For many of the breakdowns it would be helpful to understand the base rate in those countries to understand what the data means. For example, gender is easy enough since the base rate is usually close to 50⁄50, but for things like race I have no idea how many people identify as white, black, asian, etc. in each region to compare against. I realize not everything has a base rate to compare against, but for those that do having that data would really help contextualize what’s going on here.
That makes sense. Reference numbers even for things like race is surprisingly tricky. We’ve previously considered comparing the percentages for race within the EA Survey to baseline percentages. But although this works passably well for the US (EAS respondents are more white) and UK (EAS respondents are less white)- without taking into account the fact that EAS respondents are disproportionately rich, highly educated and young and therefore should not be expected to represent the composition of the general population- for many other major countries there simple isn’t national data on race/ethnicity that matches the same categories as the US/UK. I think people should generally be a lot more uncertain when estimating how far the EA community is representative in this sense. The figures still allow comparison within the EA community though.
For many of the breakdowns it would be helpful to understand the base rate in those countries to understand what the data means. For example, gender is easy enough since the base rate is usually close to 50⁄50, but for things like race I have no idea how many people identify as white, black, asian, etc. in each region to compare against. I realize not everything has a base rate to compare against, but for those that do having that data would really help contextualize what’s going on here.
That makes sense. Reference numbers even for things like race is surprisingly tricky. We’ve previously considered comparing the percentages for race within the EA Survey to baseline percentages. But although this works passably well for the US (EAS respondents are more white) and UK (EAS respondents are less white)- without taking into account the fact that EAS respondents are disproportionately rich, highly educated and young and therefore should not be expected to represent the composition of the general population- for many other major countries there simple isn’t national data on race/ethnicity that matches the same categories as the US/UK. I think people should generally be a lot more uncertain when estimating how far the EA community is representative in this sense. The figures still allow comparison within the EA community though.