Thank you Angelina for this excellent post! I really hope that this analysis, or something quite similar, gets conducted on a regular basis and shared with the entire community.
A few thoughts on this:
There are a lot of complications, judgement calls, assumptions that need to go into something like this. I think you did a very good job of articulating these and the associated limitations, and also made reasonable judgement calls along the way.
You mention that some metrics measure “levels” while others measure “changes”. I haven’t fully thought through this, but my hunch is that this is a pretty important issue and any future iterations of this report would benefit a lot from really thinking through the implications of the different types of measurement.
I probably lean toward “change” measures giving a better representation of recent growth patterns. The levels of a fair number of EA metrics grew a lot in 2022 (due to long-term growth trends and WWOTF) then flattened out or declined in 2023 (due to aftermath of FTX and subsequent scandals). Comparing annual levels, you’d see positive growth in 2023 vs. 2022 (for metrics that flattened out or declined modestly) or zero growth (for metrics that had a 2023 decline that perfectly mirrored 2022 growth). Comparing annual changes would show 2023 as worse than 2022, which IMO is how we should be interpreting this general pattern.
In addition to the AI and Effective Giving aggregations, I’d be curious to see an aggregation for effective careers (80k + Animal Advocacy Careers + any relevant redacted orgs)
I think the summary chart would be a lot easier to read/interpret if it were presented as a table.
Where there’s no data available for 2021, I think it would be helpful to include totals that are on an apples-to-apples basis (i.e. that include only projects for which there are both 2022 vs. 2021 and 2023 v. 2022 growth rates.)
Thank you Angelina for this excellent post! I really hope that this analysis, or something quite similar, gets conducted on a regular basis and shared with the entire community.
A few thoughts on this:
There are a lot of complications, judgement calls, assumptions that need to go into something like this. I think you did a very good job of articulating these and the associated limitations, and also made reasonable judgement calls along the way.
You mention that some metrics measure “levels” while others measure “changes”. I haven’t fully thought through this, but my hunch is that this is a pretty important issue and any future iterations of this report would benefit a lot from really thinking through the implications of the different types of measurement.
I probably lean toward “change” measures giving a better representation of recent growth patterns. The levels of a fair number of EA metrics grew a lot in 2022 (due to long-term growth trends and WWOTF) then flattened out or declined in 2023 (due to aftermath of FTX and subsequent scandals). Comparing annual levels, you’d see positive growth in 2023 vs. 2022 (for metrics that flattened out or declined modestly) or zero growth (for metrics that had a 2023 decline that perfectly mirrored 2022 growth). Comparing annual changes would show 2023 as worse than 2022, which IMO is how we should be interpreting this general pattern.
In addition to the AI and Effective Giving aggregations, I’d be curious to see an aggregation for effective careers (80k + Animal Advocacy Careers + any relevant redacted orgs)
I think the summary chart would be a lot easier to read/interpret if it were presented as a table.
Where there’s no data available for 2021, I think it would be helpful to include totals that are on an apples-to-apples basis (i.e. that include only projects for which there are both 2022 vs. 2021 and 2023 v. 2022 growth rates.)
Thanks for your thoughtful feedback on this! I really appreciate it.
I might not have time to respond in depth here, but will come back to this if/when we pick this project back up again.