It's an appealing and easy enough hack that I'll plug my recent LessWrong discussion post Shop for Charity: how to earn proven charities 5% of your Amazon spending in commission. Especially now that Black Friday week has started on Amazon.

Animal Charity Evaluators are now promoting this to animal welfare donors throughout their site in the sidebar, and on their blog.

I didn't say that, top level commenter did. I wish their evaluations of all charities were at least as detailed as that.

That's a pretty interesting list of x-risk donors. Eyeballing it, it looks like few people plan to donate to far future causes other than x-risk but not to existential risk alleviation itself.

[Suggestions thread]

With the seed content from the annual survey, this is the largest platform for individual EAs (well, I guess it's the only one currently!) So it's worth thinking about features etc. that could usefully be added to it, or ways others could leverage the open platform.

To get the ball rolling:

• It'd be good if EAs could raise fundraiser through these (or EA groups could organise them by leveraging the platform)

• You or others could give the EAs on there jumping-off points for actions which make the world a more optimal place in the most efficient way possible.

Thanks, that's helpful to know. Jacy Anthis suggested that, and I was the main person keeping it short. I was going to link at the end to a follow-up survey Ben Landau Taylor was listing, but it wasn't ready in time.

In general, how did people find the length of the survey, would they have filled in more, and would they have followed a link to more questions?

This 'official' account gives the impression that no term had much common currency, apart from the jokey 'super-hardcore do-gooder' before the end of 2011. I can't comment about whether other branches of the community used terms in a similar way- I've never heard of felicifia. http://www.effective-altruism.com/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism/

There's a question about other social movements people might associate themselves with. How was the list of suggestions created? At present, the list is very left-wing:

• Animal rights
• Environmentalist
• Feminist
• LGBTQ
• Rationalist/LessWrong
• Transhumanist
• Skeptic/atheist
• Other:

Ordinarily this would only be a small problem, but then you ask people about their political views after you've primed them with left-wing examples.

I'd love to hear thoughts connected to the LessWrong censuses: comparisons, lessons learnt, feedback on our survey, thoughts on how EAs and LessWrongers may differ, etc. The censuses have been going on a long time, and have a lot of data, so this would be interesting.

I judge this to be a problematic criterion. See this comment, esp. starting with "To put this another way ...", for why I think so.

That comment makes a lot of sense. It depends what we use the criterion for. In the survey, it's to gather information, and it's for precisely this reason that I chose not to ask if people were 'EAs' in your loose sense - almost everyone would say yes. I'm curious as to what uses do you think the criterion's problematic for.

My contention is that there's a distinct separation between, on the one hand, the general idea that we should be altruistic (in whatever sense we decide is meaningful and useful) and that we should seek to optimize the effectiveness of our altruism, and on the other hand, the loose community of people who share certain values, certain approaches to ethics, etc. (as I outline in the above-linked comment), which are not necessarily causally or conceptually entangled with the former (more general) idea.

It's a matter of a degree, but in the EA context (which sets a high bar), I personally call people 'altruistic' if (but not only if) they've donated >=10% of a real income for over a year or they've consistently spent over an hour a week doing something they'd otherwise rather not do to help others.

My contention is that there's a distinct separation between, on the one hand, the general idea that we should be altruistic (in whatever sense we decide is meaningful and useful) and that we should seek to optimize the effectiveness of our altruism, and on the other hand, the loose community of people who share certain values, certain approaches to ethics, etc. (as I outline in the above-linked comment), which are not necessarily causally or conceptually entangled with the former (more general) idea.

That's right, if by 'conceptually entangled' you mean 'necessarily connected', or even 'commonly accepted by both groups of people'. For example, I believe utilitarianism's widely accepted by EAs (though the survey may show otherwise!), but not entangled with merely valuing altruism and the effectiveness of altruism.

This is problematic for various reasons, I think. I won't clutter this thread by starting a debate on those reasons (unless asked), but I think it's at least important (and relevant to endeavors like this survey) to recognize this distinction.

I see no harm in thread-cluttering, at least here - go for it.