 12 terms (listed below) and ask at least 50 respondents if they originate from the LessWrong Diaspora, Academia, or neither.
- Weak Hypothesis**: There will be at least one term in this list which
respondents misidentify in origin overwhelmingly. In specific, at least 80% of respondents on at least one term or phrase will choose the wrong response.
- Strong Hypothesis**: There will be at least one term in this list which
respondents misidentify in origin overwhelmingly. In addition, at least one third (4) of the words or phrases will have 50% or more of respondents incorrectly identify its origin.
- Methodology**:
The twelve terms or phrases I plan to use are:
Alief Inside View/Outside View Epistemic Learned Helplessness Chinese Robber Fallacy Anti-Inductive Motte and Bailey Map and Territory Observer Effect Terminal vs Instrumental Values/Goals Ugh-Field Illusion of Transparency Optimiser's Curse
The terms are chosen to sound 'non-obvious' to respondents as to their origin, i.e they were deliberately selected for ambiguity. At least one term was chosen to sound especially academic and one term chosen to sound especially LessWrong Diaspora to provide a baseline. These terms are HtuSvryq and BofreireRssrpg respectively (rot13). All terms or phrases were taken from the [[https://namespace.obormot.net/Jargon/Jargon| Jargon Dictionary hosted by namespace]] (myself). Interestingly enough, I myself do not actually know the origin of many of these terms, because it's not necessary to do so to construct the survey. Ascertaining their actual origin is a step I plan to do at analysis time.
Statistically, the proposed methodology is as basic as it gets. I plan to test the hypothesis by counting the responses, and then determining what percentage of people gave each available response to each question. Of the three possible answers, only one is deemed 'correct', if the other two answer percentages combined meet the threshold for my hypothesis I will consider it proven.
Respondents will be taken from my personal 'friends list' (which I am unwilling to provide), and then further respondents will be taken from the following LessWrong Diaspora 'hangouts':
- Brier: An invite only Discord server run by myself. - #lesswrong: Freenode LessWrong IRC channel. - SlateStarCodex Discord: The 'official' Discord server of Scott Alexander's blog. - LessWrong Discord: The unofficial Discord server of the community blog of the same name. - Exegesis: Tumblr Diaspora Community server. - LessWrongers Slack: A Slack server run by elo.
It is also possible that I might post a link to the survey on forums such as /r/slatestarcodex, LessWrong 2.0, or Whistling Lobsters.
The survey will be conducted using the Google Forms software, analysis will probably use the basic results feature of that software. More advanced analysis would be done with a custom written python program.
Timestamp (autofilled) - 1514543593
| Project Type | Is Type? |
|---|---|
| Experiment | Yes |
| Database/List/Map | No |
| Gathering or Event | No |
| Social Space or Forum | No |
| Software Tool | No |
| Startup | No |
| Organization | No |
| Other | No |
