Co-founder of High Impact Engineers. Background in materials science and mechanical engineering. Also chat to me about community building, career decisions, etc.
I appreciate the work you put into this survey and report. I would like to see the breakdown of "non-white" racial identities – I would expect that answers would skew differently based on different racial identities.
I understand there might not be enough data points for each racial identity, but that might just be a sign that we need to work harder at retaining certain people (and encouraging them to fill out surveys!)
I don't know anyone personally, but you could potentially reach out to someone working at the Clean Air Task Force or perhaps Jan-Willem at Training for Good might have contacts in the space?
I was speaking with someone working on far-UVC research who mentioned that one of the biggest obstacles to GUV being implemented despite it being around for ages is the lack of skilled technicians to install them (which is what we included in our Resources Portal page on how engineers can contribute to biosecurity). I didn't realise the nuances of this until I read this post – so I really appreciate your work here!
This is a really interesting post! I think we need more posts like this that detail the practical obstacles to the implementation of solutions. Have shared with the High Impact Engineers Slack!
Thanks for your comment Vasco! There are definitely lots of factors at play here, and the "all else being equal" bit in the part you quoted is doing a lot of heavy lifting and masking multiple assumptions that we could perhaps have laid out more clearly, including the assumption that p("civilisation collapse") << p("global catastrophe") << p("catastrophe"), and that equal amounts of resources are going into prevention, response, and resilience.
This is of course not the case, but analysis of this landscape is out of scope for this iteration of the Resources Portal. This page was designed as an introduction for engineers looking into high-impact areas to do work in/start projects in, and hopefully future iterations of our Resources Portal will be able to deep dive these intricacies. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, as it's something we will look into in the future!
I would be interested in more data about what people in EA's professional backgrounds are to see if the gender ratios are different from the gender ratio of the wider (non-EA) professions. It seems plausible to me that the framing of EA (heavily data-centric, emotionally detached) could attract/appeal to men more, whereas the focus on social impact and doing good might attract more women.
Thanks for this post – as a woman in STEM and a community builder, gender diversity is something I'm trying to improve. I don't have any answers, but I want to say that I wholeheartedly support this initiative and would love to hear any suggestions on how to appeal to and retain minority groups in EA!
I appreciate the work you put into this survey and report. I would like to see the breakdown of "non-white" racial identities – I would expect that answers would skew differently based on different racial identities.
I understand there might not be enough data points for each racial identity, but that might just be a sign that we need to work harder at retaining certain people (and encouraging them to fill out surveys!)
Do you count PhD students as students? (although I reckon the main concern is that we have too many undergraduate students)
Hi Arno,
I don't know anyone personally, but you could potentially reach out to someone working at the Clean Air Task Force or perhaps Jan-Willem at Training for Good might have contacts in the space?
Jess
I was speaking with someone working on far-UVC research who mentioned that one of the biggest obstacles to GUV being implemented despite it being around for ages is the lack of skilled technicians to install them (which is what we included in our Resources Portal page on how engineers can contribute to biosecurity). I didn't realise the nuances of this until I read this post – so I really appreciate your work here!
This is a really interesting post! I think we need more posts like this that detail the practical obstacles to the implementation of solutions. Have shared with the High Impact Engineers Slack!
Thank you!
Excited to see this group launch!
Thanks for your comment Vasco! There are definitely lots of factors at play here, and the "all else being equal" bit in the part you quoted is doing a lot of heavy lifting and masking multiple assumptions that we could perhaps have laid out more clearly, including the assumption that p("civilisation collapse") << p("global catastrophe") << p("catastrophe"), and that equal amounts of resources are going into prevention, response, and resilience.
This is of course not the case, but analysis of this landscape is out of scope for this iteration of the Resources Portal. This page was designed as an introduction for engineers looking into high-impact areas to do work in/start projects in, and hopefully future iterations of our Resources Portal will be able to deep dive these intricacies. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, as it's something we will look into in the future!
I would be interested in more data about what people in EA's professional backgrounds are to see if the gender ratios are different from the gender ratio of the wider (non-EA) professions. It seems plausible to me that the framing of EA (heavily data-centric, emotionally detached) could attract/appeal to men more, whereas the focus on social impact and doing good might attract more women.
Thanks for this post – as a woman in STEM and a community builder, gender diversity is something I'm trying to improve. I don't have any answers, but I want to say that I wholeheartedly support this initiative and would love to hear any suggestions on how to appeal to and retain minority groups in EA!