Some back of the envelope calculations trying to make sense out of the number of subscribers.
The EA survey gets about ~2500 responses per year from self identified EAs and I expect it represents between 10% and 70% of the EA community, so a fair estimate is that the EA community is about 1e4 people. They ask about top priorities. About 16% of respondents consider AI risk a top priority. Assuming representativeness, that means about 2e3 EAs who consider AI risk a priority. Of those I would expect about half to be considering actively pursuing a career in the field, for 1e3 people. This checks out with the newsletter number of subscribers.
Hmm, this seems roughly plausible. It doesn’t gel with my experience of how many people seem to be trying to enter the field (which I would have estimated almost an order of magnitude less, maybe 100-200), but it’s possible that there’s a large group of such people who I don’t interact with who nonetheless are subscribed to the newsletter.
We also might have different intended meanings of “career in the field”.
Some back of the envelope calculations trying to make sense out of the number of subscribers.
The EA survey gets about ~2500 responses per year from self identified EAs and I expect it represents between 10% and 70% of the EA community, so a fair estimate is that the EA community is about 1e4 people.
They ask about top priorities. About 16% of respondents consider AI risk a top priority.
Assuming representativeness, that means about 2e3 EAs who consider AI risk a priority.
Of those I would expect about half to be considering actively pursuing a career in the field, for 1e3 people.
This checks out with the newsletter number of subscribers.
Hmm, this seems roughly plausible. It doesn’t gel with my experience of how many people seem to be trying to enter the field (which I would have estimated almost an order of magnitude less, maybe 100-200), but it’s possible that there’s a large group of such people who I don’t interact with who nonetheless are subscribed to the newsletter.
We also might have different intended meanings of “career in the field”.