Head of Data & Research at Our World in Data
GWWC pledge (10%) since 2018
EdMathieu
Karma: 1,177
[Question] How can we make Our World in Data more useful to the EA community?
New forum feature: preview & embed Our World in Data charts
The current implementation doesn’t include them. I guess it would be possible to do it, but they’re quite larger than Grapher charts in terms of interface, so I’m not sure we would manage to find a user-friendly way to make them fit within the width of a forum post.
I love this idea! I’ve also been thinking a lot about the lack of quick-response capabilities within EA during the pandemic, so I think it could be a very impactful project. Having coordinated Our World in Data’s work on COVID for the last two years, I’d be very happy to be in touch and contribute to anything data-science-related once you start to plan things.
What share of British adults are vegetarian, vegan, or flexitarian?
Thanks for the feedback! I’ve edited the title.
Thanks for the feedback Jakub! I’ve added a clearer mention of the self-reporting aspect in the article & charts.
My (unverified) suspicion is that these people wanted to pick something that they considered to be a specific diet but that isn’t related to meat-eating and therefore wasn’t listed, e.g. ‘gluten-free’. That could also explain the correlation with age if younger people tend to adopt these ‘alternative’ diets in a higher proportion.
Strong-upvoting this. The way you could decide to invest money into expanding your social media reach would be to properly sponsor your account through ads on IG/Tw/FB. These platforms allow for precise targeting based on demographics and interests – and given the specific scope of HIA, I imagine that designing good targets would be easy enough.
Space Exploration & Satellites on Our World in Data
Congrats guys – it’s great to see this productive collaboration become a full-fledged organization!
Explore the new UN demographic projections to 2100
Where did I say anything about “giving up betting as an epistemic practice”? My post specifically listed why I know it’s good epistemic practice.
All I said was that during a crisis that involves the potential loss of money of 100,000 people, constantly suggesting 4-digit bets on public online spaces as soon as two people have the slightest disagreement may not be the most empathetic thing to do.
I’m not surprised that you would strongly disagree with this. Sorry if this is a bit blunt, but given that you very recently launched a public forecast on the love life of a community member, without their permission, to the dismay of many people on Twitter, I wouldn’t think you have a particularly calibrated frame of reference as to when we should hold off on bets.
AMA: Ed Mathieu, Head of Data & Research at Our World in Data
Great question, thank you! :)
Did you mean to ask it as part of the AMA?
If so, could you please repost it as a comment there? It’s easier for coordination.
Thanks for the question!
It depends significantly on how we measure impact, which has always been tricky. As Lizka guessed below, there are multiple ways we can do this, as our impact can consist of influencing the general public (for some of our most viral pieces), “influencers” (journalists, book writers, or anyone with a significant social media presence), teachers, policymakers, etc. These can be very different paths to impact.
Some are pretty easy to measure (the general public can be roughly measured by raw pageviews). In contrast, others are much harder; influence on policymakers can be somewhat measured through mentions in things like government reports, but a lot of it happens behind closed doors (thankfully, we sometimes hear about this too, e.g., someone on our team getting a text message by a friend who works in government, saying our charts were shown in a critical meeting).
If we measure impact purely in terms of media mentions, paper citations, significant re-use, views of our charts, etc., nothing comes even close to our work on COVID-19. Both on our site, but also because it was the underlying data used by many national media on their site, the number of eyeballs on this data was quite crazy, and the rest of our content isn’t within the same order of magnitude.
A second way to answer the question would be to examine which of our articles or charts keep popping up in books, learning materials, online conversations, etc. In that regard, I think that Hannah Ritchie’s articles “You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local” and “What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?” are probably the articles that have the highest cumulative impact over time.
If we zoom out, a third way of measuring impact is to ask which of our pieces seem to have shaped other people’s worldviews. In that way, Max Roser’s broader essays such as “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.” and “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it” are strong foundations of our content and a significant fraction of the people who read us have probably come across them.
But overall, it’s hard to pinpoint precisely what has had the most impact. We have a long tail of 3,500 charts, so if one was ever shown to a head of state who made a different decision because of it, that could count as some of our highest direct impact ever – but we might not even be aware of that!
Thanks for the question, Vasco!
Animal welfare is an important topic that we want to cover better on OWID. The first step will be to publish more and better content on it. We plan to make significant steps toward this over the summer (stay tuned!).
However, this new content will likely focus on factory farming and related questions. I see the question of wild animal welfare as one on the edge of research, even by EA standards. In other words, more and more people are interested in it, but there’s no consensus that it constitutes one of the world’s largest problems. In many ways, from an outside (non-EA) perspective, it’s not so different from longtermism or digital sentience: something most people have never even considered as an issue, but that could become one over the next few years or decades.
Because of that, I could imagine us one day writing about the general idea of wild animal welfare, the philosophical arguments behind it, why some researchers study it, and what the numbers are. This would allow us to introduce more people to it as an “interesting angle” to add to their worldview. This could look like Max Roser’s article “The future is vast – what does this mean for our own life?”.
Thanks for the question, Angelina!
The article on longtermism and our content on AI were published in 2022. They’ve had great success (6-figure page views in both cases). I was particularly happy that we had no negative reaction to either topic, given that both could have seemed outside of our usual coverage for traditional OWID readers.
On longtermism, the reception was very positive. Max Roser’s hourglass chart had a Wait-but-Why vibe that made it particularly popular on social media. My (unsubstantiated) impression is that many people remembered that part of the article more than the broader presentation of longtermism. But if we want existential risks to be taken more seriously, getting more people to adopt a broader perspective of humanity’s past and future is probably an essential first step, so I’d say the article was very beneficial overall. Another nice aspect is that it was well-received in longtermist circles; no one seemed to think we had neglected or distorted any angle of the topic.
On AI, the impact has been more immediate. We published a new topic page, 5 articles, and 29 charts late last year. We were delighted that we could give a platform to the excellent data published by Epoch and that it was much more widely seen because of it (both on our site and in re-uses, e.g., in The Economist). Reactions to the 5 articles seemed very positive as well; “Technology over the long run” and “The brief history of artificial intelligence” were the most shared among them.
The most significant limitation is that this was all published just a few weeks before the ChatGPT/GPT-4 craze started. If anything, we’re even more convinced now than at the time that AI is one of the world’s largest problems, and we’re working on an interim update of our content.
We also did this for EA France a few days before EAGx Oxford (on Tuesday), and it was indeed very helpful. We answered many questions that people had about 1o1, explained how to use Swapcard (some people hadn’t quite realized how important it would be during the conference), the ‘etiquette’ for contacting people on the app, important physical & mental health tips, etc.
I’d also suggest creating a WhatsApp or Messenger group. It’s very useful for practical coordination before (hotels, admin stuff, COVID restrictions, etc.) and during the event, and gives first-timers the feeling of going to the conference as part of a larger group.