I ran the UChicago x-risk fellowship this summer (we’d already started by the time I learned there was a joint ERI survey so decided to stick with our original survey form).
I just wanted to note that, for the fellows who weren’t previously aware of x-risk, we observed a dramatic increase in how important fellows thought x-risk work was and their reported familiarity with x-risk. As well, many indicated in the written responses an intention to work on x-risk related topics in the future where they previously hadn’t when responding to the same question. We exclusively advertised to UChicago students for this iteration and about 2⁄3 of our fellows were new to EA/x-risk.
Thanks for this comment—if you do run the UChicago fellowship again, we should definitely coordinate on joint impact assessment surveys.
Your finding about less x-risk-aware fellows becoming dramatically more so is very promising. It is also somewhat different from what the surveys show; I imagine multiple factors would affect reported familiarity with x-risk (e.g., types of events you ran, nature of the projects, etc.), and I would be keen to discuss this further with you over a call at some point.
To put this in context for CERI, we received 650+ applications for ~24 places, so we might have filtered for prior x-risk engagement to a greater extent than you did. We probably also had different theories of change, and it will be interesting to compare our approaches.
I ran the UChicago x-risk fellowship this summer (we’d already started by the time I learned there was a joint ERI survey so decided to stick with our original survey form).
I just wanted to note that, for the fellows who weren’t previously aware of x-risk, we observed a dramatic increase in how important fellows thought x-risk work was and their reported familiarity with x-risk. As well, many indicated in the written responses an intention to work on x-risk related topics in the future where they previously hadn’t when responding to the same question. We exclusively advertised to UChicago students for this iteration and about 2⁄3 of our fellows were new to EA/x-risk.
Thanks for this comment—if you do run the UChicago fellowship again, we should definitely coordinate on joint impact assessment surveys.
Your finding about less x-risk-aware fellows becoming dramatically more so is very promising. It is also somewhat different from what the surveys show; I imagine multiple factors would affect reported familiarity with x-risk (e.g., types of events you ran, nature of the projects, etc.), and I would be keen to discuss this further with you over a call at some point.
To put this in context for CERI, we received 650+ applications for ~24 places, so we might have filtered for prior x-risk engagement to a greater extent than you did. We probably also had different theories of change, and it will be interesting to compare our approaches.