Thanks for this postâthe Campus Specialist program sounds really valuable, well-designed, and exciting!
I want to push back on one passage in the post. This isnât because I think the passage is wrong in a way that affects any bottom-line conclusions here, but because I think itâs basically implying correlation = causation while âsellingâ something (convincing people to apply to your program), and one thing I love about EA is that that sort of thing is rare and gets pushback when it happens. The passage is:
In the past, weâve heard concerns that community building wasnât great for building skills or developing career capital.
We disagree. Former student group organizers are scattered all over the EA movement â people like Aaron, Ben, Caroline, Dewi, and Eli. (Having made our point, weâll stop the alphabet there.)
I think it is in fact true that community building can be great for building skills or developing career capital. Iâd also guess that at least Dewi would say it was great for them in that way, and that some/âall of the others might as well. But that passage doesnât demonstrate that, nor acknowledges that it hasnât demonstrated thatâinstead, it implies that the fact some people did X and now are doing Y implies that doing X will help you do Y, and also sounds very confident about this (implying you could go on and on with more evidence like this, but youâll stop because youâve already provided sufficient evidence).
This felt especially jarring here because:
A substantial portion of all quite engaged EAs did group organizing, so âignoring the denominatorâ here (so to speak) is odd
We already know that things like enthusiasm about EA and being hard-working and such are likely to both contribute to someone choosing to do group organizing and contribute to them having impressive EA-aligned careers, so we can point to specific likely confounding variables, not just vaguely imagine possible confounding variables
I know of specific EAs, myself included, who did group organizing and now have impressive EA-aligned careers but for whom the former hardly contributed to the latter and instead both were caused by confounding variables
(I donât think this is evidence that group organizing is unable to provide useful career capital benefits, but rather that in some cases it doesnât help, perhaps sometimes because the impressive career trajectory was âoverdeterminedâ or because the person wasnât trying to reap career capital benefits from group organizing.)
Again, I in fact agree with the key point that group organizing can be great for career capital. I also expect to strongly encourage someone to apply to this program later today. I just wanted to push back on the reasoning/âargumentation style in those sentences :)
(Maybe this is a weird amount of words to spend on just a short passage when you very likely wouldâve immediately changed the passage anyway if someone had pointed this out to you at draft stageâi.e., it was presumably just a minor, honest mistake. I just feel like thereâs an important norm here.)
Thanks for this postâthe Campus Specialist program sounds really valuable, well-designed, and exciting!
I want to push back on one passage in the post. This isnât because I think the passage is wrong in a way that affects any bottom-line conclusions here, but because I think itâs basically implying correlation = causation while âsellingâ something (convincing people to apply to your program), and one thing I love about EA is that that sort of thing is rare and gets pushback when it happens. The passage is:
I think it is in fact true that community building can be great for building skills or developing career capital. Iâd also guess that at least Dewi would say it was great for them in that way, and that some/âall of the others might as well. But that passage doesnât demonstrate that, nor acknowledges that it hasnât demonstrated thatâinstead, it implies that the fact some people did X and now are doing Y implies that doing X will help you do Y, and also sounds very confident about this (implying you could go on and on with more evidence like this, but youâll stop because youâve already provided sufficient evidence).
This felt especially jarring here because:
A substantial portion of all quite engaged EAs did group organizing, so âignoring the denominatorâ here (so to speak) is odd
We already know that things like enthusiasm about EA and being hard-working and such are likely to both contribute to someone choosing to do group organizing and contribute to them having impressive EA-aligned careers, so we can point to specific likely confounding variables, not just vaguely imagine possible confounding variables
I know of specific EAs, myself included, who did group organizing and now have impressive EA-aligned careers but for whom the former hardly contributed to the latter and instead both were caused by confounding variables
(I donât think this is evidence that group organizing is unable to provide useful career capital benefits, but rather that in some cases it doesnât help, perhaps sometimes because the impressive career trajectory was âoverdeterminedâ or because the person wasnât trying to reap career capital benefits from group organizing.)
Again, I in fact agree with the key point that group organizing can be great for career capital. I also expect to strongly encourage someone to apply to this program later today. I just wanted to push back on the reasoning/âargumentation style in those sentences :)
(Maybe this is a weird amount of words to spend on just a short passage when you very likely wouldâve immediately changed the passage anyway if someone had pointed this out to you at draft stageâi.e., it was presumably just a minor, honest mistake. I just feel like thereâs an important norm here.)
Thanks Michael, these are good points. We should have been more careful here, and plan to edit the post to be more nuanced.