As it happens, since 2020, the community has continued to age. As of the end of last year, it’s median 31, mean 22.4, and we can see that it has steadily aged across years.
It’s clear that a key contributor to our age distribution is the age at which people first get involved with EA, which is median 24, mean 26.7, but the age at which people first get involved has also increased over time.
I think people sometimes point to our outreach focusing on things like university groups to explain this pattern. But I think this is likely over-stated, as this accounts for only a small minority of our recruiting, and most of the ways people first hear about EA seems to be more passive mechanisms, not tied to direct outreach, which would be accessible to people at older ages (we’ll discuss this in more detail in the 2024 iteration of this post).
That said, different age ranges do appear to have different levels of awareness of EA, with highest awareness seeming to be at the 25-34 or 35-44 age ranges. (Though our sample size is large, the number of people who we count as aware of EA are very low, so you can see these estimates are quite uncertain. Our confidence in these estimates will increase as we run more surveys). This suggests that awareness of EA may be reaching different groups unevenly, which could partly contribute to lower engagement from older age groups. But this need not be the result of differences in our outreach. It could result from different levels of interest from the different groups.
Nice! By the way, I really appreciate how consistently your team helps ground discussions like this in data. I opened this post and as I was scrolling through, I thought, “oh I bet David has already responded with something helpful.” It’s a great public service!
I agree this is a potential concern.
As it happens, since 2020, the community has continued to age. As of the end of last year, it’s median 31, mean 22.4, and we can see that it has steadily aged across years.
It’s clear that a key contributor to our age distribution is the age at which people first get involved with EA, which is median 24, mean 26.7, but the age at which people first get involved has also increased over time.
I think people sometimes point to our outreach focusing on things like university groups to explain this pattern. But I think this is likely over-stated, as this accounts for only a small minority of our recruiting, and most of the ways people first hear about EA seems to be more passive mechanisms, not tied to direct outreach, which would be accessible to people at older ages (we’ll discuss this in more detail in the 2024 iteration of this post).
That said, different age ranges do appear to have different levels of awareness of EA, with highest awareness seeming to be at the 25-34 or 35-44 age ranges. (Though our sample size is large, the number of people who we count as aware of EA are very low, so you can see these estimates are quite uncertain. Our confidence in these estimates will increase as we run more surveys). This suggests that awareness of EA may be reaching different groups unevenly, which could partly contribute to lower engagement from older age groups. But this need not be the result of differences in our outreach. It could result from different levels of interest from the different groups.
Nice! By the way, I really appreciate how consistently your team helps ground discussions like this in data. I opened this post and as I was scrolling through, I thought, “oh I bet David has already responded with something helpful.” It’s a great public service!