80,000 Hours just released an analysis of a survey we conducted at the EA Leaders Forum in August 2017. It is likely to be of significant interest to people here:
To keep all the comments in one place it would be helpful if you could comment on the post itself!
Hope you find this useful,
The 80,000 Hours team.
[Disclaimer: Rob, 80k's Director of Research, and I briefly chatted about this on Facebook, but I want to make a comment here because that post is gone and more people will see it here. Also, as a potential conflict-of-interest, I took the survey and work at an organization that's between the animal and far future cause areas.]
This is overall really interesting, and I'm glad the survey was done. But I'm not sure how representative of EA community leaders it really is. I'd take the cause selection section in particular with a big grain of salt, and I wish it were more heavily qualified and discussed in different language. Of the organizations surveyed and number surveyed per organization, my personal count is that 14 were meta, 12.5 were far future, 3 were poverty, and 1.5 were animal. My guess is that a similar distribution holds for the 5 unaffiliated respondents. So it should be no surprise to readers that meta and far future work were most prioritized.* **
I think we shouldn't call this a general survey of EA leadership (e.g. the title of the post) when it's so disproportionate. I think the inclusion of more meta organization makes sense, but there are poverty groups like the Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, as well as animal groups like The Good Food Institute and The Humane League, that seem to meet the same bar for EA-ness as the far future groups included like CSER and MIRI.
Focusing heavily on far future organizations might be partly due to selecting only organizations founded after the EA community coalesced, and while that seems like a reasonable metric (among several possibilities), is also seems biased towards far future work because that's a newer field and it's at least the reasonable metric that conveniently syncs up with 80k's cause prioritization views. Also, the ACE-recommended charity GFI was founded explicitly on the principle of effective altruism after EA coalesced. Their team says that quite frequently, and as far as I know, the leadership all identifies as EA. Perhaps you're using a metric more like social ties to other EA leaders, but that's exactly the sort of bias I'm worried about here.
Also, the EA community as a whole doesn't seem to hold this cause prioritization view (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1e5/ea_survey_2017_series_cause_area_preferences/). Leadership can of course deviate from the broad community, but this is just another reason to be cautious in weighing these results.
I think your note about this selection is fair
and I appreciate that you looked a little at cause prioritization for relatively-unbiased subsets
but it's still important to note that you (Rob and 80k) personally favor these two areas strongly, which seems to create a big potential bias, and that we should be very cautious of groupthink in our community where updating based on the views of EA leaders is highly prized and recommended. I know the latter is a harder concern to get around with a survey, but I think it should have been noted in the report, ideally in the Key Figures section. And as I mentioned at the beginning, I don't think this should be discussed as a general survey of EA leaders, at least not when it comes to cause prioritization.
This post certainly made me more worried personally that my prioritization of the far future could be more due to groupthink than I previously thought.
Here's the categorization I'm using for organizations. It might be off, but it's at least pretty close. ff = far future
80,000 Hours (3) meta AI Impacts (1) ff Animal Charity Evaluators (1) animal Center for Applied Rationality (2) ff Centre for Effective Altruism (3) meta Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (1) ff Charity Science: Health (1) poverty DeepMind (1) ff Foundational Research Institute (2) ff Future of Humanity Institute (3) ff GiveWell (2) poverty Global Priorities Institute (1) meta Leverage Research (1) meta Machine Intelligence Research Institute (2) ff Open Philanthropy Project (5) meta Rethink Charity (1) meta Sentience Institute (1) animal/ff Unaffiliated (5)
*The 80k post notes that not everyone filled out all the survey answers, e.g. GiveWell only had one person fill out the cause selection section.
**Assuming the reader has already seen other evidence, e.g. that CFAR only recently adopted a far future mission, or that people like Rob went from other cause areas towards a focus on the far future.
Hey Jacy thanks for the detailed comment - with EA Global London on this weekend I'll have to be brief! :)
One partial response is that even if you don't think this is fully representative of the set of all organisation you'd like to have seen surveyed, it's informative about the groups that were. We list the orgs that were surveyed and point out who wasn't near the start of the article so people understand who the answers represent:
... (read more)