A few years ago, I started an EA university group in Chile, got funding and support through UGAP, then got advising through 80k and continued mentoring through OSP. This year, I got hired at CEA’s Groups team.
It’s difficult to trace counterfactual impact, but I suspect this wouldn’t have been possible if UGAP hadn’t helped me get a group started, or if CEA wasn’t able to recognize good talent outside top universities.
I’m biased now, but I think people miss how most of our team’s efforts go to scalable support, which doesn’t necessarily target top universities (and includes universities like mine). Selecting top universities is a good heuristic for getting high-quality group members, but you also get diminishing returns fast because you’re bottlenecked by having great organizers at these universities who are in need of support. This, alongside the fact that there is such a thing as great groups outside of top universities, is why we still spend a lot of time, resources, and money on other universities worldwide.
I’m on the one hand happy to hear that the groups team isn’t as elite-focused as I had thought; on the other hand, I’m still troubled by the margin-based reasoning.
Treating each new person as a separate investment and trying to optimize for their marginal utility for EA, instead of looking at the aggregate effect on the movement of all the community building efforts.
Specifically in your comment, justifying diversifying investment in groups by saying “high quality group members” are the goal but top universities have bottlenecks which can’t be easily solved by just pouring more money into them—instead of arguing that it’s better to have a new group in Chile than a new group in Harvard, even if hypothetically people there were less qualified for existing EA jobs.
I’m biased now, but I think people miss how most of our team’s efforts go to scalable support, which doesn’t necessarily target top universities (and includes universities like mine).
Is the portion of efforts that currently do not go to top universities quantifiable, or at least subject to reasonable estimation? I would guess that people who were adversely affected by changes would be more vocal, which could lead to others overestimating the magnitude of those changes on non-top university support.
A few years ago, I started an EA university group in Chile, got funding and support through UGAP, then got advising through 80k and continued mentoring through OSP. This year, I got hired at CEA’s Groups team.
It’s difficult to trace counterfactual impact, but I suspect this wouldn’t have been possible if UGAP hadn’t helped me get a group started, or if CEA wasn’t able to recognize good talent outside top universities.
I’m biased now, but I think people miss how most of our team’s efforts go to scalable support, which doesn’t necessarily target top universities (and includes universities like mine). Selecting top universities is a good heuristic for getting high-quality group members, but you also get diminishing returns fast because you’re bottlenecked by having great organizers at these universities who are in need of support. This, alongside the fact that there is such a thing as great groups outside of top universities, is why we still spend a lot of time, resources, and money on other universities worldwide.
I’m on the one hand happy to hear that the groups team isn’t as elite-focused as I had thought; on the other hand, I’m still troubled by the margin-based reasoning.
Could you clarify what you mean by margin-based reasoning in this context?
Treating each new person as a separate investment and trying to optimize for their marginal utility for EA, instead of looking at the aggregate effect on the movement of all the community building efforts.
Specifically in your comment, justifying diversifying investment in groups by saying “high quality group members” are the goal but top universities have bottlenecks which can’t be easily solved by just pouring more money into them—instead of arguing that it’s better to have a new group in Chile than a new group in Harvard, even if hypothetically people there were less qualified for existing EA jobs.
Is the portion of efforts that currently do not go to top universities quantifiable, or at least subject to reasonable estimation? I would guess that people who were adversely affected by changes would be more vocal, which could lead to others overestimating the magnitude of those changes on non-top university support.