Good point about LW affiliation - in addition I would add that results are highly dependent on how the survey is distributed. This makes large predictions difficult, but more specific predictions (like >80% of LW affiliations will identify as atheist/agnostic) might be the way to go.

I'm still getting familiar with this community, but I suppose it's a fun exercise so I've added some thoughts to the excel sheet.

[Thread for making and discussing predictions]

To expand on my predictions, I think that global poverty will be the most popular cause except among those who say they heard of EA through LessWrong (whose numbers I'll be interested to see). I also think that skepticism/atheism will be the other social movement with which most identify, and atheism the most popular religious position. In the link Jacy Anthis has given a full set of predictions to test his accuracy.

I agree about consequentialism. Also, at that level of detail I can't see a way it's action-relevant (whereas if most EAs say they have no knowledge of ethical theories, that suggests a non-philosophical audience is more receptive than some have thought).

We should have explained that political terms were what you'd naturally describe yourself as in your country. Do people think most will have interpreted them thus? If so, we can cross-tabulate them against country.

If not, would this make many people more than one point out along the spectrum? I'd have thought that an American who describes themselves as 'left' is at least 'centre left' in Europe, and so on.

I definitely agree LW affiliation will be a major predictor of other results. Perhaps I should have made two sets of predictions (one for LW folks, one for others). - Jacy

I think this conversation is a time when numerical hypotheses are helpful; I personally did not expect the CFAR minicamp to increase income over the next year, happiness, or exercise, but thought if there was a discernible effect it was more likely to be positive than negative. A year is a short time as far as income is concerned; happiness is very hard to adjust; a weekend motivational retreat is unlikely to be effective at altering exercise relative to other interventions. (I exercise more now than I did before, primarily thanks to Beeminder, which shows up a lot in CFAR circles and some on LW, and I think I started that more than a year after going to CFAR the first time.)

Now, if the CFAR staff had put high probability on having success on one of those three fronts, then I think that logic is worth discussing.

"Why haven't more EAs signed up for a course on global security, or tried to understand how DARPA funds projects, or learned about third-world health? I've heard claims that this would be too time-consuming relative to the value it provides, but this seems like a poor excuse. If we want to be taken seriously as a movement (or even just want to reach consistently accurate conclusions about the world)."

This one worries me quite a bit. The vast majority of EA's (including myself) have not spent very much time learning about what the large players in third world poverty are (e.g. WHO, UN). In fact you can be an "expert" in EA content and know virtually nothing about the rest of the non-profit/charity sector.

I tried it in my youth but due to being a picky eater and not really planning it well, the doctor told my parents to give me more meat after I became anemic.

I'm interested in starting it up again in the future, when I learn a bit more about cooking and everything.

The weird thing is that I already ignore almost all meats most of the time (I pretty much eat only fish) so I don't know how going the extra mile and cutting them out completely could have much of an effect...

That makes sense - I guess you need to clarify that fundraising is more quantifiable than recruiting or development of technology (a la Leverage).

A great website, but I'd like to quickly point out that one of the core claims on this website doesn't make sense at all - "It is a hard task to make the world a better place and many of the best possible things to do are unmeasured and unquantified. This means we can take guesses at how much impact we are having, but it is quite difficult to know for sure. We’re walking forward with blindfolds. A huge benefit of fundraising is that it is one of the easiest fields to quantify with a quick feedback loop and a clear metric of success - money moved. We can take off the blindfolds and see where we’re going."

You can see how much money you're raising, which is important, but you can't see what the impact of the funds raised are, so you still don't know where you're going. Probably the target of your donation - even within a category like global health and development, or animal welfare - is much more important than the amount of money donated. The effect of a fivefold increase due to efficient fundraising could be dwarfed by this effect. This is even more the case when you talk about comparison between categories eg development vs x-risk.

Saying that fundraising takes off the blindfold because you can evaluate how much money you're making is like saying that a speedometer takes off the blindfold when you're driving, because you can tell how much you're accelerating.

I still love this charity and the idea of effective fundraising, but this claim should be fixed.

No one at Effective Fundraising has prior experience with fundraising. What you're saying sounds plausible.