Announcing EA Pulse, large monthly US surveys on EA

Straight into my veins.

(slang which means "This is very good and  I want more of it")

I'm really excited to see this survey idea getting developed. Congratulations to the Rethink team on securing funding for this! 

A few questions on design, content and purpose:

• Who are the users for this survey, how will they be involved with the design, and how will findings be communicated with them?
  • In previous living / repeated survey work that I've done (SCRUB COVID-19), having research users involved in the design was crucial for it to influence their decision-making. This also got complex when the survey became successful and there were different groups of research users, all of whom had different needs
  • Because "what gets measured, gets managed", there is a risk / opportunity in who decides which questions should be included in order to measure "awareness and attitudes towards EA and longtermism". 
• Will data, materials, code and documentation from the survey be made available for replication, international adaptation, and secondary analysis? 
  • This could include anonymised data, Qualtrics survey instruments, R code, Google docs of data documentation, etc
  • Secondary analysis could significantly boost the current and long-term value of the project by opening it up to other interested researchers to explore hypotheses relevant to EA
  • Providing materials and good code & documentation can help international replication and adapation. 
• Was there a particular reason to choose a monthly cycle for the survey? Do you have an end date in mind or are you hoping to continue indefinitely?
  • Do you anticipate that attitudes and beliefs would change that rapidly? In other successful 'pulse' style national surveys, it's more common to see yearly or even less frequent measurement (here's one great example of a longitudinal values survey from New Zealand)
  • Is there capacity to effectively design, conduct, analyse, and communicate at this pace? In previous work I've found that this cycle - especially in communicating with / managing research users, survey panel companies, etc - can become exhausting, especially if the idea is to run the survey indefinitely. 

In terms of specific questions to add, my main thought is to include behavioural items, not just attitudes and beliefs. 

• Ways of measuring this  could include "investigated the effectiveness of a charity before donating on the last occasion you had a chance", or "donated to effective charity in past 12 months", or "number of days in the past week that you ate only plant-based products (no meat, seafood, dairy or eggs)

Through the SCRUB COVID-19 project, we (several of us at Ready) ran a survey of 1700 Australians every 3 weeks for about 15 months (2020-2021) in close consultation with state policymakers and their research users. Please reach out if you'd like to discuss / share experiences.

This is amazing! I never knew how much I want to know about changes in people's attitudes over time 😊

Some questions that interest me here, changes in time of the following [written with haste]

1.  moral attitudes  (utilitarianism vs deontology, welfare vs preferential, human vs animal, maximizing vs satisficing, ...)
2. Particular moral values like nationalism, globalism, pacifism,  consumerism, pursuit of happiness, importance of freedom,  justice, equality, ...
3. Trust in institutions (government, academia, types of media, large tech companies, other countries [China, Russia])
4. attitude about the future (extinction? AI? pandemics? war? settling other star systems? utopia? digital life?)
5. attitude toward philanthropy, EA, other social movements, particular and nonparticular billionaires

Some quick thoughts:

Thanks for all your work on this, it's really great to see it finally happening! Would love it if the survey can identify and compare 'social movement' subgroups such as EA, Social justice, socialism, animal welfare etc. Could be assessed in terms of activism/participation in the subgroups and or awareness/attitude towards them.

This would be helpful in several ways. As an example, I think that it will be very helpful to better understand the relative differences in values and receptiveness to messages etc that exist between such groups and how this changes over time.

It could be interesting to explore how it changes with such groups when new books and articles are widely publicized etc.

From a movement building and impact perspective, it seems important to really understand our adjacent social movements. Where are the overlaps and disconnects in shared values? What are each groups major gripes/misconceptions etc.

I'd welcome any attempt to eventually grow this service to the point where it will allow EA orgs and researchers to easily and affordably survey large samples of key audiences (e.g., AI professionals, policy makers etc). I think that the absence of this is an upstream barrier to lots of important research and message testing.

I’m so so happy to see this project growing this way!

I'd be interested in surveying on whether people believe that AI [could presently/might one day] do a better job governing the [United States/major businesses/US military/other important institutions] than [elected leaders/CEOs/generals/other leaders].

Great initiative!

It may be worth including a question to assess the fraction of people who think their lives are positive (e.i. whether they would rather not have been born or not, neglecting effects on other beings).

Did EA Pulse every happen? Was this project abandoned?

Considering the events of November 2022 I wouldn't be surprised if it was de-prioritized, but I'd thought I'd check in, since I haven't heard of it since this initial announcement.

You might be interested in the polling that Data for Progress has recently done on longtermism among U.S. voters (disclosure: I work for them). The organization is interested in EA (we've attended EA Global several times), have a substantial polling infrastructure that is lower cost than our typical competitors, and routinely run repeated surveys on the same questions to track trends over months to years. Feel free to reach out if we could be helpful!

Was this grant associated with the Clearer Thinking regrants?

Sounds excellent! Roughly how large is large?

I am very glad this will exist!

Sounds good!  Do you plan to publish the results each month on the forum, or if not what is a good way to get a quick summary of the results each month?

Sounds worthwhile. I'm curious why this is restricted to the US population?