Community Organiser for EA UK
Organiser for EA Finance
DavidNash
Karma: 4,740
I think people can be heavily involved in something without having to take the identity of that thing. For example, if someone worked 15 years at Google, they wouldn’t have to describe themselves as a ‘googler’ even if the P&C team calls everyone a googler with a shared Google identity.
What’s your reasoning?
Self identification makes most sense to me.
For example “at the Leaders Forum 2019, around half of the participants (including key figures in EA) said that they don’t self-identify as “effective altruists”. ”
I’m assuming the posts and comments were both (separately) indexed to 1 at the start of the graph.
They have hosted 1-3 EA UK events a month and a few more adjacent events over the last few years.
I agree that it’s inaccurate to say that it’s only people at top universities who are likely to have outsized influence, but that’s not what I said.
Maybe you’re combining the idea that there is too much spending on top universities with the idea that the spending could be spread out amongst more of them rather than spent on non university movement building.
For movement building strategy, it will depend on whether you think a mass movement achieves your goals better than specific fields. For example in animal welfare, it makes sense for GFI to target entrepreneurs and tissue engineers whereas vegan advocacy is aimed more at students and a wider audience.
I don’t know how the cost benefit calculation works out but retreats have different costs than conferences (including some overnight accommodation) and less tangible costs associated with using a different venue for each event.
I would also assume there are quite a few more events that aren’t listed online.
Choosing which universities to focus on and how you run a uni group are two different questions.
Why do you think that it’s inaccurate that people at top universities are more likely to go on to have outsized influence?
It’s not that it is elitist in the sense that they value top university students more, it’s elitist in that they want people who are more likely to go on to have outsized influence/money to give more of that away to others.
It doesn’t make as much sense to ask poorer students to give away more of their income, or shift their career away from one that maximises their own and their families welfare for the benefit of others.
I think there is more value in separating out AI vs bio vs nuclear vs meta GCR than having posts/events marketed as GCR but be mainly on one topic. Both from the perspective of the minor causes and the main cause which would get more relevant attention.
Also the strategy/marketing of those causes will often be different and so it doesn’t make as much sense to lump them together unless it is about GCR prioritisation or cross cause support.
One category that you didn’t include are people that agree with the ideas and take action, but don’t want to or are too busy to attend lots of EA meetups.
Yeah, I don’t know if that dynamic exists but it would be interesting if we could see what the forum looks like if you just count votes from different locations.
Could also be the Bay Area/UK voting dynamic.
For UK, data from CAF.
”The proportion of donations going to overseas aid and disaster relief (7% -£931m) halved from a high in 2022 (14%)”
State of Global Development & EA (2024)
Over time it was getting less engagement, and I felt that the content made more sense as a substack/newsletter than a forum post—it’s not the kind of post that leads to discussions.
It’s also not a new thing—The Elitist Philanthropy of So-Called Effective Altruism—from 2013.
I’m not sure you have to do anything with it, generally groups that suggests money/influence should be shifted from A to B will get a negative response from the people it may affect or people who disagree with that direction of change. I tend to find energy spent on ideological EA critics is less valuable than good faith critics/people who are just looking for resources to help themselves to more good.
Depending on what you are aiming to achieve with that section of the website, you don’t have to have notable figures, you could include people who are most relevant (or not include individuals at all).
For example Magnify Mentoring has people who have benefited from their mentoring programs. EA Philippines have photos of their local community. EA for Christians have stories from members on their community tab and no profiles of people on their intro page.
Thanks for the shout-out akash, I appreciate it.
With engagement, there might be less comments/likes on substack but it generally gets 1.2k-1.5k views per month compared to the forum which was around 200-400 views per month.
You may find other sources from the links I include in these newsletters.
Monthly Overload of EA
Global Development & EA