Surveys and Data Analysis

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.

This post is a linkpost from the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. The report was a collaboration between 1Day Sooner and Rethink Priorities.

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.

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.

Charitable donation (and earning-to-give) has been, and continues to be a prominent, prevalent, and impactful component of the Effective Altruism movement. The EA Survey has been distributed between 2014 and 2020, at roughly 15 month intervals. As a result, surveys were released at various points in the year, ranging from April to August, and no survey was released in 2016. In each survey we asked EAs about their charitable donations in the previous year, and their predicted donations for the year of the survey. Our work in this post/section reports on the 2020 survey (2019 giving), but our analysis extends to all the years of the EA survey.

There are 21 countries with 10 or more respondents - 17 of which are in North America, Europe, or Australasia. 92% of our respondents came from these countries. The percentage of respondents outside the top 5 countries has grown in recent years, from 22% in 2018, to 26% in 2019 and 31% in 2020. There are fewer EAs from the UK among those who joined EA more recently (in contrast to steady or growing numbers elsewhere). The largest numbers of the most highly engaged EAs come from the US (39%), followed by Europe (29%) and then the UK (21%) and the rest of the world (14%). The UK has the highest proportion of male EAs (78%), followed by the rest of Europe (73%), and then the US and the rest of the world (67-68%). Europe has the lowest average age of EAs (28.1 years), followed by the US (29.9), the UK (30.6), and then the rest of the world (31.2). Overall satisfaction with the EA community is lower in the US and UK than in other regions and countries.

6 weeks ago I shared a Metaculus question series I had authored, focused mainly on predicting grants by Open Philanthropy in 2025 and 2030, with some other questions on new large EA-aligned donors also included. This post contains a summary of the predictions on these questions so far.

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

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.

There are many ways of measuring engagement in EA, from membership of various groups to a range of actions such as donating to or working on an EA cause area. Self-reportedly highly engaged EAs tend to participate in a wide variety of activities and be members of multiple EA groups (e.g., local group, EA Facebook, EA Forum, GWWC). The most common activities that EAs engaged in were donating (81% of EAs), reading an EA book (64%), and changing careers based on EA principles (51%). A narrower slice of EAs previously worked at an EA organization (13%), posted on the EA Forum (13%), received 80,000 Hours career coaching (12%), or currently work at an EA organization (10%) . Self-reported engagement seems to be well correlated with activities undertaken and lower levels of engagement were related to nonmembership of EA groups (local group, EA Facebook, EA Forum, GWWC).

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.

EAs in the survey reported total donations of $16.1M USD in 2018. The median annual donation in 2018 was $683.92. The median annual donation in 2018, excluding those who joined EA in 2019 was $990. This is higher than the median annual donation in 2017 of $832, excluding those who joined EA in 2018. 1.3% of donors accounted for 57% of donations.

74% of EAs in the survey currently live in the same set of 5 high-income English-speaking western countries as in 2018. The share of EAs living outside of the USA and Europe is slightly larger (4%) than in 2018 and larger among newer EAs than veteran EAs. 40% of EAs live in cities with fewer than 10 other fellow EAs. While Global Poverty is a high priority cause area for EAs around the world, EAs in the USA appear to prioritize Cause Prioritization less than their peers elsewhere and EAs outside the USA and Europe appear to prioritize Climate Change more. When pressed to choose only one of the traditional broad cause areas of EA (Global Poverty, Animal Welfare, Meta, Long Term Future, Other) the Long Term Future/Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction is the most popular among EAs in the USA and Europe. EAs living outside of the USA and Europe reported the largest shares of non-engaged or only mildly engaged EAs, possibly stemming from their obstacles to participating in “high engagement activities”.

Ballot initiatives are a form of direct democracy in which citizens can gather signatures to qualify a proposed piece of legislation for the ballot, which is then subject to a binding up-or-down vote by the general electorate. Ballot initiatives are possible in Switzerland, Taiwan, many U.S. states and cities, and elsewhere. Ballot initiatives appear to maintain several advantages over more traditional policy lobbying, including lower barriers to entry and more direct control over the final legislation. However, the ultimate cost-effectiveness of a ballot initiative campaign depends on several factors, many of which are difficult to specify precisely. Although ballot initiatives hold enough promise to warrant additional investigation, it is not yet possible to say to what extent ballot initiative campaigns ought to be pursued by the effective altruism community.

The most popular career paths that effective altruists in the survey (EAs) plan to follow are in earning to give roles (38%) and working at EA organizations (37%). 50% of EAs have only one planned broad career path. Two of the top four significant barriers to becoming more involved in EA were not enough job opportunities that seemed like a good fit for me (29%) and too hard to get an EA job (23%). 462 (38%) EAs have at least 3 years work or graduate experience in the most popular skills highlighted as important talent needs for EA in a recent 80, 000 Hours/CEA survey of EA leaders. 1,014 (58%) EAs want to become more involved in the community by pursuing a career in an EA-aligned cause area.

Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause in our sample as a whole. When pressed to choose only one of the traditional broad cause areas of EA (Global Poverty, Animal Welfare, Meta, Long Term Future, Other) the Long Term Future/Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction is the most popular (41%). 42% of EAs have changed their cause area focus since they joined the movement. A majority (57%) of those who changed cause moved away from Global Poverty, and a majority (54%) moved towards the Long Term Future/Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction.

This is the first in a series analysing the results of the 2019 EA Survey. We collected 2,513 valid responses from EAs in the survey. EAs in this year’s survey look demographically much like those in past years. A majority are between the ages of 25-34. 71% reported their gender as male. 87% reported that they identify as white. 86% reported being agnostic/atheist/non-religious. 46% reported being vegan or vegetarian. 72% affiliated with the Left or Center Left politically. Over 90% have attained or are in the process of completing a post-secondary degree. 20% have attended one of the top 20 universities in the world for their undergraduate studies.

We surveyed 176 local EA groups, from over 40 different countries, including 66 student groups, 78 city groups and 21 national groups. The number of local groups has rapidly grown, but has begun to plateau. The majority of groups are relatively new, with the median age being 3 years and 43.15% of groups founded in the last 2 years. Local groups are disproportionately made up of students relative to the EA community as a whole, with even city groups being on average 40% students. Overall, 14,392 people engaged with local groups in 2019, 2,124 people regularly attended EA groups’ events, and 1,498 members were reported to be highly engaged with the EA community.