TLDR: I agree that content is important, but I don’t think the current version of the fellowship does a good job emphasizing the right kind of content. I would like to see more on epistemics/principles and less on specific cause areas. Also the activities can be more relevant.
Longer version: I share some of your worries, Mauricio. I think the fellowship (at least, the version that Penn EA does) currently has three kinds of content:
Readings about principles and ways of seeing the world (e.g., counterfactualism, effectiveness mindset, expanding one’s moral circle)
Readings about content and specific information about cause areas (e.g., arguments for global health and development, animal welfare, longtermism, etc.)
Exercises in which people reflect on reading topics (e.g., estimating your future income and the impact you could make with it, sending a letter to a version of yourself from the 1840s and trying to convince them to expand their moral circle)
I think we could cut several of the readings about content and cause areas and replace them with more readings/activities about epistemics and “ways of seeing the world.” Based on my experience as a facilitator, I think the readings on principles/epistemics are usually much more valuable than the readings on cause areas. Also, if you get people fired up about the underlying ideas/principles, I think they’re inclined to read a bit about specific cause areas on their own. And I also worry a bit about the perception that EA is defined by a core set of cause areas (as opposed to being defined by a core set of principles, which then leads people to some cause areas but there is a lot of disagreement here and we should be open to changing cause areas over time etc etc.)
I also think the exercises in the fellowship could be revamped to be a bit more relevant and applied (e.g., more focus on career planning, independent research skills, redteaming EA research reports or project proposals, developing agency, and converting beliefs into actions).
Examples of new exercises: “take 1 hour to research a topic you’re interested in and write a 5-min summary” or “spend 15 minutes brainstorming people who you could talk to in order to address key uncertainties. Then, spend 15 minutes reaching out to them.” (Note: Brainstormed these in 5 mins. These are meant to be illustrative rather than polished).
Sorry, I’m a bit confused about how this relates to my response. It sounds like this is an argument for changing the distribution of content within the current fellowship structure, while my response was meant to be about which changes to the fellowship structure we should make. (Maybe this is meant to address my question about “what [content] can be cut?” to implement an activities-based fellowship? But that doesn’t seem like what you have in mind either, since unlike in the activities-based fellowship you seem to be suggesting that we keep the total amount of readings roughly constant.) So I’ll interpret your comment as an independent case for changing the fellowship content, holding structure constant (rather than as a case for some of the alternative structures proposed in the original post)--let me know if I’ve misunderstood!
I’d mostly be on board with shifting to more materials that convey core principles/mindsets, if we had promising guesses about how to implement this.
My main hesitation: (1) I don’t yet know of additional content that would do this well, and—in the absence of that opportunity cost--(2) the object-level content seems pretty good.
Do you have specific ideas for epistemics/mindset content in mind? I share your interest in adding more such content, but specifically in epistemics I’ve had trouble finding satisfactory content. These are the challenges I’ve come across:
Academic sources that cover epistemics tend to be super long and dry for our target audience
LessWrong Sequences content is spread out among a bunch of small posts that very much build on one another, so one-off readings will often transmit little knowledge
Clearer Thinking doesn’t seem to have that much epistemics-focused content, and its most relevant content is often relatively niche and long
ACX/SSC is very long/tangential, is more controversial, and doesn’t have that much epistemics-focused content
HPMOR / other online fiction is hard to heavily emphasize if we’re trying to signal professionalism/legitimacy
There’s good one-off content on a few things, e.g. Bayes’ Theorem and cognitive biases, but I’m skeptical that these are valuable enough readings to be worth the opportunity cost (skeptical about reading about Bayes’ Theorem because people already roughly apply it intuitively/roughly, while applying it explicitly/precisely is usually intractable; skeptical about cognitive biases readings because the literature suggests we can’t do that much about them).
With mindset/motivational content, we’ve added all the best stuff I’m aware of—curious what else we can add!
I also think the object-level content about cause areas is fairly valuable:
Main EA cause areas are (by design) very unconventional/neglected. So I worry that people might never come across strong arguments for each—or bother to engage with them—if these aren’t put in front of them. Or they might want to engage with the strong versions of these arguments but not know where to find them (sure, they’re somewhere in the EA-sphere, but how will new people know where?)
I’m a bit skeptical of the very sharp distinction between mindsets and cause areas—cause areas provide (a) examples of mindsets/principles (e.g. looking for large-scale problems) being applied, and (b) opportunities to apply mindsets/principles (e.g. “Here are two compelling causes—which should we prioritize? What does this mean for your career?”)
(I also agree the exercises aren’t great, although my sense was that most fellows and facilitators mostly ignore them, so for us they don’t currently seem to be a big part of the fellowship.)
Whoops—definitely meant my comment as a response to “what content can be cut?” And the section about activities was meant to show how some of the activities in the current fellowship are insufficient (in my view) & offer some suggestions for other kinds of activities.
Regardless of whether we shift to a radically new model, or we try to revamp the existing structure, I think it’ll be useful to dissect the current fellowship to see what content we most want to keep/remove.
Will try to respond to the rest at some point soon, but just wanted to clarify!
TLDR: I agree that content is important, but I don’t think the current version of the fellowship does a good job emphasizing the right kind of content. I would like to see more on epistemics/principles and less on specific cause areas. Also the activities can be more relevant.
Longer version: I share some of your worries, Mauricio. I think the fellowship (at least, the version that Penn EA does) currently has three kinds of content:
Readings about principles and ways of seeing the world (e.g., counterfactualism, effectiveness mindset, expanding one’s moral circle)
Readings about content and specific information about cause areas (e.g., arguments for global health and development, animal welfare, longtermism, etc.)
Exercises in which people reflect on reading topics (e.g., estimating your future income and the impact you could make with it, sending a letter to a version of yourself from the 1840s and trying to convince them to expand their moral circle)
I think we could cut several of the readings about content and cause areas and replace them with more readings/activities about epistemics and “ways of seeing the world.” Based on my experience as a facilitator, I think the readings on principles/epistemics are usually much more valuable than the readings on cause areas. Also, if you get people fired up about the underlying ideas/principles, I think they’re inclined to read a bit about specific cause areas on their own. And I also worry a bit about the perception that EA is defined by a core set of cause areas (as opposed to being defined by a core set of principles, which then leads people to some cause areas but there is a lot of disagreement here and we should be open to changing cause areas over time etc etc.)
I also think the exercises in the fellowship could be revamped to be a bit more relevant and applied (e.g., more focus on career planning, independent research skills, redteaming EA research reports or project proposals, developing agency, and converting beliefs into actions).
Examples of new exercises: “take 1 hour to research a topic you’re interested in and write a 5-min summary” or “spend 15 minutes brainstorming people who you could talk to in order to address key uncertainties. Then, spend 15 minutes reaching out to them.” (Note: Brainstormed these in 5 mins. These are meant to be illustrative rather than polished).
Thanks!
Sorry, I’m a bit confused about how this relates to my response. It sounds like this is an argument for changing the distribution of content within the current fellowship structure, while my response was meant to be about which changes to the fellowship structure we should make. (Maybe this is meant to address my question about “what [content] can be cut?” to implement an activities-based fellowship? But that doesn’t seem like what you have in mind either, since unlike in the activities-based fellowship you seem to be suggesting that we keep the total amount of readings roughly constant.) So I’ll interpret your comment as an independent case for changing the fellowship content, holding structure constant (rather than as a case for some of the alternative structures proposed in the original post)--let me know if I’ve misunderstood!
I’d mostly be on board with shifting to more materials that convey core principles/mindsets, if we had promising guesses about how to implement this. My main hesitation: (1) I don’t yet know of additional content that would do this well, and—in the absence of that opportunity cost--(2) the object-level content seems pretty good.
Do you have specific ideas for epistemics/mindset content in mind? I share your interest in adding more such content, but specifically in epistemics I’ve had trouble finding satisfactory content. These are the challenges I’ve come across:
Academic sources that cover epistemics tend to be super long and dry for our target audience
LessWrong Sequences content is spread out among a bunch of small posts that very much build on one another, so one-off readings will often transmit little knowledge
Clearer Thinking doesn’t seem to have that much epistemics-focused content, and its most relevant content is often relatively niche and long
ACX/SSC is very long/tangential, is more controversial, and doesn’t have that much epistemics-focused content
HPMOR / other online fiction is hard to heavily emphasize if we’re trying to signal professionalism/legitimacy
There’s good one-off content on a few things, e.g. Bayes’ Theorem and cognitive biases, but I’m skeptical that these are valuable enough readings to be worth the opportunity cost (skeptical about reading about Bayes’ Theorem because people already roughly apply it intuitively/roughly, while applying it explicitly/precisely is usually intractable; skeptical about cognitive biases readings because the literature suggests we can’t do that much about them).
With mindset/motivational content, we’ve added all the best stuff I’m aware of—curious what else we can add!
I also think the object-level content about cause areas is fairly valuable:
Main EA cause areas are (by design) very unconventional/neglected. So I worry that people might never come across strong arguments for each—or bother to engage with them—if these aren’t put in front of them. Or they might want to engage with the strong versions of these arguments but not know where to find them (sure, they’re somewhere in the EA-sphere, but how will new people know where?)
I’m a bit skeptical of the very sharp distinction between mindsets and cause areas—cause areas provide (a) examples of mindsets/principles (e.g. looking for large-scale problems) being applied, and (b) opportunities to apply mindsets/principles (e.g. “Here are two compelling causes—which should we prioritize? What does this mean for your career?”)
(I also agree the exercises aren’t great, although my sense was that most fellows and facilitators mostly ignore them, so for us they don’t currently seem to be a big part of the fellowship.)
Whoops—definitely meant my comment as a response to “what content can be cut?” And the section about activities was meant to show how some of the activities in the current fellowship are insufficient (in my view) & offer some suggestions for other kinds of activities.
Regardless of whether we shift to a radically new model, or we try to revamp the existing structure, I think it’ll be useful to dissect the current fellowship to see what content we most want to keep/remove.
Will try to respond to the rest at some point soon, but just wanted to clarify!