Thank you for writing this. I worry a lot about university groups being led by inexperienced people who have only heard of EA recently, especially given the huge focus on university groups (so, so much more focus than on regional groups or professional groups)! EA seems to be really banking on universities**, so much so that we are kinda screwed if it is done poorly, and turning people off. Some thoughts and theories:
1. Experience of organizers:
I bet the mentorship and training in the new University Group Accelerator Program will help, but also I am not sure how much time a mentor will have, and that still assumes only 25 hours of engaging with EA content. From the website:
“The program is designed for groups that… have at least two interested organizers where… at least one has engaged with high-quality EA ideas for at least 25 hours (e.g. completed an intro fellowship or equivalent) and is comfortable facilitating group discussions or could be with training”
I realize a low amount of hours is a given for this role if you want it to happen at all, but still. That could be enough for someone who is a natural conversationalist to integrate a lot of key lessons and have a deep understanding and mental infrastructure, but for a lot of people it won’t be enough that they can field concerns well and not sound like cultists (repeating things rather rote rather than being conversational). And tbh, some people won’t know what high quality content is. Is 25 hours with no focus on animal welfare enough? What about that being the almost sole focus? Or what about if most of those hours are topical discussion with other inexperienced fellows?
I would love to see the training materials for the UGAP program made public on the forum or on request to dedicated EAs, for red-teaming. Red-teaming community building is a great idea!
2. Conversationality and critiques
I absolutely agree about interfacing with people who are naturally critical and them being some of the best prospective members. This also reduces the cult vibe.. organizers should ideally be people who have thought through the problems deeply and definitely didn’t just grab onto the first thing or go with authority. Frankly, I don’t think this personality trait/intellectual inclination is something organizers can or should fake, and it is possible that student organizers should be interviewed for this ability. My heuristic is something like “If they couldn’t hang at a rat or EA group house late-night discussion, they shouldn’t be publicly teaching EA”. (at risk of sounding strict, these are very friendly situations!)
I would love to see some training to uni organisers on how to field rebuttals. Eg, “hm, I actually can’t answer that with the confidence I think it deserves. But I recommend you message X about it!” (are there people who can just field questions? Ask a forum librarian?) or “Just because of time limitations, I really want to circle back to this later with you.. can we chat after the session or over [messenger app]?”
3. On Cults
The cult thing is really problematic. Here are some known aspects of cults we don’t technically fit, but could do to ensure all EAs, especially organizers, are leaning more outside of:
-Zealots: Don’t be one.
-Separation from friends and loved ones: Happens accidentally due to value changes. Mentioning other people and commitments in your life other than EA might go a long way.
-The cult’s philosophy is the one great truth: Stress moral uncertainty and the different approaches to doing good within the movement. Discuss how EA has changed and how the philosophy doesn’t have any prescriptions written in stone except that the community welcomes people who try to do their best for the good of others using evidence and reason.
-One magical leader: No idolizing and err toward being open if you disagree with an expert. Emphasize the decentralized origin of ideas in EA. Also, if you bring up one expert, it is good to bring up others, eg why just peter singer, toby ord, will macaskill, or rob wiblin? Surely you can find a second person to support their claim? Or just say “some well-respected figures think X because Y” and don’t namedrop anybody unless requested.
-Tithes and pushing self-denial or frugality to increase the ability to tithe more: Why is this even promoted among broke college students when the community has funds for a good few years? I’d approach it as something EA ideals have pointed to in the past, and something some people still do. Let them hear about GWWC if they ask. Move on quickly to talking about direct work. EA initially had bad publicity because of talks about money, and we can thank our lucky stars that it isn’t a moral imperative to “fundraise” anymore! It’s great that people have been and are still donating, and thanks to them, organizers are free to use so many other framings in outreach and pitch other things that will be less unpopular and more impactful. So please do!
-Promising a great afterlife or great eventual reward: Immortality via simulation, cryonics, and utopian simulation are probably things to steer a beginner-friendly discussion away from if it happens to go there.
Additionally, I’d love to see some training on how young EAs can talk to their families.. I recently met a wannabe student organizer who told me how tenaciously he was talking to his (Mormon) parents about EA, and cult bells were ringing even in my head. I gave him some advice, but the odds are there are more prospective-organizers out there doing that. As an ex-young-vegan, I get it. But EA really doesn’t need parents lobbying their child’s university that the EA student group is a cult and should be shut down. Nor do we need well-meaning parents posting on social media or sending emails warning their parent friends or religious leaders about EA student groups corrupting their kids.
4. CRM
CRM seems good, but it should be used transparently. Just ask people what opportunities they would like information about and what their favorite cause areas are, and anything else about them they’d like you to know. Say you will keep this information for now, but it can be deleted any time on request. It is so you can send them things like job and fellowship opportunities they will really like, or interesting events and intellectual pieces they will really like. Be clear that you are not affiliated with any opportunities, but just doing it as a helpful service to your members.
5. Maybe we can all can help
A good volunteer opportunity for EAs might be to reach out to your university organizers and try to mentor them a bit. Send them good pieces or teach them how to proactively use the forum and subscribe to the community-building topic tag. Invite them to the slack and facebook groups and share newsletters with them they might not know about. You could even show up to the first or last day of their fellowships if the student organizers think it would help. I am doing a bit of mentoring for University of Texas organizers slightly , but this post makes me want to do moreso.
**Side note, I really don’t get the focus on student outreach in general. At least 4 of the 6 bottlenecks named seem better sourced from professionals and regional connections (management, ability to really figure out what matters most and set the right priorities, skills related to entrepreneurship / founding new organizations, and one-on-one social skills and emotional intelligence) than from universities. Plus young people are probably better at spreading cultural memes, so we might have a bigger reputational risk with them.
| Separation from friends and loved ones: Happens accidentally due to value changes.
I hope by this you mean something like “People in general tend to feel a bit more distant from friends when they realise they have different values and EA values are no exception.” But if you’ve actually noticed much more substantial separation tending to happen, I personally think this is something we should push back against, even if it does happen accidentally. Not just for optics’ sake (“Mentioning other people and commitments in your life other than EA might go a long way”), but for not feeling socially/professionally/spiritually dependent on one community, for avoiding groupthink, for not feeling pressure to make sacrifices beyond your ‘stretch zone.’
Just wanted to hop in re: the University Group Accelerator program. You are definitely hitting on some key points that we have been strategizing around for UGAP. I just want to clarify a few things:
* We see 25 hours as the minimum amount of time engaging with EA ideas before someone should help start a group. Often times we think it should be more but there have been cases of really great organizers springing up after just an intro fellowship. We have additional screening for UGAP groups beyond just meeting the pre-requisites that dive a bit more into the nuances you mentioned around what high-quality content is.
* UGAP has been very much in beta mode but we are hoping to share the training materials from the upcoming round. :) We would be excited to have people red-team these once they are presentable.
Thanks for responding! I’m actually super excited about UGAP and have already recommended the program to student organizers now that your applications are open (applications are open, people!). I do note that the 25 hour time commitment is for “at least one organizer”, but I also think mentoring will go a long way to make those 25+/- hours count for more. That’s great that you do interviews to determine quality and you clarify what quality content is.
Re: “there have been cases of really great organizers springing up after just an intro fellowship.”
I definitely believe this can happen and am glad you allow for that.
What makes someone seem really great — epistemics, alignment/buy-in, skill in a relevant area of study, __?
Side note, I really don’t get the focus on student outreach in general
There are multiple reasons for the focus on student outreach:
Students are early on in their careers. You are much more likely to be able to affect their trajectory because a) they are often still deciding (and may even seek out your advice!) b) they lack sunk cost c) they have access to low-cost opportunities like internships to try out various paths.
Students have large amounts of free time and the enthusiasm/energy of youth. If an aspect of EA sounds interesting to them, they are more likely to read about it. They have more time to volunteer and more time to invest in skilling up.
Top schools provide an opportunity to connect with people at a certain level of talent. These people are much harder to access later in their careers, both because they are busier, but also because they are distributed at many different companies instead of all concentrated on a few campuses. Beyond this, attending events is so much easier as a student and schools have, for instance, O-Days where societies can recruit members.
Besides these theoretical reasons, I expect CEA is basing this on experience and looking at the highest performers in EA and how they became involved in EA. See, for example, this post which notes:
I am aware of the reasons, and I still think it has been focused on to the neglect of other things. Perhaps I should have said extreme focus instead. Maybe that is budget consciousness (uni groups have in the past been run by free and cheap volunteers), but it doesn’t seem that should have been a strict consideration for a couple of years now. I’m not saying student groups aren’t good but that given bottlenecks and given CEA’s limited bandwidth, I don’t think it warrants the extreme focus and bullishness I see from many these days, to, I can only assume, the detriment of other programs and other experimentation. Almost all of those students will still be recommended to enter regular careers and gain career capital before they can be competitive for doing direct work, and it is unclear how many students from these groups are even going for direct work on longtermist areas. I think perspectives here might depend on AGI timelines.
Let me also clarify that I am talking about uni groups, as opposed to targeted skilling-up programs hosted at universities. I’m also guessing that that 2015 stanford group was a lot different than the uni groups today. 8 week intro fellowships didn’t exist then
So from the perspective of the recruiting party these reasons make sense. From the perspective of a critical outsider, these very same reasons can look bad (and are genuine reasons to mistrust the group that is recruiting): - easier to manipulate their trajectory - easier to exploit their labour - free selection, build on top of/continue rich get richer effects of ‘talented’ people - let’s apply a supervised learning approach to high impact people acquisition, the training data biases won’t affect it
Well, haters are gonna hate. Maybe that’s too blase, but as long as we are talking about university groups rather than high schools, the PR risks don’t feel too substantial.
A small thing, but citing a particular person seems less culty to me than saying “some well-respected figures think X because Y”. Having a community orthodoxy seems like worse optics than valuing the opinions of specific named people.
Tbh I’ve had success with this approach. Usually, someone will say “like who?” and then I get to rattle off some names with a clause-length bio without making their eyes glaze over, because they proactively requested the information. Other times they won’t ask because they are more interested in the overall point than who thinks it anyway, and they probably already trsut me by that point. Sometimes I’d actually have to google anyway “well I know one was the head of this org and one was the author of this book, let me look those up” and then people are like “whatever whatever I believe you.” It is the ideas that matter anyway
In general, I think it is good to talk casually, and this kind of wording is very natural for me with the benefit that I don’t screw up my train of thought trying to remember names then anyway. If it isn’t natural for you (and I guess for many EAs it won’t be, now that you mention it) don’t do it
I think she is suggesting that only reading up about one person’s thoughts and treating it like gospel is cult-like and bad, then sharing that singular view gives off cult-like impressions (understandably). Rather, being more open to learning many different people’s views, forming your own nuanced opinion, and then sharing that is far more valuable both intrinsically and extrinsically!
I think it’s pretty clear you shouldn’t be saying “some well-respected figures think X because Y” regardless, that’s like 101 bad epistemics because it’s not referencable and vague.
The focus on student groups is also inherently redflaggy for some people, as it can be viewed as looking for people who have less scepticism and experience.
Thank you for writing this. I worry a lot about university groups being led by inexperienced people who have only heard of EA recently, especially given the huge focus on university groups (so, so much more focus than on regional groups or professional groups)! EA seems to be really banking on universities**, so much so that we are kinda screwed if it is done poorly, and turning people off. Some thoughts and theories:
1. Experience of organizers:
I bet the mentorship and training in the new University Group Accelerator Program will help, but also I am not sure how much time a mentor will have, and that still assumes only 25 hours of engaging with EA content. From the website:
I realize a low amount of hours is a given for this role if you want it to happen at all, but still. That could be enough for someone who is a natural conversationalist to integrate a lot of key lessons and have a deep understanding and mental infrastructure, but for a lot of people it won’t be enough that they can field concerns well and not sound like cultists (repeating things rather rote rather than being conversational). And tbh, some people won’t know what high quality content is. Is 25 hours with no focus on animal welfare enough? What about that being the almost sole focus? Or what about if most of those hours are topical discussion with other inexperienced fellows?
I would love to see the training materials for the UGAP program made public on the forum or on request to dedicated EAs, for red-teaming. Red-teaming community building is a great idea!
2. Conversationality and critiques
I absolutely agree about interfacing with people who are naturally critical and them being some of the best prospective members. This also reduces the cult vibe.. organizers should ideally be people who have thought through the problems deeply and definitely didn’t just grab onto the first thing or go with authority. Frankly, I don’t think this personality trait/intellectual inclination is something organizers can or should fake, and it is possible that student organizers should be interviewed for this ability. My heuristic is something like “If they couldn’t hang at a rat or EA group house late-night discussion, they shouldn’t be publicly teaching EA”. (at risk of sounding strict, these are very friendly situations!)
I would love to see some training to uni organisers on how to field rebuttals. Eg, “hm, I actually can’t answer that with the confidence I think it deserves. But I recommend you message X about it!” (are there people who can just field questions? Ask a forum librarian?) or “Just because of time limitations, I really want to circle back to this later with you.. can we chat after the session or over [messenger app]?”
3. On Cults
The cult thing is really problematic. Here are some known aspects of cults we don’t technically fit, but could do to ensure all EAs, especially organizers, are leaning more outside of:
-Zealots: Don’t be one.
-Separation from friends and loved ones: Happens accidentally due to value changes. Mentioning other people and commitments in your life other than EA might go a long way.
-The cult’s philosophy is the one great truth: Stress moral uncertainty and the different approaches to doing good within the movement. Discuss how EA has changed and how the philosophy doesn’t have any prescriptions written in stone except that the community welcomes people who try to do their best for the good of others using evidence and reason.
-One magical leader: No idolizing and err toward being open if you disagree with an expert. Emphasize the decentralized origin of ideas in EA. Also, if you bring up one expert, it is good to bring up others, eg why just peter singer, toby ord, will macaskill, or rob wiblin? Surely you can find a second person to support their claim? Or just say “some well-respected figures think X because Y” and don’t namedrop anybody unless requested.
-Tithes and pushing self-denial or frugality to increase the ability to tithe more: Why is this even promoted among broke college students when the community has funds for a good few years? I’d approach it as something EA ideals have pointed to in the past, and something some people still do. Let them hear about GWWC if they ask. Move on quickly to talking about direct work. EA initially had bad publicity because of talks about money, and we can thank our lucky stars that it isn’t a moral imperative to “fundraise” anymore! It’s great that people have been and are still donating, and thanks to them, organizers are free to use so many other framings in outreach and pitch other things that will be less unpopular and more impactful. So please do!
-Promising a great afterlife or great eventual reward: Immortality via simulation, cryonics, and utopian simulation are probably things to steer a beginner-friendly discussion away from if it happens to go there.
Additionally, I’d love to see some training on how young EAs can talk to their families.. I recently met a wannabe student organizer who told me how tenaciously he was talking to his (Mormon) parents about EA, and cult bells were ringing even in my head. I gave him some advice, but the odds are there are more prospective-organizers out there doing that. As an ex-young-vegan, I get it. But EA really doesn’t need parents lobbying their child’s university that the EA student group is a cult and should be shut down. Nor do we need well-meaning parents posting on social media or sending emails warning their parent friends or religious leaders about EA student groups corrupting their kids.
4. CRM
CRM seems good, but it should be used transparently. Just ask people what opportunities they would like information about and what their favorite cause areas are, and anything else about them they’d like you to know. Say you will keep this information for now, but it can be deleted any time on request. It is so you can send them things like job and fellowship opportunities they will really like, or interesting events and intellectual pieces they will really like. Be clear that you are not affiliated with any opportunities, but just doing it as a helpful service to your members.
5. Maybe we can all can help
A good volunteer opportunity for EAs might be to reach out to your university organizers and try to mentor them a bit. Send them good pieces or teach them how to proactively use the forum and subscribe to the community-building topic tag. Invite them to the slack and facebook groups and share newsletters with them they might not know about. You could even show up to the first or last day of their fellowships if the student organizers think it would help. I am doing a bit of mentoring for University of Texas organizers slightly , but this post makes me want to do moreso.
**Side note, I really don’t get the focus on student outreach in general. At least 4 of the 6 bottlenecks named seem better sourced from professionals and regional connections (management, ability to really figure out what matters most and set the right priorities, skills related to entrepreneurship / founding new organizations, and one-on-one social skills and emotional intelligence) than from universities. Plus young people are probably better at spreading cultural memes, so we might have a bigger reputational risk with them.
| Separation from friends and loved ones: Happens accidentally due to value changes.
I hope by this you mean something like “People in general tend to feel a bit more distant from friends when they realise they have different values and EA values are no exception.” But if you’ve actually noticed much more substantial separation tending to happen, I personally think this is something we should push back against, even if it does happen accidentally. Not just for optics’ sake (“Mentioning other people and commitments in your life other than EA might go a long way”), but for not feeling socially/professionally/spiritually dependent on one community, for avoiding groupthink, for not feeling pressure to make sacrifices beyond your ‘stretch zone.’
Hi Ivy,
Just wanted to hop in re: the University Group Accelerator program. You are definitely hitting on some key points that we have been strategizing around for UGAP. I just want to clarify a few things:
* We see 25 hours as the minimum amount of time engaging with EA ideas before someone should help start a group. Often times we think it should be more but there have been cases of really great organizers springing up after just an intro fellowship. We have additional screening for UGAP groups beyond just meeting the pre-requisites that dive a bit more into the nuances you mentioned around what high-quality content is.
* UGAP has been very much in beta mode but we are hoping to share the training materials from the upcoming round. :) We would be excited to have people red-team these once they are presentable.
Thanks for responding! I’m actually super excited about UGAP and have already recommended the program to student organizers now that your applications are open (applications are open, people!). I do note that the 25 hour time commitment is for “at least one organizer”, but I also think mentoring will go a long way to make those 25+/- hours count for more. That’s great that you do interviews to determine quality and you clarify what quality content is.
Excited to see what comes of it :)
Re: “there have been cases of really great organizers springing up after just an intro fellowship.”
I definitely believe this can happen and am glad you allow for that. What makes someone seem really great — epistemics, alignment/buy-in, skill in a relevant area of study, __?
There are multiple reasons for the focus on student outreach:
Students are early on in their careers. You are much more likely to be able to affect their trajectory because a) they are often still deciding (and may even seek out your advice!) b) they lack sunk cost c) they have access to low-cost opportunities like internships to try out various paths.
Students have large amounts of free time and the enthusiasm/energy of youth. If an aspect of EA sounds interesting to them, they are more likely to read about it. They have more time to volunteer and more time to invest in skilling up.
Top schools provide an opportunity to connect with people at a certain level of talent. These people are much harder to access later in their careers, both because they are busier, but also because they are distributed at many different companies instead of all concentrated on a few campuses. Beyond this, attending events is so much easier as a student and schools have, for instance, O-Days where societies can recruit members.
Besides these theoretical reasons, I expect CEA is basing this on experience and looking at the highest performers in EA and how they became involved in EA. See, for example, this post which notes:
Obviously, that’s cherry-picked, but it’s still illustrative of how impactful uni group organising can be.
I am aware of the reasons, and I still think it has been focused on to the neglect of other things. Perhaps I should have said extreme focus instead. Maybe that is budget consciousness (uni groups have in the past been run by free and cheap volunteers), but it doesn’t seem that should have been a strict consideration for a couple of years now. I’m not saying student groups aren’t good but that given bottlenecks and given CEA’s limited bandwidth, I don’t think it warrants the extreme focus and bullishness I see from many these days, to, I can only assume, the detriment of other programs and other experimentation. Almost all of those students will still be recommended to enter regular careers and gain career capital before they can be competitive for doing direct work, and it is unclear how many students from these groups are even going for direct work on longtermist areas. I think perspectives here might depend on AGI timelines.
Let me also clarify that I am talking about uni groups, as opposed to targeted skilling-up programs hosted at universities. I’m also guessing that that 2015 stanford group was a lot different than the uni groups today. 8 week intro fellowships didn’t exist then
So from the perspective of the recruiting party these reasons make sense. From the perspective of a critical outsider, these very same reasons can look bad (and are genuine reasons to mistrust the group that is recruiting):
- easier to manipulate
their trajectory- easier to exploit their labour
- free selection, build on top of/continue rich get richer effects of ‘talented’ people
- let’s apply a supervised learning approach to high impact people acquisition, the training data biases won’t affect it
Well, haters are gonna hate. Maybe that’s too blase, but as long as we are talking about university groups rather than high schools, the PR risks don’t feel too substantial.
A small thing, but citing a particular person seems less culty to me than saying “some well-respected figures think X because Y”. Having a community orthodoxy seems like worse optics than valuing the opinions of specific named people.
Tbh I’ve had success with this approach. Usually, someone will say “like who?” and then I get to rattle off some names with a clause-length bio without making their eyes glaze over, because they proactively requested the information. Other times they won’t ask because they are more interested in the overall point than who thinks it anyway, and they probably already trsut me by that point. Sometimes I’d actually have to google anyway “well I know one was the head of this org and one was the author of this book, let me look those up” and then people are like “whatever whatever I believe you.” It is the ideas that matter anyway
In general, I think it is good to talk casually, and this kind of wording is very natural for me with the benefit that I don’t screw up my train of thought trying to remember names then anyway. If it isn’t natural for you (and I guess for many EAs it won’t be, now that you mention it) don’t do it
I think she is suggesting that only reading up about one person’s thoughts and treating it like gospel is cult-like and bad, then sharing that singular view gives off cult-like impressions (understandably). Rather, being more open to learning many different people’s views, forming your own nuanced opinion, and then sharing that is far more valuable both intrinsically and extrinsically!
I think it’s pretty clear you shouldn’t be saying “some well-respected figures think X because Y” regardless, that’s like 101 bad epistemics because it’s not referencable and vague.
The focus on student groups is also inherently redflaggy for some people, as it can be viewed as looking for people who have less scepticism and experience.