David_Moss

• David_MossMar 24, 2025, 6:02 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Arden Koehler’s comment on: EA Sur­vey 2024: How Peo­ple Get In­volved in EA

  Thanks Arden!
  
  I also agree that prima facie this strategic shift might seem worrying given that 80K has been the powerhouse of EA movement growth for many years.

  That said, I share your view that growth via 80K might reduce less than one would naively expect. In addition to the reasons you give above, another consideration is our finding is that a large percentage of people get into EA via ‘passive’ outreach (e.g. someone googles “ethical career” and finds the 80K website’, and for 80K specifically about 50% of recruitment was ‘passive’), rather than active outreach, and it seems plausible that much of that could continue even after 80K’s strategic shift.

  Our framings will probably change. It’s possible that the framings we use more going forward will emphasise EA style thinking a little less than our current ones, though this is something we’re actively unsure of.

  As noted elsewhere, we plan to research this empirically. Fwiw, my guess is that broader EA messaging would be better (on average and when comparing the best messaging from each) at recruiting people to high levels of engagement in EA (this might differ when looking to recruit people directly into AI related roles), though with a lot of variance within both classes of message.

EA Sur­vey 2024: How Peo­ple Get In­volved in EA

• David_MossMar 21, 2025, 9:27 AM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: In­for­mal Poll on Mo­ral Real­ism Among EAs at EAG Bay Area

  Thanks for posting!
  
  We did ask about this in the 2015 and 2017 EA Surveys. We’ve not repeated it since then due to limited space.

  In both cases, respondents were primarily realist (50.9% in 2015, 42.5% in 2017).

  

  

• David_MossMar 17, 2025, 8:11 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: OscarD🔸’s comment on: Ex­is­ten­tial Choices Sym­po­sium with Will MacAskill and other spe­cial guests (3-5pm GMT Mon­day)

  A broader coalition of actors will be motivated to pursue extinction prevention than longtermist trajectory changes… For instance, see Scott Alexander on the benefits of extinction risk as a popular meme compared to longtermism.

  This might vary between:

  • The level of the abstract memes:

    • I agree “reducing risk of extinction (potentially in the near term)” may be more appealing than “longtermist trajectory change”

  • The level of concrete interventions:

    • “Promoting democracy” (or whatever one decides promotes long term value) might be more appealing than “reducing risk from AI”^[1] (though there is likely significant variation within concrete interventions).

  1. ^

     Though our initial work does not suggest this.

Beyond Ex­tinc­tion: Re­vis­it­ing the Ques­tion and Broad­en­ing Our View

• David_MossMar 14, 2025, 2:19 PM

  50 points

  5 ∶ 0

  on: Where Are the Older Peo­ple in Our Move­ment?

  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.

• David_MossMar 12, 2025, 10:30 AM

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Win­ning is un­der­rated in grass­roots movements

  Matthew Yglesias has written more critically about this tendency (which he thinks is widely followed in activist circles, but is often detrimental). For example, here he describes what he refers to as “activist chum”, which is good for motivating and fundraising (very important for the self-interest of (those leading) movement), but can lead to focusing on “wins” that aren’t meaningful and may be unhelpful.

  The chum comes from the following political organizing playbook that is widely followed in progressive circles:

  1. Always be asking for something.

  2. Ask for something of someone empowered to give it to you.

  3. Ask for something from someone who cares what you think.

• David_MossMar 7, 2025, 1:34 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: tlevin’s comment on: levin’s Quick takes

  That’s interesting, but seems to be addressing a somewhat separate claim to mine.

  My claim was that that broad heuristics are more often necessary and appropriate when engaged in abstract evaluation of broad cause areas, where you can’t directly assess how promising concrete opportunities/​interventions are, and less so when you can directly assess concrete interventions.

  If I understand your claims correctly they are that:

  • Neglectedness is more likely to be misleading when applied to broad cause areas

  • When considering individual solutions, it’s useful to consider whether the intervention has already been tried.

  I generally agree that applying broad heuristics to broad cause areas is more likely to be misleading than when you can assess specific opportunities directly. Implicit in my claim is that where you don’t have to rely on broad heuristics, but can assess specific opportunities directly, then this is preferable. I agree that considering whether a specific intervention has been tried before is useful and relevant information, but don’t consider that an application of the Neglectedness/​Crowdedness heuristic.

• David_MossMar 6, 2025, 7:11 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: tlevin’s comment on: levin’s Quick takes

  I think this depends crucially on how, and to what object, you are applying the ITN framework:

  • Applying ITN to broad areas in the abstract, treating what one would do in them as something of a black box (a common approach in earlier cause prioritisation IMO), one might reason:

    • Malaria is a big problem (Importance)

    • Progress is easily made against malaria (Tractability)

    • … It seems clear that Neglectedness should be added to these considerations to avoid moving resources into an area where all the resources needed to solve X are already in place

  • Applying ITN to a specific intervention or action, it’s more common to be able to reason like so:

    • Malaria is a big problem (Importance)

    • Me providing more malaria nets [does /​ does not] easily increase progress against malaria, given that others [are /​ are not] already providing them (Tractability)

    • … In this case it seems that all you need from Neglectedness is already accounted for in Tractability, because you were able to account for whether the actions you could take were counterfactually going to be covered.

  On the whole, it seems to me that the further you move aware from abstract evaluations of broad cause areas, and more towards concrete interventions, the less it’s necessary or appropriate to depend on broad heuristics and the more you can simply attempt to estimate expected impact directly.

• David_MossMar 4, 2025, 8:39 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Quinn McHugh (he/him)’s comment on: EA Sur­vey 2024: Demographics

  Thanks for the comment!

  I agree these would be interesting things to include.

  • We used to ask about income as part of our donation data section. But we’ve not included the donation questions since EAS 2020. If you like, I can provide further analyses of the income data from prior surveys. On the face of it, EA income and donations have been surprisingly low historically. But this is likely explained by the high percentage of student/​very early career people in the community.

  • Also in 2020, we were asked to include a question about experiences of financial or employment instability as a child, which found relatively low levels. As noted in that post, we would generally recommend using a different measure if you want a proxy for SES, but this is the one we were asked to include. I do think that SES is a relatively neglected demographic (EA seems to be strikingly high SES background).

• David_MossMar 3, 2025, 2:45 PM

  19 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: EA Sur­vey 2024: Demographics

  We can assess this empirically, to some extent, by looking at changes in respondents who we can track over time (i.e. those who logged in to their EA account to pull their previous responses or provided their email). This allows us both to compare both how many individuals with different political views in 2022 changed to different views in 2024 and how many people with different views in 2022 may have dropped out (because we can’t track them in 2024^[1]).

  TLDR:

  • Left respondents switch in quite large numbers to the Center-left, Center leftists show a smaller switch to the center, while Centrists showed no major shift.

  • We see no signs of Leftists or Center leftists being more likely to dropout, but some weak evidence of Right and Center rightists being more likely to dropout.

  You can see the total flows between categories on this Sankey diagram.^[2]

  

  Due to the low numbers, it can be hard to compare the results for different categories though.

  First, we can compare how many people switched to NA (i.e. were not tracked in 2024 who were in 2022).

  We can see that there’s very little difference between the Left (77%), Center Left (73%) and Center (74%). We do, however, see that Center right (85%) and Right (83%) respondents seem more likely to not appear in the 2024 dataset, though these are small groups due to the very low number of right-of-center respondents.^[3]

  Switch to NA
  Left	NA	785	77.49%
  Center left	NA	788	72.76%
  Center	NA	155	73.81%
  Center right	NA	52	85.25%
  Right	NA	15	83.33%
  Libertarian	NA	109	71.71%
  Other	NA	144	75.39%
  Prefer not to answer	NA	165	83.76%
  Did not answer	NA	74	85.06%
  Did not view	NA	182	97.33%

  Then, we can compare changes in political views, setting aside the large number of NA-in-2024 responses, to see the changes more clearly. We can see quite a strong shift (27%) among Left (in 2022) respondents to the Center left (this compares to the total drop in Left respondents being 28.8%). Among the center left, we see a smaller but still noticeable switch to the Center, and for the Center, we see most respondents staying the same.^[4]

  

  Non-NA switches
  Left	Left	154	67.54%
  Left	Center left	61	26.75%
  Left	Center	4	1.75%
  Left	Center right	1	0.44%
  Left	Right	0	0.00%
  Left	Libertarian	1	0.44%
  Left	Other	7	3.07%
  		228
  Center left	Left	7	2.40%
  Center left	Center left	246	84.25%
  Center left	Center	32	10.96%
  Center left	Center right	2	0.68%
  Center left	Right	0	0.00%
  Center left	Libertarian	3	1.03%
  Center left	Other	2	0.68%
  		292
  Center	Left	1	1.85%
  Center	Center left	1	1.85%
  Center	Center	46	85.19%
  Center	Center right	3	5.56%
  Center	Right	0	0.00%
  Center	Libertarian	3	5.56%
  Center	Other	0	0.00%
  		54

  These results aren’t suggestive of leftists being particularly likely to drop out. But there is some evidence of Left respondents in 2022 switching in quite large numbers (similar to the total change in % Left) to the Center left in 2024.

  1. ^

     Caveat: a respondent might not appear in 2024 because they dropped out of EA or they didn’t take the survey or because they took the survey but didn’t log in or provide the same email address as last time. Differential disappearance across groups might still be suggestive, however, since seem to be few innocent explanations for why leftists/​rightists would systematically become less likely to take the survey or provide their email address across time.

     It’s also important to bear in mind that the sub-sample of respondents who logged in or provided their email address might differ from the total sample (e.g. they might be more engaged or more satisfied). But just over 90% of respondents in both 2022 and 2024 fit into this category, so it does not seem a very selective sub-sample.

  2. ^

     NAs in 2022 include only people who did not reach the politics question of the survey, because this sub-sample includes only people who were tracked in the 2022 survey.

  3. ^

     It makes sense that the various other categories for not answering the question would also show high rates of not answering the email question or not logging in.

  4. ^

     Center right and Right not shown because, excluding NAs in 2024, this was only 9 and 3 respondents respectively (though most stayed in the their prior category).

  What links here?

  • His­tory of di­ver­sity efforts and trends in EA by Julia_Wise🔸 (Mar 4, 2025, 3:34 PM; 135 points)

• David_MossMar 2, 2025, 5:54 PM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Aaron Bergman’s comment on: EA Sur­vey 2024: Demographics

  Thanks for putting this together! It’s good to confirm the overall pattern.

  I would note that (as we observed in the case of per capita figures for small countries), per capita figures for small colleges risk being very noisy (e.g. a very small number of respondents can make a very big difference), so I would be very cautious drawing inferences about any individual college.

• David_MossMar 2, 2025, 5:46 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JDBauman’s comment on: EA Sur­vey 2024: Demographics

  We rotate religion, politics and diet across different years due to space limitations, so religion wasn’t included this year. You can see the results for 2019-2022 here, though, which suggest relatively little change across time.

• David_MossFeb 28, 2025, 11:57 AM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: SiebeRozendal’s comment on: EA Sur­vey 2024: Demographics

  I agree that getting more fine-grained information about political views (as well as moral views, and bunch of other things) would be very interesting.

  We could potentially include it in the interim Extra EA Survey we plan to run later this year, before running the next full survey next year, depending on space. As noted above, we’ve had to run the Politics and Diet questions on alternating years due to space constraints, and keeping the same question as previous years is a priority so we can see the broad changes over time.

EA Sur­vey 2024: Demographics

• David_MossFeb 25, 2025, 7:39 PM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kat Woods’s comment on: Stop call­ing them labs

  Seems testable!

  Fwiw, I would have predicted that labs would lead to more positive evaluations overall, including higher evaluations of responsibility and safety. But I don’t think people’s intuitions are very reliable about such cases.

• David_MossFeb 21, 2025, 9:34 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Effec­tive giv­ing ini­ti­a­tives should not as­sume the best an­i­mal and hu­man welfare in­ter­ven­tions are equally cost-effec­tive?

  Thanks Vasco! We’d be happy to run a survey or experiment on this topic if orgs think it would be useful to them.

• David_MossFeb 13, 2025, 12:16 PM

  22 points

  5 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Matthew_Barnett’s comment on: Matthew_Bar­nett’s Shortform

  Thanks for writing on this important topic!

  I think it’s interesting to assess how popular or unpopular these views are within the EA community. This year and last year, we asked people in the EA Survey about the extent to which they agreed or disagreed that:

  Most expected value in the future comes from digital minds’ experiences, or the experiences of other nonbiological entities.

  This year about 47% (strongly or somewhat) disagreed, while 22.2% agreed (roughly a 2:1 ratio).

  However, among people who rated AI risks a top priority, respondents leaned towards agreement, with 29.6% disagreeing and 36.6% agreeing (a 0.8:1 ratio).^[1]

  Similarly, among the most highly engaged EAs, attitudes were roughly evenly split between 33.6% disagreement and 32.7% agreement (1.02:1), with much lower agreement among everyone else.

  This suggests to me that the collective opinion of EAs, among those who strongly prioritise AI risks and the most highly engaged is not so hostile to digital minds. Of course, for practical purposes, what matters most might be the attitudes of a small number of decisionmakers, but I think the attitudes of the engaged EAs matters for epistemic reasons.

  1. ^

     Interestingly, among people who merely rated AI risks a near-top priority, attitudes towards digital minds were similar to the sample as a whole. Lower prioritisation of AI risks were associated with yet lower agreement with the digital minds item.

• David_MossFeb 11, 2025, 10:29 PM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Swan 🔸’s comment on: Pulse 2024: Aware­ness and per­cep­tions of effec­tive altruism

  Thanks!
  
  Yes, we plan to repeat Pulse at least another three times in the US.

  We’d be interested to run it in other countries if there were interest in funding it.

• David_MossFeb 11, 2025, 12:59 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jessica_mccurdy🔸’s comment on: jes­sica_mc­curdy’s Shortform

  Relatedly, I think in many cases burnout is better conceptualised as depression (perhaps with a specific work-related etiology).

  Whether burnout is distinct from depression at all is a controversy within the literature:

  • https://​​www.sciencedirect.com/​​science/​​article/​​abs/​​pii/​​S0272735815000173

  • https://​​onlinelibrary.wiley.com/​​doi/​​abs/​​10.1002/​​jclp.22229

  • https://​​www.frontiersin.org/​​journals/​​psychology/​​articles/​​10.3389/​​fpsyg.2019.00284/​​full

  • https://​​psycnet.apa.org/​​record/​​2019-18074-001

  I think that this has the practical implications that people suffering from burnout should at least consider whether they are depressed and consider treatment options with that in mind (e.g. antidepressants, therapy).

  There’s a risk that the “burnout” framing limits the options people are considering (e.g. that they need rest /​ changes to their workplace). At the same time, there’s a risk that people underestimate the extent to which environmental changes are relevant to their depression, so changing their work environment should also be considered if a person does conclude they might be depressed.