The most common places that people first or primarily heard about EA seem to be Leaf itself, Non-Trivial, and school — none of these categories show up on the EA survey.
“School” does appear in the EA Survey, it’s just under the superordinate “Educational course” category (3%) of respondents.
We have 3 surveys of our own assessing where non-EAs more broadly heard of EA, which also find that education is among the most important source of hearing about EA:
In a survey of US students more broadly (not just EAs), we ran for CEA (referenced here) education was the most common source of hearing about EA.
In a different survey of students only at elite universities (also unpublished, referenced here), we also found that hearing about EA either on campus or through a class were among the most common sources.
Peter Singer, and YouTube / Ted talks all seem to have been more important than I would have expected.
Peter Singer is actually very frequently mentioned in the EA Survey, as I have noted before. Individuals just don’t appear in the top-line listed categories, which focus on orgs or media. As we highlighted here, Peter Singer was mentioned in 17.6% of people’s qualitative comments about where they heard of EA. At a glance, the results for TED Talk and YouTube don’t seem too different.
Of course, people who get involved with EA during their teens are a very small minority of total EAs, so I would not be surprised if that particular very small sub-population differs from the broader population in some ways, especially since some major sources like university groups and careers advice (from 80K) are most relevant to slightly older people.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that any differences found in a sample of 63 people could easily be noise. For example, purely by way of illustration, if we randomly sampled 63 people from a larger population and found 7 people were such-and-such, the estimated proportion of 11% would be bounded by 95% confidence intervals of around 5-21%.
Those additional unpublished-but-referenced results are v helpful comparisons, thank you!
I’ve noticed a fair few times when people (myself included, in this case) are gesturing or guessing about certain factors, and then you notice that and leave a detailed comment adding in relevant empirical data. I’m a big fan of that, so thank you for your contributions here and elsewhere!
I’ll tone down the phrasing about Singer and Ted talks and make a couple of other wording tweaks.
“School” does appear in the EA Survey, it’s just under the superordinate “Educational course” category (3%) of respondents.
We have 3 surveys of our own assessing where non-EAs more broadly heard of EA, which also find that education is among the most important source of hearing about EA:
In a survey of US students more broadly (not just EAs), we ran for CEA (referenced here) education was the most common source of hearing about EA.
In a different survey of students only at elite universities (also unpublished, referenced here), we also found that hearing about EA either on campus or through a class were among the most common sources.
In additional unpublished results from our survey on how many people have heard of effective altruism, we found >20% of people first heard of EA from an education source.
Peter Singer is actually very frequently mentioned in the EA Survey, as I have noted before. Individuals just don’t appear in the top-line listed categories, which focus on orgs or media. As we highlighted here, Peter Singer was mentioned in 17.6% of people’s qualitative comments about where they heard of EA. At a glance, the results for TED Talk and YouTube don’t seem too different.
Of course, people who get involved with EA during their teens are a very small minority of total EAs, so I would not be surprised if that particular very small sub-population differs from the broader population in some ways, especially since some major sources like university groups and careers advice (from 80K) are most relevant to slightly older people.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that any differences found in a sample of 63 people could easily be noise. For example, purely by way of illustration, if we randomly sampled 63 people from a larger population and found 7 people were such-and-such, the estimated proportion of 11% would be bounded by 95% confidence intervals of around 5-21%.
Those additional unpublished-but-referenced results are v helpful comparisons, thank you!
I’ve noticed a fair few times when people (myself included, in this case) are gesturing or guessing about certain factors, and then you notice that and leave a detailed comment adding in relevant empirical data. I’m a big fan of that, so thank you for your contributions here and elsewhere!
I’ll tone down the phrasing about Singer and Ted talks and make a couple of other wording tweaks.
Agree with your caveats!