Astral Codex Ten

ACX Survey

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ACX Survey

Article

ACX Survey is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 16, 2023 and June 14, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “thanks to everyone who took the ACX survey”; “I wanted to try replicating it with the ACX survey data”; “Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission”. It most often appears alongside ACX Survey Results, Pirate Wires, 2022 ACX survey.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 16, 2023
  • Last seen: June 14, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Why Do Transgender People Report Hypermobile Joints?
March 16, 2023 · Original source
Pirate Wires recently reported that transgender and bisexual people were more likely (20 - 25%) to report Long COVID compared to cisgender and straight people (~15%, yes, all these numbers are really high and you shouldn’t exactly believe them). There are lots of possible confounders, and I’ll post a replication attempt from the ACX survey data sometime, but a pretty plausible explanation is that some Long COVID is psychosomatic, all forms of neurodivergence correlate with each other, and so bi and trans people will report more of every psychosomatic condition.
Inline links: Pirate Wires recently reported
In order to learn more about this, I asked people about their gender and their joint disorders on the ACX survey, taken by about 7000 people.
Some ACX survey respondents kindly indicated that I could email them if I had any questions about their responses. I asked some trans people with joint mobility issues to tell me their stories. Here’s a typical response:
Replication Attempt: Bisexuality And Long COVID
May 03, 2023 · Original source
This seemed weird enough that I wanted to try replicating it with the ACX survey data (read more about the ACX survey here).
Inline links: here
Failure To Replicate Anti-Vaccine Poll
June 14, 2024 · Original source
So I asked about this on the 2022 and 2024 ACX surveys. Both gave similar results, but I’m going to focus on the 2024 survey, since I did the most followup on it. Here “family” was defined on the question page as including “brother, sister, mother, father, child, aunt, uncle, grandparent, grandchild, niece, or nephew”. This is broader than Pollfish’s “member of your household” but narrower than Rasmussen’s “person you know”. Kirsch and I got similar results for knowing someone who died of COVID - 6.5% vs. 7.5%. But we got very different results for knowing someone who died from the vaccine: Kirsch’s 8.5% vs. my 0.6%. Why? As people love to point out, my survey is a nonrepresentative sample. But as I point out, it’s important to keep track of when that should vs. shouldn’t matter. No matter how weird my readers are, they’re not biologically invincible - they should have side effects at similar rates to anyone else. One possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way. I didn’t have a question about vaccine-related views, but it’s no secret that vaccine opponents are more often right-wing, so I looked at questions about politics. Conservatives in general were only slightly more likely (1%) to report vaccine deaths compared to liberals (0.4%). But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%). I couldn’t find much of an effect by gender, education level, or any of the other traditional demographic categories. This doesn’t quite explain the difference between my survey and the others, since my moderates had 1.3% side effect rate, and the Rasmussen moderates had 22%. But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths. II. All of this would be much clearer if we could get in there and ask the people who said their relatives died from vaccines what they meant. Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission to email them. So I emailed the people who answered “yes” to that question and asked for their story. Some details: 5,981 people took the survey
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Emtd!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbe05b487-80af-4c93-af22-8abf99fa2f13_799x682.png, as
Here “family” was defined on the question page as including “brother, sister, mother, father, child, aunt, uncle, grandparent, grandchild, niece, or nephew”. This is broader than Pollfish’s “member of your household” but narrower than Rasmussen’s “person you know”. Kirsch and I got similar results for knowing someone who died of COVID - 6.5% vs. 7.5%. But we got very different results for knowing someone who died from the vaccine: Kirsch’s 8.5% vs. my 0.6%. Why? As people love to point out, my survey is a nonrepresentative sample. But as I point out, it’s important to keep track of when that should vs. shouldn’t matter. No matter how weird my readers are, they’re not biologically invincible - they should have side effects at similar rates to anyone else. One possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way. I didn’t have a question about vaccine-related views, but it’s no secret that vaccine opponents are more often right-wing, so I looked at questions about politics. Conservatives in general were only slightly more likely (1%) to report vaccine deaths compared to liberals (0.4%). But I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%). I couldn’t find much of an effect by gender, education level, or any of the other traditional demographic categories. This doesn’t quite explain the difference between my survey and the others, since my moderates had 1.3% side effect rate, and the Rasmussen moderates had 22%. But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths. II. All of this would be much clearer if we could get in there and ask the people who said their relatives died from vaccines what they meant. Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission to email them. So I emailed the people who answered “yes” to that question and asked for their story. Some details: 5,981 people took the survey
Inline links: as
As always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available ACX Survey Results. If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me.
Inline links: ACX Survey Results