Things I believe about making surveys, after making some surveys:

  1. If you write a question that seems clear, there’s an unbelievably high chance that any given reader will misunderstand it. (Possibly this applies to things that aren’t survey questions also, but that’s a problem for another time.)
  2. A better way to find out if your questions are clear is to repeatedly take a single individual person, and sit down with them, and ask them to take your survey while narrating the process: reading the questions aloud, telling you what they think the question is asking, explaining their thought process in answering it. If you do this repeatedly with different people until some are not confused at all, the questions are probably clear.
  3. If you ask people very similar questions in different sounding ways, you can get very different answers (possibly related to the above, though that’s not obviously the main thing going on).
  4. One specific case of that: for some large class of events, if you ask people how many years until a 10%, 50%, 90% chance of event X occurring, you will get an earlier distribution of times than if you ask the probability that X will happen in 10, 20, 50 years. (I’ve only tried this with AI related things, but my guess is that it at least generalizes to other low-probability-seeming things. Also, if you just ask about 10% on its own, it is consistently different from 10% alongside 50% and 90%.
  5. Given the complicated landscape of people’s beliefs about the world and proclivities to say certain things, there is a huge amount of scope for choosing questions to get answers that sound different to listeners (e.g. support a different side in a debate).
  6. There is also scope for helping people think through a thing in a way that they would endorse, e.g. by asking a sequence of questions. This can also change what the answer sounds like, but seems ethical to me, whereas applications of 5 seem generally suss.
  7. Often your respondent knows thing P and you want to know Q, and it is possible to infer something about Q from P. You then have a choice about which point in this inference chain to ask the person about. It seems helpful to notice this choice. For instance, if AI researchers know most about what AI research looks like, and you want to know whether human civilization will be imminently destroyed by renegade AI systems, you can ask about a) how fast AI progress appears to be progressing, b) when it will reach a certain performance bar, c) whether AI will cause something like human extinction. In the 2016 survey, we asked all of these.
  8. Given the choice, if you are hoping to use the data as information, it is often good to ask people about things they know about. In 7, this points to aiming your question early in the reasoning chain, then doing the inference yourself.
  9. Interest in surveys doesn’t seem very related to whether a survey is a good source of information on the topic surveyed on. One of the strongest findings of the 2016 survey IMO was that surveys like that are unlikely to be a reliable guide to the future.
  10. This makes sense because surveys fulfill other purposes. Surveys are great if you want to know what people think about X, rather than what is true about X. Knowing what people think is often the important question. It can be good for legitimizing a view, or letting a group of people have common knowledge about what they think so they can start to act on it, including getting out of bad equilibria where everyone nominally supports claim P because they think others will judge them if not.
  11. If you are surveying people with the intention of claiming a thing, it is helpful to think ahead about what you want to claim, and make sure you ask questions that will let you claim that, in a simple way. For instance, it is better to be able to say ‘80% of a random sample of shoppers at Tesco said that they like tomato more than beans’ than to say ‘80% of a sample of shoppers who were mostly at Tesco but also at Aldi (see footnote for complicated shopper selection process) say that they prefer tomato to peas, or (using a separate subset of shoppers) prefer peas to beans, from which we can infer that probably about 80% of shoppers in general, or more, prefer tomato to beans’. You want to be able to describe the setup and question in a way that is simple enough that the listener understands what happened, and see the significance of the finding.
  12. If you are running a survey multiple times, and you want informative answers about whether there were differences in views between those times, you should probably run exactly the same survey and not change the questions even a tiny bit unless there is very strong reason to. This follows from 3.
  13. Qualtrics costs thousands of dollars to use, and won’t let you sign up for an account or even know how much it might cost unless you book a meeting to talk to someone to sell it to you. Guidedtrack.com seems pretty nice, but I might not have been trying to do such complicated things there.
  14. Running surveys seems underrated as an activity.