Comment by asuffield on 2013 Survey Results · 2014-01-19T13:49:42.796Z · LW · GW

I'd like to advance an alternative hypothesis for the effective altruism/charitable donations data:

• People who donate more money to charity spend more time thinking about how effectively that money is used, and hence are more interested in effective altruism
• People who have more money donate more money

Aside from reversing the suggested causality (which we obviously can't test from this survey), the difference is pretty narrow, I don't really know enough about statistics to analyse how well the data supports one hypothesis over the other, and while I would be interested in knowing the answer, I'm not sufficiently interested to go and learn how to do that kind of analysis (if it's even possible from this data, which I'm unsure of). Is anybody able to come up with something?