Brown EA President
Thanks Evie :) The quote you linked also really resonates with me.
Thanks for offering this! Unfortunately, I think it's hard to make blanket recommendations about which roles people should apply for. A lot of career advice has to be given on an individual basis, and I'm wary of recommending that people apply to another category of jobs without having strong reasons why they're applying to those jobs.
Hi, thanks for this! Yeah, to clarify, when I say "ops bottlenecks" I was mostly referring to last-minute logistical problems that come up when people run events or programs. (Not other things that fall under the category of "operations" like creating efficient systems within an organization.) I agree that the latter ops bottlenecks are hard to solve!
Hey! Thanks for writing this—similar to other comments, I wanted to highlight that there's a lot of work going on in this space and updates will be published soon. After EAG SF, several EA comms professionals are meeting to coordinate and figure out which comms projects/organizations should get off the ground. We hope to publish a long list of project ideas soon.
Here's a list of existing efforts I know of to counter this problem:
I really love these books. Most of them aren't hardcore EA-ish and mostly cover fringe ideas (like what would happen if AI became sentient), but there are few stories/characters in each book that might be relevant. Best of luck with the talk! :)
Hi Luke!
Thanks so much for your thoughtful response. Socioeconomic inclusion doesn't get enough attention in EA and I'd hate for attempts to prevent mitigating rent-seeking behavior to turn into raising barriers for low-income community members.
I think that the questions of how to mitigate rent-seeking behavior and make EA more socioeconomically inclusive can largely be decoupled though. I agree with @levin that it's easy for group organizers to identify when people are motivated in good faith vs. bad faith to get funding to attend a conference. I also don't think that attempts to identify people acting in bad faith necessarily lead to socioeconomically excluding people. Rather, there aren't enough clear resources and opportunities for low-income community members, and most of the community's resources are targeted at affluent, elite students and universities. To me, these seem like much larger barriers to inclusion than the dialogue on funding in EA.
While the risk of rent-seeking behavior may be overinflated compared to the actual risk, I also think this is difficult to claim. First of all, I think that the most serious incidents of rent-seeking behavior won't be public knowledge in EA. Instead, the community health team and other individuals will likely deal with these incidents privately. Second of all, I've heard of a couple of incidents that **really concerned me** regarding how some individuals accessed large sums of money for self-motivated and manipulative reasons. EA orgs and individuals definitely have safeguards in place, but I think the high-trust nature of the community at times allows people to access a lot of money with minimal oversight. I'd personally defer to the community-health team and grantmakers in assessing the scope of the risk.
I also think there are good second-order reasons to also want to prevent rent-seeking behavior in EA (even if the first-order effect of funding a rent-seeking person isn't that bad). Maintaining a high-trust community makes it a lot easier to get stuff done and fund people. There are a lot of PR risks from individuals accessing money for personal gain. And I want to avoid spreading the meme of "EA will fund students' vacations" on college campuses, giving EA groups a bad reputation.
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.
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.
I agree that it would be better if EA had a more balanced age distribution. Anecdotally, I don't think we have enough mentorship opportunities and mid-career professionals to support the recent influx of young people into EA. I think it would also create a better epistemic culture if the median person in EA has deeper expertise in a field/skill-set as opposed to having lots of young people narrowly following 80k's advice.
I don't buy the claim though that we shouldn't focus on student outreach. I think the debate over student outreach is much more about how it's done rather than if it should be done.
I agree with you too that most students shouldn't necessarily be organizing their group. FWIW at Brown, pretty much everyone on our leadership team is prioritizing skilling up (through part-time research positions, classes, internships, etc.) alongside doing ~5 hours a week of group organizing.
The age distribution problem could also self-correct itself over the next 10 years? I think we should mostly be concerned if the fraction of young people in EA continues to grow faster than the fraction of older age groups. I also think we've been grabbing a lot of the low-hanging fruit at top universities and this will start to stabilize in the next few years (i.e. there's a finite number of people who would be really into EA at top universities). I could be wrong though if we continue to have exponential growth of new uni groups.