I’ve spoken a lot with the Cambridge lot about this. I guess the cruxes of my disagreement with their approach are:
1) I think their committee model selects more for willingness to do menial tasks for the prestige of being in the committee, rather than actual enthusiasm for effective altruism. So something like what you described happens where “a section become more high-fidelity later, and it ends up not making that much difference”, as people who aren’t actually interested drop out. But it comes at the cost of more engaged people spending time on management.
2) From my understanding, Cambridge viewed the 1 year roles as a way of being able to ‘lock in’ people to engage with EA for 1 year and create a norm of committee attending events. But my model of someone who ends up being very engaged in EA is that excitement about the content drives most of the motivation, rather than external commitment devices. So I suppose roles only play a limited role in committing people to engage, but comes at the cost of people spending X hours on admin, when they could have spent X hours on learning more about EA.
It’s worth noting that I think Cambridge have recently been thinking hard about this, and also I expect their models for how their committee provides value to be much more nuanced than I present. Nevertheless, I think (1) and (2) capture useful points of disagreement I’ve had with them in the past.
as people who aren’t actually interested drop out.
This depends on what you mean by ‘drop out’. Only around 10% (~5) of our committee dropped out during last year, although maybe 1/3rd chose not to rejoin the committee this year (and about another 1/3rd are graduating)
2) From my understanding, Cambridge viewed the 1 year roles as a way of being able to ‘lock in’ people to engage with EA for 1 year and create a norm of committee attending events.
This does not ring especially true to me, see my reply to Josh.
Thanks for the comment JoshP!
I’ve spoken a lot with the Cambridge lot about this. I guess the cruxes of my disagreement with their approach are:
1) I think their committee model selects more for willingness to do menial tasks for the prestige of being in the committee, rather than actual enthusiasm for effective altruism. So something like what you described happens where “a section become more high-fidelity later, and it ends up not making that much difference”, as people who aren’t actually interested drop out. But it comes at the cost of more engaged people spending time on management.
2) From my understanding, Cambridge viewed the 1 year roles as a way of being able to ‘lock in’ people to engage with EA for 1 year and create a norm of committee attending events. But my model of someone who ends up being very engaged in EA is that excitement about the content drives most of the motivation, rather than external commitment devices. So I suppose roles only play a limited role in committing people to engage, but comes at the cost of people spending X hours on admin, when they could have spent X hours on learning more about EA.
It’s worth noting that I think Cambridge have recently been thinking hard about this, and also I expect their models for how their committee provides value to be much more nuanced than I present. Nevertheless, I think (1) and (2) capture useful points of disagreement I’ve had with them in the past.
This depends on what you mean by ‘drop out’. Only around 10% (~5) of our committee dropped out during last year, although maybe 1/3rd chose not to rejoin the committee this year (and about another 1/3rd are graduating)
This does not ring especially true to me, see my reply to Josh.