A model for engagement growth in universities
Thanks to Warren Sunada-Wong, Emma Abele, James Aung, Juan David Gil, Trevor Levin, Matt Burtell and Lovre Pešut for feedback.
Epistemic status: not very certain in anything. At first the post was filled with multiple “it seems that” per paragraph, but I went and deleted them to make it more readable, so preface the whole post with a big “it seems that”.
This post will contain a bunch of loosely connected thoughts on how to increase the number of highly-engaged EAs (“HEAs”) at university groups (where I use “highly-engaged” roughly to refer to people who dedicate most of their energy to EA cause areas).
This model is mostly constructed from my experiences observing and participating in EA Croatia (which I co-founded), and the EA community in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Summary
In short:
We should be optimizing for increasing the number of highly engaged individuals, as most of the impact comes from a minority of highly engaged people.
To find promising people, we should have a campus presence so that anyone looking for us can find us, and promising people can be found quickly.
An individual’s engagement level is highly dependent on the engagement level of people they interact with.
Once someone becomes highly engaged, they are less likely to become less engaged than someone who is at a medium level of engagement.
We should create socials and retreats mostly populated with highly engaged people, with a few promising people sprinkled in until the promising people become highly engaged.
Groups should keep their engagement levels and epistemic norms very high, especially for people in organizer roles.
Fellowships and reading groups serve as a good way to find promising people, and get information out to people in a non socially taxing and accountable way.
Introduction
What should community builders optimize for?
It seems that most of the value produced by EAs comes from a handful of highly engaged individuals, so we should be optimizing for increasing the number of HEAs.
It is easier for people to become HEAs during college than after college (I’m quite certain that it’s not significantly harder), as they’re less locked into their career plans, and are in a stage of life where they’re supposed to have their mind changed a lot.
How do you find promising people initially?
It’s important that most of the people on campus should know that the EA club exists, so that all the insta-EAs (people who become highly engaged after a relatively small amount of exposure) are caught early on. There should be a clear and low-friction way to reach out (a contact page, for instance) so that people on the fence can get a response and set up a 1-on-1 quickly.
Some low-cost ways to increase presence are:
Table at the club fair
Have a website
Merch (laptop stickers, t-shirts)
Some ways to get people to initially engage (ordered roughly by amount of friction) are:
Talks
1-on-1s
Reading groups
Fellowships
Engagement through socialization
The main claims of this post are:
The engagement of individuals is highly dependent on the engagement of the people they come into contact with, either literally or by exposure to media created by someone.
High levels of engagement are relatively stable (harder to change than medium or low levels).
The second point comes mostly from intuition: If you imagine a highly engaged person surrounded by non-engaged people and a non-engaged person surrounded by highly engaged people, the non-engaged person’s engagement will probably increase faster than the engaged person’s engagement will decrease.
Very high levels of engagement seem to be hard to decrease. The high engagement “zone” is probably entered around the point when someone changes career plans and becomes embedded in the community.
Mutual support
The most obvious reason why engagement is contagious is probably because of people supporting each other in having a larger impact. Involving someone in a project is a good way to get them personally invested, and engaged people often tell each other to aim high about increasing their impact.
Internalization of importance
For most newcomers, “drop everything and work on an EA cause area” isn’t something they think about possibly doing in the future. Meeting people who have dedicated a lot of their time to EA makes it more palpable. I’ve seen quite a few people reply something like “I should think about doing that too” when they ask HEAs what they do.
I think many people who know much about EA but aren’t highly engaged haven’t internalized the information enough to put it to action. If you think there will be a flood tonight and then go to sleep in your basement, did you really internalize the fact that there will be a flood? Being exposed to people who have gone from thinking about EA to doing EA is a good way to internalize the implications better.
Locally making engagement high(er) status
I often hear people say things like “they’re so cool” or “they’re superhuman” about individuals who are highly engaged with EA. Saying this makes newcomers want to emulate these individuals more and become more engaged to get some of that sweet, sweet status.
Talking about ideas and pointing to resources
One of the most common things I hear in conversations where there is a high difference in engagement of the interlocutors is “you should really read this” or “I read/listened to this really good thing the other day”. Some newcomers I’ve seen leave every social with a list of things to read (I still do this sometimes). Side point is that people are much more eager to read stuff that has been recommended by multiple people independently. I sometimes hear stuff like “Someone else recommended that to me too! I should really read that!”.
It’s important not to do this too much. If you, as an individual, recommend too much stuff, then people will probably take your recommendations less seriously. Make sure to be conservative about recommending new stuff, and err on the side of (gently) checking in if they’ve read something you’ve already recommended, rather than recommending something new. One recommendation per conversation is probably near the sweet spot.
Influence factors
The two main things that increase how much influence an individual has on someone else’s engagement levels are:
Amount of interaction: people who interact more with others influence them more, up to a certain point where they interact with others so much that they become annoying (which seems to be hard to reach).
Status: leaders and board members serve as role models of what an engaged person should be doing. Cool/popular people who have credentials and/or seem to know what they’re talking about have more influence (is that a tautology?).
Implications
Surround promising people with HEAs
We should create social gatherings and groups where most people are highly engaged, with a few promising people sprinkled in (making sure HEAs interact with them). When the promising people become highly engaged, we sprinkle in more promising people, and repeat.
There should be a lot of socials with varying levels of average engagement, but there should probably be at least 30% of HEAs at every social. Regular meals should be held as much as possible given the number of HEAs that could attend each one.
Socials mostly populated with HEAs (with a few promising people sprinkled in) are probably very good to hold often. Aside from the mutual support and increase in engagement, they can serve as an opportunity for promising members to get a glimpse into what the community is like, and increase engagement rapidly for selected promising people.
Be careful about quick expansion
Too much expansion in a short period of time could lead to the group becoming watered down in terms of engagement, making it harder to get new members more engaged. This probably mostly comes down to the fact that there are just fewer HEAs per newcomer, and it makes it hard to devote time to getting each of them to engage more.
Retreats should mostly have HEAs
Most retreat spots should be filled with people who are as engaged as possible, probably leaving around 10-30% of spots for promising people.
There are two posts about retreats that mention engagement levels of attendees (by Yale EA and by CZEA), and the Yale EA post says they admitted “20 people at Yale who have the highest level of EA understanding and motivation to actively engage”, while the “Expected number of hours participants plan to spend on EA activities” for people going into the CZEA retreat was 11.8 per week. So, both of them seem to have targeted highly engaged individuals.
When admitting too many newcomers, there’s also the risk of pockets of newcomers forming where they don’t interact much with the highly engaged people and/or amplify epistemically unsound objections.
I’m especially curious about what people have to say about this ratio. It’s high stakes because, for example, a 10% absolute increase from 10% to 20% would double the number of newcomers being exposed to HEAs.
Fellowships and reading groups as mostly informational
Fellowships and reading groups can serve as low-friction ways to get people out of the zero engagement zone, but it seems that most of the value from them comes from two things:
They offer a low-social-cost way of getting people to read things (while being held accountable) and get more knowledgeable about EA. Recommending all of the readings of a fellowship/reading group one by one probably incurs a much greater social cost than just recommending the fellowship or reading group itself.
They offer a good way to spend a lot of time with newcomers, and can be useful for finding promising people who can be sorted into activities that are further in the funnel.
Board members and leaders should be highly engaged
It’s very important that organizers are highly engaged. If they aren’t, then newcomers’ engagement will probably be quite bottlenecked, because not many people want to “be more Catholic than the pope”.
Members should maintain high epistemic standards
In a growth model that’s dependent on personal interaction with HEAs, it’s very important that HEAs have good epistemic standards. A lack of epistemic standards could lead to growth stopping a few steps in. It’s good to check each other’s epistemic standards, and perhaps rationality workshops/reading groups for group organizers is something we should think about.
I’m unsure about what this practically implies for outreach strategy. The thing I’m pointing at is “we need to make sure EA doesn’t lose fidelity when being spread from person to person”, but how we can accomplish this is mostly a mystery to me.
Import HEAs if there isn’t a critical mass to begin with
If there isn’t a critical mass of people with whom you can start the process of surrounding promising people with HEAs, you can get HEAs from other places with relative sufficits to do residencies until you get the ball rolling. This went successfully in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when a bunch of HEAs from Stanford and Brown visited at the beginning of the fall semester this year and spent a lot of time with a few promising people (including myself). Some of those promising people have by now become HEAs. A similar thing seems to have happened at UPenn recently when Sydney and Thomas from Stanford EA helped University of Pennsylvania EA get off the ground.
Thanks, Nikola! +1 on so much of this. A few specific thoughts:
I agree that having high-status role models can be really inspiring/motivating. At the same time, I think some of these comments can have unintended harmful effects. I’ve seen a few ways this can go wrong:
“I’m not superhuman, so this isn’t for me”—The “some people are super cool/superhuman” mentality can reinforce the idea that there are “Super Cool/Smart/Amazing people” and then “All of the Regular People.” I worry that people—especially newcomers—might assume they’re in the latter category and then get turned off.
“This feels weird—why are they worshipping these people?” I think a lot of people are generally put off by hero-worship/cults of personality. This is especially true of people with high epistemic standards. I worry that these people will here “X is superhuman”, see a bunch of people nodding along, and then think, “wow, this community is weird and puts people on pedestals. Not for me!”
An idea for how to solve this (epistemic status: uncertain and hastily written)-- emphasize the actions that the high-status people are taking. My guess is that it’s generally better for people to tie status to actions rather than people. But talking about people can be a good way to help people see which actions are considered “high-status.”
Ex: Instead of “X is superhuman”, I currently prefer the framing “I really admire X. X is super agentic and always looking for ways to have a higher impact. As soon as X changed their mind about their cause prioritization, they started thinking seriously about changing their career plan.” I think the latter frame places the emphasis on specific concrete things the person is doing—and ideally these are things that other members could do (i.e., admiring someone for being agentic signals “you should try to be more agentic”, whereas admiring someone for being naturally smart/talented/gifted might be less likely to foster motivation to grow/improve.)
Would love to know what you think about this! (And to be clear, I don’t think your initial statement was incompatible with any of this. It’s quite possible you agree with everything & didn’t want to use space to go into all of this).
Agreed. I also think this is one of the biggest flaws of the current fellowship model. At Penn, my estimate is that roughly 20% of fellows were moderately-to-highly engaged (i.e, taking the ideas seriously & considering changes to their studies/careers).
In practice, this meant that a given fellowship group often had one promising person, a facilitator, and 3-4 people who weren’t as engaged. I think this had the effect of making the promising person less excited (to borrow your analogy, “few people want to be more Catholic than the other bishops.”)
A few possible ways to solve this: Filtering more at the beginning (e.g., having 1-on-1s with fellowship applicants and coming up with a good evaluation system) placing people into fellowship groups based on how likely they are to be engaged (I think some other unis do this), or experimenting with alternatives to the intro fellowship. I’d be curious if you have any thoughts on this challenge & these possible solutions.
Strong +1 (+2?) on residencies. I think being around Sydney/Thomas was quite influential for me/other Penn organizers. My guess is that aggressively tabling (not just at club fairs, but pretty much every day for the first few weeks of the semester) and 1-on-1s (with potential organizers and other people who seemed engaged) were the two most important components of the residency. Would be curious to hear what you think the most important parts of the Cambridge residencies.
Strong agree with the idea that we should emphasize actions people are taking and avoid hero-worship-like phrases. I was mostly using my own mental shorthand when I said “superhuman” and forgot to translate to other-people-speak.
Regarding the makeup of fellowship groups, I think probably giving people an option to attend some socials which are generally attended by highly engaged people could be good? So that, if there’s a lack of engagement in their cohorts, they can make up for it by finding a way to interact with engaged people somewhere else.
Haven’t though much about what was most important about the Cambridge residencies, but some important aspects are definitely:
Encouraging us to think big (aim for us one day becoming as good as the best groups, and then even better)
Providing advice and support with organizing
Holding intro talks and events (Kuhan has a very good intro presentation), and having one-on-ones with promising organizers
Thanks for writing this! I hadn’t thought about high engagement levels being more stable than medium or low ones, and that seems right to me. I agree that having people spend time with highly-engaged people is likely to be a good way to make them more engaged. And I definitely agree with your points about fidelity and epistemics being particularly important.
I’m uncertain some of your suggestions, though. You suggest inviting a few “promising” people to socials where most people are highly-engaged. I worry that doing this could result in a “cool kids club” in-group vibe, where people who haven’t been invited to join might not feel welcome in or good enough for EA. There are benefits to this—it might make people more strongly desire to join the highly-engaged group—it’s not obvious to me that it’s worth the cost of exclusivity.
Besides the “why am I not invited” cost, there’s another cost that you point out: only adding a few new people limits how quickly the group can grow. I agree that your approach would fairly reliably create new HEAs, but my guess is we’re early enough in working out how to grow EA that it’s worth looking for a more scalable approach that (a) isn’t exclusive and (b) has a better HEA to new person ratio. For example, 1:1 mentorship is somewhere in between your suggestion (several HEAs to each new person) and so-called “fellowships” (several new people to each HEA).