This is a useful analysis, and collectively I agree it suggests there has been a negative impact overall.
However, I think you may be overly confident when you say things like “FTX has had an obvious negative impact on the number of donors giving through EA Funds”, and “Pledge data from Giving What We Can shows a clear and dramatic negative impact from FTX”.
The data appears to be consistent with this, but it could be consistent with other explanations (or, more likely, a combination of explanations including FTX). For example, over the past couple of years there has been very high inflation across many countries, and a big drop in the value of many cryptocurrencies. Both might be expected to reduce the number of donors and the amount they donate.
This is a very good point, and something I probably should have addressed in the OP.
I agree it’s totally possible for non-FTX factors to be causing the deterioration in metrics I describe. However, I think the evidence points to FTX being the dominant factor for two main reasons:
The timing of the downturn in metrics aligns almost perfectly with FTX’s collapse. That’s not really the case with alternative explanations. Using your examples, Bitcoin (as a proxy for cryptocurrency) lost ~2/3 of its value from November 2021 to October 2022 (prior to FTX collapse) and inflation in the US started spiking in Spring 2021 and has remained elevated since. Given that longer-term situation, FTX seems much more likely to be the catalyst of changes in donation behavior we saw specifically in November 2022.
The downturn is evident in a very broad set of metrics, which are unlikely to be driven by the same alternative factor. Using your examples again, crypto declines are a plausible explanation for changes in donation behavior, but can’t really explain changes in forum engagement metrics.
In tandem, I think 1 + 2 provide extremely strong evidence that FTX is the major culprit here (though I wouldn’t be shocked if alternative explanations also turned out to be significant for a couple of metrics). Especially when ~40% of EA Community members who were surveyed on the issue “reported that they were less likely to associate with EA due to [the FTX] crisis.”
Note that many EA organizations (including CEA) paused/lowered outreach post-FTX. So decreased engagement might be because of FTX in some sense, but maybe not for the reason one would initially think.
Yeah, the OP is all about what has happened and punts on the question of why it has happened. Reduced outreach could definitely be an explanation for how some of these metrics have changed (IMO the other likeliest explanations include reduced funding, disillusionment with EA principles, disillusionment with EA orgs, and disillusionment with EA leaders, though there could certainly be other factors at play). Personally I think reduced outreach makes much more sense for some metrics (e.g. newsletter subscriptions) than others (e.g. forum engagement).
This is a useful analysis, and collectively I agree it suggests there has been a negative impact overall.
However, I think you may be overly confident when you say things like “FTX has had an obvious negative impact on the number of donors giving through EA Funds”, and “Pledge data from Giving What We Can shows a clear and dramatic negative impact from FTX”.
The data appears to be consistent with this, but it could be consistent with other explanations (or, more likely, a combination of explanations including FTX). For example, over the past couple of years there has been very high inflation across many countries, and a big drop in the value of many cryptocurrencies. Both might be expected to reduce the number of donors and the amount they donate.
This is a very good point, and something I probably should have addressed in the OP.
I agree it’s totally possible for non-FTX factors to be causing the deterioration in metrics I describe. However, I think the evidence points to FTX being the dominant factor for two main reasons:
The timing of the downturn in metrics aligns almost perfectly with FTX’s collapse. That’s not really the case with alternative explanations. Using your examples, Bitcoin (as a proxy for cryptocurrency) lost ~2/3 of its value from November 2021 to October 2022 (prior to FTX collapse) and inflation in the US started spiking in Spring 2021 and has remained elevated since. Given that longer-term situation, FTX seems much more likely to be the catalyst of changes in donation behavior we saw specifically in November 2022.
The downturn is evident in a very broad set of metrics, which are unlikely to be driven by the same alternative factor. Using your examples again, crypto declines are a plausible explanation for changes in donation behavior, but can’t really explain changes in forum engagement metrics.
In tandem, I think 1 + 2 provide extremely strong evidence that FTX is the major culprit here (though I wouldn’t be shocked if alternative explanations also turned out to be significant for a couple of metrics). Especially when ~40% of EA Community members who were surveyed on the issue “reported that they were less likely to associate with EA due to [the FTX] crisis.”
Note that many EA organizations (including CEA) paused/lowered outreach post-FTX. So decreased engagement might be because of FTX in some sense, but maybe not for the reason one would initially think.
Yeah, the OP is all about what has happened and punts on the question of why it has happened. Reduced outreach could definitely be an explanation for how some of these metrics have changed (IMO the other likeliest explanations include reduced funding, disillusionment with EA principles, disillusionment with EA orgs, and disillusionment with EA leaders, though there could certainly be other factors at play). Personally I think reduced outreach makes much more sense for some metrics (e.g. newsletter subscriptions) than others (e.g. forum engagement).
I hope CEA will take an active role in helping answer the “why” question, as it is responsible for some data sets that would help shed some light on it.