Survey Results Pt. 5: Down the Rabbit Hole

In the previous posts on my survey results, we looked at general information about Manifolders, as well as their opinions on Manifold itself, works of art in different media, and philosophy. This post will discuss their answers to the “Fun” questions, which for most of you made up the final section, but some unlocked the secret bonus section, which will also be revealed.

Which pill do you choose?

The first question on this section comes from a meme that apparently originates from a Tumblr account called Chronicles of Rettek but which I knew as the basis of Manifold’s second-favorite short story, “…And I’ll Show You How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes.”

The question included the above picture and a description saying, “What could happen with your newfound powers? Read about it here.” There was a lively discussion in the market on this question about which pill was the best, with most people settling on black, blue, or orange. Black was considered the definite favorite, given the proportion of people in the discussion who decided it was the best one. I was a dissenter, arguing that blue was the best, though I still didn’t think enough people would agree with me for it to beat black on the survey. So what were the results?

Black was indeed the one chosen by the most people, 50 in total. This is what was expected, and I guess it makes sense that people on a prediction site would want the ability to see the future. In a slight upset, the next most popular was orange (33), followed by blue (23), even though blue was expected to be the second-most popular. After that were yellow (17), grey (9), green (6), pink (4), and red (2). So every pill got at least some takers. Though somewhat ironically, the pill whose power ultimately solves The Last Question and saves the universe from heat death was the least popular.

What would you do for an extra hour in the Manifest ball pit?

This one was surprising. It was the first market I made on the survey and was a free response market. One person submitted “All of the above” as an option, which I thought was a clever way of capturing the other answers. Now, rather than voting for the individual answer you thought was funniest, you could just choose them all. The market also considered it the most likely winner, but it was not to be.

The true winner was “Manipulate markets with people IRL” with 35 total votes, despite only being given a 6% probability at close, the lowest out of all five options. Second place was “Agree to join the Manifest orgy” with 29 votes. The front-runner came in third with 22 votes. “Claim your territory by peeing in it” had 12 votes, and “Kill” had 5.

The Ruler of Everything

In reference to the Tally Hall song, I asked “What is the Ruler of Everything?” In the song, the ruler of everything is stated to be “mechanical hands”, referring to the hands on a clock as a symbol for time. In total, 66 people responded, and these were their responses:

1 meter
?
??
A big measuring stick that stretches across the whole universe
A measuring device
A mechanical hand
A ruler the size of the universe
Abadar's Rationalussy
Consistency.
Digital calipers
Elon Reeve Musk
Entropy
Entropy
Everything is computation
Hubble Space Telescope
I don't know
Information
It’s a really big ruler 
Jeff the Killer
Lonely
Man, for he is the measure of all things
Me
Me
Me
Me 
Mechanical hands
Mechanical hands, obviously
Metric system
Moloch
Moloch
No
Pain
Patterns
Purportedly, mechanical hands.
RNG
Rationalussy
Tally Hall. What's up with these questions? Are you just trolling?
That would be me.
The answer to the next question is "No", not "no".
The centimeter
The metric system, du Bureau International des Poids et Mesures
The question is paradoxical. Everything rules itself
These questions are dogshit and you should feel bad for asking them. 
Time
Time
Time (and also the only good Tally Hall song)
Time.
What isn't it 
What?
Whatever is not me
computation
gradually expanding
kilometer
man what
mechanical hands
mechanical hands
my conical hand
nothing
polycarbonate
survival
that weird song i guess
the Banana Man
the Christian God
the Ruler of Everything 
the international prototype metre?
ur mom

The most common type of response seemed to be from people taking “Ruler” to mean a measuring stick rather than one who rules, so people responded with units of distance, descriptions of a giant ruler, or even the Hubble Space Telescope, which I suppose can be considered a “Ruler of Everything” in that it can be used to measure distances on a (observable-) universe-wide scale. A lot of other responses were just people expressing confusion, giving a joke answer, or referring to the Tally Hall song itself. Multiple people answered “Me”, “Entropy”, or “Moloch” (this last one being a reference to an Alan Ginsberg poem and an interpretation of it popular in the rationalist community).

In total, there were at least 10 responses that said the ruler was “Mechanical hands”, “Time”, or something else directly related to or symbolic of time. Possibly a few more if we include “my conical hands” and the respondents who answered “Entropy”, but nowhere near 50%. In other worlds, it appears Manifolders do not understand mechanical hands are the Ruler of Everything.

Is the answer to this question no?

I had to include at least one paradoxical question the survey. A lot of people skipped it, but here are the results from people who did answer:

The majority said No, 48 to 36. This matches with the market’s prediction, which slightly favored No. It also probably has the strongest claim for being correct, based on a solution analogous to Tarski’s solution to the liar paradox.

Did Thanos do anything wrong?

I think pretty much everyone knows who Thanos is and what he did, so I didn’t include a description for this one, just a yes or no question. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority did not side with Thanos’s wiping out of half the universe:

It looks like the meme was only powerful enough to sway 25 respondents.

Did Vriska do anything wrong?

Although the “Thanos did nothing wrong” meme is more well-known, there was a similar meme about Vriska from the webcomic Homestuck prior to it. Among other things, she is known for feeding children to a giant spider, murdering one of her supposed friends, creating a villain who went on to destroy the universe, and having a crush on Nick Cage.

Looks like Vriska didn’t have all the luck with this one. Most respondents (102) hadn’t even heard of her, and out of those that had, 64% said she did something wrong (18 - 10).

Pictured: Manifolders expressing their thoughts on Vriska

Who do Manifolders sympathize with?

The survey had four separate questions asking whether Manifolders sympathize with a certain character (or in one case, Manifold user) who is claimed by some to be evil. Aside from the two above, there was a question on the Manifold section asking whether Levi is evil and one on the philosophy section asking whether users support the dragon-tyrant. So, who had the most support? To determine this, I calculated the percentage of people who sympathize with each character, out of those who had heard of them and answered the question about them. For Thanos, Vriska, and Levi, sympathy was determined based on who answered “No” to the question about them. For the dragon tyrant, I counted respondents who support his reign as 100% sympathizers and those who were neutral as 50% sympathizers. This led to the following results for the most sympathized-with:

1. Levi (60%)

2. Vriska (36%)

3. Thanos (20%)

4. The Dragon-Tyrant (9%)

This is more or less what the markets on the topic predicted, and the exact ordering I expected.

Ohiowa Showdown

Ohio and Iowa: two states that may or may not be on opposite sides of the Midwest depending on which states you consider part of the Midwest. And, most importantly, bitter rivals (by which I mean I’m pretending they’re bitter rivals for the sake of a few silly markets about them).

On the one hand, Ohio is known for its wide array of monstrous creatures that prevent people from doing everyday things, if the Internet is to be believed.

On the other hand, many fear that IA is dangerous and will wipe out humanity.

So, which state is better, Ohio or Iowa? Manifolders weighed in.

It looks like despite being stereotyped as a boring state, Ohio is better-liked than Iowa on Manifold. Though that may have something to do with the fact that the same stereotype is used against Iowa. The market was correct about this for most of the time, with Ohio being given a >75% chance of winning, but for some reason it went down below 50% shortly before close.

The shape of the Earth

Many a pedant has smugly corrected someone else about the shape of the Earth. It’s not really a sphere, you see, it’s an oblate spheroid. Just kidding! Did you fools really think it was an oblate spheroid? Due to my superior intellect, I know that it’s actually slightly distorted, like a pear. Never mind that “pear-shaped” is probably a more confusing and less accurate way to describe it than just “oblate spheroid.” Of course, true high-IQ chads know that it’s really a geoid, or rather, approximately one, since even that is only an idealized shape that ignores the nongravitational forces that keep Earth’s surface from exactly conforming to it.

For this question, I asked Manifolders how they would describe the shape of the Earth, with a series of increasingly accurate, but also increasingly complicated, answers. Of course, I also had to include the obligatory option claiming that Earth is flat, as well as a hyperbolic plane option to round out the 2D constant-curvature Manifolds, and another joke option. Here were the results:

The most common option chosen was “oblate spheroid”. Out of the answers that are actually serious descriptions of Earth’s shape, here are the number of people that chose each:

• Round (spherical) - 33

• Oblate spheroid - 34

• Approximately an oblate spheroid with slight pear-shapedness - 19

• Geoid - 9

• Approximately a geoid, but with imperfections due to surface features that don't exactly match the ideal equigeopotential surface - 30

So the median response was “oblate spheroid”, meaning Manifolders aren’t that pedantic. The most popular joke option was a tie between “Dinosaur-shaped” and “Hyperbolic plane”, with 6 responses (4.1%) each. “Flat” and “Other” had only 5 responses (3.4%) each.

Is a hot dog a sandwich?

I made a few markets on the perennial pointless debates that people come up with based on edge cases of certain words. This first one was the closest.

In an upset, Manifolders don’t think a hot dog is a sandwich, in an 83 - 63 vote.

Is cereal soup?

By a much more resounding margin (117 - 30), Manifolders don’t think cereal is soup. No surprise here.

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

This one has actually had some polls done on it among the general public, which apparently found that most people didn’t consider it a Christmas movie. Manifolders have a different opinion:

85 to 42, Manifold says Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Another correct (and very confident) prediction by the market.

Does the gostak distim the doshes?

It seems that some people were confused about this question, since only 73 answered it. So let me clarify the meanings of the terms involved: The gostak is the thing that distims the doshes, distimming is the thing the gostak does to the doshes, and doshes are the things that are distimmed by the gostak. Hopefully that clarifies it.

Well, whatever it is, the majority didn’t think that the gostak distims the doshes, in a close 40 - 33 vote.

(And for anyone actually wondering: The question is nonsensical and used as an example of how we can derive some meaning purely from the syntax of a sentence, even when the words are meaningless.)

The Best Dwarf Planet

My original dwarf planet survey ended in a tie between Pluto and Ceres. Obviously, this called for a rematch. I asked the same question as the first one, “Which dwarf planet is best?”, with the options:

• Pluto (normie choice)

• Eris (bigger Pluto)

• Ceres (not like other dwarf planets, too cool for the Kuiper belt)

• Haumea (the stretchy one)

• Makemake (the one with a funny name)

• Gonggong (the other one with a funny name)

• Quaoar (has a mystery ring)

• Sedna (aloof, kind of distant at times)

• Orcus (D&D villain)

Did we get a clear winner this time? Indeed we did:

Pluto won with 42 votes. The previous co-winner, Ceres, got second place with 30 votes. Following them were Eris (13), Quaoar (12), Sedna (10), Haumea (6), Orcus and Gonggong (4 each), and Makemake (3).

The Possessive form of Plasma Ballin’

When I changed my screen name to Plasma Ballin’ as a reference to the Crystal Ballin’ podcast and my original profile picture, it raised the question of what the possessive form should be. Normally, you would add an apostrophe and an s, but it already ends in an apostrophe. I came up with the question after seeing some examples in the wild of people referring to me in the possessive form (of course, I got around it myself by just using “Plasma’s” rather than the full form). Even the website’s coding has an opinion:

I came up with four possibilities, with the latter two having silly justifications for why they could be correct:

• Plasma Ballin''s (two apostrophes)

• Plasma Ballin's (one apostrophe)

• Plasma Ballins (the apostrophes cancel out)

• Plasma Ballin"s (the apostrophes combine to form a quotation mark)

I also included a write-in option so that people could come up with their own possessive form.

Out of the four I listed, the most popular was Plasma Ballin’s (64 votes), followed by Plasma Balin’’s (25), Plasma Ballin”s (15), and Plasma Ballins (1). There were lots of write-in answers, most of which were only given by one person. However, two did get multiple votes: Plasma’s Ballin’ (3) and Plasma’s Ballin (2). The other answers people gave were:

• Plasmas ballin’

• "Plasma Ballin'"'s

• Plasma Ballin'; DROP TABLE `manalinks`; --'s

• Plasmες Ballες

• Plasma Ballses

• Plasma Ballin's'

• Plasma Ballin'

• Joseph's

• Ballin' Plasma's

• _ of Plasma Ballin'

• Plasma’s Ballin’

• Bilbo Baggins

• Plasma Ballins'

• ,uᴉllɐq ɐɯsɐlԀ's

• Plasma Balling's

So those are all the ways you can write the possessive form of "Plasma Ballin'"'s screen name. Hopefully no one uses that third write-in to steal all of ,uᴉllɐq ɐɯsɐlԀ's mana.

Should Pluto and Eris be planets?

After Pluto was officially demoted to a dwarf planet by the IAU, many people were very mad about it. Illinois even passed a resolution declaring that it be “reestablished with full planetary status” as it passes over Illinois’s skies. However, no one ever mentions Eris, the dwarf planet larger than Pluto that was discovered shortly before the demotion (and likely one of the reasons for it). I’ve often observed that people say Pluto should be a planet, but Eris should not, which seems unfair to me. Surely Eris has just as good a claim to being a planet as Pluto does. So, does Manifold hold Pluto and Eris to a double-standard, or are Manifolders consistent?

The majority agreed that both Pluto and Eris should not be planets. Pluto got more support for its planetary status than Eris, but the percentage of people who said Eris should be a planet was more than half of those who said Pluto should be a planet, so we can say that most respondents were consistent in their beliefs about what objects should and should not be planets.

Did respondents finish the survey in one sitting?

The survey ended up being a lot longer than I initially anticipated. Luckily, Google forms saves responses, so no one had to finish it in a single sitting. I was curious about how many people actually did take just a single sitting. As it turns out, most people did:

Only 39 respondents split it up across multiple sittings.

The Secret Final Section

It is now time to reveal the secret final section of the survey. It was actually just an Easter egg for the final question, which asked whether respondents know the theme song to Malcolm in the Middle, with the options, “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,” “I don’t know,” and “Can you repeat the question?” This was a reference to the song itself, which begins with those words. The Easter egg was that choosing, “Can you repeat the question?” does in fact cause the survey to repeat the question (the secret final section just asks the same question again). Only 21 people actually accessed the secret final section, out of 168 total responses.

For those who did access the final section, these were the results of the second iteration. I didn’t include “Can you repeat the question?” on this version to avoid having to make an infinitely recursive final section.

Based on the results, the majority of people don’t know the theme song, though most of the people who accessed the final section do know it. It’s called “Boss of Me” by They Might Be Giants. Here is the full song (though they don’t actually use the entire song in the show’s intro):

And this is it, the last question on the survey. After all this time, the results are finally concluded.