Hey Iām one of the organisers of the PISE Fellowship and would like to weigh in on some of the points you made:
(a) I agree that itās hard to cover all core ideas of EA well in 4 weeks. For example we were not able to fit in animal welfare. So for a 4 week model it seems essential to offer things like discussion groups, in depth fellowships, etc. so people can keep learning after the fellowship is over.
(b) From my experience friendships and social engagement come more from social activities or working together than from a fellowship (might be different for others). Again here it seems essential when running a 4 week fellowship to offer other ways of socialising and engaging. PISE does this by organising big social events and by recruiting people into commitees after the fellowship ends.
(c) Anecdotally, multiple people mentioned that they felt like 4 weeks was not a big commitment and joined because of that. I hope we soon have some data that can shed some light on this question.
There will be a longer post about our experience with the 4 week fellowship soon.
In the newly founded EA Delft we are planning to employ a different model. We will first run a 4 week intro fellowship (and advertise it as 4 weeks), but then throughout offer people to continue the fellowship for another 4 weeks. This way the people only willing to join for 4 weeks will join, but the ones willing to do the full 8 weeks will get to dive into more topics. We will share our experience and the results we get with this method at some point.
Great post Johan! It got me thinking more deeply about the value of working on x-risk reduction and how we ought to act under uncertainty. I think people (including me) doing direct work on x-risk reduction would do well to reflect on the possibility of their work having (large) negative effects.
I read the post as making 2 main arguments:
1) The value of working on x-risk reduction is highly uncertain
2) Given uncertainty about the value of cause areas, we should use worldview diversification as a decision strategy
I agree with 1, but am not convinced by 2). WDS might make sense for a large funder like OpenPhil, but not for individuals seeking to maximize their positive impact on the world. Diversification makes sense to reduce downside risk or because of diminishing returns of investing in one option. I think neither of those apply to individuals interested in maximizing the EV of their positive impact on the world. 1) While protecting against downside risks (e.g. losing all your money) makes sense in investing, it is not important if youāre only maximizing Expected Value. 2) Each individualās contributions to a cause area wonāt change things massively, so it seems implausible that there are strong diminishing returns to their contributions.
However, I am in favor of your suggestion of doing worldview diversification at the community level, not at the level of individuals. To an extent, EA already does that by emphasising Neglectedness. Perhaps practically EAs should put more weight on neglectedness, rather than working on the single most important problem they see.