Personal Contacts (14%), LessWrong (9.6%) and 80,000 Hours (9.6%) are still the main ways most people have heard of EA over time.
Shouldn’t Peter Singer be on this list? He showed up in 203 of the open ended responses (9.5% of 2137 total responses), and that doesn’t count any open ended comments that didn’t mention him by name or non-open ended responses that he’s associated with (e.g. the people who answered they heard about EA through TLYCS the organization, which I work for in the interest of disclosure).
Thank you for conducting and sharing this analysis!
I agree Peter Singer is definitely still one of the most important factors, as our data shows (and as we highlighted last year. He’s just not included in the bullet point in the summary you point to because that only refers to the fixed categories in the ‘where did you first hear about EA?’ question.
In 2018 I wrote “Peter Singer is sufficiently influential that he should probably be his own category”, but although I think he deserves to be his own category in some sense, it wouldn’t actually make sense to have a dedicated Peter Singer category alongside the others. Peter Singer usually coincides with other categories i.e. people have read one of his books, or seen one of his TED Talks, or heard about him through some other Book/Article or Blog or through their Education or a podcast or The Life You Can Save (org) etc., so if we split Peter Singer out into his dedicated category we’d have to have a lot of categories like ‘Book (except Peter Singer)’ (and potentially so for any other individuals who might be significant) which would be a bit clumsy and definitely lead to confusion. It seems neater to just have the fixed categories we have and then have people write in the specifics in the open comment section and, in general, not to have any named individuals as fixed categories.
The other general issue to note is that we can’t compare the %s of responses to the fixed categories to the %s for the open comment mentions. People are almost certainly less likely to write in something as a factor in the open comment than they would be to select it were it offered as a fixed choice, but on the other hand, things can appear in the open comments across multiple categories, so there’s really no way to compare numbers fairly. That said, we can certainly say that since he’s mentioned >200 times, the lower bound on the number of people who first heard of EA from Peter Singer is very high.
Thanks David, that all makes sense. For future iterations of this analysis, I’d be strongly in favor of adding a sentence about Peter like you had in last year’s summary.
Shouldn’t Peter Singer be on this list? He showed up in 203 of the open ended responses (9.5% of 2137 total responses), and that doesn’t count any open ended comments that didn’t mention him by name or non-open ended responses that he’s associated with (e.g. the people who answered they heard about EA through TLYCS the organization, which I work for in the interest of disclosure).
Thank you for conducting and sharing this analysis!
Thanks Jon.
I agree Peter Singer is definitely still one of the most important factors, as our data shows (and as we highlighted last year. He’s just not included in the bullet point in the summary you point to because that only refers to the fixed categories in the ‘where did you first hear about EA?’ question.
In 2018 I wrote “Peter Singer is sufficiently influential that he should probably be his own category”, but although I think he deserves to be his own category in some sense, it wouldn’t actually make sense to have a dedicated Peter Singer category alongside the others. Peter Singer usually coincides with other categories i.e. people have read one of his books, or seen one of his TED Talks, or heard about him through some other Book/Article or Blog or through their Education or a podcast or The Life You Can Save (org) etc., so if we split Peter Singer out into his dedicated category we’d have to have a lot of categories like ‘Book (except Peter Singer)’ (and potentially so for any other individuals who might be significant) which would be a bit clumsy and definitely lead to confusion. It seems neater to just have the fixed categories we have and then have people write in the specifics in the open comment section and, in general, not to have any named individuals as fixed categories.
The other general issue to note is that we can’t compare the %s of responses to the fixed categories to the %s for the open comment mentions. People are almost certainly less likely to write in something as a factor in the open comment than they would be to select it were it offered as a fixed choice, but on the other hand, things can appear in the open comments across multiple categories, so there’s really no way to compare numbers fairly. That said, we can certainly say that since he’s mentioned >200 times, the lower bound on the number of people who first heard of EA from Peter Singer is very high.
Thanks David, that all makes sense. For future iterations of this analysis, I’d be strongly in favor of adding a sentence about Peter like you had in last year’s summary.
I just added him a mention of this to the bullet point about these open comments.
Terrific, thank you!