Thanks for sharing the survey data! I’ll update the post with those numbers.
it seems somewhat risky to compare this to numbers “based on the pictures displayed on the relevant team page”, since it seems like this will inevitably under-count mixed race people who appear white.
This is a fair point. For what it’s worth, I classified a handful of people who very well could be white as POC since it looked like they could possibly be mixed race. But these people probably accounted for something like 1% of my sample, far short of the 6.5% mixed race share of EA survey respondents. So it’s plausible that because of this issue diversity at longtermist organizations is pretty close to diversity in the EA community (though that’s not exactly a high bar).
On the other hand, I’d also note Asians are by far the largest category of POC in both my sample and the EA Community, so presumably a large share of the mixed white/non-white population is part white and part Asian. It seems reasonable to assume that ~1/2 of this group would have last names that suggest Asian heritage, but there weren’t many (any?) people in my sample with such names who looked white. This might indicate that my sample had fewer mixed race people than the EA Survey, which would make the issue you’re raising less of a problem.
Interestingly, the EA survey data also has a surprisingly high (at least to me) number of mixed race respondents relative to the number of non-mixed POC. In the survey, 33% of people who aren’t non-mixed white are mixed race. For comparison, this figure is 15% at Stanford and 13% at Harvard. So I think the measurement issue you’re pointing out is much less of a problem for benchmarks other than the EA community.
Thanks for sharing the survey data! I’ll update the post with those numbers.
This is a fair point. For what it’s worth, I classified a handful of people who very well could be white as POC since it looked like they could possibly be mixed race. But these people probably accounted for something like 1% of my sample, far short of the 6.5% mixed race share of EA survey respondents. So it’s plausible that because of this issue diversity at longtermist organizations is pretty close to diversity in the EA community (though that’s not exactly a high bar).
On the other hand, I’d also note Asians are by far the largest category of POC in both my sample and the EA Community, so presumably a large share of the mixed white/non-white population is part white and part Asian. It seems reasonable to assume that ~1/2 of this group would have last names that suggest Asian heritage, but there weren’t many (any?) people in my sample with such names who looked white. This might indicate that my sample had fewer mixed race people than the EA Survey, which would make the issue you’re raising less of a problem.
Interestingly, the EA survey data also has a surprisingly high (at least to me) number of mixed race respondents relative to the number of non-mixed POC. In the survey, 33% of people who aren’t non-mixed white are mixed race. For comparison, this figure is 15% at Stanford and 13% at Harvard. So I think the measurement issue you’re pointing out is much less of a problem for benchmarks other than the EA community.