This is a really great idea. Thanks for organizing this and writing up the results. A couple questions:
Overall, we feel we managed to achieve deep and positive engagement with tournament participants, but haven’t yet cracked the question of how to properly engage (more shallowly) with the broader debating community.
I’m curious about the “deep” engagement aspect. You mentioned that there was the Facebook group – have people continued to engage in other ways? E.g. attending meet ups or reading this forum.
high probability that within a decade or so we can expect members of this audience to be in global positions of influence makes the community a great outreach target
Do you know of anything which has measured this? I’m imagining something similar to how 80 K analyzed predictors of becoming an MP. It seems plausible to me that top debaters are disproportionately likely to gain positions of influence, but I’m not well calibrated on how big of an effect this is.
Regarding whether we achieved “deep” engagement. We have not formally followed up with participants to be able to answer this meaningfully. I can say anecdotally that a couple of participants I know personally have since been active on EA-related Facebook groups, but I don’t know if this generalizes. We’ve also collected the contact information of participants in the study and are able to follow up with additional surveys (of those interested) in the future, exactly for analysis such as this. Also, just a minor clarification—what we meant by the original sentence was a “deep” engagement in a rather informal sense—we felt people meaningfully engaged with the material. We did not mean to claim we achieved deep engagement in a stronger sense than that, e.g. as the term is used in the model of an EA group.
Regarding analysis of how likely debaters are to reach global positions of influence—I’m not aware of any proper measurement of this. My impression that this is true comes not from looking at the distribution of careers of past debaters, but rather looking at the portion of top political leaders with experience as successful debaters, and getting the impression this is substantially higher than the portion of debaters in general (but again—just an impression, no proper analysis here). While quickly searching for any analysis on this I haven’t found anything truly reliable, but I did aggregate the examples I found in this document in case it’s helpful to anyone. I’d be interested if anyone has done or knows of more reliable data on this.
This is a really great idea. Thanks for organizing this and writing up the results. A couple questions:
I’m curious about the “deep” engagement aspect. You mentioned that there was the Facebook group – have people continued to engage in other ways? E.g. attending meet ups or reading this forum.
Do you know of anything which has measured this? I’m imagining something similar to how 80 K analyzed predictors of becoming an MP. It seems plausible to me that top debaters are disproportionately likely to gain positions of influence, but I’m not well calibrated on how big of an effect this is.
Hi Ben, thanks for these questions.
Regarding whether we achieved “deep” engagement. We have not formally followed up with participants to be able to answer this meaningfully. I can say anecdotally that a couple of participants I know personally have since been active on EA-related Facebook groups, but I don’t know if this generalizes. We’ve also collected the contact information of participants in the study and are able to follow up with additional surveys (of those interested) in the future, exactly for analysis such as this. Also, just a minor clarification—what we meant by the original sentence was a “deep” engagement in a rather informal sense—we felt people meaningfully engaged with the material. We did not mean to claim we achieved deep engagement in a stronger sense than that, e.g. as the term is used in the model of an EA group.
Regarding analysis of how likely debaters are to reach global positions of influence—I’m not aware of any proper measurement of this. My impression that this is true comes not from looking at the distribution of careers of past debaters, but rather looking at the portion of top political leaders with experience as successful debaters, and getting the impression this is substantially higher than the portion of debaters in general (but again—just an impression, no proper analysis here). While quickly searching for any analysis on this I haven’t found anything truly reliable, but I did aggregate the examples I found in this document in case it’s helpful to anyone. I’d be interested if anyone has done or knows of more reliable data on this.