Dawn Drescher comments on Results of the Effective Altruism Outreach Survey

[Dawn Drescher]

Yep, I should’ve done that. See below. Insofar as we can take these numbers at face value, I think they show that we can be fairly confident that there’s no correlation.

But correct me if I’m wrong, but for a null result to not be meaningless the study would have to be methodologically excellent. I don’t trust our first foray into surveys too far. That’s what I meant in the section you quoted.

Many thanks for all your comments! (I found this one to be easiest to respond to, but I’ll get to the others next.)

Correlation between prompts and rationality:

> bayes.cor.test(
+   formula = ~ all.mean + rationality.mean,
+   data = results[!is.na(results$all.mean), ])
  |**************************************************| 100%

    Bayesian First Aid Pearson's Correlation Coefficient Test

data: all.mean and rationality.mean (n = 167)
Estimated correlation:
  -0.054
95% credible interval:
  -0.21 0.10

The correlation is more than 0 by a probability of 0.256
and less than 0 by a probability of 0.744 

Correlation between prompts and altruism:

> bayes.cor.test(
+   formula = ~ all.mean + altruism.mean,
+   data = results[!is.na(results$all.mean), ])
  |**************************************************| 100%

    Bayesian First Aid Pearson's Correlation Coefficient Test

data: all.mean and altruism.mean (n = 167)
Estimated correlation:
  -0.026
95% credible interval:
  -0.18 0.13
The correlation is more than 0 by a probability of 0.379
and less than 0 by a probability of 0.621