Thanks for writing this-it is important to think about. However, I have very different impressions of the ratio of impact of people in the EA community versus the EA network. Comparisons have been made before about the impact of an EA and, e.g., the average developed country person. If we use a relatively simple example of charity for the present generation, if we say the impact to a typical developed country charity is one, and a typical less developed country charity is 100, and 1% of the charity goes to less developed countries, that would have an impact per dollar of 1.99 (false precision for clarity). However, if the EA donates to the most effective less developed country charity, that could have a ratio of 1000 (perhaps saving a life for $5000 vs $5 million), or about 500 times as effective as the average US money going to charity (in the average, very little would go to GiveWell recommended charities). Then there could be a factor of several more in terms of the percentage of income given to charity (though it appears notyet), so I think the poverty EA being three orders of magnitude more effective than the mean developed country giver is reasonable. If you switch to the longterm future, then an extremely tiny amount of conventional money goes to high impact ways of improving the long-term future, so the ratio of the EA to mean would be much higher.
Iām not sure how to quantify the impact of the EA network. It very well could be significantly higher impact than the mean developed country person, because the EA community members will generally have chosen high-impact fields and therefore have connections with EA network people in those fields. However, many peopleās connections would not be in their field, and the field as a whole might not be very effective. Also, the EA community tends to be especially capable. So depending on the cause area, I would be surprised if the typical EA community member is less than one order of magnitude more effective than the typical EA network member. So then the impact of the EA community would be larger than the EA network (which I believe you are saying is 9x as many people and I think this is the right order of magnitude). Then there is the question of how much influence the EA community could have on the EA network. I would guess it would be significantly lower than the influence the EA community could have on itself. I still think it is useful to think about what influence we could have on the EA network because it is relatively neglected, but I donāt think it should be as large a change in priorities as you are suggesting. If we could bring more professionals into the EA community through your suggested groups, I think that could be high impact.
Iām not sure that an EA community member is āespecially capableā compared to a capable person who attends less events or is less engaged with online content. The wider network may have quite a few people who have absorbed 5+ years of online material to do with EA, but rarely interacted, and those people will have used the same advice to choose donations and careers as more engaged members.
I also think the network has higher variance, you may get people who are not doing much altruistically, but there will also be more people in business with 20+ year experience, leading academics in their field and people higher up in government who want to good with their careers.
Side point
Comparisons have been made before about the impact of an EA and, e.g., the average developed country person.
Whilst Iām aware that you move on from this point, Iām not sure itās useful to have as a comparison when the post is about people who are aware of EA and of having impact within their career rather than everyone in a developed country. It may be that itās also hard to parse your text without paragraphs and removing that first point would have helped.
Thanks for the feedback-now I have broken it into two paragraphs. Itās not clear to me whether to use the reference class of average person in the developed country versus reference class of EA community. I was not envisioning someone who has read 5+ years of EA content and is making career and donation decisions as the āEA network.ā Then I would agree that the EA community would be a better reference class for EA network. I was envisioning for the EA network more people who have heard about EA through an EA community contact, and mightāve had a one hour conversation. How would you define the EA community and how large do you think it is?
I think the community is composed of people who either attend multiple EA events each year or contribute to online discussion, and some proportion of people who work at an EA related organisation, so maybe between 500-2000 people.
There are quite a few people who might attend an EAG or read content but donāt get involved and wouldnāt consider themselves part of the community. I might be biased as part of my work at EA London has included having lots of conversations with people who often have a great understanding of EA but have never been to an event.
This is very helpful to understand where you are coming from. Local groups have 2124 regular attendees (more than an event every 2 months or more than 25% of events, which appears to be more selective than your criterion, and not all groups would have filled out the survey). Then there are ~18,000 main EA Facebook group members (and there would be some non-overlaps in other EA-themed Facebook groups), but many of them would not actually be contributing to online discussions. Of course there would be overlap with the active local group members, but there could be people in neither of these groups who are still in the community. Giving What We Can members are now up to 4,400, who I would count as being part of the EA community (though some of those have gone silent). 843 out of the 2576 people who took the 2018 EA survey had taken the GWWC pledge (33%). Not all of the EA survey takers identified as EA, and not all would meet your criterion for being in the community, but if this were representative, that would indicate about 13,000 EAs. Still, in 2017, there were about 23,000 donors to GiveWell. And there would be many other EA-inspired donations and a lot of people making career decisions based on EA who are not engaged directly with the community. So that would be evidence that the number of people making EA-informed donations and career decisions is a lot bigger than the community, as you say. The 80k newsletter has >200,000 subscribers do you have a different term for that level of engagement? I would love to hear othersā perspectives as well.
Thanks for writing this-it is important to think about. However, I have very different impressions of the ratio of impact of people in the EA community versus the EA network. Comparisons have been made before about the impact of an EA and, e.g., the average developed country person. If we use a relatively simple example of charity for the present generation, if we say the impact to a typical developed country charity is one, and a typical less developed country charity is 100, and 1% of the charity goes to less developed countries, that would have an impact per dollar of 1.99 (false precision for clarity). However, if the EA donates to the most effective less developed country charity, that could have a ratio of 1000 (perhaps saving a life for $5000 vs $5 million), or about 500 times as effective as the average US money going to charity (in the average, very little would go to GiveWell recommended charities). Then there could be a factor of several more in terms of the percentage of income given to charity (though it appears not yet), so I think the poverty EA being three orders of magnitude more effective than the mean developed country giver is reasonable. If you switch to the longterm future, then an extremely tiny amount of conventional money goes to high impact ways of improving the long-term future, so the ratio of the EA to mean would be much higher.
Iām not sure how to quantify the impact of the EA network. It very well could be significantly higher impact than the mean developed country person, because the EA community members will generally have chosen high-impact fields and therefore have connections with EA network people in those fields. However, many peopleās connections would not be in their field, and the field as a whole might not be very effective. Also, the EA community tends to be especially capable. So depending on the cause area, I would be surprised if the typical EA community member is less than one order of magnitude more effective than the typical EA network member. So then the impact of the EA community would be larger than the EA network (which I believe you are saying is 9x as many people and I think this is the right order of magnitude). Then there is the question of how much influence the EA community could have on the EA network. I would guess it would be significantly lower than the influence the EA community could have on itself. I still think it is useful to think about what influence we could have on the EA network because it is relatively neglected, but I donāt think it should be as large a change in priorities as you are suggesting. If we could bring more professionals into the EA community through your suggested groups, I think that could be high impact.
Iām not sure that an EA community member is āespecially capableā compared to a capable person who attends less events or is less engaged with online content. The wider network may have quite a few people who have absorbed 5+ years of online material to do with EA, but rarely interacted, and those people will have used the same advice to choose donations and careers as more engaged members.
I also think the network has higher variance, you may get people who are not doing much altruistically, but there will also be more people in business with 20+ year experience, leading academics in their field and people higher up in government who want to good with their careers.
Side point
Whilst Iām aware that you move on from this point, Iām not sure itās useful to have as a comparison when the post is about people who are aware of EA and of having impact within their career rather than everyone in a developed country. It may be that itās also hard to parse your text without paragraphs and removing that first point would have helped.
Thanks for the feedback-now I have broken it into two paragraphs. Itās not clear to me whether to use the reference class of average person in the developed country versus reference class of EA community. I was not envisioning someone who has read 5+ years of EA content and is making career and donation decisions as the āEA network.ā Then I would agree that the EA community would be a better reference class for EA network. I was envisioning for the EA network more people who have heard about EA through an EA community contact, and mightāve had a one hour conversation. How would you define the EA community and how large do you think it is?
I think the community is composed of people who either attend multiple EA events each year or contribute to online discussion, and some proportion of people who work at an EA related organisation, so maybe between 500-2000 people.
There are quite a few people who might attend an EAG or read content but donāt get involved and wouldnāt consider themselves part of the community. I might be biased as part of my work at EA London has included having lots of conversations with people who often have a great understanding of EA but have never been to an event.
This is very helpful to understand where you are coming from. Local groups have 2124 regular attendees (more than an event every 2 months or more than 25% of events, which appears to be more selective than your criterion, and not all groups would have filled out the survey). Then there are ~18,000 main EA Facebook group members (and there would be some non-overlaps in other EA-themed Facebook groups), but many of them would not actually be contributing to online discussions. Of course there would be overlap with the active local group members, but there could be people in neither of these groups who are still in the community. Giving What We Can members are now up to 4,400, who I would count as being part of the EA community (though some of those have gone silent). 843 out of the 2576 people who took the 2018 EA survey had taken the GWWC pledge (33%). Not all of the EA survey takers identified as EA, and not all would meet your criterion for being in the community, but if this were representative, that would indicate about 13,000 EAs. Still, in 2017, there were about 23,000 donors to GiveWell. And there would be many other EA-inspired donations and a lot of people making career decisions based on EA who are not engaged directly with the community. So that would be evidence that the number of people making EA-informed donations and career decisions is a lot bigger than the community, as you say. The 80k newsletter has >200,000 subscribers do you have a different term for that level of engagement? I would love to hear othersā perspectives as well.