I am very confident that the variance explained by speaker choice is vastly less than the variance explained by the demographics of the forecasting community, compared to a US population baseline.
I would be happy to bet on this, since I am sure we will have events that have different speaker line up but drawing from the same community, and I am sure that from a US population baseline, they will differ relatively little (my best guess is there will be a small directional effect for gender for Manifest, since the event feels a bit more masculine than other community events, but no measurable directional effect for race).
I think it is likely that a perception of sympathy or ambivalence to racism reduces the number of black people interested in being part of the rationalism / Effective Altruism communities.
I doubt the signal from a single event like this is strong enough to be detectable, but I’d be surprised if media coverage like the Guardian’s write-up didn’t have an effect on demographic compositions of the community in the aggregate.
I’d grant that specific invite list of a given event are smaller drivers than the general popularity as important intellectuals of figures like Hanania who explicitly or implicitly endorse human biodiversity.
I am very confident that the variance explained by speaker choice is vastly less than the variance explained by the demographics of the forecasting community, compared to a US population baseline.
I would be happy to bet on this, since I am sure we will have events that have different speaker line up but drawing from the same community, and I am sure that from a US population baseline, they will differ relatively little (my best guess is there will be a small directional effect for gender for Manifest, since the event feels a bit more masculine than other community events, but no measurable directional effect for race).
I think it is likely that a perception of sympathy or ambivalence to racism reduces the number of black people interested in being part of the rationalism / Effective Altruism communities.
I doubt the signal from a single event like this is strong enough to be detectable, but I’d be surprised if media coverage like the Guardian’s write-up didn’t have an effect on demographic compositions of the community in the aggregate.
I’d grant that specific invite list of a given event are smaller drivers than the general popularity as important intellectuals of figures like Hanania who explicitly or implicitly endorse human biodiversity.