big +1! Thanks for writing this.
I think also announcing summer internship opportunities in the fall/winter, even if applications don't open for a few months, would also be helpful so students know which EA orgs are planning on offering internships.
Thanks for flagging that—should be fixed now.
We haven't reached out yet but that's a great idea and we're planning on it!
Filters are now added :)
Hi Harrison,
Thanks for your comment! I definitely agree that only featuring highly-competitive internships is suboptimal and that this can lead people to feel discouraged and demotivated. I'm also sympathetic to Holden's aptitudes framework and that most of the value of internships isn't the direct work, but the experience, connections, and insights you gather. And in many cases, getting a less competitive internship might better help you skill-build and test your fit for a career path.
However, I think this advice is also very dependent on what career path someone is pursuing. While it's easier to build career capital for roles in policy, operations, management, academic research, etc. outside of the EA community, it's harder to gain comparable career capital in AI safety/meta-EA/x-risk roles outside of the EA community. I also have concerns about people using motivated reasoning to justify how an unrelated internship is helping them build skills/aptitudes.
We're also hoping to use the website to highlight some bootcamps/entry-level opportunities in the EA community that wouldn't otherwise be featured on the 80k job board (e.g. like AI Safety Camp or Phil Trammel's summer course). And we hope the third phase of our project will expand the number of entry-level internships available to young people in the community.
Overall though, I'd love to add an advice page with similar things to what you mentioned above!
Thanks so much for the resources—adding them to our website now!
We've had a few people request these filters so we should be adding them within the next week!
Thank you so much! We'll make sure to add those.
It's more of a job board since we're only publishing active opportunities, but if you submit any reoccurring opportunities that'll be offered later in the year we'll make sure to add those once they're active!
Hi, thanks for writing this! I've shared a number of your concerns, especially around the use of "HEAs," copy-paste community building efforts leading EA to become more intellectually homogenous, and EA group organizers viewing people instrumentally. However, I think you underestimate the variance in community-building efforts and the degree to which many community-builders are aware of these problems and actively trying to mitigate them. I'm not sure how many university-group organizers you've engaged with, but I'd be curious if you thought these problems were less severe than you claim after talking to more of them. Here are a few of my thoughts on specific things you wrote:
Community-building is coercive:
Community-builders are too new to EA:
People think EA is a cult:
EA groups have poor epistemics:
One caveat: A lot of these thoughts come from my personal experience, so maybe I'm anchoring too much on my model of community-building and how I choose to run Brown EA. However, I've talked to dozens of community-builders over the past year and the majority of them seem socially astute and cognizant of these pitfalls. That being said, I do think we can do significantly more to improve the epistemics of university groups/community-builders and avoid EA coming across as culty. FWIW, I'm planning on redesigning Brown EA's intro program over the summer to focus more on introducing people to EA reasoning/principles rather than conclusions/cause areas.