I don’t think there is a difference between a moral duty and an obligation.
I admit that I’m personally confused about this too.
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In 2015, there were more than 2000 respondents, right? Does this mean EA is getting smaller?
Yes, the 2015 survey had 2352 EAs, whereas we had only 1837 responses this year. Keen eye for catching that! It’s something we’ve been thinking a lot about. I do not yet know whether this is a significant finding or indicative of EA getting smaller. I think we intend to write more about this soon.
I don’t think there is a difference between a moral duty and an obligation.
I’m not entirely sure that I would agree with this. I’m supposed to be publishing more survey content on the Forum at the moment, so parsing this out may have to wait, but obligation to me feels relatively more guilt-driven, and being duty-bound seems to invoke a more diverse set of internal and external pressures
At any rate, if it’s not clear here, it’s certainly not good as a survey question.
In 2015, there were more than 2000 respondents, right? Does this mean EA is getting smaller??
Could be! May also be indicative of year-on-year survey fatigue though. We’ll be revamping the survey for 2018 to make it a better experience in general
As a non-native speaker, I find it particularly difficult to understand the difference between “moral duty” and “obligation”. And I’ve travelled in the US for half a year and have taken some extra English classes, so I’d expect that many/most other non-native speakers won’t see any difference between the terms.
I don’t think there is a difference between a moral duty and an obligation.
In 2015, there were more than 2000 respondents, right? Does this mean EA is getting smaller??
I admit that I’m personally confused about this too.
-
Yes, the 2015 survey had 2352 EAs, whereas we had only 1837 responses this year. Keen eye for catching that! It’s something we’ve been thinking a lot about. I do not yet know whether this is a significant finding or indicative of EA getting smaller. I think we intend to write more about this soon.
The difference is that the term obligation has a more negative valence than duty.
Google trends data on this https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=Effective%20altruism
I’m not entirely sure that I would agree with this. I’m supposed to be publishing more survey content on the Forum at the moment, so parsing this out may have to wait, but obligation to me feels relatively more guilt-driven, and being duty-bound seems to invoke a more diverse set of internal and external pressures
At any rate, if it’s not clear here, it’s certainly not good as a survey question.
Could be! May also be indicative of year-on-year survey fatigue though. We’ll be revamping the survey for 2018 to make it a better experience in general
As a non-native speaker, I find it particularly difficult to understand the difference between “moral duty” and “obligation”. And I’ve travelled in the US for half a year and have taken some extra English classes, so I’d expect that many/most other non-native speakers won’t see any difference between the terms.