i was paying $0.23/response/question. i didn't put a huge amount of effort into finding whether there was a cheaper platform with comparable quality.
1Given the number of surveys (20–30; I can't be bothered to count carefully) and the sample size (200–500 you said below), does that put the total expenditure at $1000–3000?
This polled only somewhat better, with 39% in favor and 19% opposing. I’m still pretty confused what conclusion to draw from this; this is probably worth digging more into.
People instinctively hate things that are too good to be true. This isn't inherently irrational - if something is, in the literal sense, too good to be possible, then whoever is proposing it is either daft or manipulative, and, in both cases, you would down-weight your priors on whatever they suggest to achieve this impossible ends being a good thing.
An equivalent would be polling Americans by phone about whether they would like to save 50 percent on car insurance. Absolutely everyone would like that, if they believed it were possible, but nearly everyone believes it's not, so you'd mostly get an annoyed "no" and a quick disconnection.
Come to think of it, you could ask that exact question to test this hypothesis.
I was just going to comment much the same thing. You can think of it like the genie who tells you you can have any wish, but you suspect he will twist it to his own ends.
I suspect while this may be a small factor, the largest one is probably that a large portion of the population receives a strong sense of meaning from their work, and if that work is optional (not necessary for their financial wellbeing or the broader society) it (and their lives) wouldn't seem meaningful. Seems like a pretty strong example of i-risk to me.
I'm interested how the immortality questions would change if you asked whether the world would be better if everyone had the option to "to live forever in perfect health and youth". It is notable due to how much support it's getting compared to the other transhumanist proposals on the list, and I think the "would you" framing is the cause.
For instance, I think people would also say they'd like an option to "change their physical appearance to whatever they want" or make themselves much smarter whenever they want. Its just they don't think the world would be better if everyone could do that.
This would also explain why the numbers don't budge much if you add the overpopulation stipulation. If people are interpreting the question as only affecting their own actions, why would overpopulation matter?
Curated (a term which here means "this was just emailed to 30,000+ people"). I love getting in contact with reality, and it's great to become actually informed about what various populations' views actually are. This post did it without killing me in stats and graphs, and also the dot-dot-dot space for predicting made it trivial for me to join in. Kudos for running all of these surveys, and thanks for the writeup!
The question, "Do you want to live forever?" has seen several academic surveys. Here's a few:
- PEW: 7% want to live to 120+
- Barnett & Helphrey: 34% yes, 40% no, 26% unsure
- Donner et al.: If guaranteed physical & mental health, 53% yes
These are very different results, and I'm not sure what going on.
the "if guaranteed physical and mental health" one seems closest in wording to mine, and also seems of comparable result.
Personally I would want clarity on whether you still have the option to die at any time. If you don't specify, some people may assume yes and others no.
Edit: I just noticed in your footnote that you mention you did specify this!
I speculate that the first study you mentioned (PEW) had the lowest result of the 3 in that while their maximum bound of 120 is a very high age to reach, it is still within the age range that humans can realistically picture. Moreover, since it had also mentioned realistic age ranges, such as the 80s and 90s, the people taking it may have been more wary of consequences of aging that they actually see in real life, such as illness and cognitive decline.
The second study, at least from the abstract I read, was more general about the way in which they framed life extension, mentioning that it was an artificial treatment but not directly listing as many potential benefits. As for the third study, the scenario seemed pretty similar to that of the second one (a hypothetical treatment to halt aging), but since it mentioned a favorable implication (i.e. guaranteed physical / mental health), a larger portion of survey-takers were guided along that line of thinking, and answered yes.
In general, I think that people's apparent willingness to live longer depends on how the question is framed, as it could either facilitate thinking of aging-related concerns or the benefits of perpetual health. Perhaps, if people were encouraged to think about the implications of an extended lifespan for a while longer (which is of course challenging for an online survey; maybe an open-ended response before the multiple-choice question could help), the results might become more similar.
The downside of the changing your appearance thing seems obvious - on either phrasing and if trivial to achieve (your phrasing doesn't say it's trivial, but it's a natural vibe) then you're making accountably tracked identities harder, which is plausibly load-bearing for much of civilization. Things like easy weight loss, or gender transition that takes time and paperwork, and so on don't raise the same concerns.
Speaking from experience, maybe gender transition ought to raise that specific concern.
At my legal name change hearing, I was asked to affirm that I wasn’t attempting any fuckery like trying to outrun a debt or something. Which I was not. I had no debts save for whatever credit card spending from the same month, which I’d pay off in full end-of-month, same as every month.
…but since then, having an old unused name that immediately reveals the party trying to find my old name as being not-approved-by-me has been surprisingly helpful. It’s significantly downgraded the effectiveness of political donation seekers, pollsters, and scammers calling looking to speak to my old name. I’ve had people call both physically at the front door, and call the phone of other people I now live with, get asked for [old name] and get turned away with variants of “nobody with that name lives here.”
If I really was trying to outrun something, this seems like it’d be pretty helpful! I just wish I could find out what they’d wanted; it leaves me curious.
Random story idea, someone transitions to avoid a voodoo curse that has been cast specifically on their name. Now their house is surrounded by confused shambling zombies that can't quite home in on the right signal.
Working title: The Deadnamers.
2This is also the explanation behind some Uzbek names being verbatim translated to seemingly trivial words like "axe", "hoe", "sickle". The belief was that evil spirits will be confused by the name and haunt the object instead of the baby.
You say that as if gender transition was an uncontroversial idea that everyone is on board with.
For some reason, I didn't think of this when I read the results, but immediately thought of it when I read the actual question's wording (even though the question doesn't mention this).
Framing effects are scarily powerful.
There is also the reverse downside to the loss of ability to track people by appearance: Anyone can now change their appearance to look exactly like you. You wouldn't be able to fully trust that anyone was anyone anymore.
A lot of people i know in person are unable to answer Yes to a hypothetical question, if they believe the scenario is impossible.
Their "Do you want to live forever? -No" is literally "I do not believe that any object can exist forever".
Their "Would you like party X get N seats in the government? -No" can be "I do not believe it is anyhow possible for them to get this many seats in our society, so the question is bullshit and i answer No (even though i like X)".
These people are also unable to construct hypothetical scenarios. For example, one of them supports Putin's invasion into Ukraine (watched a lot of Russia today i guess). I asked "what would need to happen for you to change this opinion?". Their answer "it is just a false assumption that i am wrong, i have seen so much about fascism in ukraine that nothing can convince me that is not true".
I believe the inability to answer hypothetical and inability to contruct virtual scenarios correlate.
Steelman - the hypothetical scenario is incongruous with their current world model, so it being true would require extreme changes in their world model leading to a very weird world which they might not want to live in.
E.g. How would the brain and memories function under immortality?
This may also mean that the question is underspecified and the respondent might want to seek further clarification, but the website just doesn't allow this.
I don't think that's what's happening. The research on the Flynn Effect, and the current reversal, show that it is primarily driven by changes in the ability to reason hypothetically and to understand what an abstraction is.
There appear to be people who cannot reason hypothetically.
can you come up with a control question i can run to test what % of people can reason through hypotheticals correctly/
The NeurIPS result seems baffling. Do you have any qualitative thoughts about the people who had never heard the term AGI? Very old and distinguished? Theorists or social scientists who just happened to submit there?
One of the most surprising results to me was that only 51% of Americans are in favor of literal post-scarcity ... I’m still pretty confused what conclusion to draw from this; this is probably worth digging more into.
Second order effects. You might be thinking only about the first order or anticipating only first order answers. I looked at all of those questions and thought, "two years down the road that's hell. No thank you."
For your first question, look into the research on when money does and doesn't increase happiness, spoiler: the optimal value isn't infinite leisure. Look at the data on deaths post retirement. Spoiler men die real fast. Look at the applications of Peter Turchin's cliodynamica to generation theory and historical cycles. I can keep going. From many different fields of study, approaching the problem from many angles, the optimal amount of stress is not zero. It is also not low. The optimum is moderate. Unfortunately, leisure is like sugar in the sense that we are built to enjoy it, but too much causes disease. You can already see it in humanity's reaction to phones. We are addicted and it is going bad. Give us more freedom and most won't use it to grow they'll use it to spend more time watching Tiktok and eating candy and mainlining ozempic to ward off the side effects of the candy. We already see it happening.
The absolute worst is the 10x wealth variant. Given no changes in the behaviors and mentality of the population, you just set up a massive and crushing wave of inequality. Look at how dumb even otherwise smart people behave when the win the lottery. Sure, for a very brief moment it looks good. Then it crashes and is worse than before.
Second order effects. The conservative economists will quote Sowell here with "there are no solutions only tradeoffs".
Let me say, for myself, I absolutely want such an outcome. My all time favorite book, the one that had the greatest impact on me growing up and shaping my mind is "biting the Sun" by Tanith Lee and it is (because I know none of you have ever heard of it) the only actual AI powered utopia I have ever seen fictionalized. But I also believe that she got humanity correct in the story, and the overwhelming majority will devolve into endless orgies and drugs (AI designed not to cause addiction or other harmful effects, just pleasure without mental or physical impairment). That's functionally no different than being the AI's pet. That's not an ideal scenario. I do want us to live in a society like 4Bee, with an AI that can be a villain to someone who needs a villain and a co-researcher encourager to someone who needs that and a protector while inebriated to any hedonist who needs that, all at once. But I don't want us to end up as pets.
Until our minds and culture can handle zero stress, we are best off with a moderate amount.
Could you clarify what you meant by this combination of remarks?
I looked at all of those questions and thought, "two years down the road that's hell. No thank you."
...
Let me say, for myself, I absolutely want such an outcome.
My personal take is that I can imagine there are people who really would be happier in a scenario where they'll literally starve to death if they aren't productive enough, and I guess it would be good if those people could experience the scenario where they thrive, but if there are also people who do fine with a permanent vacation then it doesn't seem ethical to forcibly keep everyone in the "work or starve" scenario. If resources aren't actually scarce, then that's basically slavery, and arguably worse.
This is an interesting take on post-scarcity. I haven't read Biting the Sun, but from a quick look at the synopsis I can see how it (and your comment) echoes some of the things I've been thinking about.
From many different fields of study, approaching the problem from many angles, the optimal amount of stress is not zero. It is also not low. The optimum is moderate.
Is it really stress that these studies are measuring? I think of it more as struggle. Of course, stress is often correlated with struggle, but it doesn't always have to be. I think the crux is that most of us need to feel like we are contributing to our society in some way, or at least that we are able to stand independently, and without some kind of struggle our accomplishments feel hollow. There are a lot of things that we can struggle against, though, and not all would be vanquished with an end to scarcity. Climbing a mountain would still be as satisfying, as would being the best football player in the town, or solving a really difficult puzzle.
What it comes down to, I think, is exactly the kind of thing which video games have been trying to optimise ever since they were invented; game balance. For a task to feel worthwhile it needs to be difficult, but not so hard that you give up on it.
I also believe that she got humanity correct in the story, and the overwhelming majority will devolve into endless orgies and drugs
The overwhelming majority? I am more inclined to think that these kinds of hedonistic pursuits would be a phase which people pass through as they mature, but as they lack that feeling of meaning most people would come out the other side looking for something more (with the option to dip back in to that hedonistic outlet whenever they want to). Unless, of course, the drugs in question are able to evoke that sense of meaningfulness within us, like LSD can.
That's functionally no different than being the AI's pet.
Whether or not we could be viewed as the 'pet' species of an AI probably comes down mostly to our capacity for self-determination. As long as we can over-rule the AI we should be okay, although if we get into the whole 'superintelligent AI convincing us to care about non-issues so we can use our veto and feel empowered without actually conceding any power on things which it considers important' there's not really much hope for us. It's worth remembering that many religious people derive satisfaction from their lives even though they genuinely believe that a god or gods are the ones truly in control of what happens to them.
Can this methodology break the curse where disagreeable people are loudest on social media? Question-for-gift card people might have closer psychographics to Americans than social media posters and commenters.
For example - and AI use in art, and data centers, are becoming two rallying cries on Reddit - If I'm on Reddit and everyone is trying to boycott a video game for using AI, I might pop over to the survey platform and ask a question like "would you boycott a video game for using AI?" as a way to sanity check the Reddit opinion.
Looking at this from outside shows me just how much of a bubble LW and the Bay Area is. Are people really surprised about the physical modification and terraforming results? The American public almost looks sane.
I don't mean to pass judgement, but maybe it would be helpful to build connections with people not concerned with space travel and AGI risks. I'm sure it would enlighten both parties.
1cool survey! im surprised x-risk isnt even a thought amongst the top worries on ai. it really is a bubble
id be interested to see this on a larger sample size, or a different population (EU, urban v rural etc) maybe ill run this myself...
maybe thirty something percent support just about anything and about half that number are opposed
some things are only 6% supported and other things are up to 66% though (i didn't include any obvious controls that should get 95% but I bet they would turn out that way)
One surprising thing for me is that apparently the sample proportion of pro-RSI people is 2× that of pro-AGI people.
Should we build the AGI though? It turns out that people are extremely opposed to the idea of building superintelligent AI. Only 6% think it would be a good idea, and 75% think it’s a bad idea. I’m curious to see how this one changes over time too.
I also ran a variant of this question about recursively self improving AI. For that variant, 12% think it would be a good idea, and 69% think it’s a bad idea.
Is it a noise issue (different samples?)? Or do they imagine RSI that doesn't limit to AGI?
My primary guess is that the 6% who like RSI but not ASI are answering based on vibes rather than coherent models, and ASI currently has worse vibes.
Though I could imagine some people thinking that RSI will stop before "superintelligence", and other people thinking that orthogonality is wrong and RSI would continue beyond some window of "dangerous superintelligence" into "godlike benevolence". I personally consider both of those possibilities to be so staggeringly implausible that they're basically just wishful thinking, but I also think that more than 6% of people are engaging in some amount of wishful thinking about AI.
I actually ran two variants of this question, one where I emphasized specifically that you could make yourself look like a celebrity (to help make the idea more concrete), and the other where I only mentioned some abstract characteristics like height, body type, and facial features, and got results within 1 percentage point of each other.
And I assume here the variants were tested on different random subsets of the overall survey population, yes? i.e. participants weren't grounded by their response to the previous similar question.
I also made sure to have another person with me whenever I was collecting data, and noticed some pretty big differences in enthusiasm of responses depending on who I was with.
Details? I'm curious.
Does the service let you do linked questions?
Ask about the inherent value of work in some fashion, with the question about post-scarcity as a follow-up.
"Is idleness detrimental to the virtues of a free citizen?" That kind of thing. "Is a man or woman with a productive career inherently more valuable than one without?"
If the answer is still baffling, see if you can question them about the conflict between the ennobling power of work vs. their desire to quit despite knowing their own best interests.
Basically trying to ask them if they need to be forced to work without being insulting.
I find it interesting that the desire to live forever has been around forever. What's changed is that now people who live in a certain safe space are confident that they can create that heaven, presumably with all the right neo-victorian artisanal goodies. Considering the 20th century, I wouldn't have so much confidence that the 23rd century would look much better than the 15th. And considering the non-diffusion of the neo-victorian bubble can't seem to permeate this very state, I have very little confidence that its population itself is sustainable. There's a very big leap between the Bobiverse and the Culture. Color me skeptical.
I find the prospect that AGI would be an unalloyed net positive to the world at large presumes quite simply that the right people with the right ethics will get the right government to sanction, underwrite, protect and defend the technology for at least 200 years. A betting man would put their money on Christianity, not steam, the printing press nor nuclear fission.
I'm not a doomer and I have three children. I can't get any of them to read Flybot.
For the inflation adjusted money gain questions, that's was the only varient i would have answered not positively, thinking that there would be no difference. My thinking is that if everyone gain an equal amount more money, that overall there should be not difference.
Edit: on further thought since its a flat amount, it would at the very least reduce wealth inequality thus net good
the remaining third is split exactly in half on whether preventing AI x-risk feels like a Democratic or Republican issue
I expect this to change soon: there's a very large difference between the parties regarding trust to experts in general and academia specifically (and we know academia and industry have different opinions regarding AI risks).
And do you think you could poll on other AI risks you identified? I expect there to be a party difference there.
Also, maybe you could poll respondents for their political affiliation before asking the questions
i already have the data of what political affiliation they are, and can do arbitrary analysis of this. what specific result did you want?
Is there a statistically significant difference in how Democrats, Independents and Republicans rank different risks from AI?
I'm curious whether e.g. Democrats mostly thought it was a Republican thing and Republicans thought it was a Democrat thing, or if most people thought it was their own party's thing, or neither
In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we live in. It’s well known that the Bay Area is a bubble, and that normal people don’t spend that much time thinking about things like AGI. But there was still some disagreement on just how strong that bubble is. I made a spicy claim: even at NeurIPS, the biggest gathering of AI researchers in the world, half the people wouldn’t know what AGI is.
As good Bayesians, we agreed to settle the matter empirically: I would go to NeurIPS, walk around the conference hall, and stop random people to ask them what AGI stands for.
Surprisingly, most of the people I approached agreed to answer my question. [1] I ended up asking 38 people, and only 63% of them could tell me what AGI stands for. Some of the people who answered correctly were a little perplexed why I was even asking such a basic question, and if it was a trick question. The people who didn’t know were equally confused. Many simply furrowed their brows in confusion. Some made a valiant attempt—I heard a few artificial generative intelligences and even an Amazon general intelligence.[2]
Judging from the response I got on X (the everything app), this was a very surprising outcome. I ended up running this experiment again at NeurIPS 2025 with an even bigger sample size (n=115).[3]
After this first experience with surveying people, it became clear to me that the next step was to venture further outside the bubble, and survey the general US population. It turns out that this is already somewhat of a solved problem. A lot of people care about what the average American thinks. The market, in its infinite wisdom, has provided a solution—you can just pay pollsters to run random questions.
It’s impossible to actually sample from the distribution of all Americans. So you find some other approximate distribution, such as the distribution of all people who answer polls on the internet in exchange for amazon gift cards. You ask them a thousand demographic questions, like “how old are you” and “how much money do you make”. Then, since we know from the US census what these distributions are supposed to look like, you can correct for the distribution shift using importance sampling.[4]
With this caveat in mind, I embarked on a journey to ask normal Americans a bunch of weird questions using one of these polling services.[5]
The first question I ran in early 2025 was about how Americans feel about living forever (or at least, a very long time). I’m personally a big fan of not dying, so I was very curious to see how my fellow Americans felt about this.
The exact wording is “If you had the option to live forever in perfect health and youth, would you choose to? (Assume you could still change your mind at any time if you ever got bored of it.)”, and the possible responses are “Yes”, “No”, and “Not sure”.
Before you read further, take a guess at the result.
.
.
.
.
(don’t peek)
.
.
.
.
.
I anecdotally had the sense that this was a deeply unpopular opinion; certainly many of the people I talked about these results with thought it would be deeply unpopular. So I was surprised and relieved to find that actually 66% of respondents said Yes, with 14% saying No, and 20% saying “Not sure”. As a follow up, it turns out roughly a third of Americans think developing the technology to enable life extension should be a top priority.[6]
To really get a sense of why people felt the way they did, I also put free response boxes for people to express why they’d want to (or not want to) live forever. The results are enlightening; here are some of my favorites:
Of course, not everyone is as optimistic that living forever would be good. Here are some of the things people are worried about:
Since it seemed like overpopulation and inequality were the main things people were worried about, I also asked a version of the question where I stipulated that these things were solved. Surprisingly, this barely shifts people’s opinions, and we get almost exactly the same response! My guess is this is a sign that the real objection is more about the vibes than any specific issue. It’s also a sobering reminder of the limitations of this methodology.
After the results for this experiment came in, I decided to test a bunch of other random weird beliefs. If you want to guess at these before seeing the results (or you’re curious what the exact wording is, because that can substantially change the result), click here to see all the questions I ran before scrolling down further. If you’re willing to spend a lot of time looking at a giant wall of questions before continuing with the rest of this post, it’s really a great way to test your calibration.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
First, despite being very pro living forever, Americans are much more skeptical of cryonics—even if they could be revived a few decades after their death to live forever thereafter, only 27% are in favor of being preserved, and 46% are opposed (the rest are unsure). Space colonization also has pretty lukewarm support, coming in at 37% in favor and 16% opposed, and cognitive enhancement for all is only a little bit more popular (42% in favor, 19% opposed). Also, for some reason, people are really opposed to a hypothetical cheap, painless, and safe arbitrary modification of physical appearance (only 23% in favor, with 37% opposed!).[7] In retrospect, the backlash against Ozempic is a sign, but I was still quite surprised. Terraforming other planets so that humans can live on them is also pretty unpopular, coming in at 37% in favor and 16% opposed. Thankfully, for most of these questions, a huge chunk of people are still undecided.
One of the most surprising results to me was that only 51% of Americans are in favor of literal post-scarcity (complete freedom to work on anything you want, as much as you want, and still enjoy a high quality of life), with 25% opposing. I was so shocked by this result not being 80%+ in favor that I reran a variant of this question with different wording. My original question asked whether the world would be better or worse if everyone had the freedom to work on whatever they want, as long as they want, and still enjoy a high quality of life, and anything we don’t want to do is done for us by robots. I thought maybe that set off some “AI taking jobs bad” instincts; for the new question I took pains to clarify that the stuff is literally conjured out of nowhere with magic and is not taken from anyone else, and got an even worse result (38% support, 34% oppose). This is even more crazy, so I ran a third version on the hypothesis that people don’t like magic, or that not having to work sounded too crazy. This version asked whether it would be good if everyone made 10x more (inflation-adjusted) than they do currently. This polled only somewhat better, with 39% in favor and 19% opposing. I’m still pretty confused what conclusion to draw from this; this is probably worth digging more into.
Tying back to the original question that started this quest, I had to know: how much are Americans feeling the AGI? I could of course ask if Americans know what AGI stands for, but some early results from asking random people on the streets spatially and temporally further away from NeurIPS suggested that the number would round down to 0%. So the more interesting question is; given a description of superhuman AI, do Americans think it’s possible?
It turns out that when I first ran this poll in mid 2025, only 25% of people thought AGI would ever be possible. That’s only half a year ago in normal people time, but an unfathomably long time in AI-land, enough for empires to rise and fall, models to be deployed and obsoleted, and even a single entire ML conference review cycle to run its course. Since then, more Americans have started feeling the AGI; a recent rerun of this question came out 10 percentage points at 35%. I’ll see you all again in another half year for the followup.
Should we build the AGI though? It turns out that people are extremely opposed to the idea of building superintelligent AI. Only 6% think it would be a good idea, and 75% think it’s a bad idea. I’m curious to see how this one changes over time too.[8]
AI existential risk also doesn’t seem to have become politically polarized yet. Two-thirds of Americans don’t associate AI x-risk with any particular political party, and the remaining third is split exactly in half on whether preventing AI x-risk feels like a Democratic or Republican issue. If we plot this data, we obtain this unusual shape that science has yet to find a name for:
As for specific risks from AI, Americans are most worried about misinformation and deepfakes (70%), followed by fraud and cybercrime (66%), and privacy and surveillance (59%). Surprisingly, people are roughly as worried about losing control of AI (57%) as they are job loss and lower wages (56%)! I would have thought that job loss would feel very near at hand, whereas loss of control would be a very weird abstract idea to people. There’s a huge drop off from there to the next biggest worries: military use (37%), mental health (35%), environmental impact (38%), bias (36%), and inequality (36%). My guess is this is because misinformation and deepfakes feel very visceral—fake news is a widespread idea, and you don’t have to be an AI connoisseur to notice that large sections of the internet are now filled with AI generated slop.
A few people also filled out the “other” box for specific risks they’re worried about. My favorite response was a shockingly accurate description of how hopeless it would be to fight back against superhuman AI:
Me too, buddy. Me too.
What about going further afield of AI? The beautiful thing is that you can just ask whatever you want.[9]
First, more broadly, Americans are very pessimistic about the future. Only 14% think that society is currently trending in a positive direction.
On a brighter note, I was able to a disprove a viral ragebait tiktok about how Americans would fail an English test meant for people learning English as a second language. I was proud to find that a good solid 85% of my fellow Americans got the problem from the tiktok right.
Because we love decision theory in this house, I wrote a question that explains Newcomb’s problem and asks whether to one-box or two-box. Americans are pretty split on this one; among the respondents who didn’t select “not sure” (honestly, kind of valid), only 46% would one-box. This is almost exactly the same as professional philosophers, who came out 44% in favor of one-boxing, according to a survey conducted by PhilPapers.
I was also curious whether people who are famous in SF are also famous among normal people. It turns out 36% of Americans know who Sam Altman is and can correctly say that he’s known for being an entrepreneur. Another 59% haven’t heard of him or don’t know what he’s known for. Honorable mentions to the remaining 5%, who think that Sam is a musician, actor, or congressperson. This same methodology finds that only 7% of Americans know who Geoffrey Hinton is, and 91% of Americans know who Elon Musk is.
I was in a discussion about whether lab grown meat would ever become widely adopted, so I asked a question about whether it would be a good thing if we could somehow create meat by growing it directly, without needing to raise and slaughter animals. It turns out 32% of Americans are in favor and 29% are opposed. When conditioning on the 55% of people who think meat production involves subjecting large numbers of animals to inhumane conditions, this tilts to 44% support and 21% oppose. I only ran the correlational study because it’s a lot easier, but I’d be interested to see whether there is a causal result on support for lab grown meat after you show people an educational video about factory farms.
Finally, for shits and giggles:
Unfortunately, only 32% got this one right. For comparison, 42% thought the answer was X Combinator, and only 6% went for W Combinator. Elon, if you’re reading this, I have a great business idea for you.[10]
What do we learn from all of this?
First, touching grass is great. At least, the kind of grass that grows on the beautiful rolling hills of cyberspace.[11]
What do I mean by this? Making contact with reality is important, and you don’t need to speculate about things when you can test them (carefully). Polling feels like a thing that only serious respectable people do, but you can actually just do things. There are a lot of limitations to this methodology, of course—all of us have divergences between our stated and revealed preferences; our own guesses as to how we’d behave in various hypotheticals can be an unreliable predictor of how we’d actually ask; wording can have huge impacts on how we respond; and respondents can be trolling us. But as long as we keep these limitations in mind, we can still draw useful conclusions, and learn new things about the world.
This one experiment singlehandedly reduced my social anxiety by a nontrivial amount. It turns out that most people are pretty friendly!
I also made sure to have another person with me whenever I was collecting data, and noticed some pretty big differences in enthusiasm of responses depending on who I was with.
I also ran a smaller p(doom) survey at ICLR 2025 (n=21) and found a mean of 18.7% and a median of 10%.
In general I’m pretty skeptical about controlling for things, but it’s way better than anecdata. For shits and giggles, I did do a few surveys of random people irl (e.g asking people who were walking through Central Park), but never anything at large scale.
Unfortunately, the specific pollster I used has a ToS that prohibits me from posting results from their platform in association with their name; presumably they don’t want anyone to leech off their reputability without paying stacks of cash for the enterprise tier or something. I tried to email them to pay more for the enterprise tier but I never got a response. So I’m not going to mention the name which pollster I used and you’re going to have to take my word that I didn’t just make these numbers up wholesale.
Exact wording was “Should developing the technology to greatly extend healthy youthful life be a top priority for humanity?”. 35% said Yes, 35% said No, 30% said Not sure.
I actually ran two variants of this question, one where I emphasized specifically that you could make yourself look like a celebrity (to help make the idea more concrete), and the other where I only mentioned some abstract characteristics like height, body type, and facial features, and got results within 1 percentage point of each other.
I also ran a variant of this question about recursively self improving AI. For that variant, 12% think it would be a good idea, and 69% think it’s a bad idea.
To be fair, the specific polling provider I ran these questions with has a review phase where they refuse to run certain questions. For example, they were really unhappy about my “would you live forever” question having a “you can die at any time” clause, so I had to replace it with a less direct “you can change your mind at any time”. But I’m sure you can find some other provider who would happily run these questions.
X (the everything combinator).
I do also touch normal grass.