Hello my dearly loved readers. I’m in the midst of a project that I at least think might be very important. I am trying to get people to fill out a survey to test a practically important and understudied social science question. This will eventually be turned into a blog post. Unfortunately, I can’t just ask you all to fill it out, because I have recently made two posts on a similar topic, and I don’t want to bias the results. I can, however, ask you to share the survey for me.
* It's probably not great practice to title the survey with what you're trying to investigate, as that could bias the results.
* Some of the questions are required, and others are optional. It seems arbitrary which is which, and the instructions say that they're all required in order to earn a prize.
* The "do you understand X" questions at the beginning are excessive; I expect many people will quit out of boredom before finishing the first page.
* Ok this is pedantic, but "two" is a number. If you want people to write it out in *digits*, I would just say that. :)
* The current prize system has no incentive for people to share the poll, and for those who are eligible to fill it out there's an incentive not to, since it makes them less likely to win if more people answer. To fix that you could do something like "please put the name of the person who referred you", and award a random prize to a randomly selected referrer.
* I expect you'd get more new readers if you include a direct link to your Substack in the last question rather than making people find it themselves.
I took the survey. Some questions seemed ambiguous or lacked appropriate answers.
E.g. the question, which is a bigger problem, society punishing too much or not enough? It was probably stated better than that, but still very binary. I don’t know how to evaluate the effectiveness of punishment, and if the subtext the question activates for me is appropriate, there is a lot more to be said. I think some violent crimes go unpunished, even uncharged. I might be wrong. I think there are many nonsense laws, which people get punished for too often. I do not know how to compare these for badness. It seems more of a question of the unresponsiveness of government to the concerns of ordinary people. Voting (letter writing, etc.) seems to be a weak feedback mechanism, unable to address this sort of thing reliably.
I was linked to it by ACX. Unfortunately I was put off by the request to not skip any questions. Sometimes I like to leave out some personal information, especially email.
Shared on Twitter/Facebook/Substack.
Some feedback/thoughts:
* It's probably not great practice to title the survey with what you're trying to investigate, as that could bias the results.
* Some of the questions are required, and others are optional. It seems arbitrary which is which, and the instructions say that they're all required in order to earn a prize.
* The "do you understand X" questions at the beginning are excessive; I expect many people will quit out of boredom before finishing the first page.
* Ok this is pedantic, but "two" is a number. If you want people to write it out in *digits*, I would just say that. :)
* The current prize system has no incentive for people to share the poll, and for those who are eligible to fill it out there's an incentive not to, since it makes them less likely to win if more people answer. To fix that you could do something like "please put the name of the person who referred you", and award a random prize to a randomly selected referrer.
* I expect you'd get more new readers if you include a direct link to your Substack in the last question rather than making people find it themselves.
I restacked it. Hope that's helpful.
I took the survey. Some questions seemed ambiguous or lacked appropriate answers.
E.g. the question, which is a bigger problem, society punishing too much or not enough? It was probably stated better than that, but still very binary. I don’t know how to evaluate the effectiveness of punishment, and if the subtext the question activates for me is appropriate, there is a lot more to be said. I think some violent crimes go unpunished, even uncharged. I might be wrong. I think there are many nonsense laws, which people get punished for too often. I do not know how to compare these for badness. It seems more of a question of the unresponsiveness of government to the concerns of ordinary people. Voting (letter writing, etc.) seems to be a weak feedback mechanism, unable to address this sort of thing reliably.
Just some feedback: It was difficult to answer the policy questions since they are so broad which is why I put down unsure for most of them.
I was linked to it by ACX. Unfortunately I was put off by the request to not skip any questions. Sometimes I like to leave out some personal information, especially email.