Robbie Shade—the homepage of his website (last updated in 2017 AFAICT) simply says, “I’m Robbie Shade, and I work at Google. I’m interested in effective altruism, and maximising the good I can do through my career.”
The CEA founding team seems like the absolute best case for value drift, because to found CEA one must have a much higher baseline inclination towards EA than the average person. Also probably a lot of power, which helps them control their environment while many EAs would be forced into non-EA lifestyles by factors beyond their control. So 25% drifters of the original CEA team feels more scary to me than 40-70% of average EAs.
I’m not so convinced on this. I think the framing of ‘this was the founding team’ was a little misleading: in 2011 all of us were volunteers and students. The lower bar for doing ~5 hours a week of volunteering for EA for ~1 year. Obviously students are typically in a uniquely good position for having time to volunteer. But it’s not clear all the people on this list had uniquely large amounts of power. Also, I think situational effects were still strong: I felt it made a huge difference to what I did that I made a few friends who were very altruistic and had good ideas of how to put that into practice. I don’t think we can assume that all of us on this list would have displayed similarly strong effective altruist inclinations without having met others in the group.
I think that’s basically right, though I also have the intuition that drift from the very early days will be higher, since at that point it was undecided what EA even was, and everyone was new and somewhat flung together.
It’s interesting to note that it’s now two years later, and I don’t think the picture above has really changed.
So the measured marginal drift rate is ~0%.
On the previous estimate of 25% leaving after 6.5 years, that’s about 5% per year, which would have predicted 1.4 extra people leaving in two years.
Of course these are tiny samples, but I think our expectation should be that ‘drift’ rates decrease over time. My prior is that if someone stays involved from age 20 to age 30, then there’s a good chance they stay involved the rest of their career. I guess my best guess should be that they stay involved for another 10 years.
If I eyeball the group above, my guess is that this pattern also holds if we look back further i.e. there was more drift in the early years among people who were involved for less time.
One small comment on the original analysis is that in addition to how long someone has already been involved, I expect ‘degree of social & identity involvement’ to be a bigger predictor of staying involved than ‘claimed level of dedication’ e.g. I’d expect someone who works at an EA org is more likely to stay involved than someone who says they intend to donate 50% but doesn’t have any good friends in the community. It would be cool to try to do an analysis more based around that factor, and it might reveal a group with lower drop out rates. The above analysis with CEA is better on these grounds but could still be divided further.
That doesn’t seem right—since this comment was made, Holly’s gone from being EA London strategy director to not really identifying with EA, which is more like the 5% per year.
Since the comment was made, Rob Gledhill has returned to CEA as the CBG Programme Manager. (Not totally confident that they are the same person though)
The reference class I’ve always used when casually thinking about something like “value drift” is the original CEA team from 2011.
Here’s my summary of the public information relevant to their “EA dedication” today (please do comment with additional relevant public info):
Will MacAskill—if anyone is the face of EA, it’s probably Will
Toby Ord—FHI research fellow
Nick Beckstead—OPP program officer (GCRs)
Michelle Hutchinson—GPI operations director
Holly Morgan—EA London strategy director
Mark Lee—unknown
Tom Ash—Rethink Charity board member
Matt Wage—I think is still donating ~50%
Ben Todd − 80k CEO
Tom Rowlands—unknown
Niel Bowerman − 80k coach
Robbie Shade—the homepage of his website (last updated in 2017 AFAICT) simply says, “I’m Robbie Shade, and I work at Google. I’m interested in effective altruism, and maximising the good I can do through my career.”
Matt Gibb—unknown
Richard Batty − 80k researcher as of Oct 2017, but doesn’t appear to be currently
Sally Murray—International Growth Centre senior country economist
Rob Gledhill—unknown
Andreas Mogensen—GPI research fellow
If I had to sum that up I’d say: ~75% of the CEA founding team (n=17) are still highly dedicated to doing the most good, 6.5 years on.
If early involvement and higher involvement/dedication are correlated (which I suspect they are), this data fits well with the following observation:
The CEA founding team seems like the absolute best case for value drift, because to found CEA one must have a much higher baseline inclination towards EA than the average person. Also probably a lot of power, which helps them control their environment while many EAs would be forced into non-EA lifestyles by factors beyond their control. So 25% drifters of the original CEA team feels more scary to me than 40-70% of average EAs.
I’m not so convinced on this. I think the framing of ‘this was the founding team’ was a little misleading: in 2011 all of us were volunteers and students. The lower bar for doing ~5 hours a week of volunteering for EA for ~1 year. Obviously students are typically in a uniquely good position for having time to volunteer. But it’s not clear all the people on this list had uniquely large amounts of power. Also, I think situational effects were still strong: I felt it made a huge difference to what I did that I made a few friends who were very altruistic and had good ideas of how to put that into practice. I don’t think we can assume that all of us on this list would have displayed similarly strong effective altruist inclinations without having met others in the group.
I think that’s basically right, though I also have the intuition that drift from the very early days will be higher, since at that point it was undecided what EA even was, and everyone was new and somewhat flung together.
This is really helpful, thanks.
It’s interesting to note that it’s now two years later, and I don’t think the picture above has really changed.
So the measured marginal drift rate is ~0%.
On the previous estimate of 25% leaving after 6.5 years, that’s about 5% per year, which would have predicted 1.4 extra people leaving in two years.
Of course these are tiny samples, but I think our expectation should be that ‘drift’ rates decrease over time. My prior is that if someone stays involved from age 20 to age 30, then there’s a good chance they stay involved the rest of their career. I guess my best guess should be that they stay involved for another 10 years.
If I eyeball the group above, my guess is that this pattern also holds if we look back further i.e. there was more drift in the early years among people who were involved for less time.
One small comment on the original analysis is that in addition to how long someone has already been involved, I expect ‘degree of social & identity involvement’ to be a bigger predictor of staying involved than ‘claimed level of dedication’ e.g. I’d expect someone who works at an EA org is more likely to stay involved than someone who says they intend to donate 50% but doesn’t have any good friends in the community. It would be cool to try to do an analysis more based around that factor, and it might reveal a group with lower drop out rates. The above analysis with CEA is better on these grounds but could still be divided further.
That doesn’t seem right—since this comment was made, Holly’s gone from being EA London strategy director to not really identifying with EA, which is more like the 5% per year.
Since the comment was made, Rob Gledhill has returned to CEA as the CBG Programme Manager. (Not totally confident that they are the same person though)
They are.