I'm pleased to announce the first annual survey of effective altruists. This is a short survey of around 40 questions (generally multiple choice), which several collaborators and I have put a great deal of work into and would be very grateful if you took. I'll offer $250 of my own money to one participant.
The survey should yield some interesting results such as EAs' political and religious views, what actions they take, and the causes they favour and donate to. It will also enable useful applications which will be launched immediately afterwards, such as a map of EAs with contact details and a cause-neutral register of planned donations or pledges which can be verified each year. I'll also provide an open platform for followup surveys and other actions people can take. If you'd like to suggest questions, email me or comment.
Anonymised results will be shared publicly and not belong to any individual or organisation. The most robust privacy practices will be followed, with clear opt-ins and opt-outs.
I'd like to thank Jacy Anthis, Ben Landau-Taylor, David Moss and Peter Hurford for their help.
Other surveys' results, and predictions for this one
Other surveys have had intriguing results. For example, Joey Savoie and Xio Kikauka's interviewed 42 often highly active EAs over Skype, and found that they generally had left-leaning parents, donated on average 10%, and were altruistic before becoming EAs. The time they spent on EA activities was correlated with the percentage they donated (0.4), the time their parents spend volunteering (0.3), and the percentage of their friends who were EAs (0.3).
80,000 Hours also released a questionnaire and, while this was mainly focused on their impact, it yielded a list of which careers people plan to pursue: 16% for academia, 9% for both finance and software engineering, and 8% for both medicine and non-profits.
I'd be curious to hear people's predictions as to what the results of this survey will be. You might enjoy reading or sharing them here. For my part, I'd imagine we have few conservatives or even libertarians, are over 70% male, and have directed most of our donations to poverty charities.
Out of curiosity, what was your reason for asking about my ethical views in detail? I did somewhat enjoy writing out that comment, but I'm curious as to whether you were planning to go somewhere with this.
I approve of virtuous acts, and disapprove of vicious ones.
In terms of labels, I think I give consequentialist answers to the standard ethical questions, but I think most character improvement comes from thinking deontologically, because of the tremendous amount of influence our identities have on our actions. If one thinks of oneself as humble, that has many known ways of making one act differently. One's abstract, far mode views are likely to only change one's speech, not one's behavior. Thus, I don't put all that much effort into theories of ethics, and try to put effort instead into acting virtuously.
1Said Achmiz
There is no such centralized place, no; I've alluded to my views in comments here and there over the past year or so, but haven't gone laid them out fully. (Then again, I'm a member of no movements that depend heavily on any ethical positions. ;)
Truth be told — and I haven't disguised this — my ethical views are not anywhere near completely fleshed-out. I know the general shape, I suppose, but beyond that I'm more sure about what I don't believe — what objections and criticisms I have to other people's views — than about what I do believe. But here's a brief sketch.
I think that consequentialism, as a foundational idea, a basic approach, is the only one that makes sense. Deontology seems to me to be completely nonsensical as a grounding for ethics. Every seemingly-intelligent deontologist to whom I've spoken (which, admittedly, is a small number — a handful of people here in LessWrong) has appeared to be spouting utter nonsense. Deontology has its uses (see Bostrom's "An Infinitarian Challenge to Aggregative Ethics", and this post by Eliezer, for examples), but there it's deployed for consequentialist reasons: we think it'll give better results. I've seen the view expressed that virtue ethics is descriptively correct as an account of how human minds implement morality, and (as a result) prescriptively valid as a recommendation of how to implement your morality in your own mind once you've decided on your object-level moral views, and that seems like a more-or-less reasonable stance to take. As an actual philosophical grounding for morality, virtue ethics is nonsense, but perhaps that's fine, given the above. Consequentialism actually makes sense. Consequences are the only things that matter? Well, yes. What else could there be?
As far as varieties of consequentialism go... I think intended and foreseeable consequences matter when evaluating the moral rightness of an act, not actual consequences; judging based on actual consequences seems utterly useless, because
I'm pleased to announce the first annual survey of effective altruists. This is a short survey of around 40 questions (generally multiple choice), which several collaborators and I have put a great deal of work into and would be very grateful if you took. I'll offer $250 of my own money to one participant.
Take the survey at http://survey.effectivealtruismhub.com/
The survey should yield some interesting results such as EAs' political and religious views, what actions they take, and the causes they favour and donate to. It will also enable useful applications which will be launched immediately afterwards, such as a map of EAs with contact details and a cause-neutral register of planned donations or pledges which can be verified each year. I'll also provide an open platform for followup surveys and other actions people can take. If you'd like to suggest questions, email me or comment.
Anonymised results will be shared publicly and not belong to any individual or organisation. The most robust privacy practices will be followed, with clear opt-ins and opt-outs.
I'd like to thank Jacy Anthis, Ben Landau-Taylor, David Moss and Peter Hurford for their help.
Other surveys' results, and predictions for this one
Other surveys have had intriguing results. For example, Joey Savoie and Xio Kikauka's interviewed 42 often highly active EAs over Skype, and found that they generally had left-leaning parents, donated on average 10%, and were altruistic before becoming EAs. The time they spent on EA activities was correlated with the percentage they donated (0.4), the time their parents spend volunteering (0.3), and the percentage of their friends who were EAs (0.3).
80,000 Hours also released a questionnaire and, while this was mainly focused on their impact, it yielded a list of which careers people plan to pursue: 16% for academia, 9% for both finance and software engineering, and 8% for both medicine and non-profits.
I'd be curious to hear people's predictions as to what the results of this survey will be. You might enjoy reading or sharing them here. For my part, I'd imagine we have few conservatives or even libertarians, are over 70% male, and have directed most of our donations to poverty charities.