I think targeted high school outreach has always looked (incredibly) good a priori. The question is whether it works in practice. At least in UK/EU, I can’t think of anyone who came through sparc/eurosparc/shic and is now working full-time on EA. Probably a couple of students, but their impact is still to be determined. Until a couple of years ago, people were saying the same thing in the Bay Area. Which would suggest all of these programs have a <1% conversion rate, and that high school outreach might have an even lower conversion rate than university group outreach (for whatever reasons). Your suggestiom that this is changed is interesting—if you can say more without getting into awkward “naming names” it’d be pretty useful.
I don’t want to name individuals on a public forum, but noting that there are at least a couple of individuals at FHI who passed through one of the programmes you mention (I don’t know about counterfactual attribution).
Also, some may still resemble “students”/apprentices with “impact still to be determined”. I guess ESPR may be hard to evaluate 4 years in, but shouldn’t SPARC students be beyond that stage, if the program has run for 8 or so years? American data could be very useful...
Without entering into too many sensitive details, when I have looked at the output of similar programs I have noticed that I was excited about the career path of 1 out of every 3 participants.
But a) I dont know how much of it was counterfactual, b) when I made the estimation I had an incentive to produce an optimistic answer and c) it relies on my subjective judgement, which you may not trust.
Also worth noting that I think that the raw conversion rate is not the right metric to focus on—the outliers usually account for most the impact of these programs.
First EuroSPARC was in 2016. Targeting 16-19 year olds, my prior would be participants should still mostly study, and not work full-time on EA, or only exceptionally.
Long feedback loops are certainly a disadvantage.
Also in the meantime ESPR underwent various changes and actually is not optimising for something like “conversion rate to an EA attractor state”.
I think targeted high school outreach has always looked (incredibly) good a priori. The question is whether it works in practice. At least in UK/EU, I can’t think of anyone who came through sparc/eurosparc/shic and is now working full-time on EA. Probably a couple of students, but their impact is still to be determined. Until a couple of years ago, people were saying the same thing in the Bay Area. Which would suggest all of these programs have a <1% conversion rate, and that high school outreach might have an even lower conversion rate than university group outreach (for whatever reasons). Your suggestiom that this is changed is interesting—if you can say more without getting into awkward “naming names” it’d be pretty useful.
I don’t want to name individuals on a public forum, but noting that there are at least a couple of individuals at FHI who passed through one of the programmes you mention (I don’t know about counterfactual attribution).
Also, some may still resemble “students”/apprentices with “impact still to be determined”. I guess ESPR may be hard to evaluate 4 years in, but shouldn’t SPARC students be beyond that stage, if the program has run for 8 or so years? American data could be very useful...
Without entering into too many sensitive details, when I have looked at the output of similar programs I have noticed that I was excited about the career path of 1 out of every 3 participants.
But a) I dont know how much of it was counterfactual, b) when I made the estimation I had an incentive to produce an optimistic answer and c) it relies on my subjective judgement, which you may not trust.
Also worth noting that I think that the raw conversion rate is not the right metric to focus on—the outliers usually account for most the impact of these programs.
First EuroSPARC was in 2016. Targeting 16-19 year olds, my prior would be participants should still mostly study, and not work full-time on EA, or only exceptionally.
Long feedback loops are certainly a disadvantage.
Also in the meantime ESPR underwent various changes and actually is not optimising for something like “conversion rate to an EA attractor state”.