This is less of a question about EAGxs themselves than the reasoning behind the change. I’m curious about this line of thinking:
EA believes that, at least at the moment, our efforts to improve the world are bottlenecked by our ability to help promising people become fully engaged, rather than attracting new interest.
Could you say 1) why CEA has come to believe this and 2) what this means you’ll be trying to do differently (besides these specific changes to EAGxes)?
This isn’t a critical question, would just like to know more.
We, in collaboration with 80,000 Hours, have been tracking the rate and value of engagement of people we try to engage with EA. We have figured out ways to easily and systematically do early-stage engagement of potential EAs with e.g. the Doing Good Better book giveaway, 80,000 Hours decision tool, and Giving What We Can pledge. However, our sense is that the majority of value comes from the few people who are most engaged, and that effective use of talent requires greater levels of engagement. (It’s more valuable to have e.g. one full-time, knowledgeable employee than the same number of hours of labor from many, short-term volunteers.) Similarly, funding that is more values-aligned can be put towards more flexible, less conventional funding areas. The scalable vehicles we developed aren’t very equipped to increase engagement.
We’ve been really impressed many people already in the community, but when we encourage them to work for an EA organization, start their own EA project, and/or seek out other EAs with whom to collaborate, this often falls flat for lack of funding, support structure, or a clear sense of what to do/read next. In addition to the shifts in EAGx, we’re attempting to address this with EA Grants, sequenced EA content, changes to EA Global, the Involvement Guide on effectivealtruism.org, and increased funneling to 80,000 Hours’ one-on-one career coaching.
the people we’d like to have do direct work in many cases already exist in the EA sphere but don’t have the affordance or nudge to dedicate themselves to EA work full-time.
Would you view the large number of rejected EA Grants proposals as evidence against this view and toward a view of funding constraints? (Of course, you can answer “yes” to that question and still think the view I quoted is accurate because of a larger balance of evidence pointing toward the quoted view.)
It’s cool to see CEA thinking systematically about the entire funnel of EA talent.
The main reason that we could not interview more people for EA Grants at this stage is that we had a limited amount of staff time to conduct interviews, rather than because of funding constraints.
I think you are right that the number of excellent EA Grants proposals suggests that small projects are often currently restricted by receiving funding. However, I think that this is less because there is not enough money, and more because there aren’t good mechanisms for matching small projects up with money. You could say it is funding-mechanism-constrained. Of course, EA Grants is trying to address this. This was a smaller trial round, to see how promising the project is, and work out how to run it well. We will reassess after we’ve completed this round, but I think that it’s very possible that we will scale the program up, to begin to address this issue.
Max’s point can be generalized to mean that the “talent” vs. “funding” constraint framing misses the real bottleneck, which is institutions that can effectively put more money and talent to work. We of course need good people to run those institutions, but if you gave me a room full of good people, I couldn’t just put them to work.
[I work for CEA on EA Grants.] We received over 700 applications, and we only offered interviews to roughly the top 10% of applicants. (We’ll do a more detailed writeup once the process is over.)
A related question—even if CEA believes that, why does CEA believe it with enough credence to have it dictate a particularly more onerous EAGx format? Are the costs in loss of flexibility and increased expense sufficiently outweighed by the benefits?
Ah, the wording makes this unclear. It isn’t that we’re dictating that more events take on the more onerous format, but instead restricting the name “EAGx” to the few events who already believe it is best for their region to run a full-weekend event. In fact, we’re encouraging most groups /not/ to do this, and instead run smaller, more targeted events.
The real shifts are a) discouraging groups from running events that are more intensive than suit their circumstances and b) using a different name for the less-intensive events to avoid the confusion of expectations experienced by lots of attendees last year. (To the latter, one of the main feedback types events received was “the content was too elementary” or “the content was too advanced,” often about the same event.)
We’re still providing funding and support to events not entitled EAGx.
This is less of a question about EAGxs themselves than the reasoning behind the change. I’m curious about this line of thinking:
Could you say 1) why CEA has come to believe this and 2) what this means you’ll be trying to do differently (besides these specific changes to EAGxes)?
This isn’t a critical question, would just like to know more.
Thanks for the question.
In brief, we’re of the view that a) EA is more talent-constrained rather than funding-constrained (https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-you-should-focus-more-on-talent-gaps-not-funding-gaps/), and b) the people we’d like to have do direct work in many cases already exist in the EA sphere but don’t have the affordance or nudge to dedicate themselves to EA work full-time.
We, in collaboration with 80,000 Hours, have been tracking the rate and value of engagement of people we try to engage with EA. We have figured out ways to easily and systematically do early-stage engagement of potential EAs with e.g. the Doing Good Better book giveaway, 80,000 Hours decision tool, and Giving What We Can pledge. However, our sense is that the majority of value comes from the few people who are most engaged, and that effective use of talent requires greater levels of engagement. (It’s more valuable to have e.g. one full-time, knowledgeable employee than the same number of hours of labor from many, short-term volunteers.) Similarly, funding that is more values-aligned can be put towards more flexible, less conventional funding areas. The scalable vehicles we developed aren’t very equipped to increase engagement.
We’ve been really impressed many people already in the community, but when we encourage them to work for an EA organization, start their own EA project, and/or seek out other EAs with whom to collaborate, this often falls flat for lack of funding, support structure, or a clear sense of what to do/read next. In addition to the shifts in EAGx, we’re attempting to address this with EA Grants, sequenced EA content, changes to EA Global, the Involvement Guide on effectivealtruism.org, and increased funneling to 80,000 Hours’ one-on-one career coaching.
We’ll have more on this on the CEA blog shortly.
Would you view the large number of rejected EA Grants proposals as evidence against this view and toward a view of funding constraints? (Of course, you can answer “yes” to that question and still think the view I quoted is accurate because of a larger balance of evidence pointing toward the quoted view.)
It’s cool to see CEA thinking systematically about the entire funnel of EA talent.
The main reason that we could not interview more people for EA Grants at this stage is that we had a limited amount of staff time to conduct interviews, rather than because of funding constraints.
I think you are right that the number of excellent EA Grants proposals suggests that small projects are often currently restricted by receiving funding. However, I think that this is less because there is not enough money, and more because there aren’t good mechanisms for matching small projects up with money. You could say it is funding-mechanism-constrained. Of course, EA Grants is trying to address this. This was a smaller trial round, to see how promising the project is, and work out how to run it well. We will reassess after we’ve completed this round, but I think that it’s very possible that we will scale the program up, to begin to address this issue.
[I’m working for CEA on EA Grants.]
Max’s point can be generalized to mean that the “talent” vs. “funding” constraint framing misses the real bottleneck, which is institutions that can effectively put more money and talent to work. We of course need good people to run those institutions, but if you gave me a room full of good people, I couldn’t just put them to work.
Is there info about this somewhere?
[I work for CEA on EA Grants.] We received over 700 applications, and we only offered interviews to roughly the top 10% of applicants. (We’ll do a more detailed writeup once the process is over.)
It was in a email sent to rejected EA grants applicants.
A related question—even if CEA believes that, why does CEA believe it with enough credence to have it dictate a particularly more onerous EAGx format? Are the costs in loss of flexibility and increased expense sufficiently outweighed by the benefits?
Ah, the wording makes this unclear. It isn’t that we’re dictating that more events take on the more onerous format, but instead restricting the name “EAGx” to the few events who already believe it is best for their region to run a full-weekend event. In fact, we’re encouraging most groups /not/ to do this, and instead run smaller, more targeted events.
The real shifts are a) discouraging groups from running events that are more intensive than suit their circumstances and b) using a different name for the less-intensive events to avoid the confusion of expectations experienced by lots of attendees last year. (To the latter, one of the main feedback types events received was “the content was too elementary” or “the content was too advanced,” often about the same event.)
We’re still providing funding and support to events not entitled EAGx.
That makes a lot of sense; thanks for the clarification!