Sorry, I probably should’ve included this in the post. The groups were UChicago, Purdue, UIUC, Wisconsin, WashU, Northwestern, amd Indiana. There was also a student from UC Berkeley and a student from Yale.
Brian Foerster
Karma: 335
- Brian Foerster 1 Jun 2026 13:01 UTC1 point0 ∶ 0in reply to: Nick Corvino’s comment on: Lessons from the Fifth Midwest Retreat
Lessons from the Fifth Midwest Retreat
A Framework for EA Investment Decisions
- Brian Foerster 24 Apr 2026 3:44 UTC13 points4 ∶ 0in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: Guy Raveh’s Quick takes
My understanding is that they were trying to sell in a hurry, and the number of buyers for properties like these is very small. Ironically, if they weren’t so desperate to rid themselves of the negative PR around having spent lots of money on a “castle”, they could have saved a great deal of money by waiting to sell it.
Edit: The last sentence is missing some qualifiers, but I think the broader point about PR skittishness and impatience leading to negative outcomes is correct, even if the monetary loss caused by this in particular is uncertain or even zero.
- Brian Foerster 2 Mar 2026 18:15 UTC1 point0 ∶ 0
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Competing Priorities in University Organizing
- Brian Foerster 13 Feb 2026 1:13 UTC2 points1 ∶ 1in reply to: Noah Birnbaum’s comment on: Noah Birnbaum’s Quick takes
While I like the potential incentive alignment, I suspect finder’s fees are unworkable. It’s much easier to promise impartiality and fairness in a single game as opposed to an iterated one, and I suspect participants relying on the fees for income would become very sensitive to the nuances of previous decisions rather than the ultimate value of their critiques.
Ultimately, I don’t think there are many shortcuts in changing the philosophy of a movement. If something is worth challenging, than people strongly believe it and there will have to be a process of contested diffusion from the outside in. You can encourage this in individual cases, but systemizing it seems difficult.
- Brian Foerster 11 Feb 2026 17:45 UTC23 points5 ∶ 0in reply to: Noah Birnbaum’s comment on: Noah Birnbaum’s Quick takes
Without a strongly supportive faculty member, I feel like you would struggle to make a group last longer than 2 years, since the succession and turnover dynamics of uni groups would be amplified.
Could still be worthwhile even with the lack of sustainability.
- Brian Foerster 11 Feb 2026 4:36 UTC1 point0 ∶ 0in reply to: Aaron Bergman’s comment on: EA Grants Database—a new website
The issue should now be fixed, thank you for bringing it to my attention.
- Brian Foerster 11 Feb 2026 4:15 UTC1 point0 ∶ 0in reply to: Aaron Bergman’s comment on: EA Grants Database—a new website
Thanks for the interest in contributing! Right now, I can’t think of many features that would be both clearly useful and easily maintained, so I would welcome any thoughts you have there.
Brian Foerster’s Quick takes
As a university organizer at a very STEM focused state school, I suspect that students getting liberal arts degrees are more easily convinced to pursue a career in direct work. If this is the case, it could be because direct work compares more favorably with the other career options of those with liberal arts degrees, or because the clearer career outcomes of STEM majors create more path dependence and friction when they consider switching careers. This is potentially another thing to keep in mind when trying to compare the successes of EA uni groups.
- Brian Foerster 8 Feb 2026 16:41 UTC2 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: MHR🔸’s comment on: EA Grants Database—a new website
Thank you for the feedback, this should now be fixed.
EA Grants Database—a new website
Matching Credits: A Market Mechanism for Discovering Donor Preferences
While I find much of this post to be plausible, I’m not sure Ollie’s post supports your conclusions.
Ollie’s post is evaluating a set of retreats which averaged a cost of $1,500 per person. As commenters on the post noted, this seems very high. (I recall reading that low end EAG costs are around the same spot.) For the one retreat I’m aware of, costs were 6-7x less. (This doesn’t include CEA staff costs, but those shouldn’t be able to make up the gap.)
Additionally, you write about how retreats might have lower outcomes due a lack of scale. While I’m sympathetic to the idea that larger scale events can provide better sorting and outcomes per person, this doesn’t seem to be the case for the sample Ollie looked at. He notes that “Outcomes per person are approximately similar in value”.
On the whole, I don’t think the post shows that EAGx’s outperform retreats on cost effectiveness in a useful sense, mainly because of the cost issue. Ultimately there have been many more retreats and conferences since Ollie’s post, and I would love to hear from someone at CEA about their present feelings on the relative cost effectiveness of different types of “small” events.
- Brian Foerster 16 Dec 2025 17:41 UTC9 points1 ∶ 0in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Where did you donate this year?
I’m also a co-president at EA Purdue.
We had very brief intros for each charity and then a non-binding vote at the start, a short discussion on the vote, followed by an introduction to effective giving with a discussion in the middle. We then gave more info on each charity. Voting was done as: discussion, first round vote to eliminate one charity, discussion, final round of voting to choose winner.
Charities were AMF, GiveDirectly, and the Humane League. The slides were a modified version of GWWC’s donation election presentation so the initial vote also included the Play Pumps fake out.
- Brian Foerster 12 Dec 2025 3:26 UTC9 points4 ∶ 0in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Two arguments against patient philanthropy
What about counties that exit low income in the next fifty years? Under your assumptions and framework, we can be sure that we won’t accidentally exclude a future low income country, but we can’t be sure we won’t fail to select a future low income country.
I somewhat agree with 2, although I would phrase it slightly differently.
The local maximum for outreach is a function of the quality of the organizing, the quality of the students, and the size of the student body. (Quality of students as potential org members, not in any objective sense). The latter two are essentially fixed, but organizing quality can shift dramatically over time. The form of the organization could also matter, but I feel this is pretty similar across EA groups and within groups over time. (I would love to see evidence that I’m wrong on this). Organizing quality has diminishing returns, but many orgs aren’t necessarily anywhere near this.
Without knowing Yale EA’s situation at all, I would be willing to guess that they had a substantial return on outreach due to an increase in organizing quality, which wasn’t previously close to diminishing returns, and which paid particularly large dividends thanks to very high student quality.
I don’t want to have a public debate on the specifics of this case, but I think it’s useful for posterity to note the following:
1. The organizing team was willing to pay for rental car transportation if more than one person wanted to go.
2. We did not have reason to believe this was the case in the run-up to the retreat.
3. Communication with university groups was broadly not as good as it could have been, and this is something we will look to improve on for future retreats.