Yeah, I think this is an excellent point that you have made more clearly than I did: we are measuring engagement as a proxy for effectiveness. It might be a decent proxy for something like ‘probability of future effectiveness’ when considering young students in particular—if an intervention meaningfully increases the likelihood that some well-meaning undergrads make EA friends and read books and come to events, then I have at least moderate confidence that it also increases impact because some of those people will go on to make more impactful choices through their greater engagement with EA ideas. But I don’t think it’s a good proxy for the amount of impact being made by ‘people who basically run their whole lives around EA ideas already.’ It’s hard to imagine how these people could increase their ENGAGEMENT with EA (they’ve read all the books, they RUN the events, they’re friends with most people in the community, etc etc) but there are many ways they could increase their IMPACT, which may well be facilitated/prompted by EAGx but not captured by the data.
Out of curiosity, would you say that since switching careers, your engagement measured by these kind of metrics (books read, events attended, number of EA friends, frequency of forum activity, etc) has gone up, gone down, or stayed the same?
would you say that since switching careers, your engagement measured by these kind of metrics (books read, events attended, number of EA friends, etc) has gone up, gone down, or stayed the same?
I think it’s up, but a lot of that is pretty confounded by other things going in the community. For example, my five most-upvoted EA Forum posts are since switching careers, but several are about controversial community issues, and a lot of the recency effect goes away when looking at inflation-adjusted voting. I did attended EAG in 2023 for the first time since 2016, though, which was driven by wanting to talk to people about biosecurity.
Yeah, I think this is an excellent point that you have made more clearly than I did: we are measuring engagement as a proxy for effectiveness. It might be a decent proxy for something like ‘probability of future effectiveness’ when considering young students in particular—if an intervention meaningfully increases the likelihood that some well-meaning undergrads make EA friends and read books and come to events, then I have at least moderate confidence that it also increases impact because some of those people will go on to make more impactful choices through their greater engagement with EA ideas. But I don’t think it’s a good proxy for the amount of impact being made by ‘people who basically run their whole lives around EA ideas already.’ It’s hard to imagine how these people could increase their ENGAGEMENT with EA (they’ve read all the books, they RUN the events, they’re friends with most people in the community, etc etc) but there are many ways they could increase their IMPACT, which may well be facilitated/prompted by EAGx but not captured by the data.
Out of curiosity, would you say that since switching careers, your engagement measured by these kind of metrics (books read, events attended, number of EA friends, frequency of forum activity, etc) has gone up, gone down, or stayed the same?
I think it’s up, but a lot of that is pretty confounded by other things going in the community. For example, my five most-upvoted EA Forum posts are since switching careers, but several are about controversial community issues, and a lot of the recency effect goes away when looking at inflation-adjusted voting. I did attended EAG in 2023 for the first time since 2016, though, which was driven by wanting to talk to people about biosecurity.