This is the key question and more research is needed.
Generally, my guess is that in most cases the answer is very mundane: people’s careers change, they graduate college and are no longer involved with other EAs, they get busier and don’t have time for EA engagement anymore, they have a kid and focus on raising them, they move towns and get involved with something else, and/or people’s fascinations just change even with no life changes, etc… it is easy to identify in a movement and then drift out to something else. For one anecdotal example, in 2009-2011 I strongly identified with the atheist movement but then drifted out due to an increasing lack of interest (and a newfound interest in EA).
It might be possible to use the email method to identify particular people who do not return and see how they compare to the population that does return, but I am nervous that these populations are just hopelessly confounded by people changing email addresses or general noise with small samples.
Insofar as we can, we could also try to ask people who don’t come back for their reasons, but these people by definition are hard to contact (since they left) and sampling will be likely biased. I know EA London made one attempt to do something like this but it felt fairly inconclusive.
Peter, when you drifted away from the atheist movement, do you feel like your values and beliefs changed, or was it more about unsubscribing from newsletters and prioritizing different blogs and events?
I can’t speak for Peter, but I also drifted away from caring much about atheism/humanism. In my case, I found that EA gave me all the rationality and caring-about-people that I’d been looking for, without the discussion of religion or focus on religion-related issues (which often felt repetitive or low-impact). My values and beliefs didn’t change; I just found a better way to fulfill them.
This raises a question: Is there something EA gave some of the people who left, which they then found more of in some other place?
That doesn’t seem to apply so well as an explanation of the dropoff that GWWC found of a fairly similar magnitude. It seems less likely that people would find it too onerous to answer GWWC’s (if I recall, fairly simple) request for confirmation that they are still meeting a formal pledge they took.
32.4% of the 2018 EA Survey respondents had taken the pledge (see our post). As of 2018 it looks like GWWC had around just over 3000 members, which suggests we captured around 25-30% of the total membership (presumably a subset that is on average more engaged in EA). My impression is that many GWWC members were not particularly engaged with (and perhaps do not even identify with) effective altruism at all, so it’s no surprise that the total number of Pledge takers within our sample of EAs is smaller than the total population of Pledge takers.
I’m not sure what the implication of suggesting that these are different populations is though? My observation was that the possibility that people simply “stop taking the EA census” doesn’t seem to serve so well as an explanation of the dropoff that GWWC observe. Of course, it’s possible that people are dropping out of the GWWC Pledge (or at least contact with GWWC checking in on their Pledge) for unrelated reasons to people disappearing from the EA Survey, though it seems likely that there is some overlap given the relationship between GWWC and EA, but it remains the case that people simply ceasing to complete the EA Survey can’t explain away GWWC’s similar rate of dropoff and so it remains a possible concern.
Got it, thanks.
I suppose the salient question then becomes: “why do 40% of folks who get excited about EA end up leaving after a few years?”
This is the key question and more research is needed.
Generally, my guess is that in most cases the answer is very mundane: people’s careers change, they graduate college and are no longer involved with other EAs, they get busier and don’t have time for EA engagement anymore, they have a kid and focus on raising them, they move towns and get involved with something else, and/or people’s fascinations just change even with no life changes, etc… it is easy to identify in a movement and then drift out to something else. For one anecdotal example, in 2009-2011 I strongly identified with the atheist movement but then drifted out due to an increasing lack of interest (and a newfound interest in EA).
It might be possible to use the email method to identify particular people who do not return and see how they compare to the population that does return, but I am nervous that these populations are just hopelessly confounded by people changing email addresses or general noise with small samples.
Insofar as we can, we could also try to ask people who don’t come back for their reasons, but these people by definition are hard to contact (since they left) and sampling will be likely biased. I know EA London made one attempt to do something like this but it felt fairly inconclusive.
Peter, when you drifted away from the atheist movement, do you feel like your values and beliefs changed, or was it more about unsubscribing from newsletters and prioritizing different blogs and events?
I feel like my values and beliefs changed to some extent. I no longer feel like reducing the influence of religion is an important thing to do.
I can’t speak for Peter, but I also drifted away from caring much about atheism/humanism. In my case, I found that EA gave me all the rationality and caring-about-people that I’d been looking for, without the discussion of religion or focus on religion-related issues (which often felt repetitive or low-impact). My values and beliefs didn’t change; I just found a better way to fulfill them.
This raises a question: Is there something EA gave some of the people who left, which they then found more of in some other place?
Point of clarification: Those focus groups were specifically focused on people who do attend events, not people who left.
My answer is even more mundane: maybe people don’t give up on the EA ideas, they just stop spending time on the EA census.
That doesn’t seem to apply so well as an explanation of the dropoff that GWWC found of a fairly similar magnitude. It seems less likely that people would find it too onerous to answer GWWC’s (if I recall, fairly simple) request for confirmation that they are still meeting a formal pledge they took.
To what extent are these the same populations? How many people who took the census also took the pledge?
32.4% of the 2018 EA Survey respondents had taken the pledge (see our post). As of 2018 it looks like GWWC had around just over 3000 members, which suggests we captured around 25-30% of the total membership (presumably a subset that is on average more engaged in EA). My impression is that many GWWC members were not particularly engaged with (and perhaps do not even identify with) effective altruism at all, so it’s no surprise that the total number of Pledge takers within our sample of EAs is smaller than the total population of Pledge takers.
I’m not sure what the implication of suggesting that these are different populations is though? My observation was that the possibility that people simply “stop taking the EA census” doesn’t seem to serve so well as an explanation of the dropoff that GWWC observe. Of course, it’s possible that people are dropping out of the GWWC Pledge (or at least contact with GWWC checking in on their Pledge) for unrelated reasons to people disappearing from the EA Survey, though it seems likely that there is some overlap given the relationship between GWWC and EA, but it remains the case that people simply ceasing to complete the EA Survey can’t explain away GWWC’s similar rate of dropoff and so it remains a possible concern.