On the object level, there now seem to be two roughly equal clusters. Cluster A are long-termist, consider EA epistemically humble,[1] don’t think we should blame ourselves for the FTX farrago and are unenthusiastic about democratisation. Cluster B take the opposite positions.
On the meta level:
It seems a bit concerning that the OP stresses the poll shouldn’t be used to say X% of EAs think Y, but the first item of the report is a list of statements where 60% of respondents either agreed or disagreed.[2] It seems that it would be easy to take these as consensus positions, when (a) the views of the 220 respondents may not be representative and (b) 60% isn’t much of a consensus. It will be interesting to see, for example, whether people assert that that this poll shows wide support for “EA leaders should be transparent about what they knew about SBF and when”.
Many of the “majority” statements seem anodyne. For example, it’s not particularly interesting to highlight (as the report does) that most people agree the top team at FTX made poor decisions.
The report doesn’t do a particularly good job at identifying “statements which make this group unique”. It includes statements which majorities in both groups agree. It highlights the statement, “I don’t believe in longtermism and I don’t feel like I can mention that to other EAs” rather than the more basic, “I think longtermism is true”. It doesn’t clearly identify the difference in views on democratisation: e.g. the disagreement on the statements “There should be a community-elected board in EA”, “‘EA should democratise’, without any detail on how this could happen, or would have prevented FTX, is just an applause light”[3] or “Democratic and transparent processes of decision making are better for both quality and oversight.”
The “areas of uncertainty” mostly identifies statements which in retrospect are unclear or inapplicable to most respondents, rather than any fundamental uncertainty. Possibly it would help to distuinguish “pass” from “unsure”, with a “pass” not being counted as an answer at all.
I can’t understand the graph at all. What are the axes? What are the rings? The graph doesn’t show two clusters. If anything, there’s one cluster in the centre, although that could conceivably be an artifact of the inner circle having a smaller area. How can participants be positioned “close” to statements they agreed, when agreement is 0/1?
OP says in a comment here that there are now too many statements, but the setup encourages respondents to submit statements. If anything, it seems surprising that 220 respondents only submitted 185 statements. Ideally, the poll would have many more respondents, so this seems to highlight a problem with the system.
The most relevant statement here reads, “I think EA is epistemically humble but external people don’t seem to think so.” It seems likely to me, based on other responses, that the disagreement stems from the first part, but of course a person who believed EA to be universally acknowledged as epistemically humble would also disagree. In retrospect, it would have been better to have “EA is epistemically humble” and “External people don’t consider EA to be epistemically humble” as separate statements.
It looks to me like the clustering is basically ok, but the presentation breaks down when there are so many statements. Better to just look at the full list.
On the object level, there now seem to be two roughly equal clusters. Cluster A are long-termist, consider EA epistemically humble,[1] don’t think we should blame ourselves for the FTX farrago and are unenthusiastic about democratisation. Cluster B take the opposite positions.
On the meta level:
It seems a bit concerning that the OP stresses the poll shouldn’t be used to say X% of EAs think Y, but the first item of the report is a list of statements where 60% of respondents either agreed or disagreed.[2] It seems that it would be easy to take these as consensus positions, when (a) the views of the 220 respondents may not be representative and (b) 60% isn’t much of a consensus. It will be interesting to see, for example, whether people assert that that this poll shows wide support for “EA leaders should be transparent about what they knew about SBF and when”.
Many of the “majority” statements seem anodyne. For example, it’s not particularly interesting to highlight (as the report does) that most people agree the top team at FTX made poor decisions.
The report doesn’t do a particularly good job at identifying “statements which make this group unique”. It includes statements which majorities in both groups agree. It highlights the statement, “I don’t believe in longtermism and I don’t feel like I can mention that to other EAs” rather than the more basic, “I think longtermism is true”. It doesn’t clearly identify the difference in views on democratisation: e.g. the disagreement on the statements “There should be a community-elected board in EA”, “‘EA should democratise’, without any detail on how this could happen, or would have prevented FTX, is just an applause light”[3] or “Democratic and transparent processes of decision making are better for both quality and oversight.”
The “areas of uncertainty” mostly identifies statements which in retrospect are unclear or inapplicable to most respondents, rather than any fundamental uncertainty. Possibly it would help to distuinguish “pass” from “unsure”, with a “pass” not being counted as an answer at all.
I can’t understand the graph at all. What are the axes? What are the rings? The graph doesn’t show two clusters. If anything, there’s one cluster in the centre, although that could conceivably be an artifact of the inner circle having a smaller area. How can participants be positioned “close” to statements they agreed, when agreement is 0/1?
OP says in a comment here that there are now too many statements, but the setup encourages respondents to submit statements. If anything, it seems surprising that 220 respondents only submitted 185 statements. Ideally, the poll would have many more respondents, so this seems to highlight a problem with the system.
The most relevant statement here reads, “I think EA is epistemically humble but external people don’t seem to think so.” It seems likely to me, based on other responses, that the disagreement stems from the first part, but of course a person who believed EA to be universally acknowledged as epistemically humble would also disagree. In retrospect, it would have been better to have “EA is epistemically humble” and “External people don’t consider EA to be epistemically humble” as separate statements.
For some reason “EA should not aim to be a community” is also appearing here although only 55% of respondents disagree.
Of course cluster B does have at least one concrete proposal, namely a community-elected board. It’s just that cluster A thinks that would be bad.
It looks to me like the clustering is basically ok, but the presentation breaks down when there are so many statements. Better to just look at the full list.