“I take your point that skews can happen, but it seems a bit suspicious to me that desire to be effective and altruistic should be so heavily skewed towards straight, white dudes.”
(1) Where did “straight” come into this picture? The author says that EAs are well-represented on sexual diversity (and maybe even overrepresented on some fairly atypical sexual orientations), and my comment (and the data I used) had nothing to say about sexual orientation?
(2) “”“it seems a bit suspicious to me that desire to be effective and altruistic should be so heavily skewed towards straight, white dudes”””
I didn’t say that desire to be effective and altruistic is heavily skewed toward men. I just said that membership in a specific community, or readership of a specific website, and things like that, can have significant gender skews, and that is not atypical. The audience for a specific community, like the effective altruist community, can be far smaller than the set of people with desire to be effective and altruistic.
For instance, if a fashion website has a 90% female audience (a not atypical number), that is not a claim that the “desire to look good” is that heavily skewed toward female. It means that the specific things that website caters to, the way it has marketed itself, etc. have resulted in it getting a female audience. Men could also desire to look good, albeit in ways that are very different from those catered to by that fashion website (or more broadly by the majority of present-day fashion websites).
“I take your point that skews can happen, but it seems a bit suspicious to me that desire to be effective and altruistic should be so heavily skewed towards straight, white dudes.”
(1) Where did “straight” come into this picture? The author says that EAs are well-represented on sexual diversity (and maybe even overrepresented on some fairly atypical sexual orientations), and my comment (and the data I used) had nothing to say about sexual orientation?
(2) “”“it seems a bit suspicious to me that desire to be effective and altruistic should be so heavily skewed towards straight, white dudes”””
I didn’t say that desire to be effective and altruistic is heavily skewed toward men. I just said that membership in a specific community, or readership of a specific website, and things like that, can have significant gender skews, and that is not atypical. The audience for a specific community, like the effective altruist community, can be far smaller than the set of people with desire to be effective and altruistic.
For instance, if a fashion website has a 90% female audience (a not atypical number), that is not a claim that the “desire to look good” is that heavily skewed toward female. It means that the specific things that website caters to, the way it has marketed itself, etc. have resulted in it getting a female audience. Men could also desire to look good, albeit in ways that are very different from those catered to by that fashion website (or more broadly by the majority of present-day fashion websites).