You probably already agree with this, but I think lower survey participation should make you think it’s more likely that the effective altruism community is shrinking than you did before seeing that evidence.
If you as an individual or CEA as an institution have any metrics you track to determine whether effective altruism is growing or shrinking, I’d find it interesting to know more about what they are.
Since this time last year, participation metrics are up across the board for many EA things — more local groups, much more Forum activity, more GiveWell donors, a much faster rate of growth for Giving What We Can, etc.
I do agree that lower survey participation is evidence in favor of a smaller community — I just think it’s overwhelmed by other evidence.
The metrics I mentioned were the first that came to mind. Trying to think of more:
From what I’ve seen at other orgs (GiveDirectly, AMF, EA Funds), donations to big EA charities seem to generally be growing over time (GD is flat, the other two are way up). This isn’t the same as “number of people in the a EA movement”, but in the case of EA Funds, I think “monthly active donors” are quite likely to be people who’d think of themselves in that way.
EA.org activity is also up quite a bit (pageviews up 35% from Jan 1 - May 23, 2021 vs. 2020, avg. time on page also up slightly).
Are there any numbers that especially interest you, which I either haven’t mentioned or have mentioned but not given specific data on?
Just for the record, I find the evidence that EA is shrinking or stagnating on a substantial number of important dimensions pretty convincing. Relevant metrics include traffic to many EA-adjacent websites, Google trends for many EA-related terms, attendance at many non-student group meetups, total attendance at major EA conferences, number of people filling out the EA survey, and a good amount of community attrition among a lot of core people I care a lot about.
I think in terms of pure membership, I think EA is probably been pretty stable with some minor growth. I think it’s somewhat more likely than not that average competence in members has been going down, because new members don’t seem as good as the members who I’ve seen leave.
It seems very clear to me that growth is much slower than it was in 2015-2017, based on basically all available metrics. The obvious explanation of “sometime around late 2016 lots of people decided that we should stop pursuing super aggressive growth” seems like a relatively straightforward explanation and explains the data.
Re: web traffic and Google trends — I think Peter Wildeford (née Hurford) is working on an update to his previous post on this. I’ll be interested to see what the trends look like over the past two years given all the growth on other fronts. I would see continued decline/stagnation of Google/Wikipedia interest as solid evidence for movement shrinkage/stagnation.
attendance at many non-student group meetups
Do you have data on this across many meetups (or even just a couple of meetups in the Bay)?
I could easily believe this is happening, but I’m not aware of whatever source the claim comes from. (Also reasonable if it comes from e.g. conversations you’ve had with a bunch of organizers — just curious how you came to think this.)
total attendance at major EA conferences
This seems like much more a function of “how conferences are planned and marketed” than “how many people in the world would want to attend”.
In my experience (though I haven’t checked this with CEA’s events team, so take it with a grain of salt), EA Global conferences have typically targeted certain numbers of attendees rather than aiming for as many people as possible. This breaks down a bit with virtual conferences, since it’s easier to “fit” a very large number of people, but I still think the marketing for EAG Virtual 2020 was much less aggressive than the marketing for some of the earliest EAG conferences (and I’d guess that the standards for admission were higher).
If CEA wanted to break the attendance record for EA Global with the SF 2022 conference, I suspect they could do so, but there would be substantial tradeoffs involved (e.g. between size and average conversation quality, or size and the need for more aggressivemarketing).
It seems very clear to me that growth is much slower than it was in 2015-2017, based on basically all available metrics. The obvious explanation of “sometime around late 2016 lots of people decided that we should stop pursuing super aggressive growth” seems like a relatively straightforward explanation and explains the data.
I think we basically agree on this — I don’t know that I’d say “much”, but certainly “slower”, and the explanation checks out. But I do think that growth is positive , based on the metrics I’ve mentioned, and that EA Survey response counts don’t mirror that overall trend.
(None of this means that EA is doing anywhere near as well as it could/should be — I don’t mean to convey that I think current trends are especially good, or that I agree with any particular decision of the “reduce focus on growth” variety. I think I’m quite a bit more pro-growth than the average person working full-time in “meta-EA”, though I haven’t surveyed everyone about their opinions and can’t say for sure.)
My personal non-data-driven impression is that things are steady overall. Contracting in SF, steady in NYC and Oxford, growing in London, DC. “longtermism” growing. Look forward to seeing the data!
You probably already agree with this, but I think lower survey participation should make you think it’s more likely that the effective altruism community is shrinking than you did before seeing that evidence.
If you as an individual or CEA as an institution have any metrics you track to determine whether effective altruism is growing or shrinking, I’d find it interesting to know more about what they are.
He mentioned a number of relevant metrics:
From context, that appears to be an incomplete list of metrics selected as positive counterexamples. I assumed there are others as well.
I do agree that lower survey participation is evidence in favor of a smaller community — I just think it’s overwhelmed by other evidence.
The metrics I mentioned were the first that came to mind. Trying to think of more:
From what I’ve seen at other orgs (GiveDirectly, AMF, EA Funds), donations to big EA charities seem to generally be growing over time (GD is flat, the other two are way up). This isn’t the same as “number of people in the a EA movement”, but in the case of EA Funds, I think “monthly active donors” are quite likely to be people who’d think of themselves in that way.
EA.org activity is also up quite a bit (pageviews up 35% from Jan 1 - May 23, 2021 vs. 2020, avg. time on page also up slightly).
Are there any numbers that especially interest you, which I either haven’t mentioned or have mentioned but not given specific data on?
Just for the record, I find the evidence that EA is shrinking or stagnating on a substantial number of important dimensions pretty convincing. Relevant metrics include traffic to many EA-adjacent websites, Google trends for many EA-related terms, attendance at many non-student group meetups, total attendance at major EA conferences, number of people filling out the EA survey, and a good amount of community attrition among a lot of core people I care a lot about.
I think in terms of pure membership, I think EA is probably been pretty stable with some minor growth. I think it’s somewhat more likely than not that average competence in members has been going down, because new members don’t seem as good as the members who I’ve seen leave.
It seems very clear to me that growth is much slower than it was in 2015-2017, based on basically all available metrics. The obvious explanation of “sometime around late 2016 lots of people decided that we should stop pursuing super aggressive growth” seems like a relatively straightforward explanation and explains the data.
Re: web traffic and Google trends — I think Peter Wildeford (née Hurford) is working on an update to his previous post on this. I’ll be interested to see what the trends look like over the past two years given all the growth on other fronts. I would see continued decline/stagnation of Google/Wikipedia interest as solid evidence for movement shrinkage/stagnation.
Do you have data on this across many meetups (or even just a couple of meetups in the Bay)?
I could easily believe this is happening, but I’m not aware of whatever source the claim comes from. (Also reasonable if it comes from e.g. conversations you’ve had with a bunch of organizers — just curious how you came to think this.)
This seems like much more a function of “how conferences are planned and marketed” than “how many people in the world would want to attend”.
In my experience (though I haven’t checked this with CEA’s events team, so take it with a grain of salt), EA Global conferences have typically targeted certain numbers of attendees rather than aiming for as many people as possible. This breaks down a bit with virtual conferences, since it’s easier to “fit” a very large number of people, but I still think the marketing for EAG Virtual 2020 was much less aggressive than the marketing for some of the earliest EAG conferences (and I’d guess that the standards for admission were higher).
If CEA wanted to break the attendance record for EA Global with the SF 2022 conference, I suspect they could do so, but there would be substantial tradeoffs involved (e.g. between size and average conversation quality, or size and the need for more aggressive marketing).
I think we basically agree on this — I don’t know that I’d say “much”, but certainly “slower”, and the explanation checks out. But I do think that growth is positive , based on the metrics I’ve mentioned, and that EA Survey response counts don’t mirror that overall trend.
(None of this means that EA is doing anywhere near as well as it could/should be — I don’t mean to convey that I think current trends are especially good, or that I agree with any particular decision of the “reduce focus on growth” variety. I think I’m quite a bit more pro-growth than the average person working full-time in “meta-EA”, though I haven’t surveyed everyone about their opinions and can’t say for sure.)
I am also definitely interested in Peter Wildeford’s new update on that post, and been awaiting it with great anticipation.
My personal non-data-driven impression is that things are steady overall. Contracting in SF, steady in NYC and Oxford, growing in London, DC. “longtermism” growing. Look forward to seeing the data!