In August 2014, I co-founded Yale EA (alongside Tammy Pham). Things have changed a lot in community-building since then, and I figured it would be good to record my memories of that time before they drift away completely.
If you read this and have questions, please ask!
Timeline
I was a senior in 2014, and I’d been talking to friends about EA for years by then. Enough of them were interested (or just nice) that I got a good group together for an initial meeting, and a few agreed to stick around and help me recruit at our activities fair. One or two of them read LessWrong, and aside from those, no one had heard of effective altruism.
The group wound up composed largely of a few seniors and a bigger group of freshmen (who then had to take over the next year — not easy!). We had 8-10 people at an average meeting.
Events we ran that first year included:
A dinner with Shelly Kagan, one of the best-known academics on campus (among the undergrad population). He’s apparently gotten more interested in EA since then, but during the dinner, he seemed a bit bemused and was doing his best to poke holes in utilitarianism (and his best was very good, because he’s Shelly Kagan).
A virtual talk from Rob Mather, head of AMF. Kelsey Piper was visiting from Stanford and came to the event; she was the first EA celebrity I’d met and I felt a bit star-struck.
A live talk from Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman (my second and third EA celebrities). They brought Lily, who was a young toddler at the time. I think that saying “there will be a baby!” drew nearly as many people as trying to explain who Jeff and Julia were. This was our biggest event, maybe 40 people.
A lunch with Mercy for Animals — only three other people showed up.
A dinner with Leah Libresco, an atheist blogger and CFAR instructor who converted to Catholicism before it was cool. This was a weird mix of EA folks and arch-conservatives, and she did a great job of conveying EA’s ideas in a way the conservatives found convincing.
A mixer open to any member of a nonprofit group on campus. (I was hoping to recruit their altruistic members to do more effective things — this sounds more sinister in retrospect than it did at the time.)
We gained zero recruits that day, but — wonder of wonders — someone’s roommate showed up for the free alcohol and then went on to lead the group for multiple years before working full-time on a bunch of meta jobs. This was probably the most impactful thing I did all year, and I didn’t know until years later.
A bunch of giving games, at activities fairs and in random dining halls. Lots of mailing-list signups, reasonably effective, and sponsored by The Life You Can Save — this was the only non-Yale funding we got all year, and I was ecstatic to receive their $300.
One student walked up, took the proffered dollar, and then walked away. I was shook.
We also ran some projects, most of which failed entirely:
Trying to write an intro EA website for high school students (never finished)
Calling important CSR staff at major corporations to see if they’d consider working with EA charities. It’s easy to get on the phone when you’re a Yale student, but it turns out that “you should start funding a strange charity no one’s ever heard of” is not a compelling pitch to people whose jobs are fundamentally about marketing.
Asking Dean Karlan, development econ legend, if he had ideas for impactful student projects.
“I do!”
Awesome! What is it?
“Can you help me figure out how to sell 200,000 handmade bags from Ghana?”
Um… thanks?
We had those bags all year and never even tried to sell them, but I think Dean was just happy to have them gone. No idea where they wound up.
Paraphrased ideas that we never tried:
See if Off! insect repellant (or other mosquito-fighting companies) would be interested in partnering with the Against Malaria Foundation?
Come up with a Christian-y framing of EA, go to the Knights of Columbus headquarters [in New Haven], and see if they’ll support top charities?
Benefit concert with the steel drum band? [Co-president Pham was a member.]
The only projects that achieved anything concrete were two fundraisers — one for the holidays, and one in memory of Luchang Wang, an active member (and fantastic person) whose death cast a shadow over the second half of the year. We raised $10-15k for development charities, of which maybe $5k was counterfactual (lots came from our members).
Our last meeting of the year was focused on criticism — what the group (and especially me) didn’t do well, and how to improve things. I don’t remember anything beyond that.
The main thing we accomplished was becoming friends. My happiest YEA-related journal entries all involve weird conversations at dinner or dorm-room movie nights. By the end of that year, I’d become very confident that social bonding was a better group strategy than direct action.
What it was like to running a group in 2014: Random notes
I prepared to launch by talking to 3-4 leaders at other college groups, including Ben Kuhn, Peter Wildeford, and the head of a Princeton group that (I think) went defunct almost immediately. Ben and Peter were great, but we were all flying by the seats of our pants to some degree.
While I kind of sucked at leading, EA itself was ridiculously compelling. Just walking through the basic ideas drove tons of people to attend a meeting/event (though few returned).
Aside from the TLYCS grant and some Yale activity funding, I paid for everything out of pocket — but this was just occasional food and maybe a couple of train tickets. I never even considered running a retreat (way too expensive).
Google Docs was still new and exciting back then. We didn’t have Airtable, Notion, or Slack.
I never mention CEA in my journal. I don’t think I’d really heard of them while I was running the group, and I’m not sure they had group resources back then anyway.
Our first academic advisor was Thomas Pogge, an early EA-adjacent philosopher who melted from public view after a major sexual harassment case. I don’t think he ever responded to our very awkward “we won’t be keeping you as an adviser” email.
But mostly, it was really hard
The current intro fellowships aren’t perfect, and the funding debate is real/important, but oh god things are so much better for group organizers than they were in 2014.
I had no idea what I was doing.
There were no reading lists, no fellowship curricula, no facilitator guides, no nothing. I had a Google doc full of links to favorite articles and sometimes I asked people to read them.
I remember being deeply anxious before every meeting, event, and email send, because I was improvising everything and barely knew what we were supposed to be doing (direct impact? Securing pledges? Talking about cool blogs?).
Lots of people came to one or two meetings, saw how chaotic things were, and never came back. (I smile a bit when I see people complaining that modern groups come off as too polished and professional — that’s not great, but it beats the alternative.)
I looked at my journal to see if the anxious memories were exaggerated. They were not. Just reading them makes me anxious all over again.
But that only makes it sweeter that Yale’s group is now thriving, and that EA has outgrown the “students flailing around at random” model of community growth.
Memories from starting a college group in 2014
In August 2014, I co-founded Yale EA (alongside Tammy Pham). Things have changed a lot in community-building since then, and I figured it would be good to record my memories of that time before they drift away completely.
If you read this and have questions, please ask!
Timeline
I was a senior in 2014, and I’d been talking to friends about EA for years by then. Enough of them were interested (or just nice) that I got a good group together for an initial meeting, and a few agreed to stick around and help me recruit at our activities fair. One or two of them read LessWrong, and aside from those, no one had heard of effective altruism.
The group wound up composed largely of a few seniors and a bigger group of freshmen (who then had to take over the next year — not easy!). We had 8-10 people at an average meeting.
Events we ran that first year included:
A dinner with Shelly Kagan, one of the best-known academics on campus (among the undergrad population). He’s apparently gotten more interested in EA since then, but during the dinner, he seemed a bit bemused and was doing his best to poke holes in utilitarianism (and his best was very good, because he’s Shelly Kagan).
A virtual talk from Rob Mather, head of AMF. Kelsey Piper was visiting from Stanford and came to the event; she was the first EA celebrity I’d met and I felt a bit star-struck.
A live talk from Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman (my second and third EA celebrities). They brought Lily, who was a young toddler at the time. I think that saying “there will be a baby!” drew nearly as many people as trying to explain who Jeff and Julia were. This was our biggest event, maybe 40 people.
A lunch with Mercy for Animals — only three other people showed up.
A dinner with Leah Libresco, an atheist blogger and CFAR instructor who converted to Catholicism before it was cool. This was a weird mix of EA folks and arch-conservatives, and she did a great job of conveying EA’s ideas in a way the conservatives found convincing.
A mixer open to any member of a nonprofit group on campus. (I was hoping to recruit their altruistic members to do more effective things — this sounds more sinister in retrospect than it did at the time.)
We gained zero recruits that day, but — wonder of wonders — someone’s roommate showed up for the free alcohol and then went on to lead the group for multiple years before working full-time on a bunch of meta jobs. This was probably the most impactful thing I did all year, and I didn’t know until years later.
A bunch of giving games, at activities fairs and in random dining halls. Lots of mailing-list signups, reasonably effective, and sponsored by The Life You Can Save — this was the only non-Yale funding we got all year, and I was ecstatic to receive their $300.
One student walked up, took the proffered dollar, and then walked away. I was shook.
We also ran some projects, most of which failed entirely:
Trying to write an intro EA website for high school students (never finished)
Calling important CSR staff at major corporations to see if they’d consider working with EA charities. It’s easy to get on the phone when you’re a Yale student, but it turns out that “you should start funding a strange charity no one’s ever heard of” is not a compelling pitch to people whose jobs are fundamentally about marketing.
Asking Dean Karlan, development econ legend, if he had ideas for impactful student projects.
“I do!”
Awesome! What is it?
“Can you help me figure out how to sell 200,000 handmade bags from Ghana?”
Um… thanks?
We had those bags all year and never even tried to sell them, but I think Dean was just happy to have them gone. No idea where they wound up.
Paraphrased ideas that we never tried:
See if Off! insect repellant (or other mosquito-fighting companies) would be interested in partnering with the Against Malaria Foundation?
Come up with a Christian-y framing of EA, go to the Knights of Columbus headquarters [in New Haven], and see if they’ll support top charities?
Benefit concert with the steel drum band? [Co-president Pham was a member.]
Live Below the Line event? [Dodged a bullet.]
Write EA memes! [Would have been fun, oh well.]
The full idea document is a fun EA time capsule.
The only projects that achieved anything concrete were two fundraisers — one for the holidays, and one in memory of Luchang Wang, an active member (and fantastic person) whose death cast a shadow over the second half of the year. We raised $10-15k for development charities, of which maybe $5k was counterfactual (lots came from our members).
Our last meeting of the year was focused on criticism — what the group (and especially me) didn’t do well, and how to improve things. I don’t remember anything beyond that.
The main thing we accomplished was becoming friends. My happiest YEA-related journal entries all involve weird conversations at dinner or dorm-room movie nights. By the end of that year, I’d become very confident that social bonding was a better group strategy than direct action.
What it was like to running a group in 2014: Random notes
I prepared to launch by talking to 3-4 leaders at other college groups, including Ben Kuhn, Peter Wildeford, and the head of a Princeton group that (I think) went defunct almost immediately. Ben and Peter were great, but we were all flying by the seats of our pants to some degree.
While I kind of sucked at leading, EA itself was ridiculously compelling. Just walking through the basic ideas drove tons of people to attend a meeting/event (though few returned).
Aside from the TLYCS grant and some Yale activity funding, I paid for everything out of pocket — but this was just occasional food and maybe a couple of train tickets. I never even considered running a retreat (way too expensive).
Google Docs was still new and exciting back then. We didn’t have Airtable, Notion, or Slack.
I never mention CEA in my journal. I don’t think I’d really heard of them while I was running the group, and I’m not sure they had group resources back then anyway.
Our first academic advisor was Thomas Pogge, an early EA-adjacent philosopher who melted from public view after a major sexual harassment case. I don’t think he ever responded to our very awkward “we won’t be keeping you as an adviser” email.
But mostly, it was really hard
The current intro fellowships aren’t perfect, and the funding debate is real/important, but oh god things are so much better for group organizers than they were in 2014.
I had no idea what I was doing.
There were no reading lists, no fellowship curricula, no facilitator guides, no nothing. I had a Google doc full of links to favorite articles and sometimes I asked people to read them.
I remember being deeply anxious before every meeting, event, and email send, because I was improvising everything and barely knew what we were supposed to be doing (direct impact? Securing pledges? Talking about cool blogs?).
Lots of people came to one or two meetings, saw how chaotic things were, and never came back. (I smile a bit when I see people complaining that modern groups come off as too polished and professional — that’s not great, but it beats the alternative.)
I looked at my journal to see if the anxious memories were exaggerated. They were not. Just reading them makes me anxious all over again.
But that only makes it sweeter that Yale’s group is now thriving, and that EA has outgrown the “students flailing around at random” model of community growth.