Scattered thoughts on this, pointing in various directions.
TL;DR: Measuring and interpreting movement growth is complicated.
Things I’m relatively confident about:
You need to be careful about whether the thing you are looking at is a proxy for ‘size of EA’ or a proxy for a derivative, i.e. ‘how fast is EA growing’. I think Google Trends searches for ‘Effective Altruism’ are mostly the latter; it’s something people might do on the way into the movement, but not something I would ever do.
After correcting for (1), my rough impression is that EA grew super-linearly up to about 2016, and then approximately linearly after that up to about March 2020. Intepretation of many metrics since COVID is complicated by, well, COVID. One salient-to-me way to think about linear growth is that each year some fraction of the new crop of university students discover EA and some fraction of them take to it.
Givewell money moved is obviously going to be impacted by a shift away from global poverty/​health as a focus area within the movement. We have survey data which suggests this has happened over the time period in question. In that context, a 93% increase in non-Open-Phil money moved to the shrinking cause area between 2015 and 2019 is pretty good.
OTOH, when looking at any kind of money moved over time you need to remember that EA’s non-Open-Phil financial power should increase regardless of the number of people increasing. The movement is young and full of the types of people who have had large income increases between 2015 and 2020. For example, while I couldn’t find the data quickly, I believe >>50% of GWWC members were students in 2015 and <50% are now.
Also on that hand, I expect most of Givewell’s donors don’t self-identify as EAs. Whether this matters is unclear, makes it a bit of a weak proxy though.
I reallydon’t think it makes sense to treat Alienation/​Demandingness as a constant. Scott’s response to this matches my impressions, and one of the things it flags is how the level of demands on proto-EAs have increased, in my opinion by a lot. I think this is true in both the ‘level of dedication required’ sense and the ‘level/​specificity of skills required’ sense.
This is particularly salient, perhaps too salient, to me for personal reasons. I am a top-third Maths graduate from a top university who has donated roughly half of my income to date, but I don’t quite hit the type and level of dedication/​skill that I perceive is desired, and partly as a result I doubt I would have gotten involved in the movement if I had been born 6 years later. I want to be explicit that this isn’t necessarily a problem—that judgement is very sensitive to beliefs about relative values of different types of individuals—I’m just providing a personal anecdote that if it generalises would serve as partial explanation for the tailing off of growth rates.
Things I am less confident about:
While the level of demands has increased, I think EA’s online spaces are actually less supportive than they used to be, creating a gap that can easily leave people disillusioned, especially if they are geographically distant from major movement hubs. Many in-person spaces seem to be healthier, but are always going to grow less rapidly.
The other gap leaving people disillusioned is the lack of actual things to do, especially at ‘entry levels’ of dedication but also at higher levels if you strike out on job applications. I chuckle sadly every time I read this piece, in particular the paragraph quoted below.
I do actually agree a lot of people who get seriously involved (say >20% dedication, including anyone who has changed their career path for EA reasons) in EA seem to have liked it as soon as they hear about it. But:
I think this is at best a partial account of why growth has stalled, because as of now my impression is that essentially nobody (<10% of university students) has heard about it.
If you lower the dedication bar at all I get a lot more positive on the possibility of convincing people. Partly this is for personal reasons, my closest friend from university has taken the GWWC pledge and I’m >50% confident he would not have done so if it weren’t for me talking about EA. I just don’t expect him to ‘go beyond’ that pledge or otherwise engage with the community.
If I do check my own path, I was introduced to EA or Rationality at least three times before something stuck: I saw Toby Ord give an interview, was nudged into reading parts of the Sequences by my first job, then a university friend pointed me to HPMOR, then finally a different university friend interned at GWWC. So on the one hand it does seem with hindsight like these communities kept knocking on my door, but on the other I didn’t actually do anything with the first few points of contact. For me it was when I was asked to do something concrete, achievable and valuable that I switched my attention. I know others’ mileage varies a lot here; some people are particularly drawn to the intellectual aspect for example. But it means that even ‘innate’ EAs might need exposure to the representation of EA that matches what they are looking for.
Finally, there are at least two candidate explanations of ‘many people who are seriously involved with EA liked it as soon as they heard about it’, if true. EA could be innate, or we could suck at providing the incentive gradients/​incremental support necessary to turn less-committed people into more-committed people. Both would create that pattern.
Hey you! You know, all these ideas that you had about making the world a better place, like working for Doctors without Borders? They probably aren’t that great. The long-term future is what matters. And that is not funding constrained, so earning to give is kind of off the table as well. But the good news is, we really, really need people working on these things. We are so talent constraint… (20 applications later) … Yeah, when we said that we need people, we meant capable people. Not you. You suck.
Scattered thoughts on this, pointing in various directions.
TL;DR: Measuring and interpreting movement growth is complicated.
Things I’m relatively confident about:
You need to be careful about whether the thing you are looking at is a proxy for ‘size of EA’ or a proxy for a derivative, i.e. ‘how fast is EA growing’. I think Google Trends searches for ‘Effective Altruism’ are mostly the latter; it’s something people might do on the way into the movement, but not something I would ever do.
After correcting for (1), my rough impression is that EA grew super-linearly up to about 2016, and then approximately linearly after that up to about March 2020. Intepretation of many metrics since COVID is complicated by, well, COVID. One salient-to-me way to think about linear growth is that each year some fraction of the new crop of university students discover EA and some fraction of them take to it.
Givewell money moved is obviously going to be impacted by a shift away from global poverty/​health as a focus area within the movement. We have survey data which suggests this has happened over the time period in question. In that context, a 93% increase in non-Open-Phil money moved to the shrinking cause area between 2015 and 2019 is pretty good.
OTOH, when looking at any kind of money moved over time you need to remember that EA’s non-Open-Phil financial power should increase regardless of the number of people increasing. The movement is young and full of the types of people who have had large income increases between 2015 and 2020. For example, while I couldn’t find the data quickly, I believe >>50% of GWWC members were students in 2015 and <50% are now.
Also on that hand, I expect most of Givewell’s donors don’t self-identify as EAs. Whether this matters is unclear, makes it a bit of a weak proxy though.
I really don’t think it makes sense to treat Alienation/​Demandingness as a constant. Scott’s response to this matches my impressions, and one of the things it flags is how the level of demands on proto-EAs have increased, in my opinion by a lot. I think this is true in both the ‘level of dedication required’ sense and the ‘level/​specificity of skills required’ sense.
This is particularly salient, perhaps too salient, to me for personal reasons. I am a top-third Maths graduate from a top university who has donated roughly half of my income to date, but I don’t quite hit the type and level of dedication/​skill that I perceive is desired, and partly as a result I doubt I would have gotten involved in the movement if I had been born 6 years later. I want to be explicit that this isn’t necessarily a problem—that judgement is very sensitive to beliefs about relative values of different types of individuals—I’m just providing a personal anecdote that if it generalises would serve as partial explanation for the tailing off of growth rates.
Things I am less confident about:
While the level of demands has increased, I think EA’s online spaces are actually less supportive than they used to be, creating a gap that can easily leave people disillusioned, especially if they are geographically distant from major movement hubs. Many in-person spaces seem to be healthier, but are always going to grow less rapidly.
The other gap leaving people disillusioned is the lack of actual things to do, especially at ‘entry levels’ of dedication but also at higher levels if you strike out on job applications. I chuckle sadly every time I read this piece, in particular the paragraph quoted below.
I do actually agree a lot of people who get seriously involved (say >20% dedication, including anyone who has changed their career path for EA reasons) in EA seem to have liked it as soon as they hear about it. But:
I think this is at best a partial account of why growth has stalled, because as of now my impression is that essentially nobody (<10% of university students) has heard about it.
If you lower the dedication bar at all I get a lot more positive on the possibility of convincing people. Partly this is for personal reasons, my closest friend from university has taken the GWWC pledge and I’m >50% confident he would not have done so if it weren’t for me talking about EA. I just don’t expect him to ‘go beyond’ that pledge or otherwise engage with the community.
If I do check my own path, I was introduced to EA or Rationality at least three times before something stuck: I saw Toby Ord give an interview, was nudged into reading parts of the Sequences by my first job, then a university friend pointed me to HPMOR, then finally a different university friend interned at GWWC. So on the one hand it does seem with hindsight like these communities kept knocking on my door, but on the other I didn’t actually do anything with the first few points of contact. For me it was when I was asked to do something concrete, achievable and valuable that I switched my attention. I know others’ mileage varies a lot here; some people are particularly drawn to the intellectual aspect for example. But it means that even ‘innate’ EAs might need exposure to the representation of EA that matches what they are looking for.
Finally, there are at least two candidate explanations of ‘many people who are seriously involved with EA liked it as soon as they heard about it’, if true. EA could be innate, or we could suck at providing the incentive gradients/​incremental support necessary to turn less-committed people into more-committed people. Both would create that pattern.