This sounds great! Hopefully there’ll be a version of the census that doesn’t take too much time to answer? I’ve seen so many surveys that purportedly require 30+ min (and often that’s already a ridiculous underestimate), and that’s just an unreasonable ask.
I don’t know what the common solution here is—maybe most questions could be optional, or maybe there would be a staggered version where you have to answer the first X questions, and could then either stop and submit or answer an additional Y questions, rinse and repeat. In any case, it’s psychologically much easier to answer a long survey if you don’t have to commit in advance to spending 30 minutes, and can instead decide every ~5 min whether to continue.
In addition, long survey forms really need a way to save progress so you don’t have to answer all questions in one go, and so a browser crash or refresh doesn’t mess up all your work.
One approach could be splitting the census into two (or more) parts. The “lite” section would include high-value 2017 census questions, to see how the LessWrong community has evolved over time, and would be reasonably short.
The “extended” section (possibly split into “demographics”, “values/morality”, and “AI”) could contain more subject-specific and detailed questions and would be for people who are willing to put in the time and effort.
One downside of this approach would be that the sample size for the extended section could be too low, however.
This sounds great! Hopefully there’ll be a version of the census that doesn’t take too much time to answer? I’ve seen so many surveys that purportedly require 30+ min (and often that’s already a ridiculous underestimate), and that’s just an unreasonable ask.
I don’t know what the common solution here is—maybe most questions could be optional, or maybe there would be a staggered version where you have to answer the first X questions, and could then either stop and submit or answer an additional Y questions, rinse and repeat. In any case, it’s psychologically much easier to answer a long survey if you don’t have to commit in advance to spending 30 minutes, and can instead decide every ~5 min whether to continue.
In addition, long survey forms really need a way to save progress so you don’t have to answer all questions in one go, and so a browser crash or refresh doesn’t mess up all your work.
I agree. I am currently intending to go with the “Here is the MVP section up-front, the remaining 80% is all bonus” solution.
One approach could be splitting the census into two (or more) parts. The “lite” section would include high-value 2017 census questions, to see how the LessWrong community has evolved over time, and would be reasonably short.
The “extended” section (possibly split into “demographics”, “values/morality”, and “AI”) could contain more subject-specific and detailed questions and would be for people who are willing to put in the time and effort.
One downside of this approach would be that the sample size for the extended section could be too low, however.