Thanks for putting together this survey and sharing it on the forum! A brief background to me: I co-direct High Impact Engineers, where we aim to help (non-software) engineers do more high-impact work. If the Foresight Institute does decide to go ahead with the outlined ideas/next steps for bridging the gap between EA and STEM, I can see some collaborations being beneficial. I expand on this in my general comments below. (The rest of this comment is from a personal capacity, rather than on behalf of HI-Eng)
General comments (not very heavily edited, apologies for the length and for any rambling/unclear parts. Main points in bold):
Although people in STEM share a lot of important attributes (numerical and analytical skills, problem-solving ability, etc.), there isn’t really such a thing as a STEM community as they’re split out into many different domains of expertise, interests, applications, skills, etc.
It seems unlikely that the survey respondents are omni-STEM, and I think grouping them all under the “STEM” banner obscures a lot of useful information, e.g. in which fields professionals think EA and STEM are already well-integrated, and which aren’t; which skills professionals think would be useful to develop technology to mitigate X-risks/do DTD research projects, etc.
It would be useful to be able to see what the breakdown of the respondents’ fields is – I suspect that life sciences are under-represented here as those fields tend to skew less male-dominated.
Somewhat related: I think we also need more social scientists in EA (understanding how people behave, especially around new technologies, is probably very useful and important for X-risk mitigation – and I’d argue that psychologists and sociologists belong in the S for Science in the STEM acronym), but I assume there were very few of these scientists in this survey considering the survey was sent to a group of people in mostly “hard” tech/sciences.
In terms of demographics, the majority were male and living in the US. A few respondents were based in the UK, and only one woman answered.
If only one woman responded, this survey obviously doesn’t cover the whole STEM community. Hot take: this seems to me to be more a survey of men rather than a survey of the “STEM community” (in quotes due to point 1 and also because a survey of the STEM community would probably be too broad to be useful).
If this is going to become a community-building effort, I think we need to be careful if we spend more time, effort, and money building communities in the respondents’ communities. EA is already overwhelmingly white and male; I somewhat worry that increasing overlap in the respondents’ communities will cause EA to become a boy’s club.
Since the majority of the respondents were US- (and some UK-) based, I would also be interested in seeing the ethnic breakdown (if this was collected).
A final demographic that I’d like to see from this survey is the age breakdown – mid-career professionals, in my experience, tend to have important and useful perspectives that EA generally lacks.
Like Linda, I’d also like to know the response rate for this survey. [EDIT]: 41/~1800 seems like an awfully low response rate, so doesn’t seem particularly representative of Foresight’s STEM community, which makes me question the validity of these conclusions.
Technology is very important in solving X-risk challenges: Many respondents believe that technology has the potential to help mitigate X-risks. They feel that getting technologists involved in the conversation is essential to developing effective solutions.
What does technology mean here? Usually it means information technology, but I think “physical” technologies also have the potential to help mitigate X-risks. It feels obvious to me that getting technologists involved will help solve problems effectively – this is what technologists do!
I agree with the conclusions and recommended actions, and my intuition says that it’s better to focus on the ways to get STEM professionals working on X-risks and EA cause areas without integrating the EA and STEM communities.
High Impact Engineers has already been doing point 3 of the recommended actions(introducing existential risks and EA cause areas for the STEM community) at universities as a low-risk test of whether people with an engineering background respond well to these ideas – we’ve found that they do! We plan to do more outreach to professional engineering institutes in the next 6 months, and this is a project where collaboration could be beneficial. Happy to discuss more.
Specific technological areas you deem promising for bridge-building
At HI-Eng, common areas that we’ve found to be in-demand for biosecurity, civilisation resilience, AI governance, differential neurotechnology development, and other X-risk mitigation seem to be electrical/electronic engineers, mechanical engineers, and materials engineers (particularly experts in semiconductors). Bioengineers and biomedical engineers seem to be useful for biosecurity. Happy to discuss this further, and we also expect to have a presentation/poster to share on this soon.
My overall takeaway: a survey like this is probably useful and important, but I would need to know more about the types of people surveyed for the data to be useful and for the actions to be convincing.
Hi Jessica, thank you so much for your thorough read and response! I found it very useful.
I agree there isn’t really such a thing as “the STEM community”, and if I were to write the post now I would want to better reflect the fact that this was asked to the Foresight community, in which most participants are working in one of our technical fields: neurotech, space tech, nanotech, biotech or computation. In the survey I ask if people identify themselves as STEM professionals, a question to which most answered yes (85% of respondents in this v. small survey). So as you point out, most are not in the life sciences.
Regarding the demographics, our community is very male dominated. However, our team is all female, and we are actively trying to improve on this. I would be interested to hear if you at HI Engineers are doing anything on this, and have any learning that you can share? I did not collect any data on ethnicity or age in this survey.
As I stated in the post, and can only state again, this is very preliminary, so I agree one shouldn’t draw too much of a conclusion based on this. But I’m happy I put it out there as is so that I could get this useful feedback from you!
Regarding what technology means in the text, I would say that it refers to both informations and “physical” technologies. I’d be very interested to hear more about your outreach work with HI Engineers. Overall, your work looks very interesting, and so I hope you don’t mind if I reach out “off forum”! :)
Thanks for putting together this survey and sharing it on the forum! A brief background to me: I co-direct High Impact Engineers, where we aim to help (non-software) engineers do more high-impact work. If the Foresight Institute does decide to go ahead with the outlined ideas/next steps for bridging the gap between EA and STEM, I can see some collaborations being beneficial. I expand on this in my general comments below. (The rest of this comment is from a personal capacity, rather than on behalf of HI-Eng)
General comments (not very heavily edited, apologies for the length and for any rambling/unclear parts. Main points in bold):
Although people in STEM share a lot of important attributes (numerical and analytical skills, problem-solving ability, etc.), there isn’t really such a thing as a STEM community as they’re split out into many different domains of expertise, interests, applications, skills, etc.
It seems unlikely that the survey respondents are omni-STEM, and I think grouping them all under the “STEM” banner obscures a lot of useful information, e.g. in which fields professionals think EA and STEM are already well-integrated, and which aren’t; which skills professionals think would be useful to develop technology to mitigate X-risks/do DTD research projects, etc.
It would be useful to be able to see what the breakdown of the respondents’ fields is – I suspect that life sciences are under-represented here as those fields tend to skew less male-dominated.
Somewhat related: I think we also need more social scientists in EA (understanding how people behave, especially around new technologies, is probably very useful and important for X-risk mitigation – and I’d argue that psychologists and sociologists belong in the S for Science in the STEM acronym), but I assume there were very few of these scientists in this survey considering the survey was sent to a group of people in mostly “hard” tech/sciences.
If only one woman responded, this survey obviously doesn’t cover the whole STEM community. Hot take: this seems to me to be more a survey of men rather than a survey of the “STEM community” (in quotes due to point 1 and also because a survey of the STEM community would probably be too broad to be useful).
If this is going to become a community-building effort, I think we need to be careful if we spend more time, effort, and money building communities in the respondents’ communities. EA is already overwhelmingly white and male; I somewhat worry that increasing overlap in the respondents’ communities will cause EA to become a boy’s club.
Since the majority of the respondents were US- (and some UK-) based, I would also be interested in seeing the ethnic breakdown (if this was collected).
A final demographic that I’d like to see from this survey is the age breakdown – mid-career professionals, in my experience, tend to have important and useful perspectives that EA generally lacks.
Like Linda, I’d also like to know the response rate for this survey.[EDIT]: 41/~1800 seems like an awfully low response rate, so doesn’t seem particularly representative of Foresight’s STEM community, which makes me question the validity of these conclusions.What does technology mean here? Usually it means information technology, but I think “physical” technologies also have the potential to help mitigate X-risks. It feels obvious to me that getting technologists involved will help solve problems effectively – this is what technologists do!
I agree with the conclusions and recommended actions, and my intuition says that it’s better to focus on the ways to get STEM professionals working on X-risks and EA cause areas without integrating the EA and STEM communities.
High Impact Engineers has already been doing point 3 of the recommended actions (introducing existential risks and EA cause areas for the STEM community) at universities as a low-risk test of whether people with an engineering background respond well to these ideas – we’ve found that they do! We plan to do more outreach to professional engineering institutes in the next 6 months, and this is a project where collaboration could be beneficial. Happy to discuss more.
At HI-Eng, common areas that we’ve found to be in-demand for biosecurity, civilisation resilience, AI governance, differential neurotechnology development, and other X-risk mitigation seem to be electrical/electronic engineers, mechanical engineers, and materials engineers (particularly experts in semiconductors). Bioengineers and biomedical engineers seem to be useful for biosecurity. Happy to discuss this further, and we also expect to have a presentation/poster to share on this soon.
My overall takeaway: a survey like this is probably useful and important, but I would need to know more about the types of people surveyed for the data to be useful and for the actions to be convincing.
Hi Jessica, thank you so much for your thorough read and response! I found it very useful.
I agree there isn’t really such a thing as “the STEM community”, and if I were to write the post now I would want to better reflect the fact that this was asked to the Foresight community, in which most participants are working in one of our technical fields: neurotech, space tech, nanotech, biotech or computation. In the survey I ask if people identify themselves as STEM professionals, a question to which most answered yes (85% of respondents in this v. small survey). So as you point out, most are not in the life sciences.
Regarding the demographics, our community is very male dominated. However, our team is all female, and we are actively trying to improve on this. I would be interested to hear if you at HI Engineers are doing anything on this, and have any learning that you can share? I did not collect any data on ethnicity or age in this survey.
As I stated in the post, and can only state again, this is very preliminary, so I agree one shouldn’t draw too much of a conclusion based on this. But I’m happy I put it out there as is so that I could get this useful feedback from you!
Regarding what technology means in the text, I would say that it refers to both informations and “physical” technologies. I’d be very interested to hear more about your outreach work with HI Engineers. Overall, your work looks very interesting, and so I hope you don’t mind if I reach out “off forum”! :)