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Thanks for your thoughtful comment—I think that is indeed a better way of phrasing it. For the sake of continuity of the survey we probably won't update it now, but I agree that it probably should have been phrased this way to begin with. However, it does seem perfectly reasonable to add in the option that Jason suggested below, so we will go ahead and do this.

Ultimately, we sought some unambiguous cutoff to qualify for the donation amount, and we thought that 5hr/week devoted to meaningfully working on an EA cause would be a reasonable criterion for this. We definitely still want to hear from you and are certainly not going to discount or exclude your responses, but we are still currently planning to donate $40 * number of actively/directly involved EAs who take the survey to the selected charities.

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Survey for EAs: help us build better models of the community's priors!

by Cameron Berg, Judd Rosenblatt, AE Studio

Feb 22 20241 min read 6

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CommunityOpportunities to take actionBuilding effective altruismRequests (open)SurveysResearch

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Many thanks to Spencer Greenberg, John Bargh, Lucius Caviola, Josh Lewis, and Philip Gubbins for their helpful and constructive feedback in the development of this survey.

UPDATE 3/9: Thanks to broad participation from the community, this and associated surveys have has raised approximately $10,000 for high-impact charities. Given the reasonable sample size we now have, we are now going to pause donations for any subsequent responses. (However, we will preserve the charity voting question, and if anyone wants to sponsor donations for any surveys taken after March 9th, please ping us at alignment@ae.studio.)

AE Studio is launching a short, anonymous survey for EAs in order to help develop a stronger model of the dominant psychological and epistemological priors in EA. We believe this work will yield specific and actionable insights related to the community’s views and more general characteristics.

The survey is a straightforward 5-10 minute Google Form with some simple multiple choice questions. No writing is required.

For every EA-affiliated individual who completes the survey, we will donate $40 to a high-impact effective organization/charity of your choosing (see specific options on the form).

We will also send everyone who wants one a customized report that compares their personal results to those of the broader community.

Together, we hope to not only raise some money for some great organizations/charities, but also develop a better model of the ideas and people that comprise the Effective Altruism community. We will open-source all data and analyses when we publish the results.

Thanks in advance for participating and for sharing this around with other EAs!

Full survey link here: https://forms.gle/fs2tC4gCBp1dEp8RA

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tobycrisford 🔸Feb 26 20243

Are you wanting non "actively involved" EAs to complete the survey?

The definition of "active involvement" is given as working >5 hours per week in at least one EA cause area, and it reads like the $40 is only donated for people in that category? Suggesting maybe these are the only people you want to hear from?

This seems quite strict! I've taken the GWWC pledge and I give all my income to EA causes above a cap. I also volunteer with the humane league, probably spending a few hours a month on average doing stuff with them. And I check the EA forum pretty regularly, even commenting sometimes! But I definitely don't spend 5 hours of my time a week working on the causes from that list, so can't honestly describe myself as an "actively involved" EA in answer to that question.

If the survey's not for me, then that's obviously fine, it's your survey! Can't help feeling a bit disappointed that I don't qualify as "actively involved" though! Maybe a survey for "EAs involved in direct work" would be a kinder way of phrasing it?

Cameron BergFeb 26 20244

tobycrisford 🔸Feb 27 20241

Makes sense, thank you for the reply, I appreciate it!

And good to know you still want to hear from people who don't meet that threshold of involvement, I wasn't sure if that was the case or not from the wording of the post and survey questions. I will fill it in now!

JasonFeb 26 20242

I thought that question should have an option for ">= 5 hr/wk but not >= 5 hr in any specific cause area," and should be called "significant time involvement" or somesuch.

Ben Millwood🔸Mar 19 20242

Should I take the fact that you have stopped donations as a signal that you no longer value further responses? Will you close the Google Form and/or update this post when you're beginning analysis and further responses won't be counted? Is there a specific deadline?

Cameron BergMar 19 20242

Hi Ben, we are continuing to accept further responses and of course value any additional respondents. Stopping donations is more a function of our available budget for this project than how much value we put on the additional data. We are keeping the form open until the data analysis is complete (it is easy to just plug in new entries to the existing analysis pipeline), at which point we will close the form. No specific deadline, but we imagine the analysis will be complete in the next week or two.