[Note: This is very rough but I’m looking for feedback and help on doing this estimate so I wanted to just post it quickly and see if others can help.]
I’ve been trying to estimate the theoretical upper-bounds (or lower-bounds) on the *potential* community size of LW.
I know rationalists who seriously claim that we shouldn’t spend effort trying to grow LW because over half of the people smart enough to even follow the conversation (much less add to it) are already here. The world is pretty irrational, but I’m trying to find evidence (if it exists) that things aren’t that bad. There are only around 6000 LW accounts and only 200-300 are active any given month.
So a trivial bound on our community is
[200, 6.88 billion]
A big filter is being able to use English online
Native English Speakers: 341,000,000
All English Speakers: 508,000,000
I found a similar number (536,000,000) for number of internet users who speak English.
7.4% --- Speak English
However, only 15% of US + UK (majority of English speakers worldwide) are “Not religious”. Another sad sub-fact is that 25% of people with “No religion” believe in god as well! So really it’s only 10-11% of Americans and British who are potential LWers. My guess is that if someone can’t get this right, they really need to go through Dawkins before they can realistically contribute to or benefit from our community. I’m sure there’s some debate on this, but it seems like a pretty good heuristic while not being iron-clad.
0.81%
"Intelligence and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations" says that the US and the UK have avg IQs of 98 and 100 respectively.
And although you’d think being an atheist would be a big screen that would filter highly for IQ, it only accounts for about 4 extra IQ points versus the average.
So if we assume a base-line IQ of 103 among atheist from the US and UK (who speak English), the proportion of them with an IQ of at least 130+ is only 3.6%
0.0293%
So in we clumsily extrapolate the US+UK demos across all English speaking online people world-wide, maybe we have 2 million possible readers left in our target audience?
Google Analytics claims Less Wrong has had a total of 1,090,339 “Absolute Unique Visitors” since LW started. That’s almost certainly an over-estimate -- although it’s not just unique visitors which is over 2 million. Hmm... if we assumed that was correct and 1 million people have come to LW at some point and only 6000 stuck around long enough to sign up, perhaps we did already have 1/2 our target audience or so arrive and leave already? I dunno. What do you think?
I think this analysis of mine is pretty weak. Especially the numerical estimates and my methodology. I’m trying to use conditional probabilities but having trouble separating things.
I’d welcome help from anyone who can find better statistics or do a totally different analysis to get our potential audience size. Is it 10 million? 10,000? Somewhere in between?
Some other screening characteristics I’ve considered using are MBTI, gender (is it correct to just divide our target by 2? i haven’t chosen to do that but i think a fair case could be made for it... let me know what you think), age (although I believe my English screen takes into account removing those too young to use the net), etc
I’m looking forward to seeing some other sets of numbers that come to different estimates!
Thanks for this analysis Yvain. I'm glad you're interested in this even if you are (rightfully) pessimistic.
I agree that the ongoing community dynamic is a terrible place to "jump into" LW. I've been wanting help from someone (any volunteers out there??) to help design a more friendly, more Wikipedia-ish homepage for LessWrong which could actually help non-hardcore LW users navigate the site in a way that makes sense. The promoted stream is such a horrible resource for that. If someone could make a mock-up of a potential LW homepage (on the LW wiki perhaps?), I could get it implemented for you if it's even halfway respectable. Nothing could be worse than what we currently have. A good homepage would probably have a few stable pointers to the important sequences, a portion of the current promoted feed, a video or other tutorial explaining what LW is all about... I dunno. Just anything that isn't an opaque listing of "Open threads!", "Cryonics!", "Torture scenarios!", "Rationality Quotes!", "Omega!", "Meetups!", "Cake!"
For what it's worth, the thing that got me visiting here regularly was the list of EY's OB posts.
I know y'all love the sequences as such, and I can understand why, but the fact remains that I was motivated to work my way through much of that material relatively systematically in a chronological format, but once I got to the end of that list -- that is, the time of the OB-to-LW migration -- I bogged down (1). The sequence/wiki style is less compelling to me than the chronological style, especially given the degree to which the posts themselves really are b... (read more)