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Reader poll #1: age
Brian Leiter
MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY
I'm going to run a series of polls of the readership over the next couple of weeks, and would be grateful if readers would respond. We'll start with age:
UPDATE: So with 1700 votes cast, here's the age breakdown of the readers who responded:
17 or younger: 1% (19)
18-22: 5% (83)
23-30: 35% (589)
31-40: 29% (501)
41-50: 14% (230)
51-60: 8% (135)
61-70: 5% (90)
71 or older: 3% (53)
An unknown, of course, is whether particular age groups were less likely to respond to such a poll–I would guess that older readers might be less likely to respond, but that's just a guess. (While the poll was running, the blog has had close to 20,000 visits, so plainly many visitors did not participate–of course, some may not have been regular readers, but given the consistency of traffic, many surely were.) If anyone knows of research on that question, feel free to post in the comments.
"An unknown, of course, is whether particular age groups were less likely to respond to such a poll–I would guess that older readers might be less likely to respond, but that's just a guess. "
On the other hand, Ghostery regards the embedded poll as something to block to avoid tracking, and younger people may be more likely to use ad and tracking blockers (though I'm 43). (FYI, neither AdBlock nor Ghostery recognizes your border ads as ads, I assume because they're locally hosted rather than being fed from an ad network.)
Wow, those are amazing statistics, showing a remarkable skew toward younger philosophers. One can understand a big bump in the 23-30 year old category, because that would comprehend graduate students who might never make it into the profession. But one would mostly expect a fairly even number of philosophers in professional positions across the years, and that's not what this poll shows.
It really does suggest that polls on other subjects must be interpreted in the light of this heavy skew. One would surmise that on political questions, for example, the polls would be dominated by the peculiar point of view of the very young cohort of philosophers.
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