“EA Survey 2024: Cause prioritization” by Rethink Priorities

Summary In this post, we provide an overview of responses to the cause area prioritization questions in the 2024 EA Survey. We report on the relative ranking of cause areas, how this has changed over time, and how prioritization relates to respondents’ preferred resource allocation between causes. We also consider how other responses, such as endorsement of ideas related to EA, engagement, and demographic factors, relate to prioritizations. Overall cause prioritization AI risks and global health and poverty were considered the most highly prioritised causes, followed by biosecurity, and, unlike previous years, animal welfare Animal welfare and AI risks received higher prioritisation ratings than in the last survey year High-engagement respondents rated AI risks, EA movement building, and animal welfare higher Low-engagement respondents rated climate change and mental health higher High engagement was the strongest predictor of cause prioritization  Philosophical ideas related to cause prioritization The agreement or disagreement with certain ideas was related to cause prioritizations in domains such as animal welfare, AI risks, global health and poverty, and climate change Cause areas relating to bio- and nuclear security and cause prioritization research were not related to agreement with any ideas Agreement has changed very little [...] ---Outline:(00:12) Summary(00:43) Overall cause prioritization(01:19) Philosophical ideas related to cause prioritization(01:59) Allocation of resources to causes(02:51) Cause Prioritizations(06:20) Trends in cause prioritization over time(06:52) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Line graph titled Trends in cause prioritization over time showing multiple causes from 2015 to 2024.(08:48) Engagement and cause prioritization(10:01) Factors linked with prioritization of different causes(11:39) EA-related Ideas and Cause Prioritizations(14:40) Time trends in EA-related ideas endorsement(15:32) Relationship between ideas and causes(16:54) Allocation of resources across causes(18:17) By Engagement(19:03) Factors linked with resource allocation(20:25) Acknowledgments en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Rethink Priorities logo(20:38) Appendix(20:41) Methodological notes on cause prioritization, linear regressions(24:09) Additional partial dependence plots for cause prioritization linear regressions(24:28) EA-related ideas agreement(24:33) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ A bar graph showing EA ideas agreement by engagement across different categories.(24:54) Methodological notes on resource allocation linear regressions(25:30) Associations between resource allocations and cause prioritization ratings --- First published: December 4th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CKwDgZGLipchAoxtN/ea-survey-2024-cause-prioritization --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.