I think it captures a few different notions. I’ll try and spell out a few salient ones
1) Pushes back against the idea that an outreach talk needs to cover all aspects of EA. e.g. I think some intro EA 45min talks end up being really unsatisfactory as they only have time to skim across loads of different concepts and cause areas lightly. Instead I think it could be OK and even better to do outreach talks that don’t introduce all of EA but do demonstrate a cool and interesting facet of EA epistemology. e.g. I could imagine a talk on differential vs absolute technological progress as being a way to attract new people.
2) Pushes back against running introductory discussion groups. Sometimes it feels like you need to guide someone through the basics, but I’ve found that often you can just lend people books or send them articles and they’ll be able to pick up the same stuff without it taking up your time.
3) Reframes particular community niches, such as a technical AI safety paper reading group, as also a potential entry-point into the broader community. e.g. People find out about the AI group since they study computer science and find it interesting and then get introduced to EA.
I’m still confused: Intuitively, I would understand “Don’t introduce EA” as “Don’t do introductory EA talks”. The “don’t teach” bit also confuses me.
My personal best guess is that EA groups should do regular EA intro talks (maybe 1-2 per year), and should make people curious by touching on some of the core concepts to motivate the audience to read up on these EA ideas on their own. In particular, presenting arguments where relatively uncontroversial assumptions lead to surprising and interesting conclusions (“showing how deep the rabbit hole goes”) often seems to spark such curiosity. My current best guess is that we should aim to “teach” such ideas in “introductory” EA talks, so I’d be interested whether you disagree with this.
Hey! Thanks for the comment.
I think it captures a few different notions. I’ll try and spell out a few salient ones
1) Pushes back against the idea that an outreach talk needs to cover all aspects of EA. e.g. I think some intro EA 45min talks end up being really unsatisfactory as they only have time to skim across loads of different concepts and cause areas lightly. Instead I think it could be OK and even better to do outreach talks that don’t introduce all of EA but do demonstrate a cool and interesting facet of EA epistemology. e.g. I could imagine a talk on differential vs absolute technological progress as being a way to attract new people.
2) Pushes back against running introductory discussion groups. Sometimes it feels like you need to guide someone through the basics, but I’ve found that often you can just lend people books or send them articles and they’ll be able to pick up the same stuff without it taking up your time.
3) Reframes particular community niches, such as a technical AI safety paper reading group, as also a potential entry-point into the broader community. e.g. People find out about the AI group since they study computer science and find it interesting and then get introduced to EA.
I’m still confused: Intuitively, I would understand “Don’t introduce EA” as “Don’t do introductory EA talks”. The “don’t teach” bit also confuses me.
My personal best guess is that EA groups should do regular EA intro talks (maybe 1-2 per year), and should make people curious by touching on some of the core concepts to motivate the audience to read up on these EA ideas on their own. In particular, presenting arguments where relatively uncontroversial assumptions lead to surprising and interesting conclusions (“showing how deep the rabbit hole goes”) often seems to spark such curiosity. My current best guess is that we should aim to “teach” such ideas in “introductory” EA talks, so I’d be interested whether you disagree with this.
I think that makes sense and I agree with you. We also have run the sort of things you describe in Oxford.
Maybe don’t teach can be understood as ‘prefer using resources as a way of conveying ideas, rather than you teaching’.
I agree that we should aim to ‘outreach’, in ‘(on-topic) introductory’ EA talks, and don’t disagree here.