CEA defines an engaged EA as someone who takes significant actions motivated by EA principles (we sometimes also use the term “impartially altruistic, truth-seeking principles). In practice, this can look like selecting a job or degree program, donating a substantial portion of one’s income, working on EA-related projects, and so on. [italics added]
Just to clarify my understanding, are you defining/taking yourself to be looking at “highly engaged” EAs or just “engaged” EAs? For reference, the criteria for the CEA definition of “engaged EA” above are met by over half the EA Survey sample (more like 2/3rds depending on how you defined a “substantial” portion of one’s income). In contrast, EA org employees/CBG recipients is a much higher bar for engagement (~10% of EA Survey are current EA org employees), while attending EAG is ~30% of EA Survey respondents, so I’d expect very different retention rates for these different populations.
We first checked if individuals were still supported by a Community Building Grant or working at an EA-related organization. If they were, we marked them as still being highly engaged. If they were not, we checked what they were currently doing and whether they still fulfilled the definition of being highly engaged. (These checks either involved looking at data from CEA’s various programs, LinkedIn, talking to people who knew about the individual’s activities, or the individual directly.)
Were you able to get definitive answers about all the individuals on your lists using these methods? If not, I’m curious what numbers the percentages were drawn from (e.g. just the people you could get a definitive answer about or were unclear cases assumed to have dropped out/not dropped out etc.?).
29.8% is much closer to the annual retention estimate produced by Peter Wildeford based on the 2018 EA Survey.
Note that in the comments on Ben’s earlier post, Peter suggests that the other method that we used in that post would be more accurate (which gives an estimated ~60% retention after 4-5 years). We should be able to improve on that estimate quite a bit now that we have more cross-year data.
In case it’s helpful, I wanted to let you know that I embedded a series of public comments using the Hypothes.is tool.
If you get an account and a browser plugin at https://hypothes.is/ (it’s quick) you will see my comments on the page itself, and you can respond to them. Let me know if you have problems or want me to post these in another way.
Thanks for the post. It looks like useful data!
Just to clarify my understanding, are you defining/taking yourself to be looking at “highly engaged” EAs or just “engaged” EAs? For reference, the criteria for the CEA definition of “engaged EA” above are met by over half the EA Survey sample (more like 2/3rds depending on how you defined a “substantial” portion of one’s income). In contrast, EA org employees/CBG recipients is a much higher bar for engagement (~10% of EA Survey are current EA org employees), while attending EAG is ~30% of EA Survey respondents, so I’d expect very different retention rates for these different populations.
Were you able to get definitive answers about all the individuals on your lists using these methods? If not, I’m curious what numbers the percentages were drawn from (e.g. just the people you could get a definitive answer about or were unclear cases assumed to have dropped out/not dropped out etc.?).
Note that in the comments on Ben’s earlier post, Peter suggests that the other method that we used in that post would be more accurate (which gives an estimated ~60% retention after 4-5 years). We should be able to improve on that estimate quite a bit now that we have more cross-year data.
Hi Gaby. Thanks for the post!
In case it’s helpful, I wanted to let you know that I embedded a series of public comments using the Hypothes.is tool.
If you get an account and a browser plugin at https://hypothes.is/ (it’s quick) you will see my comments on the page itself, and you can respond to them. Let me know if you have problems or want me to post these in another way.