As someone who organized at the University of Mississippi—a school of loosely 20K undergrads—I can say that I understand this sentiment and there probably is some merit to it, but I am also somewhat skeptical.
Tl;dr: Outreach capabilities presumably do not linearly scale with university size, and I suspect higher-prestige universities probably attract a substantially greater proportion (5x-20x?) of engagement-adjusted EA-inclined students than most middle-tier universities, which may offset the bigger pool at larger universities. But there are probably some mid- to high-tier universities with large populations worth targeting, and there may be other meaningful benefits (e.g., diversity)
TBC, I agree that there are probably a variety of >30K undergrad schools that might be good places to organize at, in part due to the larger population. Additionally, there are probably meaningful benefits from having a more socioeconomically and/or educationally diverse population (even if only so that EA doesn’t seem as elitist).
However, I found that despite Ole Miss’ population being larger by a sizable factor than many ivy schools, organizing at Ole Miss was far less effective relative to the experiences I’ve heard from many Ivy League schools.
With the caveats that I may have simply not been a good organizer (in part due to personality and in part due to the fact that I only had 3 semesters left and became busy with my thesis in the last two), the person who said they’d co-organize with me ended up flaking (and I wasn’t able to find another co-organizer), and COVID hit the semester after it was created: I probably put in some ~5-10 hours a week on average for most of the semester when I began the org, and still struggled to get people interested.
I put up fliers, blasted groupmes, told people in clubs (especially debate, which probably made up about 50% of regular attendance), tabled at the fresher fair, invited friends, ran informational sessions in welcome week, asked faculty to send emails to departments, got the org included in the honors college newsletter, gave brief presentations in a few classes totaling some 150–200 students (e.g., philosophy and ethics classes), got school funding for free pizza, and at one point even submitted an unrelated article to a student publication on the condition that the editor would attend a discussion meeting (his idea, not mine)—but still failed to attract a co-organizer or maintain sufficient attendance into the second semester.
(At the time, I was not aware of retreats and fellowships, and probably wouldn’t have had the capacity; they also might have been fairly new/limited in 2019)
In contrast, the stories I’ve heard and seen at more prestigious universities tend to be that even with a significantly smaller student population, a number of students happily dive into EA events with relatively little hand-holding or encouragement, and some even happily volunteer to help out with organizing.
In summary, some of my thoughts have been:
I think that ivy leagues just attract a significantly greater proportion of EA-inclined people. In contrast, I think that many high-impact/proto-EA/EA-inclined people just don’t choose to attend most middle-tier universities like Ole Miss. Personally, I was a proto-EA through most of high school and college, and the reasons that I attended Ole Miss are complicated/uncommon (probably including: I was homeschooled, a bit lazy about college choices, simplistically settled on a career path I figured was high-impact without doing much research, that career path was intelligence analysis which isn’t a common minor/major, and Ole Miss had fantastic scholarships). At the risk of sounding very pretentious, I’ll say I often felt out of place among my peers at Ole Miss—and retrospectively think I was especially out of place now that I’ve interacted with more EAs (and other people) from higher-prestige universities. If an Ivy League population is ~1/5th that of a large university but the prevalence of Proto-EAs is >5x that at middle-tier large universities (it might be more like 10–20x), then it’s worth prioritizing Ivies, ceteris paribus.
Your reach does not linearly correlate with the size of the university: you shouldn’t expect to reach 5x as many people at a university 5x the size, in part due to attention competition with other organizations (especially Greek). Additionally, it’s probably easier to attract people you know rather than total randos, and you can’t just know proportionally more people at larger universities.
I think that you make a good point. The narrative of “bigger = better” is a vast simplification. Perhaps there are other useful factors in addition to student population that we can look at, such as “% of students majoring in non-profit management, environmental studies, etc.” as a rough proxy for the level of “proto-EA-ness” in a student population.
I wonder if there is some good enough to be useful way to evaluate the prevalence of Proto-EAs on a university campus. I’m trying to think of how to create a rough/toy function the of: student population, prevalence of Proto-EAs (as measured by some proxy)… but what other factors would be useful?
If “eliteness” really is a useful metric, then maybe it would make sense to prioritize university outreach to the top X universities, but maybe X should be 30 or 50 or 80 rather than 10.
Perhaps there are other useful factors in addition to student population that we can look at, such as “% of students majoring in non-profit management, environmental studies, etc.” as a rough proxy for the level of “proto-EA-ness” in a student population.
I agree that those specific examples are probably not great proxies, but things related to machine learning or other important technologies might be good—especially in conjunction with information about the competitiveness of the programs.
Anecdotally, the most engaged young EAs I’ve come across are usually heavily into liberal arts (a lot of philo and history majors) or CS majors. I’d find it difficult to make meaningful major-specific strategies off of that.
Hmm at the (strong) danger of selecting too much on traits that I think I or my friends are likely to have, rather than predictors of actual expected impact:
enjoyment of rationalist-y writing
vegetarianism or other predictors of moral choices, particularly at an unusually young age
though I think an increasingly high percentage of young liberals are vegetarians these days, so it’s probably a weaker signal
preference for utilitarianism-like thinking
preference for analytic philosophy in general
high general cognitive ability
International Math (or Physics, or Informatics etc) Olympiad gold/silver medalists, or other signifiers of outlier ability
which universities have (impact- or engagement- weighted) EA alumni
evidence of wanting to/being able to think from the perspective of others, e.g. debate/philosophy club
I thought Joseph was trying to identify proxies that you could easily measure at the university level, e.g., by collecting stats from university webpages. Some of the proxies you mention—e.g., “enjoyment of rationalist-y writing”—don’t seem to fit this goal, as they seem more targeted to the individual (or are just not already collected and reported at the university level). Granted, some such as IMO medalists and EA alumni representation do seem amenable to such analysis, although the latter seems like it would be a very laggy-metric.
Something like “existence of and participation in speech & debate clubs and related extracurriculars (e.g., ethics bowl, Model UN, Mock Trial)” seems like it would be worth looking into as a candidate.
I feel like I read that someone was working on this at some point, although maybe I just conflated this question with something related. Whatever I read that I am thinking of was probably co-authored by Lucius Caviola, but I’m not sure.
This actually aligns with my experience as well. Without external prompting, I find that students from “elite” schools were the most proactive. In Singapore there’s only been one high school chapter. EA SG would have supported any HS student who asked, but that school was the only one that had any. Likewise, I later cofounded a climate advocacy org with someone I messaged on Twitter who was the first person to conduct climate protest in Singapore, and us cofounders were from the two top schools even though we would have taken anyone. I suppose it’s combination of curiosity+privilege.
But in any case, I think it’s good not to assume current movement trends reflect some universal truth. I think EA should broaden its reach as much as it can, and methodical attempts at boosting participation is good. Heck, if you look at the most common alma maters of EAs, there’s some distinctly non-Ivy, non Russell Group unis at the top distributions that prove anomalous outrach efforts can make a difference. No reason to say no to that.
As someone who organized at the University of Mississippi—a school of loosely 20K undergrads—I can say that I understand this sentiment and there probably is some merit to it, but I am also somewhat skeptical.
Tl;dr: Outreach capabilities presumably do not linearly scale with university size, and I suspect higher-prestige universities probably attract a substantially greater proportion (5x-20x?) of engagement-adjusted EA-inclined students than most middle-tier universities, which may offset the bigger pool at larger universities. But there are probably some mid- to high-tier universities with large populations worth targeting, and there may be other meaningful benefits (e.g., diversity)
TBC, I agree that there are probably a variety of >30K undergrad schools that might be good places to organize at, in part due to the larger population. Additionally, there are probably meaningful benefits from having a more socioeconomically and/or educationally diverse population (even if only so that EA doesn’t seem as elitist).
However, I found that despite Ole Miss’ population being larger by a sizable factor than many ivy schools, organizing at Ole Miss was far less effective relative to the experiences I’ve heard from many Ivy League schools.
With the caveats that I may have simply not been a good organizer (in part due to personality and in part due to the fact that I only had 3 semesters left and became busy with my thesis in the last two), the person who said they’d co-organize with me ended up flaking (and I wasn’t able to find another co-organizer), and COVID hit the semester after it was created: I probably put in some ~5-10 hours a week on average for most of the semester when I began the org, and still struggled to get people interested.
I put up fliers, blasted groupmes, told people in clubs (especially debate, which probably made up about 50% of regular attendance), tabled at the fresher fair, invited friends, ran informational sessions in welcome week, asked faculty to send emails to departments, got the org included in the honors college newsletter, gave brief presentations in a few classes totaling some 150–200 students (e.g., philosophy and ethics classes), got school funding for free pizza, and at one point even submitted an unrelated article to a student publication on the condition that the editor would attend a discussion meeting (his idea, not mine)—but still failed to attract a co-organizer or maintain sufficient attendance into the second semester.
(At the time, I was not aware of retreats and fellowships, and probably wouldn’t have had the capacity; they also might have been fairly new/limited in 2019)
In contrast, the stories I’ve heard and seen at more prestigious universities tend to be that even with a significantly smaller student population, a number of students happily dive into EA events with relatively little hand-holding or encouragement, and some even happily volunteer to help out with organizing.
In summary, some of my thoughts have been:
I think that ivy leagues just attract a significantly greater proportion of EA-inclined people. In contrast, I think that many high-impact/proto-EA/EA-inclined people just don’t choose to attend most middle-tier universities like Ole Miss. Personally, I was a proto-EA through most of high school and college, and the reasons that I attended Ole Miss are complicated/uncommon (probably including: I was homeschooled, a bit lazy about college choices, simplistically settled on a career path I figured was high-impact without doing much research, that career path was intelligence analysis which isn’t a common minor/major, and Ole Miss had fantastic scholarships). At the risk of sounding very pretentious, I’ll say I often felt out of place among my peers at Ole Miss—and retrospectively think I was especially out of place now that I’ve interacted with more EAs (and other people) from higher-prestige universities. If an Ivy League population is ~1/5th that of a large university but the prevalence of Proto-EAs is >5x that at middle-tier large universities (it might be more like 10–20x), then it’s worth prioritizing Ivies, ceteris paribus.
Your reach does not linearly correlate with the size of the university: you shouldn’t expect to reach 5x as many people at a university 5x the size, in part due to attention competition with other organizations (especially Greek). Additionally, it’s probably easier to attract people you know rather than total randos, and you can’t just know proportionally more people at larger universities.
I think that you make a good point. The narrative of “bigger = better” is a vast simplification. Perhaps there are other useful factors in addition to student population that we can look at, such as “% of students majoring in non-profit management, environmental studies, etc.” as a rough proxy for the level of “proto-EA-ness” in a student population.
I wonder if there is some good enough to be useful way to evaluate the prevalence of Proto-EAs on a university campus. I’m trying to think of how to create a rough/toy function the of: student population, prevalence of Proto-EAs (as measured by some proxy)… but what other factors would be useful?
If “eliteness” really is a useful metric, then maybe it would make sense to prioritize university outreach to the top X universities, but maybe X should be 30 or 50 or 80 rather than 10.
I expect this to be a pretty poor proxy fwiw.
I agree that those specific examples are probably not great proxies, but things related to machine learning or other important technologies might be good—especially in conjunction with information about the competitiveness of the programs.
Yeah there’s way too many variables.
Anecdotally, the most engaged young EAs I’ve come across are usually heavily into liberal arts (a lot of philo and history majors) or CS majors. I’d find it difficult to make meaningful major-specific strategies off of that.
I agree that it is pretty sloppy/rough. Can you share any suggestions for better proxies?
Hmm at the (strong) danger of selecting too much on traits that I think I or my friends are likely to have, rather than predictors of actual expected impact:
enjoyment of rationalist-y writing
vegetarianism or other predictors of moral choices, particularly at an unusually young age
though I think an increasingly high percentage of young liberals are vegetarians these days, so it’s probably a weaker signal
preference for utilitarianism-like thinking
preference for analytic philosophy in general
high general cognitive ability
International Math (or Physics, or Informatics etc) Olympiad gold/silver medalists, or other signifiers of outlier ability
which universities have (impact- or engagement- weighted) EA alumni
evidence of wanting to/being able to think from the perspective of others, e.g. debate/philosophy club
I thought Joseph was trying to identify proxies that you could easily measure at the university level, e.g., by collecting stats from university webpages. Some of the proxies you mention—e.g., “enjoyment of rationalist-y writing”—don’t seem to fit this goal, as they seem more targeted to the individual (or are just not already collected and reported at the university level). Granted, some such as IMO medalists and EA alumni representation do seem amenable to such analysis, although the latter seems like it would be a very laggy-metric.
Something like “existence of and participation in speech & debate clubs and related extracurriculars (e.g., ethics bowl, Model UN, Mock Trial)” seems like it would be worth looking into as a candidate.
I feel like I read that someone was working on this at some point, although maybe I just conflated this question with something related. Whatever I read that I am thinking of was probably co-authored by Lucius Caviola, but I’m not sure.
This actually aligns with my experience as well. Without external prompting, I find that students from “elite” schools were the most proactive. In Singapore there’s only been one high school chapter. EA SG would have supported any HS student who asked, but that school was the only one that had any. Likewise, I later cofounded a climate advocacy org with someone I messaged on Twitter who was the first person to conduct climate protest in Singapore, and us cofounders were from the two top schools even though we would have taken anyone. I suppose it’s combination of curiosity+privilege.
But in any case, I think it’s good not to assume current movement trends reflect some universal truth. I think EA should broaden its reach as much as it can, and methodical attempts at boosting participation is good. Heck, if you look at the most common alma maters of EAs, there’s some distinctly non-Ivy, non Russell Group unis at the top distributions that prove anomalous outrach efforts can make a difference. No reason to say no to that.