Since I’m finally getting settled in here, I thought it was a good time to do a reader survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MW3YFZH.
So it’s open. You can only take it once, but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. There are 30 questions but the first 20 are mostly demographic and should go very quickly (e.g., your age, your sex, your race), and the last 10 are not difficult either (if you don’t know if you are a deontologist or consequentalist on ethics, don’t answer). Many are now of the form where you can answer more than one option.
I basically took the template of last year’s survey, made several changes, removing some questions and adding some. Also, I stole a few from Slate Star Codex.
You can read the non-text answers of the 2016 survey here.
In the middle of May I will the raw data (no-IP) and post it here so others can analyze if they want.
Addendum 1: Since I don’t know where else to put this, I have noticed an increase in referrals through my Amazon links. So that’s much appreciated. Obviously I’m not really getting paid much for blogging or doing the sysadmin activities, but it’s definitely going to covering overages from VPS traffic or anything like that. Remember, even if you don’t buy directly through the link I still get a referral if you are on Amazon during a session and buy something different.
Addendum 2: Forgot to mention. I’ve been doing reader surveys since 2004. The final tally of the number of people who fill the survey is always between 300 and 500, invariant of how much traffic I received (my traffic has varied about an order of magnitude over the years). It is curious to me that this “core readership” (as I perceive it) is about the same size as a Roman cohort.
Put a PayPal donate button on there so we can fork some more money over to you!
Demographically your reader base isn’t very diverse, but ideologically I know of few folks who are so evenly divided across the political spectrum.
white guys with viewpoint diversity basically.
i won’t tolerate identity politics here really…but am OK with diversity of opinion on lots of stuff.
A few comments.
Educational attainment
This question is rather US centric. Maybe try to make it a bit more flexible.
21. Moral views
I wanted to select something related to error theory /nihilism (there are no moral truths)
Politics
I think it would be nice if you had a Nolan chart. It seems you tried to do this, but you used ‘social issues’ instead of ‘personal freedom’ as the axis, which makes me unable to place myself.
I remember before you would ask if your readers were virgins and/or have read Human Action. I don’t think you actually reported the correlation between the two though.
1) massachussets and maryland over-represented in 2016, yes? i presume will hold again this year.
2) There are plenty of ppl who will admit, even just to themselves in a survey, that they are ‘reactionary’? That comes as a bit of a shock to me. I always thought of that term as pejorative, like ‘troglodyte’. Just goes to show that, even though I regularly poke around Taki and Unz and Drudge to marvel at the atavism while also being enriched by what reasonable contention can be gleaned, still I know very few of the secret handshakes.
3) ‘philosophy’ majors over-represented? mea culpa.
I have a law degree and selected Commercial/Finance, but depending on your school/country I guess you could end up choosing e.g. Humanities, too.
i set up a patreon literally in the last 20 minutes in response to this question:
https://www.patreon.com/razibkhan
tell me if i did anything wrong if anyone tries to do the patron thing. you can now see the patreon link on the right too.
the paypal donate button is going to be right below the search bar on the right. keep paging down. above the books.
i doubt i will ask aggressively for $ from readers since writing has never been my primary source of income, but if people want to support what i’m doing i won’t object. i have 3 kids to feed now 😉 and, i do pay myself for subscriptions to several national newspapers so i’m not being hypocritical (though i consume a lot of free media too obv).
I am disappointed that the question about Internet communities did not include HBD. Many people would have chosen it if it were there.
I floundered on the question about ethics. Is there a decent intro to the subject that you can recommend? Seems to me most ethical systems do not take science or evolution into account. While no amount of is can justify an ought, surely knowing more about the is affects one’s opinions about oughts.
It would be quite interesting to know what proportion of readers lean towards dualism versus monism with respect to the mind-brain problem