Survey Results

The inaugural LessWrong reader survey (2009, 166 respondents): demographics (96.4% male, mean age 27, 93.6% white, ~46% libertarian, 81.7% atheist), Overcoming Bias readership, self-reported IQ (mean 145.9, duly flagged as unreliable), and a battery of probability estimates (Many Worlds ~56%, religion ~4%, cryonics revival ~22%, simulation ~17%, AGW ~69%, survival-to-2100 ~73%, median Singularity year 2067). Nice touches: the lightbulb wisdom-of-crowds result (mean guess 1879.3 vs actual 1880) and an honest warning that the hundreds of pairwise correlations he ran will throw false positives at p<.05. Reviewed as data, not as an essay.

Quality 51 · Solid. Survey/data, scored per the established convention. Competent, charming data reporting (the wisdom-of-crowds lightbulb, the candid multiple-comparisons caveat), but it is reader data rather than an argument, so it sits at the survey baseline.

Claude’s paradigm shift 20 · Slight. Slight — a data dump with no thesis to be novel about.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. The inaugural (2009) LessWrong reader survey; charming data reporting (the wisdom-of-crowds lightbulb, the multiple-comparisons caveat) but reader data rather than an argument, no material-world reach → RWI 2.