Thatās certainly true. I donāt know exactly what they had in mind when they claimed that āmost seem to be long-termists in some broad sense,ā but the 2019 survey at least has data directly on that question, whereas 2018 just has the best approximation we could give, by combining respondents who selected any of the specific causes that seemed broadly long-termist and Long Term Future lost out to Global Poverty using that method in both 2018 and 2019.*
*As noted in the posts, that method depends on the controversial question of what fine-grained causes should be counted as part of the āLong Term Futureā group. If Climate Change (the 2nd most popular cause in 2019, 3rd in 2018) were counted as part of LTF, then LTF would win by a mile. However, I am sceptical that most Climate Change respondents in our samples count as LTF in the relevant (EA) sense. i.e. normal (non-EA) climate change supporters who have no familiarity with LTF reasoning and think we need to be sustainable and think about the world 100 years or more in advance, seem quite different from long-termist EA (it seems they donāt and generally would not endorse LTF reasoning about other areas). An argument against this is that that we see from the 2019 analysis, that people who selected Climate Change as a specific cause predominantly broke in favour of LTF when asked to select a broader cause area. Iām not sure how dispositive that is though. It seems likely to me that people who most support a specific cause other than Global Poverty (or Animals or Meta) would probably be more to select a broader, vaguer cause category, which their preferred cause could plausibly fit into (as Climate Change does into ālong term future/āexistential riskā), than one of the other specific causes, and as noted above, people might like the vague category of concern for the ālong term futureā without actually supporting LTF the EA cause area. Some evidence for this comes from the other analyses in 2018 and 2019 which found that respondents who supported Climate Change were quite dissimilar from those who supported LTF causes in almost all respects (e.g. they tended to be newer to EA- very heavily skewed towards the most recent years- and less engaged with EA, generally following the same trends as Global Poverty and the opposite to AI, see here).
40.08% isnāt āmostā. :P
Thatās certainly true. I donāt know exactly what they had in mind when they claimed that āmost seem to be long-termists in some broad sense,ā but the 2019 survey at least has data directly on that question, whereas 2018 just has the best approximation we could give, by combining respondents who selected any of the specific causes that seemed broadly long-termist and Long Term Future lost out to Global Poverty using that method in both 2018 and 2019.*
*As noted in the posts, that method depends on the controversial question of what fine-grained causes should be counted as part of the āLong Term Futureā group. If Climate Change (the 2nd most popular cause in 2019, 3rd in 2018) were counted as part of LTF, then LTF would win by a mile. However, I am sceptical that most Climate Change respondents in our samples count as LTF in the relevant (EA) sense. i.e. normal (non-EA) climate change supporters who have no familiarity with LTF reasoning and think we need to be sustainable and think about the world 100 years or more in advance, seem quite different from long-termist EA (it seems they donāt and generally would not endorse LTF reasoning about other areas). An argument against this is that that we see from the 2019 analysis, that people who selected Climate Change as a specific cause predominantly broke in favour of LTF when asked to select a broader cause area. Iām not sure how dispositive that is though. It seems likely to me that people who most support a specific cause other than Global Poverty (or Animals or Meta) would probably be more to select a broader, vaguer cause category, which their preferred cause could plausibly fit into (as Climate Change does into ālong term future/āexistential riskā), than one of the other specific causes, and as noted above, people might like the vague category of concern for the ālong term futureā without actually supporting LTF the EA cause area. Some evidence for this comes from the other analyses in 2018 and 2019 which found that respondents who supported Climate Change were quite dissimilar from those who supported LTF causes in almost all respects (e.g. they tended to be newer to EA- very heavily skewed towards the most recent years- and less engaged with EA, generally following the same trends as Global Poverty and the opposite to AI, see here).