I have never done community building and am probably ignorant of many ongoing initiatives so maybe I am stating the obvious below.
I am just wondering about mid-career professionals: Could one not easily abandon the focus on elite universities for this group? I think I have seen calls for getting more mid-career professionals into EA (@Letian Wang mentions this in another comment on this post), and I think at a mid-career point people have sufficient track record in their discipline/industry that one can almost completely disregard their education. In my experience, some of the most talented people I have worked with were people who either never considered moving to the UK/US to attend elite universities, or who just did not take university too seriously but later found ways to make significant contributions in their field. Maybe this is more true outside of research roles, as researchers still seem to have a harder time “decoupling” from their undergrad.
I am just wondering about mid-career professionals: Could one not easily abandon the focus on elite universities for this group?
The focus on top universities is to access the people there. Mid-career people (outside of researchers) are no longer at university, so they are not primarily accessed through university groups. I don’t think anyone is applying a harsh undergrad filter to people with strong track records in their field (at least, I’d expect most EAs to be less credentialist that is the norm for e.g. government hiring), and I’m confused why you would think this was the case.
It’s not that it is elitist in the sense that they value top university students more, it’s elitist in that they want people who are more likely to go on to have outsized influence/money to give more of that away to others.
It doesn’t make as much sense to ask poorer students to give away more of their income, or shift their career away from one that maximises their own and their families welfare for the benefit of others.
I think it’s elitist (and inaccurate) to assume that only attendees of a small number of elite universities will have the future funds to give away.
And ultimately it’s not a straight decision between whether to fund a student group at Oxford or one at Oxford Brookes, it’s a decision whether to pay student society leaders at a small number of target universities so much they feel uncomfortable about it and fund expensive retreats for them, or spreading movement building budget more widely to support outreach in more places (that’s not to suggest there aren’t other challenges to setting up more student groups in places that don’t have an existing community). I can see the argument that focusing resources on a handful of courses at a handful of elite universities makes sense for recruitment into a small number of highly specialised positions, but not for maximising future fundraising capacity.
I think it’s inaccurate that only people at top universities are likely to have outsized influence, or to dismiss everyone else as “poorer students” that it “doesn’t make as much sense” to encourage to engage in altruistic activity. The university Sorting Hat really isn’t that good.
And more specifically from a movement building perspective it usually makes sense to prioritise reaching more people than to ensure a small group of [already advantaged] people have access to particularly lavish allowances. Students at elite universities’ ability to achieve outsized impact later in life probably isn’t particularly closely linked to the size of the stipend the current organizer of their well-established EA group is able to claim from central funding bodies, whereas actually having some outreach at other universities is going to have more impact, even if fewer of those students’ impact will be outsized and the median earn to give amounts might be a little lower.
Edit: not really sure what’s so controversial here, though I’ve amended the quote just in case it’s because my representation of DavidNash’s original comment was considered uncharitable.
I agree that it’s inaccurate to say that it’s only people at top universities who are likely to have outsized influence, but that’s not what I said.
Maybe you’re combining the idea that there is too much spending on top universities with the idea that the spending could be spread out amongst more of them rather than spent on non university movement building.
For movement building strategy, it will depend on whether you think a mass movement achieves your goals better than specific fields. For example in animal welfare, it makes sense for GFI to target entrepreneurs and tissue engineers whereas vegan advocacy is aimed more at students and a wider audience.
I believe the connection (which might or might not directly pick up on something you are defending?) is that if you go beyond merely starting your student community building with top universities first as a heuristic, and you further concentrate spending on the top universities to extreme degrees, you are in fact assuming a very strong distinction between those universities. David T has described the distinction in an approximate way as saying there are ‘only’ influential/high-earning-potential people at top universities.
The assumption of a strong distinction can be read from how the decision to concentrate implies it takes a huge amount of marginal funding before the diminishing returns of giving the next dollar to top unis is considered less valuable than giving a first dollar to a mid-range uni.
To defend large disparities between funding of different universities, it’s not enough to say ‘well you have to draw the line somewhere as you can only fund so many universities’; you need to further justify the choice to treat top universities as being in another class.
And arguably that’s an elitist worldview which sees a large difference between top unis and the rest — it’s more elitist if it talks about large talent gaps, implying top unis are able to filter students on intelligence very well; and it’s less elitist if it talks only about ‘people who will go on to be influential’, putting the blame of elitism on the society that rewards elite resumes.
That’s how I relate what David T has been saying, to what you said, DavidNash.
I agree that movement building strategy may vary in specific fields and with your specific examples (and hinted as much about recruitment in my first post!) so I don’t think our differences are irreconcilable!
But your original post conveyed—perhaps more strongly than you intended—the sentiment that it didn’t make much sense to try to persuade people [who in most cases don’t even hear about EA] outside a small number of elite universities to pledge or do direct work [versus the CEA tweaking priorities to direct even more funding to generally already well-established and well-funded student orgs]. If the context was that for every student at $randomuni that was asked to pledge, someone at Oxford never heard about EA, maybe there would be some truth that it made less sense to fund outreach ti them, but I don’t think that represents the reality at all. If anything, the OP and various others have suggested that the funding available in some circumstances is even sufficient to have a negative impact on incentives; on the other hand there’s probably a high return to reaching people who would otherwise not have even heard of EA taking Giving Pledges or contemplating the many areas of direct work that don’t need elite academic credentials.
As for taking the opposite stance and actively trying to spread funding to more universities or workplaces, I recognise there are many other challenges to incubating organizations without the people and institutions already in place and don’t claim to have a solution, but I suspect it would be net positive, and generally more net positive than lowering the funding bar for groups already best positioned to access EA resources. But tbh my comment was less making a particular case for funding and more pushing back on the negative framing of the idea of funding outreach to “poorer students” in a subthread provoked by someone talking about how the original decision was a setback to their attempts to defend the movement against accusations of elitism.
(I also broadly endorse the third David’s interpretation of my argument, FWIW :D)
I have never done community building and am probably ignorant of many ongoing initiatives so maybe I am stating the obvious below.
I am just wondering about mid-career professionals: Could one not easily abandon the focus on elite universities for this group? I think I have seen calls for getting more mid-career professionals into EA (@Letian Wang mentions this in another comment on this post), and I think at a mid-career point people have sufficient track record in their discipline/industry that one can almost completely disregard their education. In my experience, some of the most talented people I have worked with were people who either never considered moving to the UK/US to attend elite universities, or who just did not take university too seriously but later found ways to make significant contributions in their field. Maybe this is more true outside of research roles, as researchers still seem to have a harder time “decoupling” from their undergrad.
The focus on top universities is to access the people there. Mid-career people (outside of researchers) are no longer at university, so they are not primarily accessed through university groups. I don’t think anyone is applying a harsh undergrad filter to people with strong track records in their field (at least, I’d expect most EAs to be less credentialist that is the norm for e.g. government hiring), and I’m confused why you would think this was the case.
That makes sense. I guess it’s then not really that EA is elitist, but the part of EA that focuses on students.
I think ‘elitism’ is not a helpful frame for understanding things here.
It’s not that it is elitist in the sense that they value top university students more, it’s elitist in that they want people who are more likely to go on to have outsized influence/money to give more of that away to others.
It doesn’t make as much sense to ask poorer students to give away more of their income, or shift their career away from one that maximises their own and their families welfare for the benefit of others.
I think it’s elitist (and inaccurate) to assume that only attendees of a small number of elite universities will have the future funds to give away.
And ultimately it’s not a straight decision between whether to fund a student group at Oxford or one at Oxford Brookes, it’s a decision whether to pay student society leaders at a small number of target universities so much they feel uncomfortable about it and fund expensive retreats for them, or spreading movement building budget more widely to support outreach in more places (that’s not to suggest there aren’t other challenges to setting up more student groups in places that don’t have an existing community). I can see the argument that focusing resources on a handful of courses at a handful of elite universities makes sense for recruitment into a small number of highly specialised positions, but not for maximising future fundraising capacity.
Choosing which universities to focus on and how you run a uni group are two different questions.
Why do you think that it’s inaccurate that people at top universities are more likely to go on to have outsized influence?
I think it’s inaccurate that only people at top universities are likely to have outsized influence, or to dismiss everyone else as “poorer students” that it “doesn’t make as much sense” to encourage to engage in altruistic activity. The university Sorting Hat really isn’t that good.
And more specifically from a movement building perspective it usually makes sense to prioritise reaching more people than to ensure a small group of [already advantaged] people have access to particularly lavish allowances. Students at elite universities’ ability to achieve outsized impact later in life probably isn’t particularly closely linked to the size of the stipend the current organizer of their well-established EA group is able to claim from central funding bodies, whereas actually having some outreach at other universities is going to have more impact, even if fewer of those students’ impact will be outsized and the median earn to give amounts might be a little lower.
Edit: not really sure what’s so controversial here, though I’ve amended the quote just in case it’s because my representation of DavidNash’s original comment was considered uncharitable.
I agree that it’s inaccurate to say that it’s only people at top universities who are likely to have outsized influence, but that’s not what I said.
Maybe you’re combining the idea that there is too much spending on top universities with the idea that the spending could be spread out amongst more of them rather than spent on non university movement building.
For movement building strategy, it will depend on whether you think a mass movement achieves your goals better than specific fields. For example in animal welfare, it makes sense for GFI to target entrepreneurs and tissue engineers whereas vegan advocacy is aimed more at students and a wider audience.
I believe the connection (which might or might not directly pick up on something you are defending?) is that if you go beyond merely starting your student community building with top universities first as a heuristic, and you further concentrate spending on the top universities to extreme degrees, you are in fact assuming a very strong distinction between those universities. David T has described the distinction in an approximate way as saying there are ‘only’ influential/high-earning-potential people at top universities.
The assumption of a strong distinction can be read from how the decision to concentrate implies it takes a huge amount of marginal funding before the diminishing returns of giving the next dollar to top unis is considered less valuable than giving a first dollar to a mid-range uni.
To defend large disparities between funding of different universities, it’s not enough to say ‘well you have to draw the line somewhere as you can only fund so many universities’; you need to further justify the choice to treat top universities as being in another class.
And arguably that’s an elitist worldview which sees a large difference between top unis and the rest — it’s more elitist if it talks about large talent gaps, implying top unis are able to filter students on intelligence very well; and it’s less elitist if it talks only about ‘people who will go on to be influential’, putting the blame of elitism on the society that rewards elite resumes.
That’s how I relate what David T has been saying, to what you said, DavidNash.
I agree that movement building strategy may vary in specific fields and with your specific examples (and hinted as much about recruitment in my first post!) so I don’t think our differences are irreconcilable!
But your original post conveyed—perhaps more strongly than you intended—the sentiment that it didn’t make much sense to try to persuade people [who in most cases don’t even hear about EA] outside a small number of elite universities to pledge or do direct work [versus the CEA tweaking priorities to direct even more funding to generally already well-established and well-funded student orgs]. If the context was that for every student at $randomuni that was asked to pledge, someone at Oxford never heard about EA, maybe there would be some truth that it made less sense to fund outreach ti them, but I don’t think that represents the reality at all. If anything, the OP and various others have suggested that the funding available in some circumstances is even sufficient to have a negative impact on incentives; on the other hand there’s probably a high return to reaching people who would otherwise not have even heard of EA taking Giving Pledges or contemplating the many areas of direct work that don’t need elite academic credentials.
As for taking the opposite stance and actively trying to spread funding to more universities or workplaces, I recognise there are many other challenges to incubating organizations without the people and institutions already in place and don’t claim to have a solution, but I suspect it would be net positive, and generally more net positive than lowering the funding bar for groups already best positioned to access EA resources. But tbh my comment was less making a particular case for funding and more pushing back on the negative framing of the idea of funding outreach to “poorer students” in a subthread provoked by someone talking about how the original decision was a setback to their attempts to defend the movement against accusations of elitism.
(I also broadly endorse the third David’s interpretation of my argument, FWIW :D)