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.
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.