Possible, but likely a smaller effect than you might think because:
a) I was very ambiguous about the subject matter until they were taking the survey (e.g. did not mention AGI or risk or timelines)
b) Last time (for the 2016 survey) we checked the demographics of respondents against those for a random subset of non-respondents, and they weren’t very different.
Participants were also mostly offered substantial payment for taking the survey ($50 usually, for a ~15m survey), in part in the hope of making payment a larger motivator than desire to express some particular view, but I don’t think payment actually made a large difference to the response rate, so probably failed have the desired effect on possible response bias.
Possible, but likely a smaller effect than you might think because: a) I was very ambiguous about the subject matter until they were taking the survey (e.g. did not mention AGI or risk or timelines) b) Last time (for the 2016 survey) we checked the demographics of respondents against those for a random subset of non-respondents, and they weren’t very different.
Participants were also mostly offered substantial payment for taking the survey ($50 usually, for a ~15m survey), in part in the hope of making payment a larger motivator than desire to express some particular view, but I don’t think payment actually made a large difference to the response rate, so probably failed have the desired effect on possible response bias.