Around May 2022, TFG will host a week-long retreat, training corporate executives with 10+ years experience
Interesting. Do you have any data/anecdata about the tractability of getting 30+ year-olds to switch into EA careers? My current guess is that on the margin, although this seems valuable, week-long retreats teaching people about EA should be done for high-achieving high-schoolers (mostly because they would be more willing to change their career paths). Targeting high-schoolers makes less sense if you want to solve the management gap, though you could, for instance, target high-achieving entrepreneurial high-schoolers to help solve the entrepreneur gap (that I perceive there to be).
Jan-Willem here, one of the other co-founders of Training for Good. I actually have some data on tractability of outreach to an older generation. As chapter director at EA Netherlands we organised a serie of workshops targeted at a slightly older audience (average age ~35).
Three out of 25 people in this program comitted to considerable changes in their life (pledging large amounts of money and switching into high impact roles). We didn’t use a control group, but it is a good sign of tractability.
Thanks! This is the exact kind of thing I was interested in hearing about. If you don’t mind sharing, is there any significant way in which the 25 people were selected for? E.g. “people who expressed interest in a program about doing good” vs “people who had engaged with EA for at least N hours and were the top 25 most promising from our perspective out of 100 who applied.” I’m hoping for the sake of meta-EA tractability that it was closer to the former :)
“People who expressed interest in a program about doing good” seems to be the best description. Marketing was focused on Dutch speaking people that wanted to do more good.
No prior EA knowledge was needed and most people heard about EA but had no real prior knowledge.
Your specific idea for an entrepreneurship training programme for high-schoolers sounds like a really interesting one.
I’m somewhat sceptical that such a programme targeting high-schoolers is the right approach to solving this skill gap though. The entrepreneurship gap seems like an important but difficult one to solve (eg. see Longtermist Entrepreneurship Project). Charity Entrepreneurship has had success in this area, but they’ve typically targeted graduates & people further along in their career. I would imagine that most high-schoolers would neither be in a position to found an organisation right away or have the necessary skills to do so.
It’s definitely possible that such a programme could help develop skills for high-schoolers (perhaps even by founding and running their own small-scale project) in the hope that they’d later use these to found an organisation. However, in this case, it seems very difficult to assess the success of the programme (as the feedback loops would be quite long) and I’d suspect that very few trainees would ultimately go on to found high impact organisations.
I definitely could be wrong here though and would be interested to hear your thoughts?
We don’t have much data on the tractability of convincing mid-career professionals to switch into EA careers (though we’d be excited to see any evidence supporting or contradicting this if it exists). Our main reason for targeting mid-career professionals over promising high-schoolers is that we think the information value of doing so is higher. This group possesses a lot of relevant skills and has typically been quite neglected by EA outreach, so we’re excited to test out this approach. If we found that drawing experienced professionals into EA career paths was very tractable, we could envisage running similar programmes in the future to fill many other skill gaps.
I do agree that week-long retreats engaging promising high-schoolers seem really valuable though. There’s quite a few programmes like this already (eg. SPARC, ESPR and Leaf ) and Open Philanthropy is excited to fund more such projects if others are interested in pursuing this!
Several of CEA’s new hires over the past couple of years have been people older than 30 with no prior EA experience, who in at least some cases were responding to materials that were “broad” enough to include them in the discussion. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be investing a lot of effort into reaching experienced people, but they do apply for first-time EA jobs!
Two examples of impressive older people switching into EA work (no comment on how much impact they’ve had in their roles):
Open Philanthropy’s Beth Jones (led ops for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, worked on Obama’s staff)
ex-MIRI staffer Edward Kmett, one of the world’s foremost Haskell programmers, who worked there for ~3 years
I imagine you can source entrepreneurial minded folks in more promising places than high schools—likely there are masters programs that teach a course on entrepreneurship, say as part of a environment, policy, or food systems related program, that would have early to mid range professionals who often graduate with less clarity/job leads than expected from a masters program (speaking from anecdotal knowledge). But connecting with a few professors at universities would likely shed much more light.
Interesting. Do you have any data/anecdata about the tractability of getting 30+ year-olds to switch into EA careers? My current guess is that on the margin, although this seems valuable, week-long retreats teaching people about EA should be done for high-achieving high-schoolers (mostly because they would be more willing to change their career paths). Targeting high-schoolers makes less sense if you want to solve the management gap, though you could, for instance, target high-achieving entrepreneurial high-schoolers to help solve the entrepreneur gap (that I perceive there to be).
Hi Jack,
Jan-Willem here, one of the other co-founders of Training for Good. I actually have some data on tractability of outreach to an older generation. As chapter director at EA Netherlands we organised a serie of workshops targeted at a slightly older audience (average age ~35).
Three out of 25 people in this program comitted to considerable changes in their life (pledging large amounts of money and switching into high impact roles). We didn’t use a control group, but it is a good sign of tractability.
Thanks! This is the exact kind of thing I was interested in hearing about. If you don’t mind sharing, is there any significant way in which the 25 people were selected for? E.g. “people who expressed interest in a program about doing good” vs “people who had engaged with EA for at least N hours and were the top 25 most promising from our perspective out of 100 who applied.” I’m hoping for the sake of meta-EA tractability that it was closer to the former :)
“People who expressed interest in a program about doing good” seems to be the best description. Marketing was focused on Dutch speaking people that wanted to do more good.
No prior EA knowledge was needed and most people heard about EA but had no real prior knowledge.
Your specific idea for an entrepreneurship training programme for high-schoolers sounds like a really interesting one.
I’m somewhat sceptical that such a programme targeting high-schoolers is the right approach to solving this skill gap though. The entrepreneurship gap seems like an important but difficult one to solve (eg. see Longtermist Entrepreneurship Project). Charity Entrepreneurship has had success in this area, but they’ve typically targeted graduates & people further along in their career. I would imagine that most high-schoolers would neither be in a position to found an organisation right away or have the necessary skills to do so.
It’s definitely possible that such a programme could help develop skills for high-schoolers (perhaps even by founding and running their own small-scale project) in the hope that they’d later use these to found an organisation. However, in this case, it seems very difficult to assess the success of the programme (as the feedback loops would be quite long) and I’d suspect that very few trainees would ultimately go on to found high impact organisations.
I definitely could be wrong here though and would be interested to hear your thoughts?
Great question Jack!
We don’t have much data on the tractability of convincing mid-career professionals to switch into EA careers (though we’d be excited to see any evidence supporting or contradicting this if it exists). Our main reason for targeting mid-career professionals over promising high-schoolers is that we think the information value of doing so is higher. This group possesses a lot of relevant skills and has typically been quite neglected by EA outreach, so we’re excited to test out this approach. If we found that drawing experienced professionals into EA career paths was very tractable, we could envisage running similar programmes in the future to fill many other skill gaps.
I do agree that week-long retreats engaging promising high-schoolers seem really valuable though. There’s quite a few programmes like this already (eg. SPARC, ESPR and Leaf ) and Open Philanthropy is excited to fund more such projects if others are interested in pursuing this!
Several of CEA’s new hires over the past couple of years have been people older than 30 with no prior EA experience, who in at least some cases were responding to materials that were “broad” enough to include them in the discussion. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be investing a lot of effort into reaching experienced people, but they do apply for first-time EA jobs!
Two examples of impressive older people switching into EA work (no comment on how much impact they’ve had in their roles):
Open Philanthropy’s Beth Jones (led ops for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, worked on Obama’s staff)
ex-MIRI staffer Edward Kmett, one of the world’s foremost Haskell programmers, who worked there for ~3 years
I imagine you can source entrepreneurial minded folks in more promising places than high schools—likely there are masters programs that teach a course on entrepreneurship, say as part of a environment, policy, or food systems related program, that would have early to mid range professionals who often graduate with less clarity/job leads than expected from a masters program (speaking from anecdotal knowledge). But connecting with a few professors at universities would likely shed much more light.