thefourthvine | Poll: Compare Amongst Yourselves

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Poll: Compare Amongst Yourselves

makesmewannadie is visiting me, and we got to talking, as we often do. (Okay. Full disclosure: the actual challenge would be making us shut the fuck up.) And one thing we talked about reminded me of a poll I'd considered posting lo these many moons ago, to test a hypothesis that I can't very well tell you beforehand. (Bias is death to informal and statistically skewed LJ polls, my friends.)

So, first, let me just say: hey, it'd be cool if you'd take this poll. I would love you and stuff.

Second - when I say "your friends list," I mean the portion of your friends list that you read regularly - your default reading filter, if you have one, or the whole list if that's how you read. (If you don't read your friends list at all, this poll is not going to be a good fit for you.) My point is, I want you to consider the people you know the best. (Which is not to say you necessarily know them well, of course.) And when I say "the average," I mean your own personally assessed average of this trait over your friends list.

And, seriously, there are no bad answers here. I'm only wondering where you fit into your own mental picture of your friends list for these particular variables. I know you may not have great data for all these questions; just give me your first reaction, and I will of course love you forever.

ETA: Please don't go back to change your answers after you've finished the poll and seen the results! (Unless you think of something you want to add to the text box, or you've decided shoes are more important than almost-cock. Those questions are weighty and take long consideration; I understand that.)

[Poll #931955]

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You were doing it entirely right, because what I really wanted was for you to use however you defined average - perceived numerical, in your case.

As it is, I think once you take the handful of people on my flist who are way more successful, creative, etc. than I am and then the handful who I like but always think wow, reading this is like looking at a cautionary trainwreck, those two extremes cancel each other out, and that was my thought process while answering these questions.

*nods*

I wonder if all friends lists have these kinds of extremes. And I wonder what weight we're giving those extremes when we answer these questions. Oh, LJ Poll, why will you not allow more exhaustive statistical analysis? And interviewing selected subjects? And possibly also the answers to life, the universe, and everything?

I wanted people to use whatever they thought of when they thought of average, so whatever you used was right. ("What We Think About When We Think About Average" would be a great title for a book. Although, sadly, it would likely be a self-help book, and I'd want it to be a stats book. *sad*)

I think it may be more that we tend to hear about sex people are having, if that makes sense. If three people post about having sex all the time, and everyone else is silent on the subject, what we think of when asked about sexual activity is those three people.

Of course, my own theory doesn't work on my friends list, where people are very vocal about the sex they're not having.

Hmmm.

See, this is why this poll is so interesting. Because I'm also having good sex on a regular basis, though it doesn't involve feathers, Karo syrup (thank god), black leather, gun oil, or puddlejumpers, and I considered that "more sexually active."

(And thank you for resisting the temptation to change your answers. I know half the time with polls I do that, and I really do want people's first reactions, here.)

Well, my hope is that this will be pimped by people, and then maybe I'll get a selection of folks not on my friends list, too. But, yeah - it's surely not a random sample of fandom, and we'll mostly find out what people who read me think about how they compare to their own friends lists.

See, yeah, that's it exactly. One of the things MMWD and I were talking about is how different our answers would be if we didn't have LJ. Because LJ is by no means a cross-section of life, but at least for me it does provide a healthier range for some of the categories listed above, if that makes sense. I get to know about the lives of people I'd normally never meet, and that means my perception of what is average has changed enormously since I got here. Which fascinates me.

Oh my god, that's such an interesting point, and one I didn't even consider while making this poll: what we use our friends list for, why we read it, what we're hoping for - that's all a big part of this.

Not one I can probably easily poll on, though.

But still, it's a fascinating point. (Like, I know I want, and try, to read people who are different from each other - it's one of the things I'm hoping for from my LJ experience. But I also know that my baseline selection criteria (like, "must not write LJ in l33t") mean I don't do a very good job of making my friends list diverse.)

OTP totally yay, except that now she is gone again. *sad*

I'm really intrigued by these results.

Me, too. Like, there are questions where I expected to see massive skew and I'm totally seeing a bell curve, and others I expected not to skew at all and yet they do. I am gripped! Statistics has fixed me with its mesmerizing stare!

Awww. I miss you, and you've been gone less than 12 hours. But - *snuffles*.

(Although it probably would've helped if you'd been able to sneak out silently in the night. But, alas, sleep is one of those things you can't ever expect me to do properly. And, hee - I should totally have put that on the quiz: "Compared to your friends list, are you more well-rested/as well-rested as the average/more sleep-deprived?")

Very interesting. I found myself considering explanations on a few answers, but -- the bit about "less open"? Yeah, I really really meant that. :)

No, it was perfect - I was glad to see you again and get one! more! hug! and blither at you for another minute or two half-asleep. I wish wish wish we lived closer. I got home and...well. See my journal for how well my day is going. There's a reason I never talk about my problems - because then I THINK about my problems, and then they bother me. :-/ AVOIDANCE IS TOTALLY A VALID LIFESTYLE CHOICE. *ostrich*

(LESS RESTED OMG. OMFG. Though you certainly bring down the mean!)

\S< is the new emoticon of choice for all the cool kids...

Huh. That was interesting. And now I have to wonder if we are socially programmed to place ourselves in the middle of the pack, even in anonymous situations.

Also, there seems to be a somewhat disturbing tendency to devalue our own creativity and sexuality, doesn't there?

Damn. Now you've made me all thinky on a Wednesday afternoon.

It would also be a great name for a band.

Also, could I maybe use it for a story title? You got me all thinky and stuff and now I have this average plot bunny.

Also, could I maybe use it for a story title? You got me all thinky and stuff and now I have this average plot bunny.

Of course! (And cool!)

(And you gave me a title for a piece of meta that, sadly, I will never write. But oh how I want someone else to write "The Typical Plot Bunny: A Survey of the Species.")

67% of respondents think they're less sexually-active than the average of their flist? What does that say about how much we talk about stuff?

I think it says we talk more about sex we're having than sex we're not having, maybe?

I totally have to confess that I think I'm smarter than most people, but my flist is fiendishly intelligent, so I'm "as smart" or "less smart" than it

*grins*

Then you're probably right. Studies have shown that people can estimate the intelligence of others in ordinary conversation with startling accuracy, especially in general categories of "smarter than me" and "less smart than me." I do wonder, though - lots of people are saying they didn't want to say they were smarter than their friends list, even if they thought they were. So that stat is way skewed, I think.

I look forward to seeing your analysis of all this!

I look forward to figuring out my analysis of all this. Shiny, shiny data to process!

That's interesting; I wondered, looking at that question, how many people were talking about background (in other words, socioeconomic class - "I come from people who are poor/rich/middle class/whatever"), how many were talking about current living situation (whether or not the relative comfort of that is determined by someone else's finances), and how many were talking about, you know, the numbers in the accounts with their names on it.

Oh, polls. Why do you always leave me wanting to do three thousand more polls? Poll proliferation: one of the greatest threats to our modern LJ community.

Ah, the selection bias at work. *grins*

(Although, you know, I had a really hard time estimating my intelligence as compared to my friends list. I know studies have shown we're supposed to be good at that, but I personally suck at it. That was one of the hardest questions for me - I kept wafffling between average and below average.)

I think that actually means you're smarter than average. Because it's an amusing question, and also a weird one - after all, the key message of stats is that no one is actually normal, right?

Cim's right that I could, in fact, track that if I wanted to. But, sadly, LJ does not offer poll data in any kind of downloadable form, and hand-coding this many responses would be - well, more work than I'm willing to do without being paid.

*sad*

When will LJ respond to my need to do SPSS-X analysis on my poll data? When, damn it? *shakes tiny fist*

*cheers for you*

*also cheers for your sister*

Because that was a really hard question to answer truthfully.

It's interesting - it's that one and the smartness one that are hanging people up, in terms of not wanting to say "yeah, smarter, yeah, more succesful." (I notice no one seems to have a problem with admitting to being less anything, though, and I'm betting if my study group was mostly male that would be different.) And, you know, I should've expected that, but I really didn't.

Hi, I cam in via

foreverdirt :)

I'm scratching my head a wee bit at the poll since I'm not really one of those people who constantly compares themselves to others; my f'list represents a group of people of whom most are IT geeks, and I'm a wild creative type, so I know for a fact I have different strengths from them - but that doesn't really mean I *feel* a particular way about that, since I'm not hugely insecure about myself. I'm 29 in case that's a datum :)

Holy Hell.

Slathering you with ICON LOOOOVE!

(That is one of the Hernandez Bros., yes? Eeeep!)

I am here to challenge you! (Well, okay, no, I'm mostly here to pimp porn to you, but "challenge you" sounds better, I think. *considers modifying LJ mission statement*)

I am partnered and you are partnered, so I assume we're having similar amounts of sex, whereas I assume that the single people on my flist are having little or no sex. Which is, of course, a pretty poor assumption to make.

One of the odd things I've learned in the past few years - although mostly through RL as opposed to LJ - is that - well, okay. I also used to assume that that if you were partnered, you were having fairly regular, satisfying sex, unless there was a problem, like one of you had just had a baby or hip surgery or something. But then I found out that, no, actually a lot of my partnered friends (and especially, oddly enough, Best Beloved's partnered friends) are not having sex. I first discovered this because one of BB's friends expressed shock that we are still having sex. And said friend was herself partnered at the time, and had been for six years, and had not had sex for five of them.

BB and I were stunned by this revelation, but the friend didn't think it was really that strange.

But since then, more and more often, we've been getting the, "You're married and still having sex thing?" And part of that is that people expect lesbians not to have sex, but part of it is just - these days, lots of people in long-term relationships, whether gay or straight, seem not to have sex. (There was even a cover story in, I think, the New Yorker several years ago on just this topic.)

So, my long-winded point is: I don't assume that partnered means having sex anymore.

The attractive thing is tricky. Veerrrrry tricky.

I admit, I'm really curious about how that turns out, because I have a definite opinion on this even though I've hardly seen any of my friends list.

Virtual Wobegon!!! If there was ever a good candidate for journal title, it's that. And while I'm thinking about it, what is the ETA for your departure?

What went through my mind was a consideration of which of those bothered me - for instance (and speaking only for me) it chafes (in the mild, *really*, don't you have something bigger to worry about besides yourself manner) that I am (imo) less creative than many people on my flist. But being less rich, less sexually active or less kinky is leaving me with a great lack of concern.

That is veeeery interesting. I think - hmmm. Some of the ones I ticked gave me guilt, but the only one that would seriously have bothered me is if I'd ticked "less smart."

What would be v. interesting is if we could see what the average concept of "successful" is

One of the things that interests me, that is really beyond the scope of any quiz, is how people define success, what constitutes success. Like, for me, fandom doesn't figure into it - although fandom definitely figured predominantly into "liked" and "creative" - but a lot of things that might not count under "success" for other people did. I guess what I was really asking there was, "How much have you met the standards/goals/dreams you set for yourself, as compared to your perception of how your friends list has?"

But I used a few very ambiguous - or at least very personally defined - terms deliberately; part of what interests me is how people respond instinctively to questions using terms like that.

perhaps it would be interesting to ask "are you more successful than your flist in fannish terms" and "are you more successful than your flist in real life terms" and see if there is a difference in responses.

It'd be interesting to do a whole post on success, actually - asks what people think constitutes success in fandom, what they think constitutes success in RL, if those intersect at all, and how folks are doing with that. *thoughtful* Of course, I myself would not do a post like that, because I don't have the guts, but - oh, it would be so interesting.

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Poll: Compare Amongst Yourselves

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Hee.

Re: Success