The EAIF isn’t supporting university groups anymore (though I don’t think it’s implausible that we will start doing this again in the future).
I think we have a pretty good sense of which uni groups and activities tend to produce people that go on to do high-impact work. I don’t think that is the only metric on which we should assess uni groups, but it’s an important one. I do think that groups wth paid organisers tend to have more measurable impact than groups without (though ofc there are selection effects). The groups also generally seem larger and more productive.
I think the reputational harm effects that you pointed out exist, but I don’t think they are particularly large. My personal view is that people should be compensated for doing challenging work that produces large amounts of altruistic value and I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many EA groups do have a large positive impact e.g. the Rethink Priorities and Open Phil surveys.
The EAIF isn’t supporting university groups anymore (though I don’t think it’s implausible that we will start doing this again in the future).
I think we have a pretty good sense of which uni groups and activities tend to produce people that go on to do high-impact work. I don’t think that is the only metric on which we should assess uni groups, but it’s an important one. I do think that groups wth paid organisers tend to have more measurable impact than groups without (though ofc there are selection effects). The groups also generally seem larger and more productive.
I think the reputational harm effects that you pointed out exist, but I don’t think they are particularly large. My personal view is that people should be compensated for doing challenging work that produces large amounts of altruistic value and I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many EA groups do have a large positive impact e.g. the Rethink Priorities and Open Phil surveys.