I understand the importance of reducing burnout, but I wonder if, as a movement, we aren’t placing too much emphasis on reducing burnout compared to pushing ourselves to do more. Anecdotally, I see more EA articles about self care than pushing oneself to do more. I can see why there are some publicity benefits of reducing burden when it comes to attracting new people to the movement, but when it comes to discussing within the community, my guess is the EV of pushing oneself to do more is positive for most people in the movement.
As an example how we may be doing too little on the average, only around 23% of those who revealed their donations in the 2014 EA survey. donated at least 10% of their income. Obviously there’s more ways to be an EA than donating and many of these individuals are students, but it does suggest that many people can push themselves a lot harder. I would be surprised if most people needed more than 90% of their salaries for adequate self care. I think we need to strike a balance between self care/pushing ourselves harder, but my suspicions are that we should move in the latter direction. I would love to find more concrete evidence either way though.
The low median donation by EAs suggests that more needs to be done to raise this level. We now have a large list of EAs (the EA facebook page) with ~11k EAs. I think it would be worthwhile to conduct some message testing experiments on the list if possible. We might send messages/articles promoting a greater level of donations to a random subset of the list then later survey the facebook group to ask how much they have donated during the time period since the messagea. Then we could compare the average treatment effects of the various messages used.