This post introduces an app—Distributr—developed by Rethink Priorities’ Jamie Elsey to better incorporate and visualize uncertainty in cost-effectiveness estimates. As a case study, the post discusses GiveWell’s assessment of Happier Lives Institute’s cost-effectiveness analyses for StrongMinds.

This blog post examines why people adapt vegetarian and vegan diets. RP’s 2019 survey indicated that the greatest sources of influence were personal interactions, as well as interactions with animals. The importance attributed to social media, online videos, and documentaries is also high, particularly among more recent adopters.

Previous research from Rethink Priorities found that a majority of the population agreed with a statement from the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) that stated “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” This research piece explores why 26% of the population disagreed with this statement.

On June 2-3, 2023, Rethink Priorities conducted an online poll of US adults to assess their views regarding a recent open statement from the Center for AI Safety (CAIS). The statement read: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

This nationally-representative survey of U.S. public opinions on AI aimed to replicate and extend other recent polls. The findings suggest that people are cautious about AI and favor federal regulation though they perceive other risks (e.g. nuclear war) as more likely to cause human extinction.

In December, Rethink Priorities’ Survey team worked with the Center for Effective Altruism (CEA) to rapidly add a section to the 2022 EA Survey to assess reactions to the crisis and to responses by those in the community.

This post reports the results of a survey we ran in April 2022 investigating how many people had heard of ‘effective altruism’ in a large sample, weighted to be representative of the US general population. This survey replicates and extends a survey we ran in conjunction with CEA in early 2021, which focused only on US students. Because that survey was not representative, we think that these new results offer a significant advance in estimating how many people in the US population have heard of EA, and in particular sub-groups like students and even students at top-ranked universities.

In this post we describe people’s self-reported levels of engagement in EA, what activities related to effective altruism they have completed and their group membership. We also describe differences in these modes of engagement across groups (gender, race, age, time in EA etc.) and present a series of models looking at factors associated with higher engagement. This may help identify which groups are currently more engaged, which groups are likely to become more engaged and which factors may lead to EAs becoming more engaged.

Like last year’s post, this post reports on a number of questions about people’s experiences of the EA community and what factors helped or harmed their involvement, many of which were requested by the Centre for Effective Altruism. Most of the questions requested are different from last year’s, though they address similar topics.

Global Poverty is the highest rated cause overall. We found support for longtermist and meta causes to increase with higher self-reported engagement in EA. We also observed higher support for neartermist causes in non-male respondents across engagement levels, though there was no gender difference in support for longtermist causes among more engaged respondents. Comparing ratings across separate EA surveys, we observe a decrease in support for global poverty over time, and an increase in support for animal welfare and AI risk

A significant share of Americans are uncertain (24%-45% don’t know) about their attitudes toward insect farming. This suggests that consumers may be particularly responsive to information on insect farming and that these views are largely “up for grabs”. There may be a large first mover advantage to whomever first ends up informing consumers most clearly. More Americans oppose a ballot measure to ban insect feed for farmed animals (49%) than support it (29%). We did find high levels of support (52%-65%) for the idea that insects (honeybees, ants, termites) were capable of feeling pain.

Personal contacts (16.3%) remain the most common way people that people have first heard about EA, throughout the history of the movement, followed by 80,000 Hours (12.8%). Among EAs who first got involved in EA in 2020, 17.1% first heard about EA through a personal contact and 16.5% from 80,000 Hours. Podcasts have increased in importance as a source of people first hearing about EA, accounting for 15.2% of people who got involved in 2020. More than half (50.7%) of respondents cited 80,000 Hours as important for them getting involved in EA. A much larger proportion of non-male respondents first heard about EA from a personal contact compared to male respondents. Significantly higher proportions of non-male respondents found personal contacts or local groups important for them getting involved in EA

222 unique groups completed the survey from 50 different countries. There were roughly equal numbers of city groups (78) and university groups (77), with a smaller number of national/regional groups ( 39), joint university/city groups, (12) and other groups (16). The largest proportion of groups are in Europe (37%), followed by US/Canada (29%), the UK (12%), Australasia (7%) and 15% in the rest of the world. The number of new groups founded per year has remained steady since 2015. Nearly 12,000 people interacted with these groups in some fashion in the previous year, lower than in previous years (likely explained by the pandemic).

The composition of the EA community remains similar to last year, in terms of age (82% 34 or younger), race (76% white) and gender (71% male). The median age when EAs reported getting involved in the community was 24. More than two thirds (69%) of our sample were non-students and <15% were undergraduates. Roughly equal proportions of non-student EAs report being in for-profit (earning to give), for-profit (not earning to give), non-profit (EA), non-profit (not EA), government, think tank/lobbying/advocacy careers. More respondents seem to be prioritizing career capital than immediate impact

We examine the cost of living in the cities with the largest numbers of EAs. Most cities with large EA populations are very expensive to live in. This may pose a barrier to EAs wishing to live and work in cities with lots of EAs

We estimate that 6.5-8.8% of EAs live in the San Francisco Bay Area and 5.3-7.3% live in London. Both are much larger than the next largest EA centre (New York). More EAs in our sample live in ‘Loxbridge’ (London, Oxford and Cambridge) than the SF Bay Area. The total percentage of EAs living in Loxbridge and the SF Bay Area combined is estimated to be between 14.5% and 19.5% (roughly 1-in-7 to 1-in-5). 50% of EAs live in the top 22 cities, 80% live in the top 100 cities out of 340 cities total. Almost a third (32%) of highly engaged EAs live in the SF Bay Area, London or Oxbridge. The share of EAs living outside the SF Bay Area, London or Oxbridge appears to be steadily growing with time.

It is uncertain how many people there in the EA community and what proportion of these the EA Survey manages to sample. We compare EA Survey numbers to other data sources and estimate that we sampled around 40% of highly engaged EAs, and fewer less engaged EAs. Based on this, we estimate there are around 2315 highly engaged EAs and 6500 (90% CI: 4700-10,000) active EAs in the community overall.

More respondents’ level of interest in EA increased over the last year (43%) than decreased (18%). The most common reasons for interest increasing were local EA groups (14%), the respondent being new to EA (12%), the local EA community more broadly (10%), or career change (10%). The most common reasons for interest decreasing were people being too busy (18%), a perceived mismatch between the person’s cause preferences with that of the overall EA community (12%), or finding diminishing returns from involvement in EA (10%). The most commonly cited barriers to further involvement in EA were lack of job opportunities that were a good fit (29%), no close friends in EA (28%), and it being too hard to get an EA job (23%).

Personal Contacts (14%), LessWrong (9.6%) and 80,000 Hours (9.6%) are still the main ways most people have heard of EA over time. In recent years (2018-2019), 80,000 Hours (17%) is the single largest source for people first hearing about EA, followed by Personal Contacts (15%). 80,000 Hours (47.8%), GiveWell (42.7%) and Personal Contact (34.8%) had the highest percentages of EAs saying they were important for getting them involved in EA.

In this post we explore geographic differences in EA across the globe. A plurality of respondents reported being located in the United States (36.33%), followed by the UK (16.19%). It seems worthwhile to investigate if these populations are distinctly different from EAs elsewhere. This may help to point to causes or dynamics in the movement that are being missed to due to the dominance of these two nationalities.