Tag Archives: original research

SSC Survey Data On Models Of Political Conflict

There were a lot of good comments on yesterday’s conflict vs. mistake post. Some were very appropriate challenges: for example, doesn’t public choice theory itself assume conflict between special interests? And didn’t Marxism start off with a dry incentive-based explanation … Continue reading

Bundles Of Joy

[Content warning: Discussion of child-rearing, may invoke mild feelings of social pressure to have children] On December’s survey, I asked readers who had children whether they were happy with that decision. Here are the results, from 1 (very unhappy) to … Continue reading

Fight Me, Psychologists: Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong

“Birth order” refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how their birth order affected their personality: oldest children are more conservative, … Continue reading

SSC Survey Results 2018

Thanks to the 8,077 people (!) who took this year’s SSC survey. I don’t have the energy to screenshot/copy/paste the graph for every single question the way I have in previous years, so let’s do it differently. The survey page … Continue reading

Preregistration Of Hypotheses For The SSC Survey

[This post is about the 2018 SSC Survey. If you’ve read at least one blog post here before, please take the survey if you haven’t already. Please don’t read on until you’ve taken it, since this could bias your results.] … Continue reading

SSC Survey Results On Trust

Last post talked about individual differences in whether people found others basically friendly or hostile. The SSC survey included a sort of related question: “Are people basically trustworthy?” The exact phrasing asked respondents to rate other people from 1 (“basically … Continue reading

Can We Link Perception And Cognition?

Last month I talked a little bit about the Hollow Mask Illusion as a clue to the Bayesian operations going on “below the hood” in the brain. Today I want to go a little bit deeper into what the SSC … Continue reading

Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?

[Epistemic status: So, so speculative. Don’t take any of this seriously until it’s replicated and endorsed by other people.] I. If you’ve ever wanted to see a glitch in the Matrix, watch this spinning mask: Source: http://hearingthevoice.org/2013/11/14/predictive-coding-masterclass/ Did you see … Continue reading

Polyamory Is Not Polygyny

[Content warning: polyamory, brief quote of weird Heartiste stuff] The objections I hear to polyamory tend to separate into two narratives sharing a common thread. The first narrative is supposedly concerned about women, and typified by National Review’s Polyamory Is … Continue reading

AI Persuasion Experiment Results

I. Last month I asked three thousand people to read some articles on AI risk and tell me how convinced they were. Last week, I asked them to come back and tell me some more stuff, to see if they … Continue reading