CEA update, Q4 2020

Summary

Org-wide/executive updates

Progress towards our goals

• Goal 1: We aim to help onboard new students and young professionals, particularly from highly-ranked universities and underrepresented groups.¹ We plan to do this by following a cohort of students through the academic year,² and helping them to engage with quality content, make connections, and take action.

  • We’ve begun to search for examples of EAs who became highly engaged through our work in 2020 to pressure test our ability to measure this target. So far, we’ve found two highly-engaged EAs from the Student Summit, three from Community Building Grants (CBGs), and six from introductory fellowships.
  • One example is Neel, who has just completed an AI Alignment visiting fellowship at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), and is about to start a research engineering internship at DeepMind. He graduated top of the year in maths at Cambridge and is an International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) Gold Medallist. He has previously interned at Jane Street Capital and is considering earning to give. In his response to the CBG group member survey in 2019, he estimated attending 20+ of the Cambridge group’s events in the last 12 months. He also mentioned the following:

    • "[As a result of] the EA Cambridge retreat last year […] and contacts I made, I ended up interacting a lot with the EA London community (met >20 new people and made >5 good new friends), went to a CFAR [Center for Applied Rationality] workshop, EAG [EA Global], got 80K coaching and went to an AIRCS [AI Risk for Computer Scientists] workshop. I think that being involved in helping to run/organise EA Cambridge events was pretty helpful for me to become more agenty and to feel more emotionally invested in things (e.g., doing outreach/giving careers advice helped me clarify my own thoughts). As a result of this much stronger exposure to the EA community, ideas like changing my career plan and working on things like AI safety feel much more plausible and OK on an emotional level, and more likely to happen."
• Goal 2: We aim to increase the total value that highly-engaged EAs³ get from EA discussion spaces by 30%, by producing more high-quality content (which will encourage continued learning) and helping them make more connections.

  • We are still developing a dashboard to track the number of engagement hours and new connections.
  • Forum and event engagement time continued to grow this quarter (after a strong Q3).
• Goal 3: We aim to mitigate key risks to EA’s and CEA’s success.

  • The Groups team advised group organizers on handling conflicts within the group, handling tense discussions, etc.
  • The Community Health team advised several other EA-aligned organizations about best practices in HR and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
  • We worked with Rethink Priorities to plan a survey measuring US students’ inclination toward/understanding of EA.

Other program updates

• We continue to pilot introductory and advanced fellowships in groups (especially at highly-ranked universities), and we’re planning to promote fellowships more broadly online.
• We had ~100-150 attendees at three groups training sessions, and >75 calls with organizers.
• We made five Community Building Grants, including a new one at Harvard.
• We ran two major online events and began to plan a more goal-focused program of events for next year.
• 80,000 Hours hosted a popular careers open thread on the Forum.
• We began to import Pablo Stafforini’s effective altruism wiki (currently in development) onto the EA Forum.

Program updates

Groups

• Huw Thomas will be joining CEA in a Groups Associate role.

  • Huw will develop resources for EA university groups, and aid them with strategy and planning.
  • Before joining CEA, Huw studied maths and philosophy at the University of Oxford, and spent two years funded by a CEA Community Building Grant to work on various projects, including leading the EA Oxford student group and launching the Student Career Mentoring Program.
• Support

  • Our contractors ran two strategy workshops for a total of eight university group leaders from Stanford, Harvard, and Yale. (The average likelihood of recommending the event was 8.8/10.)
  • Joan hosted a call for university groups with Community Building Grants in December to align on plans for 2021.
• Resources

  • 300+ students (the majority from highly-ranked universities) participated in an introductory fellowship in Q4. Fellowships are 6-8 week courses for learning more about topics related to effective altruism and discussing them in a weekly facilitated group.
  • We reviewed and drafted learning objectives for the In Depth Fellowship. This led to some major changes in our approach; we plan to launch an updated version in January. We surveyed students who had taken the introductory fellowship, and 130 of them expressed interest in the In Depth Fellowship. So did 425 people who took the EA Survey, and 68 Student Summit attendees. (Note: these may double- or triple-count some people).

• We made the following grants:

  • EA Brown - 1 FTE, 6 months
  • EA Harvard - 0.5 FTE, 5 months
  • EA Czechia - 2 FTE, 12 months
  • EA Stanford - 1.4 FTE, 12 months
  • EA Geneva - 2 FTE, 12 months
• Support

  • With our help, EA Norway hosted a training call for CBG recipients on user-centered design in December.

• Resources

  • We drafted a website for making group-organizer-led online fellowships available to the public.

    • We’re working with Emma Abele (EA Brown) to pilot this in Q1.
    • We’re planning to offer introductory and advanced fellowships, and may expand offerings in the future based on data we’ve gathered about what students are looking for.
    • We hope that this will make high-quality groups-style content accessible to anyone who wants to join.
  • Trainings at the Student Summit:

    • ~125 group organizers⁴ attended a workshop from Joan on goals for university groups.
    • ~100 organizers attended a session on how to teach group members about EA principles.
    • ~150 organizers attended a workshop on using career resources in groups.
    • These resources have now been published on the EA Hub to help other organizers.
  • We have also updated our Giving Season activity resources in collaboration with Giving What We Can.
• Events

  • We have passed information on 600+ attendees from the Student Summit to group organizers, so that the organizers can follow up with anyone they’re not already in regular contact with.
• Operations

  • The Groups Survey has been completed (327 people participated).
  • The groups list is up-to-date online and in our CRM.
  • $5,060 in basic group funding has been disbursed.
• Calls

  • In Q4, the Groups team had 75 calls with group organizers, plus several more casual, unlogged calls.

• We now have information about areas of demand for further engagement from the Student Summit, the Intro Fellowship Post Survey, and the EA Survey. We’ve shared this information with CBG recipients. Sample below:

• Huw will add a lot of capacity and relevant experience to the team.
• We’re excited about the pilot online courses platform. We think that local group organizers could refer their members to this while still holding lower-effort events. This would allow them to provide quality content without spending much time; “not enough time” is the most common bottleneck for organizers (according to the 2020 EA Groups Leaders Survey).
• For the first time, we have data on what people interested in EA want from groups, which we can share with group leaders.

• Mentorship for group organizers: we think that group organizers might benefit more from calls with people who can give them direction and feedback on their plans for the group, rather than calls with core EAs who can advise them on EA ideas and career plans (but might have fewer ideas about group plans). This is partly because we’ve found that mentees often aren’t sure what kind of support they want.
• We had an objective to align on a set of 2021 goals and metrics for the CBG programme based on CEA’s objectives; this was deprioritized due to the management change between Joan and Katie.

Community Health

• 7 inquiries or cases around media stories about EA
• 6 concerns around interpersonal problems such as sexual harassment
• 4 cases where we advised on situations in early field building (geographies or fields where EA is just getting established)
• 24 other situations where we advised groups, organizations, and individuals on situations like conflicts between staff or group members, online conflicts, best practices in HR, personal or mental health problems, and improving diversity, equity, and inclusion within organizations

• PR

  • We have worked with the Operations team to set up systems to vet and monitor donations.
  • We have worked with Rethink Priorities to set up a repeatable survey of college students to monitor EA awareness and inclination in the US.
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion

  • We read the available chapters of Will MacAskill’s in-progress book on longtermism, and provided support to Will’s team on finding other reviewers who could advise on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the book.
  • We followed up individually with 13 promising Black / Latino leads from the Student Summit.
• Culture and epistemics

  • We provided input on the epistemics section of the In Depth Fellowship.
  • We advised and interviewed group organizers on handling group discussions about the relationship between EA and social justice; we are currently preparing a resource we hope will be helpful for them.

• We had some internal confusion between teams about the process of reaching out to Black and Latino students after the Student Summit; for a time, we weren’t sure whether to prioritize having conversations ourselves, or finding a person who would be well-suited to having many such conversations in the future.

Events

• The EA Student Summit, October 24-25
• EAGxAsia Pacific, November 21-22

• There were 1.07 meetings per student through our event app (848 meetings in total), but people who filled out our survey reported 4.3 new connections (average). We think this is mostly because people who filled out the survey engaged more with the event, although some people were also booking meetings outside of the event app.
• 94% of participants in our mentorship program that responded to our survey intend to take at least one significant action (e.g. Giving What We Can Pledge, career change) in the next six months.
• 89% of highly-engaged EAs (who attended the event mostly to advise students) report that their expectations for the event were met or exceeded.

EA Forum

• We continued our experiment with open threads by adding monthly progress threads in addition to welcome threads. These have been moderately successful (usually getting a dozen or so comments). Open threads can be found here.
• 80,000 Hours posted an open careers thread which drew dozens of participants, many of whom had never posted on the Forum before.
• Pablo Stafforini received a grant from the Long Term Future Fund to create a Wikipedia-like collection of content focused on EA. We’ve been working with Pablo to host his work on the Forum’s tagging/wiki system. We began uploading his work this quarter. We hope that the combination of Pablo’s full-time work and the Forum’s network effects will allow this wiki to be maintained and used much more consistently than past efforts of this kind.
• We imported the following features from LessWrong:

  • You can comment on wiki/tag pages.
  • The new text editor is now the default option.
  • You can embed content from Elicit, YouTube, and Metaculus.
• EA Forum-specific features:

  • Posts now appear on the front page by default, rather than having to be moved there by moderators.⁵ We expect this to create a more pleasant experience for both authors and moderators.
  • A post’s social media preview image is now the first image in the post rather than the Forum logo (we’ve passed this feature along to LessWrong). We hope that this will drive more engagement from social media.
  • We link to the EA Hub’s groups page in the sidebar (thus hopefully increasing referrals to local groups).

• We had planned to set up OAuth in Q4 (to allow a single sign-in for the Forum and EA Funds/Giving What We Can, and maybe other things in the future). We decided not to do this because the LessWrong team was already working on it.
• As with most content platforms, our success is driven by the popularity of our users’ posts, which have a relatively fat-tailed distribution. Regular open threads seem like a promising approach (particularly if we can sustain the type of engagement we got in the career advice thread).
• So far, tracking view hours seems like a good metric; it seems consistent with other metrics and our subjective sense of how the Forum is doing.

  • Notably, page views reported by Google Analytics have increased 74% this quarter, so we are no longer in the situation where our internal metric is growing a lot but page views are flat.

Funds

Operations

Progress this quarter

• We managed CEA’s annual review and fundraising process, publishing our annual review much earlier than normal and reaching out to many potential donors. We also ran financial analysis for all five organizations within the CEA legal entity (80,000 Hours, Forethought Foundation, etc.). This process was much easier than last year, because our financial systems are now much more efficient.
• We moved out of our former Oxford office and pushed forward on the preparation of the new office. The project has been delayed by six weeks due to some complications with internal electrics, and we expect to take possession of the building on 14 January.
• We improved the user interface of our grant management system. Our grants contractor is now the only person managing that system, which has freed up capacity for the rest of the team.
• We began to scope out a project to develop a CRM for CEA’s projects.

Finances

Metrics and CRM

Staff

• Joan: recruitment goal
• Ben: retention goal
• Katie: risk reduction goal
• Josh: operations
• Caitlin: people operations

• We’ve launched a new professional development strategy which is centered on a set of core competencies.
• We’ve held biweekly all-staff discussion on recent publications, podcasts, and talks. We hosted two social events near the end of the quarter.
• We ran an all-staff training session on survey design in collaboration with Faunalytics, and may do more expert-led training for staff.

Public communications