DM

David_Moss

Principal Research Director @ Rethink Priorities
6665 karmaJoined Aug 2014Working (6-15 years)

Bio

I am the Principal Research Director at Rethink Priorities and currently lead our Surveys and Data Analysis department. Most of our projects involve private commissions for core EA movement and longtermist orgs, where we provide:

  • Private polling to assess public attitudes
  • Message testing / framing experiments, testing online ads
  • Expert surveys
  • Private data analyses and survey / analysis consultation
  • Impact assessments of orgs/programs

Formerly, I also managed our Wild Animal Welfare department and I've previously worked for Charity Science, and been a trustee at Charity Entrepreneurship and EA London.

My academic interests are in moral psychology and methodology at the intersection of psychology and philosophy.

How I can help others

Survey methodology and data analysis.

Sequences
3

RP US Public AI Attitudes Surveys
EA Survey 2022
EA Survey 2020

Comments
480

Hopefully in the next couple/few weeks, though we're prioritising the broader community health related questions from that followup survey linked above.

I can confirm that there's not been so dramatic a shift since the 2020 cause results (below for reference), i.e. global poverty and AI are still very similarly ranked. The new allocation-of-resources data should hopefully give an even clearer sense of 'how much of EA' people want to be this or that.

We did gather cause prioritization data in the most recent EA Survey, we just delayed publishing that report because we gathered additional cause prioritization data in this followup survey, which we ran in December. This was looking at what share of resources EAs would allocate to different causes, rather than just their rating of different causes, which I think adds an important new angle.

We stopped gathering information about donations to individual charities in 2020 as part of a drive to make the EA Survey shorter to increase participation. However, that does mean that you can access donation data more recent than 2019, in our 2020 report (and the accompanying bookdown), which reports a breakdown by charity cause area.

Thanks! I agree that allocating a percentage of "resources", where this contains very different kinds of resources (money and labour) can be difficult. Still, we wanted this to largely match the question asked at the Meta Coordination Forum, which also combined this, so we matched their wording.

Thanks!

We'll definitely be reporting on changes in awareness of and attitudes towards EA in our general reporting of EA Pulse in 2024. I'm not sure if/when we'd do a separate dedicated post towards changes in EA awareness/attitudes. We have a long list (this list is very non-exhausive) of research which is unpublished due to lack of capacity. A couple of items on that list also touch on attitudes/awareness of EA post-FTX, although we have run additional surveys since then.

Feel free to reach out privately if there are specific things it would be helpful to know for EA Netherlands.

Thanks Luke! Everyone who opted to receive additional surveys by email in the last EA Survey, will have received an email with this survey (December 11-12th). We find they often get sent to the spam folder though, so you might want to check.

If you follow the link in that email, it won't automatically pre-fill your email or automatically track you, but you will be able to know which email address it was sent to, so that you can enter that one.

It sounds like you are reading my comment as saying that "center left" is very similar to "left". But I think it's pretty clear from the full quote that that's not what I'm saying.

The OP says that EA is 80% "center-left". I correct them, and say that EA is 36.8% left and 39.8% "Center left." 

The "(so quite similar)" here refers to the percentages 36.8% and 39.8% (indeed, these are likely not even statistically significant differences). 

I can see how, completely in the abstract, one could read the claim as being that "Left" and "Center left" are similar ideologies. But, in context, it only makes sense for me to be making the observation that the percentages of "Left" and "Center left" are quite similar (challenging OP's claim that EA is all Center left). If I were asserting that "Left" and "Center left" are "quite similar", then I'd be minimising my own claim (many EAs are "Left" not merely "Center left").


That said, I'm not sure that mistake is the reason for the downvote, since my other comment also got downvoted. And that one just:

  • Shows the breakdown by countries
  • Confirms Larks' guess that "French and Scandinavian EAs also say they are left wing more frequently than right wing."
  • Adds that French EAs are more likely to say they are "Left" than "Center left".

It's worth noting that:

  • Results don't vary so dramatically across most countries in our data, with none of the countries with the largest number of EAs showing less than ~35% identifying as "Left".
  • The majority of EAs and the majority of EA left/center-leftists are outside the US

Confirmed. And not only that, but French EAs are more likely to say that they are Left, rather than Center left.

I'm curious why this post got -3 worth of downvotes (at time of writing). It seems like a pretty straightforward statement of our results.

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