Chapter 1: What sparked the discussion about the Bay Area bubble?
My Hobby – Running Deranged Surveys By Leogau Published on March 26, 2026 In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we live in. It's well known that the Bay Area is a bubble and that normal people don't spend that much time thinking about things like AGI.
But there was still some disagreement on just how strong that bubble is. I made a spicy claim. Even at NeurIPS, the biggest gathering of AI researchers in the world, half the people wouldn't know what AGI is. There's an image here. Description.
Two stick figures discussing silicate chemistry and experts overestimating public knowledge.
As good Bayesians, we agreed to settle the matter empirically. I would go to NeurIPS, walk around the conference hall and stop random people to ask them what AGI stands for. Surprisingly, most of the people I approached agreed to answer my question. I ended up asking 38 people and only 63% of them could tell me what AGI stands for.
Some of the people who answered correctly were a little perplexed why I was even asking such a basic question, and if it was a trick question. The people who didn't know were equally confused. Many simply furrowed their brows in confusion. Some made a valiant attempt. I heard a few artificial generative intelligences and even an Amazon general intelligence.
Judging from the response I got on X, the everything app, this was a very surprising outcome. I ended up running this experiment again at NeurIPS 2025 with an even bigger sample size, n equals 115. There's an image here.
A graph showing density distributions of AGI knowledge fraction at NeurIPS conferences.
After this first experience with surveying people, it became clear to me that the next step was to venture further outside the bubble and survey the general US population. 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.
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Chapter 2: How did the survey about AGI knowledge at NeurIPS unfold?
And I would hope that we would have a Republican government and get rid of the Democrats because they're ruining our country. They're Marxism and the globalists need to go to, along with Bill Gates, and it would be a happier world if we could live forever. But it's not possible, but yeah. And I'd read every book there was in the world.
Of course, not everyone is as optimistic that living forever would be good. Here are some of the things people are worried about. How would we manage overpopulation? The environment would be hard-pressed to support a population that doesn't have checks and balances. God made people who die for a reason. We are not God and need to quit acting as if we are.
If people could live forever, one of the main worries would be the potential for stagnation, both personally and societally. On a personal level, the concept of immortality might lead to a sense of boredom or meaninglessness over time. I would be worried that only the ultra-rich would have the longer lifespan.
They are not always the best, the most generous, the most humane, the smartest amongst us. End quote. Since it seemed like overpopulation and inequality were the main things people were worried about, I also asked a version of the question where I stipulated that these things were solved.
Chapter 3: What were the surprising results of the AGI knowledge survey?
Surprisingly, this barely shifts people's opinions and we get almost exactly the same response. My guess is this is a sign that the real objection is more about the vibes than any specific issue. It's also a sobering reminder of the limitations of this methodology. After the results for this experiment came in, I decided to test a bunch of other random weird beliefs.
If you want to guess at these before seeing the results or you're curious what the exact wording is because that can substantially change the result, click here to see all the questions I ran before scrolling down further. If you're willing to spend a lot of time looking at a giant wall of questions before continuing with the rest of this post, it's really a great way to test your calibration.
First, despite being very pro-living forever, Americans are much more skeptical of cryonics. Even if they could be revived a few decades after their death to live forever thereafter, only 27% are in favor of being preserved, and 46% are opposed, the rest are unsure.
Space colonization also has pretty lukewarm support, coming in at 37% in favor and 16% opposed, and cognitive enhancement for all is only a little bit more popular, 42% in favor, 19% opposed. Also, for some reason, people are really opposed to a hypothetical cheap, painless, and safe arbitrary modification of physical appearance, only 23% in favor, with 37% opposed.
In retrospect, the backlash against Ozempic is a sign, but I was still quite surprised. Terraforming other planets so that humans can live on them is also pretty unpopular, coming in at 37% in favour and 16% opposed. Thankfully, for most of these questions, a huge chunk of people are still undecided.
One of the most surprising results to me was that only 51% of Americans are in favor of literal post-scarcity, complete freedom to work on anything you want, as much as you want, and still enjoy a high quality of life, with 25% opposing. I was so shocked by this result not being 80% plus in favor that I reran a variant of this question with different wording.
My original question asked whether the world would be better or worse if everyone had the freedom to work on whatever they want, as long as they want, and still enjoy a high quality of life, and anything we don't want to do is done for us by robots. I thought maybe that set off some AI taking jobs bad instincts.
For the new question I took pains to clarify that the stuff is literally conjured out of nowhere with magic and is not taken from anyone else, and got an even worse result, 38% support, 34% oppose. This is even more crazy, so I ran a third version on the hypothesis that people don't like magic, or that not having to work sounded too crazy.
This version asked whether it would be good if everyone made 10x more, inflation-adjusted, than they do currently. This polled only somewhat better, with 39% in favour and 19% opposing. I'm still pretty confused what conclusion to draw from this. This is probably worth digging more into. Tying back to the original question that started this quest, I had to know.
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Chapter 4: How did the guest expand the survey to the general US population?
Quote,
How do you hide from a robot that's more intelligent than humans and can see through walls etc.? You can't hide. End quote. Me too, buddy. Me too. What about going further a field of AI? The beautiful thing is that you can just ask whatever you want. First, more broadly, Americans are very pessimistic about the future. Only 14% think that society is currently trending in a positive direction.
On a brighter note, I was able to disprove a viral rage bait TikTok about how Americans would fail an English test meant for people learning English as a second language. I was proud to find that a good solid 85% of my fellow Americans got the problem from the TikTok right.
Because we love decision theory in this house, I wrote a question that explains Newcomb's problem and asks whether to one box or two box. Americans are pretty split on this one. Among the respondents who didn't select not sure, honestly, kind of valid, only 46% would one-box.
This is almost exactly the same as professional philosophers, who came out 44% in favor of one-boxing, according to a survey conducted by PhilPapers. I was also curious whether people who are famous in SF are also famous among normal people. It turns out 36% of Americans know who Sam Altman is and can correctly say that he's known for being an entrepreneur.
Another 59% haven't heard of him or don't know what he's known for. Honorable mentions to the remaining 5% who think that Sam is a musician, actor, or congressperson. This same methodology finds that only 7% of Americans know who Jeffrey Hinton is, and 91% of Americans know who Elon Musk is.
I was in a discussion about whether lab-grown meat would ever become widely adopted, so I asked a question about whether it would be a good thing if we could somehow create meat by growing it directly, without needing to raise and slaughter animals. It turns out 32% of Americans are in favor and 29% are opposed.
When conditioning on the 55% of people who think meat production involves subjecting large numbers of animals to inhumane conditions, this tilts to 44% support and 21% oppose. I only ran the correlational study because it's a lot easier, but I'd be interested to see whether there is a causal result on support for lab-grown meat after you show people an educational video about factory farms.
Finally, for shits and giggles, there's an image here.
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