A broad spectrum of ages with a peak in the early 20s.
Summary statistics for age:
Min. 15
1st Qu. 23
Median 28
Mean 30.5
3rd Qu. 35.8
Max. 65
Only 5% of respondants were female, the rest male.
Of those males, about 5% made some kind of wise crack about the sex question. ;P
The majority have at least a bachelors. Alot of those who have completed high school are in the midst of their bachelors.
As one could probably guess, there are lots of people involved in software. Obviously some of these occupations overlap. I've also attempted to consolidate alot of the responses, and have only graphed the occupations that have more than one count, since it'd be difficult to represent otherwise.
Formal subject tallies are in dark grey and independent subjects are represented by light grey. Again, I've consolidated some of these subjects and excluded those with only 1 count. I particularly liked the response of "Everything" to the independent study question.
In the questionaire the levels for a) were described as:
0 None
1 Newbie
2 College graduate
3 Average working computer programming
4 Hacker that can competently design software
5 Fluidly and elegantly use several programming languages as naturally as speech.
Mean was 2.96 but a large numbers of subscribers that only have cursory experience with programming.
Regarding the level descriptions. Some people had problems with the connotations of "hacker", particularly that it implies software hacked together and leads to bad software design. I should have explicitly mentioned I was referring to it in it's original usage (always learning, always striving, immerses themselves in the subject area), or just used a different description completely.
Most people knew some amount less than 10, mean was 7.15. Some individuals knew as many as 30.
I personally can't really write anything without referring to docs, except for C. But it seems most people can do it in a few.
Someone commented that "the standard should really be an O(n log n) internal memory one" - however, the idea was not to judge programming skill, but to what extent you really knew the languages. A sorting algorithm was the simplest program I could think of that did something useful, and that is pretty universal.
I personally identified with the comment: "None - that's what googles for - I don't keep those details in local memory"
This question wasn't worded very well. The intended meaning was, "What got you interested in the singularity?", but alot of people just responded directly with the example words - which isn't their fault at all. I should have been more clear.
However, the answers do indicate what angle people are coming at thinking about the singularity from.
Min 2012
Median 2030
Mean 2039
Max 2150
Several people had no opinion, or did not think the singularity would happen in the foreseeable future.
I should have worded the question better as below human AI could arguably have been the first chess program. The time should be from human equivalent AI, to clearly above the capabilities of current human endeavour.
Most people predicted a relatively slow take-off taking months or years.
Sometimes interpreted as the greatest threat to the singularity occuring, rather than a threat to humanities existence. For example UFAI would be a existential threat, even though it'd be a form of singularity in itself.
Not surprisingly, most subscribers are lurkers. It was great they took the time to fill in the survey though.
Someone made the comment "ever noticed how this list is rough? Interesting to read, but until I know enough, I'll remain a happy lurker, rather than showing my ignorance by making vague statements... a feeling shared by many a lurker, no doubt. Then again, I understand and agree with the list policy."
The coordinate limits I used didn't match the results of the test url I gave.
For any answers that gave coordinates beyond the -2 to 2 range, I normalised them.
I also made a decision on whether to normalise based on whether integers or decimals were used. Decimals generally indicated that the online test was used, whereas integers meant the respondent estimated based on where they thought their own beliefs lay.
Here I shouldn't have asked this question using the word "avid" - rather, just whether you were a fan, i.e a large proportion of your fictional reading was sci-fi based.
Not unexpectedly, most people were. And a couple of people used to be, but had reasons why they were not any longer (generally their reading time had been taken up with non-fiction works).
There were a range of answers to this question.
The rationale behind it was that if we expect an ultra intelligent being to treat us with respect we shouldn't be hypocrites and treat animals, that are arguably conscious beings to some extent, as industrial machines. This will of course depend on whether you think animals have consciousness or if consciousness is a distinctly human trait.
One respondent summed this up as "I adopted this stance because of Golden Rule, i.e. I don't want to be eaten by a superhuman intelligence."
I tried to find statistics on the percentage of vegetarians in the general population, but there was nothing obvious to directly compare against.
11% of respondents claimed to have some Ashkenazi genetic heritage.
Similarly to the vegetarian question, I couldn't find data on the percentage in the general population. However Wikipedia claims 11.2 million Ashkenazi Jews worldwide, which is a tiny percentage of the total 6/7 billion humans on Earth (although having genetic heritage and being counted as Ashkenazi Jew are different things of course).
Thanks to everyone who responded to the survey on the SL4 list and sorry for this very late summary. Personal crises, PhD, and other commitments have meant me putting this off for several months!
If you'd like to comment you can do so on my linked blog post here, or email me. I welcome any added comments or observations on these results since this is relatively brief overview (I just wanted to get this data out there for all the patient respondents).