Compared to the other ideas here, I think the benefits of an explicitly EA university seem small (compared to the current set-up of EA institutes at normal universities, EAs doing EA-relevant degrees at normal universities and EA university societies).
Are there other major benefits I’m missing other than more value-alignment + more co-operation between EAs?
One downside of EA universities I can think of is that it might slow movement growth since EAs will be spending less time with people unfamiliar with the movement / fewer people at normal universities will come across EA.
I think this is one of these things that are a bit hard to judge unless you have contextual knowledge of, e.g. how things work out at EA-dominated research university institutes. I think more abstract considerations will only take you so far.
The same point also pertains to the other comments in this thread.
I would be surprised if it were worthwhile building an entire university with all the normal departments, but I could see value if it offered specialist masters degrees that you can’t obtain elsewhere such as a Masters of AI Safety.
Even then it would seem preferable to me to fund something like a “department of AI safety” at an existing university, since the department (staff and graduates) could benefit from the university’s prestige. I assume this is possible since FHI and GPI exist.
Word on the grapevine is that many universities have really poor operations capacity, including R1 research universities in the US and equivalent ones in Europe. It’s unclear to me if an EA university can do better (eg by paying for more ops staff, by thinking harder about incentives), but it’s at least not implausible.
Rethink Priorities, Open Phil, and MIRI all naively appear to have better ops than my personal impression of what ops at EA-affliated departments in research universities look like.
Promotion tracks in most (but not all) elite American universities are based on either a) (this is typical) paper publication record or b) (especially in liberal arts colleges) teaching. This can be bad if we (e.g.) want our researchers to study topics that may be unusually sensitive. So we might want to have more options like a more typical “research with management” track (like in thinktanks or non-academic EA research orgs), or prize funding like Thiel/All Souls (though maybe less extreme).
Having EAs work together seems potentially really good for wasting less time of both researchers and students.
Universities often just do a lot of things that I personally perceive as pretty immoral and dumb (eg in student admissions, possibly discriminate a lot against Asian descent or non-Americans, have punitive mental health services). Maybe this is just youthful optimism, but I would hope that an EA university can do better on those fronts.
I have argued for a more “mutiny” (edit: maybe “exit” is a better word for it) style theory of change in higher education so I really like the idea of an EA university where learning would be more guided by a genuine sense of purpose, curiosity and ambition to improve the world rather than a zero-sum competition for prestige and a need to check boxes in order to get a piece of paper. Though I realize that many EAs probably don’t share my antipathy towards the current higher education system.
One downside of EA universities I can think of is that it might slow movement growth since EAs will be spending less time with people unfamiliar with the movement / fewer people at normal universities will come across EA.
Though if it becomes really successful and prestigious, it could also raise the profile of EA.
In my experience, EAs tend to be pretty dissatisfied with the higher education system, but I interpreted the muted/mixed response to my post on the topic as a sign that my experience might have been biased, or that despite the dissatisfaction, there wasn’t any real hunger for change. Or maybe a sense that change was too intractable.
Though I might also have done a poor job at making the case.
My speculative, cynical, maybe unfair take is that most senior EAs are so enmeshed in the higher education system, and sunk so much time succeeding in it, that they’re incentivized against doing anything too disruptive that might jeopardize their standing within current institutions. And why change how undergrad education is done if you’ve already gone through it?
My guess is that it can help converting non-EAs into people who have roughly EA-aligned objectives which seems highly valuable ! What I mean is that a simple econ degree is enough to have people who think almost like EAs so I I expect an EA university to be able to do that even better
Compared to the other ideas here, I think the benefits of an explicitly EA university seem small (compared to the current set-up of EA institutes at normal universities, EAs doing EA-relevant degrees at normal universities and EA university societies).
Are there other major benefits I’m missing other than more value-alignment + more co-operation between EAs?
One downside of EA universities I can think of is that it might slow movement growth since EAs will be spending less time with people unfamiliar with the movement / fewer people at normal universities will come across EA.
I think this is one of these things that are a bit hard to judge unless you have contextual knowledge of, e.g. how things work out at EA-dominated research university institutes. I think more abstract considerations will only take you so far.
The same point also pertains to the other comments in this thread.
I would be surprised if it were worthwhile building an entire university with all the normal departments, but I could see value if it offered specialist masters degrees that you can’t obtain elsewhere such as a Masters of AI Safety.
Even then it would seem preferable to me to fund something like a “department of AI safety” at an existing university, since the department (staff and graduates) could benefit from the university’s prestige. I assume this is possible since FHI and GPI exist.
Some quick thoughts:
Word on the grapevine is that many universities have really poor operations capacity, including R1 research universities in the US and equivalent ones in Europe. It’s unclear to me if an EA university can do better (eg by paying for more ops staff, by thinking harder about incentives), but it’s at least not implausible.
Rethink Priorities, Open Phil, and MIRI all naively appear to have better ops than my personal impression of what ops at EA-affliated departments in research universities look like.
Promotion tracks in most (but not all) elite American universities are based on either a) (this is typical) paper publication record or b) (especially in liberal arts colleges) teaching. This can be bad if we (e.g.) want our researchers to study topics that may be unusually sensitive. So we might want to have more options like a more typical “research with management” track (like in thinktanks or non-academic EA research orgs), or prize funding like Thiel/All Souls (though maybe less extreme).
Having EAs work together seems potentially really good for wasting less time of both researchers and students.
Universities often just do a lot of things that I personally perceive as pretty immoral and dumb (eg in student admissions, possibly discriminate a lot against Asian descent or non-Americans, have punitive mental health services). Maybe this is just youthful optimism, but I would hope that an EA university can do better on those fronts.
I have argued for a more “mutiny” (edit: maybe “exit” is a better word for it) style theory of change in higher education so I really like the idea of an EA university where learning would be more guided by a genuine sense of purpose, curiosity and ambition to improve the world rather than a zero-sum competition for prestige and a need to check boxes in order to get a piece of paper. Though I realize that many EAs probably don’t share my antipathy towards the current higher education system.
Though if it becomes really successful and prestigious, it could also raise the profile of EA.
Anecdotally, most EAs I have spoken to about this topic have tended to agree
I am a professor and have steadily been e xiting higher education. It is bad
Out of curiosity, would you be interested in sharing your biggest “causes for concern” with higher education?
In my experience, EAs tend to be pretty dissatisfied with the higher education system, but I interpreted the muted/mixed response to my post on the topic as a sign that my experience might have been biased, or that despite the dissatisfaction, there wasn’t any real hunger for change. Or maybe a sense that change was too intractable.
Though I might also have done a poor job at making the case.
My speculative, cynical, maybe unfair take is that most senior EAs are so enmeshed in the higher education system, and sunk so much time succeeding in it, that they’re incentivized against doing anything too disruptive that might jeopardize their standing within current institutions. And why change how undergrad education is done if you’ve already gone through it?
My guess is that it can help converting non-EAs into people who have roughly EA-aligned objectives which seems highly valuable ! What I mean is that a simple econ degree is enough to have people who think almost like EAs so I I expect an EA university to be able to do that even better