Re: agency of the community itself, I’ve been trying to get to this “pure” form of EA in my university group, and to be honest, it felt extremely hard.
-People who want to learn about EA often feel confused and suspicious until you get to object-level examples. “Ok, impactful career, but concretely, where would that get me? Can you give me an example?”. I’ve faced real resistance when trying to stay abstract.
-It’s hard to keep people’s attention without talking about object-level examples, be it for teaching abstract concepts. It’s even harder once you get to the “projects” phase of the year.
-People anchor hard on some specific object-level examples after that. “Oh, EA ? The malaria thing?” (Despite my go-to examples included things as diverse as shrimp welfare and pandemic preparedness)
-When it’s not an object-level example, it’s usually “utilitarianism” or “Peter Singer”, which act a lot as thought stoppers and have an “eek” vibe for many people.
-People who care about non-typical causes actually have a hard time finding data and making estimates.
-In addition to that, agency for really making estimates is hard to build up. One member I knew thought the most Impactful career choice he had was potentially working on nuclear fusion. I suggested him to find out about the Impact-Tractability-Neglectedness of it to compare to another option he had (even rough OOMs) as well as more traditional ones. I can’t remember him giving any numbers even months later. When he just mentioned he felt sure about the difference, I didn’t feel comfortable arguing about the robustness of his justification. It’s a tough balance to strike between respecting preferences and probing reasons.
-A lot of it comes down to career 1:1s. Completing the ~8 or so parts is already demanding. You have to provide estimates that are nowhere to be found if your center of interest is “niche” in EA. You then have to find academic and professional opportunities as well as relations that are not referenced anywhere in the EA community (I had to reach back to the big brother of a primary school friend I had lost track of to get a fusion engineer he could talk to!). If you need funding, even if your idea is promising, you need excellent communication skills for writing a convincing blog post, plausibly enough research skills to get non-air-plucked estimates for ITN / cost-effectiveness analysis, and a desire to go to EAGs and convince people who could just not care. Moreover a lot of people expressly limit themselves to their own country or continent. It’s often easier to stick to the usual topics (I get call for applications for AIS fellowships almost every months, of course I never had ones about niche topics)
-Another point about career 1:1s, the initial list of options to compare is hard to negotiate. Some people will neglect non-EA options, others will neglect EA options, and I had issues with artificially adding options to help them truly compare options.
-Another other point, some people barely have the time to come to a few sessions. It’s hard to get them to actually rely on the methodological tools they haven’t learned about in order to compare their options during career 1:1s.
-A good way to cope with all of this is to encourage students to start things out -to create an org rather than joining one. But not everyone has the necessary motivation for this.
I’m still happy with having started the year with epistemics, rationality, ethics and meta-ethics, and to have done other sessions on intervention and policy evaluation, suffering and consciousness, and population ethics. I didn’t desperately need to have sessions on GHD / Animal Welfare/ AI Safety, thought they’re definitely “in demand”.
Re: agency of the community itself, I’ve been trying to get to this “pure” form of EA in my university group, and to be honest, it felt extremely hard.
-People who want to learn about EA often feel confused and suspicious until you get to object-level examples. “Ok, impactful career, but concretely, where would that get me? Can you give me an example?”. I’ve faced real resistance when trying to stay abstract.
-It’s hard to keep people’s attention without talking about object-level examples, be it for teaching abstract concepts. It’s even harder once you get to the “projects” phase of the year.
-People anchor hard on some specific object-level examples after that. “Oh, EA ? The malaria thing?” (Despite my go-to examples included things as diverse as shrimp welfare and pandemic preparedness)
-When it’s not an object-level example, it’s usually “utilitarianism” or “Peter Singer”, which act a lot as thought stoppers and have an “eek” vibe for many people.
-People who care about non-typical causes actually have a hard time finding data and making estimates.
-In addition to that, agency for really making estimates is hard to build up. One member I knew thought the most Impactful career choice he had was potentially working on nuclear fusion. I suggested him to find out about the Impact-Tractability-Neglectedness of it to compare to another option he had (even rough OOMs) as well as more traditional ones. I can’t remember him giving any numbers even months later. When he just mentioned he felt sure about the difference, I didn’t feel comfortable arguing about the robustness of his justification. It’s a tough balance to strike between respecting preferences and probing reasons.
-A lot of it comes down to career 1:1s. Completing the ~8 or so parts is already demanding. You have to provide estimates that are nowhere to be found if your center of interest is “niche” in EA. You then have to find academic and professional opportunities as well as relations that are not referenced anywhere in the EA community (I had to reach back to the big brother of a primary school friend I had lost track of to get a fusion engineer he could talk to!). If you need funding, even if your idea is promising, you need excellent communication skills for writing a convincing blog post, plausibly enough research skills to get non-air-plucked estimates for ITN / cost-effectiveness analysis, and a desire to go to EAGs and convince people who could just not care. Moreover a lot of people expressly limit themselves to their own country or continent. It’s often easier to stick to the usual topics (I get call for applications for AIS fellowships almost every months, of course I never had ones about niche topics)
-Another point about career 1:1s, the initial list of options to compare is hard to negotiate. Some people will neglect non-EA options, others will neglect EA options, and I had issues with artificially adding options to help them truly compare options.
-Another other point, some people barely have the time to come to a few sessions. It’s hard to get them to actually rely on the methodological tools they haven’t learned about in order to compare their options during career 1:1s.
-A good way to cope with all of this is to encourage students to start things out -to create an org rather than joining one. But not everyone has the necessary motivation for this.
I’m still happy with having started the year with epistemics, rationality, ethics and meta-ethics, and to have done other sessions on intervention and policy evaluation, suffering and consciousness, and population ethics. I didn’t desperately need to have sessions on GHD / Animal Welfare/ AI Safety, thought they’re definitely “in demand”.