EA - EA EDA: What do Forum Topics tell us about changes in EA? by JWS

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA EDA: What do Forum Topics tell us about changes in EA?, published by JWS on July 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.tl;dr2: Data on EA Forum posts and topics doesn't show clear 'waves' of EAtl;dr: I used the Forum API to collect data on the trends of EA Forum topics over time. While this analysis is by no means definitive, it doesn't support the simple narrative that there was a golden age of EA that has abandoned for a much worse one. There has been a rise in AI Safety posts, but that has also been fairly recent (within the last ~2 years)1. IntroductionI really liked Ben West's recent post about 'Third Wave Effective Altruism', especially for its historical reflection on what First and Second Wave EA looked like. This characterisation of EA's history seemed to strike a chord with many Forum users, and has been reflected in recent critical coverage of EA that claims the movement has abandoned its well-intentioned roots (e.g. donations for bed nets) and decided to focus fully on bizarre risks to save a distant, hypothetical future.I've always been a bit sceptical with how common this sort of framing seems to be, especially since the best evidence we have from funding for the overall EA picture shows that most funding is still going to Global Health areas. As something of a (data) scientist myself, I thought I'd turn to one of the primary sources of information for what EAs think to shed some more light on this problem - the Forum itself!This post is a write-up of the initial data collection and analysis that followed. It's not meant to be the definitive word on either how EA, or use of the EA Forum, has changed over time. Instead, I hope it will challenge some assumptions and intuitions, prompt some interesting discussion, and hopefully leads to future posts in a similar direction either from myself or others.2. Methodology(Feel free to skip this section if you're not interested in all the caveats)You may not be aware, the Forum has an API! While I couldn't find clear documentation on how to use it or a fully defined schema, people have used it in the past for interesting projects and some have very kindly shared their results & methods. I found these following three especially useful (the first two have linked GitHubs with their code):The Tree of Tags by Filip SondejEffective Altruism Data from HamishThis LessWrong tutorial from Issa RiceWith these examples to help me, I created my own code to get every post made on the EA Forum to date (without those who have deleted their post).There are various caveats to make about the data representation and data quality. These include:I extracted the data on July 7th - so any totals (e.g. number of posts, post score etc) or other details are only correct as of that date.I could only extract the postedAt date - which isn't always when the post in question was actually posted. A case in point, I'm pretty sure this post wasn't actually posted in 1972. However, it's the best data I could find, so hopefully for the vast majority of posts the display date is the posted date.In looking for a starting point for the data, there was a discontinuity between August to September 2014, but the data was a lot more continuous after then. I analyse the data in terms of monthly totals, so I threw out the one-week of data I had for July. The final dataset is therefore 106 months from September 2014 to June 2023 (inclusive).There are around ~950 distinct tags/topics in my data, which are far too many to plot concisely and share useful information. I've decided to take the top 50 topics in terms of times used, which collectively account for 56% of all Forum tags and 92% of posts in the above time period.I only extracted the first listed Author of a post - however, only 1 graph shared below relies on a user-level aggregat...