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.)
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.)