Stanford EA holds weekly discussion-focused meetings, with an average turnout of around 15 people. These are based around sheets with a list of questions and relevant background; you can see examples of previous ones here. (Thanks to Kelsey Piper for writing these!) At one point we planned to consistently provide a page of background on the other side of the sheet; we've partially stopped doing so, as the background didn't seem to really guide the conversation.
First we have a few minutes to write down our answers to the questions on the sheet. We then go around the circle doing introductions, as specified at the top of the sheet. Then, for each question, we go around the circle and give our response to it.
Most of the interesting discussion happens as prompted by things people say when providing their answers. It’s pretty loose: people ask you about your answer, and you respond to them, and the discussion kind of goes where it will. When it’s gone on a long enough tangent, Kelsey moves the conversation along by asking the next person to give their answer to the question. This is a great way of ensuring that the conversation can stay roughly on track and everyone gets a chance to speak. Often meetups have a problem where new people don’t know what to say; this goes some of the way to solving that.
These questionnaires also make the discussion more accessible to people who know less about effective altruism, because often it’s easy to grasp the complex natures of questions like “how much do you value IQ increases vs saving more lives”. The Stanford EA meetup, like all meetups, occasionally veers pretty hard into jargon and confusing advanced territory, but Kelsey is able to somewhat restrain that by moving the conversation to the next person or next question. The background info on the sheets, when present, also helps.
It’s rare that we actually make it all the way through the questions. Usually we discuss some aspects of a later question when talking about an earlier one, or we do a quick straw poll about a later one and don’t discuss it further. Generally, the topics which lead to the most digressions are the more abstract or philosophical ones; when we talked about population ethics, we spent an hour and a half discussing the first question.
The meetup lasts for an hour and a half, after which most of us get dinner together. Dinner discussions tend to still be about EA topics, but instead about anything people who want to talk about. They also tend to be where we discuss/plan ideas for non-discussion meetings; the larger number of people allows the leaders to get better feedback on which future events should be run.
(Thanks to Buck Shlegeris for writing the first draft of this post; thanks to Kelsey for running the meetups and writing the discussion sheets; thanks to Alex Richard for revisions.)
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This is super practical advice that I can definitely see myself applying in the future. The introductions on the sheets seem particularly well-suited to getting people engaged.
Also, "What is the first thing you would do if appointed dictator of the United States?" likely just entered my favorite questions to ask anyone in ice-breaker scenarios, many of which have nothing to do with EA.
The question we've had the most success with for a regular/weekly meetup is "what is something interesting you've learned/read/thought about recently". The advantage to keeping it consistent is that people know what to expect; this question also avoids most of the disadvantages of keeping the question consistent (namely that people repeat themselves and get bored). It also tends to provoke fascinating answers.
I can also vouch for the success of "What's one good thing and one bad thing that has happened to you this week/month/since last time?" Each person picks one of each and talks about it. Naturally, some people may bring up things related to EA very easily with this question if they are involved with it.
Curated and popular this week
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[Cross-posted from my Substack here]
If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right?
The answer is all of them and none of them.
This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say:
* Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement.
* Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick.
* Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement.
* Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964.
* Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly.
* And so on…
To paint this picture, we can see this in action below:
Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption
Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising
What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things:
1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing
2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
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I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons.
1. Scalability
2. Capital counterfactuals
3. Standards
4. Learning potential
5. Earning to give potential
These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1]
Scalability
There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations.
Capital Counterfactuals
I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue.
Standards
Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want.
Learning Potential
Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
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James Özden and Sam Glover at Social Change Lab wrote a literature review on protest outcomes[1] as part of a broader investigation[2] on protest effectiveness. The report covers multiple lines of evidence and addresses many relevant questions, but does not say much about the methodological quality of the research. So that's what I'm going to do today.
I reviewed the evidence on protest outcomes, focusing only on the highest-quality research, to answer two questions:
1. Do protests work?
2. Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence?
Here's what I found:
Do protests work? Highly likely (credence: 90%) in certain contexts, although it's unclear how well the results generalize. [More]
Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence? Yes—the report's core claims are well-supported, although it overstates the strength of some of the evidence. [More]
Cross-posted from my website.
Introduction
This article serves two purposes: First, it analyzes the evidence on protest outcomes. Second, it critically reviews the Social Change Lab literature review.
Social Change Lab is not the only group that has reviewed protest effectiveness. I was able to find four literature reviews:
1. Animal Charity Evaluators (2018), Protest Intervention Report.
2. Orazani et al. (2021), Social movement strategy (nonviolent vs. violent) and the garnering of third-party support: A meta-analysis.
3. Social Change Lab – Ozden & Glover (2022), Literature Review: Protest Outcomes.
4. Shuman et al. (2024), When Are Social Protests Effective?
The Animal Charity Evaluators review did not include many studies, and did not cite any natural experiments (only one had been published as of 2018).
Orazani et al. (2021)[3] is a nice meta-analysis—it finds that when you show people news articles about nonviolent protests, they are more likely to express support for the protesters' cause. But what people say in a lab setting mig
I can also vouch for the success of "What's one good thing and one bad thing that has happened to you this week/month/since last time?" Each person picks one of each and talks about it. Naturally, some people may bring up things related to EA very easily with this question if they are involved with it.