Agree!

In our current hiring round for EA Germany, I'm offering all 26 applicants "personal feedback on request if time allows", and I think it's probably worth my time at least trying to answer as many feedback requests as I can.

I'd encourage other EA recruiters to do the same, especially for those candidates that already did work tests. If you ask someone to spend 2h on an unpaid work test, it seems fair to make at least 5min time for feedback.

Thanks for writing this up! Agree that we should coordinate more on regional level.

City/national groups are often run by adult, professional people, who don't know enough about what it means to run a uni group.

I'm curious, why do you think so?

Many city / national level group organisers started with organising uni groups, and even those who only learned about EA after university have often done some other form of student engagement as well like running other student groups, so I'd guess that the majority of city / national level group organisers do have experience with this. Even those who do not would be happy to learn more about what it's like to run student groups. 

I think there are benefits of having one central national-level group rather than several organisations, and if a specific national group lacks capacity or competence to support uni groups, then I would first try to build up capacity there (e.g. hire someone to do uni group support specifically) rather than founding a new organisation with all the overhead that comes with it. 

Lastly, this system seems to work well in countries with well-established national-level groups like EA Norway.

Why only US & UK universities?

This looks potentially very helpful to (foreign) students, thanks for setting this up! 

If you have a moment, I would be curious to hear your reasoning on why this is limited to US & UK universities only. I understand that for many students, their best choice is to study in the US or UK, but for many other students other universities might be a better choice, and this limitation would still bias them towards UK & US universities. 

In addition, there might more be cost-effective opportunities elsewhere, given that most other universities are a lot cheaper than those in US & UK. For example, the same grant that funds one student's tuition fee at Brown university ($76000/year) could fund up to four students to live and study at ETH Zurich (#8 in the QS world university ranking, expensive city but only $1200/year tuition fee). 

Agree that this seems neglected. EA Germany (and I personally) are happy to support EA projects that have potential to grow into impactful EA organisations. If you have ideas on how to better do that (within the limited capacity of national group organisers), feel free to get in touch!

(I also agree on the importance of having founders that are value-aligend and have good epistemics, which I think some entrepreneurs are but many others may not be)

Thanks for writing this up! 

Cause and career groups like Effective Animal Advocacy or the EA Consulting Network are in my opinion one of the best ways to get involved but they often get overlooked, would they be worth a mention here? 

• So meeting someone who tested negative indoors without a mask implies 18%*.02% = 36 microCOVIDs, which is very low.

I'd also be curious to know better estimates to this - have you updated your estimate after these two answers? Or did anyone else update their estimates?

(if you have time to reply, no worries if not)

Would also recommend asking on the EA Groups Slack. Are you on there yet? The invite link should be somewhere on www.eahub.org, but let me know if you can't find it. 

I think it's worthwhile, and lots of local groups do that already (like EA Berlin). 

Maybe local groups can do most of that as they have the benefit of people being able to meet in person (after corona) and sharing similar culture, job prospects etc, and then everyone who does not have a local group nearby can use EA Anywhere?

Maybe the existing EA Career Discussion Facebook group would be a good place to start such peer support groups, and then they could create their own facebook groups / Slack / etc?

Whatsapp does not have a "thread-function", so I'd expect this to get chaotic rather quickly.