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AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
We did gather cause prioritization data in the most recent EA Survey, we just delayed publishing that report because we gathered additional cause prioritization data in this followup survey, which we ran in December. This was looking at what share of resources EAs would allocate to different causes, rather than just their rating of different causes, which I think adds an important new angle.
We stopped gathering information about donations to individual charities in 2020 as part of a drive to make the EA Survey shorter to increase participation. However, that does mean that you can access donation data more recent than 2019, in our 2020 report (and the accompanying bookdown), which reports a breakdown by charity cause area.
Thank you for collecting the data in these surveys! Do you have an idea for the ETA for the 2023 data?
My motivation is that when I talk to people about EA, I often hear the criticism that EA is all about AI risk, and I respond by saying that actually EAs in practice mostly prioritize and donate to global health causes. I've been linking the 2019 survey for a few years now and I'm starting to notice that it's out of date.
Hopefully in the next couple/few weeks, though we're prioritising the broader community health related questions from that followup survey linked above.
I can confirm that there's not been so dramatic a shift since the 2020 cause results (below for reference), i.e. global poverty and AI are still very similarly ranked. The new allocation-of-resources data should hopefully give an even clearer sense of 'how much of EA' people want to be this or that.