Hi there, just a quick thought on the cause groupings in case you use them in future posts.
Currently, the post notes that global poverty is the cause most often selected as the top priority, but it should add that this is sensitive to how the causes are grouped, and there’s no single clear way to do this.
The most common division we have is probably these 4 categories: global poverty, GCRs, meta and animal welfare.
If we used this grouping, then the identifiers would report:
GCRs: 28%
Global poverty: 27%
Meta: 27%
Animal welfare: 10%
(Plus Climate Change: 13% Mental health: 4%)
So, basically the top 3 areas are about the same. If climate change were grouped into GCRs, then GCRs would go up to 41% and be the clear leader.
Global poverty is a huge area that receives hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, and could arguably be divided into health, economic empowerment (e.g. cash transfers), education, policy-change etc. That could also be an option for the next version of the survey.
I’m glad we have the finer grained divisions in the survey, but we have to be careful about how to present the results.
It’s interesting that you think of grouping Climate Change with GCRs. I normally think of it as an aspect of medium-term global poverty, because my impression is that climate change will displace and kill millions in the developing world, but doesn’t present an existential risk. I’m open to changing my mind though.
Hi there, just a quick thought on the cause groupings in case you use them in future posts.
Currently, the post notes that global poverty is the cause most often selected as the top priority, but it should add that this is sensitive to how the causes are grouped, and there’s no single clear way to do this.
The most common division we have is probably these 4 categories: global poverty, GCRs, meta and animal welfare.
If we used this grouping, then the identifiers would report:
GCRs: 28%
Global poverty: 27%
Meta: 27%
Animal welfare: 10%
(Plus Climate Change: 13% Mental health: 4%)
So, basically the top 3 areas are about the same. If climate change were grouped into GCRs, then GCRs would go up to 41% and be the clear leader.
Global poverty is a huge area that receives hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, and could arguably be divided into health, economic empowerment (e.g. cash transfers), education, policy-change etc. That could also be an option for the next version of the survey.
I’m glad we have the finer grained divisions in the survey, but we have to be careful about how to present the results.
Thanks Ben. I totally agree and we’re going to go into this a lot more in the Cause Preference post.
It’s interesting that you think of grouping Climate Change with GCRs. I normally think of it as an aspect of medium-term global poverty, because my impression is that climate change will displace and kill millions in the developing world, but doesn’t present an existential risk. I’m open to changing my mind though.
I think in practice people work on it for both reasons depending on their values.