Thanks! I’m sympathetic to the broad idea here, but the pitfalls you point out seem pretty significant (maybe less so for the 3-week version, but that one also seems most similar to the current structure).
My main hesitation with activity-based fellowships is that intro fellowships are already pretty light on content (as you point out, they could fit in a busy weekend), so I suspect that cutting content even more would mean leaving even more massive gaps in participants’ knowledge of EA. (Right now, content is roughly an intro to core EA mindsets and an intro to the main cause areas—what can be cut?) Then, I’d worry that by default we’d get a bunch of people doing vaguely EA-related projects, mostly dropping off after a bit (since doing independent projects is hard for many people), and not having read much EA-specific content. E.g. maybe someone will look into how to efficiently prevent floods in wealthy countries and just read about that for a few weeks.
That said, it seems like you’re right that we probably could and should do much better than the status quo. To vaguely gesture toward potential ideas:
Most of my worries about alternatives 1-3 come from the intuition that students will get busy with and prioritize classes, so maybe there’s room for more of these accelerated programs to take place over times when students don’t have classes? (Although then it’s also harder to do in-person interaction.) Or maybe setting it up as a (paid?) larger time commitment (maybe framed as an “internship” or something?) would make students more willing to make and stick to that commitment?
Maybe there’s things we can add to the current intro fellowship, to keep the current baselines of accountability and content but add more optional ways for people to quickly dive in? (E.g. more social events, more opportunities to start organizing, more workshops, etc.)
I’d also be very curious to hear more details about your own (or others’) experience with the fellowship! E.g. which of the limitations of the fellowship felt most salient for you?
Thanks Mauricio! I agree that some of the pitfalls for the alternatives, specifically challenges with accountability (more things being self-directed) and content (shorter timescales affording less time to consume content), seem significant. That said, I’m optimistic that there are ways to mitigate those challenges through program design.
I think we agree that increasing accountability and quality content in Intro Fellowship-like things seems like a good idea. To me, the “current baselines of accountability and content” in the Intro Fellowship are not what we should be striving for and adding more of what already exists might not be the best strategy? (note: I think the worry about students getting busy and prioritizing classes is already an existing problem in Intro Fellowships). The Intro Fellowship misses out on other ways accountability can be increased, some of which I’ve listed below (I liked your ideas around maybe making fellowships prestigious and offering stipends and included them). I also think there are ways to structure content where fellows spend less time reading, but still cover all the core material.
Accountability can come from:
Weekly meetings with facilitator and cohort of peers
Being in-person (at a retreat)
Project deliverables
1-on-1s
Stipends
Making program more prestigious
Mentors / EA professionals
Content: I think more is not always better, and agree with Akash that the Intro Fellowship isn’t sufficiently selective with content / selects for the wrong content. To me, most Intro syllabuses seem unwieldy—ex, there are so many “recommended readings” and exercises which I’ve noticed fellows rarely do. Your concern that fellows might not do enough reading to gain a basic understanding of EA principles / cause areas is very valid. The general idea behind the strategies I share below that might mitigate this is that a more effective way of learning might be for someone to summarize things / identify key ideas for you:
Facilitator synthesizing the readings (maybe through a 15 min presentation)
Facilitator reviewing / approving fellows’ projects to ensure they are sufficiently relevant, there could even be a pre-created list of projects fellows might choose from
A distilled memo session for the week (I honestly think someone could create a 1-3 page memo for each of the weeks in the Intro Fellowship that communicates the important info people should remember)
Identifying key concepts in a given week, and giving each fellow the responsibility to dive deeply into one of the concepts and share learning with their peers
Cutting out misc readings and exercises that most people already ignore, so folks can focus on what’s important
Re: my own experience, the limitations that felt most salient as a fellow was getting stuck in a Fellowship cohort I wasn’t very impressed by, and as a facilitator is committing to a recurring thing for 8 weeks. While circulating drafts of this post, various people felt very strongly about different downsides though, so I’m not sure if there’s one downside that emerges as the biggest limitation.
Yup, to be clear I didn’t mean to suggest “more of the same,” although you’re right that my examples near the end may have been overly anchored to the events fellowships currently have.
a more effective way of learning might be for someone to summarize things / identify key ideas for you
Hm, maybe. One hypothesis is that people tend to understand and remember ideas much better if they engage with them for longer amounts of time. If true, I think this would mean more (good) content is better. This seems likely to me because:
It seems much more common for people to have big life/worldview changes from books than from talks or articles.
Collections of somewhat detailed readings let people check links, see responses to a wide range of counterarguments, look things up if they’re missing context, and more generally get a more thorough version of an argument.
A bunch of core motivations for EA and its cause areas are potentially paradigm-shifting, so they seem especially hard for people to quickly slot into their existing worldviews.
More time spent on an idea --> more attention spent on it, more chances to make downstream updates
Much of the K-college educational system seems built on this assumption (which is definitely not rock-solid evidence, but it’s some evidence)
The spacing effect is a thing (unless that too has failed to replicate?)
So I’m skeptical that people can “really get” ideas like “we’re always in triage,” or “maybe animals matter,” or “maybe we should think a lot about the future” from just brief summaries. (Brief summaries accompanied by things that motivate people to look into things more deeply on their own seem great, if we can pull that off.)
So I’m still hesitant about replacing content with projects. Still excited about:
Content + additional ways to dive in
Or replacing some content with other activities that encourage deep engagement (e.g. certain retreats) if we can figure out good follow-up
(I’m also not sure about the self-directed fellowship format—we could mitigate the relevant downsides by adding accountability measures, but doesn’t that largely bring it back to being a not-so-self-directed fellowship? We could also do more individualized accountability like 1-on-1′s, but that’s significantly more costly.)
Thanks! I’m sympathetic to the broad idea here, but the pitfalls you point out seem pretty significant (maybe less so for the 3-week version, but that one also seems most similar to the current structure).
My main hesitation with activity-based fellowships is that intro fellowships are already pretty light on content (as you point out, they could fit in a busy weekend), so I suspect that cutting content even more would mean leaving even more massive gaps in participants’ knowledge of EA. (Right now, content is roughly an intro to core EA mindsets and an intro to the main cause areas—what can be cut?) Then, I’d worry that by default we’d get a bunch of people doing vaguely EA-related projects, mostly dropping off after a bit (since doing independent projects is hard for many people), and not having read much EA-specific content. E.g. maybe someone will look into how to efficiently prevent floods in wealthy countries and just read about that for a few weeks.
That said, it seems like you’re right that we probably could and should do much better than the status quo. To vaguely gesture toward potential ideas:
Most of my worries about alternatives 1-3 come from the intuition that students will get busy with and prioritize classes, so maybe there’s room for more of these accelerated programs to take place over times when students don’t have classes? (Although then it’s also harder to do in-person interaction.) Or maybe setting it up as a (paid?) larger time commitment (maybe framed as an “internship” or something?) would make students more willing to make and stick to that commitment?
Maybe there’s things we can add to the current intro fellowship, to keep the current baselines of accountability and content but add more optional ways for people to quickly dive in? (E.g. more social events, more opportunities to start organizing, more workshops, etc.)
I’d also be very curious to hear more details about your own (or others’) experience with the fellowship! E.g. which of the limitations of the fellowship felt most salient for you?
Thanks Mauricio! I agree that some of the pitfalls for the alternatives, specifically challenges with accountability (more things being self-directed) and content (shorter timescales affording less time to consume content), seem significant. That said, I’m optimistic that there are ways to mitigate those challenges through program design.
I think we agree that increasing accountability and quality content in Intro Fellowship-like things seems like a good idea. To me, the “current baselines of accountability and content” in the Intro Fellowship are not what we should be striving for and adding more of what already exists might not be the best strategy? (note: I think the worry about students getting busy and prioritizing classes is already an existing problem in Intro Fellowships). The Intro Fellowship misses out on other ways accountability can be increased, some of which I’ve listed below (I liked your ideas around maybe making fellowships prestigious and offering stipends and included them). I also think there are ways to structure content where fellows spend less time reading, but still cover all the core material.
Accountability can come from:
Weekly meetings with facilitator and cohort of peers
Being in-person (at a retreat)
Project deliverables
1-on-1s
Stipends
Making program more prestigious
Mentors / EA professionals
Content: I think more is not always better, and agree with Akash that the Intro Fellowship isn’t sufficiently selective with content / selects for the wrong content. To me, most Intro syllabuses seem unwieldy—ex, there are so many “recommended readings” and exercises which I’ve noticed fellows rarely do. Your concern that fellows might not do enough reading to gain a basic understanding of EA principles / cause areas is very valid. The general idea behind the strategies I share below that might mitigate this is that a more effective way of learning might be for someone to summarize things / identify key ideas for you:
Facilitator synthesizing the readings (maybe through a 15 min presentation)
Facilitator reviewing / approving fellows’ projects to ensure they are sufficiently relevant, there could even be a pre-created list of projects fellows might choose from
A distilled memo session for the week (I honestly think someone could create a 1-3 page memo for each of the weeks in the Intro Fellowship that communicates the important info people should remember)
Identifying key concepts in a given week, and giving each fellow the responsibility to dive deeply into one of the concepts and share learning with their peers
Cutting out misc readings and exercises that most people already ignore, so folks can focus on what’s important
Re: my own experience, the limitations that felt most salient as a fellow was getting stuck in a Fellowship cohort I wasn’t very impressed by, and as a facilitator is committing to a recurring thing for 8 weeks. While circulating drafts of this post, various people felt very strongly about different downsides though, so I’m not sure if there’s one downside that emerges as the biggest limitation.
Thanks!
Yup, to be clear I didn’t mean to suggest “more of the same,” although you’re right that my examples near the end may have been overly anchored to the events fellowships currently have.
Hm, maybe. One hypothesis is that people tend to understand and remember ideas much better if they engage with them for longer amounts of time. If true, I think this would mean more (good) content is better. This seems likely to me because:
It seems much more common for people to have big life/worldview changes from books than from talks or articles.
Collections of somewhat detailed readings let people check links, see responses to a wide range of counterarguments, look things up if they’re missing context, and more generally get a more thorough version of an argument.
A bunch of core motivations for EA and its cause areas are potentially paradigm-shifting, so they seem especially hard for people to quickly slot into their existing worldviews.
More time spent on an idea --> more attention spent on it, more chances to make downstream updates
Much of the K-college educational system seems built on this assumption (which is definitely not rock-solid evidence, but it’s some evidence)
The spacing effect is a thing (unless that too has failed to replicate?)
So I’m skeptical that people can “really get” ideas like “we’re always in triage,” or “maybe animals matter,” or “maybe we should think a lot about the future” from just brief summaries. (Brief summaries accompanied by things that motivate people to look into things more deeply on their own seem great, if we can pull that off.)
So I’m still hesitant about replacing content with projects. Still excited about:
Content + additional ways to dive in
Or replacing some content with other activities that encourage deep engagement (e.g. certain retreats) if we can figure out good follow-up
(I’m also not sure about the self-directed fellowship format—we could mitigate the relevant downsides by adding accountability measures, but doesn’t that largely bring it back to being a not-so-self-directed fellowship? We could also do more individualized accountability like 1-on-1′s, but that’s significantly more costly.)