Hey, I’m Joris and I currently run CEA’s University Groups Team. I just wanted to share some more personal thoughts on this topic. My thoughts do not represent CEA’s official position and are also a bit messy, but I wanted to share them to be transparent and maybe provide some insight into how I am thinking about things.
First, I just wanted to flag that the team and I are aware of themanydiscussions on the topic of ‘top’ or ‘focus’ universities that have happened on the Forum. Many of our internal conversations touch upon many of the arguments raised there
I think it’s important to keep in mind that most talented people that we’d want to contribute to the EA mission are just not at these few institutions
Zooming out, I believe that most talented, altruistic and driven people in the world might just never even get a chance to act on those motivations due to large systemic issues like poverty, lack of education, or just a sheer dearth of opportunities to do good on a large scale more generally.
I think a lot of EA initiatives try to address these problems, but I don’t think it’s where our team should try to make a dent in the world (at least not directly).
On a more actionable note, however, it does feel like there is a subsection of the world’s population that we can reach with EA ideas, and we should make sure to prioritize well between all of those possible audiences. I think it’s now the right call to spend some of our marginal efforts on improving EA groups at these ‘top’ universities:
Now that our scalable support feels firmly in place and reaches hundreds of organizers around the world, I feel better about focusing more of our efforts on the pilot universities. This, together with our focus on ‘what things from our pilot program can we scale to other groups?’, makes things feel different from past work with ‘top’ universities
For context: the University Groups Team currently consists of Alex, Jemima, Joris, ~0.5 of Sam (he’s still studying), and our assistants Anto and Igna. I’d estimate that from May till now, about 20% of our combined time has been spent on mentorship and other support for the pilot uni program, while at least 30% of our time is spent on broad support programming
Personally, I’m excited to be focusing more of my time on our scalable support once we have onboarded someone for the pilot university role!
In general, I often notice myself thinking that I feel sad to live in a world where a small fraction of the population has such outsized opportunities to shape the world. But people in certain positions do have outsized resources to impact the world, and if we get a chance to inspire these people with EA ideas and motivate them to act on them, we should. I’m excited to find someone who can work with us on making the most of this large opportunity for impact, and hope people apply for the role!
Hey, I’m Joris and I currently run CEA’s University Groups Team. I just wanted to share some more personal thoughts on this topic. My thoughts do not represent CEA’s official position and are also a bit messy, but I wanted to share them to be transparent and maybe provide some insight into how I am thinking about things.
First, I just wanted to flag that the team and I are aware of the many discussions on the topic of ‘top’ or ‘focus’ universities that have happened on the Forum. Many of our internal conversations touch upon many of the arguments raised there
I think it’s important to keep in mind that most talented people that we’d want to contribute to the EA mission are just not at these few institutions
Zooming out, I believe that most talented, altruistic and driven people in the world might just never even get a chance to act on those motivations due to large systemic issues like poverty, lack of education, or just a sheer dearth of opportunities to do good on a large scale more generally.
I think a lot of EA initiatives try to address these problems, but I don’t think it’s where our team should try to make a dent in the world (at least not directly).
On a more actionable note, however, it does feel like there is a subsection of the world’s population that we can reach with EA ideas, and we should make sure to prioritize well between all of those possible audiences. I think it’s now the right call to spend some of our marginal efforts on improving EA groups at these ‘top’ universities:
Now that our scalable support feels firmly in place and reaches hundreds of organizers around the world, I feel better about focusing more of our efforts on the pilot universities. This, together with our focus on ‘what things from our pilot program can we scale to other groups?’, makes things feel different from past work with ‘top’ universities
For context: the University Groups Team currently consists of Alex, Jemima, Joris, ~0.5 of Sam (he’s still studying), and our assistants Anto and Igna. I’d estimate that from May till now, about 20% of our combined time has been spent on mentorship and other support for the pilot uni program, while at least 30% of our time is spent on broad support programming
Personally, I’m excited to be focusing more of my time on our scalable support once we have onboarded someone for the pilot university role!
In general, I often notice myself thinking that I feel sad to live in a world where a small fraction of the population has such outsized opportunities to shape the world. But people in certain positions do have outsized resources to impact the world, and if we get a chance to inspire these
people with EA ideas and motivate them to act on them, we should. I’m excited to find someone who can work with us on making the most of this large opportunity for impact, and hope people apply for the role!