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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
I feel like this is a hard question to answer. People who identify as an Effective Altruist come from all sorts of backgrounds and I suppose there aren't specific groups of people who are more likely to become EAs, as opposed to others.
While I agree this is a hard question + anyone could self-identify as an aspiring EA, I lean towards thinking that right now, EA attracts certain kinds of people moreso than others, as evidenced by Rethink Priorities' demographic surveys: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ThdR8FzcfA8wckTJi/ea-survey-2020-demographics
At the very least, I suspect people who are more (academically) educated are more likely to become part of the EA community.
That survey was just the thing I was looking for. Thank you!