Based on this post, conversations with students, and the comments, seems like it might be worth community organizers’ time to brainstorm project ideas (as separate from activity ideas within the fellowship) that would be learning opportunities but actually valuable uses of people’s time. If someone thinks this has already been well done, or really tried such that we should update that there aren’t so many, I’d love to be linked to it.
1a. Categories I’ve heard of /thought of /mentioned in this comments section are:
summarizing / explaining / making cross-media versions of readings (Michael Aird has argued for things like this): can create things that if good, are valuable for other people who want to understand those readings, and in doing the summarization will hopefully learn the ideas more deeply
research: there are many lists of open questions and problems, and then the bottlenecks are probably mentors and research skill, but if there’s low hanging fruit, or this and previous category can be combined into a literature review, that seems good
Activities and making things more interactive seems great, I’ll try to put together a short form soon with some ideas
3a. I wonder if letting highly engaged people go faster is actually easily fixable given how much podcast and other content there is. If someone’s excited after the first meeting or two, they can just listen to 80ks intro series or any that look interesting, without going ahead in the fellowship. Is the problem that then they’d be too well informed?
Based on this post, conversations with students, and the comments, seems like it might be worth community organizers’ time to brainstorm project ideas (as separate from activity ideas within the fellowship) that would be learning opportunities but actually valuable uses of people’s time. If someone thinks this has already been well done, or really tried such that we should update that there aren’t so many, I’d love to be linked to it.
1a. Categories I’ve heard of /thought of /mentioned in this comments section are:
low intensity but valuable, like communication projects (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/53Wcw73rav4rkQ4WM/ea-communication-project-ideas)
summarizing / explaining / making cross-media versions of readings (Michael Aird has argued for things like this): can create things that if good, are valuable for other people who want to understand those readings, and in doing the summarization will hopefully learn the ideas more deeply
research: there are many lists of open questions and problems, and then the bottlenecks are probably mentors and research skill, but if there’s low hanging fruit, or this and previous category can be combined into a literature review, that seems good
Activities and making things more interactive seems great, I’ll try to put together a short form soon with some ideas
3a. I wonder if letting highly engaged people go faster is actually easily fixable given how much podcast and other content there is. If someone’s excited after the first meeting or two, they can just listen to 80ks intro series or any that look interesting, without going ahead in the fellowship. Is the problem that then they’d be too well informed?
3b. To akash’s point below, anyone especially interested in EA content who would benefit from epistemics reading should maybe just read the sequences/scout mindset (there are now 2⁄6 small, aesthetically nice books of sequence essays, the first one is here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Map-Territory-Rationality-AI-Zombies/dp/1939311233/ref=asc_df_1939311233/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=310805555931&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5539477848737037867&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1006976&hvtargid=pla-594520181470&psc=1&th=1&psc=1) and push them to incorporate those ideas into the fellowship.