Thanks for those analyses Lorenzo! I was aware of the claims that people don't tend to be good at knowing what makes them happy or unhappy (thanks to an old 80K article!), but it didn't occur to me that this could have influenced this data.  

With this in mind it seems fairly possible that the real distribution should be more negative. Despite that, I still feel that the data feels like a positive update for me. 
a) There are just quite a few people reporting that being in EA is good for their mental health - and I don't want to doubt that too much (but maybe that is hopeful thinking on my part)
b) Also, before the survey results came out I expected that a larger number would report negative impacts as I had heard many people in the community reporting to me that EA had negatively affected their mental health (which is expected given my role), and I'd also heard some community builders tell me that they felt that EA was often bad for members mental health (which worried me a lot more).

It would be interesting to ask people in comparable groups, the same question of how involvement changed their mental health - if the distributions were a lot more positive or negative than EAs then that would be interesting. Maybe environmentalism or animal advocacy would be a reasonable comparison group as involvement might also give a similarly increased sense of awareness and obligation.

Turns out Rethink Priorities have been funded by EA Funds to work on something that could shed some light on this question. I'm looking forward to hearing how they get on at gathering survey respondents and seeing the results they get.

I'm really not sure. 

I do think it is likely that many people get exposed to EA and realise it isn't a great space for them personally, and choose not to engage as a result. These people won't have filled in the EA Sometimes those people might not be a good fit for EA anyway -- they have different priorities or values in their lives. But I expect some would have been very value aligned and gotten a lot out of being involved, so that is the group I'm worried about.  

The Rethink Priorities data makes me (tentatively) a little less worried that a large number of people spend a couple of years engaging EA (and so fill in the survey) and find it too rough for them and then leave (and don't fill in subsequent surveys). I DO think this happens to some people. But if this was a very large pattern I would expect community member who had been around longer to say it is more positive for their mental health, whereas the data points gently in the opposite direction.  

I don't know whether active community members are more or less likely to fill in the survey if they're having a rough time in EA. I think it could go either way. 
 

This sounds plausible. Unfortunately I don't think we or Rethink Priorities have this data to do this breakdown at the moment. 

Our World In Data has amazing daily data insights. This one from a couple of days ago is astonishing to me. https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/in-the-last-30-years-almost-everybody-in-bangladesh-gained-access-to-electricity 
 

I'm a bit of a Benthamite "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'"

For any plausible (to me) guess about which non-human animals are capable of suffering, there are far far more non-human animals living in terrible conditions than humans in similarly bad conditions, and there just seems to be so many underfunded and underexplored ways we could help reduce that suffering. I've also seen some cost-effectiveness estimations that indicate you can help thousands of animals a lot for the same cost as helping one person a lot. ("a lot" being very vague!)

The only reason why I'm not at 100% agree is because helping humans become healthier might cause larger positive flow on effects, and this might add up to more impact in the long run. That's super tentative and could go either way - e.g. it seems possible that helping animals now could lead to our species being more ethical towards sentient beings in the long run too.  

Thanks for your questions James 

> This should therefore be easily transferable into feedback to the grantee. 

I think this is where we disagree - this written information often isn’t in a good shape to be shared with applicants and would need significant work before sharing. 

> The post you linked by Linch and the concern he raises that by being transparent about the reasons for not making a grant may risk applicants overupdating on the feedback seems unfounded/unevidenced. I also question how relevant given they weren't funded anyway, so why would you be concerned they'd over update? 

The concern here is that people can alter their plan based on the feedback with the hope it would mean that they’d have a better chance of getting the opportunity in the future. As Linch says in his post
> Often, to change someone’s plans enough, it requires careful attention and understanding, multiple followup calls, etc. 

I’ve personally seen cases where it seems that feedback sends a project off in a direction that isn’t especially good. This can happen when people have different ideas of what would be reasonable steps to take in response to the feedback.

But you’re right, Linch and I don’t provide evidence for the rate of problems caused by overupdating. This is a good nudge for me to think about how problematic this is overall, and whether I’m overreacting due to a few cases.

> If you don't tell them they were a near miss and what changes may change your mind, then instead the risk is they either update randomly or the project is just completely canned - which feels worse for edge cases.

I think it is most useful for decision makers to share feedback when a) it is a near miss, and b) the decision maker believes they can clearly describe something that the applicant can do that would make the person/project better and would likely lead to an approval. 

Hi Frida, 

I’m really sorry you had a bad experience with our team. You are welcome to share your experience with our team lead Nicole (nicole.ross@centreforeffectivealtruism.org).  

Sometimes people want to discuss a concern with us confidentially  – our confidentiality policy is outlined here. This means we sometimes don’t have permission to talk to the person concerned at all, or can't share many details as it might identify the people that came to us. In those cases we sadly aren’t in a good position to discuss the situation in depth with the people involved. I realise it is really frustrating to receive only vague feedback or none at all, and in an ideal world this would be different.

The EA donation swap project has had very little usage over the last couple of years and has been officially discontinued.

You can find out about tax deductible effective giving options in your country by checking out Giving What We Can's guide.

I’d like for Marisa to be remembered for all the many ways she contributed to the EA Community, and the causes we all care about. 

She contributed in so many ways, that I know I’m going to miss a bunch of things. I guess that was one striking feature of Marisa – she saw things that needed to be done, or heard people’s requests for help or advice, and she didn’t hesitate to leap in to help. In particular, she did an impressive amount to help us be a welcoming, inclusive and supportive community for newcomers to EA and to people of backgrounds underrepresented in EA. 

I think she really embodied the EA principles. Many of the things she did were unpaid, unglamorous, and sometimes tedious. But she took on all these tasks with eagerness because they were important and needed doing. 

This is certainly not a full list - please feel free to add more information if you know it. 

• In her early EA days (2017) Marisa volunteered at Rethink Charity, helping out across a number of Rethink Charity projects, and was hired part time to work on operations. We could throw her a wide variety of problems and could deeply trust that she’d somehow manage to work them all out.
• During this time she studied Sociology at Loyola University in New Orleans (with a semester in Ghana), and wrote an undergrad thesis on Value Drift in EA. This was shared and discussed a bunch over the years and was awarded an EA Forum prize. She also spent some time during this period in Uganda, volunteering at an agricultural development charity. 
• When she finished her degree, she worked full time at Rethink Charity – keeping the org running smoothly; helping run RC Forward, a charity that allows Canadian donors to donate to the world’s most effective charities; and Giving Tuesday coordination, among other things.  
• Alongside her work she helped coordinate ops information sharing through Ops Slack, offered her time readily to have calls and EAG meetings with community members interested in working in ops.  
• She helped run a bunch of online things during Covid, including the EA Student Summit (a 2 day online conference during Covid), and EAGxAsia-Pacific. 
• She volunteered for ALLFED doing operations work.
• With SamiM, she started EA Anywhere, a virtual group for people who don't live near or can't attend local EA group meetups. She mostly ran this in her free time – running online meetups, having 1:1s with folks new to EA, and coordinating the other EA Anywhere volunteers. She secured funding in order to hire a new full time community organiser (Sasha) so she could work on other things.
• On the back of her experience with EA Anywhere, she worked part time for several months with me on the CEA Groups team, creating resources for EA Groups and writing the monthly EA Groups Newsletter. 
• In the last few years Marisa studied for a Masters in Public Policy at Georgetown University in DC, while also 
  • Working on operations and community building at the Legal Priorities Project
  • Working on operations for Effective Institutions Project
  • Acting as a research assistant at fp21
  • Interning with the Department of State’s Knowledge Management Program.