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this is: New data suggests the ‘leaders’’ priorities represent the core of the community, published by Benjamin_Todd on the effective altruism forum.
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There have been several surveys of attendees of what was previously called the ‘EA Leaders Forum’ about what they believe the community’s cause priorities should be (2017, 2018, 2019).
The relevance of these results have been criticised each year for not representing the views of the wider community (e.g. in 2019). You can see some hypotheses about why there might be differences in views between the Leaders Forum group and others here. In particular, the former group is selected to be more into longtermism than the average, potentially skewing the results.
Similarly, CEA and 80,000 Hours have been criticised for not having their priorities line up with the community (e.g. this post summarises criticisms about representativeness, and 80k was recently criticised here).
Critics of the Leaders Forum survey often appeal to the EA Survey as a reflection of the community’s priorities. This is a much broader survey with about 2,500 respondents, and when we compare the ideal portfolio chosen in the Leaders Forum Survey to the top cause preferences of the EA Survey respondents (as explained in more depth later), we see significant differences:
The problem with this is the EA Survey is open to anyone to take, and without knowing more about who’s taking it, it’s unclear why this should be used to set community priorities.
Fortunately, the 2019 EA Survey lets us make progress on this question. It asked many more questions about people’s level of engagement, which means we can further subdivide the responses.
In this post, I do a quick analysis of these new results to show that based on this data, the Leaders Forum survey priorities seem to reflect the most engaged half of the community – around 1,000-2,000 people – pretty well. This suggests the issue we actually face is not a difference between the leaders and the core of the community, but rather between the core and those who are new or moderately engaged.
The data
In the 2019 EA Survey, one question asked about how engaged people feel they are on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 was defined as “I am heavily involved in the effective altruism community, perhaps helping to lead an EA group or working at an EA-aligned organization. I make heavy use of the principles of effective altruism when I make decisions about my career or charitable donations.”[1]
About 450 out of 2,100 respondents to this question reported a “5”. My estimate is that only about 40% of engaged EAs filled out the survey in 2019,[2] which would suggest there are around ~1,000 people with this level of engagement, so it’s a much wider group than the ~30 or so people at the leaders forum.
If we look at what different members of this group said they think is the ‘top cause’, and compare that to the ‘ideal portfolio’ chosen by the mean attendee of the Leaders Forum,[3] (making some assumptions about how the categories line up) we find:
As you can see, these line up pretty well, except that the EA Survey group actually has a greater collective preference for ‘meta’ cause prioritisation work. (Note that ‘other near term’ wasn’t offered as a category on the leaders forum survey so may be undercounted – I hope this will be fixed this year.)
Using broader buckets, among the leaders survey we get 54% longtermist, 20% meta, and 24% near term and 2% other. Among the survey respondents we find 48% longtermist, 28% meta, and 24% near term.
(The 2020 Leaders Forum results are also not published, but at a glance they line up even better, with more agreement on AI and other near term causes.)
I should be very clear: these questions are asking about different things. The Leaders Forum one is about the ideal portfolio of resources...
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