There is detailed discussion of some closely related issues in this book chapter in the Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues book edited by Hilary Graves and Theron Pummer. The author discusses these in less detail in this post on PEA Soup.

I also ran a small survey to test effective altruists' views on the thought experiments discusses. I haven't gotten around to writing it up, due to more pressing tasks. I could also share the survey again here, if people are particularly interested.

I don't think this response makes much sense. Many of the questions listed are of very niche EA interest. For example, the number of researchers in the whole world looking at Wild Animal Suffering (through an EA lens) is surely in the 10s. The number of these who are specifically on the ground in Rwanda making notes on the experiences of wildlife, it should go without saying, close to zero. Of course, there are many zoologists in the world, but as EA WAW researchers often find, it is hard to apply much of this to research that is interested in welfare specifically.

The same goes for site visits to factory farms. First hand information about actual conditions on factory farms is notoriously hard to come by and many EA discussions have noted that we lack information about conditions as they may vary across other parts of the world. It would be very surprising if there were a plethora of animal welfare first hand case studies of conditions in farms across different parts of Africa that we haven't noticed before.

Most of the rest of the questions just seem to involve speaking to locals about their perspectives while in different parts of Africa. While I agree that there is, of course, already qualitative research somewhat related to many of these questions, it's hard to see the rationale for not speaking to Africans about their perspectives and only reading qualitative reports second hand from the developed world.

There was no way to ask whether people knew about all the resources that currently existed (although in the next survey we could ask whether they know about the EA Hub's resources specifically). We do know from other questions in this survey and in 2017's that many group leaders are not aware of existing services in general though.

It's great to see more reflection about approval voting and possible alternatives. I think the EA community should probably favour a lot more research into these alternatives before it invests resources in promoting any of these options.

Excessive political polarisation, especially party polarisation in the US, makes it harder to reach consensus or a fair compromise, and undermines trust in public institutions. Efforts to avoid harmful long-term dynamics, and to strengthen democratic governance, are therefore of interest to effective altruists.

I will note that many political theorists think that reducing polarisation and increasing consensus should not be our goals in democracy and need not be positive things e.g. agonistic theorists. This is especially so when, increasing consensus and compromise solutions is identified with "moderate" or centrist (which, as you note, could be construed as a bias).

I agree that the main EA Facebook group has many low quality comments which "do not meet the bar for intellectual quality or epistemic standards that we should have EA associated with." That said, it seems that one of the main reasons for this is that the Facebook group contains many more people with very low or tangential involvement with EA. I think we should be pretty cautious about more heavily moderating or trying to exclude the contributions of newer or less involved members

As an illustration: the 2018 EA Survey found >50% of respondents were members of the Facebook group, but only 20% (i.e. 1 in 5) were members of the Forum. Clearly the Facebook group has many more users who are even less engaged with EA, who don't take the EA Survey. The forthcoming 2019 results were fairly similar.

At the moment I think the EA Facebook group plays a fairly important role alongside the EA Forum (which only a small minority of EAs are involved with) in giving people newer to the community somewhere where they can express their views. Higher moderation of comments would probably add to the pervasive (we will discuss this in a future EA Survey post) sense that EA is exclusive and elitist.

I do think it's worth considering whether low quality discussion on the EA Facebook group will cause promising prospective EAs to 'bounce' i.e. see the low quality discussion, infer that EA is low quality and leave. The extent to which this happens is a tricky broader question, but I'm inclined to hope that it wouldn't be too frequent since readers can easily see the higher quality articles and numerous Forum posts linked on Facebook and I would also hope that most readers will know that online discussion on Facebook is often low quality and not update too heavily against EA on the basis of it.

It also seems worth bearing in mind that since most members of the Facebook group clearly don't make the decision to move over to participating in the EA Forum, that efforts to make the EA Facebook discussion more like the Forum, may just put off a large number of users.

I think this is a good explanation of at least part of the phenomenon. As you note, where we do samples of the general population and only 5% of people report being vegetarian or vegan, then even a small number of lizardperson answering randomly, oddly or deliberately trolling could make up a large part of the 5%.

That said, I note that even in surveys which are deliberately solely targeting identified vegetarians or vegans (so 100% of people in the sample identified as vegetarian or vegan), large percentages then say that they eat some meat. Rethink Priorities has an unpublished survey (report forthcoming soon) which sampled exclusively people who have previously identified as vegetarian or vegan (and then asked them again in the survey whether they identified as vegetarian or vegan) and we found just over 25% of those who answered affirmatively to the latter question still seemed to indicate that they consumed some meat product in a food frequency questionnaire. So that suggests to me that there's likely something more systematic going on, where some reasonably large percentage of people identify as vegetarian or vegan despite eating meat (e.g. because they eat meat very infrequently and think that's close enough). Of course, it's also possible that the first sampling to find self-identified vegetarian or vegans sampled a lot of lizardpersons, meaning that there was a disproportionate number of lizardpersons in the second sampling, meaning that there was a disproportionate number of lizardpersons who then identified as vegetarian or vegan in our survey. And perhaps lizardpersons don't just answer randomly but are disproportionately likely to identify as vegetarian or vegan when asked, which might also contribute.

I don't think that really explains the observed pattern that well.

I agree that in general, people not appearing in the EA Survey could be explained either by them dropping out of EA or them just not taking the EA Survey. But in this case, what we want to explain is the appearance of a disproportionate number of people who took the EA Survey in 2018, not taking the EA Survey in 2019, among the most recent cohorts of EAs who took the EA Survey in 2018 (2015-2017) compared to earlier cohorts (who have been in EA longer).

The explanation that this is due to EAs disproportionately drop out during their first 3 years seems to make straightforward intuitive sense.

The explanation the people who took the EA Survey in 2018 and joined within 2015-2017 specifically, were disproportionately less likely to take the EA Survey in 2019 seems less straightforward. Presumably the thought is that these people might have taken the EA Survey once, realised it was too long or something, and decided to not take it in 2019, whereas people who joined in earlier years have already taken the EA Survey and so are less likely to drop out of taking it, if they haven't already done so? I don't think that fits the data particularly well. Respondents from the 2015 cohort, would have had opportunities to take the survey at least 3 times, including 2018, before stopping in 2019, so it's hard to see why they specifically would be less likely to stop taking the EA Survey in 2019 compared to earlier EAs. Conversely EAs from before 2015 all the way back to 2009 or earlier, had at most 1 extra opportunity to be exposed to the EA Survey (we started in 2014), so it's hard to see why these EAs would be less likely to stop taking the EA Survey in 2019 having taken it in 2018.

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In general, I expect the observation may have more than one explanation, including just random noise, but I think higher rates of dropout among particular more recent cohorts makes sense as an explanation, whereas these people specifically being more likely to take the EA Survey in 2018 and not in 2019 doesn't really.

That's certainly true. I don't know exactly what they had in mind when they claimed that "most seem to be long-termists in some broad sense," but the 2019 survey at least has data directly on that question, whereas 2018 just has the best approximation we could give, by combining respondents who selected any of the specific causes that seemed broadly long-termist and Long Term Future lost out to Global Poverty using that method in both 2018 and 2019.*

*As noted in the posts, that method depends on the controversial question of what fine-grained causes should be counted as part of the 'Long Term Future' group. If Climate Change (the 2nd most popular cause in 2019, 3rd in 2018) were counted as part of LTF, then LTF would win by a mile. However, I am sceptical that most Climate Change respondents in our samples count as LTF in the relevant (EA) sense. i.e. normal (non-EA) climate change supporters who have no familiarity with LTF reasoning and think we need to be sustainable and think about the world 100 years or more in advance, seem quite different from long-termist EA (it seems they don't and generally would not endorse LTF reasoning about other areas). An argument against this is that that we see from the 2019 analysis, that people who selected Climate Change as a specific cause predominantly broke in favour of LTF when asked to select a broader cause area. I'm not sure how dispositive that is though. It seems likely to me that people who most support a specific cause other than Global Poverty (or Animals or Meta) would probably be more to select a broader, vaguer cause category, which their preferred cause could plausibly fit into (as Climate Change does into 'long term future/existential risk'), than one of the other specific causes, and as noted above, people might like the vague category of concern for the 'long term future' without actually supporting LTF the EA cause area. Some evidence for this comes from the other analyses in 2018 and 2019 which found that respondents who supported Climate Change were quite dissimilar from those who supported LTF causes in almost all respects (e.g. they tended to be newer to EA- very heavily skewed towards the most recent years- and less engaged with EA, generally following the same trends as Global Poverty and the opposite to AI, see here).

Which cause is most popular depends on cause categorisation and most surveyed EAs seem to be long-termists in some broad sense. EA Survey 2018 Series: Cause Selection"

This is clearly fairly tangential to the main point of your post, but since you mention it, the more recent EA Survey 2019: Cause Prioritization post offers clearer evidence for your claim that most surveyed EAs seem to be long-termists, as 40.08% selected the 'Long Term Future / Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction' (versus 32.3% selecting Global Poverty) when presented with just 4 broad EA cause areas. That said, the claim in the main body of your text that "Global poverty remains a popular cause area among people interested in EA" is also clearly true, since Global Poverty was the highest rated and most often selected 'top cause' among the more fine-grained cause areas (22%).