Before writing the post, I was maybe thinking of 3-5 people who have experienced different versions of this? And since posting I have heard from at least 3 more (depending how you count) who have long histories with EA but felt the post resonated with them.
So far the reactions I’ve got suggest that there are quite a lot of people who are more similar to me (still engage somewhat with EA, feel some distance but have a hard time articulating why). That might imply that this group is a larger proportion than the group that totally disengages… but the group that totally disengages wouldn’t see an EA forum post, so I’m not sure :)
Thanks for sharing this! Do you have a sense for what the denominator is? I’ve previously tried to get some sense of this, and found it pretty challenging (mostly for obvious reasons like “people who have left EA are by definition harder for me to contact”).
I’m guessing 3-5 people is like 1 in 50 of the EA’s you know, over the course of a ~decade?
Yeah, fair question, though I think both estimating the numerator and the denominator is tricky. Probably your estimate that I know very roughly ~150-250 EAs is approximately right. But I’d be nervous about a conclusion of “this problem only affects 1 in 50, so it’s pretty rare/not a big deal,” both because I think the 3-5 number is more about specific people I’ve been interacting with a lot recently who directly inspired this post (so there could be plenty more I just know less about), and because there’s also a lot of room for interpretation of how strongly people resonate with different parts of this / how completely they’ve disengaged from the community / etc.
Before writing the post, I was maybe thinking of 3-5 people who have experienced different versions of this? And since posting I have heard from at least 3 more (depending how you count) who have long histories with EA but felt the post resonated with them.
So far the reactions I’ve got suggest that there are quite a lot of people who are more similar to me (still engage somewhat with EA, feel some distance but have a hard time articulating why). That might imply that this group is a larger proportion than the group that totally disengages… but the group that totally disengages wouldn’t see an EA forum post, so I’m not sure :)
Thanks for sharing this! Do you have a sense for what the denominator is? I’ve previously tried to get some sense of this, and found it pretty challenging (mostly for obvious reasons like “people who have left EA are by definition harder for me to contact”).
I’m guessing 3-5 people is like 1 in 50 of the EA’s you know, over the course of a ~decade?
Yeah, fair question, though I think both estimating the numerator and the denominator is tricky. Probably your estimate that I know very roughly ~150-250 EAs is approximately right. But I’d be nervous about a conclusion of “this problem only affects 1 in 50, so it’s pretty rare/not a big deal,” both because I think the 3-5 number is more about specific people I’ve been interacting with a lot recently who directly inspired this post (so there could be plenty more I just know less about), and because there’s also a lot of room for interpretation of how strongly people resonate with different parts of this / how completely they’ve disengaged from the community / etc.
That makes sense, thanks!