I think that an annual ‘living survey’ of the public could be very helpful. Maybe it could, for example, track public trends in moral views, attitudes towards activist ‘brands’ (e.g., EA, vegan activism, extinction rebellion), key EA organisations (e.g., FHI, 80,000 hours), key EA behavioural outcomes (e.g., supporting effective charities/caring about longtermism) could be very helpful.
Ideally I would want the survey to help the EA community to have better i) aggregations of public behaviours and attitudes (e.g., what demographics/geographies/groups do/think), ii) awareness of internal and unobservable behavioural drivers and barriers (e.g., whether people are fail to act as hoped because they are unaware, unable, or unmotivated, and why), iii) forecasts for future behaviour (e.g., whether people expect to think or act more or less optimally in future), iv) audience targeting (e.g., who we should target our outreach for best effect) and v) intervention tailoring (e.g., what to say to whom to get the best outcomes).
Knowing the combinations of experiences, beliefs, value, abilities etc that differentiate EAs from non-EAs could be very helpful, so it would be great if we could easily compare the results from the public survey against a similar EA sample (maybe the EA survey) and track divergence and convergence over time.
This would all help (a little) to answer many important questions that I, and other EA actors and organisations, seem to regularly have.
Thanks for this, David.
Quick thoughts:
I think that an annual ‘living survey’ of the public could be very helpful. Maybe it could, for example, track public trends in moral views, attitudes towards activist ‘brands’ (e.g., EA, vegan activism, extinction rebellion), key EA organisations (e.g., FHI, 80,000 hours), key EA behavioural outcomes (e.g., supporting effective charities/caring about longtermism) could be very helpful.
Ideally I would want the survey to help the EA community to have better i) aggregations of public behaviours and attitudes (e.g., what demographics/geographies/groups do/think), ii) awareness of internal and unobservable behavioural drivers and barriers (e.g., whether people are fail to act as hoped because they are unaware, unable, or unmotivated, and why), iii) forecasts for future behaviour (e.g., whether people expect to think or act more or less optimally in future), iv) audience targeting (e.g., who we should target our outreach for best effect) and v) intervention tailoring (e.g., what to say to whom to get the best outcomes).
Knowing the combinations of experiences, beliefs, value, abilities etc that differentiate EAs from non-EAs could be very helpful, so it would be great if we could easily compare the results from the public survey against a similar EA sample (maybe the EA survey) and track divergence and convergence over time.
This would all help (a little) to answer many important questions that I, and other EA actors and organisations, seem to regularly have.