All of lucarade's Comments + Replies

Alex is correct, Envision is not only targeting future tech leaders, it's targeting future leaders in tech development, policy, academia, and business.

On your last paragraph about other means of accomplishing what Envision has in mind:

• I agree on the importance of using existing ecosystems, and I think Envision is doing what you describe. Ie Entrepreneurship Club, a conference, being a student group, running a pitch competition, leveraging existing opinions and resources rather than producing our own. I would argue what Envision is doing is leveraging the existing ecosystem more than a student think-tank producing papers would be.

• The work of the Wilberforce Society is admirable, and we will cer... (read more)

Thank you, Gregory. You raise excellent points. I will address them individually and then alltogether in conclusion.

1) That's correct, we will have to compete with other student groups. So far, our message appears powerful enough to give us a significant advantage, which will help partially compensate for our lack of a track record.

We also don’t necessarily have to compete. The strategy of partnering with other successful student groups (ie Entrepreneurship Club at Princeton; similar organizations at a handful of universities have expressed excitement ... (read more)

Hi AGB,

Great points, I completely agree. On your last question, this is an intriguing one. I think 10% is too low; they'll be sidelined, unless those 10% include most of the leadership and most socially influential individuals. Probably 50% is a good starting level, as long as this increases quite quickly.

Curious to hear everyone else's thoughts on this!

Hi Ben,

You raise good points, thank you for taking the time. To address them:

1. I don't think Envision is anywhere near as difficult a message to get across as EA. The basic idea already exists in latent form in many students, and the messaging is naturally attractive to those with ambition (who tend to have world-scale goals already), without the negative associations that often exist around the words "altruism" and "impact." The Princeton Futurist Society (Envision's previous name) has only been around for one semester and already has

Hi Gleb,

The specifics aren't worked out yet, but we're working with EA Build and will coordinate with individual EA chapters at the universities we found chapters at. The general idea is that members of EA chapters who are interested in technology and the future will help with the setting up and growing of Envision chapters, and we will direct Envision members who seem interested in EA towards the EA chapter. There may be some events co-hosted; this is probably context-specific.

Hi Michael,

Great to hear! They are not; although we have some funding, we are still far from fully funded to execute on all our projects. If you're interested, shoot me an email at lrade@princeton.edu and we can discuss further.

Have you looked into why SC failed and if there's parallels between its organizational structure and EA's? Although you've convincingly argued that in many of the specifics the two movements differ significantly, there might be useful insights into how to prevent failure modes in a more general sense of a movement seeking to improve altruism.