My answer to 'Write any 5 random words' : 'Moon landing was a hoax'
Mine was 'correct horse battery stapler comic'
The xkcd survey
121–130 of 281 posts
Re: The xkcd survey
#122Re: The xkcd survey
#123I can't shake the feeling that this will just measure of how willing people are to follow instructions for no reason whatsoever.
Here are some obvious signals that I think can be pulled from the data set: • gender • age (since they just straight up ask for it) • rough geo data (if the survey records IP geo information, so assume they are doing that) • economic status • rough tech literacy level
As far as I know, it's not possible to record respondents' IP addresses with Google Surveys, so I think that one's out. I suppose you could make rough inferences based on the food, weather, and snow questions.
Re: The xkcd survey
#124Found out that gnome 3 has some keybinding for dynamically changing screen resolution. I don't know which keybinding that is, but I found it during the mash the keyboard test.
Sigh. I hit "Enter" and it submitted the form without letting me finish. Now they will never know if I'm a dog or a cat person...
Re: The xkcd survey
#125Re: The xkcd survey
#126=== SPOILER ALERT! === The most interesting question, to me, is the one about which words you know the meaning of. About half of them aren't real words. I assume this question is used partly as a gauge of vocabulary (how many of the real words do you recognize) and partly of honesty (how many of the fake words do you claim to recognize).
Kinda wish you had waited until after the results were published to mention it. Plenty of people will read the comments first, so by talking about it now you're actively harming the very experiment you're so impressed by.
That only applies to people who saw this on Hacker News; the survey link is on xkcd's front page today, and I imagine there are many xkcd readers who don't come here.
Re: The xkcd survey
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I have to match socks between several different styles Do I understand correctly that you throw all your socks into a drawer/container, and when you need a pair, you go and have to find two matching ones? This may be cultural (or even familial) thing, but I always curl two socks up into a ball so that they stay together. When I need a pair, I just take one ball, uncurl it, and voila.
But do you curl matching socks or not? If you have many different styles, you need to go hunt around and find matches. Curl or not just delays the matching problem, it does not solve it. Having all the socks be the same makes matching an O(1) problem.
but if you curl them after drying, you have a much smaller pool to find the pair from, the just washed socks (which will be the socks you use the most anyway). So it's faster that way, than to mix them all up and only then match.
Re: The xkcd survey
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, I run 6 days a week so my running socks get beat up pretty bad. When they are dead, I need to throw them out. So my options are: 1) Buy 1 new pack of socks, throw out 6 old socks - repeat every month. Doing it this way I have to match socks between several different styles. or 2) Put 4 packs of socks, throw out all of my socks, repeat 4x less often. Also I have no matching to do, as all of my socks are the sa…
My son just picks two in the dark and wears them. He wanted an outward sign of his nerd cred. If they matched, he used to pick again. But he stopped doing that, because if he really didn't care, he would wear matching socks too. Has he reached some higher level of Nerdvana?
I think technically caring about having socks that doesn't match rules him out. He's testing strongly for hipster though.
Re: The xkcd survey
#129I can't shake the feeling that this will just measure of how willing people are to follow instructions for no reason whatsoever.
That's what I though, at least while reading the "type 'cat'" one.
That's probably a trap question, to let you filter out people who aren't paying attention. Similarly, in the 'recognize words' section, I'm fairly sure some of those words aren't real and so you could increase data quality by throwing out anyone who claims to recognize fake words.
Re: The xkcd survey
#130Who else? > Type five random words five random words
I considered typing that, but went with "five totally random words phoropter".