Thanks for asking. We’ve run around 30 survey projects since we were founded. When I calculated this in June we’d run a distinct survey project (each containing between 1-7 surveys), on average, every 6 weeks.
Most of the projects aren’t exactly top secret, but I err on the side of not mentioning the details or who we’ve worked with unless I’m certain the orgs in question are OK with it. Some of the projects, though, have been mentioned publicly, but not published: for example, CEA mentioned in their Q1 update that we ran some surveys for them to estimate how many US college students have heard of EA.
An illustrative example of the kind of project a lot of these are would be an org approaching us saying they are considering doing some outreach (this could be for any cause area) and wanting us to run a study (or studies) to assess what kind of message would be most appropriate. Another common type of project is just polling support for different policies of interest and testing the robustness of these results with different approaches. Both these kinds of projects are the most common but generally take up proportionately less time.
There are definitely a lot of other things that we can do and have done. For example the ‘survey’ team has also used focus groups before and would be interested in doing so again (which we think would be useful for a lot of EA purposes), and much of David Reinstein’s work is better described as behavioural experiments (usually field experiments), rather than surveys.
Another aspect of our work that has increased a lot recently to a degree that was slightly surprising is what Peter refers to here as “ad hoc analysis requests” and consulting (e.g. on analysis and survey design), without us actually running a full project ourselves. I’d say we’ve provided services like this to 8-9 different orgs/researchers (sometimes taking no more than a couple of hours, sometimes taking multiple days) in the last few weeks alone. As Peter mentions in that post, these can be challenging from a fund-raising perspective, although I strongly encourage people not to not reach out to us on that basis.
The projects we did used to be more FAW leaning, but over time the composition has changed a bit and, perhaps unsurprisingly, now contains more longtermist projects. Because the things we work on are pretty responsive to requests coming from other orgs, the cause-composition can change unexpectedly in a short space of time. Right now the projects we’re working on are roughly evenly split between animals, movement building and meta, but it wouldn’t be that surprising if it became majority longtermism over the next 6 months.
Thanks for asking. We’ve run around 30 survey projects since we were founded. When I calculated this in June we’d run a distinct survey project (each containing between 1-7 surveys), on average, every 6 weeks.
Most of the projects aren’t exactly top secret, but I err on the side of not mentioning the details or who we’ve worked with unless I’m certain the orgs in question are OK with it. Some of the projects, though, have been mentioned publicly, but not published: for example, CEA mentioned in their Q1 update that we ran some surveys for them to estimate how many US college students have heard of EA.
An illustrative example of the kind of project a lot of these are would be an org approaching us saying they are considering doing some outreach (this could be for any cause area) and wanting us to run a study (or studies) to assess what kind of message would be most appropriate. Another common type of project is just polling support for different policies of interest and testing the robustness of these results with different approaches. Both these kinds of projects are the most common but generally take up proportionately less time.
There are definitely a lot of other things that we can do and have done. For example the ‘survey’ team has also used focus groups before and would be interested in doing so again (which we think would be useful for a lot of EA purposes), and much of David Reinstein’s work is better described as behavioural experiments (usually field experiments), rather than surveys.
Another aspect of our work that has increased a lot recently to a degree that was slightly surprising is what Peter refers to here as “ad hoc analysis requests” and consulting (e.g. on analysis and survey design), without us actually running a full project ourselves. I’d say we’ve provided services like this to 8-9 different orgs/researchers (sometimes taking no more than a couple of hours, sometimes taking multiple days) in the last few weeks alone. As Peter mentions in that post, these can be challenging from a fund-raising perspective, although I strongly encourage people not to not reach out to us on that basis.
The projects we did used to be more FAW leaning, but over time the composition has changed a bit and, perhaps unsurprisingly, now contains more longtermist projects. Because the things we work on are pretty responsive to requests coming from other orgs, the cause-composition can change unexpectedly in a short space of time. Right now the projects we’re working on are roughly evenly split between animals, movement building and meta, but it wouldn’t be that surprising if it became majority longtermism over the next 6 months.