Thanks for your question. We’ve addressed this in a number of different ways over the years.
In 2020 we asked respondents how far they agreed with an explicit statement of longtermism. Agreement was very high (68.5% agreement vs 17.7% disagreement).
Responses to this (like our measures of longtermism and neartermism reported above and here) vary across engagement levels (see below). Since we sample a larger proportion of highly engaged people than less engaged people, the true number of people not agreeing with longtermism in the broader community is likely higher.
In contrast, in 2019 we were asked to include a broad forced-choice question between longtermism and other cause areas. 40.8% selected “Long Term Future.”
Of course, this doesn’t neatly capture a longtermism vs neartermism distinction since only a small number of cause areas outside “Long Term Future” are mentioned, and some of the people selecting these may nevertheless count as longtermists. For example, in our analysis of the fine-grained cause areas, we find that Meta is strongly associated with Longtermism, so some of these respondents would doubtless count as longtermists. As such, overall, I’m not a big fan of the broad forced choice question, especially since it didn’t line up particularly well with responses to the more fine-grained categories.
Thanks for your question. We’ve addressed this in a number of different ways over the years.
In 2020 we asked respondents how far they agreed with an explicit statement of longtermism. Agreement was very high (68.5% agreement vs 17.7% disagreement).
Responses to this (like our measures of longtermism and neartermism reported above and here) vary across engagement levels (see below). Since we sample a larger proportion of highly engaged people than less engaged people, the true number of people not agreeing with longtermism in the broader community is likely higher.
In contrast, in 2019 we were asked to include a broad forced-choice question between longtermism and other cause areas. 40.8% selected “Long Term Future.”
Of course, this doesn’t neatly capture a longtermism vs neartermism distinction since only a small number of cause areas outside “Long Term Future” are mentioned, and some of the people selecting these may nevertheless count as longtermists. For example, in our analysis of the fine-grained cause areas, we find that Meta is strongly associated with Longtermism, so some of these respondents would doubtless count as longtermists. As such, overall, I’m not a big fan of the broad forced choice question, especially since it didn’t line up particularly well with responses to the more fine-grained categories.