May I ask what your cold emails looked like? I’m always curious about what sort of prompts are more likely to get replies, and which are more likely to be left on read.
It was formatted based on typical academic “I am conducting a survey on X, $Y for Z time”, and notably didn’t mention AI safety. The intro was basically this:
My name is Vael Gates, and I’m a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford studying how productive and active AI researchers (based on submissions to major conferences) perceive AI and the future of the field. For example:
- What do you think are the largest benefits and risks of AI?
- If you could change your colleagues’ perception of AI, what attitudes/beliefs would you want them to have?
My response rate was generally very low, which biased the sample towards… friendly, sociable people who wanted to talk about their work and/or help out and/or wanted money, and had time. I think it was usually <5% response rate for the NeurIPS / ICML sample off the top of my head. I didn’t A/B test the email. I also offered more money for this study than the main academic study, and expect I wouldn’t have been able to talk to the individually-selected researchers without the money component.
May I ask what your cold emails looked like? I’m always curious about what sort of prompts are more likely to get replies, and which are more likely to be left on read.
It was formatted based on typical academic “I am conducting a survey on X, $Y for Z time”, and notably didn’t mention AI safety. The intro was basically this:
My response rate was generally very low, which biased the sample towards… friendly, sociable people who wanted to talk about their work and/or help out and/or wanted money, and had time. I think it was usually <5% response rate for the NeurIPS / ICML sample off the top of my head. I didn’t A/B test the email. I also offered more money for this study than the main academic study, and expect I wouldn’t have been able to talk to the individually-selected researchers without the money component.