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?
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!
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?
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!
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.)