In this post we share our experience of running an online reading group in hope to help others who run similar projects. This is a part of our Community Building work in EA Poland.
You can read more about our other activities in our recently published post.
We’ve been running an online reading group for 9 months in Poland, once every 2 weeks. We invite people through our social media - Facebook, Instagram, and newsletter. Some meetings attracted a lot of (even 15) people, some did not. We had two objectives in mind:
Our current plan is to continue organizing those meetings.
In this post I describe details of how our reading group has worked since November 2022, when we decided to keep our meetings open to everyone. Before that, from March to September 2022, we had our internal book club meetings (only for EAs, not announced on our social media). We read Doing Good Better and The Precipice. From those meetings we had a few main insights:
We had three main goals:
We think that we indeed 1. had fun and 3. got to know each other better. We also think that those meetings can be used as an entry-point for non-EA people, however we do not find support for this in our statistics. Indeed a few people joined our community Slack because of the reading group however they are no longer active users. In January 2023 we started organizing Intro Fellowship, so it is possible that it attracted newcomers who would have otherwise joined our reading group.
We plan to continue organizing meetings only changing the frequency. Instead of one meeting every two weeks, we would like to try doing them once a month. We expect that this could increase the attendance because it’d be easier for busy participants to find some time to prepare and attend.
Here are some statistics and comments from our previous meetings. This can perhaps be useful for other book club organizers, just to see how a particular reading worked out for us.
| Date | Reading | Impressions/reception | #participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| 02.11.2022 | Peter Singer - Famine, Affluence, and Morality | This topic worked really well with fluent discussion flow. | 14 |
| 16.11.2022 | Peter Singer - Famine, Affluence, and Morality | >=7 (forgot to write down) | |
| 30.11.2022 | Peter Singer - Animal Liberation (chap. 1) | This topic worked really well with fluent discussion flow. | 11 |
| 14.12.2022 | Peter Singer - Animal Liberation (chap. 1) | There were only 4 people who basically agreed on the topic, so some non-mainstream cases were discussed, e.g. feeding dogs, moral offsetting, or moral status of farming "happy" animals. | 4 |
| 11.01.2023 | Holden Karnofsky - The Most Important Century: 1. All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild 2. The Duplicator 3. Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal | Fluent discussion flow. No need for using prepared questions. Some discussions on "playing god" and what we ought to do, minor discussions on technicalities of duplicating people, and the role of AGI in our future. | 15 |
| 25.01.2023 | Holden Karnofsky - The Most Important Century: 4. This Can’t Go On 5. Forecasting Transformative AI, Part 1: What Kind of AI? 6. Why AI Alignment Could Be Hard With Modern Deep Learning | There were only 3 people, but all of us with some knowledge about AI safety, and one of us quite large knowledge, so we discussed more technical topics like Mesa-Optimizers or Shard Theory | 3 |
| 08.02.2023 | Holden Karnofsky - The Most Important Century: 7. Forecasting Transformative AI: What's The Burden Of Proof? 8. Forecasting Transformative AI: Are We "Trending Toward" Transformative AI? 9. Forecasting transformative AI: the "biological anchors" method in a nutshell 10. AI Timelines: Where the Arguments, and the "Experts," Stand | Sharing our thoughts on forecasting - nice discussion, far from being saturated | 4 |
| 22.02.2023 | Holden Karnofsky - The Most Important Century: 11. How to make the best of the most important century? 12. Call to Vigilance | The good thing about meetings in small groups is that you can go in-depth with a particular topic. | 3 |
| 08.03.2023 | Foerster, Thomas. "Moral offsetting." The Philosophical Quarterly 69.276 (2019): 617-635. https://philarchive.org/archive/FOEMO | Fluent discussion. After the meeting, one participant said that it helped him to clarify thoughts on the topic. | 3 |
| 22.03.2023 | Thomas Nagel - What is it like to be a bat? | Everyone agreed that this essay was hard to read and didn't give much insight. We had somewhat related discussions on what it might be to be another animal and how physically they differ from us. Then we went through 4 arguments as in the document by Prof. JeeLoo Liu | 5 |
| 05.04.2023 | Nick Bostrom - Are you living in a computer simulation? | Cancelled because too few participants | 2 |
| 19.04.2023 | Eliezer Yudkowsky - Ethical injunctions, link: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/AmFb5xWbPWWQyQ244, first 4 posts: - Why Does Power Corrupt? - Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans) - Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies - Protected From Myself | Fluent discussions. We decided not to continue the series, because we guessed that most ideas we already got from the first 4 posts, and preferred to move to some new text. | 6 |
| 03.05.2023 | - | Vacation because of day off in Poland | - |
| 17.05.2023 | Nick Bostrom - Are you living in a computer simulation? | Fluent discussions on assigning probabilities using indifference principle and probabilities people assign to each of 3 outcomes. | 4 |
| 31.05.2023 | Scott Alexander - Meditations on Moloch | It seems that most participants got the point and agree that we're in a bad place. We discussed some ideas of what we can do about Moloch and digressed into related topics, e.g. ai safety or surveillance in China | 7 |
| 14.06.2023 | Break due to EAGxWarsaw | - | |
| 28.06.2023 | Tobias Baumann - Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe (chap. 1-6) | Fluent discussions | 6 |
| 12.07.2023 | Tobias Baumann - Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe (chap. 7-11) | Cancelled because too few participants | 1 |