Funny how I never receive letters from charities which inquire after my life and family and then stop. One might think that if they were "genuinely interested" they might express it in some way which does not involve "Please give us money, the more the better".

Is there a deadline for when the survey will close?

“Hi [Person A]!

How are things? How are your kids doing? Over here, things are going really well. I just came back from a trip to Chicago, which was surprisingly beautiful and very cold. It snowed! The buildings were gorgeous and ornate though. It felt like I’d come to a steampunk city. [Note: start with something personal]

I don't like such things. I believe they are poisoning the well.

This is a commercial message (I define commercial as "about money"). The "How are your kids doing?" is a lie -- it's an attempt to make commercial personal, to use personal as a tool to extract money. I understand that this is the standard operating mode for charities. It does not make me like it any more.

I don't want to acquire an association between receiving a message that starts by asking about my family and wondering what kind of a template the writer is using and how much money does he want.

For reference, here are the results from last year's survey, along with Peter's analysis of them. This includes a link to a Github repository including the raw data, with names and email addresses removed.

Notable findings included:

• The top three sources people in our sample first heard about EA from were LessWrong, friends, or Giving What We Can. LessWrong, GiveWell, and personal contact were cited as the top three reasons people continued to get more involved in EA. (Keep in mind that EAs in our sample might not mean all EAs overall, as discussed in .)
• 66.9% of the EAs in our sample were from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, but we have EAs in many countries. You can see the public location responses visualized on the Map of EAs!
• The Bay Area had the most EAs in our sample, followed by London and then Oxford. New York and Washington DC have surprisingly many EAs and may have flown under the radar.
• The EAs in our sample in total donated over $5.23 million in 2013. The median donation size was $450 in 2013 donations.
• 238 EAs in our sample donated 1% of their income or more, and 84 EAs in our sample give 10% of their income. You can see the past and planned donations that people have chosen to made public on the EA Donation Registry.
• The top three charities donated to by EAs in our sample were GiveWell's three picks for 2013 ­­ AMF, SCI, and GiveDirectly. MIRI was the fourth largest donation target, followed by unrestricted donations to GiveWell.
• Poverty was the most popular cause among EAs in our sample, followed by metacharity and then rationality.
• 33.1% of EAs in our sample were either vegan or vegetarian.
• 34.1% of EAs in our sample who indicated a career indicated that they were aiming to earn to give.

Here's drawing your attention to this year's Effective Altruism Survey, which was recently released and which Peter Hurford linked to in LessWrong Main. As he says there:

This is a survey of all EAs to learn about the movement and how it can improve. The data collected in the survey is used to help EA groups improve and grow EA. Data is also used to populate the map of EAs, create new EA meetup groups, and create EA Profiles and the EA Donation Registry.

If you are an EA or otherwise familiar with the community, we hope you will take it using this link. All results will be anonymised and made publicly available to members of the EA community. As an added bonus, one random survey taker will be selected to win a $250 donation to their favorite charity.

Take the EA Survey

For reference, here are the results from last year's survey, along with Peter's analysis of them. This includes a link to a Github repository including the raw data, with names and email addresses removed.

Notable findings included:

• The top three sources people in our sample first heard about EA from were LessWrong, friends, or Giving What We Can. LessWrong, GiveWell, and personal contact were cited as the top three reasons people continued to get more involved in EA. (Keep in mind that EAs in our sample might not mean all EAs overall, as discussed in .)
• 66.9% of the EAs in our sample were from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, but we have EAs in many countries. You can see the public location responses visualized on the Map of EAs!
• The Bay Area had the most EAs in our sample, followed by London and then Oxford. New York and Washington DC have surprisingly many EAs and may have flown under the radar.
• The EAs in our sample in total donated over $5.23 million in 2013. The median donation size was $450 in 2013 donations.
• 238 EAs in our sample donated 1% of their income or more, and 84 EAs in our sample give 10% of their income. You can see the past and planned donations that people have chosen to made public on the EA Donation Registry.
• The top three charities donated to by EAs in our sample were GiveWell's three picks for 2013 ­­ AMF, SCI, and GiveDirectly. MIRI was the fourth largest donation target, followed by unrestricted donations to GiveWell.
• Poverty was the most popular cause among EAs in our sample, followed by metacharity and then rationality.
• 33.1% of EAs in our sample were either vegan or vegetarian.
• 34.1% of EAs in our sample who indicated a career indicated that they were aiming to earn to give.

You're conflating something here. The statement only refers to "what is true", not your situation; each pronoun refers only to "what is true":

What is true is already true. Owning up to the truth doesn't make the truth any worse.

Perhaps 'Fermi estimate' was not the best term to use but I couldn't think of an equally understandable but better one. It could be called simply 'estimate', but I think the important thing here is that its used very similarly to how a Fermi estimate would be (with very high uncertainty of the inputs, and done in a very simple manner). What would you call it? (http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5e/fermi_estimates/).

Thanks, I think this may be a valuable direction to pursue.

The error-tracking for multiplication in Fermilab seems like it's probably wrong. But I don't think there's an easy fix, since products of Gaussian distributions aren't Gaussian. Since multiplication is more common than addition in Fermi estimates, you might replace your distributions with log-normals (this is what I do when tracking uncertainty in back-of-the-envelope calculations), but I agree that monte carlo simulations are really the way to go.