As a sometimes-helper and sometimes-hater of you videos, I can certify that this one was real good. Gripping from start to finish and did a nice job illustrating the kinds of headwinds people trying to put goodness first will face when trying to intervene in AI.

And just as a piece of art, the way you changed frames from the board drama play-by-play to the flashbacks was masterful.

Very excited to see you two in particular doing this! I'm happy to facilitate a cohort or help with whatever else you need.

I think your suggestion about talented people's ability to triage advice is at least partially true. A problem with it is that a smart response to bad or inapplicable advice is to stop listening to the advice-giver entirely. So you only get a few chances to make contact and you shouldn't spend them on the lower-value content.

Thanks Vasco. Conceptually was very helpful in generating my original list. I think the other lists have value, but are more more observational heuristics that might explain many micro issues, but not really help you make sense of the world and how things work overall. 

Thank you so much Raymond these are great. All Tier 1 and 2 concepts I failed to include. And thank you for catching a typo in the sheet!

Thank you Jen! And we might just take you up on that...

Limiting to US universities is mostly a me and Sarah consideration. We're American and it's good to focus. I thought about European universities early on, but they were physically and culturally too far away for our high-touch approach.

The fundamental thing happening here is that the opportunity cost of an exceptionally talented person taking advice aimed at the average person is vastly higher than the inverse, so people give advice that ensures the exceptionally talented lean into ambition and build these fields, even if many non-exceptional people will try and fail. 

People are not good at self-assessment in both directions and the more you caveat and qualify your advice, the less it gets through, so this is the bet to make. 

However correct or compelling these critiques turn out to be,^[1] I want to praise the incredibly constructive framing here. Most 'criticism' on the Forum does not evince 1) the conviction that the underlying problem is still extremely important, 2) the resolve to continue making progress on it, and 3) the trust that actors will update on evidence/arguments. Wonderful.  

1. ^{^}

   FWIW, my summary of the discourse is:

   The evidence on shrimp stunning does seem terrifyingly thin

   The cage-free controversy is comparatively well studied (but still too little), and very sensitive to assumptions about inputs to quality of life

   Meat alternative uptake is a known issue. The question is how long we should keep trying things before deciding the theory of change is fundamentally flawed (much longer, imo!) 

I'm also excited about organizers writing their own syllabi. People have different perspectives on what's most fundamental to EA and what the most important framings are. You should facilitate the reading group you'd be excited to join! 

To that end, I've [started to] put together some seminal EA content here, from which people can draw. 

This is somewhat at odds with fast-launching a fellowship, but if people want to take the time to modestly modify their off-the-shelf options, there is time to do that between launching the application and your first session.