EA Groups Should Rename Intro Fellowships for Better Clarity
This is a quick post that serves as a call to action for university EA group organizers!
For university EA groups (and maybe other EA groups) the term “introductory fellowship” can lead to various confusions: seeming religious, inaccurately prestigious, or too official, for example. I propose that most groups should switch to an alternative, such as Georgia Tech’s “Effective Altruism Introductory Seminar” or (one that I’m particularly excited for, that we’ve used at LSU this semester) calling introductory reading/discussion groups the “IDEA Program”:
IDEA—Introduction to making a Difference through Effective Altruism.
Why is this better than the typical framing of “Effective Altruism Introductory Fellowship”?
Much harder to confuse as religious: In a recent popular thread in the EA Groups slack, there was discussion of alternative names to “fellowship”; quite a few group organizers expressed that newcomers to EA interpreted fellowship as religious, and that it promoted the idea of EA coming across as cult-ish. I would imagine this problem is not unique to the ~6 people who mentioned it in the slack thread, so eliminating this confusion seems useful for better outreach and communication for groups in the future!
Emphasis on both doing and learning: This framing puts more of a focus on what those in EA are actually trying to accomplish—making a difference (this is the D of IDEA). I think it does a good job of beginning to switch one’s first impression of the fellowship from “Here’s this community called EA, I can sign up for this fellowship to read about what they have to say” to “here are some ideas touted by this community called EA, maybe I can use their ideas to better make a difference/have an impact”.
Better Epistemics: Similarly, this framing makes EA seem more like “a set of tools/ideas I can use to have an impact” (i.e. making a difference through effective altruism) as opposed to “a set of dogmas or predetermined ideas about how to have an impact”. The former is a more accurate conception of EA (or at least of what EA would ideally be).
Petty reason: It rolls off the tongue better.
Less prestigious-sounding: (disclaimer: anecdote) When I first heard the phrasing “EA Introductory Fellowship” I was confused as to why a reading group was being advertised as a fellowship. My impression was that fellowships are reserved for more prestigious (usually paid) academic or intern-like positions, and it was a little off-putting to see people in EA try to oversell their intro programs. The term “fellowship” could definitely still be useful in some places where participants are more heavily-selected, or maybe at schools where EA groups have very impressive reputations, but I think the phrasing usually seems inaccurate, especially if we are aiming for big tent EA.
In general, catchy acronyms can be fun to come up with and more engaging than long bulky names. “IDEA Program” is probably not the best version of this, but it’s a step in the right direction compared to the unclear, long-to-pronounce “Effective Altruism Introductory Fellowship”.
For fairness: why we might NOT want to switch from “fellowship”:
Intro programs/reading groups should be more selective, and “fellowship” better expresses the seriousness/commitment that is expected from participants.
“Fellowship” is already pretty common and well-used among EA groups, so we shouldn’t try to disrupt the equilibrium (I think this is probably a pretty bad reason; name changes require minimal effort)
“IDEA Program” doesn’t actually tell someone what it’s about in the name. Effective Altruism Intro Fellowship is more explicit about: A) the fact that it’s introductory and B) that it’s affiliated with effective altruism.
This is probably less of a problem with good marketing and design.
Overall, I find these latter reasons not as compelling, and changing fellowship names is low-hanging fruit for less confusing and more honest outreach. At the very least, I think more groups should try it out!
Thanks to Justin Guo for feedback, and Michel Justen for encouraging me to write this up.
Just found, at EA Oxford we just changed “intro fellowship” and “in depth fellowship” to “intro seminar programme (ISP) and in depth seminar programme (idsp)
To potentially confuse things even more: I know some groups in the Netherlands use the name ‘IDEA program’ to refer to the in-depth fellowship.
In-Depth EA program
As I write this comment, the post has negative karma, but nobody seems to have explained why they disagree with the post. I haven’t made my mind up on this yet, and I’d love to hear from the people who push back on this (e.g. the people who are downvoting it).
Perhaps one source of downvotes is that the main idea of this post is unoriginal. Anyone putting on an intro fellowship has put some amount of thought into:
Do I call it a “fellowship” to give it prestige, or do I call it a “seminar” / “reading group” to make it sound academic, or do I call it a “program” or a more neutral tone, …
Do I call it “Arete” to sound fancy, or do I call it “intro” to sound welcoming, …
Do I explicitly put “EA” in the title?
The one new thought here seems to be having the acronym “IDEA” stand for “Introduction to making a Difference through Effective Altruism”. And this post isn’t even a comprehensive exploration of the pros and cons of this acronym! OP leaves off one important downside: at other universities (e.g. Harvard, Brown), IDEA stands for “In-Depth EA”. Another point OP doesn’t expand on is why “fellowship” had religious connotations for so many people. (Could this be more of an issue in LSU / the US South in general, compared to other parts of US/Europe?)
Finding good names is important, but this post doesn’t really do much in aim of this goal. The pros and cons here are exclusively supported by anecdotal evidence or OP’s personal aesthetics. Stuff I would like to see in the “naming CB interventions better” space:
More experiments such as “Should you use EA in your group name?” An update on PISE’s naming experiment
A compendium of names used at different universities / regions, with attached retrospectives from organizers
(Probably too high effort) Proper user testing on group names
The name change sounds good to me.
Although, when I did the intro and in-depth course, it was simply called The Effective Altruism Introductory & In-depth Program.
If it was called a fellowship, it wouldn’t mean a religious thing to me, perhaps because I have been on several fellowship programs and have co-run others, that has nothing to do with religion.
Thanks for sharing. I may adopt some of the suggestions to my EA group, when sharing about the programs.
Yeah I think college students will often think “Fellowship” is religious because that’s likely the only context they have seen the word used in, even though it’s often used for all kinds of non-religious opportunities.
I’m not sure how important this is—I soon realized lots of fellowships at my school were not religious and that it had a broader meaning.
I guess people could try different things out and see how they work. Maybe something simple like EA reading group. Or focus on a topic name: people would probably be less likely to confuse something like “public health/pandemic prevention/AI Ethics fellowship” as something religious.
For what it’s worth, my independent impression was that the fact that “fellowship” sounded more prestigious was probably a good thing, mostly because it could fit within an academic culture very well[1].
I had never made the connection to religious fellowships[2], and I don’t quite understand the argument from epistemics[3]. However, I do like the potential emphasis on doing and learning, which, I think, is a problem in the current form of most introductory fellowships (see here).
This might be very dependent on the communications strategy of each group. At our local student group, we found the connection with academia helpful; however that also raises legitimate concerns with diversity.
This might be cultural; my first language is spanish, where “fellowship” is mostly used untranslated and only in the academic sense.
Why would “fellowship” point to a set of dogmas but “seminar” wouldn’t?