I weakly upvoted this for the second section, which is a discussion I’ve had with many people in person and is something I’m glad to see in writing. But I found the title offputting given the very modest amount of evidence presented in support of the claim.
There are a huge number of things you could check to gauge the total size of the EA movement. You chose GiveWell’s total funding, Google Trends data, and the growth of Giving What We Can.
(These are all reasonable things to choose, but I don’t think they are collectively decisive enough to merit a title as strongly-worded as “why hasn’t effective altruism grown?” I’m really just objecting to the title here, rather than the spirit or execution of this project.)
The last number is solid evidence of weaknesses in community building strategy: CEA acknowledges that they should have put more staff time into Giving What We Can post-2016 And when Luke Freeman took over as the project’s first full-time leader in years, GWWC saw faster growth (in absolute terms) than ever before. The rate of growth wasn’t high compared to 2016, but it’s encouraging that someone was able, within a few months, to break a record set by a larger team working full-time on GWWC when there was (presumably) more low-hanging fruit available to pick.
As for the other items:
When I look at GiveWell’s funding to get evidence on EA growth, I mostly care about the dark blue number, which represents “money that didn’t come from the same two people” (not sure whether Incubation Grants are Good Ventures or other funds off the top of my head). GiveWell gets a lot more donations from outside Good Ventures now than it did in 2018; I wouldn’t be surprised to see it more than double the 2015 figure in 2021.
On Google Trends: You identify yourself that these numbers can be a bit messy, but I agree with you that they seem like at least weak evidence that public interest in the specific term “effective altruism” hasn’t grown. However, I don’t think any of the orgs you quoted as aiming to grow the community were trying to achieve that kind of growth — there’s been much more focus on developing specific, smaller-scale pipelines for directing money and talent to EA projects.
Some examples of things that I believe have been growing, with numbers where I can easily find them:
Academic publications on EA-related topics (e.g. 310 Google Scholar results for “existential risk” in 2015, 1020 in 2020; 25 vs. 47 for “wild animal suffering”)
Number of students participating in EA “fellowship” programs (doing a lot of structured reading and activities)
Number of active EA groups worldwide (EA Hub currently lists 230; I don’t know the figure from 2015, but I did start an EA group in 2014 and remember being able to find maybe a few dozen groups total when I looked at places like THINK [that year’s equivalent of EA Hub]).
EA Forum activity (pageviews roughly doubled from 2019 to 2020)
Number of EA community members involved in government/public policy in some capacity (people in this category don’t always announce their views publicly, so I don’t think good figures will be available anywhere — this claim is anecdotal, based on many stories I’ve heard about people starting this work and the creation of groups like APPGFG and organizations like CSET)
Number of people employed by EA-aligned organizations (again, no hard numbers, but a lot of charities have started up within the last few years, and I’d be surprised if a similar number had shut down)
I wish I had more data easily to hand on some of these figures, but I’d bet at 10:1 on any one of them being higher in 2020 than 2015. And while none of them are slam-dunk evidence that EA is definitely “growing” by any reasonable definition of the word, I think they collectively paint a clear picture.
I fear that most of these metrics aren’t measures of EA growth, so much as of reaping the rewards of earlier years’ growth. They seem compatible with a picture where EA grew a lot until 2015 and then these EAs slowly became more engaged, moved into different roles and produced different outcomes, without EA engaging significantly more new people since 2015.
We have some concrete insight about the ‘lag’ between people joining EA and different outcomes based on EA Survey data:
- On engagement, looking at years in EA and self-reported level of engagement, we can see that it appears to take some years for people to become highly engaged. Mean engagement continues to increase up until 5-6 years in EA, at which point it plateaus. (Although, of course, this is complicated by potential attrition, i.e. people who aren’t engaged dropping out of earlier cohorts. We’ll talk more about this in this year’s series).
- The mean length of time between someone first hearing about EA and taking the GWWC pledge (according to 2019 EAS data) is 1.16 years (median 1 year). There are disproportionately more new EAs in the sample though, since (germane to this discussion!) EA does seem to have consistently been growing year on year (although per the above this could also be confounded somewhat by attrition) and of course people who just heard of EA in the last year couldn’t have taken the GWWC pledge more than 1 year after they first heard of EA. So it may be that a more typical length of time to take the pledge is a little longer.
- Donations: these arguably have a lower barrier to entry compared to other forms of engagement, yet still increase dramatically with more time in EA.
Of course, this is likely somewhat confounded by the fact that people who have spent more time in EA have also spent more time developing their career and so their ability to donate, but the same confound could account for observed increase in EA outputs over time even if EA weren’t growing.
This seems like it could be true for some of the figures, but not all. I’d strongly expect “number of active EA groups” to correlate with “number of total people engaged in EA”. The existence of so many groups may come from people who joined in 2015 and started groups later, but many group leaders are university students, so that can’t be the whole story.
In this case, do you think it’s likely that there are about as many group members as before, spread across more groups? Or maybe there are more group members, but the same number of total people engaged in EA, with a higher % of people in groups than before?
I think this applies to growth in local groups particularly well. As I argued in this comment above, local groups seem like a particularly laggy metric due to people usually starting local groups after at least a couple of years in EA. While I’ve no doubt that many of the groups that have been founded by people who joined since 2015*, I suspect that even if we cut those people out of the data, we’d still see an increase in the number of local groups over that time frame- so we can’t infer that EA is continuing to grow based on increase in local group numbers.
*Indeed, we should expect this because most people currently in the EA community (at least as measured by the EA Survey) are people who joined since 2015. In each EA survey, the most recent cohorts are almost always much larger than earlier cohorts (with the exception of the most recent cohort of each survey since these are run before some EAs from that year will have had a chance to join). See this graph which I previously shared, from 2019 data, for example:
(Of course, this offers, at best, an upper bound on growth in the EA movement, since earlier cohorts will likely have had more attrition).
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do you think it’s likely that there are about as many group members as before, spread across more groups? Or maybe there are more group members, but the same number of total people engaged in EA, with a higher % of people in groups than before?
There’s definitely been a very dramatic increase in the percentage of EAs who are involved in local groups (at least within the EA Survey sample) since 2015 (the earliest year we have data for).
In EAS 2019 this was even higher (~43%) and in EAS 2020 it was higher still (almost 50%).
So higher numbers of local group members could be explained by increasing levels of engagement (group membership) among existing EAs. (One might worry, of course, that the increase in percentage is due to selective attrition, but the absolute numbers are higher than 2015 as well.)
Unfortunately we don’t have good data on the number of local group members, because the measures in the Groups Survey were changed between 2019-2020. On the one measure which I was able to keep the same (total number of people engaged by groups) there was a large decline 2019-2020, but this is probably pandemic-related.
University group members are mostly undergraduates, meaning they are younger than ~22. This implies that they would have been younger than 18 in 2017, and there was almost no one like that on the 2017 survey. And they would have been under 16 in 2015, although I don’t think we have data going back that far. I can think of one or two people who might have gotten involved as 15-year-olds in 2015, but it seems quite rare. Is there something I’m missing?
I’m not sure where you are disagreeing, because I agree that many people founding groups since 2015 will in fact have joined the movement later than 2015. Indeed, as I show in the first graph in the comment you’re replying to, newer cohorts of EA are much larger than previous cohorts, and as a result most people (>60%) in the movement (or at least the EA Survey sample[^1]) by 2019 are people who joined post-2015. Fwiw, this seems like more direct evidence of growth in EA since 2015 than any of the other metrics (although concern about attrition mean that it’s not straightforward evidence that the total size of the movement has been growing, merely that we’ve been recruiting many additional people since 2015).
My objection is that pointing to the continued growth in number of EA groups isn’t good evidence of continued growth in the movement since 2015 due to lagginess (groups being founded by people who joined the movement in years previous). It sounds like your objection is that since we also know that some of the groups are university groups (albeit a slight minority) and university groups are probably mostly founded by undergraduates, we know that at least some of the groups founded since 2015 were likely founded by people who got into EA after 2015. I agree this is true, but think we still shouldn’t point to the growth in number of new groups as a sign of growth in the movement because it’s a noisy proxy for growth in EA, picking up a lot of growth from previous years. (If we move to pointing to separate evidence that some of the people who founded EA groups probably got into EA only post 2015, then we may as well just point to the direct evidence that the majority of EAs got into EA post-2015!)
[^1]: I don’t take this caveat to undermine the point very much because, if anything I would expect the EA Survey sample to under-represent newer, less engaged EAs and over-represent EAs who have been involved longer.
I think maybe I was confused about what you are saying. You said:
I think this applies to growth in local groups particularly well… While I’ve no doubt that many of the groups that have been founded by people who joined since 2015*, I suspect that even if we cut those people out of the data, we’d still see an increase in the number of local groups over that time frame- so we can’t infer that EA is continuing to grow based on increase in local group numbers.
But then also:
Fwiw, this seems like more direct evidence of growth in EA since 2015 than any of the other metrics
In my mind, A being evidence of B means that you can (at least partially) infer B from A. But I’m guessing you mean “infer” to be something like “prove”, and I agree the evidence isn’t that strong.
DM: While I’ve no doubt that many of the groups that have been founded by people who joined since 2015*, I suspect that even if we cut those people out of the data, we’d still see an increase in the number of local groups over that time frame- so we can’t infer that EA is continuing to grow based on increase in local group numbers.
BW: It sounds like maybe when you say “we can’t infer that EA is continuing to grow based on increase in local group numbers” you mean “part of the growth might be explained by things other than what would be measured by a change in number of groups”? (Or possibly “increasing group numbers is evidence of growth since 2015, but not necessarily evidence of growth since, say, 2019”?)
I meant something closer to: ‘we can’t infer Y from X, because we’d still expect to observe X even if ¬Y.’
My impression is still that we have been somewhat talking past each other, in the way I described in the second paragraph of my previous comment. My core claim is that we should not look at the number of new EA groups as a proxy for growth in EA, since many new groups will just be a delayed result of earlier growth in EA, (as it happens I agree that EA has grown since 2015, but we’d see many new EA groups even if it hadn’t). Whereas, if I understand it, your claim seems to be that as we know that at least some of the new groups were founded by new people to EA, we know that there has been some new EA growth.
I weakly upvoted this for the second section, which is a discussion I’ve had with many people in person and is something I’m glad to see in writing. But I found the title offputting given the very modest amount of evidence presented in support of the claim.
There are a huge number of things you could check to gauge the total size of the EA movement. You chose GiveWell’s total funding, Google Trends data, and the growth of Giving What We Can.
(These are all reasonable things to choose, but I don’t think they are collectively decisive enough to merit a title as strongly-worded as “why hasn’t effective altruism grown?” I’m really just objecting to the title here, rather than the spirit or execution of this project.)
The last number is solid evidence of weaknesses in community building strategy: CEA acknowledges that they should have put more staff time into Giving What We Can post-2016 And when Luke Freeman took over as the project’s first full-time leader in years, GWWC saw faster growth (in absolute terms) than ever before. The rate of growth wasn’t high compared to 2016, but it’s encouraging that someone was able, within a few months, to break a record set by a larger team working full-time on GWWC when there was (presumably) more low-hanging fruit available to pick.
As for the other items:
When I look at GiveWell’s funding to get evidence on EA growth, I mostly care about the dark blue number, which represents “money that didn’t come from the same two people” (not sure whether Incubation Grants are Good Ventures or other funds off the top of my head). GiveWell gets a lot more donations from outside Good Ventures now than it did in 2018; I wouldn’t be surprised to see it more than double the 2015 figure in 2021.
On Google Trends: You identify yourself that these numbers can be a bit messy, but I agree with you that they seem like at least weak evidence that public interest in the specific term “effective altruism” hasn’t grown. However, I don’t think any of the orgs you quoted as aiming to grow the community were trying to achieve that kind of growth — there’s been much more focus on developing specific, smaller-scale pipelines for directing money and talent to EA projects.
Some examples of things that I believe have been growing, with numbers where I can easily find them:
Academic publications on EA-related topics (e.g. 310 Google Scholar results for “existential risk” in 2015, 1020 in 2020; 25 vs. 47 for “wild animal suffering”)
Number of students participating in EA “fellowship” programs (doing a lot of structured reading and activities)
Number of active EA groups worldwide (EA Hub currently lists 230; I don’t know the figure from 2015, but I did start an EA group in 2014 and remember being able to find maybe a few dozen groups total when I looked at places like THINK [that year’s equivalent of EA Hub]).
Edit: I see that Brian added more data on this
EA Forum activity (pageviews roughly doubled from 2019 to 2020)
Number of EA community members involved in government/public policy in some capacity (people in this category don’t always announce their views publicly, so I don’t think good figures will be available anywhere — this claim is anecdotal, based on many stories I’ve heard about people starting this work and the creation of groups like APPGFG and organizations like CSET)
Number of people employed by EA-aligned organizations (again, no hard numbers, but a lot of charities have started up within the last few years, and I’d be surprised if a similar number had shut down)
I wish I had more data easily to hand on some of these figures, but I’d bet at 10:1 on any one of them being higher in 2020 than 2015. And while none of them are slam-dunk evidence that EA is definitely “growing” by any reasonable definition of the word, I think they collectively paint a clear picture.
I fear that most of these metrics aren’t measures of EA growth, so much as of reaping the rewards of earlier years’ growth. They seem compatible with a picture where EA grew a lot until 2015 and then these EAs slowly became more engaged, moved into different roles and produced different outcomes, without EA engaging significantly more new people since 2015.
We have some concrete insight about the ‘lag’ between people joining EA and different outcomes based on EA Survey data:
- On engagement, looking at years in EA and self-reported level of engagement, we can see that it appears to take some years for people to become highly engaged. Mean engagement continues to increase up until 5-6 years in EA, at which point it plateaus. (Although, of course, this is complicated by potential attrition, i.e. people who aren’t engaged dropping out of earlier cohorts. We’ll talk more about this in this year’s series).
- The mean length of time between someone first hearing about EA and taking the GWWC pledge (according to 2019 EAS data) is 1.16 years (median 1 year). There are disproportionately more new EAs in the sample though, since (germane to this discussion!) EA does seem to have consistently been growing year on year (although per the above this could also be confounded somewhat by attrition) and of course people who just heard of EA in the last year couldn’t have taken the GWWC pledge more than 1 year after they first heard of EA. So it may be that a more typical length of time to take the pledge is a little longer.
- Donations: these arguably have a lower barrier to entry compared to other forms of engagement, yet still increase dramatically with more time in EA.
Of course, this is likely somewhat confounded by the fact that people who have spent more time in EA have also spent more time developing their career and so their ability to donate, but the same confound could account for observed increase in EA outputs over time even if EA weren’t growing.
This seems like it could be true for some of the figures, but not all. I’d strongly expect “number of active EA groups” to correlate with “number of total people engaged in EA”. The existence of so many groups may come from people who joined in 2015 and started groups later, but many group leaders are university students, so that can’t be the whole story.
In this case, do you think it’s likely that there are about as many group members as before, spread across more groups? Or maybe there are more group members, but the same number of total people engaged in EA, with a higher % of people in groups than before?
I think this applies to growth in local groups particularly well. As I argued in this comment above, local groups seem like a particularly laggy metric due to people usually starting local groups after at least a couple of years in EA. While I’ve no doubt that many of the groups that have been founded by people who joined since 2015*, I suspect that even if we cut those people out of the data, we’d still see an increase in the number of local groups over that time frame- so we can’t infer that EA is continuing to grow based on increase in local group numbers.
*Indeed, we should expect this because most people currently in the EA community (at least as measured by the EA Survey) are people who joined since 2015. In each EA survey, the most recent cohorts are almost always much larger than earlier cohorts (with the exception of the most recent cohort of each survey since these are run before some EAs from that year will have had a chance to join). See this graph which I previously shared, from 2019 data, for example:
(Of course, this offers, at best, an upper bound on growth in the EA movement, since earlier cohorts will likely have had more attrition).
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There’s definitely been a very dramatic increase in the percentage of EAs who are involved in local groups (at least within the EA Survey sample) since 2015 (the earliest year we have data for).
In EAS 2019 this was even higher (~43%) and in EAS 2020 it was higher still (almost 50%).
So higher numbers of local group members could be explained by increasing levels of engagement (group membership) among existing EAs. (One might worry, of course, that the increase in percentage is due to selective attrition, but the absolute numbers are higher than 2015 as well.)
Unfortunately we don’t have good data on the number of local group members, because the measures in the Groups Survey were changed between 2019-2020. On the one measure which I was able to keep the same (total number of people engaged by groups) there was a large decline 2019-2020, but this is probably pandemic-related.
University group members are mostly undergraduates, meaning they are younger than ~22. This implies that they would have been younger than 18 in 2017, and there was almost no one like that on the 2017 survey. And they would have been under 16 in 2015, although I don’t think we have data going back that far. I can think of one or two people who might have gotten involved as 15-year-olds in 2015, but it seems quite rare. Is there something I’m missing?
I’m not sure where you are disagreeing, because I agree that many people founding groups since 2015 will in fact have joined the movement later than 2015. Indeed, as I show in the first graph in the comment you’re replying to, newer cohorts of EA are much larger than previous cohorts, and as a result most people (>60%) in the movement (or at least the EA Survey sample[^1]) by 2019 are people who joined post-2015. Fwiw, this seems like more direct evidence of growth in EA since 2015 than any of the other metrics (although concern about attrition mean that it’s not straightforward evidence that the total size of the movement has been growing, merely that we’ve been recruiting many additional people since 2015).
My objection is that pointing to the continued growth in number of EA groups isn’t good evidence of continued growth in the movement since 2015 due to lagginess (groups being founded by people who joined the movement in years previous). It sounds like your objection is that since we also know that some of the groups are university groups (albeit a slight minority) and university groups are probably mostly founded by undergraduates, we know that at least some of the groups founded since 2015 were likely founded by people who got into EA after 2015. I agree this is true, but think we still shouldn’t point to the growth in number of new groups as a sign of growth in the movement because it’s a noisy proxy for growth in EA, picking up a lot of growth from previous years. (If we move to pointing to separate evidence that some of the people who founded EA groups probably got into EA only post 2015, then we may as well just point to the direct evidence that the majority of EAs got into EA post-2015!)
[^1]: I don’t take this caveat to undermine the point very much because, if anything I would expect the EA Survey sample to under-represent newer, less engaged EAs and over-represent EAs who have been involved longer.
I think maybe I was confused about what you are saying. You said:
But then also:
In my mind, A being evidence of B means that you can (at least partially) infer B from A. But I’m guessing you mean “infer” to be something like “prove”, and I agree the evidence isn’t that strong.
I meant something closer to: ‘we can’t infer Y from X, because we’d still expect to observe X even if ¬Y.’
My impression is still that we have been somewhat talking past each other, in the way I described in the second paragraph of my previous comment. My core claim is that we should not look at the number of new EA groups as a proxy for growth in EA, since many new groups will just be a delayed result of earlier growth in EA, (as it happens I agree that EA has grown since 2015, but we’d see many new EA groups even if it hadn’t). Whereas, if I understand it, your claim seems to be that as we know that at least some of the new groups were founded by new people to EA, we know that there has been some new EA growth.