SSC Survey Results 2020

EDIT: This post presents open-access data from a large survey that anyone is allowed to download and analyze. It’s gone viral because a Twitter user named Philippe Lemoine downloaded the data and used it to investigate politics and mental illness. That analysis is not described here, it’s not my analysis, and I have various caveats about it, which are described here. Sorry for any confusion.

Thanks to the 8,043 people who took the 2020 Slate Star Codex survey.

See the questions for the SSC survey

See the results from the SSC Survey (click “see previous responses” on that page)

Some people expressed concern about privacy on the survey. Originally, respondents could see aggregate responses, including the responses of people who marked their answers private. I figured this was okay because nobody’s responses could be connected – ie you could see that one person put their age as 83, and another person put their country as Canada, but because the table order wasn’t the same you couldn’t link these together to form a coherent picture of an 83 year old Canadian. Some people still expressed concern about a few of the long answers, since some people might have put personal information in there. There’s no way for me to eliminate only the private people’s responses from Google Forms and still display the information to you like this, so instead I’ve removed all long answer questions. If you’re interested in those, you can find them in the downloadable data files. Sorry for not doing this earlier, and I hope this compromise is okay to everyone. I’ll try to get a clearer picture of what people want before the next survey.

I’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this week. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 7000 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. The public datasets will not exactly match the full version, some overly identifiable questions (eg age) will be binned, and a few sensitive subjects will not be included.

Download the public data (.xlsx, .csv)

Finally, the game results. I randomly selected Game 3, “Prisoner’s Dilemma Against Your Clone”, chose a random respondent as the prisoner, and found someone similar to be his clone. Of the two clones, one cooperated and one defected, so the defector gets the full prize. That defector’s public key is “gwern is my waifu and paperklipot maximizer”. Please email me within one week at scott[at]slatestarcodex.com with your private key and a Paypal account where I can send you money (or a charity you want me to donate to).