I’d love to hear any advice from how that charity decided which courses would be best for people to do! Also whether there are any specific ones you recommend (if any are applicable in the UK).
I’m afraid that I’m not aware of specific courses that are also offered in the UK.
I think that generally the charity actually didn’t do a great job at selecting the best courses among the available ones. However, my suspicion is that conditional on having selected an appropriate topic there often wasn’t actually that much variance between courses because most of the benefits come from some generic effect of “deliberately reflecting on and practicing X”, with it not being that important how exactly this was one. (Perhaps similar to psychotherapy.)
For courses where all participants were activists from that same charity, I suspect a significant source of benefits was also just collaborative problem solving, and sharing experiences and getting peer advice from others who had faced similar problems.
Another observation is that these courses often involved in-person conversations in small groups, were quite long in total (2 hours to 2 days), and significant use of physical media (e.g. people writing ideas on sheets of paper, and then these being pinned on a wall). By contrast, in my “EA experience” similar things have been done by people spending at most one hour writing in a joint Google doc. I personally find the “non-virtual” variant much more engaging, but I don’t know to what extent this is idiosyncratic.
I’m afraid that I’m not aware of specific courses that are also offered in the UK.
I think that generally the charity actually didn’t do a great job at selecting the best courses among the available ones. However, my suspicion is that conditional on having selected an appropriate topic there often wasn’t actually that much variance between courses because most of the benefits come from some generic effect of “deliberately reflecting on and practicing X”, with it not being that important how exactly this was one. (Perhaps similar to psychotherapy.)
For courses where all participants were activists from that same charity, I suspect a significant source of benefits was also just collaborative problem solving, and sharing experiences and getting peer advice from others who had faced similar problems.
Another observation is that these courses often involved in-person conversations in small groups, were quite long in total (2 hours to 2 days), and significant use of physical media (e.g. people writing ideas on sheets of paper, and then these being pinned on a wall). By contrast, in my “EA experience” similar things have been done by people spending at most one hour writing in a joint Google doc. I personally find the “non-virtual” variant much more engaging, but I don’t know to what extent this is idiosyncratic.