I respond here: https://worldspiritsockpuppet.com/2021/03/09/why-does-ads-think-ea-hasnt-grown.html

Tldr: I agree the 'top of the funnel' seems to not be growing (i.e. how many people are reached each year). This was at least in part due to a deliberate shift in strategy. I think the 'bottom' of the funnel (e.g. money and people focused on EA) is still growing. Eventually we'll need to get the top of the funnel growing again, and people are starting to focus on this more.

Around 2015, DGB and The Most Good You Can Do were both launched, which both involved significant media attention that aimed to reach lots of people (e.g. two TED talks). 80k was also focused on reaching more people.

After that, the sense was that the greater bottleneck was taking all these newly interested people (and the money from Open Phil), and making sure that results in actually useful things happening, rather than reaching even more people.

(There was also some sense of wanting to shore up the intellectual foundations, and make sure EA is conveyed accurately, rather than as "earn to give for malaria nets", which seems vital for its long-term potential. There was also a shift towards niche outreach, rather than mass media - since mass media seems better for raising donations to global health, but less useful for something like reducing GCBRs, and although good at reaching lots of people, wasn't as effective as the niche stuff.)

E.g. in 2018, 80k switched to focusing on our key ideas page and podcast, which are more about making sure already interested people understand our ideas than reaching new people; Will focused on research and niche outreach, and is now writing a book on longtermism. GWWC was scaled down, and Toby wrote a book about existential risk.

This wasn't obviously a mistake since I think that if you track 'total money committed to EA' and 'total number of people willing to change career (or take other significant steps)', it's still growing reasonably (perhaps ~20% per year?), and these metrics are closer to what ultimately matter. (Unfortunately I don't have a good source for this claim and it relies on judgement calls, though Open Phil's resources have increased due to the increase in Dustin Moskovitz's net worth; several other donors have made a lot of money; the EA Forum is growing healthily; 80k is getting ~200 plan changes per year; the student groups keep recruiting people each year etc.)

One problem is that if the top of the funnel isn't growing, then eventually we'll 'use up' the pool of interested people who might become more dedicated, so it'll turn into a bottleneck at some point.

And all else equal, more top of funnel growth would be better, so it's a shame we haven't done more.

My impression is that people are starting to focus more on growing the top of the funnel again. However, I still think the focus is more on niche outreach, so you'd need to track a metric more like 'total number of engaged people' to evaluate it.

Scott Alexander has a very interesting response to this post on reddit: see here.

Another indicator: Wikipedia pageviews show fairly stable interest in articles on EA and related topics over the last five years.

I weakly upvoted this for the second section, which is a discussion I've had with many people in person and is something I'm glad to see in writing. But I found the title offputting given the very modest amount of evidence presented in support of the claim. 

There are a huge number of things you could check to gauge the total size of the EA movement. You chose GiveWell's total funding, Google Trends data, and the growth of Giving What We Can. 

(These are all reasonable things to choose, but I don't think they are collectively decisive enough to merit a title as strongly-worded as "why hasn't effective altruism grown?" I'm really just objecting to the title here, rather than the spirit or execution of this project.)

The last number is solid evidence of weaknesses in community building strategy: CEA acknowledges that they should have put more staff time into Giving What We Can post-2016 And when Luke Freeman took over as the project's first full-time leader in years, GWWC saw faster growth (in absolute terms) than ever before. The rate of growth wasn't high compared to 2016, but it's encouraging that someone was able, within a few months, to break a record set by a larger team working full-time on GWWC when there was (presumably) more low-hanging fruit available to pick.

As for the other items:

• When I look at GiveWell's funding to get evidence on EA growth, I mostly care about the dark blue number, which represents "money that didn't come from the same two people" (not sure whether Incubation Grants are Good Ventures or other funds off the top of my head). GiveWell gets a lot more donations from outside Good Ventures now than it did in 2018; I wouldn't be surprised to see it more than double the 2015 figure in 2021.
• On Google Trends: You identify yourself that these numbers can be a bit messy, but I agree with you that they seem like at least weak evidence that public interest in the specific term "effective altruism" hasn't grown. However, I don't think any of the orgs you quoted as aiming to grow the community were trying to achieve that kind of growth — there's been much more focus on developing specific, smaller-scale pipelines for directing money and talent to EA projects.

Some examples of things that I believe have been growing, with numbers where I can easily find them:

• Academic publications on EA-related topics (e.g. 310 Google Scholar results for "existential risk" in 2015,  1020 in 2020; 25 vs. 47 for "wild animal suffering")
• Number of students participating in EA "fellowship" programs (doing a lot of structured reading and activities)
• Number of active EA groups worldwide (EA Hub currently lists 230; I don't know the figure from 2015, but I did start an EA group in 2014 and remember being able to find maybe a few dozen groups total when I looked at places like THINK [that year's equivalent of EA Hub]).
  • Edit: I see that Brian added more data on this
• EA Forum activity (pageviews roughly doubled from 2019 to 2020)
• Number of EA community members involved in government/public policy in some capacity (people in this category don't always announce their views publicly, so I don't think good figures will be available anywhere — this claim is anecdotal, based on many stories I've heard about people starting this work and the creation of groups like APPGFG and organizations like CSET)
• Number of people employed by EA-aligned organizations (again, no hard numbers, but a lot of charities have started up within the last few years, and I'd be surprised if a similar number had shut down)

I wish I had more data easily to hand on some of these figures, but I'd bet at 10:1 on any one of them being higher in 2020 than 2015. And while none of them are slam-dunk evidence that EA is definitely "growing" by any reasonable definition of the word, I think they collectively paint a clear picture.

Thanks for writing this post and crossposting it here on the EA forum! :) 

This post is also posted on LessWrong and discussed there.

Scattered thoughts on this, pointing in various directions. 

TL;DR: Measuring and interpreting movement growth is complicated.

Things I'm relatively confident about:

1. You need to be careful about whether the thing you are looking at is a proxy for 'size of EA' or a proxy for a derivative, i.e. 'how fast is EA growing'. I think Google Trends searches for 'Effective Altruism' are mostly the latter; it's something people might do on the way into the movement, but not something I would ever do.
2. After correcting for (1), my rough impression is that EA grew super-linearly up to about 2016, and then approximately linearly after that up to about March 2020. Intepretation of many metrics since COVID is complicated by, well, COVID. One salient-to-me way to think about linear growth is that each year some fraction of the new crop of university students discover EA and some fraction of them take to it.
3. Givewell money moved is obviously going to be impacted by a shift away from global poverty/health as a focus area within the movement. We have survey data which suggests this has happened over the time period in question.  In that  context, a 93% increase in non-Open-Phil money moved to the shrinking cause area between 2015 and 2019 is pretty good.
   • OTOH, when looking at any kind of money moved over time you need to remember that EA's non-Open-Phil financial power should increase regardless of the number of people increasing. The movement is young and full of the types of people who have had large income increases between 2015 and 2020. For example, while I couldn't find the data quickly, I believe >>50% of GWWC members were students in 2015 and <50% are now.
   • Also on that hand, I expect most of Givewell's donors don't self-identify as EAs. Whether this matters is unclear, makes it a bit of a weak proxy though.
4. I really don't think it makes sense to treat Alienation/Demandingness as a constant. Scott's response to this matches my impressions, and one of the things it flags is how the level of demands on proto-EAs have increased, in my opinion by a lot. I think this is true in both the 'level of dedication required' sense and the 'level/specificity of skills required' sense.
   • This is particularly salient, perhaps too salient, to me for personal reasons. I am a top-third Maths graduate from a top university who has donated roughly half of my income to date, but I don't quite hit the type and level of dedication/skill that I perceive is desired, and partly as a result I doubt I would have gotten involved in the movement if I had been born 6 years later. I want to be explicit that this isn't necessarily a problem - that judgement is very sensitive to beliefs about relative values of different types of individuals - I'm just providing a personal anecdote that if it generalises would serve as partial explanation for the tailing off of growth rates.

Things I am less confident about: 

1. While the level of demands has increased, I think EA's online spaces are actually less supportive than they used to be, creating a gap that can easily leave people disillusioned, especially if they are geographically distant from major movement hubs. Many in-person spaces seem to be healthier, but are always going to grow less rapidly.
2. The other gap leaving people disillusioned is the lack of actual things to do, especially at 'entry levels' of dedication but also at higher levels if you strike out on job applications. I chuckle sadly every time I read this piece, in particular the paragraph quoted below.
3. I do actually agree a lot of people who get seriously involved (say >20% dedication, including anyone who has changed their career path for EA reasons) in EA seem to have liked it as soon as they hear about it. But:
   1. I think this is at best a partial account of why growth has stalled, because as of now my impression is that essentially nobody (<10% of university students) has heard about it.
   2. If you lower the dedication bar at all I get a lot more positive on the possibility of convincing people. Partly this is for personal reasons, my closest friend from university has taken the GWWC pledge and I'm >50% confident he would not have done so if it weren't for me talking about EA. I just don't expect him to 'go beyond' that pledge or otherwise engage with the community.
   3. If I do check my own path, I was introduced to EA or Rationality at least three times before something stuck: I saw Toby Ord give an interview, was nudged into reading parts of the Sequences by my first job, then a university friend pointed me to HPMOR, then finally a different university friend interned at GWWC.  So on the one hand it does seem with hindsight like these communities kept knocking on my door, but on the other I didn't actually do anything with the first few points of contact. For me it was when I was asked to do something concrete, achievable and valuable that I switched my attention. I know others' mileage varies a lot here; some people are particularly drawn to the intellectual aspect for example.  But it means that even 'innate' EAs might need exposure to the representation of EA that matches what they are looking for.
   4. Finally, there are at least two candidate explanations of 'many people who are seriously involved with EA liked it as soon as they heard about it', if true. EA could be innate, or we could suck at providing the incentive gradients/incremental support necessary to turn less-committed people into more-committed people. Both would create that pattern.

Hey you! You know, all these ideas that you had about making the world a better place, like working for Doctors without Borders? They probably aren’t that great. The long-term future is what matters. And that is not funding constrained, so earning to give is kind of off the table as well. But the good news is, we really, really need people working on these things. We are so talent constraint… (20 applications later) … Yeah, when we said that we need people, we meant capable people. Not you. You suck.

Interesting observations. I only have one thought that I don't see mentioned in the comments.

I see EA as something that is mostly useful when you are deciding how you want to do good. After you figured it out, there is little reason to continue engaging with it. ^[1] Under this model of EA, the fact that engagement with EA is not growing would only mean that the number of people who are deciding how to do good at any given time is not growing. But that is not what we want to maximize. We want to maximize the number of people actually working on doing good. I think that EA fields like AI safety and effective animal advocacy have been growing though I don't know. But I think this model of EA is only partially correct.

Thanks for this post. One dataset not included in this analysis though is the number of EA groups. CEA's 2019 local EA group organizers survey data shows that EA has grown in terms of number of active groups significantly since 2015, but the number of new groups founded per year was pretty stagnant from 2015 to 2018. The screenshots below are taken from the survey report.

However,  according to CEA's 2020 annual review, they tracked 250 active groups via the EA Groups survey, compared to 176 at the end of 2019. So I think EA, in terms of number of active groups, has actually grown a lot in 2020 compared to 2015-2019. 

It would be great if CEA released a writeup on the data from the EA Groups 2020 Survey so we can have updated numbers for the two figures above.

One last piece of anecdotal evidence: Despite repeated attempts, I have never been able to "convert" anyone to effective altruism. Not even close. I've gotten friends to agree with me on every subpoint, but still fail to sell them on the concept as a whole. These are precisely the kinds of nerdy and compassionate people you might expect to be interested, but they just aren't.

In comparison, I remember my own experience taking to effective altruism the way a fish takes to water. 

I've had many conversations about EA, and I've convinced at least a few people about the basic "give more to charity,  and find better charities" idea (people who didn't seem to have an underlying compulsion to give). And I've definitely heard stories of people who became gradually more convinced by arguments related to e.g. longtermism or wild animal suffering, despite initial reluctance or commitment to what they were previously working on. 

What would you count as a "conversion"? Someone who is initially resistant to one or more EA-related ideas, but eventually changes their mind? For any definition, I think examples are out there, though how common they are will depend on which definition we use.

One place to look for examples would be EA-aligned orgs that hire people who aren't particularly EA-oriented. Staff at these orgs are immediately exposed to lots of EA philosophy, but (in some cases I've heard of) only gradually shift their views in that direction, or start off not caring much but become more interested as they see the ideas put into practice.

I can try to track down people who I think this would describe and connect them with you. But first — what are you planning to do with the emails you receive? Would it be better for people to describe their "conversion" experiences on a Forum thread?

Thanks for this post. It made me think a lot about how EA could evolve. But I'm still puzzled about what sort of metrics we could use to measure growth or interest. I'll just add that, besides (as mentioned in the text) being hard to make sense of Google Trends data, I made a brief comparison with other terms related to EA, such as "doing good better" &"giving what we can" &"the life you can save", and it shows very different trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=effective altruism,giving what we can,doing good better,the life you can save,less wrong

1. As Katja's response alludes to, the non-Open-Phil chunk of GiveWell has more than doubled since 2015 (plus EA funds has gone from zero to $9M, etc.)
2. I see a few comments at the Reddit/LessWrong versions of this post intimating that EA does not want [much] more money, or has stopped trying to fundraise. This was not my impression at all. Is it not true that even just considering GiveWell's top charities and near-misses, they could absorb many millions more without being saturated?