For people who have started effective altruist meetups, how large was its counterfactual impact? If you start a meetup for outreach purposes, it can be hard to tell whether people’s increased engagement resulted from a new meetup or would’ve happened anyway.
In my opinion, not very large. In my experience, I think telling people about EA has had high counterfactual value, but further work to sustain their commitment hasn’t had much counterfactual value—they either don’t get engaged despite my work, or they stay engaged despite my being hands off.
To tease the results of the 2014 Survey of EAs, local groups were one of the least popular answers to the question “Which factors were important in ‘getting you into’ Effective Altruism, or altering your actions in its direction?”. Does anyone know of other data on this?
Though keep in mind that the reason they’re not very popular could be that EAs from local groups don’t get much into LessWrong, the EA Forum, etc., where they would see links to take the survey. …So maybe local groups create lots of EAs that are less engaged with the online content.
I think we did do that to the best extent we could; Tom Ash could confirm. Definitely something we should look into more. The problem is it’s hard to know what meetup groups exist and who to contact.
Yes, that’s quite possible, good point Peter. Specifically, it could be that EAs in local groups are less involved in the online EA community and less easily reachable by a survey.
For people who have started effective altruist meetups, how large was its counterfactual impact? If you start a meetup for outreach purposes, it can be hard to tell whether people’s increased engagement resulted from a new meetup or would’ve happened anyway.
In my opinion, not very large. In my experience, I think telling people about EA has had high counterfactual value, but further work to sustain their commitment hasn’t had much counterfactual value—they either don’t get engaged despite my work, or they stay engaged despite my being hands off.
To tease the results of the 2014 Survey of EAs, local groups were one of the least popular answers to the question “Which factors were important in ‘getting you into’ Effective Altruism, or altering your actions in its direction?”. Does anyone know of other data on this?
Though keep in mind that the reason they’re not very popular could be that EAs from local groups don’t get much into LessWrong, the EA Forum, etc., where they would see links to take the survey. …So maybe local groups create lots of EAs that are less engaged with the online content.
You might want to ask local group organisers to distribute the survey among their members.
I think we did do that to the best extent we could; Tom Ash could confirm. Definitely something we should look into more. The problem is it’s hard to know what meetup groups exist and who to contact.
Confirmed! I think that we reached a pretty good cross-section of the known-about meetup groups.
Yes, that’s quite possible, good point Peter. Specifically, it could be that EAs in local groups are less involved in the online EA community and less easily reachable by a survey.