Really cool survey, and great write up of the results! I especially liked the multilevel regression and post-stratification method of estimating distributions.
Peter Singer seems to be higher profile than the other EAs on your list. How much of this do you think is from popular media, like The Good Place, versus from just being around for longer?
Peter Singer is also well known because of his controversial disability/abortion views. I wonder if people who indicated they only heard about Peter Singer (as opposed to only hearing about MackAskill, Ord, Alexander, etc.) scored lower on ratings of understanding EA? I’ve had conversations with people who refused to engage with the EA community because we were “led by a eugenicist”, but that’s clearly not what EA believes in.
Also kinda sad EA is being absolutely crushed by taffeta.
Peter Singer seems to be higher profile than the other EAs on your list. How much of this do you think is from popular media, like The Good Place, versus from just being around for longer?
Interesting question. It does seem clear that Peter Singer is known more broadly (including among those who haven’t heard of EA, and for some reasons unrelated to EA). It also seems clear that he was a widely known public figure well before ‘The Good Place’ (it looks like he was described as “almost certainly the best-known and most widely read of all contemporary philosophers” back in 2002, as one example).
So, if the question is whether he’s more well known due to popular media (narrowly construed) like The Good Place, it seems likely the answer is ‘no.’ If the question is whether he’s more well known due to his broader, public intellectual work, in contrast to his narrowly academic work, then that seems harder to assign credit for, since much of his academic work has been extremely popular and arguably a prerequisite of the broader public intellectual work.
If the question is more whether he’s more well known than some of the other figures listed primarily because of being around longer, that seems tough to answer, since it implies speculation about how prominent some of those other figures might become with time.
I wonder if people who indicated they only heard about Peter Singer (as opposed to only hearing about MackAskill, Ord, Alexander, etc.) scored lower on ratings of understanding EA?
This is another interesting question. However, a complication here seems to be that, I think we’d generally expect people who have heard of more niche figures associated with X to be more informed about X, than people who have only heard of a very popular figure associated with X for indirect reasons (unrelated to the quality of information transmitted from those figures).
Also kinda sad EA is being absolutely crushed by taffeta.
Agreed. I had many similar experiences while designing this survey, where I conducted various searches to try to identify terms that were less well known than ‘effective altruism’ and kept finding that they were much more well known. (I remember one dispiriting example was finding that the ‘Cutty Sark’ seemed to be much more widely known than effective altruism).
I’d heard of Peter Singer in an animal rights context years before I knew anything around his EA association or human philosophy in general. I wonder if a lot of people who have heard of him are in the same place I was.
Similarly, I’d heard of Peter Singer as a result of campus controversies over his (alleged) views on disability long before I heard anything else about him. But it was actually learning about that controversy that prompted me to go see him speak some time in 2001 or so and I was surprised by what I heard.
Really cool survey, and great write up of the results! I especially liked the multilevel regression and post-stratification method of estimating distributions.
Peter Singer seems to be higher profile than the other EAs on your list. How much of this do you think is from popular media, like The Good Place, versus from just being around for longer?
Peter Singer is also well known because of his controversial disability/abortion views. I wonder if people who indicated they only heard about Peter Singer (as opposed to only hearing about MackAskill, Ord, Alexander, etc.) scored lower on ratings of understanding EA? I’ve had conversations with people who refused to engage with the EA community because we were “led by a eugenicist”, but that’s clearly not what EA believes in.
Also kinda sad EA is being absolutely crushed by taffeta.
Interesting question. It does seem clear that Peter Singer is known more broadly (including among those who haven’t heard of EA, and for some reasons unrelated to EA). It also seems clear that he was a widely known public figure well before ‘The Good Place’ (it looks like he was described as “almost certainly the best-known and most widely read of all contemporary philosophers” back in 2002, as one example).
So, if the question is whether he’s more well known due to popular media (narrowly construed) like The Good Place, it seems likely the answer is ‘no.’ If the question is whether he’s more well known due to his broader, public intellectual work, in contrast to his narrowly academic work, then that seems harder to assign credit for, since much of his academic work has been extremely popular and arguably a prerequisite of the broader public intellectual work.
If the question is more whether he’s more well known than some of the other figures listed primarily because of being around longer, that seems tough to answer, since it implies speculation about how prominent some of those other figures might become with time.
This is another interesting question. However, a complication here seems to be that, I think we’d generally expect people who have heard of more niche figures associated with X to be more informed about X, than people who have only heard of a very popular figure associated with X for indirect reasons (unrelated to the quality of information transmitted from those figures).
Agreed. I had many similar experiences while designing this survey, where I conducted various searches to try to identify terms that were less well known than ‘effective altruism’ and kept finding that they were much more well known. (I remember one dispiriting example was finding that the ‘Cutty Sark’ seemed to be much more widely known than effective altruism).
I’d heard of Peter Singer in an animal rights context years before I knew anything around his EA association or human philosophy in general. I wonder if a lot of people who have heard of him are in the same place I was.
Similarly, I’d heard of Peter Singer as a result of campus controversies over his (alleged) views on disability long before I heard anything else about him. But it was actually learning about that controversy that prompted me to go see him speak some time in 2001 or so and I was surprised by what I heard.