Thank you for your excellent work on the survey! Like the other posts in this series, I found this very interesting.
One quick suggestion: it’s unclear to me if respondents interpreted “EA job” as (a) “job at an EA organization” or (b) “high-impact job according to EA principles”. E.g. doing AI safety research in academia would be an EA job according to (b) but not (a) [except maybe for a few exceptions such as CHAI]. It could be good to clarify this in future surveys.
(This is assuming that “Too hard to get EA job” is all information respondents saw. If there was additional information indicating whether (a) or (b) was intended, it would be good to clarify this in the post.)
it’s unclear to me if respondents interpreted “EA job” as (a) “job at an EA organization” or (b) “high-impact job according to EA principles”
I agree. This was one of the questions which was requested externally, that I mentioned at the top of the post, which I included verbatim, so I don’t know which was the intended meaning. The precise wordings were “Too hard to get an EA job” and “Not enough job opportunities that seemed like a good fit for me” which I agree could be interpreted more narrowly or more broadly.
To perhaps gain a little insight, we can cross-reference this with our data on respondents’ career plans. Among those that included ‘Work at an EA non-profit’ in their plans (note that this was a multi-select question), 35.7% said that “Too hard to get an EA job” was a barrier to being more involved in EA. Conversely, among those that did not include working for an EA non-profit in their career plan, 20.1% selected this as a barrier. This is a significant difference (p<0.001), but notably it means that many participants who selected this as a barrier were not aiming to work in a specifically EA org. In fact, to put it another way, 49.3% of those who selected this as a barrier did not say they planned to work in an EA non-profit, whereas 50.7% did plan to work in an EA org (but note that many of these also included other routes, like academia, in their career plans, so it’s not clear that it being too hard to work in an EA org specifically was what they viewed as a barrier). Of course, it’s also possible that for some of these respondents it was because it was too hard to get a job in an EA org, which they viewed as a barrier, that they did not select EA org as part of their career plans.
Thank you for your excellent work on the survey! Like the other posts in this series, I found this very interesting.
One quick suggestion: it’s unclear to me if respondents interpreted “EA job” as (a) “job at an EA organization” or (b) “high-impact job according to EA principles”. E.g. doing AI safety research in academia would be an EA job according to (b) but not (a) [except maybe for a few exceptions such as CHAI]. It could be good to clarify this in future surveys.
(This is assuming that “Too hard to get EA job” is all information respondents saw. If there was additional information indicating whether (a) or (b) was intended, it would be good to clarify this in the post.)
Thanks for your comment Max!
I agree. This was one of the questions which was requested externally, that I mentioned at the top of the post, which I included verbatim, so I don’t know which was the intended meaning. The precise wordings were “Too hard to get an EA job” and “Not enough job opportunities that seemed like a good fit for me” which I agree could be interpreted more narrowly or more broadly.
To perhaps gain a little insight, we can cross-reference this with our data on respondents’ career plans. Among those that included ‘Work at an EA non-profit’ in their plans (note that this was a multi-select question), 35.7% said that “Too hard to get an EA job” was a barrier to being more involved in EA. Conversely, among those that did not include working for an EA non-profit in their career plan, 20.1% selected this as a barrier. This is a significant difference (p<0.001), but notably it means that many participants who selected this as a barrier were not aiming to work in a specifically EA org. In fact, to put it another way, 49.3% of those who selected this as a barrier did not say they planned to work in an EA non-profit, whereas 50.7% did plan to work in an EA org (but note that many of these also included other routes, like academia, in their career plans, so it’s not clear that it being too hard to work in an EA org specifically was what they viewed as a barrier). Of course, it’s also possible that for some of these respondents it was because it was too hard to get a job in an EA org, which they viewed as a barrier, that they did not select EA org as part of their career plans.