These data are helpful, but they somewhat miss what we really care about.
First, we care more about growth in impact on top causes than the numbers of people involved etc.
I think the key story here is that Open Phil has ramped up donations from $30m to over $120m (4-fold growth in a year), and is expected to increase that several times more in the next few years, but this would be easy to miss in the presentation above.
I’d also prefer to try to look at even more fundamental measures of progress in the top causes, though this is hard since they’ll be qualitative. For instance, I think taking AI risk mainstream as a field 2015-2017 has been a huge success.
When it comes to measures of the number of people engaging in EA, we also have to be careful. Many in the community have stepped back from increasing the number of people involved & media outreach, towards increasing the quality of engagement, as reflected in our recent survey: https://80000hours.org/2017/11/talent-gaps-survey-2017/
This means some of these declines in web hits and so on might actually be intentional. We could have easily driven up visits to the EA Forum or wikipedia page if we had tried.
That said, unfortunately, we don’t yet have a good measure of the quality of engagement, so it’s hard to know if that strategy is working either (though I feel like we’re making good progress within 80k at least).
I think the key story here is that Open Phil has ramped up donations from $30m to over $120m (4-fold growth in a year), and is expected to increase that several times more in the next few years, but this would be easy to miss in the presentation above.
These data are helpful, but they somewhat miss what we really care about.
First, we care more about growth in impact on top causes than the numbers of people involved etc.
I think the key story here is that Open Phil has ramped up donations from $30m to over $120m (4-fold growth in a year), and is expected to increase that several times more in the next few years, but this would be easy to miss in the presentation above.
I’d also prefer to try to look at even more fundamental measures of progress in the top causes, though this is hard since they’ll be qualitative. For instance, I think taking AI risk mainstream as a field 2015-2017 has been a huge success.
When it comes to measures of the number of people engaging in EA, we also have to be careful. Many in the community have stepped back from increasing the number of people involved & media outreach, towards increasing the quality of engagement, as reflected in our recent survey: https://80000hours.org/2017/11/talent-gaps-survey-2017/
See some defence of this idea here: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/the-fidelity-model-of-spreading-ideas/
This means some of these declines in web hits and so on might actually be intentional. We could have easily driven up visits to the EA Forum or wikipedia page if we had tried.
That said, unfortunately, we don’t yet have a good measure of the quality of engagement, so it’s hard to know if that strategy is working either (though I feel like we’re making good progress within 80k at least).
That’s not EA as a movement though.