Is the paragraph below saying that surveying the general population would not provide useful information, or is it saying something like ‘this would help, but would not totally address the issue’.
It’s just describing limitations. In principle, you could definitely update based on representative samples of the general population, but there would still be challenges.
Notably, we have already run a large representative survey (within the US), looking at how many people have heard of EA (for unrelated reasons). It illustrates one of the simple practical limitations of using this approach to estimate the composition of the EA community, rather than just to estimate how many people in the public have heard of EA.
Even with a sample of n=6000, we still only found around 150 people who plausibly even knew what effective altruism was (and we think this might still have been an over-estimate). Of those, I’d say no more than 1-3 seemed like they might have any real engagement with EA at all. (Incidentally, this is roughly a ratio that seems plausible to me for how many people who hear of EA actually then engaged with EA at all, i.e. 150-50:1 or less.) Note that we weren’t trying to see whether people were members of the EA community in this survey, so the above estimate is just based on those who happened to mention enough specifics- like knowing about 80,000 Hours- that it seemed like they might have been at all engaged with EA). So, given that, we’d need truly enormous survey samples to sample a decent number of ‘EAs’ via this method, and the results would still be limited by the difficulties mentioned above.
Thanks for the comments!
It’s just describing limitations. In principle, you could definitely update based on representative samples of the general population, but there would still be challenges.
Notably, we have already run a large representative survey (within the US), looking at how many people have heard of EA (for unrelated reasons). It illustrates one of the simple practical limitations of using this approach to estimate the composition of the EA community, rather than just to estimate how many people in the public have heard of EA.
Even with a sample of n=6000, we still only found around 150 people who plausibly even knew what effective altruism was (and we think this might still have been an over-estimate). Of those, I’d say no more than 1-3 seemed like they might have any real engagement with EA at all. (Incidentally, this is roughly a ratio that seems plausible to me for how many people who hear of EA actually then engaged with EA at all, i.e. 150-50:1 or less.) Note that we weren’t trying to see whether people were members of the EA community in this survey, so the above estimate is just based on those who happened to mention enough specifics- like knowing about 80,000 Hours- that it seemed like they might have been at all engaged with EA). So, given that, we’d need truly enormous survey samples to sample a decent number of ‘EAs’ via this method, and the results would still be limited by the difficulties mentioned above.
Thanks for taking the time to explain, David!