Wow, some fascinating and surprising answers, e.g. that there was more support for the statement “I hope that in the future, humanity will spread to other solar systems” than support for a population of 10bn rather than a population of 1bn. I was also interested in the finding that “Valuing spatially distant people was correlated with valuing temporally distant people (r = 0.63, p < 3e-16).”
Beyond some of the discussion around the question wording raised by others, I’m also wondering why you chose to present people with these two articles, rather than just running the survey without any accompanying information? I’m not sure what was gained by providing people with this information and I think it makes the answers less representative and useful. For example, you state that the results “suggest that people generally view some of the core ideas of longtermism in a favorable light.” I would more cautiously claim that the results “suggest that people who have just read two articles that are favorable to longtermism generally accept some of the core ideas of longtermism, at least temporarily.”
I think I would have found this more useful either as a nationally representative survey (e.g. using Ipsos), to explore what people currently think, while attempting to minimise the effects of the survey design on the answers, or as an RCT, where a control group (no article) is compared to 1+ intervention group(s), testing for the effectiveness of possible pro-longtermist messaging on people’s attitudes.
(But, to clarify, as a quick survey via Positly, which is cheaper than using Ipsos, I do think that these findings are still useful and interesting.)
Wow, some fascinating and surprising answers, e.g. that there was more support for the statement “I hope that in the future, humanity will spread to other solar systems” than support for a population of 10bn rather than a population of 1bn. I was also interested in the finding that “Valuing spatially distant people was correlated with valuing temporally distant people (r = 0.63, p < 3e-16).”
Beyond some of the discussion around the question wording raised by others, I’m also wondering why you chose to present people with these two articles, rather than just running the survey without any accompanying information? I’m not sure what was gained by providing people with this information and I think it makes the answers less representative and useful. For example, you state that the results “suggest that people generally view some of the core ideas of longtermism in a favorable light.” I would more cautiously claim that the results “suggest that people who have just read two articles that are favorable to longtermism generally accept some of the core ideas of longtermism, at least temporarily.”
I think I would have found this more useful either as a nationally representative survey (e.g. using Ipsos), to explore what people currently think, while attempting to minimise the effects of the survey design on the answers, or as an RCT, where a control group (no article) is compared to 1+ intervention group(s), testing for the effectiveness of possible pro-longtermist messaging on people’s attitudes.
(But, to clarify, as a quick survey via Positly, which is cheaper than using Ipsos, I do think that these findings are still useful and interesting.)