Leogao

It turns out that this is already somewhat of a solved problem.

A lot of people care about what the average American thinks.

The market, in its infinite wisdom, has provided a solution.

You can just pay pollsters to run random questions.

It's impossible to actually sample from the distribution of all Americans.

So you find some other approximate distribution, such as the distribution of all people who answer polls on the internet in exchange for Amazon gift cards.

You ask them a thousand demographic questions, like how old are you and how much money do you make.

Then, since we know from the US Census what these distributions are supposed to look like, you can correct for the distribution shift using important sampling.

With this caveat in mind, I embarked on a journey to ask normal Americans a bunch of weird questions using one of these polling services.

The first question I ran in early 2025 was about how Americans feel about living forever, or at least, a very long time.

I'm personally a big fan of not dying, so I was very curious to see how my fellow Americans felt about this.

The exact wording is if you had the option to live forever in perfect health and youth, would you choose to?

Assume you could still change your mind at any time if you ever got bored of it, and the possible responses are yes, no, and not sure.

Before you read further, take a guess at the result.

Don't peek.

I anecdotally had the sense that this was a deeply unpopular opinion.

Certainly many of the people I talked about these results with thought it would be deeply unpopular.

So I was surprised and relieved to find that actually 66% of respondents said yes, with 14% saying no, and 20% saying not sure.

As a follow-up, it turns out roughly a third of Americans think developing the technology to enable life extension should be a top priority.

To really get a sense of why people felt the way they did, I also put free response boxes for people to express why they'd want to, or not want to, live forever.