Fortunately we have data on this (including data on different engagement levels using EA Forum as a proxy) going back to 2017 (before that the cause question had a multi-select format that doesn’t allow for easy comparison to these results).
If we look at the full sample over time using the same categories, we can see that there’s been a tendency towards increased support for long-termist causes overall and a decline in support for Global Poverty (though support for Poverty remains >50% higher than for AI. The “Other near term” trend goes in the opposite direction, but this is largely because this category combines Climate Change and Mental Health and we only added Mental Health to the EAS in 2018.
Looking at EA Forum members only (a highly engaged ~20% of the EAS sample), we can see that there’s been a slight trend towards more long-termism over time, though this trend is not so immediately obvious to see since between 2018 and 2019 EAs in this sample seem to have switched between AI and other long-termist causes. But on the whole the EA Forum subset has been more stable in its views (and closer to the LF allocation) over time.
Of course, it is not immediately obvious what we should conclude from this about dropout (or decreasing engagement) in non-longtermist people. We do know that many people have been switching into long-termist causes (and especially AI) over time (see below). But it’s quite possible that non-longtermists have been dropping out of EA over a longer time frame (pre-2017). That said, I do think that the EA Forum proxy for engagement is probably more robust to these kinds of effects than the self-reported (1-5) engagement level, since although people might dropout of Forum membership due to disproportionately longtermist discussion, the Forum still has at least a measure of cause diversity, whereas facets of the engagement scale (such as EA org employement and EA Global attendance) are more directly filtering on long-termism. We will address data about people decreasing engagement or dropping our of EA due to perceiving EA as prioritizing certain causes too heavily in a forthcoming EA Survey post.
Fortunately we have data on this (including data on different engagement levels using EA Forum as a proxy) going back to 2017 (before that the cause question had a multi-select format that doesn’t allow for easy comparison to these results).
If we look at the full sample over time using the same categories, we can see that there’s been a tendency towards increased support for long-termist causes overall and a decline in support for Global Poverty (though support for Poverty remains >50% higher than for AI. The “Other near term” trend goes in the opposite direction, but this is largely because this category combines Climate Change and Mental Health and we only added Mental Health to the EAS in 2018.
Looking at EA Forum members only (a highly engaged ~20% of the EAS sample), we can see that there’s been a slight trend towards more long-termism over time, though this trend is not so immediately obvious to see since between 2018 and 2019 EAs in this sample seem to have switched between AI and other long-termist causes. But on the whole the EA Forum subset has been more stable in its views (and closer to the LF allocation) over time.
Of course, it is not immediately obvious what we should conclude from this about dropout (or decreasing engagement) in non-longtermist people. We do know that many people have been switching into long-termist causes (and especially AI) over time (see below). But it’s quite possible that non-longtermists have been dropping out of EA over a longer time frame (pre-2017). That said, I do think that the EA Forum proxy for engagement is probably more robust to these kinds of effects than the self-reported (1-5) engagement level, since although people might dropout of Forum membership due to disproportionately longtermist discussion, the Forum still has at least a measure of cause diversity, whereas facets of the engagement scale (such as EA org employement and EA Global attendance) are more directly filtering on long-termism. We will address data about people decreasing engagement or dropping our of EA due to perceiving EA as prioritizing certain causes too heavily in a forthcoming EA Survey post.
Both images from the EA Survey 2019: Cause Prioritization
Yes, that is what I meant. Thank you so much for providing additional analysis!
Thank you for preparing these—very interesting!