David Moss shares this chart saying “I fear that most of these metrics aren’t measures of EA growth, so much as of reaping the rewards of earlier years’ growth… looking at years in EA and self-reported level of engagement, we can see that it appears to take some years for people to become highly engaged”.
I have a different interpretation, which is that less engaged people are much more likely to churn out of the movement entirely and won’t show up in this data.
Thanks for quoting me, though you cut out the bit where I say:
we can see that it appears to take some years for people to become highly engaged. (Although, of course, this is complicated by potential attrition, i.e. people who aren’t engaged dropping out of earlier cohorts. We’ll talk more about this in this year’s series).
That said, while differential attrition is a serious problem (particularly in the earlier cohorts), I think it remains clear that people typically take some years to become highly engaged. Clearly very, very few people are highly engaged in their first year or so of EA involvement (only about 5%, or 10 people were highly engaged from the 2019 cohort in 2019). If EA were gaining highly engaged EAs only at that rate, (with the percentage of engaged EAs increasing only due to less engaged EAs dropping out) we’d be in a very poor state, gaining only a handful of engaged EAs per year. It also doesn’t accord with the raw numbers of highly engaged EAs in each of the cohorts: there were 3x as many highly engaged EAs in the 2018 cohort as the 2019, twice as many highly engaged EAs in the 2017 cohort as the 2018 cohort and about 30% more in 2016 as in 2017. And total cohort size hadn’t been decreasing dramatically over time time frame either. So it seems more natural to conclude that EAs are slowly increasing in engagement. As I say, we’ll go into this in more detail in this year’s series though.
Thanks for quoting me, though you cut out the bit where I say:
That said, while differential attrition is a serious problem (particularly in the earlier cohorts), I think it remains clear that people typically take some years to become highly engaged. Clearly very, very few people are highly engaged in their first year or so of EA involvement (only about 5%, or 10 people were highly engaged from the 2019 cohort in 2019). If EA were gaining highly engaged EAs only at that rate, (with the percentage of engaged EAs increasing only due to less engaged EAs dropping out) we’d be in a very poor state, gaining only a handful of engaged EAs per year. It also doesn’t accord with the raw numbers of highly engaged EAs in each of the cohorts: there were 3x as many highly engaged EAs in the 2018 cohort as the 2019, twice as many highly engaged EAs in the 2017 cohort as the 2018 cohort and about 30% more in 2016 as in 2017. And total cohort size hadn’t been decreasing dramatically over time time frame either. So it seems more natural to conclude that EAs are slowly increasing in engagement. As I say, we’ll go into this in more detail in this year’s series though.