Any human-focused moral weights work!!

How much do members of the public care about:

• Subjective wellbeing
• Increases in income
• Increases in happiness
• Reductions in pain
• Mental health 
• Education
• Being alive

Public surveys would be crucial for developing better QALYs / DALYs / WELBYs / etc (see these posts).

Public surveys are also needed to make trade offs between health and things not captured by QALYs / DALYs (such as increased income or justice), to trade of between years of life and quality of life (especially for some population ethics view) and so on.

Surveys in developing countries would be particularly useful.

What is the public's views, visions and ideas of what a good future will look like?

The idea here is that a clear vision of a what a good future looks like has been a key part of successful long-term policy making to date (based on experiences in Wales and Portugal). The hope is a clear vision of what the public want helps make long-term decision making feel easier to democratic policy makers, it helps them to explain and justify a focus on the long-term and should ultimately helps policy-makers prioritise the long-term more. 

What are the public's views and concerns on AI, AI ethics and AI risks?

I regulation is going to happen. A better understanding of the public's attitudes would be useful for helping EA-aligned policy advocates to ensure that the regulation designed is effective at both addressing public need and ensuring that AI development is done in a safe way.

Making progress on ethics.

Sometimes I think philosophers could do better ethics work if they included surveying and working with the public as part of their tool kit . What do people actually think and how do they make trade-offs?

One specific example: I had a recent chat with a bunch of philosophers who said the standard view in philosophy is it impossible to have (or to technically formalise) a consequentialist view of justice based ethics. This confused me because in practice people do this all the time – you can find a bunch of justice based EAs and get them to make ethical trade-offs and it becomes pretty consequentialist pretty quickly (see here).  

How do people feel about hearing about effective charities?

How do people feel about hearing about effective careers?

First, one should ask what non-elites can do to make great positive impact. What comes to mind is donating, learning about EA, developing solutions, and presenting them to their networks. In addition, I was thinking about doing in-network elites' work so that the privileged individuals can more fully focus on EA-related advocacy within their circles.

Why one would seek to refrain from approaching the public is that 1) reputational loss risk based on a public appeals to reject EA, 2) upskilling relatively large numbers of persons whose internal professionalism standards do not reflect those of global elites in time-effective communication norms requires specialized capacity investment and 3) sharing EA concepts in depth with a large number of individuals would constrain experts in the community. 

There should be people who can (2) coach relevant professional communication while maintaining openness to an individual's expression and (3) people can be encouraged to engage with more senior people only after they extensively learn on their own and with peers, so EA should have the capacity to address these two concerns. 

The remaining challenge in approaching the non-elite public is (1) minimizing reputational loss from public appeals to reject EA. This can be done by avoiding individuals who would be more likely to advocate against EA and developing narratives where such public rejections would benefit the community.

Thus, some relevant questions can cover opinions on the idea of continuous pro bono learning on how to benefit others to a greater extent, perspectives on preferred learning models, linking social media posting and EA-related learning motivations, and ads that would motivate respondents' peers to start learning. Then, the appropriate ads can be offered to low reputational loss risk and high participation potential audiences based on their social media activity.

In addition to gathering data on what advertisements would invite the right people to the community, I thought of gaining the determinants of persons' wellbeing in order to identify possible win-win solutions and conducting a network analysis to target nodes of influence that have the greatest wellbeing impact.

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.