Nice work! Lots of interesting results in here that I think lead to concrete strategy insights.
only 7.4% of New York University students knew what effective altruism (EA) is. At the same time, 8.8% were extremely sympathetic to EA … Interestingly, these EA-sympathetic students were largely ignorant about EA; only 14.5% knew about it before the survey.
This is a great core finding! I think I got a couple important lessons from these three numbers alone. Outreach could probably be a few times bigger without the proportion of EA students who know about it getting near enough to 100% for sharply diminishing returns. Knowing what EA is seems like about 2:1 evidence in favor of being EA-sympathetic, which is useful, but not that huge. Getting the impression that “nobody at my school knows about EA :(” isn’t actually very bad news—folks who are interested in EA do know about it at a meaningfully higher rate, so even at the ideal level, maybe only 50% of students will know what EA is.
Strikingly, 47.9% of this group did not consider existential risk mitigation to be a global priority.
This seems to suggest that recent thoughts about “longtermism” vs “X-risk” and the importance of arguing for the size of the far future may not be good for outreach. My impression is that maybe the importance of X-risk even without the “size of the future” piece of the argument seems important to someone who’s been around EA for a while, but isn’t obvious enough to be good for outreach, where attention is a scarce resource. Accepting the argument for high X-risk only leads to prioritizing it about half the time. I wonder how including a size-of-the-future argument would change this?
There were few robust demographic predictors of EA agreement. Neither gender, SAT scores, nor most study subjects significantly correlated with it.
This is a big update! I expected correlations on all three of those things. This suggests the current EA stereotype is more due to founder effect than actual difference in affinity for the ideas, which is huge for outreach targeting.
This is a thing I and a lot of other organizers I’ve talked to have really struggled with. My pet theory that I’ll eventually write up and post (I really will, I promise!) is that you need Alignment, Agency, and Ability to have a high impact. Would definitely be interested in actual research on this.