Nice work. I agree that these results help us judge how much outreach we should do. More specifically, they can offer us an upper-bound: at NYU, there’s only room to grow the talent pool n-fold, for the time being, where n is 8.8/1.3=6.7. Let’s say that on the margin, NYU student outreach is currently y times more effective than OpenPhil. Then, outreach should be scaled up at most n × y-fold. The actual number will be less, because as you say, the average person who hasn’t found out about EA yet but is very sympathetic towards it is less likely to become highly engaged than a person who has found out about it. Put differently, there will be diminishing returns to getting people engaged, and also in getting them doing useful work. But this kind of calculation could be a useful starting point.
Nice work. I agree that these results help us judge how much outreach we should do. More specifically, they can offer us an upper-bound: at NYU, there’s only room to grow the talent pool n-fold, for the time being, where n is 8.8/1.3=6.7. Let’s say that on the margin, NYU student outreach is currently y times more effective than OpenPhil. Then, outreach should be scaled up at most n × y-fold. The actual number will be less, because as you say, the average person who hasn’t found out about EA yet but is very sympathetic towards it is less likely to become highly engaged than a person who has found out about it. Put differently, there will be diminishing returns to getting people engaged, and also in getting them doing useful work. But this kind of calculation could be a useful starting point.