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I have thought about this topic a lot, so I am always excited what other people think about the question. I basically agree with all the explanations you came up with and I think they explain most of the difference.

There is another points I think might be part of the explanation: Many highly engaged EAs are very ambitious and often highly intelligent. Those are the kinds of people that would be much more likely to attend highly competitive universities like Oxford or Cambridge. So if you just look at the EA-potential of the set of students at one of those Unis, I just think it’s a lot higher than at the average University in Germany where no such selection effect exists and students don’t differ that strongly between cities.

Additionally, due to the absence of tuition in Germany a lot of german students seem to not take their studies very seriously, so the percentage of students registered at the university that would invest significant time in a local group is reduced before even looking at things like value alignment and stuff.

From my experience small EA groups are often stuck in a bad equilibrium. Without many members it becomes challenging to do many events. A lot of the responsibility will rest on the shoulders of the organizer(s), but those are often less motivated if only a few people attend the events. This might even lead to them investing less time in the future. The exact opposite happens if a group is on an upward trajectory in membership.

Overall I fully share your opinion that we need much more ambition and a spirit of optimism and I am excited for the future of the Göttingen local group!

Another thing that came to my mind recently. In Germany many EA meetups are still held in english. Maybe there are some people who would be open to EA ideas, but having to listen and more importantly speak english before people they don’t know comes with extra effort. So at the beginning the hurdle for joining may be a just a bit higher.

(I’m an organiser at EA Edinburgh and from Germany.)

Yes. Your point about the social culture at German universities seems crucial. The lack of an extensive extracurricular life in and around the university should lead to smaller EA groups (because of people not looking for student groups, less enthusiasm from organisers, lacking knowledge about how to build such groups, …)

In terms of action plans, I think an important component is getting EA group organisers excited and ambitious. Communication between large, vibrant EA groups and German groups would be good for this. Show them what is possible. And then we probably need upskilling.

Apart from that, German groups probably need the same things as other groups. I think that this is mainly, again, excited organisers, who are willing to put in time. Just in case this is interesting to you, I’m thinking about running a “bootcamp” in the UK for new organisers, fellowship facilitators, etc. to get them excited about organising. (Approaches similar to this seem to have an amazing track record.) Would be happy to chat about this!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and plans, I also think it would be really great to work on scaling up German local groups. :)

I was recently considering the idea of moving to a city with more active EAs, e.g. Berlin or Tübingen, and wonder if this is something we might encourage more generally. E.g. we could make it easier to move to Berlin by supporting finding a flat there, by spreading knowledge about which Bachelor‘s or Master‘s in Berlin are especially good, etc. Maybe also paying the travel costs for people who might want to visit in-person fellowships at EA hubs, so they can see what it’s like to live in more populous EA communities?

Student parliament and university political organizations attract a lot of new students

Anecdotally, student councils of the different departments (Fachschaften) also swallow up a lot of engagement, maybe more so than in other countries?

Also anecdotally, the three Amnesty groups I was part of more or less also struggled with the same problems as the few German EA groups I’m more familiar with.

Your plan for a semester sounds excellent. Some questions I have are: To what extent are German university groups already doing these things? Are they running introductory fellowships, and if so, what are the main levers by which we can make these programs more successful? What is the most successful Germany EA university group, and how could other German uni groups replicate their success?

In the past year, I’ve had the honor of starting EA at Georgia Tech (in the United States), and its growth has exceeded anything I would have anticipated if you had asked me a year ago. I started off in April 2021 by advertising the virtual intro fellowship in lots of large group chats and on the university Reddit, and we had about eight people participating that round. Advertising the program again in the fall semester, both on mailing lists and in group chats, we had 35 participants that semester, six of whom joined our organizing team. This semester, we’ll have 62 participants in our intro program, 27 in our reading group of The Precipice, and 36 in AI Safety Fundamentals. I’m really excited for our group’s future, and I hope that my experience may be helpful for German uni groups as well.

I think our most important activities were advertising the intro fellowship (especially on lots of mailing lists and large group chats), and then running it. Everything else we did – general discussion meetings, free vegan lunches, a computer science careers workshop, etc. – was of secondary importance for the purpose of building up the group and having more organizer capacity. So if you have limited time, I would try to focus your efforts on helping the advertising reach an incredible number of university students, though the other activities seem helpful as well. Maybe have calls with the uni groups to try to help them make their advertising strategy the best that it can be. But take my thoughts with a grain of salt, as maybe Georgia Tech is very different from German universities.