This seems quite likely given EA Survey data where, amongst people who indicated they first heard of EA from a Podcast and indicated which podcast, Sam Harris’ strongly dominated all other podcasts.
More speculatively, we might try to compare these numbers to people hearing about EA from other categories. For example, by any measure, the number of people in the EA Survey who first heard about EA from Sam Harris’ podcast specifically is several times the number who heard about EA from Vox’s Future Perfect. As a lower bound, 4x more people specifically mentioned Sam Harris in their comment than selected Future Perfect, but this is probably dramatically undercounting Harris, since not everyone who selected Podcast wrote a comment that could be identified with a specific podcast. Unfortunately, I don’t know the relative audience size of Future Perfect posts vs Sam Harris’ EA podcasts specifically, but that could be used to give a rough sense of how well the different audiences respond.
Notably, Harris has interviewed several figures associated with EA; Ferriss only did MacAskill, while Harris has had MacAskill, Ord, Yudkowsky, and perhaps others.
This is true, although for whatever reason the responses to the podcast question seemed very heavily dominated by references to MacAskill.
This is the graph from our original post, showing every commonly mentioned category, not just the host (categories are not mutually exclusive). I’m not sure what explains why MacAskill really heavily dominated the Podcast category, while Singer heavily dominated the TED Talk category.
My guess is people who like Sam Harris are disproportionately likely to be potentially interested in EA.
This seems quite likely given EA Survey data where, amongst people who indicated they first heard of EA from a Podcast and indicated which podcast, Sam Harris’ strongly dominated all other podcasts.
More speculatively, we might try to compare these numbers to people hearing about EA from other categories. For example, by any measure, the number of people in the EA Survey who first heard about EA from Sam Harris’ podcast specifically is several times the number who heard about EA from Vox’s Future Perfect. As a lower bound, 4x more people specifically mentioned Sam Harris in their comment than selected Future Perfect, but this is probably dramatically undercounting Harris, since not everyone who selected Podcast wrote a comment that could be identified with a specific podcast. Unfortunately, I don’t know the relative audience size of Future Perfect posts vs Sam Harris’ EA podcasts specifically, but that could be used to give a rough sense of how well the different audiences respond.
Notably, Harris has interviewed several figures associated with EA; Ferriss only did MacAskill, while Harris has had MacAskill, Ord, Yudkowsky, and perhaps others.
This is true, although for whatever reason the responses to the podcast question seemed very heavily dominated by references to MacAskill.
This is the graph from our original post, showing every commonly mentioned category, not just the host (categories are not mutually exclusive). I’m not sure what explains why MacAskill really heavily dominated the Podcast category, while Singer heavily dominated the TED Talk category.