I was referring to things like phrasings used and how often someone working for an EA org vs not was discussed relative to other things; I wasnât referring to the actual criteria used to classify people as having dropping out /â reduced involvement or not.
Given that Ben says heâs now made some edits, it doesnât seem worth combing through the post again in detail to find examples of the sort of thing I mean. But I just did a quick ctrl+f for âorganisationsâ, and found this, as one example:
Of the 14 classified as staff, I donât count any clear cases of drop out. 12 are working at EA organisations, and I think the remaining 2 would still be interested in working at an EA organisation in the future.
So, we could summarise this as 0% drop out over 6 years, and 14% becoming less involved, though not clearly in a permanent way.
Of the 24 categorised as âspeakersâ (which mostly donât overlap), I could only count 1 case of drop out (4%).
Itâs also interesting to note that 20 out of the 24 (83%) are currently working in EA organisations.
This is definitely not explicitly saying ânot dropping out = working at an EA orgâ. Instead, I think itâs meant as something more like âThere are many ways one can stay involved in EA, but in this case we had the obvious evidence that most of these people were still working at EA orgs, making it unnecessary to check if they were still involved in other ways.â
That said:
I think that, for various reasons that I mostly donât pin on 80k[1], various people feel like working at an EA org is one of the most impactful and/âor âEA-yâ things to do, even if they donât necessarily explicitly believe that. (I think you highlighted this well in your own recent post.) So it seems worth being extra careful about things that could accidentally exacerbate that feeling.
The text I quoted does sound like it categorises 2 of the first set of 14 people as âbecoming less involvedâ because theyâre not working at an EA org, without saying anything about whether theyâre still doing potentially high-impact things.
On the other hand, it also suggests that 3 of the set of 24 people arenât working at EA orgs but are still not considered to have not dropped out, which pushes against this.
Plus, itâs totally plausible Ben did consider whether those 2 people were doing other potentially high-impact things, found they seemed not to be (or not as much as they had been), and just didnât mention that.
Also, to be clear, I didnât mean my original comment as even a mild criticism of this post, really. I just thought it would be useful for this point to be explicitly made, to push against an impression some people might erroneously form after reading this post.
[1] To the extent to which it seems plausible that 80k has contributed to this phenomena, I donât think it wouldâve been easy for someone else to have done better. I think 80k has an unusual degree of prominence and respect in the EA community that makes it unusually likely that people will be influenced by 80k in ways that 80k didnât intend, even if 80k is doing a well-above-average job of communicating carefully and with nuance. (And I indeed think 80k is doing a well-above-average job of that.)
I was referring to things like phrasings used and how often someone working for an EA org vs not was discussed relative to other things; I wasnât referring to the actual criteria used to classify people as having dropping out /â reduced involvement or not.
Given that Ben says heâs now made some edits, it doesnât seem worth combing through the post again in detail to find examples of the sort of thing I mean. But I just did a quick ctrl+f for âorganisationsâ, and found this, as one example:
This is definitely not explicitly saying ânot dropping out = working at an EA orgâ. Instead, I think itâs meant as something more like âThere are many ways one can stay involved in EA, but in this case we had the obvious evidence that most of these people were still working at EA orgs, making it unnecessary to check if they were still involved in other ways.â
That said:
I think that, for various reasons that I mostly donât pin on 80k[1], various people feel like working at an EA org is one of the most impactful and/âor âEA-yâ things to do, even if they donât necessarily explicitly believe that. (I think you highlighted this well in your own recent post.) So it seems worth being extra careful about things that could accidentally exacerbate that feeling.
The text I quoted does sound like it categorises 2 of the first set of 14 people as âbecoming less involvedâ because theyâre not working at an EA org, without saying anything about whether theyâre still doing potentially high-impact things.
On the other hand, it also suggests that 3 of the set of 24 people arenât working at EA orgs but are still not considered to have not dropped out, which pushes against this.
Plus, itâs totally plausible Ben did consider whether those 2 people were doing other potentially high-impact things, found they seemed not to be (or not as much as they had been), and just didnât mention that.
Also, to be clear, I didnât mean my original comment as even a mild criticism of this post, really. I just thought it would be useful for this point to be explicitly made, to push against an impression some people might erroneously form after reading this post.
[1] To the extent to which it seems plausible that 80k has contributed to this phenomena, I donât think it wouldâve been easy for someone else to have done better. I think 80k has an unusual degree of prominence and respect in the EA community that makes it unusually likely that people will be influenced by 80k in ways that 80k didnât intend, even if 80k is doing a well-above-average job of communicating carefully and with nuance. (And I indeed think 80k is doing a well-above-average job of that.)