EA Berkeley seemed more positive about their student-led EA class, calling it “very successful”, but we believe it was many times less ambitious
Yeah, that’s accurate. I doubt that any of our students are more likely to go into prioritization research as a result of the class. I could name a few people who might change their career as a result of the class, but that would also be a pretty low number, and for each individual person I’d put the probability at less than 50%. “Very successful” here means that a large fraction of the students were convinced of EA ideas and were taking actions in support of them (such as taking the GWWC pledge, and going veg*n). It certainly seems a lot harder to cause career changes, without explicitly selecting for people who want to change their career (as in an 80K workshop).
We implicitly predicted that other team members would also be more motivated by the ambitious nature of the Project, but this turned out not to be the case. If anything, motivation increased after we shifted to less ambitious goals.
We observed the same thing. In the first iteration of EA Berkeley’s class, there was some large amount of money (probably ~$5000) that was allocated for the final project, and students were asked to propose projects that they could run with that money. This was in some sense even more ambitious than OxPrio, since donating it to a charity was a baseline—students were encouraged to think of more out-of-the-box ideas as well. What ended up happening was that the project was too open-ended for students to really make progress on, and while people proposed projects because it was required to pass the course, they didn’t actually get implemented, and we used the $5000 to fund costs for EA Berkeley in future semesters.
Yeah, that’s accurate. I doubt that any of our students are more likely to go into prioritization research as a result of the class. I could name a few people who might change their career as a result of the class, but that would also be a pretty low number, and for each individual person I’d put the probability at less than 50%. “Very successful” here means that a large fraction of the students were convinced of EA ideas and were taking actions in support of them (such as taking the GWWC pledge, and going veg*n). It certainly seems a lot harder to cause career changes, without explicitly selecting for people who want to change their career (as in an 80K workshop).
We observed the same thing. In the first iteration of EA Berkeley’s class, there was some large amount of money (probably ~$5000) that was allocated for the final project, and students were asked to propose projects that they could run with that money. This was in some sense even more ambitious than OxPrio, since donating it to a charity was a baseline—students were encouraged to think of more out-of-the-box ideas as well. What ended up happening was that the project was too open-ended for students to really make progress on, and while people proposed projects because it was required to pass the course, they didn’t actually get implemented, and we used the $5000 to fund costs for EA Berkeley in future semesters.