ACX Survey Results 2025 · Read Scott Alexander

Thanks to the 5,975 people who took the 2025 Astral Codex Ten survey.

See the results from the ACX Survey (click “see previous responses” on that page¹)

I’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 5500 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions². If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and I’ll probably send it to you.

You can download the public data here as an Excel or CSV file:

http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.xlsx
http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/ACXPublic2025.csv

Here are some of the answers I found most interesting:

Trump’s electoral victory and political rehabilitation has improved his image among ACX readers, with his favorability ratings (defined as 4 or 5 on a five point scale) going from 4.3% last year to a whopping 7.4% this year! Maybe Richard Hanania can find a way to fit this into his upcoming book on Elite Human Capital.

There’s an outside chance of an apocalyptic scenario for Long COVID: if each case of COVID has an fixed percent chance of giving you the syndrome, and the syndrome lasts forever, then as more COVID cases happen (ie even though COVID is no longer pandemic, most people still get it once every few years), the amount of Long COVID keeps going up and up for decades, until deaths finally equal new cases. I think this is very unlikely but worth devoting a few brain cells to worrying about.

On the question “Have you ever had Long COVID?” (not pictured), the survey results from 2022 → 2024 → 2025 went from 3.1% → 3.6% → 4.5%.

On the question above, the number of people saying they were still fatigued went from 2.5% → 1.8% → 2.1%.

These are obviously small and weak samples, but it seems like maybe people keep getting Long COVID, but for most of them it gets better after a year or two, so the amount of existing Long COVID cases stays pretty steady.

On the same trio of surveys, this question went from 16.2% → 4.1% → 3.5%.

Lower numbers mean older architecture, so this confirms the few polls I’ve cited suggesting most people prefer older. Obviously ACX is a selected population, but probably most of the selection is on things other than architecture taste. When I asked people to rank various styles of office buildings and houses, the winners were:

This was overwhelmingly people’s favorite office building style, with almost twice as many votes as second place.

And this was people’s favorite style of house, but a modernist house did come in a close second.

I did another analysis and found that of people in the target demographic (Americans who voted and had a guide for their city) about 50% said it changed their vote, 30% said they weren’t convinced, and 20% said they didn’t know about it. Overall we changed about 500 people’s votes.

This one surprised me, so halfway through I added a question asking people to guess what the answer would be. You got it pretty much exactly right (24.96%), so score one for the wisdom of crowds. I’m still interested to see what demographic characteristics predict overestimating vs. underestimating it.

These answers also surprised me. In any ACX article related to crime, it feels like the comment section is full of people demanding tougher punishments - no, tougher than that - no, MAXIMUM TOUGHNESS! - with only a tiny number of dissenters. But actually, the silent majority is big softies. 86% want no jail time - not even a weekend - for a first offense shoplifter. And 66% want a month or less even for a ten-time offender! (though 1.3% of you do want death)

This is the version of this question most relevant to San Francisco, where there usually aren’t open shelter beds.

Same surprise as the previous question - the comment section demands MAXIMUM TOUGHNESS, but the survey takers are bleeding hearts. Most people chose either red (arrest harassers only) or orange (arrest harassers, institutionalize anyone who seems mentally ill), but to otherwise leave the encampment alone.

I think this is both a clear right choice, and maybe politically impractical (the justice system doesn’t have the capacity to prove beyond a reasonable doubt which homeless people are harassers/mentally ill and which ones aren’t), so maybe the difference between this question and the comment section is what second-best option people choose when the clear right choice isn’t available.

Among the 28 pp of readers who own crypto, 16 pp (57%) are only speculating; the other 12 pp (43%) used it for at least somewhat non-speculative uses - of which 5.7 pp (20%) were completely non-speculative and legal. Typical examples were VPNs, international transfers, drugs (including legal drugs that were just hard to get elsewhere), and donations.

I’d heard some pretty crazy rumors about this, so I asked the 113 of you who had used ayahuasca to tell me your stories. 37 of you filled in the text box, of whom:

16 (43%) said it wasn’t too interesting.
8 (21%) said it made them feel a little better for a few weeks to months
13 (35%) said it had long-term beneficial effects, including:
- “Obliterated my atheism, inverted my world view no longer believe matter is base substrate believe consciousness is, no longer fear death, non duality seems obvious to me now.”
- “Stopped using drugs and drinking for 6 years”
- “It cured my long-standing autoimmune illness. Seriously! Also helped with the PTSD I have from childhood sexual abuse and homelessness. “
- “It cured my severe mental health problems. And it made me reassess all my life priorities. And it fundamentally altered my personality (permanently increasing openness to experience and extroversion, lowering neuroticism). I first partook 3 years ago and have been in 13 ceremonies. It’s been an interesting ride!”
- “Too many to type out here, but radically transformed my life - directly led to quitting career and feeling cool without ever knowing what happens next, put right and left hemispheres in proper order (only really understood 6 years later when reading McGilchrist) and totally blew open my heart, leading to finding Disney-magic love a few months later, a state I've been living and smiling in ever since :)”

Nobody claimed anything bad happened to them beyond some normal drug effects (eg vomiting), but I suppose we would want to talk to their friends and see if they agreed.

Thanks again to everyone who took the survey! If you want to investigate the answers in more depth, download the public data (.xlsx, .csv)

1 I can’t make Google Forms only present data from people who agreed to make their responses public, so I’ve deleted everything identifiable on the individual level, eg your written long response answers. Everything left is just things like “X% of users are Canadian” or “Y% of users have ADHD”. There’s no way to put these together and identify an ADHD Canadian, so I don’t think they’re privacy relevant. If you think you’ve found something identifiable on the public results page, please let me know.

2 I deleted email address, some written long answers, some political questions that people might get in trouble for answering honestly, and some sex-related questions. I binned age to the nearest 10 years and deleted the finer-grained ethnicity question. I replaced all incomes above $1,000,000 with $1,000,000, and removed all countries that had fewer than ten respondents (eg if you said you were from Madagascar, it would have made you identifiable, so I deleted that). If you need this information for some reason, email me.