I agree with these claims (extracted from your comment):
EA student group outreach is an amazing opportunity
people doing it well while students often end up having more impact through it than they do in their later jobs
someone working 15h per week on it is probably going to achieve more than 3x as much as someone working 5h per week
someone being intentional about outreach can often achieve a lot more than someone who just does an object-level EA thing
learning to talk to people about EA on a small scale is really useful to doing later high-scale marketing; and running a student group of volunteers teaches you a bunch about management in general
Mass outreach may be valuable, but a big advantage of “mass” is that it can be done by professionals (who can themselves have invested years in getting a nuanced understanding of what’s needed in direct work); there’s no need for this to be done by students
I think that non-mass outreach will often be more effective from students who are significantly engaged with the EA project in non-outreach-y ways, since it lets them talk sincerely about their own practice and experience, without it coming across as a Ponzi scheme (OK this was covered in this post as 3.3)
While I agree that 15h/week will achieve more than 3x as much as 5h/week, I don’t think it’s >>3x as much, and I think will typically be outweighed by the benefits
I think that many professionals in direct work should be making a bit of time for community-building, and I think the skill-building from having done a little bit of outreach at university will often be helpful for this, so I don’t want to restrict this benefit to just a handful of people
Extra question: does it seem like the bigger scale university outreach opportunities are in fact going to be covered by full-time professionals, or will major low hanging fruit remain that student group leaders could otherwise focus on for the next X years?
Those are interesting points. I agree that if mass-outreach (& perhaps overall coordination of work) at universities can be covered by full-time professionals, then it seems plausible current students should by default make skilling-up / career planning / being closer to object-level priorities their main focus, and do non-mass campus outreach as a secondary thing (e.g. via some combo of talking to their friends, showing up at events, volunteering for one year out of four).
So maybe that was the missing piece of the argument for me.
Less importantly, I still feel unsure about this: “I think that non-mass outreach will often be more effective from students who are significantly engaged with the EA project in non-outreach-y ways, since it lets them talk sincerely about their own practice and experience, without it coming across as a Ponzi scheme.” When I think about the past organisers who got the most people involved, many of them made running the student group their main focus outside of studying, and didn’t have significant engagement with non-meta projects. Of course, they were typically exceptional in other ways, were maybe more connected to EA leaders, faced more low hanging fruit, and did put some people off too. Still, I think there are often big gains from making EA outreach your main focus.
Interesting point re. part organizers who were particularly successful. I don’t have a great grasp of the anecdata here; I had a rough impression that some of the very successful ones also got relatively obsessive about understanding object-level areas, but that might be wrong.
(If you’re right, I’m also interested in whether they were the only people who had a serious/deliberate go at doing great outreach vs just doing it more passively; I’d update particularly if we had examples of people trying seriously to do say a 60⁄40 learning/outreach split and not getting far with the outreach.)
I agree with these claims (extracted from your comment):
But I feel much worse about your proposed model. This is significantly for the reasons discussed in this post, and in my post on why it’s important for community building to be well-integrated with direct work. But also because:
Mass outreach may be valuable, but a big advantage of “mass” is that it can be done by professionals (who can themselves have invested years in getting a nuanced understanding of what’s needed in direct work); there’s no need for this to be done by students
I think that non-mass outreach will often be more effective from students who are significantly engaged with the EA project in non-outreach-y ways, since it lets them talk sincerely about their own practice and experience, without it coming across as a Ponzi scheme (OK this was covered in this post as 3.3)
While I agree that 15h/week will achieve more than 3x as much as 5h/week, I don’t think it’s >>3x as much, and I think will typically be outweighed by the benefits
I think that many professionals in direct work should be making a bit of time for community-building, and I think the skill-building from having done a little bit of outreach at university will often be helpful for this, so I don’t want to restrict this benefit to just a handful of people
Extra question: does it seem like the bigger scale university outreach opportunities are in fact going to be covered by full-time professionals, or will major low hanging fruit remain that student group leaders could otherwise focus on for the next X years?
Those are interesting points. I agree that if mass-outreach (& perhaps overall coordination of work) at universities can be covered by full-time professionals, then it seems plausible current students should by default make skilling-up / career planning / being closer to object-level priorities their main focus, and do non-mass campus outreach as a secondary thing (e.g. via some combo of talking to their friends, showing up at events, volunteering for one year out of four).
So maybe that was the missing piece of the argument for me.
Less importantly, I still feel unsure about this: “I think that non-mass outreach will often be more effective from students who are significantly engaged with the EA project in non-outreach-y ways, since it lets them talk sincerely about their own practice and experience, without it coming across as a Ponzi scheme.” When I think about the past organisers who got the most people involved, many of them made running the student group their main focus outside of studying, and didn’t have significant engagement with non-meta projects. Of course, they were typically exceptional in other ways, were maybe more connected to EA leaders, faced more low hanging fruit, and did put some people off too. Still, I think there are often big gains from making EA outreach your main focus.
Interesting point re. part organizers who were particularly successful. I don’t have a great grasp of the anecdata here; I had a rough impression that some of the very successful ones also got relatively obsessive about understanding object-level areas, but that might be wrong.
(If you’re right, I’m also interested in whether they were the only people who had a serious/deliberate go at doing great outreach vs just doing it more passively; I’d update particularly if we had examples of people trying seriously to do say a 60⁄40 learning/outreach split and not getting far with the outreach.)