Building Ideas-First EA

TLDR: Sarah Bluhm and I are funding and mentoring ideas-first (as opposed to, e.g., careers-first) EA community builders. If you’re at one of these universities or know someone who is, we want to talk to you, especially this subset:

• University of Toronto
• University of Michigan
• UCLA
• USC
• NYU
• Columbia
• Claremont Colleges (Claremont McKenna, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Pitzer)
• Stanford
• Harvard
• MIT
• Cornell
• Georgetown
• Northwestern

**Contact us here or at [email protected]**

The Network for EA Support & Training (NEST)

We (Matt Reardon and Sarah Bluhm) founded NEST, whose mission is to build vibrant in-person EA communities by teaching organizers the craft of communicating EA ideas with courage and authenticity.

I (Matt) am a former lawyer and 80k advisor who blogs, tweets, and podcasts about EA. Sarah worked on CEA’s university groups team and has a background in bioengineering.

NEST’s philosophy is that EA communities should be platforms for individuals to form their own views on the central questions of Effective Altruism: what are the most important issues in the world, why those issues, and what should I do about them?

This contrasts with approaches to community building that act as recruiting funnels for specific organizations or fields. We think thoughtful consideration of the ideas and arguments around Effective Altruism will independently motivate some individuals to plug into high impact roles, but we are not optimizing for this.

We are optimizing for the quality of the conversations and arguments that come out of the groups we support. Do people come away understanding these 200 concepts well? Do they have robust ethical outlooks that account for all the important intuitions and considerations? Perhaps most importantly, do they have people who will help them act on these beliefs?

University groups

We’ve decided to focus on university groups at a subset of these schools. Society has conveniently created the densest clusters of intellectual vibrancy among people who are at an age where they are still deciding what they believe and what to commit themselves to. And these clusters have a lot of built-in infrastructure for social connection.

I wouldn’t invest community building efforts in different settings until I was confident this ecosystem was thoroughly supported and I still see major gaps here. While a few EA groups at these schools are thriving,^[1] many have only 1-3 committed members who don’t find their groups especially rewarding. Others have no group at all.

I think it’s easily worth funding at least one full time person working to seed and invigorate an EA group at each one of these universities. The bottleneck is finding the people with the context, judgment, extraversion, motivation, and work ethic to make that happen. 

I think the team at CEA—who have been far and away leading efforts in this area for years—would agree that this is the bottleneck and that they feel spread too thin. So Sarah and I are adding ourselves to the mix,^[2] and also taking a different approach with regard to scale: we will focus intensively on just 7 of these universities and potentially hire community builders who will focus on 1-2 universities each.

What we provide

Our mission is to train organizers in communicating ideas and support them in building groups. Here’s what we expect that will entail:

1. Helping organizers master the full scope of EA-relevant ideas and perspectives so they’re comfortable leading any discussion through:
   1. 1-1 coaching
   2. Multi-day workshops with the best thinkers in EA
   3. A curated library of the best ~200 foundational EA articles
2. Hiring full time organizers
3. Grants of up to $20,000 to cover group expenses
4. Crafting events, fellowship curricula, and sourcing speakers
5. Advising group members 1-1
6. Coming to campuses ourselves to speak on EA topics and themes

Connecting points 3 and 6 here, I'm excited to give a talk railing against the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Doing good is (mostly) about achieving good outcomes in the world, not the purity of your intentions or how much you sacrificed to reach those outcomes. The groups we support will be fun and well-funded. NEST will not be trying to share EA ideas with one hand behind its back while Bain and McKinsey throw cocktail parties.

For us, fun entails both generic things like good food and nice spaces, but also the affordance for organizers to try things they’re excited about without extensive justification. We want to be similarly permissive with respect to topics and subject matter. As long as you’re taking the question of doing Big Good seriously, we want you to host discussions of everything from RCTs, to fundamental science, to YIMBY, to post-AGI politics, and more.

We also want groups to engage with non-EA ideas aimed at doing good. Giving proponents of these ideas space and a full hearing is often a powerful way to understand both the rigor and the flaws of common EA views.

The next step

As above, we’re looking for interested people at universities on our long list, especially these ones listed above. This is for both potential organizers and potential (non-organizer) group members. It is also for both you (the reader) and people you know at these universities (e.g. a high school classmate who's interested in EA).

I want to build people up into a great ideas-first EA communicators. Or if they’re already there, I want to throw resources at them and raise their ambitions. So if we haven’t spoken, get in touch!^[3]

1. ^{^}

    Looking at you, UChicago, UC Berkeley, and Yale

2. ^{^}

   Well with Sarah it’s complicated, but I’m definitely adding myself

3. ^{^}

   You can also email us directly at [email protected] or [email protected], especially if you're recommending a friend