Fantastic work. Would you be able to, if you think it is advisable, to have some sort of “adjusted JEID” score? I am thinking that since EA is mostly white and male, that if the community, in its current form, had been more “equally distributed across gender, race, etc”, that the JEID concerns would have loomed even larger?
Very simplified, something like if 20% of respondents identified as POC, and JEID issues were raised by 15% of respondents, that we could do something like “if EA was 50% POC, the JEID issues would be raised by 37.5% of respondents”. This is wrong math, I know, but meant to give an example to point in the direction of what I am thinking about.
And if any readers did not pick up on this already—I am potentially very interested to chip in on any JEID efforts where you think perhaps my privileges (or lay DEI expertise) might be of some use.
We can provide the percentages broken down by different groups. I would advise against thinking about this in terms of ‘what would the results be if weighted to match non-actual equal demographics’ though: (i) if the demographics were different (equal) then presumably concern about demographics would be different [fewer people would be worried about demographic diversity if we had perfect demographic diversity], and (ii) if the demographics were different (equal) then the composition of the different demographic groups within the community would likely be different [if we had a large increase in the proportion of women / decrease in the proportion of men, the people making up those groups would plausibly differ from the current groups].
That said, people identified as a woman or anything other than a man, were more likely to mention JEID as at last of somewhat importance, and they were also more likely to mention cause prioritization and excessive focus on AI/x-risk/longtermism as a concern. Conversely, men were more likely to refer to scandals, leadership and epistemics.
I would be even more cautious about interpreting the differences based on race due to the low sample size (the total number would be much larger in the full EA Survey), and the fact that the composition of non-white respondents as a group differs from what you would see in a ‘perfectly equal demographics’ scenario (i.e. more Asian, unequal representation across countries).
Fantastic work. Would you be able to, if you think it is advisable, to have some sort of “adjusted JEID” score? I am thinking that since EA is mostly white and male, that if the community, in its current form, had been more “equally distributed across gender, race, etc”, that the JEID concerns would have loomed even larger?
Very simplified, something like if 20% of respondents identified as POC, and JEID issues were raised by 15% of respondents, that we could do something like “if EA was 50% POC, the JEID issues would be raised by 37.5% of respondents”. This is wrong math, I know, but meant to give an example to point in the direction of what I am thinking about.
And if any readers did not pick up on this already—I am potentially very interested to chip in on any JEID efforts where you think perhaps my privileges (or lay DEI expertise) might be of some use.
Thanks Ulrik!
We can provide the percentages broken down by different groups. I would advise against thinking about this in terms of ‘what would the results be if weighted to match non-actual equal demographics’ though: (i) if the demographics were different (equal) then presumably concern about demographics would be different [fewer people would be worried about demographic diversity if we had perfect demographic diversity], and (ii) if the demographics were different (equal) then the composition of the different demographic groups within the community would likely be different [if we had a large increase in the proportion of women / decrease in the proportion of men, the people making up those groups would plausibly differ from the current groups].
That said, people identified as a woman or anything other than a man, were more likely to mention JEID as at last of somewhat importance, and they were also more likely to mention cause prioritization and excessive focus on AI/x-risk/longtermism as a concern. Conversely, men were more likely to refer to scandals, leadership and epistemics.
I would be even more cautious about interpreting the differences based on race due to the low sample size (the total number would be much larger in the full EA Survey), and the fact that the composition of non-white respondents as a group differs from what you would see in a ‘perfectly equal demographics’ scenario (i.e. more Asian, unequal representation across countries).