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this is: Empirical data on value drift, published by Joey on the effective altruism forum.
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Why It’s Important to Know the Risk of Value Drift
The concept of value drift is that over time, people will become less motivated to do altruistic things. This is not to be confused with changing cause areas or methods of doing good. Value drift has a strong precedent of happening for other related concepts, both ethical things (such as being vegetarian) and things that generally take willpower (such as staying a healthy weight).
Value drift seems very likely to be a concern for many EAs, and if it were a major concern, it would substantially affect career and donation plans.
For example, if value drift rarely happens, putting money into a savings account with the intent of donating it might be basically as good as putting it into a donor-advised fund. However, if the risk of value drift is higher, a dollar in a savings account is more likely to later be used for non-altruistic reasons and thus not nearly as good as a dollar put into a donor advised fund, where it’s very hard not to donate it to a registered charity.
In a career context, a plan such as building career capital for 8 years and then moving into an altruistic job would be considered a much better plan if value drift were rare than if it were common. The more common value drift is, the stronger near-term focused impact plans are relative to longer-term focused impact plans. For example, you might get an entry-level position at a charity and build up capacity by getting work experience. This has the potential, though not always, to be slower at building your CV than getting a degree or working in a low-impact but high-prestige field. However, it has impact right away, which matters more if the risk of value drift is high.
The Data
Despite the importance of value drift to important questions, it's rarely been talked about or studied. One of the reasons it is so under-studied is that it would take a long time to get good data.
I have been in the EA movement for ~5 years. I decided to pool some data from contacts who I met in my first year of EA. I only included people who would have called themselves EAs for 6 months or longer (I would not include someone who was only into EA for a month and then disappeared), and who and took some sort of EA action (working for an EA org, taking the GWWC pledge, running an EA group). I also only included people who I knew and kept in touch with well enough to know what happened to them (even if they left the EA movement). It is ultimately a convenience sample, but it was based on working for 4 current EA orgs and living in 4 different countries over that time, so it’s not focused on a single location or organization.
I also broke the groups down into ~10% donors and ~50% donors, because many times I have heard people being more or less concerned about one of these groups vs the other. These broad groups are not just focused on people doing earning to give. Someone who is working heavy hours for an EA organization and making most of their life decisions with EA as their number one priority would be considered in the 50% group. Someone running an EA chapter who makes decisions with EA as a factor, but prioritizes other factors above it, would be put in the 10% group. The percentages are aimed at rough proxies of how important EA is in these people's lives, not strictly financial donations. I did not count changing cause areas as value drift (e.g. changing from donating 10% to MIRI to AMF) -- only different levels of overall altruistic involvement.
The results over 5 years are as follows:
16 people were ~50% donors → 9/16 stayed around 50%
22 people were ~10% donors → 8/22 stayed around 10%
No one moved from the 10% category to the 50% category, and I only counted fairly noticeabl...
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