People learning about EA through 80,000 Hours

By Naoya Okamoto @ 2023-03-04T12:50 (+1)

80,000 Hours is the second-highest way in which people first hear about effective altruism, according to EA Survey 2020. I am wondering if there is more granular information available about user engagement, including the most common first pages for users to interact with.

I am asking mostly out of curiosity, however, this information could provide valuable insights, which I know the 80,000 Hours team are likely already working on. If this information was publicized, people could better understand what perspectives people are trying to engage 80,000 Hours from. Whilst I'm not sure to what extent this information would be valuable in adjusting community building strategies, aggregated data could be useful in understanding people's motivations behind engaging with effective altruism.^[1] For example, if most people who learn about EA through 80,000 Hours first interact with 80,000 Hours career reviews, especially with careers that aren't recommended as being high impact, such as front office finance, this may suggest that it could be valuable to place a greater emphasis on how individuals can shift careers or have a greater impact with the job that they're currently in.

Take these ideas with a grain of salt, because I have written them mostly from intuition without empirical evidence.

1. ^{^}

   I believe that insights regarding engagement that we infer from data regarding the first pages on 80,000 Hours that people engage with will likely only apply to people who first learn about EA through 80,000 Hours. Because people hearing about EA through 80,000 Hours only accounted for 12.8% of the individuals surveyed, it could also be that it is not worth spending very much time understanding the pages that users first interact with on 80,000 Hours. At the same time, if 80,000 Hours receives a very high number of first-time visits, then this may be worth spending more time looking into.