Nice! Have personality questions been included in subsequent EA surveys? I am guessing not, given you only report the 2018 data. Why is there a ~6-year lag in reporting these results? I assume there are good reasons, just seems a bit strange at first glance.
Have personality questions been included in subsequent EA surveys? I am guessing not, given you only report the 2018 data.
That’s right. We haven’t included them in later EA Surveys due to space constraints and the fact that these seem relatively low priority. People seem very interested in them and have often contacted us about whether we have any personality data (presumably, in part, because they are of academic interest). But they don’t seem particularly decision-relevant compared to other questions they’re competing with.
Why is there a ~6-year lag in reporting these results?
Same reason as above for why we didn’t originally write a post about these results: these results seemed relatively low priority compared to other results and other project. For context, these questions were originally included in the optional ‘Extra Credit’ section of the survey, which previously used to include more ‘fun’ questions people requested or questions of interest to academics, but in recent years tends to just include slightly lower priority requests from core EA orgs that we can’t fit in the main section of the survey.
As to why we are publishing the results now: as we saw more posts coming out based on people gathering new data, we thought there was more value in making our own results available to help inform people, and one of our staff had a small amount of spare capacity while waiting on other projects with fixed timelines. As we discussed, we’ll also try to get our EAs per capita data out there in the near future, but we always have multiple possible projects which are competing with each other.
Nice! Have personality questions been included in subsequent EA surveys? I am guessing not, given you only report the 2018 data. Why is there a ~6-year lag in reporting these results? I assume there are good reasons, just seems a bit strange at first glance.
That’s right. We haven’t included them in later EA Surveys due to space constraints and the fact that these seem relatively low priority. People seem very interested in them and have often contacted us about whether we have any personality data (presumably, in part, because they are of academic interest). But they don’t seem particularly decision-relevant compared to other questions they’re competing with.
Same reason as above for why we didn’t originally write a post about these results: these results seemed relatively low priority compared to other results and other project. For context, these questions were originally included in the optional ‘Extra Credit’ section of the survey, which previously used to include more ‘fun’ questions people requested or questions of interest to academics, but in recent years tends to just include slightly lower priority requests from core EA orgs that we can’t fit in the main section of the survey.
As to why we are publishing the results now: as we saw more posts coming out based on people gathering new data, we thought there was more value in making our own results available to help inform people, and one of our staff had a small amount of spare capacity while waiting on other projects with fixed timelines. As we discussed, we’ll also try to get our EAs per capita data out there in the near future, but we always have multiple possible projects which are competing with each other.