(I lead the CEA uni groups team but don’t intend to respond on behalf of CEA as a whole and others may disagree with some of my points)
Hi Dave,
I just want to say that I appreciate you writing this. The ideas in this post are ones we have been tracking for a while and you are certainly not alone in feeling them.
I think there is a lot of fruitful discussion in the comments here about strategy-level considerations within the entire EA ecosystem and I am personally quite compelled by many of the points in Will’s comment. So, I will focus specifically on some of the considerations we have on the uni group level and what we are trying to do about this. (I will also flag that I could say a lot more on each of these but my response was already getting quite long and we wanted to keep it somewhat concise)
We also try to screen that people actually understand the arguments behind the claims they are making & common arguments against those positions. This is a large part of what we think screen for when looking for open-mindedness and truth-seeking. This is, of course, difficult and we do have false positives.
I will note, we sometimes admit people who we think don’t understand some important arguments because we expect students to generally be learning. I expect most clubs for any cause or idea to have a weaker bar though, and we still do screen for people being self-aware about the fact that they don’t understand certain arguments. We probe for this in interviews, such as by posing multiple counterarguments.
Concretely, the ~most common reason we decline to support groups (though do encourage them to reapply later) is that we think the organizers “agree with” ideas, but don’t actually understand them or the important arguments around them. So we tell them they should focus on understanding common arguments first (often by reading, for lack of a better option), etc before running a group.
Personal anecdote: Part of what drew me to EA was the openness to new ideas and truth-seeking. This was so apparently prominent in my EA group compared to many other communities I interacted with on campus who often refused to engage with certain arguments. I loved being in an intellectually vigorous environment where people did take ideas seriously and I loved that my group was so skeptical about everything. I am sad to see some spaces in the EA community not upholding these values even though I know it is based on good intentions.
Retreats
I want to apologize since I know you attended one of our summits and if you want to reach out with any additional feedback or suggestions, we would be keen to hear from you (either on the groups slack or via unigroups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org).
Retreats are definitely high-variance interventions. I do think there is more we can do to make them intellectually humble and welcoming spaces. I care a lot about psychological safety and think it is important for progress. We are always looking for feedback and ideas on how to improve this at future events and people can reach us at unigroups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
I do think there are big value-adds to retreats.
People normally go through their lives day-to-day not being able to set aside time to think about big ideas and how they might want to change their behaviors off of them. Retreats provide a space for this which I think is valuable.
They also make applying these ideas to your life a real possibility by showing examples of people who have done so. For many people, these are an opportunity to see “woah, you can actually work on these things!”.
While I push back on the “retreats mainly act by disabling epistemic immune systems” frame, I will say I am a huge proponent of people having other communities to go back to and safe exit strategies. I think there are some good considerations around this in this post on going to an EA hub.
Personal anecdote: The first few retreats/workshops/summits I went to were really intense and I often felt like I didn’t belong, and I think that was bad (although afaict somewhat common for retreats in other clubs with new, unfamiliar people) but I didn’t regret going to them. Reflecting back on them, I think they were hugely valuable for me as a person and for me thinking through my impact. Though, I did appreciate having a community I could return back to who could push against ideas and personally encourage people to have this.
Paying Organizers
The Open Philanthropy Organizer Fellowship is the main source of funding for organizers’ time (and they manage that fellowship themselves, without CEA’s involvement) but CEA does offer some stipends. I do think that for some (but not all) people this can have a large effect on how much time they can spend on their group and on upskilling.
I am pretty sympathetic to need-based considerations but these are pretty hard to track. We have moved to our stipends being opt-in rather than default to help with this.
We also follow a method of not giving out our entire stipend amounts until the end of the semester so we can verify that organizers did complete the requirements we asked of them.
I do think organizers shouldn’t expect to be paid for this type of work by default and we are considering not offering stipends in the future (though we are still collecting data on their helpfulness).
Personal anecdote: I worked a few part-time jobs in college and being paid to run my group enabled me to spend my time on what I thought was most impactful and I really appreciated that. However, in my last semester, I didn’t need the funding and opted out of it.
(I lead the CEA uni groups team but don’t intend to respond on behalf of CEA as a whole and others may disagree with some of my points)
Hi Dave,
I just want to say that I appreciate you writing this. The ideas in this post are ones we have been tracking for a while and you are certainly not alone in feeling them.
I think there is a lot of fruitful discussion in the comments here about strategy-level considerations within the entire EA ecosystem and I am personally quite compelled by many of the points in Will’s comment. So, I will focus specifically on some of the considerations we have on the uni group level and what we are trying to do about this. (I will also flag that I could say a lot more on each of these but my response was already getting quite long and we wanted to keep it somewhat concise)
Epistemics
We are also quite worried about epistemic norms in university groups. We have published some of our advice around this on the forum here (though maybe we should have led with more concrete examples) and I gave a talk at EAG Bay Area on it.
We also try to screen that people actually understand the arguments behind the claims they are making & common arguments against those positions. This is a large part of what we think screen for when looking for open-mindedness and truth-seeking. This is, of course, difficult and we do have false positives.
I will note, we sometimes admit people who we think don’t understand some important arguments because we expect students to generally be learning. I expect most clubs for any cause or idea to have a weaker bar though, and we still do screen for people being self-aware about the fact that they don’t understand certain arguments. We probe for this in interviews, such as by posing multiple counterarguments.
Concretely, the ~most common reason we decline to support groups (though do encourage them to reapply later) is that we think the organizers “agree with” ideas, but don’t actually understand them or the important arguments around them. So we tell them they should focus on understanding common arguments first (often by reading, for lack of a better option), etc before running a group.
Personal anecdote: Part of what drew me to EA was the openness to new ideas and truth-seeking. This was so apparently prominent in my EA group compared to many other communities I interacted with on campus who often refused to engage with certain arguments. I loved being in an intellectually vigorous environment where people did take ideas seriously and I loved that my group was so skeptical about everything. I am sad to see some spaces in the EA community not upholding these values even though I know it is based on good intentions.
Retreats
I want to apologize since I know you attended one of our summits and if you want to reach out with any additional feedback or suggestions, we would be keen to hear from you (either on the groups slack or via unigroups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org).
Retreats are definitely high-variance interventions. I do think there is more we can do to make them intellectually humble and welcoming spaces. I care a lot about psychological safety and think it is important for progress. We are always looking for feedback and ideas on how to improve this at future events and people can reach us at unigroups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
I do think there are big value-adds to retreats.
People normally go through their lives day-to-day not being able to set aside time to think about big ideas and how they might want to change their behaviors off of them. Retreats provide a space for this which I think is valuable.
They also make applying these ideas to your life a real possibility by showing examples of people who have done so. For many people, these are an opportunity to see “woah, you can actually work on these things!”.
While I push back on the “retreats mainly act by disabling epistemic immune systems” frame, I will say I am a huge proponent of people having other communities to go back to and safe exit strategies. I think there are some good considerations around this in this post on going to an EA hub.
Personal anecdote: The first few retreats/workshops/summits I went to were really intense and I often felt like I didn’t belong, and I think that was bad (although afaict somewhat common for retreats in other clubs with new, unfamiliar people) but I didn’t regret going to them. Reflecting back on them, I think they were hugely valuable for me as a person and for me thinking through my impact. Though, I did appreciate having a community I could return back to who could push against ideas and personally encourage people to have this.
Paying Organizers
The Open Philanthropy Organizer Fellowship is the main source of funding for organizers’ time (and they manage that fellowship themselves, without CEA’s involvement) but CEA does offer some stipends. I do think that for some (but not all) people this can have a large effect on how much time they can spend on their group and on upskilling.
I am pretty sympathetic to need-based considerations but these are pretty hard to track. We have moved to our stipends being opt-in rather than default to help with this.
We also follow a method of not giving out our entire stipend amounts until the end of the semester so we can verify that organizers did complete the requirements we asked of them.
I do think organizers shouldn’t expect to be paid for this type of work by default and we are considering not offering stipends in the future (though we are still collecting data on their helpfulness).
Personal anecdote: I worked a few part-time jobs in college and being paid to run my group enabled me to spend my time on what I thought was most impactful and I really appreciated that. However, in my last semester, I didn’t need the funding and opted out of it.
Hi Jessica, if you have time, I’d love to get your thoughts on some of my suggestions to improve university group epistemics via the content of introductory fellowships: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/euzDpFvbLqPdwCnXF/university-ea-groups-need-fixing?commentId=z7rPNpaqNZPXH2oBb