All of Joris 🔸's Comments + Replies
Just quickly noting the Forum hosted two AMAs recently that might be helpful to browse through (or still engage with!). One was with career advisors, one with recruiters.
Good luck with your job search Taylor and thank you for trying to find an impactful job and for posting here asking for advice!
Congrats on landing a Bluebook position, that's so cool! Through the Impactful Policy Careers program I know some EA-aligned folks who'll also start the next round of Bluebook - happy to put you in touch :)
And happy my post was helpful!
Thanks for writing this!
I wanted to add some personal observations, from interacting with a bunch of people around the School in person, attending some SMA events, and following them quite closely online:
- Many founders / early joiners of the organization are very sympathetic to EA ideas, and think hard about how to have the most impact
- Those who have entered something like the 'core' group more recently (e.g. fellows, new employees) seem to catch on to some key ideas, but not others. Specifically, I was surprised how much they care about donating effec
Thanks, those are helpful thoughts! Just to clarify: my excitement about APA roles shouldn't be read to mean that I think other roles are likely less impactful. It's super hard to assess it from the outside!
- That hypothesis for the Commission could most certaintly be true. We talked to three EA-aligned folks in the Commission and I think all three of them had pretty different experiences, from "I don't think I've had any impact in my two years at the Commission" to someone who thought he'd influenced quite some things positively (I hope I'm not misrepresent
You can maybe pull from this AMA Peter Singer did on the Forum; there's some unanswered questions there
Intro fellowship sign-ups at EA groups participating in Early OSP doubled this Fall.
CEA’s University Groups Team is increasingly focusing its marginal efforts on piloting more involved support to a subset of EA university groups. This pilot program – Early OSP or EOSP[1] – includes early mentorship (starting in the summer), a semester planning retreat in August, and a workshop around EAG Boston, among other initiatives.
With the Fall semester now complete, we are analyzing initial outcomes. One standout result is that intro fellowsh...
Thanks! No—I’ve spoken with them a little bit about their content but otherwise they were put together independently. Theirs is remote, consists mainly of readings and discussions, and is meant to be at least somewhat more broadly accessible; ours is in person at Stanford, consists mainly of lectures, and is meant mainly for econ grad students and people with similar backgrounds.
Thank you for writing this! I wish I had internalized some of these points more while I was at university, and guess others will feel the same.
One thing in particular that I recognized is viewing 80,000 Hours (and the EA community more broadly) as offering definitive answers, rather than tools and questions. Looking back, I realize I maybe fell into that mindset. I almost expected that if I just followed the "right" path they laid out and worked as hard as I could, I’d maximize my impact. That was, of course, a very soothing thought, drastically simplifying the complexity of my career choice. But it was also very wrong, and I'm grateful that this quick take is now there to point this out :)
Hey Saul, I'm not sure how but I missed this comment! Sorry about that!
I think that the best way to answer your question is by reading this & Open Phil's original post so that where it says "AI safety groups" you read "non-EA groups". That is my understanding from Open Phil's original post.
Does that help?
Hi Weronika, thank you for sharing your story and reflections so openly! I basically think you are right in there probably being organizers for whom the stipends are the difference between organizing their EA group and not doing so, and I really want to make sure we take this point into account as my team dives into considerations around part-time stipends in the new year. As @satpathyakash notes, I think an imporant question here is the scale, and I hope to make some progress on this point!
I also wanted to flag explicitly that we are tracking the diversit...
Hi @peterhartree, I'm getting an error when trying to open the voting form:
"You need permission - This form can only be viewed by users in the owner's organization."
Hey, I’m Joris and I currently run CEA’s University Groups Team. I just wanted to share some more personal thoughts on this topic. My thoughts do not represent CEA’s official position and are also a bit messy, but I wanted to share them to be transparent and maybe provide some insight into how I am thinking about things.
- First, I just wanted to flag that the team and I are aware of the many discussions on the topic of ‘top’ or ‘focus’ universities that have happened on the Forum. Many of our internal conversations touch upon many of the
Many semesters are about to kick off in the next ~month, meaning the busiest and most important time of the year is coming up for many EA university group organizers.
I'm very grateful for the work of university group organizers around the world. University groups have been a place where so many people learned about EA ideas and met others who are equally motivated to do good in an impartial and scope-sensitive way. Many of the people who got involved with EA through university groups are now making progress on fighting very difficult problems in...
If you have some experience in a relevant field, you could also consider offering to speak at an event :) When I was organising my university group, I know I was pretty nervous about reaching out to people working in EA-aligned careers. I expect having alumni speak might make those career paths particularly salient ("I used to be exactly like you, and now I do this").
A few months ago, @Naomi N and I collected this overview of all post-FTX reflection-related projects we were aware of at the time - you and others might find that helpful!
For anyone wondering what other reflection/reform projects are happening - just plugging this overview Naomi and I put together!
Thanks for clarifying that national groups fulfil important roles beyond those two parts of the funnel!
Reading this made me realise I'm worried that there are important things that regional/national groups do that aren't always very legible to funders, like:
- Allowing EAs outside of traditional EA Hubs maintain motivation in their work (kind of what you describe in the 'Continuous contact points' section)
- Having EAGx conferences take place (initiating the idea; getting a team together, etc.)
- Fostering positive portrayals of Effective Altruism in local media ou
Focusmate works incredibly well for me!
Some things I really like:
- If you show up more than 2 mins late your session is cancelled, meaning you'll kind of disappoint the person on the other end of the call, and you have to wait another 13 minutes to get started. That's a big motivation to show up and get started!
- During the session, there's someone else expecting you to make progress in the next 25/55/75 minutes. I feel way more (healthy) pressure to actually make progress when there's expectations of a stranger (compared to e.g. a colleague or friend)
- Th
Thanks Harrison, we're indeed looking at exactly those "policy responses to non-existential low-probability risks" as there is little material out there on policy change regarding GC & X-risks. By 'lowering the bar' a bit to what we called 'extreme risks', we hope to include smaller, less deadly risks into our case study candidates. As such, 9/11 is indeed one to consider, thank!
This sounds great! PISE, the group at Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands) has also been trying to this over the past two years. Although it's far from perfect, I think we have a pretty good branding and online presence (especially compared to the average EA group). Feel free to check out our Instagram, I'd be happy to put you in touch with the people who do the hard work of creating great marketing content :)
Two months ago our group ran a 4-week fellowship! We plan on writing a longer forum post about it soon, but here are some main takeaways:
- I think our approach combined some of the suggestions you do: our fellowship was a 4-week sprint, we offered extra events during and after the program and went on a retreat right after the groups finished their fellowship
- There's no AB test on this, but our intuition is that people were more comfortable with committing to a 4 week rather than an 8 week program
- We heightened the workload a bit, from ~2.5 hours to ~4 hours pe
Thank you for your post Naomi! I saw some interesting similarities with how we organize our student group, so I wrote down some thoughts below.
Firstly, that same trend (heightened interest in aug/sep and jan/feb) probably also applies to students' availability/willingness to get engaged with new initiatives on their campus. This is certainly true for students at our university, so we also work with two 'recruitment seasons' (we call them 'cycles') per year.
Three additions to your image from our student group's perspective would be:
- Our initial marketi
Donations to Doneer Effectief grew with 40+% in 2025, to over €8 million! Made me smile when I saw the announcement post earlier this month :)