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.
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.