GWWC's membership has steadily grown in the recent years, so it's not that GWWC isn't getting more people to give significantly and effectively! I think this highlights broader questions about what the focus of the current effective altruism community is, and what it should be.

GWWC team members have advocated for a "big tent" effective altruism where everyone who wants to do good effectively should feel that they can be a part of the community - but anecdotally we hear sometimes that people who are primarily interested in giving don't feel like the broader effective altruism community is the right place for them. (So this might be why there is a decreasing trend seen in the survey)

I'd like to see that trend reverse, and GWWC continues to push for an inclusive EA community, where a spectrum of involvement is respected and celebrated but we can't do it all ourselves! We're only one part of the community, and I think it would take an increased focus on the "big tent" approach from other key organisations to help this be corrected.

I think the elephant in the room might be OpenPhil spending at least $211m on "Effective Altruism Community Growth (Longtermism)", including 80k spending $2.6m in marketing in 2022.^[1] 

As those efforts get results I expect the % of EA growth from those sources to increase.

I also expect EA™ spaces where these surveys are advertised to over-represent "longermism"/"x-risk reduction" (in part because of donor preferences, and in part because they are more useful for some EAs), so that would impact the % of people coming to these spaces from things like GiveWell.

High uncertainty, but for LW and ACX users I'm not sure about the view that they have of CEA spaces. My impression is that for LW users it might plausibly be negative, so they might spend relatively less time in the places where this survey was advertised (which are mostly CEA-run / OpenPhil Longtermist Community Growth - funded).

I think that's negligible compared to the $200m effort in longtermism community growth from OpenPhil, and again I'm really uncertain about this, but there might be a lot of EAs (e.g. GiveWell donors) that might have become relatively less likely to respond to these surveys

1. ^{^}

   Some of it in late 2022, but I think the main point still stands

I think this is one case where it's useful to also look at the absolute numbers from each source across years rather than the percentages. (Usually the absolute totals risk being very misleading/confusing, because the total numbers of respondents from different surveys varies a lot, e.g. 2020 was a nadir, with just over 2000 respondents, whereas in 2022 we recruited over 3500).

The raw numbers show similar numbers from GiveWell across years, whereas GWWC's raw totals do seem lower than their peak in earlier years. So it doesn't seem to simply be the case that they've been outpaced by faster growth from 80K or others.

Or, for GiveWell and to a lesser extent GWWC, "changes in EA's focus over the years have made it less likely that the population interested in GiveWell would be engaged enough in the EA meta to see and complete the survey?"

Hi Rockwell, thanks for the question.

In response to your comment I went over the descriptions from respondents who said they first heard of EA via a podcast and coded, where possible, the name of the podcast or podcast host. I also included the numbers from respondents who first heard of EA via 80,000 Hours and who specifically mentioned the 80,000 Hours podcast. The results are in the graph below.

It shouldn't be too surprising to hear people who enter EA mention Sam Harris because his podcast is by far the most popular podcast mentioned, at 62.6% of all podcasts.

In addition to my other comment, I would add that there are two different things to distinguish:

• 'More engaged people are more likely to say that EAG helped them get involved, because more engaged people are more likely to have attended EAG.' [As I understand it, this is not your claim.]
  • I think this is broadly true.
  • But the results are still not circular, since you can engage with a factor, but not think it important for getting involved. As I noted in my other comment, many more highly engaged people have engaged with an EA book than an EA Group, but EA Groups trounce books in terms of importance for getting highly engaged EAs involved.
• 'More engaged people are more likely to say that EAG helped them get involved, because the wording of the engagement scale includes attending EAG among the examples of Considerable engagement...'
  • I think this is very unlikely to be true.
  • The crux seems to me to be: if we were to change the wording of the engagement scale so that EAG/EA Groups (or all the concrete examples) were removed from the items, would this change these results.
    • I would predict that this would neither significantly change the pattern of low/high engagement respondents who have attended EAG/an EA Group, nor change the results in terms of what factors are important for getting involved in EA.
    • As noted in my other comment, I think there are a number of reasons to think this, not least, that attending an EA Group is not even mentioned among the high engagement categories in the wording of the question.

Thanks for the comment.

I think the fact that the engagement scale makes reference to specific activities as examples is worth bearing in mind (we've discussed this before, going back to the 2019 post where we introduced the scale, and the 2020 post, and more recently in the comments on the Demographics post). 

You're right that there could be an influence from 'the scale mentioning "attending an EA Global conference" as an example in one of the higher engagement categories' -> people who attend EAG being more likely to be select (and so be counted as) higher engagement -> higher engagement people being more likely to say EAG was important for them getting involved (because they are more likely to have attended EAG). 

However, I think there a few reasons why the results are nevertheless not likely to be largely circular.

• As implied above, this is somewhat indirect. The engagement measure refers to attending EA Global, but not whether EA Global was important for getting involved. So, in theory, it's possible for people to attend EAG but not select it as important for getting them involved. If people who attended EAG didn't report it being important for them getting involved, increasing the association between engagement and attending EAG would not help the association between engagement and reporting EAG being important.
• Although EAG is mentioned as an example in the scale, it's possible to be highly engaged but not attend EAG (around just over 45% of highly engaged respondents had not attended EAG, or to attend EAG but not be highly engaged (around 31.6% of EAG attendees). This is using 2020 data, since we did not ask about EAG attendance this year.
• You mention "being a member of a group", but "regularly attending events at a local group" is given as an example of Moderate engagement, which would fall below High engagement in the binary categorisation we use in these analyses.
• Similarly, engaging with "articles, videos, podcasts, discussions, or events on effective altruism" and "subscribing to the 80,000 Hours podcast" are mentioned as examples in the same level of the engagement scale, but we do not observe comparably large bumps for these factors. [Edit] However, we do observe large effects for other factors which aren't mentioned in the definition of the scales (e.g. personal contacts).
• I'd also add that many more EAs (both highly engaged and less engaged, though more among the highly engaged than the less engaged) have undertaken activities such as read an EA book (2019 data) than have attended EAG or attended a local group. So, one might expect that even greater numbers in both of these groups would report that a book was important for getting them involved. But we don't observe this, EA groups are still cited as important considerably more frequently than EA books, despite fewer EAs having encountered them.

As another illustration, we can look at the association between engaging in different activities related to EA and reporting that EAG is important for getting involved in EA. This just asks whether people have completed each activity (0 = no, 1=yes), so there's no possible circularity in the wording.

As we can see, people who have engaged in each of the individual the activities are much more likely to report that EAG was important for them getting involved. 

In addition, I created a simple 'engagement_score' based on the number of activities individuals had completed (0=1SD lower below the mean, 1=1SD above the mean'). We can see that the results for the engagement_score are almost identical to the results for high_engagement on the self-reported engagement scale (in black).

For more discussion of the associations between and validation of the engagement measures see our 2019 and 2020 reports.

The most detailed discussion of this issue is in our bookdown from last year. 

The survey is distributed with the help of a number of different EA orgs through a number of different channels (noted below). In this year's EA Survey, the EA Forum was the largest referrer, followed by 80,000 Hours, and then via a sharing link for respondents to share the survey with others. In previous years the EA Newsletter has been more dominant and my impression is that a big factor is simply the timing of when different sources are released (e.g. many respondents would either see the survey via the Forum or the Newsletter because they read both, and will simply take the survey via whichever they see first).

One of the most important factors (which is unrelated to the particular referrers above) is that the survey recruits relatively more highly engaged EAs than people who are less engaged. In particular, we recruit many more people who are moderately-highly engaged (levels 3-5), and very few with lower engagement (e.g. have read EA materials for a few hours). I think this makes perfect sense, since we would expect people who are more engaged with the community to be more likely to take the survey.^[1] Given this, you would likely want to consult the analyses we provide on differences between low/high engagement respondents to get a sense of the differences. Unfortunately, there's no way to simply weight the results to get around this (as we could if we were doing a representative survey of the US public, for example), due to the simple fact that no-one knows what the real composition is of the full EA population including those with low engagement with EA.

The other area where recruitment methods are particularly significant is where the referrers to the survey are also categories of interest in the survey questions. For example, as we have discussed before, 80,000 Hours is a large referrer to the survey, which may influence responses to questions which mention 80K. In last year's post, we therefore conducted an additional analysis, where we found that removing 80K-referred people, lowered the proportion of people selecting 80,000 Hours, though still let them among the most important sources (moving them from 50.7% to 45% of respondents). As we noted in that post though, simply looking at the proportion who were not referred to the survey from 80K (or other factor) is likely to be a wild over-correction for the fact that people influenced by that factor were more likely to be referred to the survey from that factor.

If there's sufficient demand we could potentially produce another post looking at similar analyses, though my impression is that when we did so for last year's EAS there wasn't significant interest.

1. ^{^}

   Though, as we note in the linked post, in practice, people may be primarily interested in the responses of those who are at least moderately engaged. Lower engagement would be someone who has e.g. "engaged with a few articles, videos, podcasts, discussions, events on effective altruism (e.g. reading Doing Good Better or spending ~5 hours on the website of 80,000 Hours)" but not necessarily engaged in any other way.

I was also wondering this - did 80k link to it in their newsletter (which has a big audience)?

Relatedly, I wonder if you can see differences in reported source by the place the survey respondent navigated to the survey from?

Although SSC/ACX has decreased in importance, I think it still recruited most of its respondents relatively late (partly due to starting later than other sources). e.g. SSC's peak was in 2017, but TED Talks recruited their most respondents in 2013 (mean years in EA for SSC = 3.8, mean years in EA for Ted Talk = 4.78). The case is more clear for podcasts (mean years in EA = 2.59).

That said, there was some evidence from last year's EAS of SSC respondents being lower engagement even in a model controlling for time in EA.

Unfortunately, we don't have consent from participants to share raw data (except with CEA / 80K, for particular purposes, if they opt for that). But if you let us know what questions you are interested in we can likely try to answer these. We have already conducted a large number of private analyses for EA orgs / community members.