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This is: EA Survey 2019 Series: How EAs Get Involved in EA, published by David_Moss on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
Personal Contacts (14%), LessWrong (9.6%) and 80,000 Hours (9.6%) are still the main ways most people have heard of EA over time.
In recent years (2018-2019), 80,000 Hours (17%) is the single largest source for people first hearing about EA, followed by Personal Contacts (15%).
80,000 Hours (47.8%), GiveWell (42.7%) and Personal Contact (34.8%) had the highest percentages of EAs saying they were important for getting them involved in EA.
We find few differences in the proportion of highly engaged EAs first hearing of EA from different sources, except for significantly higher proportions of engaged EAs first hearing of EA from a personal contact or a local group.
Additionally, for the first time, we provide data about which specific books, podcasts, TED Talks etc. people most commonly heard about EA from. Peter Singer was the most commonly mentioned factor, appearing in 17.6% of these comments.
We find some differences in which things get men and women involved in EA: personal contacts and 80,000 Hours seem to recruit more women. We also find that significantly more non-white individuals first heard about EA from 80,000 Hours, with few differences across any of the other sources.
Where do people first hear about EA?
Where have most people first heard of EA overall?
2137 (85%) respondents answered the “Where did you first hear about Effective Altruism?” question.[1]
‘Personal Contact’ is quite far ahead of all other options (14%), followed by LessWrong and 80,000 Hours (each 9.6%). There are now substantially fewer responses in the broad ‘Other’ category (8.6%) than in 2018, but is still the fourth largest category.
Due to changes to the categories, this year’s results are not directly comparable to the previous years. However, we can see that the results are quite similar. Personal Contact was the most selected option in both 2018 and 2019 (notwithstanding the ‘Other’ category in 2018), with 16% and 14% respectively. LessWrong (12% vs 9.6%) and 80,000 Hours (8% vs 9.6%) were the next most popular categories. Local EA Group (5% vs 5.2%) and Slate Star Codex (5% vs 6.8%) follow next, with Book (6%) and Podcast (5.6%), TED Talks (4.6%) and Article/Blog (4.5%) also receiving similar numbers of responses. New additions, Future Perfect and One For the World, received
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