Re-announcing Pulse
In September 2022, we announced that we were developing Pulse, a large and repeated US-population survey focusing on public attitudes relevant to high impact issues.
This project was originally going to be supported by the FTX Future Fund and was therefore delayed while we sought alternative funding.[1] We have now acquired alternative funding for this project for one year. However, the project will now be running on a quarterly basis, rather than monthly, to make the most efficient use of limited funds.
Request for questions
As such, we are now, again, soliciting requests for questions to include in the survey.
We are particularly interested in questions which people would value being tracked across time, since this will make the most use of Pulse’s nature as a quarterly survey. We will still likely include some one-off questions in Pulse (space permitting), and welcome requests of this kind, but in principle we could just include these questions in separate surveys (funding permitting).
Given the lower frequency of the surveys, we now believe it is more important than ever to ensure that we include the questions which are the highest priority. Due to space constraints (data quality drops dramatically when surveys exceed a certain length), we are not able to field questions on every topic that we might wish to.
At present, we plan to include questions primarily focused on:
Awareness of and attitudes towards effective altruism, longtermism, and related areas (e.g. (our previous work)).
Support for different cause areas or particular policies (e.g. AI)
However, we are keen to get requests for other cause areas or topics.
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Ironically, this meant that we weren’t able to run Pulse during the time of the FTX crisis, when tracking attitudes towards EA at a large scale would have been particularly useful. It also meant that Pulse wasn’t running during the recent increase in public interest in AI risk. We think this is a useful illustration of why it is important to have regular surveys running in advance (and keep them running) so that we can capture changes in public attitudes due to unforeseen events. Fortunately, we do have some pre-test data on both of these topics, which we will be able to use to assess changes to some extent.
Very glad to hear this is still happening!
Are you planning on asking any question related to farmed animals? If so, which ones? And if not, would you be up for doing so?
If you’re not yet but would consider it: I’m happy to talk to a few relevant US folks to suggest some questions. Obviously RP has a very solid animal welfare so asking them is potentially an easier option but happy to do so regardless if you think it’ll be useful.
Thanks!
We’ve spoken to a few different orgs/researchers about animal welfare requests, but would welcome more.
Really glad to see this is happening! In terms of questions, it might be easiest if you share a draft of the planned questions so that people can see what is already in there and what seems in scope to include. My desire to share my ideas for specific questions is hindered by the concern that it will be a wasted effort.
One option is to share a spreadsheet of potential questions with a relevant audience/here and ask people to indicate the X (e.g., 5) questions that are of most and least interest, and/or suggest changes or new questions.
Some general thoughts: I’d like you to cover concern for the major cause areas in EA, and some of the core values of EA (e.g., the extent to which people think we should care about animals, future people, people overseas etc)>
I’d like you to think about how we can get most value from the data—can you share it so that other people can use it in publication? Can we get someone to create nice visualisations of relevant trends that we might want to publicise?
Thanks!
Makes sense. We’re trying to elicit another round of suggestions here first (since people may well have new requests since the original announcement).
Excellent news! If anyone wants to fund this for the Netherlands hit me up…