This is a really helpful chart and has updated my model of the community more than any of the written comments.
For a community of data nerds, it’s surprising that we don’t use data visualisations in our Forum comments more regularly.
Do you have data on the trends over time? I’m interested to know if the three attributes are getting closer together or further apart at both ends of the engagement spectrum.
My hypothesis is that the attributes will be getting closer together at low levels of engagement and getting further apart at the higher levels.
Do you have data on the trends over time? I’m interested to know if the three attributes are getting closer together or further apart at both ends of the engagement spectrum.
We only have a little data on the interaction between engagement and cause preference over time, because we only had those engagement measures in the EA Survey in 2019 and 2020. We were also asked to change some of the cause categories in 2020 (see Appendix 1), so comparisons across the years are not exact.
Still, just looking at differences between those two years, we see the patterns are broadly similar. True to your prediction, longtermism is slightly higher among the less engaged in 2020 than 2019, although the overall interaction between engagement, cause prioritisation and year is not significant (p=0.098). (Of course, differences between 2019 and 2020 need not be explained by particular EAs changing their views (they could be explained by non-longtermists dropping out, or EAs with different cause preferences being more/less likely to become more engaged between 2019 and 2020)).
Thanks David! I won’t update much on this given the small amount of data but this seems like an important area for CEA to be tracking in terms of their recruitment, retention, and diversity goals.
For considering “recruitment, retention, and diversity goals” I think it may also be of interest to look at cause preferences across length of time in EA, across years. Unlike in the case of engagement, we have length of time in EA data across every year of the EA Survey, rather than just two years.
Although EAS 2017 messes up what is otherwise a beautifully clear pattern*, we can still quite clearly see that:
On average people start out (0 years) in EA favouring neartermist causes and gradually cohorts become more longtermist. (Note that this is entirely compatible with non-longtermists dropping out, rather than describing individual change: though we know many individuals do change cause prioritization, predominantly in a longtermist direction.)
Each year (going up the graph vertically) has gradually become more longtermist even among people who have only been EA 0 years. Of course, this could partly be explained by non-longtermists dropping out within their first year of hearing about EA, but it could also reflect EA recruiting progressively more longtermist people.
We can also descriptively see that the jump between 2015 and 2018-2020 is quite dramatic. In 2015 all cohorts of EA (however long they’d been in EA) were strongly near-termist leaning. By 2018-2020, even people who’d just joined of EA were dramatically more favourable to longtermism. And by 2020, even people who had been in EA a couple of years were on average roughly equally longtermist/neartermist leaning and beginning to be on average longtermist leaning.
* EAS 2017 still broadly shows the same pattern until the oldest cohorts (those who have been in EA the longest, which have a very low sample size). In addition, as Appendix 1 shows, while EAS 2018-2020 have very similar questions, EAS 2015-2017 included quite different options in their questions.
I’ve included a plot excluding EAS 2017 below, just so people can get a clearer look at the most recent years, which are more comparable to each other.
This is a really helpful chart and has updated my model of the community more than any of the written comments.
For a community of data nerds, it’s surprising that we don’t use data visualisations in our Forum comments more regularly.
Do you have data on the trends over time? I’m interested to know if the three attributes are getting closer together or further apart at both ends of the engagement spectrum.
My hypothesis is that the attributes will be getting closer together at low levels of engagement and getting further apart at the higher levels.
Thanks for the nice comment!
We only have a little data on the interaction between engagement and cause preference over time, because we only had those engagement measures in the EA Survey in 2019 and 2020. We were also asked to change some of the cause categories in 2020 (see Appendix 1), so comparisons across the years are not exact.
Still, just looking at differences between those two years, we see the patterns are broadly similar. True to your prediction, longtermism is slightly higher among the less engaged in 2020 than 2019, although the overall interaction between engagement, cause prioritisation and year is not significant (p=0.098). (Of course, differences between 2019 and 2020 need not be explained by particular EAs changing their views (they could be explained by non-longtermists dropping out, or EAs with different cause preferences being more/less likely to become more engaged between 2019 and 2020)).
Thanks David! I won’t update much on this given the small amount of data but this seems like an important area for CEA to be tracking in terms of their recruitment, retention, and diversity goals.
For considering “recruitment, retention, and diversity goals” I think it may also be of interest to look at cause preferences across length of time in EA, across years. Unlike in the case of engagement, we have length of time in EA data across every year of the EA Survey, rather than just two years.
Although EAS 2017 messes up what is otherwise a beautifully clear pattern*, we can still quite clearly see that:
On average people start out (0 years) in EA favouring neartermist causes and gradually cohorts become more longtermist. (Note that this is entirely compatible with non-longtermists dropping out, rather than describing individual change: though we know many individuals do change cause prioritization, predominantly in a longtermist direction.)
Each year (going up the graph vertically) has gradually become more longtermist even among people who have only been EA 0 years. Of course, this could partly be explained by non-longtermists dropping out within their first year of hearing about EA, but it could also reflect EA recruiting progressively more longtermist people.
We can also descriptively see that the jump between 2015 and 2018-2020 is quite dramatic. In 2015 all cohorts of EA (however long they’d been in EA) were strongly near-termist leaning. By 2018-2020, even people who’d just joined of EA were dramatically more favourable to longtermism. And by 2020, even people who had been in EA a couple of years were on average roughly equally longtermist/neartermist leaning and beginning to be on average longtermist leaning.
* EAS 2017 still broadly shows the same pattern until the oldest cohorts (those who have been in EA the longest, which have a very low sample size). In addition, as Appendix 1 shows, while EAS 2018-2020 have very similar questions, EAS 2015-2017 included quite different options in their questions.
I’ve included a plot excluding EAS 2017 below, just so people can get a clearer look at the most recent years, which are more comparable to each other.