Yes we do (and thanks for the comment!).
First, 80.1% of respondents who were asked to answer additional questions about FTX decided to do so. This is similar to the number of respondents (83.1%) who agreed to answer the ‘extra credit’ questions prior to us adding the FTX questions. So, it does not seem like there was a large tendency for respondents to not answer the FTX questions, compared to just a general tendency to not answer extra questions at all.
Second, we looked at whether there are differences in demographics between those who answered the FTX questions and extra credit questions (prior to FTX). We found that men were slightly less likely to answer the extra credit questions (81.8% for men and 85.7% for non-men) but more likely to answer the FTX questions than non-men (81.9% for men and 76.3% for non-men).
We also find that more engaged respondents are more likely to answer the additional questions (no surprise there).
Looking at cause prioritization, we found that higher ratings of longtermist causes and higher ratings of neartermist causes were associated with being less likely to answer this section. So, these do not seem to show a distinctive effect of longtermism or neartermism. This could simply be explained by a third factor or reflect an association with general ‘cause positivity’ (e.g. people who generally tend to rate all causes more highly are less likely to answer these questions).
We conducted a further analysis based on a cluster analysis which we had conducted previously (and which we will outline in the forthcoming cause priortization post). This groups respondents into three discrete groups: longtermists, neartermists, and a group which rates both cause areas highly (this group is disproportionately newer EAs). In this analysis there was no significant difference in likelihood to answer these questions, but people in the ‘high everything’ cluster were substantially less likely to answer these questions.
We did not find any statistically significant differences regarding race (White vs. Non-white) and age.
Hi Rockwell, thanks for the question.
In response to your comment I went over the descriptions from respondents who said they first heard of EA via a podcast and coded, where possible, the name of the podcast or podcast host. I also included the numbers from respondents who first heard of EA via 80,000 Hours and who specifically mentioned the 80,000 Hours podcast. The results are in the graph below.
It shouldn’t be too surprising to hear people who enter EA mention Sam Harris because his podcast is by far the most popular podcast mentioned, at 62.6% of all podcasts.