EA groups have been and continue to be overpowered.
Running an EA group is among the most impactful things you can do when you are at University.
The other day my previous co-organizer sent me a list of 15 (!) people who were in our EA group who are doing exciting and important GCR work.
In the interest of getting this quick take out, I am not reaching out to everyone to see if I can list their name/quote them but I want to stress the “exciting and important” aspect of this. Some of these people are perhaps within the top 10 people affecting American AI policy from a GCR lens. And they only graduated within the last 5 years—many of whom started in very impactful roles in less than two years(!). People are advising on 100s of millions of dollars, in political office, and founding exciting new orgs in the ecosystem (like, actually awesome orgs!).
And that is only GCR work—a previous member of our group is now CEO of one of the largest EA-affiliated global health orgs and another, a researcher at GiveWell.
When I was a group organizer, I was often stressing about whether I was having an impact and I often hear organizers stressing about whether the payoff will be quick enough. It is true that my group’s outcomes are not the median and that sometimes it does just take many years to pay off—but there definitely are existence proofs of massive impact on a pretty quick timeframe.
I have been involved in EA groups since 2017. Almost a decade now!
And in the meantime I’ve seen so many exciting impact stories coming out from groups all over the world.If you are interested in more of my takes on groups you can check out some of my past talks: Hyping them up and Sharing potential pitfalls
Has anyone at CEA ever looked systematically at the near-misses: the people who came to one or two meetings and never came back? The success stories are striking, but without some comparison group it’s hard to tell how much is the group’s doing and how much is that ambitious people at those universities end up in those roles regardless. Even an informal follow-up on the handful of drop-out names you can still remember would say something.
Not that I need this to be convinced, the anecdote here is striking enough, I’m mostly just curious.
EA groups have been and continue to be overpowered.
Running an EA group is among the most impactful things you can do when you are at University.
The other day my previous co-organizer sent me a list of 15 (!) people who were in our EA group who are doing exciting and important GCR work.
In the interest of getting this quick take out, I am not reaching out to everyone to see if I can list their name/quote them but I want to stress the “exciting and important” aspect of this. Some of these people are perhaps within the top 10 people affecting American AI policy from a GCR lens. And they only graduated within the last 5 years—many of whom started in very impactful roles in less than two years(!). People are advising on 100s of millions of dollars, in political office, and founding exciting new orgs in the ecosystem (like, actually awesome orgs!).
And that is only GCR work—a previous member of our group is now CEO of one of the largest EA-affiliated global health orgs and another, a researcher at GiveWell.
When I was a group organizer, I was often stressing about whether I was having an impact and I often hear organizers stressing about whether the payoff will be quick enough. It is true that my group’s outcomes are not the median and that sometimes it does just take many years to pay off—but there definitely are existence proofs of massive impact on a pretty quick timeframe.
I have been involved in EA groups since 2017. Almost a decade now!
And in the meantime I’ve seen so many exciting impact stories coming out from groups all over the world.If you are interested in more of my takes on groups you can check out some of my past talks: Hyping them up and Sharing potential pitfalls
If you are interested in running a group there are many resources available to you!
Has anyone at CEA ever looked systematically at the near-misses: the people who came to one or two meetings and never came back? The success stories are striking, but without some comparison group it’s hard to tell how much is the group’s doing and how much is that ambitious people at those universities end up in those roles regardless. Even an informal follow-up on the handful of drop-out names you can still remember would say something.
Not that I need this to be convinced, the anecdote here is striking enough, I’m mostly just curious.