The Nonlinear Library EA - Most smart and skilled people are outside of the EA/rationalist community: an analysis by titotal
Jul 12, 2024
23:24
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Most smart and skilled people are outside of the EA/rationalist community: an analysis, published by titotal on July 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Introduction:
The (highly interrelated) effective altruist and Rationalist communities are very small on a global scale. Therefore, in general, most intelligence, skill and expertise is outside of the community, not within it.
I don't think many people will disagree with this statement. But sometimes it's worth reminding people of the obvious, and also it is worth quantifying and visualizing the obvious, to get a proper feel for the scale of the difference. I think some people are acting like they have absorbed this point, and some people definitely are not.
In this post, I will try and estimate the size of these communities. I will compare how many smart people are in the community vs outside the community. I will do the same for people in a few professions, and then I will go into controversial mode and try and give some advice that I think might follow from fully absorbing these results.
How big is EA and rationalism
To compare EA/rats against the general population, we need to get a taste for the size of each community. Note that EA and Rationalism are different, but highly related and overlapping communities, with EA often turning to rationalism for it's intellectual base and beliefs.
It is impossible to give an exact answer to the size of each community, because nobody has a set definition of who counts as "in" the community. This gets even more complicated if you factor in the frequently used "rationalist adjacent" and "EA adjacent" self labels. For the sake of this article, I'm going to grab a pile of different estimates from a number of sources, and then just arbitrarily pick a number.
Recently JWS placed an estimate of the EA size as the number of "giving what we can" pledgees, at 8983. Not everyone who is in EA signs the pledge. But on the flipside, not everyone who signs the pledge is actively involved in EA.
A survey series from 2019 tried to estimate this same question. They estimated a total of 2315 engaged EA's, 6500 active EA's in the community, with 1500 active on the EA forum.
Interestingly, there has also been an estimate of how many people had even heard of effective altruism, finding 6.7% of the US adult population, and 7.9% of top university students, had heard of EA. I would assume this has gone up since then due to various scandals.
We can also look at the subscriber counts to various subreddits, although clicking a "subscribe" button once is not the same thing as being a community member. It also doesn't account for people that leave. On the other hand, not everyone in a community joins their subreddit.
r/effectivealtruism: 27k
r/slatestarcodex: 64k
r/lesswrong: 7.5k
The highest estimate here would be the r/slatestarcodex, however this is probably inflated by the several year period when the subreddit hosted a "culture war" thread for debate on heated topics, which attracted plenty of non-rationalists. Interestingly, the anti-rationalist subreddit r/sneerclub had 19k subscribers, making it one of the most active communities related to rationalism before the mods shut it down.
The (unofficial?) EA discord server has around 2000 members.
We can also turn to surveys:
The lesswrong survey in 2023 only had 588 respondents, of which 218 had attended a meetup.
The EA survey in 2022 had 3567 respondents.
The Astralcodexten survey for 2024 had 5,981 respondents, of which 1174 were confirmed paid subscribers and 1392 had been to an SSC meetup.
When asked about what they identified as, 2536 people identified as "sort of " Lesswrong identified, while only 736 definitively stated they were. Similarly, 1908 people said they were "sort of" EA identified, while 716 identified as such without qualifica...
Introduction:
The (highly interrelated) effective altruist and Rationalist communities are very small on a global scale. Therefore, in general, most intelligence, skill and expertise is outside of the community, not within it.
I don't think many people will disagree with this statement. But sometimes it's worth reminding people of the obvious, and also it is worth quantifying and visualizing the obvious, to get a proper feel for the scale of the difference. I think some people are acting like they have absorbed this point, and some people definitely are not.
In this post, I will try and estimate the size of these communities. I will compare how many smart people are in the community vs outside the community. I will do the same for people in a few professions, and then I will go into controversial mode and try and give some advice that I think might follow from fully absorbing these results.
How big is EA and rationalism
To compare EA/rats against the general population, we need to get a taste for the size of each community. Note that EA and Rationalism are different, but highly related and overlapping communities, with EA often turning to rationalism for it's intellectual base and beliefs.
It is impossible to give an exact answer to the size of each community, because nobody has a set definition of who counts as "in" the community. This gets even more complicated if you factor in the frequently used "rationalist adjacent" and "EA adjacent" self labels. For the sake of this article, I'm going to grab a pile of different estimates from a number of sources, and then just arbitrarily pick a number.
Recently JWS placed an estimate of the EA size as the number of "giving what we can" pledgees, at 8983. Not everyone who is in EA signs the pledge. But on the flipside, not everyone who signs the pledge is actively involved in EA.
A survey series from 2019 tried to estimate this same question. They estimated a total of 2315 engaged EA's, 6500 active EA's in the community, with 1500 active on the EA forum.
Interestingly, there has also been an estimate of how many people had even heard of effective altruism, finding 6.7% of the US adult population, and 7.9% of top university students, had heard of EA. I would assume this has gone up since then due to various scandals.
We can also look at the subscriber counts to various subreddits, although clicking a "subscribe" button once is not the same thing as being a community member. It also doesn't account for people that leave. On the other hand, not everyone in a community joins their subreddit.
r/effectivealtruism: 27k
r/slatestarcodex: 64k
r/lesswrong: 7.5k
The highest estimate here would be the r/slatestarcodex, however this is probably inflated by the several year period when the subreddit hosted a "culture war" thread for debate on heated topics, which attracted plenty of non-rationalists. Interestingly, the anti-rationalist subreddit r/sneerclub had 19k subscribers, making it one of the most active communities related to rationalism before the mods shut it down.
The (unofficial?) EA discord server has around 2000 members.
We can also turn to surveys:
The lesswrong survey in 2023 only had 588 respondents, of which 218 had attended a meetup.
The EA survey in 2022 had 3567 respondents.
The Astralcodexten survey for 2024 had 5,981 respondents, of which 1174 were confirmed paid subscribers and 1392 had been to an SSC meetup.
When asked about what they identified as, 2536 people identified as "sort of " Lesswrong identified, while only 736 definitively stated they were. Similarly, 1908 people said they were "sort of" EA identified, while 716 identified as such without qualifica...