What kinds of high schools did you generally target? Did you specifically target your efforts at schools that are feeders for top universities?
Though I wish EA were more diverse, it’s simply true that students at top universities have far more interest in EA than the average population. I’d imagine this holds true in high schools: The kids who end up running Berkeley EA are the ones who’d love to read Peter Singer in high school.
3 out of the 5 EA-aligned teachers who contributed to the post were from quite elite schools. In London we only got around to contacting schools with high grades (we had a sorted list, and were slowly working our way down the list). In Greater Vancouver we contacted every high school. I haven’t done any careful analysis, but from eyeballing the data, there doesn’t seem to be a clear correlation between school ranking and interest in running our workshops. Nor does there seem to be a clear correlation between school ranking and interest in advanced workshops.
From the data we collected, there is nothing to suggest students from elite schools are more “interested” in EA than the average population. However, it is probably fair to say students from elite schools are on average more able to act upon EA principles as they get older, so targeting elite schools could be justified for that reason.
That’s very interesting. Seems like evidence that EA might not be inherently more appealing to students at top schools, but rather that EA’s current composition is a product of circumstance and chance.
I was a SHIC ambassador at my high school, which is fairly selectie, in contrast to Jessica’s “[high schoolers] will usually just believe you and accept what you say,” I felt that the students at my high school were much more skeptical than I expected. Even some of the eighth graders were like if you decrease your demand for factory farmed products, won’t that just make it cheaper and have no net effect on supply? What about that fish farm that I visited in Israel where the fish seemed to be doing pretty great? With my actual club, one person raised the issue of harms caused by farming plants, and I wasn’t able to navigate that very well. (I’m not a great presenter, fyi. Also, the Cognitive Quirks level didn’t work out very well, since for the 2-4-8 they were like what about −3? π? and it turns out that they’re not actually scope-insensitive.)
Of course, it’s great to have a critically thinking audience, but it raises the risk of getting into thorny issues that you’re not fully prepared to explain well and so your presentation falls apart.
Hm. Definitely more a personal impression, and I should’ve qualified that as “it seems to me”. But I’d also bet on it being true.
Data point #1, people who took the 2018 EA Survey are twice as likely as the average American to hold a bachelor’s degree, and 7x more likely to hold a Ph.D. Maybe they’re getting these degrees from less competitive schools, but that seems less likely than the alternative.
Data point #2, a quick Google search reveals that all7IvyLeagueuniversitieshaveEA clubs. On the other hand, at the 5 most populous US universities, each with 5-10x more students than the average Ivy, only Ohio State and Texas A&M have any online indication of an EA club, and both of these online pages have zero content posted on them.
Anecdotally, I go to an unranked state university with >50k students. There’s no EA club and I haven’t met anyone that’s ever heard of EA.
I think there’s a lot of potential for EA to be a lot more mainstream, but in its current state where top recommended careers include Machine Learning PhDs, Economics PhDs, and quant trading, it can be very hard to appeal to the vast majority of people.
It seems to me that the people who are currently involved in EA and the people who are predisposed to be interested in EA are quite different groups. For example, currently EA is heavily male, but I don’t think that’s because the basic ideas of Effective Altruism resonate more with men than women (I recognize there is some debate on this point). Similarly, currently EA is widespread at elite universities because it was founded at elite universities, but that doesn’t mean students at elite universities are naturally more interested.
I seem to recall a survey done on Mechanical Turk about how interested strangers are in EA ideas that showed quite different demographics than our current community, although I can’t recall anymore what it was called...
My impression from my outreach to all ages is that founders effects are pretty significant (including who we network with, and how we usually communicate in a way that people like ourselves would find appealing) - I’ve found a wide variety of people find the basic ideas appealing.
Also the capability to get fully involved is pretty biased towards young people with few commitments and a lot of choice over what career path they take.
But of course that doesn’t rule out a decent skew in who is likely to become deeply interested—I do think a skew is very likely at least for the more “weird” EA ideas.
One thing to note about the the Kagan/Fitz study, is that I believe it used a fairly mild specification of “Interest in Effective Giving” along the lines of whether they support charities overseas rather than in the US, rather than a more out-there specifications including, I dunno, worrying about insect sentience, or what they think of the potential value of interplanetary colonisation.
What kinds of high schools did you generally target? Did you specifically target your efforts at schools that are feeders for top universities?
Though I wish EA were more diverse, it’s simply true that students at top universities have far more interest in EA than the average population. I’d imagine this holds true in high schools: The kids who end up running Berkeley EA are the ones who’d love to read Peter Singer in high school.
3 out of the 5 EA-aligned teachers who contributed to the post were from quite elite schools. In London we only got around to contacting schools with high grades (we had a sorted list, and were slowly working our way down the list). In Greater Vancouver we contacted every high school. I haven’t done any careful analysis, but from eyeballing the data, there doesn’t seem to be a clear correlation between school ranking and interest in running our workshops. Nor does there seem to be a clear correlation between school ranking and interest in advanced workshops.
From the data we collected, there is nothing to suggest students from elite schools are more “interested” in EA than the average population. However, it is probably fair to say students from elite schools are on average more able to act upon EA principles as they get older, so targeting elite schools could be justified for that reason.
That’s very interesting. Seems like evidence that EA might not be inherently more appealing to students at top schools, but rather that EA’s current composition is a product of circumstance and chance.
I was a SHIC ambassador at my high school, which is fairly selectie, in contrast to Jessica’s “[high schoolers] will usually just believe you and accept what you say,” I felt that the students at my high school were much more skeptical than I expected. Even some of the eighth graders were like if you decrease your demand for factory farmed products, won’t that just make it cheaper and have no net effect on supply? What about that fish farm that I visited in Israel where the fish seemed to be doing pretty great? With my actual club, one person raised the issue of harms caused by farming plants, and I wasn’t able to navigate that very well. (I’m not a great presenter, fyi. Also, the Cognitive Quirks level didn’t work out very well, since for the 2-4-8 they were like what about −3? π? and it turns out that they’re not actually scope-insensitive.)
Of course, it’s great to have a critically thinking audience, but it raises the risk of getting into thorny issues that you’re not fully prepared to explain well and so your presentation falls apart.
“it’s simply true that students at top universities have far more interest in EA than the average population” Source?
Hm. Definitely more a personal impression, and I should’ve qualified that as “it seems to me”. But I’d also bet on it being true.
Data point #1, people who took the 2018 EA Survey are twice as likely as the average American to hold a bachelor’s degree, and 7x more likely to hold a Ph.D. Maybe they’re getting these degrees from less competitive schools, but that seems less likely than the alternative.
Data point #2, a quick Google search reveals that all 7 Ivy League universities have EA clubs. On the other hand, at the 5 most populous US universities, each with 5-10x more students than the average Ivy, only Ohio State and Texas A&M have any online indication of an EA club, and both of these online pages have zero content posted on them.
Anecdotally, I go to an unranked state university with >50k students. There’s no EA club and I haven’t met anyone that’s ever heard of EA.
I think there’s a lot of potential for EA to be a lot more mainstream, but in its current state where top recommended careers include Machine Learning PhDs, Economics PhDs, and quant trading, it can be very hard to appeal to the vast majority of people.
It seems to me that the people who are currently involved in EA and the people who are predisposed to be interested in EA are quite different groups. For example, currently EA is heavily male, but I don’t think that’s because the basic ideas of Effective Altruism resonate more with men than women (I recognize there is some debate on this point). Similarly, currently EA is widespread at elite universities because it was founded at elite universities, but that doesn’t mean students at elite universities are naturally more interested.
I seem to recall a survey done on Mechanical Turk about how interested strangers are in EA ideas that showed quite different demographics than our current community, although I can’t recall anymore what it was called...
I presume you mean this survey by Ari Kagan and Nick Fitz? https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MDxaD688pATMnjwmB/to-grow-a-healthy-movement-pick-the-low-hanging-fruit
Yes! Thanks
My impression from my outreach to all ages is that founders effects are pretty significant (including who we network with, and how we usually communicate in a way that people like ourselves would find appealing) - I’ve found a wide variety of people find the basic ideas appealing.
Also the capability to get fully involved is pretty biased towards young people with few commitments and a lot of choice over what career path they take.
But of course that doesn’t rule out a decent skew in who is likely to become deeply interested—I do think a skew is very likely at least for the more “weird” EA ideas.
One thing to note about the the Kagan/Fitz study, is that I believe it used a fairly mild specification of “Interest in Effective Giving” along the lines of whether they support charities overseas rather than in the US, rather than a more out-there specifications including, I dunno, worrying about insect sentience, or what they think of the potential value of interplanetary colonisation.