It’s possible the selection bias is high, but I don’t have good evidence for this besides personal anecdata. I don’t know how many people are relevantly similar to me, and I don’t know how representative we are of the latest EA ‘freshers’, since dynamics will change and I’m reporting with several years’ lag.
Here’s my personal anecdata.
Since 2016, around when I completed undergrad, I’ve been an engaged (not sure what counts as ‘highly engaged’) longtermist. (Before that point I had not heard of EA per se but my motives were somewhat proto EA and I wanted to contribute to ‘sustainable flourishing at scale’ and ‘tech for good’.) Nevertheless, until 2020 or so I was relatively invisibly upskilling, reflecting on priorities, consuming advice and ideas etc. and figuring out (perhaps too humbly and slowly) how to orient. More recently I’ve overcome some amount of impostor syndrome and simultaneously become more ‘community engaged’ (hence visible) and started directly contributing to technical AI safety research.
If there are a lot with stories like that, they might form a large but quiet cohort countervailing your concern.
Having said that, I think what you express here is excellent to discuss, I think I may have been unusually quiet+cautious, I didn’t encounter EA during undergrad, and I suspect (without here justifying) that community dynamics have changed sufficiently that my anecdote is not IID with the cohort you’re discussing.
Appreciate the anecdata! I agree that probably there are at least a good number of people like you who will go under the radar, and this probably biases many estimates of the number of non-community-building EAs downward (esp estimates that are also based on anecdata, as opposed to e.g. survey data).
It’s possible the selection bias is high, but I don’t have good evidence for this besides personal anecdata. I don’t know how many people are relevantly similar to me, and I don’t know how representative we are of the latest EA ‘freshers’, since dynamics will change and I’m reporting with several years’ lag.
Here’s my personal anecdata.
Since 2016, around when I completed undergrad, I’ve been an engaged (not sure what counts as ‘highly engaged’) longtermist. (Before that point I had not heard of EA per se but my motives were somewhat proto EA and I wanted to contribute to ‘sustainable flourishing at scale’ and ‘tech for good’.) Nevertheless, until 2020 or so I was relatively invisibly upskilling, reflecting on priorities, consuming advice and ideas etc. and figuring out (perhaps too humbly and slowly) how to orient. More recently I’ve overcome some amount of impostor syndrome and simultaneously become more ‘community engaged’ (hence visible) and started directly contributing to technical AI safety research.
If there are a lot with stories like that, they might form a large but quiet cohort countervailing your concern.
Having said that, I think what you express here is excellent to discuss, I think I may have been unusually quiet+cautious, I didn’t encounter EA during undergrad, and I suspect (without here justifying) that community dynamics have changed sufficiently that my anecdote is not IID with the cohort you’re discussing.
Appreciate the anecdata! I agree that probably there are at least a good number of people like you who will go under the radar, and this probably biases many estimates of the number of non-community-building EAs downward (esp estimates that are also based on anecdata, as opposed to e.g. survey data).