Survey on X-risk: Feedback needed

I expect many people will have never even considered the possibility of human extinction, so maybe question two should be rephrased to allow for a "What, you mean like, extinct? But... It can't..." style response.

I don't know how important it will be for a naive sample, but if the sample includes transhumanists, you might need to clarify your definitions of "humanity" and "extinct". If we transition to beings of pure energy that bear no more relation to humans than humans do to cockroaches, is that "humanity becomes extinct" or not?

I feel like question 1 could be tweaked so that it's harder to put in wrong answers (in this case, not weakly increasing probability estimates). Maybe you could ask for the probabilities that humanity will go extinct in certain ranges of time (e.g. "How likely do you think it is that humanity survives to the year 2100 but goes extinct by 2200?"). Or, to circumvent the condition that the probabilities add to less than 100%, you could condition: "Assuming that humanity survives to the year 2100, how likely do you think it is that humanity then goes extinct by 2200?"

I only make these suggestions because I can imagine someone reading the original questions and thinking "Hmm, yes, it seems pretty likely that we annihilate ourselves by 2100: 40-60%" and then putting down 0-20% for part (e) because it's so much harder to think of ways to go extinct that take thousands of years.

And I would reverse the order of 6 and 7: "What is your level of education? If you are a college student, what is your area of study?" And if you want people's past experience to count too, you could ask instead "If you have or are earning a college degree, what is/was your area of study?"

How important do you think reducing the risk of human extinction is, compared to giving foreign aid?

These are not parallel things, because in one choice, an effect is achieved and in the other, money is put to acheving an effect. The following are parallel:

How important do you think reducing the risk of human extinction is, compared to influencing foreign countries to treat their people well and not wage war?

How important do you think spending money to try and reduce the risk of human extinction is, compared to giving foreign aid?

A better question would be to ask what percentage of the Federal budget should be spent on it, or how much money should be borrowed per year to spend on it. The foreign aid bit is too ideological, and the answer will depend on a variable - what people think is spent on foreign aid.

Support for foreign aid is a politically polarized issue. Unfortunately, I can't think of a great replacement that isn't too general ("charity" for instance). As an alternative, you could think of two things which don't follow the same political fault lines. Question 3 could ask for a comparison to foreign aid, and Question 4 could ask for a comparison to something else.

Otherwise it looks fine!

Which distribution of answers to 2) and 3) do you expect here on LessWrong? If your goal is to survey the opinion of average people, you will fail that goal the moment you take the answers here into account.

The problem with question 1 is that it makes the implicit assumption that either we have become extinct or things are more or less okay. I'm confident there will be still people around in, say, a thousand years. But it is the way of extinction that the outcome is often decided long before, and by factors having nothing to do with the cause of, the death of the last individual. If we fail to take this shot at escaping our boundaries, I'm not at all confident we'll get another chance. We could end up in a scenario where our species still exists but extinction by ordinary geological processes has become inevitable.

The problem with question 3 is this it makes the implicit assumption that spending money with the stated aim of reducing the risk of extinction, will have the effect of reducing that risk rather than increasing it. Both the theory of how human psychology works in far mode, and experience with trying to spend money on politically charged good causes, suggests the opposite.

You aren't obliged to agree with me on these points, but as they are the primary issues, if you are producing a document that claims to be a questionnaire, I will suggest it would be appropriate to spell out the primary issues as explicit questions rather than making them implicit assumptions.

1. For all timeframes, 0 - 20%.
2. None are likely, but some kind of bioweapon seems most probable? An AI problem is also possible, but not highly likely.
3. e) Much less important 4a Age 44, Gender male, Nationality British
4. Financial modeller
5. Degree