The first obvious answer is that most students simply haven’t been reached yet. If true, we may need to massively boost (high-quality) student outreach, making sure that every student who could be sympathetic towards EA ideas finds out about EA.
This is my bias as a media guy, but to me this survey actually suggests the opposite of the need to “massively boost (high-quality) student outreach” — if there is a large bloc of students who are sympathetic to EA but have never heard of it, what’s needed is really just greater prominence in mass media. If you just randomly come across the term “effective altruism” enough times, you’ll get curious what it means and if you go Google and find out it turns out to be ideas that you are sympathetic to.
I think the Carrick Flynn congressional race just generating some articles that say “here’s this thing called Effective Altruism and they got this guy running for congress” is constructive in that same way. The survey indicates that EA is currently very far from tapped out in terms of the potential upside to extremely shallow outreach.
This is my bias as a media guy, but to me this survey actually suggests the opposite of the need to “massively boost (high-quality) student outreach” — if there is a large bloc of students who are sympathetic to EA but have never heard of it, what’s needed is really just greater prominence in mass media. If you just randomly come across the term “effective altruism” enough times, you’ll get curious what it means and if you go Google and find out it turns out to be ideas that you are sympathetic to.
I think the Carrick Flynn congressional race just generating some articles that say “here’s this thing called Effective Altruism and they got this guy running for congress” is constructive in that same way. The survey indicates that EA is currently very far from tapped out in terms of the potential upside to extremely shallow outreach.
I don’t really know anyone who got into EA after reading a newspaper article and from what I’ve heard this matches other people’s experience.
That’s because there haven’t been enough articles!
In the UK there are people who’ve heard about it on the radio, podcasts and some articles in the media.
A lot of people got into EA after reading a book, and a lot of people find new topics to investigate by reading newspaper articles.