Hey,

I’m really sorry to hear about this experience. I’ve also experienced what feels like social pressure to have particular beliefs (e.g. around non-causal decision theory, high AI x-risk estimates, other general pictures of the world), and it’s something I also don’t like about the movement. My biggest worries with my own beliefs stem around the worry that I’d have very different views if I’d found myself in a different social environment. It’s just simply very hard to successfully have a group of people who are trying to both figure out what’s correct and trying to change the world: from the perspective of someone who thinks the end of the world is imminent, someone who doesn’t agree is at best useless and at worst harmful (because they are promoting misinformation).

In local groups in particular, I can see how this issue can get aggravated: people want their local group to be successful, and it’s much easier to track success with a metric like “number of new AI safety researchers” than “number of people who have thought really deeply about the most pressing issues and have come to their own well-considered conclusions”. 

One thing I’ll say is that core researchers are often (but not always) much more uncertain and pluralist than it seems from “the vibe”. The second half of Holden Karnofsky’s recent 80k blog post is indicative. Open Phil splits their funding across quite a number of cause areas, and I expect that to continue. Most of the researchers at GPI are pretty sceptical of AI x-risk. Even among people who are really worried about TAI in the next decade, there’s normally significant support (whether driven by worldview diversification or just normal human psychology) for neartermist or other non-AI causes. That’s certainly true of me. I think longtermism is highly non-obvious, and focusing on near-term AI risk even more so; beyond that, I think a healthy EA movement should be highly intellectually diverse and exploratory. 

What should be done? I have a few thoughts, but my most major best guess is that, now that AI safety is big enough and getting so much attention, it should have its own movement, separate from EA. Currently, AI has an odd relationship to EA. Global health and development and farm animal welfare, and to some extent pandemic preparedness, had movements working on them independently of EA. In contrast, AI safety work currently overlaps much more heavily with the EA/rationalist community, because it’s more homegrown. 

If AI had its own movement infrastructure, that would give EA more space to be its own thing. It could more easily be about the question “how can we do the most good?” and a portfolio of possible answers to that question, rather than one increasingly common answer — “AI”.

At the moment, I’m pretty worried that, on the current trajectory, AI safety will end up eating EA. Though I’m very worried about what the next 5-10 years will look like in AI, and though I think we should put significantly more resources into AI safety even than we have done, I still think that AI safety eating EA would be a major loss. EA qua EA, which can live and breathe on its own terms, still has huge amounts of value: if AI progress slows; if it gets so much attention that it’s no longer neglected; if it turns out the case for AI safety was wrong in important ways; and because there are other ways of adding value to the world, too. I think most people in EA, even people like Holden who are currently obsessed with near-term AI risk, would agree. 

One said climate change, two said global health, and two said AI safety. Neither of the people who said AI safety had any background in AI. If after Arete, someone without background in AI decides that AI safety is the most important issue, then something likely has gone wrong (Note: prioritizing any non-mainstream cause area after Arete is epistemically shaky. By mainstream, I mean a cause area that someone would have a high prior on).

This seems like a strange position to me. Do you think people have to have a background in climate science to decide that climate change is the most important problem, or development economics to decide that global poverty is the moral imperative of our time? Many people will not have a background relevant to any major problem; are they permitted to have any top priority?

I think (apologies if I am mis-understanding you) you try to get around this by suggesting that 'mainstream' causes can have much higher priors and lower evidential burdens. But that just seems like deference to wider society, and the process by which mainstream causes became dominant does not seem very epistemically reliable to me.

(I lead the CEA uni groups team but don’t 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 Will’s 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 don’t 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 don’t 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 "agree with" ideas, but don't 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 [email protected]).
• 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 [email protected]. 
• 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 “woah, you can actually work on these things!”. 
• While I push back on the “retreats mainly act by disabling epistemic immune systems” 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/workshops/summits I went to were really intense and I often felt like I didn’t belong, and I think that was bad (although afaict somewhat common for retreats in other clubs with new, unfamiliar people) but I didn’t 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 organizers’ time (and they manage that fellowship themselves, without CEA’s 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 shouldn’t 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 didn’t need the funding and opted out of it.

Hi Dave,

Thanks for taking the time to write this. I had an almost identical experience at my university. I helped re-start the club, with every intention to lead the club, but I am no longer associated with it because of the lack of willingness from others to engage with AI safety criticisms or to challenge their own beliefs regarding AI safety/Existential risk.

I also felt that those in our group who prioritized AI safety had an advantage as far as getting recognition from more senior members of the city group, ability to form connections with other EAs in the club, and to get funding from EA orgs. I was quite certain I could get funding from the CEA too, as long as I lied and said I prioritized AI safety/Existential risk, but I wasn’t willing to do that. I also felt the money given to other organizers in the club was not necessary and did not have any positive outcomes other than for that individual.

I am now basically fully estranged from the club (which sucks, because I actually enjoyed the company of everyone) because I do not feel like my values, and the values I originally became interested in EA for (such as epistemic humility) exist in the space I was in.

I did manage to have a few conversations with people in the club about AI safety that were somewhat productive, and I am grateful for those people (one senior EA community member who works in AI safety in particular). But despite this, our club basically felt like an AI safety club. Almost every student involved (at least the consistent ones, and the president) were AI safety focused. In addition, they were mainly interested in starting AI safety reading groups and most conversations led to AI safety (other than a philosophy group that my partner and I started, but eventually stopped running).

People have been having similar thoughts to yours for many years, including myself. Navigating through EA epistemic currents is treacherous. To be sure, so is navigating epistemic currents in lots of other environments, including the "default" environment for most people. But EA is sometimes presented as being "neutral" in certain ways, so it feels jarring to see that it is clearly not.

Nearly everyone I know who has been around EA long enough to do things like run a university group eventually confronts the fact that their beliefs have been shaped socially by the community in ways that are hard to understand, including by people paid to shape your beliefs. It's challenging to know what to do in light of that. Some people reject EA. Others, like you, take breaks to figure things out more for themselves. And others press on, while trying to course correct some. Many try to create more emotional distance, regardless of what they do. There's not really an obvious answer, and I don't feel I've figured it fully out myself. All this is to just say: you're not alone. If you or anyone else reading this wants to talk, I'm here.

Finally, I really like this related post, as well as this comment on it. When I ran the Yale EA in depth fellowship, I assigned it as a reading.

Sorry not to weigh in on the object-level parts about university groups and what you think they should do differently, but as I've graduated I'm no longer a community builder so I'm somewhat less interested in weighing in on that.

I'm really glad you chose to make this post and I'm grateful for your presence and insights during our NYC Community Builders gatherings over the past ~half year. I worry about organizers with criticisms leaving the community and the perpetuation of an echo chamber, so I'm happy you not only shared your takes but also are open to resuming involvement after taking the time to learn, reflect, and reprioritize.

Adding to the solutions outlined above, some ideas I have:

• Normalize asking people, "What is the strongest counterargument to the claim you just made?" I think this is particularly important in a university setting, but also helpful in EA and the world at large. A uni professor recently told me one of the biggest recent shifts in their undergrad students has been a fear of steelmanning, lest people incorrectly believe it's the position they hold. That seems really bad. And it seems like establishing this as a new norm could have helped in many of the situations described in the post, e.g. "What are some reasons someone who knows everything you do might not choose to prioritize AI?" • Greater support for uni students trialing projects through their club, including projects spanning cause areas. You can build skills that cross cause areas while testing your fit and achieving meaningful outcomes in the short-term. Campaign for institutional meat reduction in your school cafeteria and you'll develop valuable skills for AI governance work as a professional. • Mentorship programs that match uni students with professionals. There are many mentorship programs to model this on and most have managed to avoid any nefariousness or cult vibes. • Restructuring fellowships such that they maintain the copy-paste element that has allowed them to spread while focusing more on tools that can be implemented across domains. I like the suggestion of a writing fellowship. I'm personally hoping to create a fellowship focused on social movement theory and advocacy (hit me up if interested in helping!).

Mad props for going off anon. Connecting it to your resignation from columbia makes me take you way more seriously and is a cheap way to make the post 1000x more valuable than an anon version. 

Thanks for making this post. Many commenters are disputing your claim that "Being paid to run a college club is weird", and I want to describe why I think it is in fact distorting.

One real reason you don't want to pay the leadership of a college club a notably large amount of money is because you expose yourself to brutal adverse selection: the more you pay above the market rate for a campus job, the more attractive the executive positions are to people who are purely financially motivated rather than motivated by the mission of the club. This is loosely speaking a problem faced by all efforts to hire everywhere, but is usually resolved in a corporate environment through having precise and dispassionate performance evaluation, and the ability to remove people who aren't acting "aligned", if you will. I think the lack of mechanisms like this at college org level basically mean this adverse selection problem blows up, and you simply can't bestow excess money or status on executives without corrupting the org. I saw how miserable college-org politics were in other settings, with a lot less money to go around than EA. 

At the core of philanthropic mission is a principal-agent problem. Donors, at some length, need to empower agents to spend their money wisely and maximally efficiently. As an EA contributor, rather than primarily a donor, you are constantly being nudged by your corrupted hardware to justify spending money on luxuries and conveniences. From the outside, it's very difficult to tell whether the money-spenders are adjusting for this bias, hence why things like Wytham Abbey are controversial. So then as an outsider, seeing that the Columbia EA club pays its executives so much and does things like maintain The Commons basically destroys the club's credibility in my eyes, and I'd only engage with it (as a former Columbia student and now donor) if it were of a substantially different and more frugal looking character. 

I expect I reside farther on the "you should be frugal to signal credibility" axis than a lot of people here, and this comment bleeds into larger criticisms I have of current EA culture, but I thought it was reflected neatly in the dynamic your post describes. 

My poor epistemics led me astray, but weirdly enough, my poor epistemics gained me some social points in EA circles. While at the retreat and at EA events afterwards, I was socially rewarded for telling people that I was a longtermist who cared about AI safety.

This is odd to me because I have a couple memories of feeling like sr EAs were not taking me seriously because I was being sloppy in my justification for agreeing with them. Though admittedly one such anecdote was pre-pandemic, and I have a few longstanding reason to expect the post-pandemic community builder industrial complex would not have performed as well as the individuals I'm thinking about. 

For what it's worth, I run an EA university group outside of the U.S (at the University of Waterloo in Canada). I haven't observed any of the points you mentioned in my experience with the EA group:

• We don't run intro to EA fellowships because we're a smaller group. We're not trying to convert more students to be 'EA'. We more so focus on supporting whoever's interested in working on EA-relevant projects (ex: a cheap air purifier, a donations advisory site, a cybersecurity algorithm, etc.). Whether they identify with the EA movement or not. 
• Since we're not trying to get people to become EA members, we're not hosting any discussions where a group organiser could convince people to work on AI safety over all else. 
• No one's getting paid here. We have grant money that we've used for things like hosting an AI governance hackathon. But that money gets used for things like marketing, catering, prizes, etc. - not salaries. 

Which university EA groups specifically did you talk to before proclaiming "University EA Groups Need Fixing"? Based only on what I read in your article, a more accurate title seems to be "Columbia EA Needs Fixing" 

Is it actually bad if AI, longtermism, or x-risk are dominant in EA? That seems to crucially depend on whether these cause areas are actually the ones in which the most good can be done - and whether we should believe that depends on how strong arguments back up these cause areas. Assume, for example, that we can do by far the most good by focusing on AI x-risks and that there is an excellent case / compelling arguments for this. Then, this cause area should receive significantly more resources and should be much more talked about, and promoted, than other cause areas. Treating it just like other cause areas would be a big mistake: the (assumed) fact that we can do much more good in this cause area is a great reason to treat it differently! 

To be clear: my point is not that AI, longtermism, or anything else should be dominant in EA, but that how these cause areas should be represented in EA (including whether they should be dominant) depends on the object-level discourse about their cost-effectiveness. It is therefore unobvious, and depends on difficult object-level questions, whether a given degree of dominance of AI, longtermism, or any other cause area, is justified or not. (I take this to be in tension with some points of the post, and some of the comments, but not as incompatible with most of its points.)

Sorry to hear that you've had this experience.

I think you've raised a really important point - in practice, cause prioritisation by individual EAs is heavily irrational, and is shaped by social dynamics, groupthink and deference to people who don't want people to be deferring to them. Eliminating this irrationality entirely is impossible, but we can still try to minimise it. 

I think one problem we have is that it's true that cause prioritisation by orgs like 80000 Hours is more rational than many other communities aiming to make the world a better place. However, the bar here is extremely low, and I think some EAs (especially new EAs) see cause prioritisation by 80000 Hours as 100% rational. I think a better framing is to see their cause prioritisation as less irrational.

As someone who is not very involved with EA socially because of where I live, I'd also like to add that from the outside, there seems to be fairly strong, widespread consensus that EAs think AI Safety is the more important cause area. But then I've found that when I meet "core EAs", eg - people working at CEA, 80k, FHI etc, there is far more divergence in views around AI x-risk than I'd expect, and this consensus does not seem to be present. I'm not sure why this discrepancy exists and I'm not sure how this could be fixed - maybe staff at these orgs could publish their "cause ranking" lists.

Some of my suggestions for all EA organisers and CEA to improve epistemics and cause prioritisation via intro fellowships and Arete fellowships:

1. Discuss this thought experiment to better emphasise uncertainty in cause prioritisation, to encourage more independent cause prioritisation, and discourage deference. a) "Imagine 100 different timelines where effective altruism emerged. How consistent do you think the movement’s cause priorities (and rankings of them) would be across these 100 different timelines?" and b) "Imagine effective altruism independently emerged in 100 different countries and these movements could not contact each other. How consistent do you think the movement’s cause priorities (and rankings of them) would be across these 100 different countries?"
2. Discuss specific, unavoidable philosophical problems with cause prioritisation. This includes a) the effects of defining problems more narrowly or more broadly on "pressingness", b) the fact that cause prioritisation is used to identify impactful interventions, which is not ideal, and probably other problems that I can't think of off the top of my head.
3. Make new EAs aware of the Big List of Cause Candidates post, and the concept of Cause X.
4. When encouraging EA's to get involved with the community, discuss the risk of optimising for social status instead of collective impact.
5. At the end of Arete Fellowships / an EA Intro Fellowships, show fellows data from the EA Surveys (particularly cause prioritisation survey data) to give them a more evidence-based sense of what the community actually thinks about things.

First, I am sorry to hear about your experience. I am sympathetic to the idea that a high level of deference and lack of rigorous thinking is likely rampant amongst the university EA crowd, and I hope this is remedied. That said, I strongly disagree with your takeaways about funding and have some other reflections as well:

• "Being paid to run a college club is weird. All other college students volunteer to run their clubs."
  
  This seems incorrect. I used to feel this way, but I changed my mind because I noticed that every "serious" club (i.e., any club wanting to achieve its goals reliably) on my campus pays students or hires paid interns. For instance, my university has a well-established environmental science ecosystem, and at least two of the associated clubs are supported via some university funding mechanism (this is now so advanced that they also do grantmaking for student projects ranging from a couple thousand to a max of $100,000). I can also think of a few larger Christian groups on campus which do the same. Some computer science/data-related clubs also do this, but I might be wrong.
  
  Most college clubs are indeed run on a volunteer basis. But most are run quite casually. There is nothing wrong with this; most of them are hobby-based clubs where students simply want to create a socially welcoming atmosphere for any who might be interested. They don't have weekly discussions, TA-like facilitation, socials/retreats, or, in some cases, hosting research/internship programs. In this way, EA clubs are different because they aren't trying to be the "let's get together and have fun" club. I almost see university EA clubs as a prototype non-profit or a so-so-funded university department trying to run a few courses. 
  
  In passing I should also mention that it is far more common for clubs to get funding for hosting events, outreach, buying materials, etc. My guess is that in these cases if more funding were available, then students running those clubs would also get stipends.
   
• "Getting paid to organize did not make me take my role more seriously, and I suspect that other organizers did not take their roles much more seriously because of being paid."
  
  My experience has been the opposite of yours. Before getting paid, organizing felt like a distraction from more important things; there was always this rush to wrap up tasks; I enjoyed organizing but always felt somewhat guilty for spending time on it. These feelings vanished after getting funded. I (at least) doubled the amount of time I spent on the club, got more exposed to EA, got more organized with the meetings/deadlines, and I feel that I have a sense of responsibility for running this project the best I can. 
   
• Turn the University Group Organizer Fellowship into a need-based fellowship. 
  
  I am uncertain about this. I think a better and simpler heuristic is that if people are working diligently for x hours a week, then they should be funded for their labor.
   
• "If the University Group Organizer Fellowship exit survey indicates that funding was somewhat helpful in increasing people's commitment to quality community building, then reduce funding..."
  
  I agree with this. Funding being given out could be somewhat reduced and I feel it would be equally as impactful as it is now, but I am keen to see the results of the survey. 
   
• "I am very concerned with just how little cause prioritization seems to be happening at my university group."
  
  At least for university groups, maybe this is the wrong thing to be concerned about. It would be better if students could do rigorous cause-prioritization, but I think for most, this would be quite challenging, if not virtually impossible. 
  
  The way I see it, most university students are still in the formative stages of figuring out what they believe in and their reasons for doing so. Almost all are in the active process of developing their identity and goals. Some have certain behavioral traits that prevent them from exploring all options (think of the shy person who later went on to become a communicator of some sort). All this is sometimes exacerbated by mental health problems or practical concerns (familial duties, the need to be financially stable, etc.). 
  
  Expecting folks from this age group to perform cause prioritization is a high bar. I am sure some can do it, but I wouldn't have been able to. Instead, I think it'd be better if university EA groups helped their members understand how to make the best possible bet at the moment to have a pathway to impact. For instance, I hope that most students who go through the fellowship:
  — Develop better ways of thinking and forming opinions
  — Be more open-minded / have a broad sphere of concern
  — Take ideas seriously and act on them (usually by building career capital)
  — Play the long game of having a high-impact career
  
  Now, this likely doesn't happen to the best possible degree. But I think that all this and more, in combination, would help most in refining their cause prioritization over the years and setting themselves up to have a rewarding and impactful career. 
  
  Maybe this is what you meant when you were expressing your concerns, in which case, sorry for the TED talk and I wholeheartedly agree. 

One data point to add in support: I once spoke to a relatively new EA who was part of a uni group who said they "should" believe that longtermism/AI safety is the top cause, but when I asked them what their actual prio was said it was mental health.

Your description of retreats matches my experience almost disconcertingly; it even described things I didn't even realize I took away from the retreat. I went to I felt like the only one who had those experiences. Thanks for writing this up. I hope things work out for you! 

but I am very concerned with just how little cause prioritization seems to be happening at my university group

I've heard this critique in different places and never really understood it. Presumably undergraduates who have only recently heard of the empirical and philosophical work related to cause prioritization are not in the best position to do original work on it. Instead they should review arguments others have made and judge them, as you do in the Arete Fellowship. It's not surprising to me that most people converge on the most popular position within the broader movement. 

Thank you for the post, as a new uni group organizer I'll take this into account. 

I think a major problem may lie in the intro-fellowship curriculum offered by CEA. It says it is an "intro" fellowship but the program discusses longtermism/x-risk framework disproportionally for 3 weeks. And for a person who just meets EA ideas newly this could bring 2 problems:

First, as Dave mentioned, some people may want to do good as much as possible but don't buy  longtermism. We might lose these people who could do amazing good. 

Second, EA is weird and unintuitive. Even without ai stuff, it is still weird because of stuff like impartial altruism, prioritization, and earning to give. And if we give this content of weirdness plus the "most important century" narrative to the wanna-be EAs we might lose people who could be EA if they had encountered the ideas with a time for digestion. 

This was definitely the case for me. I had a vegan advocacy background when I enrolled in my first fellowship. It was only 6 weeks and only one week was given to longtermism. Now I do believe we are in the most important century after a lot of time thinking and reading but If I was given this weird framework from the start, I may have been scared and taken a step back from EA because of the overwhelming weirdness and cultish vibes

Maybe If we slow down the creation of  "ai safety people" by cutting the fellowship to 6 weeks and maybe offering a 2-week additional track program for people who are interested in longtermism. Or by just giving them resources, having 1:1s or taking them to in-depth programs. 

First, I’m sorry you’ve had this bad experience. I’m wary of creating environments that put a lot of pressure on young people to come to particular conclusions, and I’m bothered when AI Safety recruitment takes place in more isolated environments that minimize inferential distance because it means new people are not figuring it out for themselves.

I relate a lot to the feeling that AI Safety invaded as a cause without having to prove itself in a lot of the ways the other causes had to rigorously prove impact. No doubt it’s the highest prestige cause and attractive to think about (math, computer science, speculating about ginormous longterm impact) in many ways that global health or animal welfare stuff is often not. (You can even basically work on AI capabilities at a big fancy company while getting credit from EAs for doing the most important altruism in the world! There’s nothing like that for the other causes.)

Although I have my own ideas about some bad epistemics going on with prioritizing AI Safety, I want to hear your thoughts about it spelled out more. Is it mainly the deference you’re talking about?

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and reasons for disillusionment. I found this section the most concerning. If this has even a moderate amount of truth to it (especially the bit about discouraging new potential near termist EAs) then these kind of fellowships might need serious rethinking.

"Once the fellowship is over, the people who stick around are those who were sold on the ideas espoused in weeks 4, 5, and 6 (existential risks, longtermism, and AI) either because their facilitators were passionate about those topics, they were tech bros, or they were inclined to those ideas due to social pressure or emotional appeal. The folks who were intrigued by weeks 1, 2, and 3 (animal welfare, global health, and cost-effectiveness) but dismissed longtermism, x-risks, or AI safety may (mistakenly) think there is no place for them in EA. Over time, the EA group continues to select for people with those values, and before you know it your EA group is now a factory that churns out x-risk reducers, longtermists, and AI safety prioritizers."

Thanks so much for writing this post Dave; I find this really helpful for pinning down some of the perceived and real issues with the EA community.

I think some people have two stable equilibria: one being ~“do normal things” and the other being “take ideas seriously” (obviously an oversimplification). I think getting from the former to the latter often requires some pressure, but the latter can be inhabited without sacrificing good epistemics and can be much more impactful. Plus, people who make this transition often end up grateful that they made it, and wish they’d made it earlier. I think other people basically don’t have these two stable equilibria, but some of those have an unstable equilibrium for taking ideas seriously which is epistemically unsound, and it becomes stable through social dynamics rather than by thinking through the ideas carefully, which is bad… but also potentially good for the world if they can do good work despite the unsound epistemic foundation… This is messy and I don’t straightforwardly endorse it, but I also can’t honestly say that it’s obvious to me we should always prioritize pure epistemic health if it trades off against impact here. Reducing “the kind of outreach and social pressure that harms epistemic health” might also reduce the number of both kinds of people who take ideas seriously. Maybe there is no tradeoff; maybe this is ultimately bad from an impact perspective too, or maybe there’s a way to get the good without the bad. But that’s not clear to me, and I would love to hear anyone’s suggestions.

(The stable vs. unstable equilibrium concept isn’t described exactly right, but I think the point is clear.)

I'm not really an EA, but EA-adjacent. I am quite concerned about AI safety, and think it's probably the most important problem we're dealing with right now. 

It sounds like your post is trying to point out some general issues in EA university groups, and you do point out specific dynamics that one can reasonably be concerned about. It does seem, however, like you do have an issue with the predominance of concerns around AI that is separate from this issue and that strongly shines through in the post. I find this dilutes your message and it might be better separated from the rest of your post. 

Hello,

I am sorry that this was your experience in your university group. I would also like to thank you for being bold and sharing your concerns because it will help make necessary changes to various groups who are having the same experience. This kind of effort is important because it will keep the priorities, actions and overall efforts of E.A groups in check.

There are some actions that my university facilitator took to help people "think better" about issues they are particular interested in and fall under the EA umbrellas (or would make the world a better place). 

1. He held 1 on 1s with each member to try and access interests in various course areas. He also assessed if the EA community has been of help to each individual in helping us think better, and encouraged us to air any concerns we might have such as the issues you have written on your post.
2. He held discussions with the group members individually to try and establish if the course they are undertaking at the university is something they are interested in or they just landed on it which would mean their interested in another career path or interests that would help others in line with the E.A goals. 
3. He also guided us on the best way to cause prioritize and how to best use E.A and the resources available to make the most out of our efforts to make the world a better place. 
4. He encouraged us to be vocal about cause areas we thing that are neglected and more efforts should be put into. We also have general conversations within this space. Having conversations with likeminded individuals in the line of the E.A goals helped us foster growth and think better.
   1. After each session where we discuss the week’s content, we take time and discuss our personal (E.A related) ideas and learn in a safe space where we can ask any question we have. Honestly helped me see various issue in different perspectives and in turn helped me start to think of cause areas that are a best fit for me.

In my own view, we should commend the organizers  and other stakeholders involved in A.I safety. The movement has become a success and they are on the right path to prevent A.I related risks in the future despite the failures you have highlighted based on your experience. We should push other E.A related movements to have as much traction as A.I safety. However, we should not just push people towards any of the E.A related organization without cause prioritization. 

 I agree with various comments on how the A.I safety (and other high impact cause areas) issue should have their individual movements to give E.A space to be its own thing. This will give individuals an opportunity to join such high impact organizations of their choice based on their interests and fitness. In turn E.A will only focus on teaching people how to “find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” both as a research field and a practical community.

Regarding payment to organizers, I think that this helps them spend time doing what is most impactful. I think paying the organizers helps them by motivating them to continue volunteering and fostering growth of the group. Funding the organizer would make a difference between them taking more time organizing the club versus them looking for a part time jobs which would take more of their time. I believe that if an organizer is in a stable financially, they should decline the payment and see it directed towards another cause area. This will definitely depend on how altruistic a person is.

As someone that organizes and is in touch with a various EA/AI safety groups, I can definitely see where you're coming from! I think many of the concerns here boil down to group culture and social dynamics that could be irrespective of what cause areas people in the group end up focusing on.

You could imagine two communities whose members in practice work on very similar things, but whose culture couldn't be further apart:

• Intellectually isolated community where longtermism/AI safety being of utmost importance is seen as self-evident. There are social dynamics that discourage certain beliefs and questions, including about said social dynamics. Comes across as groupthinky/culty to anyone that isn't immediately on-board.
• Epistemically humble community that tries to figure out what the most impactful projects are to improve the world, a large fraction of which have tentatively come to the conclusion that AI safety appears very pressing and have subsequently decided to work on this cause area. People are self-aware of the tower of assumptions underlying this conclusion. Social dynamics of the group can be openly discussed. Comes across as truth-seeking.

I think it's possible for some groups to embody the culture of the latter example more, and to do so without necessarily focusing any less on longtermism and AI safety.

Sorry to hear that you had such a rough experience.

I agree that there can be downsides of being too trapped within an EA bubble and it seems worthwhile suggesting to people that after spending some extended time in the bay, they may benefit from getting away from it for a bit.

Regarding retreats, I think it can be beneficial for facilitators to try to act similarly to philosophy lecturers who are there to ensure you understand the arguments for and against more than trying to get you to agree with them.

I also think that it would be possible to create an alternate curriculum that encouraged more debate, perhaps by pairing up articles with others arguing the opposite position. However, producing such a resource would be a lot of work.

Thank you for taking the time to write this. In 2020, I had the opportunity to start a city group or a university group in Cyprus, given the resources and connections at my disposal. After thinking long and hard about the homogenization of the group towards a certain cause area, I opted not to, but rather focused on being a facilitator for the virtual program, where I believe I will have more impact by introducing EA to newcomers from a more nuanced perspective. Facilitators of the virtual program have the ability to maintain a perfect balance between cause areas and the inability of certain cause areas to dominate due to the lack of any external pressure. I find it a much better use of my time and efforts. With no social hierarchy or community to impress in the virtual program, it is often clear and easy for people to defend their epistemic beliefs and cause area prioritization without any external factors or social pressure. I also try my best to mention to cohorts the need for personal fit in choosing cause areas, not just on the basis of groupthink or potential social currency. Perhaps this is where university fellowships and the virtual program diverge (no external pressure). Cohorts are often nudged to think deeply about positions and ideas that they hold without feeling any pressure. Some end up working on AI safety; others end up working on different areas such as climate change and biorisk; and some end up joining CE to develop new charity ideas. I find this highly fulfilling. I don't necessarily think the syllabus from CEA nudges people towards AI safety (often times it serves as a good resource for cohorts who joined the program through animal warfare, global health, and poverty) to learn about other EA cause areas and also compare their epistemics and personal fit on how to tackle pressing issues. I do often get asked tough questions about why the community seems too focused on AI safety, especially from cohorts who I have nudged to attend EAGX and EAGs. I do point out the massive nuances in funding for different areas within EA because it is far too easy for some cohorts to develop the idea that EA is one huge AI-based movement.

Given the different dynamics between the virtual program and university groups, I do sympathize with you.

Thank you for writing this. It puts some of the questions I get asked during the fellowship into a better perspective, especially coming from a university organizer.

Kudos to you for having the courage to write this post. One of the things I like most about it is the uncanny understanding and acknowledgement of how people feel when they are trying to enter a new social group. EAs tend to focus on logic and rationality but humans are still emotional beings. I think perhaps we may underrate how these feelings drive our behavior. I didn't know that university organizers were paid - that, to me, seems kind of insane and counter to the spirit of altruism. I really like the idea of making it need based. One other thing your post made me reflect on is how community-building strategies and epistemics may differ at less-selective versus highly-selective universities. Your experience is at highly-selective schools but I'm curious how many EA groups there are at regional comprehensive universities and open access schools, or HBCUs, community colleges, tribal colleges, etc. Those student populations are very different but may bring valuable perspectives to EA if effort is made to engage them.

@Lizka Apologies is this was raised and answered elsewhere, but I just noticed in relation to this article that your reading estimate says 12 minutes, but when I press listen to this article it says 19 minutes at normal speed? Is there a reason for the discrepancy? How is the reading time calculated?

Also, when I tried to look for who else from the Forum team to tag - I don't find any obvious page/link that lists the current team members. How can I find this in the future?