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 in favor or here against.

Graph

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.

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

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, but it can easily be created from the .xlsx file, or I can make it available for a small donation to the AMF.

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