I want to start off by saying I think the idea of getting EA messages to a broader audience is really important and exciting, and that high school students, especially in their final couple of years, are ambitious about helping the world and in the right context would be really excited by EA ideas. I’ve started off with this because a lot of the rest of this post is going to be quite negative. Hopefully you’ll see why.
I think it would be really useful for anyone thinking of taking any action in this space to read this article very carefully. I have worked in a school for several years, and do run a club for the students where we talk about EA ideas, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and talking to other members of the EA community about it. Broader outreach has also been tried, less successfully:
The thing that really worried me in your post was the phrase “at an early age when minds are malleable”. EA ideas are not uncontroversial, and parents tend to react extremely badly to people trying to use the malleability of children’s brains to convince them of a particular worldview. Debates about what gets included on national curricula are particularly heated, especially when it comes to religion, and it’s not going to be possible to separate any reform to ethics teaching from discussion of religion.
Even ignoring potential reputational harm to the EA movement, your assessment of the tractability seems to assume no possibility of downside in terms of recruitment, a claim I also find concerning. First impressions can happen exactly once, and an unclear, unskilled, or otherwise unsuccessfuly outreach attempt (including, but not limited to, an “intro to EA” lesson taught by a non-specialist as part of a national curriculum) may “turn off” students who otherwise would have come across the ideas of effective altruism later and found them appealing.
In spite of all the above, I am a teacher who works in a school and does EA outreach, so I clearly don’t think the idea is in principle bad. What I do think, however, is that it needs to be done very carefuly, with very high quality communication, and with a very keen eye on potential downsides. I’m extremely happy to talk at length to anyone considering something similar.
In terms of broad approaches, there are a couple of things I would like to see which I think are likely to be safe:
Books for schools, see this thread for some more detail. I think these lessen the risks above partly because they either aren’t explicitly EA outreach, or are but have been very carefully considered (Doing Good Better has been really well received by some of my students).
Related to the above, I think above and beyond giving books away, it would be great to see some competitions with either EA ideas and book token prizes (not cash given the age groups involved), or EA books as prizes. Essay competitions about the future with a $100 voucher and a copy of The Precipice, or Human Compatible as a prize for top Computer Science Olympiad participants, are a couple of ideas here.
I’d love to see an organisation like 80k which focuses on careers advice for high school students, either helping students who seek them out (including with things like applications to top programmes and scholarships, test preparation if applicable etc.) or who provide a service to schools where they come in and talk about impact as one potential consideration to give to choosing a career. Again, in the latter case, I’d be much more keen on this if it was being very carefully considered and implemented by an organisation than as unilateral impact by individuals.
Hi there, thanks for your reply. I will need some more time to reflect on what you have said and the links you sent but I wanted to send a preliminary reply based on my first impressions.
Firstly I don’t really disagree with anything you have said. I wouldn’t say I have assumed there is no possibility of a downside and I wouldn’t suggest that. However I sincerely take your comments on board and recognise that considerations of downsides would have to play a central role if taking this idea any further. As mentioned I have posted an intentionally basic analysis for exploratory value and it was not intended to be holistic in the slightest.
Some of the downsides you bring up are EA-specific, so this would seem to imply that you may see greater potential in the teaching of ethics more generally to children in schools as opposed to ethics specific to EA. Would you broadly agree with this?
The interventions considered in the links you sent and your conception of ‘outreach’ is perhaps subtly different to what I am exploring. I am essentially interested in institutional change by changing curricula, as opposed to outreach. I will need some more time to consider how this may or may not influence the relevance of your criticisms and the content in the links you sent. Any such institutional change would necessarily go through a lot of bureaucracy and ‘checks and balances’ which may reduce, but certainly not eliminate, worries about doing harm.
P.S. I see in hindsight that the use of the term ‘malleable’ is slightly sinister!
Yes, my reply focused entirely on the “Embed EA specifically as part of the curriculum” part of this. Encouraging ethics to be taught more widely is its own conversation, and one I haven’t though much about. the downside risks in terms of reputational harm to EA are obviously much smaller, though I think the “poor first impression” concern still holds some water. In my experience, non-examinable but compulsory parts of the school curriculum tend not to be taken particularly seriously by either teaching staff or students.
I’ve slightly edited my post above to clarify how I think the downside risks I mentioned apply specifically in the case of board curriculum change.
I want to start off by saying I think the idea of getting EA messages to a broader audience is really important and exciting, and that high school students, especially in their final couple of years, are ambitious about helping the world and in the right context would be really excited by EA ideas. I’ve started off with this because a lot of the rest of this post is going to be quite negative. Hopefully you’ll see why.
I think it would be really useful for anyone thinking of taking any action in this space to read this article very carefully. I have worked in a school for several years, and do run a club for the students where we talk about EA ideas, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and talking to other members of the EA community about it. Broader outreach has also been tried, less successfully:
The thing that really worried me in your post was the phrase “at an early age when minds are malleable”. EA ideas are not uncontroversial, and parents tend to react extremely badly to people trying to use the malleability of children’s brains to convince them of a particular worldview. Debates about what gets included on national curricula are particularly heated, especially when it comes to religion, and it’s not going to be possible to separate any reform to ethics teaching from discussion of religion.
Even ignoring potential reputational harm to the EA movement, your assessment of the tractability seems to assume no possibility of downside in terms of recruitment, a claim I also find concerning. First impressions can happen exactly once, and an unclear, unskilled, or otherwise unsuccessfuly outreach attempt (including, but not limited to, an “intro to EA” lesson taught by a non-specialist as part of a national curriculum) may “turn off” students who otherwise would have come across the ideas of effective altruism later and found them appealing.
In spite of all the above, I am a teacher who works in a school and does EA outreach, so I clearly don’t think the idea is in principle bad. What I do think, however, is that it needs to be done very carefuly, with very high quality communication, and with a very keen eye on potential downsides. I’m extremely happy to talk at length to anyone considering something similar.
In terms of broad approaches, there are a couple of things I would like to see which I think are likely to be safe:
Books for schools, see this thread for some more detail. I think these lessen the risks above partly because they either aren’t explicitly EA outreach, or are but have been very carefully considered (Doing Good Better has been really well received by some of my students).
Related to the above, I think above and beyond giving books away, it would be great to see some competitions with either EA ideas and book token prizes (not cash given the age groups involved), or EA books as prizes. Essay competitions about the future with a $100 voucher and a copy of The Precipice, or Human Compatible as a prize for top Computer Science Olympiad participants, are a couple of ideas here.
I’d love to see an organisation like 80k which focuses on careers advice for high school students, either helping students who seek them out (including with things like applications to top programmes and scholarships, test preparation if applicable etc.) or who provide a service to schools where they come in and talk about impact as one potential consideration to give to choosing a career. Again, in the latter case, I’d be much more keen on this if it was being very carefully considered and implemented by an organisation than as unilateral impact by individuals.
Hi there, thanks for your reply. I will need some more time to reflect on what you have said and the links you sent but I wanted to send a preliminary reply based on my first impressions.
Firstly I don’t really disagree with anything you have said. I wouldn’t say I have assumed there is no possibility of a downside and I wouldn’t suggest that. However I sincerely take your comments on board and recognise that considerations of downsides would have to play a central role if taking this idea any further. As mentioned I have posted an intentionally basic analysis for exploratory value and it was not intended to be holistic in the slightest.
Some of the downsides you bring up are EA-specific, so this would seem to imply that you may see greater potential in the teaching of ethics more generally to children in schools as opposed to ethics specific to EA. Would you broadly agree with this?
The interventions considered in the links you sent and your conception of ‘outreach’ is perhaps subtly different to what I am exploring. I am essentially interested in institutional change by changing curricula, as opposed to outreach. I will need some more time to consider how this may or may not influence the relevance of your criticisms and the content in the links you sent. Any such institutional change would necessarily go through a lot of bureaucracy and ‘checks and balances’ which may reduce, but certainly not eliminate, worries about doing harm.
P.S. I see in hindsight that the use of the term ‘malleable’ is slightly sinister!
Yes, my reply focused entirely on the “Embed EA specifically as part of the curriculum” part of this. Encouraging ethics to be taught more widely is its own conversation, and one I haven’t though much about. the downside risks in terms of reputational harm to EA are obviously much smaller, though I think the “poor first impression” concern still holds some water. In my experience, non-examinable but compulsory parts of the school curriculum tend not to be taken particularly seriously by either teaching staff or students.
I’ve slightly edited my post above to clarify how I think the downside risks I mentioned apply specifically in the case of board curriculum change.
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