The counterfactual attendances at EA conferences is a pretty interesting metric (at least for us at CEA) - I'm glad you're tracking that. 

Great to hear of all your progress over 2024 Gergő and Milán!

(And thanks for the thanks! In retrospect I think those initial meetings with EA Hungary might have been among my most useful meetings with group organisers!)

I'm thrilled to have an EA conference in my home town (thanks @Gavin Bishop 🔹 and @Ruben Castaing for leading this event)!

For those of you who are considering coming -- a little (biased) plug from me:

The EA Christchurch and the EA Aotearoa New Zealand communities have been active for 10 years now, with a handful of very engaged EAs who have dedicated their careers to EA-aligned work of various types (community building, donation funnelling, civilisational resilience, AI safety, animal advocacy, probably other things too that I've forgotten), and many other engaged EAs have been involved in the past and have flown the coop for their high-impact careers. While our community is small in global standards I think we are pretty impressive by per-capita and by per-unit of resources invested. And we're very friendly and supportive too! So it would be lovely to see people join us!

While the conference is just a single day, a few of us are planning to also have some more relaxed social activities on Friday night and Sunday, so try to come for the whole weekend if you can. 

Nau mai, haere mai!

This is a great story of someone taking a selfless and high expected value bet, that sadly didn't work out. 
I'm grateful and impressed that you tried so hard to make the donation happen Santeri!
I hope Mikko gets a new kidney ASAP, and that you both experience excellent health in the future.  

Depopulation is Bad

I think humans are good. And larger groups of people can do a lot more (more innovation, more cultural activities, more variety of human experiences). 

Right now, in 2025, I would not advocate for more people due to animal welfare and environmental costs of having more people. 

But looking at the many countries that have gone through a very demographic transition to less-than-replacement fertility (and all the other countries that seem to be following a very similar trajectory), I'm worried that the population will plummet shortly after it hits peak. 

I'm not sure what to do about it. And I'm worried about governments/other people in influence increasingly trying to increase fertility in ways that reduce individual freedom. 

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.