Thanks for providing a detailed suggestion to go with this critique!
While I’m part of the team that puts together the EA Survey, I’m only answering for myself here.
I’ve met people who are giving quite a lot of money, who have perhaps tried applied to EA jobs and not succeeded. And yet they are not allowed to consider themselves “highly engaged”. I guess this leads to them feeling disillusioned.
People can consider themselves anything they want! It’s okay! You’re allowed! I hope that a single question on the survey isn’t causing major changes to how people self-identify. If this is happening, it implies a side-effect the Survey wasn’t meant to have.
Have you met people who specifically cited the survey (or some other place the question has showed up — I think CEA might have used it before?) as a source of disillusionment?
I’m not sure I understand why people would so strongly prefer being in a “highly engaged” category vs. a “considerably engaged” category if those categories occupy the same relative position on a list. Especially since people don’t use that language to describe themselves, in my experience. But I could easily be missing something.
I want someone who earns-to-give (at any salary) to feel comfortable saying “EA is a big part of my life, and I’m closely involved in the community”. But I don’t think this should determine how the EA Survey splits up its categories on this question, and vice-versa.
*****
One change I’d happily make would be changing “EA-aligned organization” to “impact-focused career” or something like that. But I do think it’s reasonable for the survey to be able to analyze the small group of people whose professional lives are closely tied to the movement, and who spend thousands of hours per year on EA-related work rather than hundreds.
(Similarly, in a survey about the climate movement, it would seem reasonable to have one answer aimed at full-time paid employees and one answer aimed at extremely active volunteers/donors. Both of those groups are obviously critical to the movement, but their answers have different implications.)
Earning-to-give is a tricky category. I think it’s a matter of degree, like the difference between “involved volunteer/group member” and “full-time employee/group organizer”. Someone who spends ~50 hours/year trying to allocate $10,000 is doing something extraordinary with their life, and EA having a big community of people like this is excellent, but I’d still like to be able to separate “active members of Giving What We Can” from “the few dozen people who do something like full-time grantmaking or employ people to do this for them”.
*****
Put another way: Before I joined CEA, I was an active GWWC member, read a lot of EA-related articles, did some contract work for MIRI/CFAR, and went to my local EA meetups. I’d been rejected from multiple EA roles and decided to pursue another path (I didn’t think it was likely I’d get an EA job until months later).
I was pretty engaged at this point, but the nature of my engagement now that I work for CEA is qualitatively different. The opinions of Aaron!2018 should mean something different to community leaders than the opinions of Aaron!2021 — they aren’t necessarily “less important” (I think Aaron!2018 would have a better perspective on certain issues than I do now, blinded as I am by constant exposure to everything), but they are “different”.
*****
All that said, maybe the right answer is to do away with this question and create clusters of respondents who fit certain criteria, after the fact, rather than having people self-define. e.g. “if two of A, B, or C are true, choose category X”.
Thanks for providing a detailed suggestion to go with this critique!
While I’m part of the team that puts together the EA Survey, I’m only answering for myself here.
People can consider themselves anything they want! It’s okay! You’re allowed! I hope that a single question on the survey isn’t causing major changes to how people self-identify. If this is happening, it implies a side-effect the Survey wasn’t meant to have.
Have you met people who specifically cited the survey (or some other place the question has showed up — I think CEA might have used it before?) as a source of disillusionment?
I’m not sure I understand why people would so strongly prefer being in a “highly engaged” category vs. a “considerably engaged” category if those categories occupy the same relative position on a list. Especially since people don’t use that language to describe themselves, in my experience. But I could easily be missing something.
I want someone who earns-to-give (at any salary) to feel comfortable saying “EA is a big part of my life, and I’m closely involved in the community”. But I don’t think this should determine how the EA Survey splits up its categories on this question, and vice-versa.
*****
One change I’d happily make would be changing “EA-aligned organization” to “impact-focused career” or something like that. But I do think it’s reasonable for the survey to be able to analyze the small group of people whose professional lives are closely tied to the movement, and who spend thousands of hours per year on EA-related work rather than hundreds.
(Similarly, in a survey about the climate movement, it would seem reasonable to have one answer aimed at full-time paid employees and one answer aimed at extremely active volunteers/donors. Both of those groups are obviously critical to the movement, but their answers have different implications.)
Earning-to-give is a tricky category. I think it’s a matter of degree, like the difference between “involved volunteer/group member” and “full-time employee/group organizer”. Someone who spends ~50 hours/year trying to allocate $10,000 is doing something extraordinary with their life, and EA having a big community of people like this is excellent, but I’d still like to be able to separate “active members of Giving What We Can” from “the few dozen people who do something like full-time grantmaking or employ people to do this for them”.
*****
Put another way: Before I joined CEA, I was an active GWWC member, read a lot of EA-related articles, did some contract work for MIRI/CFAR, and went to my local EA meetups. I’d been rejected from multiple EA roles and decided to pursue another path (I didn’t think it was likely I’d get an EA job until months later).
I was pretty engaged at this point, but the nature of my engagement now that I work for CEA is qualitatively different. The opinions of Aaron!2018 should mean something different to community leaders than the opinions of Aaron!2021 — they aren’t necessarily “less important” (I think Aaron!2018 would have a better perspective on certain issues than I do now, blinded as I am by constant exposure to everything), but they are “different”.
*****
All that said, maybe the right answer is to do away with this question and create clusters of respondents who fit certain criteria, after the fact, rather than having people self-define. e.g. “if two of A, B, or C are true, choose category X”.