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this is: Is EA Growing? EA Growth Metrics for 2018, published by Peter Wildeford on the effective altruism forum.
Is EA growing? Rather than speculating from anecdotes, I decided to collect some data. This is a continuation of the analysis started last year. For each trend, I collected the raw data and also highlighted in green where the highest point was reached (though this may be different from the period with the largest growth depending on which derivative you are looking at). You can download the raw data behind these tables here.
Implications
This year, I decided to separate growth stats into a few different categories, looking at how growth changes when we talk about people learning about EA through reading; increasing their commitment through joining a newsletter, joining a Facebook group, joining the EA Forum, or subscribing to a podcast; increasing engagement by committing -- self-identifying as EA on the EA Survey and/or taking a pledge; and having an impact by doing something, like donating or changing their careers[33].
When looking at this, it appears that there has been a decline of people searching and looking for EA (at least in the ways we track), with the exception of 80,000 Hours pageviews and EA Reddit page subscriptions which continued to grow but at a much lower pace. When we look at the rate of change, we can see a fairly clear decline across all metrics:
We can also see that when it comes to driving initial EA readership and engagement, 80,000 Hours is very clearly leading the pack while other sources of learning about EA are declining a bit:
In fact, the two sources of learning about EA that seem to best represent natural search -- Google interest and Wikipedia pageviews -- appear somewhat correlated and are now both declining together.
However, there are more people consuming EA in closer ways (what I termed “joining”) -- while growth rate in the EA Newsletter and 80K Newsletter has slowed down, the EA FB is more active, the EA Reddit and total engagement from 80K continues to grow, and new avenues like Vox's Future Perfect and 80K's podcast have opened up. However, this view of growth can change depending on which derivative you look at. Looking at the next derivative makes clear that there was a large explosion of interest in 2017 in the EA Reddit and the EA Newsletter that wasn’t repeated in 2018:
Additionally, Founder's Pledge continues to grow and OFTW has had explosive growth, though GWWC has stalled out a bit. The EA Survey has also recovered from a sluggish 2017 to break records in 2018. Looking at the rate of change shows Founder's Pledge clearly increasing, GWWC decreasing, and OFTW’s having fairly rapid growth in 2018 after a slowdown in 2017.
Lastly, the part we care about most seems to be doing the strongest -- while tracking the actual impact of the EA movement is really hard and very sensitive to outliers, nearly every doing/impact metric we do track was at its strongest in either 2017 or 2018, with only GiveWell and 80K seeing a slight decline in 2018 relative to 2017. However, looking at the actual rate of change shows a bleaker picture that we may be approaching a plateau.
Conclusion
Like last year, it still remains a bit difficult to infer broad trends given that a decline for one year might be the start of a true plateau or decline (as appears to be the case for GWWC) or may just be a one-time blip prior to a bounce back (as appears to be the case for the EA Survey[34]).
Overall, the decline in people first discovering EA (reading) and the growth of donations / career changes (doing) makes sense, as it is likely the result of the intentional effort across several groups and individuals in EA over the past few years to focus on high-fidelity messaging and growing the impact of pre-existing EAs and deliberate decisions to stop mas...
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