Thank you for thoughtfully engaging! On the growth team side, Angelina is unfortunately ill right now, but we plan on responding to this in a few days when she gets back :)
jessica_mccurdyđ¸
Karma: 1,868
I just want to quickly note that I think there are a lot of people who would resonate with the principles of EA but havenât heard about it. Very few people have heard of EA, and while there are some methodological nuances to be had with this study, it suggests that the number of EA-sympathetic students on NYUâs campus is over 5x the number of students who were sympathetic and familiar with EA. So generally, I think there is a lot of potential growth available of people who do strongly align to EA principles.
You could argue that growth mechanisms to find these people would still lead to the movement having weaker commitment to the principles. I address some adjacent points in my response to Neelâs comment here.
Thanks Neel! Iâve jotted down some quick clarifications below.
Overall: as I mentioned in my previous comment, I donât think growth is obviously good and there are a lot of various risks to be aware of. I also think that even though it is only one of four strategy pillars at CEA it is a somewhat easier pillar for us to contribute to as we have more foundations for it. That could mean us unintentionally prioritizing it too much, and that is something I am trying to track. So, overall, I am sympathetic to a lot of your concerns but generally am more optimistic about this direction (as Iâll discuss below).
Some more specific clarifications:
We are trying to grow EA over time, not just during this year. Growing over time will require doing things like working on brand, foundation building, and rehabilitation. We are serious about the âsustainableâ part of growth and growth itself is only one of our four major strategy pillars this year.
We are not optimizing for growth â our vision is currently to aim for moderate, sustainable growth (versus growth at all costs). We think growth over time will be important for EA to reach its full potential, but optimizing for it would likely be counterproductive to impact goals for various reasons, as you say.
We are trying to grow the number of people involved in EA across the entire funnel, not just at the top. So part of growth is helping people become more high context/âhelping high context people progress in their involvement and impact.
I think that retention of people already energized by EA is an important part of growth (if people leave or become demotivated this is of course bad for growth!) â part of this project is thinking about how to double down and revitalize the existing community, and not just about how to bring in new people.
I think itâs appropriate that some EA community building programs have some context level barrier to entry (for instance in-person EA Global events have an admissions policy), whereas some donât (the EA Newsletter is designed to be a no-barrier intro to EA). My general take is that different spaces should continue to optimize for people with different levels of context. For many of the context-restricted programs, I am actively fighting for âlowering the barâ to be off the table as a growth strategy.
Quick response to another piece:
I think Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures is a nice example of some of the post morteming etc. I am not saying this is /âenough/â but wanted to flag the example as writing it took a fair amount of capacity and shows some work in this area.
Hi, Iâm Jessica, and I lead the growth pillar of CEAâs strategy. Iâm excited about the potential for the EA community to grow and for EA ideas to reach more people, and I wanted to share how weâre thinking about that growth.
Our main goal is the same as EAâs: to help others as effectively as possible. We believe that growing the EA community can help us achieve more of the good we want to see in the world. While the community isnât perfect, Iâm proud of its accomplishments. I believe it can help many more people increase their impactâwhile the EA community can benefit from new perspectives, experiences, and domain knowledge..
That said, weâre very aware that growth comes with risks. As the post mentions, weâre not trying to grow EA at all costs. Growth isnât our only goal, and weâve put internal principles in place to avoid compromising our core values in pursuit of scale. I feel pretty good about where we are on that.
Other concerns are harder to track, like increased risk from risky actors joining our community, scandals, or undesired change in community culture, ambition, or epistemics leading us to be less effective overall. Thereâs also the concern that our strategies could lead to many people getting involved in EA, but their involvement is not overall positive (either for them or the world, e.g., if they feel they donât have good ways to contribute immediately).
These are real concerns, and weâre actively tracking them. I used to be more skeptical about EA growth myself. But overall, Iâm excited about aiming for moderate, sustainable growth at the current marginâmoving the trajectory upward while managing risks carefully. We want and need the communityâs help in spotting those risks early.
I also lead the Groups Team, and I want to briefly speak to group organizers: I could imagine someone reading this update and making major changes to their group strategy based on CEAâs growth focus. Please donât over-update based on this. We continue to advocate for advertising your programs broadly at the start of the semester (and specific points in the year for non-uni groups) and then focusing on a smaller group of people who are taking the ideas most seriously. If our advice changes, weâll share that clearly through our usual channels (Slack, newsletter, advising calls, etc.).
The guidance in our existing materialsâlike this advice post, my EAG talk on common pitfalls in community building, and our Resource Center âstill stands. We think groups trying to grow too much can be counterproductive to their goals. We care deeply about more than just numbers, that hasnât changed under our new strategy.
Finally, I may not have time to engage much in comments, but please do reach out to groups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org with any questions or concerns.
Agus is one of my favorite people I have ever worked with! Would recommend :)
Quick take on Burnout
Note: I am obviously not an expert here nor do I have much first hand experience but I thought it could be useful for people I work with to know how I currently conceptualize burnout. I was then encouraged to post on the forum. This is based off around 4 cases of burnout that I have seen (at varying levels of proximity) and conversations with people who have seen significantly more.
Different Conceptions of Burnout
Basic conception that people often have: working too hard until energy is depleted.
Yes, working too hard can lead to exhaustion, but thereâs a difference between exhaustion and burnout.
Exhaustion vs. Burnout
Exhaustion:
Result of working very hard/â a lot of hours. Possibly including sleep deprivation or just brain fog.
Can often be resolved with a short break or vacation (eg: one week)
Burnout:
More pervasive and affects many areas of life/âwork. While it shared many physical symptoms of exhaustion, it is deeper.
A short vacation isnât sufficient to resolve it.
Core Feelings Tied to Burnout
Burnout is often tied to more core feelings like motivation, recognition, and feeling good about the work youâre doing. It is more tied to your feelings of motivation and value than pure sleep deprivation or lack of rest. If someone is unsure of the value of their work and isnât super recognized, especially if theyâre also working really hard, that can really get into your brain and feels like a recipe for burnout.
Importance of Motivation
This is why I stress the value of motivation so much
Nuance: we should distinguish motivation from being overly enthusiastic about programs.
Jessica take is that we should have set times for re-evaluating the value of programs. Having set evaluation times helps reduce constant worry about program value but still maintains our ability to have a critical eye toward making sure we are having a large impact.
To some extent motivation is a very moldable thing and if you want to try and get more motivated, you can (but it often includes help from others like your manager and team)
Quick note
This isnât me advocating for exhaustion because it isnât burnout. I think exhaustion can be very counterproductive and leads to future hours being less productive.
My main thing here is that I donât think our LFG /â work hard culture is the recipe for burnout. I think being uncertain of the value of our programs, facing many internal structural changes, and not being on top of motivation can be. This is part of why I am excited about the M&E work we are doing, people doing tour of duties, and people tracking motivation/âactively valuing it.
Jessica addition in Dec. 2024:
Getting sick more often than usual is an indicator to be aware of. This can lead to a spiral of âGet sick, get less done, get more stressed and feel like you are not doing good enough/ânot feeling good about your work, that stress causing you to get more sick/âget sick againâ
(I will add for the forum that right now I am feeling really good about the value of our programs but its always good to be approaching programs critically to ensure you are having the most impact :) )
Very quickly: I feel like itâs useful to share that I did this survey and found it very hard, and a lot of other people did too. In particular, it did feel pretty rushed for such difficult questions that we didnât necessarily have a fully informed pre-existing take on. OP does mention this, but I wanted to stress that for people reading this post.
I still think it has a lot of useful information and is directionally very informative. I might get a chance to write up more thoughts here, but I am not sure I will be able to. I mostly wanted to give a quick additional flag :)
Thanks for sharing this! The power of prompts and letting go of nice to haves have been things Iâve noticed in my work as well. Good luck with your future efforts here!
I have found rocket money to be quite helpful!
Thank you! And thank you so much for your podcastsâlike I mentioned in the post I found them really helpful and relatable and am grateful for you sharing so much!
Iâm on buproprion xl and generally they donât recommend taking it at night because it can cause insomnia but Iâm really lucky and have never really had problems with that. Instead, I just found waking up in the morning extremely difficultâI often woke up sad and just wanted to stay in bed and keep sleeping (even if I had slept a really long time). Due to the extended release, taking it at night means that peak effects are now happening in the mornings when I was most sad /â low motivation before. So that was honestly just really great for me.
This is super interesting! How do you do the experiments? Do you change one thing at a time and track?
Thanks! I actually also was using bearable for a while there and had a similar experience of âitâs hard to find out info because of confounders but this is generally useful for being mindful of my wellbeingâ. I donât use it any more but might look into it again :)
I remember thinking it was super cool when I found it
Thank you for writing and sharing this! Iâm excited about your work and also excited for other orgs to learn from it :)
This is really impressive output for such a small team!
Just wanted to drop in this study: Harvard Undergraduate Survey on Generative AI since it seems somewhat related/âinteresting :)
Hey
I am really sorry to hear about all of these negative experiences. I feel lucky to have gotten to work with you over the years and seen the positive impact you have had on others in the community and the exciting work you have moved into. I think the community will be losing a really lovely person. I admire both your courage in posting this and that you are prioritizing your well-being right now.
I was sad to hear that our team contributed to your negative experiences though I definitely understand. When I first was introduced to the idea of focusing on top universities, I also felt quite uncomfortable with the implications. I knew so many brilliant people not from those top universities and knew many systemic disadvantages prevent people from attending them.
That being said, I do still endorse this prioritization (though not an exclusive one!). In case itâs useful context, for you or others reading this post, Iâve written some reasons why I think this.
When piloting new forms of support or being limited in the number of universities a small team can give higher touch support to, hard decisions have to be made about which universities get that support.I believe most of the people who go on to have incredibly impactful careers will come from outside those top universities. That is part of why we set up UGAPâto help provide support and opportunities to promising individuals and groups around the world who might not have the same access and advantages.
However, top universities are the places with the highest concentrations of people who ultimately have a very large influence on the world. Partially that is because of the screening mechanisms of the university and but partially it is because of the built-in benefits and unfair advantages that students receive while they attend those universities. Given that this is the reality weâre working with, I believe we should do our best to leverage the existing system and opportunities at these universities to help get more people into high-impact careers. That often means focusing resources on those universities even though that can be demotivating to others.
Again, just wanted to note that I appreciate you sharing this post and am sorry to hear about your experience. I am wishing you the best.
Hi Andreas,
This is a different and unrelated role (you can compare the role descriptions to see more differences)
We are currently doing work trials for candidates for the group support contractor role.
Hi Isaac, this is a good question! I can elaborate more in the Q&A tomorrow but here are some thoughts:
Ultimatley a lot depends on your personal fit and comparative advantage. I think people should do the things they excel at. While I do think you can have a more scalable impact on the groups team, the groups team would have very little to no impact without the organizers working on the ground!I can share some of the reasons that led me to prefer working at CEA over working on the ground:
I value having close management to help me think through my goals (both within my work and those related to more long-term professional development). I have had the benefit of working with some very experienced managers who have both taught me a lot and empowered me to grow myself through increasing levels of responsibility.
I really value learning from an established organization with efficient systems in place. It is pretty nice having most operational things handled and to have pre-existing support for things like budgeting, hiring, management, and performance reviews.
I really love the people at CEA. Donât get me wrong, I also loved the people at my uni group but /âeveryone/â at CEA is so caring, competent, and hardworking. It is pretty hard to match that with just students (and especially when so many of the students are just volunteers or participants with lots of competing interests)
I personally prefer working with organizers who are already excited about EA and connecting them with the broader community and opportunities. I find it a lot harder to introduce people to EA.
I like to work on building scalable systems, managing people who are full-time, and doing lots of coordination across many geographies and groups of people.
Due to my personal circumstances, I prefer to not be tied to one specific location like a single university. Working with CEA gives me a lot more flexibility (and can help me have a more normal work-life balance)
However, there are some good reasons why you might prefer to work on the ground:
I think the counterfactual impact story on the ground can be easier to see. Although we are able to make counterfactual connections for organizers, a lot of our impact happens through other people whose impact then also happens through others. Taking someone from not knowing anything about EA to transitioning into a high impact career is really fulfilling.
Working on a campus allows you to form deeper relationships with those you are working with and have more face-to-face time. Most of my work is remote and many of my coworkers work around the world let alone the organizers I work with. This works better for some people than others.
If you donât want to be a part of a bigger organization and the bureaucratic costs that come with that. I donât personally think these are that bad but we do have to be very careful about various legal and operational considerations. Sometimes things like budget approvals can feel like they are slowing you down.
Depending on your university, replaceability might be a larger consideration (ie: the difference in impact between you and the next best person on the groups team might be less than the difference in impact between the groups team and working with one uni if no one would replace you.)
Since you are working with so many people and making lots of commitments, it can be harder to rapidly shift directions.
Hey Camille,
Thanks for writing this and I am sorry you faced so many struggles and felt alone.
Arguments around students not having time feel surprising to me. Do you feel like your students are significantly busier than say, MIT students? I would defer to you since you have more context, but I have heard the âstudents donât have timeâ answer from a lot of universities that eventually ran quite successful clubs. So I think it would be interesting to know what ENS students are doing with their time? Do more students work outside schooling or is there a cultural norm around not participating in clubs? Or is the courseload significantly more intense (I think Cal Tech might be the only example I currently know where this might be true)? I think sharing more details on what makes ENS students so busy relative to other schools could help other schools when deciding whether they will face similar problems.
Also, mostly for others who are reading this and thinking about how it applies to their groups, there are some workarounds that schools have tried such as fellowships where people do the reading in the session. Many groups are happy to share their syllabi via the groups slack (though given your cultural concerns many of these may be too English and would have required editing). I think the main thing that makes fellowships the most successful (but far from ideal) innovation in groups is the consistent and recurring meeting nature of it. So would be curious to hear if you think the readings in the session version would work. I like the cozy sessions idea and have seen these be quite successful at other groups too :)
Iâm sorry about the communication problems you faced in UGAP and that it didnât feel like it would be useful. However, 80% confidence that a UGAP mentor wouldnât have been right for you seems super high! I think it is pretty plausible for the reasons you mentioned that the UGAP programming would be less useful for you but mentorship is very unique to the person and flexible. So my guess is it would have still been valuable even if you mostly didnât talk about organizing and instead talked about EA ideas and your own career. But maybe we could chat more about what made this prediction so high for you :)
Again, appreciate you sharing and admire your perseverance and innovation here :)
(I lead the CEA uni groups team but donât intend to respond on behalf of CEA as a whole and others may disagree with some of my points)
Hi Dave,
I just want to say that I appreciate you writing this. The ideas in this post are ones we have been tracking for a while and you are certainly not alone in feeling them.
I think there is a lot of fruitful discussion in the comments here about strategy-level considerations within the entire EA ecosystem and I am personally quite compelled by many of the points in Willâs comment. So, I will focus specifically on some of the considerations we have on the uni group level and what we are trying to do about this. (I will also flag that I could say a lot more on each of these but my response was already getting quite long and we wanted to keep it somewhat concise)
Epistemics
We are also quite worried about epistemic norms in university groups. We have published some of our advice around this on the forum here (though maybe we should have led with more concrete examples) and I gave a talk at EAG Bay Area on it.
We also try to screen that people actually understand the arguments behind the claims they are making & common arguments against those positions. This is a large part of what we think screen for when looking for open-mindedness and truth-seeking. This is, of course, difficult and we do have false positives.
I will note, we sometimes admit people who we think donât understand some important arguments because we expect students to generally be learning. I expect most clubs for any cause or idea to have a weaker bar though, and we still do screen for people being self-aware about the fact that they donât understand certain arguments. We probe for this in interviews, such as by posing multiple counterarguments.
Concretely, the ~most common reason we decline to support groups (though do encourage them to reapply later) is that we think the organizers âagree withâ ideas, but donât actually understand them or the important arguments around them. So we tell them they should focus on understanding common arguments first (often by reading, for lack of a better option), etc before running a group.
Personal anecdote: Part of what drew me to EA was the openness to new ideas and truth-seeking. This was so apparently prominent in my EA group compared to many other communities I interacted with on campus who often refused to engage with certain arguments. I loved being in an intellectually vigorous environment where people did take ideas seriously and I loved that my group was so skeptical about everything. I am sad to see some spaces in the EA community not upholding these values even though I know it is based on good intentions.
Retreats
I want to apologize since I know you attended one of our summits and if you want to reach out with any additional feedback or suggestions, we would be keen to hear from you (either on the groups slack or via unigroups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org).
Retreats are definitely high-variance interventions. I do think there is more we can do to make them intellectually humble and welcoming spaces. I care a lot about psychological safety and think it is important for progress. We are always looking for feedback and ideas on how to improve this at future events and people can reach us at unigroups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
I do think there are big value-adds to retreats.
People normally go through their lives day-to-day not being able to set aside time to think about big ideas and how they might want to change their behaviors off of them. Retreats provide a space for this which I think is valuable.
They also make applying these ideas to your life a real possibility by showing examples of people who have done so. For many people, these are an opportunity to see âwoah, you can actually work on these things!â.
While I push back on the âretreats mainly act by disabling epistemic immune systemsâ frame, I will say I am a huge proponent of people having other communities to go back to and safe exit strategies. I think there are some good considerations around this in this post on going to an EA hub.
Personal anecdote: The first few retreats/âworkshops/âsummits I went to were really intense and I often felt like I didnât belong, and I think that was bad (although afaict somewhat common for retreats in other clubs with new, unfamiliar people) but I didnât regret going to them. Reflecting back on them, I think they were hugely valuable for me as a person and for me thinking through my impact. Though, I did appreciate having a community I could return back to who could push against ideas and personally encourage people to have this.
Paying Organizers
The Open Philanthropy Organizer Fellowship is the main source of funding for organizersâ time (and they manage that fellowship themselves, without CEAâs involvement) but CEA does offer some stipends. I do think that for some (but not all) people this can have a large effect on how much time they can spend on their group and on upskilling.
I am pretty sympathetic to need-based considerations but these are pretty hard to track. We have moved to our stipends being opt-in rather than default to help with this.
We also follow a method of not giving out our entire stipend amounts until the end of the semester so we can verify that organizers did complete the requirements we asked of them.
I do think organizers shouldnât expect to be paid for this type of work by default and we are considering not offering stipends in the future (though we are still collecting data on their helpfulness).
Personal anecdote: I worked a few part-time jobs in college and being paid to run my group enabled me to spend my time on what I thought was most impactful and I really appreciated that. However, in my last semester, I didnât need the funding and opted out of it.
Thanks for sharing your experiences and reflections here â I really appreciate the thoughtfulness. I want to offer some context on the group organizer situation you described, as someone who was running the university groups program at the time.
On the strategy itself:
At the time, our scalable programs were pretty focused from evidence we had seen that much of the impact came from the organizers themselves. We of course did want groups to go well more generally, but in deciding where to put our marginal resource we were focusing on group organizers. It was a fairly unintuitive strategy â and I get how that could feel misaligned or even misleading if it wasnât clearly communicated.
On communication:
We did try to be explicit about this strategy â it was featured at organizer retreats and in parts of our support programming. But we didnât consistently communicate it across all our materials. That inconsistency was an oversight on our part. Definitely not an attempt to be deceptive â just something that didnât land as clearly as we hoped.
Where weâre at now:
Weâve since updated our approach. The current strategy is less focused narrowly on organizers and more on helping groups be great overall. That said, we still think a lot of the value often comes from a small, highly engaged core â which often includes organizers, but not exclusively.
In retrospect, I wish weâd communicated this more clearly across the board. When a strategy is unintuitive, a few clear statements in a few places often isnât enough to make it legible. Sorry again if this felt off â I really appreciate you surfacing it.