This is great! But it would be even better if UK (non-founder) EAs had a cost-effective DAF option to donate to. 

I think there are very strong reasons for many donors not to get all their money out the door within the tax year they receive it (principally: the ability to prioritise more, and wait for better opportunities). 

As it stands, I'm not aware of any cost-effective DAF options for UK donors donating low to mid tens of thousands of £ per year. I'm currently forced to use an account with Charities Aid Foundation, which charges 4.5% fees and does not allow one to invest one's holdings (thereby foregoing significant gains).

I reached out to Founders Pledge, who seem to offer excellent UK DAFs (both free and investment options), but they do not seem to allow non-founders to make use of their service).

Thanks for the post!
 

This [extinction from AI] is not some weird fear only EAs have. About 9% of the general population in the UK think AI might doom us all.

I'll add that in another survey of ours we found that the median probability of AI leading to extinction was 15% (for US respondents). In a separate survey, we also found strong public support for a pause. Those surveys are from three years ago though, I would expect higher concern now.

Caring about bees, who more and more researchers think are sentient, and shrimps, who the UK government officially declared as sentient, is too outlandish for him

We also found that many of the UK public also think this. A majority think they are likely sentient, an even larger majority think they can feel pain.

I guess you might think "professional EA orgs" or something are more male-dominated than EA survey respondents. That seems possible, depending on what you wanna count. One thing is 80k is currently majority-women and I think however you carve it up we're a big chunk of the space :)

Agreed. Fwiw, in EA Survey 2024 data, people currently working at EA orgs are actually significantly more likely to be women or non-binary than those not (36.9% vs 29.1%, p=0.004).

It has been considered for the EA Survey! I'm not sure why this was never prioritised for inclusion, after being raised. But if the meta orgs we work with say they want us to include these questions in the survey going forward, we will.

Have you tried any platforms other than Positly? (I ask because you wrote "I haven’t been able to fulfill this quota through either Positly." which made it sound like you had already tried someone else).

Prolific nominally have 570 active UK Muslims (though I would expect to recruit fewer than that cited number), and 299 in the US.

SurveyMonkey claim to be able to reach 500 US Muslims.

Feel free to DM me if further suggestions would be helpful. I would also approach surveying respondents from website like Prolific a little differently to how I would approach surveying from most panels (e.g. many more checks required on the latter, but potentially higher representativeness on the former).

Thanks for the useful post!

You may also be interested on our empirical studies on framing EA and longtermism.

We do, indeed, find that "longtermism" is distinctively unpopular as a framing. But messaging focused on global catastrophic risk reduction, or specific risks, such as AI safety in particular, performed quite well.

We're actually working on a new study examining EA vs AI framing specifically (including differences in who gets recruited by such framings). We'd welcome input on specific framings / elements to test.

How would you define and operationalize the vibe shift? Whether there's been a vibe shift and, if so, how significant, seems empirically tractable to determine.

Thank you Vasco.

I agree this is an important and interesting topic. I will look into the prior studies to assess what I think would be needed to shed light on the above (e.g. required sample size, required measures) and get back to you.

Interestingly, community members' prioritisation of animal welfare appears to have been increasing in recent years. (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CKwDgZGLipchAoxtN/ea-survey-2024-cause-prioritization#Trends_in_cause_prioritization_over_time)

This is neither to agree or disagree with the observation about representation of animal welfare at EA conferences and such.

I think this is interesting, but I don't think we should infer too much from this relationship. This plot basically matches those we produced examining the relationship between cortical neuron count and perceived moral value of different animals (replicating SlateStarCodex and another's surveys). As you can see below, we found extremely strong correlations. But we also found similarly strong correlations using EQ or total brain size rather than cortical neuron count, or using a crude 0-100 measure of how people 'care' about the animal in place of tradeoff ratios. Notably, when we replace the moral value measure with a simple ordinal ranking of the animals by neuron count (as in the second plot below), we find even stronger relationships.

My impression is therefore that the strong correlations more reflect the fact that we have a small number of datapoints with animals differing dramatically on a wide variety of predictor (or, in principle, outcome) variables which are all highly correlated, rather than indicating that neuron counts are distinctively predictive of any outcomes of interest. See Andrew Gelman's similar discussion of our study.

I think to actually disentangle these we would need a larger sample of animals who diverge on the key dimensions (e.g., birds with high neuron density but small brains, or animals with higher neuron count but lower perceived similarity to humans).