I think this post mostly stands up and seems to have been used a fair amount.
Understanding roughly how large the EA community seems moderately fairly, so I think this analysis falls into the category of ‘relatively simple things that are useful to the EA community but which were nevertheless neglected for a long while’.
One thing that I would do differently if I were writing this post again, is that I think I was under-confident about the plausible sampling rates, based on the benchmarks that we took from the community. I think I was understandably uneasy, the first time we did this, basing estimates of sampling rates based on the handful of points of comparisons (EA Forum members, the EA Groups survey total membership, specific local groups, and an informal survey in the CEA offices), so I set pretty wide confidence intervals in my guesstimate model. But, with hindsight, I think this assigns too much weight to the possibility that the broader population of highly engaged EAs were taking the EA Survey at a higher rate than members of all of these specific highly engaged groups. As a result, the overall estimates are probably a bit too uncertain but, in particular, the smaller estimates of the size of the community are probably less likely.
One of the more exciting developments following this post is that, now that we have more than one year of data, we can use this method to estimate growth in the EA community (as discussed here and in the thread below). This method has since been used, for example, here and here. Estimating the growth of the EA community may be more important than estimating the size of the EA community, so this is a neat development. I put a guesstimate model for estimating growth here, which suggests around 14% growth in the number of highly engaged EAs (the number of less engaged EAs is much less certain). For simplicity of comparison, I left confidence intervals as wide as they were in 2019, even though, as discussed, I think this suggests implausible levels of uncertainty about the estimates.
I think this post mostly stands up and seems to have been used a fair amount.
Understanding roughly how large the EA community seems moderately fairly, so I think this analysis falls into the category of ‘relatively simple things that are useful to the EA community but which were nevertheless neglected for a long while’.
One thing that I would do differently if I were writing this post again, is that I think I was under-confident about the plausible sampling rates, based on the benchmarks that we took from the community. I think I was understandably uneasy, the first time we did this, basing estimates of sampling rates based on the handful of points of comparisons (EA Forum members, the EA Groups survey total membership, specific local groups, and an informal survey in the CEA offices), so I set pretty wide confidence intervals in my guesstimate model. But, with hindsight, I think this assigns too much weight to the possibility that the broader population of highly engaged EAs were taking the EA Survey at a higher rate than members of all of these specific highly engaged groups. As a result, the overall estimates are probably a bit too uncertain but, in particular, the smaller estimates of the size of the community are probably less likely.
One of the more exciting developments following this post is that, now that we have more than one year of data, we can use this method to estimate growth in the EA community (as discussed here and in the thread below). This method has since been used, for example, here and here. Estimating the growth of the EA community may be more important than estimating the size of the EA community, so this is a neat development. I put a guesstimate model for estimating growth here, which suggests around 14% growth in the number of highly engaged EAs (the number of less engaged EAs is much less certain). For simplicity of comparison, I left confidence intervals as wide as they were in 2019, even though, as discussed, I think this suggests implausible levels of uncertainty about the estimates.