Hmm. On the one hand I think these are all useful topics for an EA to know. But I don’t think it’s necessary for all EAs to know these things. I think there’s a lot of EAs who don’t have this technical knowledge, but are happy to outsource decisions relying on this knowledge (such as where to donate) to people who do. That said, I think that often leads to donating less-than-effectively (e.g. giving to whatever EA Fund appeals to you personally, rather than rationally thinking about trade-offs/probabilistic outcomes).
I guess this is, in part, a big-tent vs. elite EA trade-off question. If EA is best as an elite movement, it makes sense that all the members should have this knowledge. But if we want to take an “everyone has a place in EA” approach, then it might not make sense to have a central curriculum.
Also, I don’t think we want everyone in EA to have the same skillset. EA isn’t, in my view, a single professional field, but perhaps more like a company (although this is probably an oversimplification). If a company gave all of their employees a handbook on How to Be A Great Project Manager, it’d be helpful… for project managers. But the rest of the team ought to be rounding out skills that others in the company don’t have that suit their comparative advantage and will move the company forward. The only thing everyone at the company really needs to know is the product. Basic time management / other soft skills are also useful. I don’t think we need 100% of EAs to have a solid grounding in economics. Maybe we need ~100% of EAs to trust economics. But I’d rather have some EAs focusing on building skills like movement-building, communications, fundraising, operations/management, entrepreneurship, policy, qualitative research, etc.
Granted, I’m thinking about this from the perspective of careers, rather than being able to participate in discussions in EA spaces. To answer to that aspect of it—although I certainly think it’s possible to discuss EA without knowing about economics / statistics / decision analysis knowledge, the conversation does sometimes go in this more technical direction and leave newcomers behind. The question, then, might be whether it’s the newcomers who should hold the responsibility of learning this so that they can participate in these discussions, or if the people who are discussing things at such a technical level should adjust the way they discuss these issues to make them more accessible to a non-technical audience. I lean more towards the latter (though it depends on the context).
Rather than a single body of knowledge being a standard education for EAs, I like the fellowship structure that many EA Uni groups use.
For me, one of the main goals in running these fellowship to expose students to enough EA ideas and discussions to decide for themselves what knowledge and skills they want to build up in order to do good better. For some people, this will involve economics, statistics, and decision analysis knowledge, but for others, it will look totally different.
Hmm. On the one hand I think these are all useful topics for an EA to know. But I don’t think it’s necessary for all EAs to know these things. I think there’s a lot of EAs who don’t have this technical knowledge, but are happy to outsource decisions relying on this knowledge (such as where to donate) to people who do. That said, I think that often leads to donating less-than-effectively (e.g. giving to whatever EA Fund appeals to you personally, rather than rationally thinking about trade-offs/probabilistic outcomes).
I guess this is, in part, a big-tent vs. elite EA trade-off question. If EA is best as an elite movement, it makes sense that all the members should have this knowledge. But if we want to take an “everyone has a place in EA” approach, then it might not make sense to have a central curriculum.
Also, I don’t think we want everyone in EA to have the same skillset. EA isn’t, in my view, a single professional field, but perhaps more like a company (although this is probably an oversimplification). If a company gave all of their employees a handbook on How to Be A Great Project Manager, it’d be helpful… for project managers. But the rest of the team ought to be rounding out skills that others in the company don’t have that suit their comparative advantage and will move the company forward. The only thing everyone at the company really needs to know is the product. Basic time management / other soft skills are also useful. I don’t think we need 100% of EAs to have a solid grounding in economics. Maybe we need ~100% of EAs to trust economics. But I’d rather have some EAs focusing on building skills like movement-building, communications, fundraising, operations/management, entrepreneurship, policy, qualitative research, etc.
Granted, I’m thinking about this from the perspective of careers, rather than being able to participate in discussions in EA spaces. To answer to that aspect of it—although I certainly think it’s possible to discuss EA without knowing about economics / statistics / decision analysis knowledge, the conversation does sometimes go in this more technical direction and leave newcomers behind. The question, then, might be whether it’s the newcomers who should hold the responsibility of learning this so that they can participate in these discussions, or if the people who are discussing things at such a technical level should adjust the way they discuss these issues to make them more accessible to a non-technical audience. I lean more towards the latter (though it depends on the context).
I agree with Marisa
Rather than a single body of knowledge being a standard education for EAs, I like the fellowship structure that many EA Uni groups use.
For me, one of the main goals in running these fellowship to expose students to enough EA ideas and discussions to decide for themselves what knowledge and skills they want to build up in order to do good better. For some people, this will involve economics, statistics, and decision analysis knowledge, but for others, it will look totally different.
(For fellowship syllabus examples you can check out this Intro Fellowship I’m running at Brown EA, and this In-Depth Fellowship run by EA Oxford).