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This is an interesting idea, with a good plan, and carries an implicit demonstration of impressive amounts of work done (particularly re. the conference). The merits of the plan are well-discussed, and I am also pleased you note some of the potential difficultiesâin most real cases, reasonable considerations do not all point one way.
I offer some further considerations below. These are all critical, but only because the positive ones I conceive recapitulate ones already stated already, and better, in the OP.
1) Targeting future elites is an extremely crowded area
To a first approximation, every organisation on the planet wants to get the attention of future elites. Companies want them to become employees, ideologies want them âon sideâ, political parties want them in their own talent pipeline, and so on and so forth. Envision may not directly compete with (e.g.) MiscTechCo directly as one can both support the former and intern for the latter, but the indirect competition to get elite university undergrads to go to your event not someone elses is pretty fierce.
2) The difficulty of getting students to run the org
As Ben suggests below, you are also competing for leaders to join your org and found chapters, and this is also super-crowded: students who are able to lead or even willingly and competantly administer aspects of a student group are in extremely short supply, and there are strong incentives (i.e. CV points) prefering these people to strike out on their own project or take a subsidiary role at a prestigious or well-established student group. Playing second (or nth) fiddle to be a junior officer in satellite chapter of a new student group is likely for true-believers only. And (as ben also suggests) the rapid turnover means this challenge repeats, and also applies to keeping the org going: it is easy to overpredict longevity and success if one doesnât account for the likelihood that ones successors are unlikely to be as invested in the project as you are. Most orgs I was involved in helping set up as a student no longer exist.
3) The predictive model will almost certainly fail to identify future leaders
I would be amazed if you find any novel signal predictive of someone becoming a future elite leader: everyone wants this sort of human capital, and so means of identifying it given even mild instrumental rationality on the part of competitor groups should be very well trodden, if only via informal metrics rather than a formal model. The outside view on a recent student run org finding an edge in human capital identification over large organisations which may include professionals specializing in this area with potentially decades of individual and corporate experience and very large resources addressed to this task does not augur well.
My hunch is that is extremely hard for reasons you do not identify. The first big issue is range restriction: basically everyone at (e.g.) Princeton is highly intelligent, conscientious, and motivated, because getting into an elite Ivy selects strongly on those traits. Within such a rarefied group discrimination is going to be very tough: although (e.g.) IQ is likely good a predictor of success in most fields, the difference between smart-for-princeton and dumb-for-princeton is unlikely to be greatâthe smart cohort might fare better, but the degree of scatter makes individual predictions next to worthless (maybe its 25% for smart versus 22% for dumb). Worse, most universities want to âequip the leaders for tomorrowâ or similar, and so are already selecting in part for leadership traits. The factors fairly orthogonal to this may be unmeasurable, or simply the vicissitudes of chance (do you happen to get on really well with the boss you interned for, do you happen to know socially the person with the complementary skillset for your start-up, etc. etc.) Even without goodhartâs law, the tails come apart for the distributions of actual performance and performance on proxy measures. Iâd guess any such model constructed repeats what employers/âgrad schools/âetc. use already: GPA, test scores, particular softs, etc.
(Obviously, validation for any model will take several years to a decade as you at need to follow up the cohort long enough to get to early-career stages where you might be able to predict future trajectory).
[Continued]
4) On the perils of obnoxious elitism
I find the idea of selecting âfellowsâ amongst the students who get perks as a way of fostering elitism disquieting orthogonal to the difficulties I suggest above for âpicking winnersâ, and I believe I have significantly greater tolerance for elitism than most. I expect significant downsides with resentment of the majority to be judged as relatively âun-eliteâ (good luck getting them to attend your next event!), a lot of unpleasantness attendant to whatever procedure is used for selection (who decides, and how?), and it looking absurd with the power dynamic generally applicable to most universities: most student groups start off small and desperate for both committee members and attendees to their events so as not to offend the speakers they enlist. It sounds like you have cleared this bump at Princeton, but it may not prove so easy somewhere else.
I fear the strategy implied puts the cart before the horse: you donât get to âbe eliteâ by just offering codified means of differential status, but rather by that status forming a gatekeeper to unique opportunities and experiences which the audience cannot get elsewhere. The only group at my university which could plausibly reach this bar is the Cambridge Union, which is hundreds of years old, has (by student society standards) an absolutely vast budget and infrastructure, and a reputation that extends beyond the university itself. Getting to even a fraction of this, even segmented for tech, requires building considerable reputational resources, which I expect will take a while even if things go well.
5) Extremely optimistic targets
Less important, but although the metrics appear reasonably well chosen, the targets are stratospheric. Getting 10% of princeton 2016s to apply surely wonât happen (do any other groups on campus get this level of interest?), getting 10% of another university to sign up would be flabberghastingâif application means any more than âjoin the mailing listâ, I donât think any group outside the Union gets that in Cambridge, for example. Getting 50% of the alumni to be leaders (however defined) looks impossible: beating the base rate by a OR > 1.5 would be extraordinary. Ditto changing 70% of your audiences minds with a talk, and ditto almost everything else. I know setting aggressive goals fits the gung-ho start-up ethos, but this can become meaningless if they have no prospect of successâwhich I believe the balance of these are (prove me wrong on this and I will start offering you money).
6) Over and under-segmentation
You are explicit in aiming to be an âEA-liminalâ org, attempting to avoid some of the negative connotations of the label. I agree this is probably wise (although note regret en passant that the EA brand is somewhat toxic) but I am unsure there is a sufficient niche to carve out the worldwide org you have in mind. There are usually groups that cater for âinterested in science and technologyâ group, which have generally been around for a while and thus usually have more clout. The âimplications and existential threat of emerging technologiesâ is pretty solidly in the EA ambit.
This poses a problem where there is an existing ecosystem of both groups where you are trying to enter. Cambridge has SciSoc, the triple helix (looking at science at society), biosoc, chemsoc, comsoc, a couple of student think tanks, a GWWC chapter, an 80k chapter, and a nascent x-risk groupâand I am sure some further groups that escaped my knowledge. There seems an area around Envisionâs remit which isnât at least covered once, and I doubt other target unis will be much less saturated here. My guess would be adding another group with a narrowly tailored (but overlapping) focus will likely be more of a detriment in terms of dividing efforts than a dividend. EA (or EA-related) groups trying to set up chapters at universities are also pretty saturated (I count GWWC, EA groups simpliciter, SHIC, 80k. Perhaps others?)
7) Summing up
My overall view is, with qualifications, negative. The outside view on initiatives to produce a hyper-successful university org that wins significant outside prestiege and access to extra-university elites (i.e. entrepreneurs, tech companies, et c.) and then repeats the same process multiple times across elite universities is that the vast majority fail in their ambition. The plan seems to be over-optimistic in setting targets, and relies on success in several highly competitive areas (e.g. predicting elite leaders, tempting them invest their time and attention in you, ensuring momentum and resilence for the org to persist for years, getting a nucleus of highly effective leaders to start parallel groups other universities). For each of these, there is neither a clear edge in principle (and often the outside view will favour competitors with more people, more experience, more cash, more insitutional capital, etc.) norâwith no desire to âdo downâ the considerable achievement of getting to a mid-sized student org in 6 months or arranging a conferenceâa sufficiently impressive track record to anticipate such the requisite (very substantial) degree of success going forward.
My hunch is there remains considerable overlap between Envision and what various EA groups are already trying to accomplish. My suggestion would be a better means of accomplishing what Envision has in mind by trying to penetrate elite student audiences with EA-esque messages about Tech whilst avoiding the brand baggage of EA is to instead work within the existing ecosystem to deliver progress in that direction, both leveraging existing resources and capital, and developing the right sort of loose collaborations. An example:
The Wiberforce Society is a student run think tank in Cambridge. It ran a day of panel discussions on the impacts of future technology, and had one planned on ânavigating AI in the 21st centuryâ. I signed up to help produce the paper draft, with a mix of peopleâsome were EA-xrisky types, but not all. The panelists who would discuss our paper included a mix of people from Xrisk orgs, academia, and industry. There have been several attractive dividends: some of the coauthors have gone on to tech start-ups and discussing publically the implications of (e.g.) drone technologies, others have been invited to attend conferences, and so on and so forth. It seems very challenging for an org started in Cambridge to have emerged similarly successfully.
8) Warm wishes
I hope this persuades you to change course. Obviously, if you decide to continue along the lines suggested in the above strategy, I wish Envision every possible success, and sincerely hope my concern proves misplaced. I am fairly good at stats (although you might have access to professorial statistical firepower) and I am happy to advise re. predictive modelling etc. if you donât already have much better people on board. :)
Thank you, Gregory. You raise excellent points. I will address them individually and then alltogether in conclusion.
1) Thatâs correct, we will have to compete with other student groups. So far, our message appears powerful enough to give us a significant advantage, which will help partially compensate for our lack of a track record.
We also donât necessarily have to compete. The strategy of partnering with other successful student groups (ie Entrepreneurship Club at Princeton; similar organizations at a handful of universities have expressed excitement at partnering with us and helping set up a chapter, although of course excitement does not necessarily equal actual work) appears to be sufficient to allow us to compete at a level that weâre able to grow and sustain. Envision is in many ways a welcome addition to entrepreneurship groups so theyâve been very receptive so far to partnering and sharing resources.
2) Excellent point. To counter this, weâre focusing on building up an ecosystem of faculty advisors and partner organizations, which adds both prestige in the competition for student leaders and significantly increases the likelihood of sustainability.
I also think you underestimate the appeal of helping build a new organization, especially one working on something exciting, even if you donât run it. However, I could be wrong on this.
Lack of investment by later leaders is certainly a problem. However, 1) investment is less important since the organization already exists so far less work is required, 2) continued involvement by a board of alumni will help keep the organization on track, and 3) with faculty advisor buy-in some of the continuity will stem from them. With this combination, a weak leader should not cause the organization to collapse.
3) A good point, and one we had not thought of in detail. A few thoughts: 1) we could just use external validation criteria, eg internships at the most competitive companies, although this is not necessarily indicative of future domain leadership. 2) Breadth is a strong solution to this; the more people we reach in absolute terms, the higher the likelihood we touch future leaders.
In light of your point, do you think itâs worth creating a predictive model at all? It would use up valuable man-power, and youâve convinced me it would likely have limited impact.
4) This is a good point. Although it seems like having fellows could actually increase attendance at events. In any case, youâve convinced me to defer a fellow program until at least after the conference before re-considering in light of the new evidence weâll have gathered.
5) I disagree that the targets are âstratosphericâ â although they are optimistic. I also donât see the problem with the âgung-ho start-up ethosâ â it gets quite a lot done. The targets are hard to achieve, and itâs very unlikely weâll hit all of them, but weâll try and get pretty far in the process. Failing at achieving optimistic targets but getting quite far towards them in striving is much preferable to achieving unambitious ones and sitting back in satisfaction.
Having made that philosophical objection, I do agree our targets are in some cases probably unrealistic. Iâd welcome a more detailed explanation of which ones you think are unrealistic and why, as well as suggestions for more reasonable targets.
6) From my perspective, Envision fills a clear and gaping niche. âInterested in science and technologyâ is different from âinterested in the medium-term and long-term future of science and technology and what we can do to pioneer a better future with the tools we have and will have available.â The differences: more action-oriented; focused on future issues that do not receive much attention on college campuses; more broadly focused on multiple technologies and how they interact; integrating technology and science with ethics, policy, and entrepreneurship.
To use reductio ad absurdum on your argument of there existing separate groups that each touch on an aspect of Envision: there have always been groups for altruistic people and groups for effective people. That does not mean a group for effectively altruistic people can add no value.
I also donât see much overlap with EA groups â most of our members are not EA, even though many have heard of it. Keep in mind weâre targeting future leaders, in particular those who do not yet have a concern for safety or awareness of the future of technology, to help them learn about it.
A final note â I think you overestimate how many similar student groups exist. Weâve now exhaustively gone through all student organizations at over a dozen universities, and have not yet come across an organization with significant overlap that is run well to the point of making Envision unnecessary. Cambridge is among those with the most potential candidates (although weâve also had the most interest from students there, in addition to MIT, about starting a chapter).
Finally, as a thought experiment â how many student organizations contain entrepreneurs and policy-makers not in the EA sphere and have Andrew Critch and Robin Hanson as speakers?
Summing up
There is a lot to be said here. First, to break down your second sentence:
âą Hyper-successful: Iâm not entirely sure what this means, but I donât see how Envision succeeding at its goals requires it. We certainly need success as a student group, but I donât think we need substantially more than what would traditionally qualify as success for a student group, albeit repeated several times (which is certainly harder).
âą Significant outside prestige: We need prestige among students, but I donât see why outside prestige is necessary (if Iâm interpreting this correctly). It helps with getting external organizations on board, but prestige is sufficient for this, not necessary â being students excited about the future of tech and an organization with the prospect of hiring opportunities, and in the EA sphere being a student organization with the goal of promoting safety, goes a long way.
âą Access to extra-university elites: This is true, but we only need very limited access. Ie a few hours on a weekend to come speak or showcase your technology at a conference that pays for your flight, setting up a recruitment booth in return for providing a (for a company) small amount of money, having your name on a student organization and occasionally speaking to excited students, etc. Weâve so far been pretty successful at getting this since itâs low-cost. To be successful, we donât need more than this â the more the better, but the acceptable threshold of access to ensure success is quite low. In light of this, looking at some other student groups, I think the amount that fail is less than the vast majority, especially when keeping in mind weâre partnering with organizations like Entrepreneurship Club that have already been successful on most relevant metrics and can advise us, lend us their credibility, and help us with recruiting.
On repeating the same process: Here I agree with you. This is certainly one of the most difficult parts of Envisionâs strategy. Even if our success is limited to Princeton, though (and I have high confidence weâll establish at least a few additional chapters at significant universities), I think the net impact is still sufficient to justify building Envision.
With regards to your second sentence:
âą Predicting elite leaders â I agree this is difficult, but as I explained in the point about this, not necessary to success. Casting a wide net at universities most likely to produce future leaders ensures high probability of impacting the correct people. Predicting future leaders would be hugely beneficial, but failure here does not invalidate the value proposition.
âą Tempting them to invest their time and attention in you â They need only attend a few events and change their minds. We need officers, but this is only a tiny subset, and I think thereâs sufficient message attraction to fill this. Getting people to attend events is not trivial, but certainly doable, and has been done before, including by us.
âą Ensuring momentum and resilience â I agree that this is a major challenge. However, as I outlined above in the relevant point, I think building a framework will make this significantly easier.
âą Getting a nucleus of highly effective leaders to start parallel groups at other universities â I completely agree that this is extremely difficult and highly competitive. But in my experience the draw of starting a new organization, even as a chapter, is quite high. And again, I think the message is powerful and will in itself attract several such highly effective leaders.
For reasons I have already elaborated, I disagree that we have no edge in principle (interpreting this as a synonym for message â correct me if Iâm wrong).
Track record â I agree we donât yet have this, but neither did any organization (especially student organization) upon founding. And the partnership with existing student organizations quite significantly mitigates this.
On your last paragraph about other means of accomplishing what Envision has in mind:
âą I agree on the importance of using existing ecosystems, and I think Envision is doing what you describe. Ie Entrepreneurship Club, a conference, being a student group, running a pitch competition, leveraging existing opinions and resources rather than producing our own. I would argue what Envision is doing is leveraging the existing ecosystem more than a student think-tank producing papers would be.
âą The work of the Wilberforce Society is admirable, and we will certainly seek collaboration with them given this information about their concern for AI and the future of technology. But it doesnât seem like the type of organization to attract entrepreneurs, future business leaders, and hardcore tech developers (I could be wrong about this). And signing up to write a paper about AI suggests a pre-established interest. Running such a panel is also high-effort, and it seems like it affected a handful of people. Again, not to say anything negative about Wilberforce Society at all â just to make the point that I donât think this is necessarily far more effective than Envision. I think they serve different goals and should both exist.
Conclusion
First of all, thank you so much again for taking the time to write out this post. Youâve convinced me of a fair amount of significant changes to our plan, and helped better clarify others.
However, you have not persuaded me to change course. I think Iâve argued quite convincingly why Envision adds value â and I welcome any additional arguments for why it does not, or disagreements with my points. For the sake of keeping this at a readable length I skimmed over some points and left the details to inference, so also feel free to ask for clarification.
Thank you for the model-building offer. Depending on whether you think the model is still worth it, we would be interested in discussing further.
As a final note, Envision is exciting. And excitement is powerful.
This is an impressive plan.
The main thing I want to mention is that it seems like a big undertaking. Student groups that promote novel ideas only succeed if thereâs a strong leader in each location, who can drive the group and persuade others. These people are very hard to recruit, and tend to have strong alternative options (e.g. founding their own project). Moreover, thereâs constant turnover, so you need to recruit one strong leader every 1-2 years in every location. If you miss one year, the group can easily end up in a negative cycle: a weak leader recruiters a weaker replacement, and so on, until the group falls apart.
Weâve had plenty of experience of this in 7 years of student group organising around EA.
(Note that itâs not the same if youâre promoting an idea thatâs already widely adopted, because then you have an existing pool of talented people to draw on.)
Building this network out to 10-20 locations will already be years of work, and it will require constant maintenance. Making the groups awesome enough that you get significant penetration in each location will be much harder again. Youâll need to develop your messaging from scratch, and figure out how to make the whole thing seem like âa big dealâ with a generation of students. My guess is itâs a 5-10 year project with several full-time staff.
Just look at how much investment there has been in EA student groups so far over 7 years, and thereâs still under ~20 successful ones (my rough guess), and these only engage a few percent of the student body, so itâs a long way from getting the future leaders. Perhaps this idea will be a bit easier to spread than EA, but thatâs not obvious. Also consider that EA student groups can piggypack off the main organisations, which have received excellent media coverage and produce all kinds of quality content and provide lots of support and experience.
So one question is whether you want to spend the next multiple years of your life doing this. Of course you donât have to decide right away, but at some point someone will have to make this kind of commitment.
My other thought is that although thereâs interesting differences, thereâs still a lot of overlap with the strategy of EA groups (and also 80k). Theyâre going after basically the same audience, and one of the key messages of EA groups is the importance of shaping future tech. And the EA groups could maybe adopt some of your other differences, such as more positive messaging.
Given that both projects require a major amount of work, and itâs better to have one big success than two mediocre efforts (lognormal returns), and similar projects cause confusion, I wonder if it would be better to put your considerable talents into promoting EA groups instead.
Hi Ben,
You raise good points, thank you for taking the time. To address them:
I donât think Envision is anywhere near as difficult a message to get across as EA. The basic idea already exists in latent form in many students, and the messaging is naturally attractive to those with ambition (who tend to have world-scale goals already), without the negative associations that often exist around the words âaltruismâ and âimpact.â The Princeton Futurist Society (Envisionâs previous name) has only been around for one semester and already has 91 members without a strong marketing effort and with an off-putting name; over 30 student groups at universities across the US have said they are planning to attend the conference (including in tech, engineering, entrepreneurship, and policy). Weâre not peddling a controversial message, or one that many perceive as in opposition to their own interests (which is how, in my experience, many see altruism and EA); the way I see it, weâre giving words and tangible action paths to what people already want. I certainly could be wrong about this; it will become clearer over the next year. If Iâm wrong strategy will be adjusted accordingly.
I also donât think weâre developing our message from scratch. Weâre combining several different messages into one; ie the massive potential of technology, and the importance of safety in realizing that potential. Thereâs many existing resources to draw from and existing ideas which make it a lot easier to build off of what exists, especially as compared to EA, which had less precedent. As a concrete example, we donât need to write any books about our message, we just need to promote books and invite speakers.
As a result of the above two points, I think it will be easier than you suggest to grow Envision, although ensuring the integrity of the organization and its message as it grows will certainly be a major challenge. That said, easier does not mean easy, and we certainly acknowledge that it will be difficult.
The danger of weak leaders is indeed serious, and one of the most likely failure scenarios to pan out, at least on a localized level. Thatâs why weâll be cautious in founding chapters and are devoting significant time and effort to figuring out how best to identify good chapter founders. Any advice on this is much appreciated, as we have little prior experience to go off of.
I disagree that thereâs much overlap between EA and Envision; although they may appear similar, thereâs a deep distinction. The majority of those interested in Envision so far are either not, or barely, EA, including many that have heard of it. For various reasons, most entrepreneurs are not attracted to EA, but are attracted to Envision (our conference is co-hosted with Princeton Entrepreneurship Club). Although I donât want to speculate too much about the causes of this, I think thereâs a strong psychological difference between a movement whose primary goal is helping all sentient beings, with one of the tools being technology (a crude but I think sufficiently accurate description of EA) and a movement whose primary goal is the realization of technological development, done in a way that is beneficial to humanity. I could be wrong here and welcome any counter-points. So to summarize, although EA and Envision are pursuing a similar end state and thereâs some similarity in the means, thereâs a pretty fundamental distinction in the mindset and implementation, which means Envision appeals to many who are not attracted by EA. And I think that audience will play a pivotal role in shaping humanityâs future.
I also agree with AGBâs points below; will comment separately.
I hope that addresses all your points; let me know if it didnât or if you have any additional questions and/âor counter-points.
Iâm aware of this from the main post, but I think itâs pretty weak evidence.
Youâre essentially trying to integrate the idea of concern for existential risk into tech development, which seems like a similarly difficult task to EA.
Moreover, EA had many excellent existing resources and powerful ideas to draw on, such as the importance of global poverty, the biases literature, the evidence-based movement, and so on. I donât see a significant difference in difficulty here.
Entrepreneurs are perhaps EAs best target audience. Almost all of GiveWellâs donors are either from tech or finance, and then they partnered with Dustin Moskovitz. Ried Hoffman and the Gates Foundation endorsed Willâs book. Our blog posts are regularly front page of Hacker News. I could go on.
Overall I agree thereâs some nice features of the messaging that are different (more positive frame etc.) but I think these benefits are relatively small, and donât obviously outweigh the large costs of setting up a new org, in an area thatâs already extremely crowded by EA effort, and potentially diverting attention from EA groups.
I think a more cost-effective strategy would be to try to spread these messages through existing groups. Or by trying to integrate the positive features of the messaging into EA, perhaps starting in the Princeton group. I think with some ingenuity you could get the Princeton EA group to seriously engage 5% of students then become self-sustaining, and that would be an extremely valuable project that would only take a couple of years.
I share some of these concerns and donât have anything like a settled opinion on what to do, but there are also arguments against simply having this idea promoted by EA groups, many of which are mentioned in the post. Notably:
EA is generally much more narrow-base/âhigh-ask than Enivision would be. Weâve done this because we seem to get the most impact out of a relatively small number of people doing relatively dramatic things, but it makes the targeting poorly suited for a broad-based low-ask group.
EA already has a political dimension to it that I suspect âmake technology developments safeâ might be able to avoid. Again, for EA this isnât super-problematic because weâre only going after a fairly narrow base to start with and itâs not obvious that what negative optics EA already has are hugely affecting that narrow base. But it would be quite sad if, e.g., the terrible reputation of Peter Singer in Germany meant that we couldnât make headway with future German leaders on technology safety given how far apart the actual topics are.
A related question is what kinds of percentages you really need to make Envision work, or rather at what point the value starts to flatten off. I find it fairly intuitive that 90% of an organisation working on a dangerous technology (e.g. AI) being safety-conscious to start with isnât that much better than 70% or probably even 50%; all you need is a critical mass to get these ideas seriously considered in circulation. But how low can you go here? Is a 10% starting point enough because that 10% can then teach the others? What about 5%?
Hey Alex,
I definitely agree there are some arguments against, but Iâm concerned theyâre not strong enough to offset the downsides of setting up a new org.
Also, my understanding is that Envision is also narrow-base. Theyâre explicitly aiming at future leaders in tech. EA is aiming at that group plus others, so if anything is a wider base than Envision. Rather, Envision differs in being low-ask.
If envision really is only aiming at tech and adjacent undergrads Iâll be disappointed, but that wasnât my read; what I see âleaders in tech development, policy, academia, and businessâ. So for instance I assume an high-flying Oxford PPE graduate with a side interest in tech would qualify*.
I think we might be talking past each other slightly on the base point though, when I said EA was narrow-base/âhigh-ask I meant to imply that our available base is narrowed (a lot) by the high ask; it only appeals to people with a fairly strong to very strong altruistic bent. So I think I could sell Envision or something like it to a much wider cross-section of maths/âcomp sci types than I could EA in general (within JS, maybe 55% versus 20% to give you some idea of percentages).
*For non-UK readers, Oxford PPE graduates have fairly insane levels of penetration into the highest levels of UK politics.
Ah, I got you.
Also just to clarify I was saying with Envision the audience is future leaders, whereas with EA itâs future leaders plus others; so thatâs a sense in which EA has a broader audience.
Alex is correct, Envision is not only targeting future tech leaders, itâs targeting future leaders in tech development, policy, academia, and business.
Hi AGB,
Great points, I completely agree. On your last question, this is an intriguing one. I think 10% is too low; theyâll be sidelined, unless those 10% include most of the leadership and most socially influential individuals. Probably 50% is a good starting level, as long as this increases quite quickly.
Curious to hear everyone elseâs thoughts on this!
This is really cool! Itâs exactly the kind of X-risk intervention Iâm excited about (capacity building among elites). I think this investment in the future is even more important than tackling technical problems today.
I noticed that you didnât mention any need for funding. Does the mean that your current funding needs are adequately met?
Hi Michael,
Great to hear! They are not; although we have some funding, we are still far from fully funded to execute on all our projects. If youâre interested, shoot me an email at lrade@princeton.edu and we can discuss further.
I want to add my voice to those who are very excited to see an initiative along these lines. At least a few people have had to listen to me rant that pretty much exactly this doesnât exist and should exist in some form.
Serious thought should be given to Ben Toddâs points if thatâs not happening already, which it probably is. I replied there also.
Thanks for sharing about the project! Iâm curious how do you plan to engage with existing EA chapters in colleges?
Hi Gleb,
The specifics arenât worked out yet, but weâre working with EA Build and will coordinate with individual EA chapters at the universities we found chapters at. The general idea is that members of EA chapters who are interested in technology and the future will help with the setting up and growing of Envision chapters, and we will direct Envision members who seem interested in EA towards the EA chapter. There may be some events co-hosted; this is probably context-specific.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Sounds like there will be a significant focus on collaboration. Also consider collaborating with SHIC if you arenât yet!
I really think it will become very important initiative in the near future.