If the definition of being more engaged includes going to EAG and being a member of a group, aren't some of these results a bit circular?

EA isn't a political party but I still think it's an issue if the aims of the keenest members diverges from the original aims of the movement, especially if the barrier to entry to be a member is quite low compared to being in an EA governance position. I would worry that the people who would bother to vote would have much less understanding of what the strategic situation is than the people who are working full time.

Maybe we have had different experiences, I would say that the people who turn up to more events are usually more interested in the social side of EA. Also there are lot of people in the UK who want to have impact and have a high interest in EA but don't come to events and wouldn't want to pay to be a member (or even sign up as a member if it was free).

I think people can still hold organisations to account and follow the money, even if they aren't members, and this already happens in EA, with lots of  critiques of different organisations and individuals.

I think one large disadvantage of a membership association is that it will usually consist of the most interested people, or the people most interested in the social aspect of EA. This may not always correlate with the people who could have the most impact, and creates a definitive in and out.

I'd be worried about members voting for activities that benefit them the most rather than the ultimate beneficiaries (global poor, animals, future beings).

Olivia Fox Cabane has an alt protein industry landscape map.

A separate organisation just for CBGs would have been useful too rather than a lot of one and two person teams with constant turnover.

I thought about this briefly a few months ago and came up with these ideas.

• CEA - incubate CBG groups as team members until they are registered as separate organisations with their own operations staff
• CEA but for professional EA network building (EA Consulting network, High Impact Engineers, Hi-Med, etc). They are even more isolated than CBGs which have some support from CEA
• Rethink Priorities - One of the incubated orgs could do similar work to EV Ops (which is maybe what the special projects team is doing already, but it might be good to have something more separate from RP, or a cause specific support org (animal advocacy/AI safety, biosecurity)
• EV Ops - Spin out 80k/GWWC to increase capacity for other smaller orgs
• Open Phil - Some of their programs might work better with project managers rather than individuals getting grants (e.g. the century fellowship)

Also looking at local groups, there is some coordination on the groups slack and some retreats but there is still a lot of duplication and a high rate of turnover which limits any sustained institutional knowledge.

I didn't vote but there has been discussion of issues in richer countries that received votes but the author pointed out how it fit into the context of effective altruism.

There have also been posts about mass media interventions but they generally refer to stronger evidence for their effectiveness.

Thanks for diving into the data David, I think a lot of this might hinge on the 'highly engaged EAs' metric and how useful that is for determining impact vs how much someone has an interest in EA.

Are you also able to see if there are differences between different types of local groups (National/City/University/interest)?

I would go further and say that more people are interested in specific areas like AI safety and biosecurity than the general framing of x-risks. Especially senior professionals that have worked in AI/bio careers. 

There is value for some people to be working on x-risk prioritisation but that would be a much smaller subset than the eventual sizes of the cause specific fields.

You mention this in your counterarguments but I think that it should be emphasised more. 

Also Matt Clifford has written regularly about wanting to encourage more entrepreneurship and increasing growth