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.
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.