Prevalence of belief in "human biodiversity" amongst self-reported EA respondents in the 2020 SlateStarCodex Survey ===================================================================================================================== Note: This post presents some data which might inform downstream questions, rather than providing a fully cooked perspective on its own. For this reason, I have tried to not really express many opinions here. Readers might instead be interested in more fleshed out perspectives on the Bostrom affair, e.g., [here](https://rychappell.substack.com/p/text-subtext-and-miscommunication) in favor or [here](https://www.pasteurscube.com/why-im-personally-upset-with-nick-bostrom-right-now/) against. ## Graph ![](https://images.nunosempere.com/blog/2023/01/16/hbd-ea/q_hbd_eas.png) ## Discussion ### Selection effects I am not sure whether EAs who answered the EA forum are a representative sample of all EAs. It might not be, if SSC readers have shared biases and assumptions distinct from those of the EA population as a whole. That said, raw numerical numbers will be accurate, e.g., we can say that "at least 57 people who identified as EAs in 2020 strongly agree with the human biodiversity hypothesis". ### Question framing effects I think the question as phrased is likely to *overestimate* belief in human biodiversity, because the phrasing seems somewhat inocuous, and in particular because "biodiversity" has positive mood affiliation. I think that fewer people would answer positively to a less inocuous sounding version, e.g., "How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity",\n eg the belief that some races are genetically stupider than others? (1 = very unfavorable, 5 = very favorable)". For a review of survey effects, see [A review of two books on survey-making](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DCcciuLxRveSkBng2/a-review-of-two-books-on-survey-making). ### Interpreting as a probability This isn't really all that meaningful, but we can assign percentages to each answer as follows: - 1: 5% - 2: 20% - 3: 50% - 4: 80% - 5: 95% - NA: 50% The above requires a judgment call to assign probabilities to numbers in a Likert scale. In particular, I am making the judgment call that 1 and 5 correspond to 5% and 95%, rather than e.g., 0% and 100%, or 1% and 99%, based on my forecasting experience. And then we can calculate an implicit probability as follows ``` ( 174 * 0.03 + 227 * 0.2 + 288 * 0.5 + 175 * 0.8 + 57 * 0.95 + 22 * 0.5) / 993 ``` The above calculation outputs 0.4025..., which, in a sense, means that SSC survey respondents which self-identified as EA assigned, as a whole, a 40% credence to the human biodiversity hypothesis. ### Comparison with all SSC respondents ![](https://images.nunosempere.com/blog/2023/01/16/hbd-ea/q_hbd_all.png) ## Code to replicate this In an R runtime, run: ``` ## Libraries library(ggplot2) ## Read data setwd("/home/loki/Documents/core/ea/fresh/misc/ea-hbd") ## change to the folder in your computer data <- read.csv("2020ssc_public.csv", header=TRUE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE) ## Restrict analysis to EAs data_EAs <- data[data["EAID"] == "Yes",] View(data_EAs) n=dim(data_EAs)[1] n ## Find biodiversity question colnames(data_EAs) colnames(data_EAs)[47] ## Process biodiversity question for EAs tally <- list() tally$options = c(1:5, "NA") tally$count = sapply(tally$options, function(x){ sum(data_EAs[47] == x, na.rm = TRUE) }) tally$count[6] = sum(is.na(data_EAs[47])) tally$count tally = as.data.frame(tally) tally ## Plot prevalence of belief within EA titulo='Prevalence of attitudes towards "human biodiversity"\n amongst EA SlateStarCodex survey respondents in 2020' subtitulo='"How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity",\n eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?"\n (1 = very unfavorable, 5 = very favorable), n=993' (ggplot(data = tally, aes(x =options, y = count)) + geom_histogram( stat="identity", position= position_stack(reverse = TRUE), fill="navyblue" ))+ scale_y_continuous(limits = c(0, 300))+ labs( title=titulo, subtitle=subtitulo, x="answers", y="answer count", legend.title = element_blank(), legend.text.align = 0 )+ theme( legend.title = element_blank(), plot.subtitle = element_text(hjust = 0.5), plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5), legend.position="bottom" ) + geom_text(aes(label=count, size = 2), colour="#000000",size=2.5, vjust = -0.5) height=5 width=height*(1+sqrt(5))/2 ggsave("q_hbd_EAs.png" , units="in", width=width, height=height, dpi=800) ## Process biodiversity question for all SSC respondents tally_all_ssc <- list() tally_all_ssc$options = c(1:5, "NA") tally_all_ssc$count = sapply(tally_all_ssc$options, function(x){ sum(data[47] == x, na.rm = TRUE) }) tally_all_ssc$count[6] = sum(is.na(data[47])) tally_all_ssc$count tally_all_ssc = as.data.frame(tally_all_ssc) tally_all_ssc tally ## Plot titulo='Prevalence of attitudes towards "human biodiversity"\n amongst all SlateStarCodex survey respondents in 2020' subtitulo='"How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity",\n eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?"\n (1 = very unfavorable, 5 = very favorable), n=993' (ggplot(data = tally_all_ssc, aes(x =options, y = count)) + geom_histogram( stat="identity", position= position_stack(reverse = TRUE), fill="navyblue" ))+ scale_y_continuous(limits = c(0, 2000))+ labs( title=titulo, subtitle=subtitulo, x="answers", y="answer count", legend.title = element_blank(), legend.text.align = 0 )+ theme( legend.title = element_blank(), plot.subtitle = element_text(hjust = 0.5), plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5), legend.position="bottom" ) + geom_text(aes(label=count, size = 2), colour="#000000",size=2.5, vjust = -0.5) height=5 width=height*(1+sqrt(5))/2 ggsave("q_hbd_all.png" , units="in", width=width, height=height, dpi=800) ``` The file 2020ssc_public.csv is no longer available in the [SSC blogpost](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/), but it can easily be created from the .xlsx file, or I can make it available for a small donation to the AMF.