TL;DR: There is basically no Penn EA group right now. However, I don’t think this is as severe a failure as it sounds because all the potential organizers might be doing higher-impact things.
Basically, the first couple months of Penn EA found ~6 engaged people with any time at all to help run a group, not including me and Sydney. My impression is that one or two of them drifted away from EA as a philosophy, stopped having time, or something. Three of them dropped out of Penn (undergrad or graduate); of these, Ashley and Akash are working on movement-scale talent search and Tamera is skilling up towards direct work. They thought about their decisions pretty carefully from an impact maximization perspective, and I think they are creating substantially more impact than they could have at Penn. The other potential organizer, Brandon, is a full-time student who was pretty new to EA and didn’t have capacity to run a group on his own.
My best guess is that under the optimal allocation of people, 0-1 of the 3 who dropped out are still at Penn doing community-building, and 2-3 of them correctly dropped out.
Brain drain towards direct work and bigger meta work is an established pattern with university groups. The Stanford EA executive board had 9 people in early 2021, and for a while in late 2021 Stanford EA was basically being run by 1-2 people and in danger of falling apart because basically the entire board graduated, dropped out, or spent all of their spare time doing part-time EA things that were not running Stanford EA. I think that most of them made good decisions. To be fair, a little of this was for bad reasons: when everyone else is moving to Berkeley/the UK, it’s fun to be there and so on. Also, even if everyone had absolute disadvantage running Stanford EA, there should be coordination among people so that the person with the least comparative disadvantage among Stanford EA made succession not fail. (Although I know a lot of Stanford EA people, some of this is rumor/speculation so don’t take my word as definitive.)
This was all exacerbated by three shifts in movement-building philosophy over the last few months.
The first is from “EA group community-building” to “global talent search”. There is now less emphasis on having a university group at every top-20 university in the US, and more emphasis on (a) search for top talent in neglected countries like India and Brazil (either at top universities there or through other means), and (b) cause-area-specific discussion groups at the very top universities like MIT. Due to all the longtermist resources now, this is happening the most with AI safety reading groups, some following Cambridge’s AGISF syllabus, some more advanced that are filled with aspiring researchers. But it’s also happening with e.g. altpro. I think this shift is on net good but depends heavily on implementation—there can be old-style groups that cause a lot of impact on important problems because they happen to target talent well and are large enough to specialize into cause areas, or whatever reason.
The second shift is from intro/advanced fellowships to retreats/workshops. Workshops have much higher fidelity, plus concentrate people from multiple universities in a space so they can have high-context conversations and connect with each other. There’s a tradeoff here, but my view on that is outside the scope of this comment. I think it’s potentially OK that Penn didn’t have fellowships for this reason, though it’s pretty bad that they didn’t have weekly dinners.
The third shift is towards greater ambition and larger action spaces. This is why most of the organizers dropped out. I think Penn had a greater proportion of people who were willing to drop out than most university groups, and this has diminishing returns when it is as high as 75%.
Lessons for new university groups
If there’s an update for new university groups, it’s that building capacity to recruit talented people at moderate efficiency is easy, but that succession fails by default and is even more likely to fail when you don’t put lots of effort into it. The community is moving towards a place where it might no longer be necessary to developing university groups in the same way, and succession is somewhat less of a perennial issue, due to workshops and efforts like GCP. However, there’s value in university groups existing at all, e.g. by creating ways for people to hear about EA at all. There’s also a lot of value in building groups with their own culture (this gives you intellectual diversity and information value) though this is easy to screw up either by reducing efficiency or targeting the wrong things.
The top considerations I have for whether to do community-building at university groups, for people who are willing to drop out, are basically “what’s your counterfactual? (if movement-scale CB, does this have higher fidelity and growth rate?)”, and “are you irreplaceable in this university CB role?” and “if you build the university group, will it actually produce a lot of impact (the classic source of impact is career changes of highly talented people towards the best thing they could be doing)?”. There are sub-considerations which I can expand on, but I haven’t spent much time thinking about university group strategy, so I’m pretty uncertain.
Mistakes
I think the mistake was that Sydney, Ashley, and I basically stopped thinking about Penn when we left. We all have pretty limited capacity to take on side projects, but one of us should have (a) tried to have weekly calls with the remaining Penn organizers, and (b) connected them with GCP. I think the median outcome of this is that not much happened at Penn due to sheer lack of organizer hours, but there was still lots of expected value there for relatively little investment.
One is brain drain, as you mentioned. I wrote a little about this in the “keeping one’s eye on the ball” section of this comment. I think we should be reasoning about the bay as “look at all these magical things happening there” and constantly panicking about the opportunity cost every day we’re not creating more bays in other places.
Another has to do with
one of us should have (a) tried to have weekly calls with the remaining Penn organizers, and (b) connected them with GCP.
And why Quinn M wasn’t tapped, or myself. Is there a view formed that people in their later 20s out working aren’t a super good fit for university work? Is there a view formed that top universities are culturally particular, and that people who weren’t at top universities would screw it up? Things like this seem plausible to me, but I’m shooting in the dark.
But moreover, I’m really glad to read your comment about weighing CB against anything else CBers could be doing. (I have concerns about the movement doing so much advocacy that we build out the wrong skillsets, and so on).
And why Quinn M wasn’t tapped, or myself. Is there a view formed that people in their later 20s out working aren’t a super good fit for university work? Is there a view formed that top universities are culturally particular, and that people who weren’t at top universities would screw it up? Things like this seem plausible to me, but I’m shooting in the dark.
My view is some of (1) and not much of (2), and people who think more about university groups might have more concerns. The point at which we made the mistake was probably not even thinking about it, and it’s plausible that if we had, we would have connected them to EA Philly.
Thanks for posting this comment.
TL;DR: There is basically no Penn EA group right now. However, I don’t think this is as severe a failure as it sounds because all the potential organizers might be doing higher-impact things.
Basically, the first couple months of Penn EA found ~6 engaged people with any time at all to help run a group, not including me and Sydney. My impression is that one or two of them drifted away from EA as a philosophy, stopped having time, or something. Three of them dropped out of Penn (undergrad or graduate); of these, Ashley and Akash are working on movement-scale talent search and Tamera is skilling up towards direct work. They thought about their decisions pretty carefully from an impact maximization perspective, and I think they are creating substantially more impact than they could have at Penn. The other potential organizer, Brandon, is a full-time student who was pretty new to EA and didn’t have capacity to run a group on his own.
My best guess is that under the optimal allocation of people, 0-1 of the 3 who dropped out are still at Penn doing community-building, and 2-3 of them correctly dropped out.
Brain drain towards direct work and bigger meta work is an established pattern with university groups. The Stanford EA executive board had 9 people in early 2021, and for a while in late 2021 Stanford EA was basically being run by 1-2 people and in danger of falling apart because basically the entire board graduated, dropped out, or spent all of their spare time doing part-time EA things that were not running Stanford EA. I think that most of them made good decisions. To be fair, a little of this was for bad reasons: when everyone else is moving to Berkeley/the UK, it’s fun to be there and so on. Also, even if everyone had absolute disadvantage running Stanford EA, there should be coordination among people so that the person with the least comparative disadvantage among Stanford EA made succession not fail. (Although I know a lot of Stanford EA people, some of this is rumor/speculation so don’t take my word as definitive.)
This was all exacerbated by three shifts in movement-building philosophy over the last few months.
The first is from “EA group community-building” to “global talent search”. There is now less emphasis on having a university group at every top-20 university in the US, and more emphasis on (a) search for top talent in neglected countries like India and Brazil (either at top universities there or through other means), and (b) cause-area-specific discussion groups at the very top universities like MIT. Due to all the longtermist resources now, this is happening the most with AI safety reading groups, some following Cambridge’s AGISF syllabus, some more advanced that are filled with aspiring researchers. But it’s also happening with e.g. altpro. I think this shift is on net good but depends heavily on implementation—there can be old-style groups that cause a lot of impact on important problems because they happen to target talent well and are large enough to specialize into cause areas, or whatever reason.
The second shift is from intro/advanced fellowships to retreats/workshops. Workshops have much higher fidelity, plus concentrate people from multiple universities in a space so they can have high-context conversations and connect with each other. There’s a tradeoff here, but my view on that is outside the scope of this comment. I think it’s potentially OK that Penn didn’t have fellowships for this reason, though it’s pretty bad that they didn’t have weekly dinners.
The third shift is towards greater ambition and larger action spaces. This is why most of the organizers dropped out. I think Penn had a greater proportion of people who were willing to drop out than most university groups, and this has diminishing returns when it is as high as 75%.
Lessons for new university groups
If there’s an update for new university groups, it’s that building capacity to recruit talented people at moderate efficiency is easy, but that succession fails by default and is even more likely to fail when you don’t put lots of effort into it. The community is moving towards a place where it might no longer be necessary to developing university groups in the same way, and succession is somewhat less of a perennial issue, due to workshops and efforts like GCP. However, there’s value in university groups existing at all, e.g. by creating ways for people to hear about EA at all. There’s also a lot of value in building groups with their own culture (this gives you intellectual diversity and information value) though this is easy to screw up either by reducing efficiency or targeting the wrong things.
The top considerations I have for whether to do community-building at university groups, for people who are willing to drop out, are basically “what’s your counterfactual? (if movement-scale CB, does this have higher fidelity and growth rate?)”, and “are you irreplaceable in this university CB role?” and “if you build the university group, will it actually produce a lot of impact (the classic source of impact is career changes of highly talented people towards the best thing they could be doing)?”. There are sub-considerations which I can expand on, but I haven’t spent much time thinking about university group strategy, so I’m pretty uncertain.
Mistakes
I think the mistake was that Sydney, Ashley, and I basically stopped thinking about Penn when we left. We all have pretty limited capacity to take on side projects, but one of us should have (a) tried to have weekly calls with the remaining Penn organizers, and (b) connected them with GCP. I think the median outcome of this is that not much happened at Penn due to sheer lack of organizer hours, but there was still lots of expected value there for relatively little investment.
I see two open discussions here.
One is brain drain, as you mentioned. I wrote a little about this in the “keeping one’s eye on the ball” section of this comment. I think we should be reasoning about the bay as “look at all these magical things happening there” and constantly panicking about the opportunity cost every day we’re not creating more bays in other places.
Another has to do with
And why Quinn M wasn’t tapped, or myself. Is there a view formed that people in their later 20s out working aren’t a super good fit for university work? Is there a view formed that top universities are culturally particular, and that people who weren’t at top universities would screw it up? Things like this seem plausible to me, but I’m shooting in the dark.
But moreover, I’m really glad to read your comment about weighing CB against anything else CBers could be doing. (I have concerns about the movement doing so much advocacy that we build out the wrong skillsets, and so on).
My view is some of (1) and not much of (2), and people who think more about university groups might have more concerns. The point at which we made the mistake was probably not even thinking about it, and it’s plausible that if we had, we would have connected them to EA Philly.