I would absolutely expect EAs to differ in various ways to the general population. The fact that a greater proportion of EAs are vegan is totally expected, and I can understand the computer science stat as well given how important AI is in EA at the moment.
However when it comes to sexuality it isn’t clear to me why the EA population should differ. It may not be very important to understand why, but then again the reason why could be quite interesting and help us understand what draws people to EA in the first place. For example perhaps LGBTQ+ people are more prone to activism/trying to improve the world because they find themselves to be discriminated against, and this means they are more open to EA. If so, this might indicate that outreach to existing activists might be high value. Of course this is complete conjecture and I’m not actually sure if it’s worth digging further (I asked the question mostly out of curiosity).
I agree that there’s not a direct explanation of why we would expect this difference in the EA community, unlike in the case of veganism and computer science.
I also agree that properties of our sampling itself don’t seem to offer good explanations of these results (although of course we can’t rule this out). This would just push the explanation back a level, and it seems even harder to explain why we’d heavily oversample nonheterosexual (and especially female nonheterosexual EAs compared to female heterosexual EAs) than to explain why we might observe these differences in the EA community.
That said, we do have good reason to think that the EA community (given its other characteristic) would have higher percentages of nonheterosexual responses. Elite colleges in general also have substantially higher rates than the general population (it looks like around 15% at Harvard and Yale) and of course the EA community contains a very disproportionate percentage of elite college graduates. Also, although we used slightly different questions, it seems like the EA community may be more liberal than elite colleges, and we might expected higher self-reported nonheterosexuality in more liberal populations (comparing to Harvard and Yale again, they have around 12% somewhat/very conservatives, we have around 3% centre right or right- we have more ‘libertarians’, but if these are mostly socially liberal then the same might apply).
As I noted before though, I think that this is probably just a result of the particular question format used. I would expect more nonheterosexual responses where people can write in a free response compared to where they have to select either heterosexual or some other fixed category.
Let’s presume that the ‘share non-straight is’ a robust empirical finding and not an artifact of sample selection or of how the question was asked, or of the nonresponse etc. (We could dig into this further if it merited the effort)...
It is indeed somewhat surprised, but I am not who surprised, as I expect a group that is very different in some ways from the general population may likely be very different in other ways, and we may not always have a clear story for why. If we did want to look into it further it further, we might look into what share of the vegan population, or of the ‘computer science population’, in this mainly very-young age group, is not straight-identified. (of course those numbers may also be very very difficult together, particularly because of the difficulty of getting a representative sample of small populations, as I discuss here.
This may be very interesting from a sociological point of view but I am not sure if it is a first order important for us right now. That said, if we have time we may be able to get back to it.
I was also surprised, but obviously we are far from a random sample of the population, there is a very unusual ‘selection’ process to
know about EA
identify with EA
take the survey
E.g., (and its not a completely fair analogy but) about 30% of 2019 respondents said they were vegan vs about vs about 1-3% of comparable populations
Perhaps better analogy: Looking quickly at the 2018-2019 data, roughly half of responded studied computer science. This compares to about 5% of the US degrees granted , 10% if we include all engineering degrees.
But is this worth pursuing further? Should we dig into surprising was the EA/EA-survey population differs from the general population?
I would absolutely expect EAs to differ in various ways to the general population. The fact that a greater proportion of EAs are vegan is totally expected, and I can understand the computer science stat as well given how important AI is in EA at the moment.
However when it comes to sexuality it isn’t clear to me why the EA population should differ. It may not be very important to understand why, but then again the reason why could be quite interesting and help us understand what draws people to EA in the first place. For example perhaps LGBTQ+ people are more prone to activism/trying to improve the world because they find themselves to be discriminated against, and this means they are more open to EA. If so, this might indicate that outreach to existing activists might be high value. Of course this is complete conjecture and I’m not actually sure if it’s worth digging further (I asked the question mostly out of curiosity).
I agree that there’s not a direct explanation of why we would expect this difference in the EA community, unlike in the case of veganism and computer science.
I also agree that properties of our sampling itself don’t seem to offer good explanations of these results (although of course we can’t rule this out). This would just push the explanation back a level, and it seems even harder to explain why we’d heavily oversample nonheterosexual (and especially female nonheterosexual EAs compared to female heterosexual EAs) than to explain why we might observe these differences in the EA community.
That said, we do have good reason to think that the EA community (given its other characteristic) would have higher percentages of nonheterosexual responses. Elite colleges in general also have substantially higher rates than the general population (it looks like around 15% at Harvard and Yale) and of course the EA community contains a very disproportionate percentage of elite college graduates. Also, although we used slightly different questions, it seems like the EA community may be more liberal than elite colleges, and we might expected higher self-reported nonheterosexuality in more liberal populations (comparing to Harvard and Yale again, they have around 12% somewhat/very conservatives, we have around 3% centre right or right- we have more ‘libertarians’, but if these are mostly socially liberal then the same might apply).
As I noted before though, I think that this is probably just a result of the particular question format used. I would expect more nonheterosexual responses where people can write in a free response compared to where they have to select either heterosexual or some other fixed category.
Let’s presume that the ‘share non-straight is’ a robust empirical finding and not an artifact of sample selection or of how the question was asked, or of the nonresponse etc. (We could dig into this further if it merited the effort)...
It is indeed somewhat surprised, but I am not who surprised, as I expect a group that is very different in some ways from the general population may likely be very different in other ways, and we may not always have a clear story for why. If we did want to look into it further it further, we might look into what share of the vegan population, or of the ‘computer science population’, in this mainly very-young age group, is not straight-identified. (of course those numbers may also be very very difficult together, particularly because of the difficulty of getting a representative sample of small populations, as I discuss here.
This may be very interesting from a sociological point of view but I am not sure if it is a first order important for us right now. That said, if we have time we may be able to get back to it.