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 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)