Hide table of contents

The EA Survey 2024 is now live at the following link:  

Take the survey

We would encourage you to take this survey if you feel that you broadly identify with effective altruism, or are at all engaged with the EA community, however loosely. It is useful for us to get responses from a broad selection of people.

We currently plan to leave the survey open until December 31st, though it’s possible we might extend the window, as we did last time. 

If you would like to share the survey with others (which we appreciate!), please use this link: https://rethinkpriorities.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_afVuyzagANx2V2S?source=sharing

Why take the EA Survey?

The EA Survey provides valuable information about the EA community on topics such as:

  • The community’s changing demographics and where they are located
  • How people are first hearing about EA and what projects help them get involved
  • What helps people have an impact and connect with other EAs
  • Community health, including factors affecting community satisfaction, retention and mental health
  • Which causes EAs think should be prioritized, and more

Every year the survey is used to inform the decisions of a number of different EA orgs. 

The survey is relatively short (around 10 minutes to complete the main section) and we again worked with CEA to make it possible for some of your answers to be pre-filled with your previous responses, to save you even more time. Note that this is only enabled if you took the 2022 EA Survey and gave your consent. 

Prize

This year the Centre for Effective Altruism has, again, generously donated a prize of $1000 USD that will be awarded to a randomly selected respondent to the EA Survey, for them to donate to any of the organizations listed on the GWWC donation page. Please note that to be eligible, you need to provide a valid e-mail address so that we can contact you.

120

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Comments7
Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

I hate to continue to ride this hobby horse, but I wish that questions about mental health as an EA cause area would distinguish between mental health as a global health problem, and mental health for EAs or other capacity-building purposes (or, if not, just leave them out). Conflating them in the same question without a clear disambiguation, especially around prioritisation, makes this data nearly useless because I don’t know what the answerer interpreted it to mean. (I hope it’s not too late to add a clarification now?)

Thanks for the feedback huw.

The question should be interpreted as being about the substantive cause area of mental health (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/mental-health-cause-area), not as a subset of movement building by providing mental health services for EAs, so we've added 'not as part of EA movement building' to the question to make it clearer.

Thank you so much! That’s a great clarification ❤️

When is the survey going to be open until? Asking as a group organizer who is planning how to get members to fill in the survey

Thanks for asking ezrah. We currently plan to leave the survey open until December 31st, though it’s possible we might extend the window, as we did last time. 

When will you be able to share first results? Any timeline? 

These results seem more valuable the sooner you can share them, 3-6 months from now they'll already be partially outdated and many orgs will have their annual strategies finalized, so if you can, the sooner the better. If you have limited capacity, I would also find it helpful to only see the results that are easy to share, such as number of EAs per country or career stage. 

Thank you for doing this! 

Hey Manuel,

I think the public posts should start coming out pretty soon (within the next couple of weeks). 

That said I would strongly encourage movement builders and other decision-makers to reach out to us directly and request particular results when they are relevant to your work. We can often produce and share custom analyses within a day (much faster than a polished public post).

Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 25m read
 · 
Epistemic status: This post — the result of a loosely timeboxed ~2-day sprint[1] — is more like “research notes with rough takes” than “report with solid answers.” You should interpret the things we say as best guesses, and not give them much more weight than that. Summary There’s been some discussion of what “transformative AI may arrive soon” might mean for animal advocates. After a very shallow review, we’ve tentatively concluded that radical changes to the animal welfare (AW) field are not yet warranted. In particular: * Some ideas in this space seem fairly promising, but in the “maybe a researcher should look into this” stage, rather than “shovel-ready” * We’re skeptical of the case for most speculative “TAI<>AW” projects * We think the most common version of this argument underrates how radically weird post-“transformative”-AI worlds would be, and how much this harms our ability to predict the longer-run effects of interventions available to us today. Without specific reasons to believe that an intervention is especially robust,[2] we think it’s best to discount its expected value to ~zero. Here’s a brief overview of our (tentative!) actionable takes on this question[3]: ✅ Some things we recommend❌ Some things we don’t recommend * Dedicating some amount of (ongoing) attention to the possibility of “AW lock ins”[4]  * Pursuing other exploratory research on what transformative AI might mean for animals & how to help (we’re unconvinced by most existing proposals, but many of these ideas have received <1 month of research effort from everyone in the space combined — it would be unsurprising if even just a few months of effort turned up better ideas) * Investing in highly “flexible” capacity for advancing animal interests in AI-transformed worlds * Trying to use AI for near-term animal welfare work, and fundraising from donors who have invested in AI * Heavily discounting “normal” interventions that take 10+ years to help animals * “Rowing” on na
 ·  · 3m read
 · 
About the program Hi! We’re Chana and Aric, from the new 80,000 Hours video program. For over a decade, 80,000 Hours has been talking about the world’s most pressing problems in newsletters, articles and many extremely lengthy podcasts. But today’s world calls for video, so we’ve started a video program[1], and we’re so excited to tell you about it! 80,000 Hours is launching AI in Context, a new YouTube channel hosted by Aric Floyd. Together with associated Instagram and TikTok accounts, the channel will aim to inform, entertain, and energize with a mix of long and shortform videos about the risks of transformative AI, and what people can do about them. [Chana has also been experimenting with making shortform videos, which you can check out here; we’re still deciding on what form her content creation will take] We hope to bring our own personalities and perspectives on these issues, alongside humor, earnestness, and nuance. We want to help people make sense of the world we're in and think about what role they might play in the upcoming years of potentially rapid change. Our first long-form video For our first long-form video, we decided to explore AI Futures Project’s AI 2027 scenario (which has been widely discussed on the Forum). It combines quantitative forecasting and storytelling to depict a possible future that might include human extinction, or in a better outcome, “merely” an unprecedented concentration of power. Why? We wanted to start our new channel with a compelling story that viewers can sink their teeth into, and that a wide audience would have reason to watch, even if they don’t yet know who we are or trust our viewpoints yet. (We think a video about “Why AI might pose an existential risk”, for example, might depend more on pre-existing trust to succeed.) We also saw this as an opportunity to tell the world about the ideas and people that have for years been anticipating the progress and dangers of AI (that’s many of you!), and invite the br
 ·  · 12m read
 · 
I donated my left kidney to a stranger on April 9, 2024, inspired by my dear friend @Quinn Dougherty (who was inspired by @Scott Alexander, who was inspired by @Dylan Matthews). By the time I woke up after surgery, it was on its way to San Francisco. When my recipient woke up later that same day, they felt better than when they went under. I'm going to talk about one complication and one consequence of my donation, but I want to be clear from the get: I would do it again in a heartbeat. Correction: Quinn actually donated in April 2023, before Scott’s donation. He wasn’t aware that Scott was planning to donate at the time. The original seed came from Dylan's Vox article, then conversations in the EA Corner Discord, and it's Josh Morrison who gets credit for ultimately helping him decide to donate. Thanks Quinn! I met Quinn at an EA picnic in Brooklyn and he was wearing a shirt that I remembered as saying "I donated my kidney to a stranger and I didn't even get this t-shirt." It actually said "and all I got was this t-shirt," which isn't as funny. I went home and immediately submitted a form on the National Kidney Registry website. The worst that could happen is I'd get some blood tests and find out I have elevated risk of kidney disease, for free.[1] I got through the blood tests and started actually thinking about whether to do this. I read a lot of arguments, against as well as for. The biggest risk factor for me seemed like the heightened risk of pre-eclampsia[2], but since I live in a developed country, this is not a huge deal. I am planning to have children. We'll just keep an eye on my blood pressure and medicate if necessary. The arguments against kidney donation seemed to center around this idea of preserving the sanctity or integrity of the human body: If you're going to pierce the sacred periderm of the skin, you should only do it to fix something in you. (That's a pretty good heuristic most of the time, but we make exceptions to give blood and get pier