An interesting, but potentially contentious and risky, approach could be to target a small number of high schools whose pupils have historically tended to wield outsized influence on the world. Certainly in the UK, these schools are pretty well-known. Focussing outreach on them would seem, naively, to be very efficient—but also throw up reputational issues in terms of equity and inclusiveness.
I’d expect a more significant risk to be that the outreach just wouldn’t work. I expect that for EA outreach to be effective, you need to significantly filter for a bunch of things, like altruism, truth-seeking, reliance on evidence and reason, meta-cognition, etc. I’d expect a school like Eton to filter pretty hard for expected future influence on the world, but not for probability of being interested in EA?
Though I guess it somewhat filters for intelligence, which correlates a bit with those things
Though I guess it somewhat filters for intelligence, which correlates a bit with those things
As someone who went to a top private school I would agree with this, although admit it’s not a perfect correlation.
Indeed I think we could do some targeting within top schools as you get a variety of students with different interests. You will get those who want to go to debating society and discuss the big issues of the day. You will get those are bored in every class waiting to get to the sports pitch. You will get maths geniuses who are pretty consumed by pursuing pure maths without much thought about the impact they will have. And you will get some who don’t really want to be there.
So potential targeting could look like—EA outreach for students that actually sign up for it (obviously they will be interested then), for those taking philosophy A-level, for those in debating society (we could even arrange for a debate on a relevant topic), for those participating in Maths Olympiads etc. This targeting could bear more fruit than just ‘outreach to Etonians’.
An interesting, but potentially contentious and risky, approach could be to target a small number of high schools whose pupils have historically tended to wield outsized influence on the world. Certainly in the UK, these schools are pretty well-known. Focussing outreach on them would seem, naively, to be very efficient—but also throw up reputational issues in terms of equity and inclusiveness.
I’d expect a more significant risk to be that the outreach just wouldn’t work. I expect that for EA outreach to be effective, you need to significantly filter for a bunch of things, like altruism, truth-seeking, reliance on evidence and reason, meta-cognition, etc. I’d expect a school like Eton to filter pretty hard for expected future influence on the world, but not for probability of being interested in EA?
Though I guess it somewhat filters for intelligence, which correlates a bit with those things
As someone who went to a top private school I would agree with this, although admit it’s not a perfect correlation.
Indeed I think we could do some targeting within top schools as you get a variety of students with different interests. You will get those who want to go to debating society and discuss the big issues of the day. You will get those are bored in every class waiting to get to the sports pitch. You will get maths geniuses who are pretty consumed by pursuing pure maths without much thought about the impact they will have. And you will get some who don’t really want to be there.
So potential targeting could look like—EA outreach for students that actually sign up for it (obviously they will be interested then), for those taking philosophy A-level, for those in debating society (we could even arrange for a debate on a relevant topic), for those participating in Maths Olympiads etc. This targeting could bear more fruit than just ‘outreach to Etonians’.