Are introductory fellowships and other courses run by local EA groups considered under "educational courses" or does that mean things like philosophy classes, where EA might be mentioned as a concept?

There are two different things to consider here:

• People's response to the main question about where they heard about EA, which was a selection from a fixed list. So this just means the respondent selected "Educational course (e.g., lecture, class, MOOC)", with no additional classification from us.
• Their responses to the open comment follow-up question asking for more detail: the majority of these (>75%) refer to a university course or the Singer MOOC. 

In most cases where someone joins EA through an activity run by their EA group, they'll select EA Group. I went through references to "group" in the comments for those who did not select EA Group and most (23/36) were not referring to an EA Group, 3 referred to a friend referring them to a group, 2 referred to seeing an ad for a group, 5 mentioned something else first introducing them to EA but a group being useful for them beginning to seriously engage and the rest were miscellaneous/uncategorisable. I went through comments of those who did select EA Group and 9/111 (8%) mentioned a fellowship. You can see a more detailed analysis of comments by those who selected EA Group in 2020 here, where 7% mentioned a fellowship, but a larger number mentioned an event or fresher's fair.

Alternatively, would it be possible to ask for country-specific data analysis?

For Estonia, there are not very clear differences (p=0.023). This is from n=37 for Estonia, so we should not be very confident about the differences.

Thanks for raising this interesting point!

If we look direction at the association between active outreach and levels of engagement, we see no strong relationship (aside from within the very small "No engagement with EA" category).

I agree that it's intuitively plausible, as you say, that people who actively sought out EA might be expected to be more inclined to high engagement.

But I think that whether the person encounters EA through active outreach (influencing selection) may often be in tension with whether the person encounters EA through a high-touch form of engagement (leading to different probability of continued engagement). For example, EA Groups are quite active outreach (ex hypothesi, leading to lower selection for EA inclination), but higher touch (potentially leading to people being more likely to get engaged), whereas a book is more passive outreach (ex hypothesi, leading to higher selection for EA inclination), but lower touch (and so may be less likely to facilitate engagement)^[1].

1. ^{^}

   There may be other differences between these particular two examples of course. For example, EA Groups and EA books might select in different ways.

I definitely agree that this seems unusual (and our results show that it is!). Still, it seems reasonable that a very small number of people might stumble across an EAGx first, as in Arden's anecdote below.

@titotal I'm curious whether or to what extent we substantively disagree, so I'd be interested in what specific numbers you'd anticipate, if you'd be interested in sharing.

• My guess is that we'll most likely see <30% reduction in people first hearing about EA from 80K next time we run the survey (though this might be confounded if 80K don't promote the EA Survey so much, so we'd need to control for that).
• Obviously we can't directly observe this counterfactual, but I'd guess that if a form of outreach that was 100% active shut down, we'd observe close to a 100% reduction (e.g. if everyone stopped running EA Groups or EAGs, we'd soon see ~0% people hearing about EA from these sources).^[1]

1. ^{^}

   I don't say strictly 0% only because I think there's always the possibility for a few unusual cases, e.g. someone is googling how to do good and happens across an old post about EAG or their inactive local group.

I'm imagining someone googling "ethical career" 2 years from now and finding 80k, noticing that almost every recent article, podcast, and promoted job is based around AI, and concluding that EA is just an AI thing now.

I definitely agree that would eventually become the case (eventually all the older non-AI articles will become out of date). I'm less sure it will be a big factor 2 years from now (though it depends on exactly how articles are arranged on the website and so how salient it is that the non-AI articles are old).

It could also be bad even for AI safety: There are plenty of people here who were initially skeptical of AI x-risk, but joined the movement because they liked the malaria nets stuff. Then over time and exposure they decided that the AI risk arguments made more sense than they initially thought, and started switching over.

I also think this is true in general (I don't have a strong view about the net balance in the case of 80K's outreach specifically). 

Previous analyses we conducted suggested that over half of Longtermists (~60%) previously prioritised a different cause and that this is consistent across time.

You can see the overall self-reported flows (in 2019) here.

Thanks Arden!

I also agree that prima facie this strategic shift might seem worrying given that 80K has been the powerhouse of EA movement growth for many years.

That said, I share your view that growth via 80K might reduce less than one would naively expect. In addition to the reasons you give above, another consideration is our finding is that a large percentage of people get into EA via 'passive' outreach (e.g. someone googles "ethical career" and finds the 80K website', and for 80K specifically about 50% of recruitment was 'passive'), rather than active outreach, and it seems plausible that much of that could continue even after 80K's strategic shift.

Our framings will probably change. It's possible that the framings we use more going forward will emphasise EA style thinking a little less than our current ones, though this is something we're actively unsure of.

As noted elsewhere, we plan to research this empirically. Fwiw, my guess is that broader EA messaging would be better (on average and when comparing the best messaging from each) at recruiting people to high levels of engagement in EA (this might differ when looking to recruit people directly into AI related roles), though with a lot of variance within both classes of message.

Thanks for posting!

We did ask about this in the 2015 and 2017 EA Surveys. We've not repeated it since then due to limited space.

In both cases, respondents were primarily realist (50.9% in 2015, 42.5% in 2017).

A broader coalition of actors will be motivated to pursue extinction prevention than longtermist trajectory changes... For instance, see Scott Alexander on the benefits of extinction risk as a popular meme compared to longtermism.

This might vary between: 

• The level of the abstract memes:
  • I agree "reducing risk of extinction (potentially in the near term)" may be more appealing than "longtermist trajectory change"
• The level of concrete interventions:
  • "Promoting democracy" (or whatever one decides promotes long term value) might be more appealing than "reducing risk from AI"^[1] (though there is likely significant variation within concrete interventions).

1. ^{^}

   Though our initial work does not suggest this.

I agree this is a potential concern.

As it happens, since 2020, the community has continued to age. As of the end of last year, it's median 31, mean 22.4, and we can see that it has steadily aged across years.

It's clear that a key contributor to our age distribution is the age at which people first get involved with EA, which is median 24, mean 26.7, but the age at which people first get involved has also increased over time.

I think people sometimes point to our outreach focusing on things like university groups to explain this pattern. But I think this is likely over-stated, as this accounts for only a small minority of our recruiting, and most of the ways people first hear about EA seems to be more passive mechanisms, not tied to direct outreach, which would be accessible to people at older ages (we'll discuss this in more detail in the 2024 iteration of this post). 

That said, different age ranges do appear to have different levels of awareness of EA, with highest awareness seeming to be at the 25-34 or 35-44 age ranges. (Though our sample size is large, the number of people who we count as aware of EA are very low, so you can see these estimates are quite uncertain. Our confidence in these estimates will increase as we run more surveys). This suggests that awareness of EA may be reaching different groups unevenly, which could partly contribute to lower engagement from older age groups. But this need not be the result of differences in our outreach. It could result from different levels of interest from the different groups.

Matthew Yglesias has written more critically about this tendency (which he thinks is widely followed in activist circles, but is often detrimental). For example, here he describes what he refers to as "activist chum", which is good for motivating and fundraising (very important for the self-interest of (those leading) movement), but can lead to focusing on "wins" that aren't meaningful and may be unhelpful.

The chum comes from the following political organizing playbook that is widely followed in progressive circles:

1. Always be asking for something.
2. Ask for something of someone empowered to give it to you.
3. Ask for something from someone who cares what you think.