Cool study! I wish there were more people who went out and just tested assumptions like this.
One high level question:
People in the EA community are very concerned about existential risk, but what is the perception among the general public? Answering this question is highly important if you are trying to reduce existential risk.
Why is this question highly important for reducing extinction risks? This doesn’t strike me as obvious. What kind of practical implications does it have if the general public either assigns existential risks either a very high or very low probability?
You could make an argument that this could inform recruiting/funding efforts. Presumably you can do more recruiting and receive more funding for reducing existential risks if there are more people who are concerned about extinction risks.
But I would assume the percentage of people who consider reducing existential risks to be very important to be much more relevant for recruiting and funding than the opinion of the ‘general public’.
Though the opinion of those groups has a good chance of being positively correlated, this particular argument doesn’t convince me that the opinion of the general public matters that much.
Cool study! I wish there were more people who went out and just tested assumptions like this. One high level question:
Why is this question highly important for reducing extinction risks? This doesn’t strike me as obvious. What kind of practical implications does it have if the general public either assigns existential risks either a very high or very low probability?
You could make an argument that this could inform recruiting/funding efforts. Presumably you can do more recruiting and receive more funding for reducing existential risks if there are more people who are concerned about extinction risks.
But I would assume the percentage of people who consider reducing existential risks to be very important to be much more relevant for recruiting and funding than the opinion of the ‘general public’.
Though the opinion of those groups has a good chance of being positively correlated, this particular argument doesn’t convince me that the opinion of the general public matters that much.
Public opinion would likely matter for government funding in democracies.