Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Happier Lives Institute: 2021 Annual Review & AMA, published by BarryGrimes on April 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We’re pleased to share our 2021 Annual Review with you. This post also doubles as an AMA, so feel free to ask us about our work to date, our future plans, or anything else. Michael, Barry, and Joy will be at EA Global: London this weekend and we plan to respond to your questions before and after the conference. You can also meet us in person at the career fair on Friday (4 pm-8 pm) and during our office hours on Saturday (11 am-12 pm). Before we get to the Annual Review, we’d like to make two announcements : We’re currently hiring for a Senior Researcher, a Grants Strategist, and an Operations Manager. If you want to get a better feel for what it’s like working at HLI, we think you’ll enjoy these blog posts on life as a researcher and an operations manager by members of our team. We’ve updated our cost-effectiveness comparison of psychotherapy and cash transfers to include an estimate of the effects on other household members. We now estimate that StrongMinds is 9 times more cost-effective than GiveDirectly (a slight reduction from 12 times in our previous analysis). 1. Director’s foreword by Michael Plant In 2021, we took a significant step forward with the publication of our first substantial piece of empirical work comparing the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers and psychotherapy in terms of subjective wellbeing. We analysed data from more than 140,000 participants across 80 studies to show that providing group psychotherapy to people with depression in low- and middle-income countries is around 10 times more cost-effective than providing cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first two meta-analyses assessing the cost-effectiveness of any intervention in terms of subjective wellbeing. This is a surprising and important result. We’ve demonstrated that it’s possible to compare seemingly incomparable outcomes by measuring their effects in terms of subjective wellbeing. By doing so, we found a new and outstanding funding opportunity for philanthropists and policymakers. This provides further evidence that we shouldn’t rely on our intuitions about what makes people happier and should prioritise further research on the best ways to measure and increase global wellbeing. The cost-effectiveness analyses of cash transfers, psychotherapy, and StrongMinds consumed most of our research capacity in 2021. However, we also published an updated research agenda and a new problem area report on mental health, to accompany our previous report on pain. We were featured in Vox, The New Statesman, The Times, BBC Radio 4, and the Clearer Thinking podcast and our work was discussed on social media by prominent thinkers including Alexander Berger, Chris Blattman, Tim Ferriss, Geoff Mulgan, Duncan Green, and Justin Sandefur. I was delighted to welcome three new members to the team: Samuel Dupret (research), Joy Bitter (operations), and Barry Grimes (communications). Dr Caspair Kaiser joined our Board of Trustees and we said a fond farewell to our COO, Clare Donaldson, who joined the Lead Exposure Elimination Project. And for the first time, we were joined by a talented team of summer research fellows who explored a variety of applied and theoretical topics from our research agenda. Our search for the best ways to measure and improve global wellbeing continues in earnest in 2022. We have a pipeline of promising ‘micro’-interventions to evaluate, including deworming, cataract surgery, and providing cement floors. We are tentatively expanding our scope to look for funding opportunities that can absorb over $20 million of philanthropic funding or be scaled up by policymakers. We also continue to interrogate k...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Happiness for the whole household: accounting for household spillovers when comparing the cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy to cash transfers, published by JoelMcGuire on April 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post summarises our updated cost-effectiveness comparison of psychotherapy and cash transfers. It now includes an estimate of household spillovers and concludes psychotherapy is 9 times more cost-effective than cash transfers. Our original analysis estimated that the average psychotherapy intervention in our dataset would be 12 times more cost-effective than the average monthly cash transfer. We used this wider evidence base to estimate the cost-effectiveness of two highly effective charities at implementing each type of intervention: Give Directly (which provides $1,000 lump-sum cash transfers) and StrongMinds (which provides group psychotherapy). We estimated that StrongMinds was 12 times more cost-effective than GiveDirectly. Our analysis was critiqued (on Twitter and the EA Forum) on the grounds that omitting household spillovers would underestimate the effects of cash transfers compared to psychotherapy. We, therefore, decided to extend our estimate to include household spillovers. We now find that psychotherapy and StrongMinds are 9 times as cost-effective, a small reduction from before. We believe that our analysis demonstrates that high-quality mental health interventions can be as good or better than highly-regarded and well-evidenced economic interventions. This is a surprising and important result that should inform our global priorities. A further implication is that we’ve shown it is feasible to compare interventions in terms of their effects on subjective wellbeing and doing so can reveal new funding opportunities. In short, we think we can do good better by measuring good better. In the rest of this post, we review the pathways through which household spillovers occur and briefly discuss our methods and main findings. Pathways for interventions to spillover onto the whole household Some readers may be sceptical about the size of the spillover effects for cash transfers and/or psychotherapy. We think household spillovers can occur in at least two ways: economic contributions and emotional contagion (e.g. improved interpersonal interactions). Our aim here is simply to illustrate the mechanisms by which psychotherapy and cash transfers might plausibly produce household spillovers rather than providing a neat account of the nature and relative strengths of these dynamics. The evidence for household spillovers through economic contribution is clear for cash transfers. GiveDirectly recipients report spending most of their cash transfers (68.4%) on common household goods (GiveWell, 2016). Household spillovers via economic contributions also seem plausible for psychotherapy as meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials find that psychotherapy improves economic outcomes (Lund et al., 2020). Emotional contagion is likely to play a role in the spillover effects of both interventions as people’s mood is affected by the mood of their close connections (Headey et al., 2014; Rosenquist et al., 2011). Meta-analyses have found that psychotherapy improves mother-child relationships (Cuijpers et al., 2015) and cash transfers reduce domestic violence (Baranov et al., 2021). Methods The key to estimating the total household effect for each intervention is to estimate the household spillover ratio, the share of the recipient’s benefit that the average household member receives. We estimate this by taking the ratio of the average recipient effect and the household member effect for every study we found that includes both. Results For cash transfers, we estimate that each household member experiences 86% (95% CI: 43%, 154%) of the benefits experienced...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Launching SoGive Grants, published by SoGive on April 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Exciting news from the SoGive (virtual) office! Currently SoGive issues grants to several charitable organisations. Most of the funding comes from a small number of major donors. In order to seek out the highest impact choices, it is valuable for SoGive to also seek out giving opportunities which have a high risk/high reward profile. In order to do this, we are thrilled to announce the pilot launch of SoGive Grants which will allow individuals and organisations working on high-impact projects to apply for funding. The total amount that we propose distributing via this mechanism will be dependent on the number and quality of applications we receive. Conceivably this could be anywhere from £20k to £500k. This range is large reflecting the fact that this is a pilot and there is some uncertainty about the nature of the applications we will receive. Who is eligible? We encourage applications from a broad range of projects that would appear high-impact as viewed through an Effective Altruism lens. We are particularly interested in work that focuses on the following: Biosecurity/pandemic risk, especially those applications which cover “alternative” (i.e. not technical) ways of reducing pandemic risk; technical biosecurity (e.g. funding biologists to work on biosecurity) is also covered by other funders (e.g. the Open Philanthropy Biosecurity Scholarships) Climate change, especially in ways that involve keeping fossil fuels in the ground Research or policy work that enables the world to improve, preferably dramatically; research and policy work which appears effective through a longtermist lens is more likely to be viewed positively, although we may also consider neartermist work in this vein if there is a strong reason to believe that the work is neglected and high impact. We do not encourage applications for AI safety research, as we believe there are several other funders in this space. Applications are open to organisations or to individuals, although please note that any individuals applying would need to set up a non-profit entity (e.g. a registered charity or social enterprise) in order to receive the funds; setting up a company limited by guarantee is relatively quick and straightforward in the UK - we haven't checked this for other jurisdictions. Organisations applying should be a non-profit entity, such as a registered charity (e.g. 501(c)(3) in the US), if the entity is not a registered charity, we are more likely to require references, and if the application comes from an individual who will create a bespoke legal entity, then we are highly likely to seek references. You can be based anywhere worldwide in order to apply for a grant. Russia may be an exception to this; we have not investigated whether the Ukraine conflict would constitute a barrier to us providing grants to Russian organisations, and we plan to investigate this if we receive any interest in applying from any Russian applicants. If you are unsure whether you are eligible for a grant, please simply apply. If you have queries of a purely logistical nature, you may address those queries to [email protected], however as much as possible we would encourage you to simply submit an application, and raise your queries as part of that process; as our application form is very similar to the EA Funds application form, applicants who have applied to EA Funds may not need material extra work to apply to SoGive Grants. Grant applications will be shared and reviewed within the SoGive team, and may also be discussed with our donors if we want to make a positive recommendation. We may also share grant applications with trusted informal advisors in the relevant field to get their advice, if you would prefer us not to shar...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Redwood Research is hiring for several roles (Operations and Technical), published by JJXWang on April 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Redwood Research is a research organization with the mission of aligning superhuman AI. In addition to our primary work of applied AI alignment research, we host and operate Constellation, a shared office space we created to foster knowledge-sharing and collaboration between longtermist organizations. People from the Alignment Research Center, MIRI, and Open Philanthropy often work from the space. Redwood and Constellation are expanding. Redwood Research’s staff includes Nate Thomas (CEO), Buck Shlegeris (CTO), and Bill Zito (COO), and a board of Nate Thomas, Holden Karnofsky, and Paul Christiano. We’re running a hiring round for a number of Operations roles, across of range of experience levels. The roles we are most excited to hire are: Constellation Operations Manager Constellation: Head of Community Constellation IT Analyst Recruiting & MLAB Lead We also have a number of other roles, including technical roles, which you can also apply to here. Our office is in downtown Berkeley, thirteen seconds from the nearest BART stop. We offer catered lunches and dinners, and cover PPO health, dental, and vision insurance. We will consider international applicants who need visas. Below is a picture taken from the office -- we have beautiful views in all directions! If you’re interested in any of the roles listed above, fill out this application form. If you would like to express interest in this role but don’t want to be considered for the current hiring round there is the option to specify this on the form. Any questions, please email [email protected], if you’re on the fence about applying, please email us. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA on r/Place: An Art Project Post-mortem, published by EricHerboso on April 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. On April 1, Reddit released r/Place, a collaborative art project consisting of a large empty canvas where each Reddit user could place a single colored pixel every five minutes. After several false starts, a group of 160 EAs collaborated to make the following image: In this post-mortem, we’d like to go over our method, what we should have done differently, and show off some interesting looking timelapses of both our failed and ultimately successful efforts. False Starts Several of us did not initially appreciate just how difficult it would be to create and maintain an image on r/Place. Harrison Durland and Caleb Biddulph started off with high ambitions, suggesting that we might be able to take up a moderately large space, but these initial efforts were aborted early on. The first real attempt was by Jelle Donders and Gruffydd Gozali, who were able to organize a number of redditors in the r/EffectiveAltruism subreddit and create a temporary discord server to help direct users on where to place pixels. Before long, it became clear that the only way to keep an image up was to do outreach to neighboring groups. Via this method, we attempted negotiations for space several times, sometimes successfully with multiple neighbors — but without agreements with all neighbors, we found ourselves failing twice more. You can see a timelapse of these false starts (and our eventual place) below. A Secured Spot When we finally found our final place on r/Place, it was in the newly blank area at the bottom of the canvas. It was through a renewed sense of camaraderie and shared fun that we were able to paint this new area, and it was through successful early negotiations that we were able to keep the area until the end of r/Place. Our strongest alliance was with the neighboring My Little Pony community, which has supported effective altruism charities several times in the past, particularly through Bronies for Good. Thanks to Lorelei in our discord server, we were able to convince them to generously include us as a part of their template, which meant a large number of their users (and a fair number of their bots) would defend not just their artwork, but also the Effective Altruism logo on r/Place. Was This Effective? No. But it nevertheless felt worthwhile. While the return on investment in terms of communications value versus how much effort we put into this collaborative art project is quite low, the sheer amount of fun from socializing with fellow EAs in this endeavor ended up being unexpectedly significant. I do not think we should overlook the benefits that come from increasing the social interconnectedness of the EA community. If we prevented some EAs from doing more worthwhile work, then perhaps the social value may not have been significant enough to override that. But, from the conversations I had with people in our discord channels, my sense is that people only participated during time that they otherwise would have spent on nothing particularly high value. People seemed to view this as a fun socialization event that they took advantage of in their off hours. Lessons Learned Early on, we tried to be somewhat conservative in advertising the discord server where we worked on our art project. In part, this was because we didn’t feel that many in the non-reddit EA community would have the time nor drive to work on this. We were surprised to learn that a large number of EAs came to us organically after reading about various people talking about us beyond the subreddit, including from the EA Forum, the EA Facebook community, and the EA Creatives & Communicators slack channel. Given the social event value of a one-time event like this, we actually believe that we shou...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Minor political parties as an advocacy strategy: The case of animal politics, published by Ren Springlea on April 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Author: Ren Springlea (they/them) Note: This article reflects my views and my experiences outside of work. This article does not reflect the views of my employer (Animal Ask). Animal Ask is not affiliated with any political party, including the ones discussed in this article. Acknowledgements: Thank you very much to Michael Dello-Iacovo and Louise Pfeiffer for proofreading this article and providing helpful suggestions. I'm also grateful to the AJP National Board of Directors for useful suggestions and permission to publish this content. Summary of key points Minor political parties are one way to advocate for policy change. This is an alternative to traditional interest group lobbying, and it may be underexplored in effective altruism. Minor political parties can have policy influence well beyond their level of formal electoral success. Adapting this strategy to new settings is feasible (particularly when considering all levels of government) but would require a sound understanding of the political context. Introduction In animal advocacy and other cause areas, a typical approach to legislative advocacy is to start an organisation and then lobby government officials. The goal of this article is to shine light on another, complementary strategy: starting, or working with, minor political parties (also called niche parties). I offer some key points from the academic literature, and I illustrate these points using the example of a recent election campaign in which I participated in Australia. I suspect that this avenue for political advocacy might be underexplored in the effective animal advocacy community. While most effective altruists live in the US and the UK [1], the most successful animal parties are in Australia and continental Europe. As such, this article is mostly written based on my own experience in Australia and academic literature from Europe, where minor political parties for animals have been most successful. There have been some discussions on party politics in the effective altruism community, many of which have focused on major parties (e.g. [2–6] plus a post from today). I seek to add to this conversation by emphasising the avenue of minor parties that focus on a narrow cause area. This article centres on animal advocacy, although this strategy may also be applicable to other cause areas. I also limit my discussion to democratic countries. Since I intend to simply suggest and reflect on this strategy, this article is less rigorous than my typical research. Interest groups vs minor political parties When advocating for animals, is the best strategy to operate as a traditional interest group and work with elected officials? Or is it better to start (or join) a minor political party and try to secure policies from within the political system? As a baseline, consider traditional interest groups. As far as I'm aware, this is the main strategy used by the effective animal advocacy community to pursue legislative change. To give two examples, Crustacean Compassion and Aquatic Life Institute have each recently pursued campaigns that involved lobbying government officials on behalf of animals. The probability of success of lobbying is notoriously difficult to measure [7]. But everyone agrees that lobbying can be effective for securing policies [8], and this is supported by experimental studies in this area [e.g. 9,10]. In comparison, consider political parties formed to advocate for animals ('animal parties'). The electoral success of animal parties is generally low, and it will remain low for the foreseeable future. This is because the number of seats that a political party can win is limited by the publ...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Place Where We Survived, published by ThomasWoodside on April 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Edit: I've been informed this was probably an anti-bomber missile so have edited slightly. It’s hard to find the place where we survived. Google Maps took me to an empty parking lot at a UPS distribution center, silent on that Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t the right place. I peered at a satellite image on my phone, trying to find how to get there. Doubling back the way I came, I pulled off the road onto a potholed driveway. The driveway was lined with Budget rental trucks, but that business, too, was closed for the weekend. At the end of the driveway, I reached my destination. An abandoned tennis court. A baseball diamond, well kept. A playground, with a swing set and slides. And there it was. The missile silo. There were no signs, no commemoration, no signal as to the identity of the structure. The park was called “Nike Park,” but the children who come here would associate that name more with shoes than a Cold War missile program. The missiles, of course, are gone. In their place are stray baseballs. Only the shell of the silo remains: boarded up for good, but still standing. When we die, or a great calamity occurs, there is a time and a place when it happens. Of course, the time after which it became inevitable is less clear. But when something falls apart, or life is extinguished, or a missile hits its target, there is a time and a place. There is a monument, or a newspaper report, or a gravestone. If nobody is left to bear witness, there is a deafening silence. Even if we cannot find the place where we started to die, or became certain to die, we can find the place where we did. We can’t find the place where we survived, because there are thousands of such places. We may point at people like Stanislav Petrov, but his case is simply a visible one. It matters little which of the many Nike sites I visited. Missiles might have come from any one of these silos at the end of the world as we know it. But they didn’t. We survived. Today, the missile silo is simply part of the background. It has been built around. Many children who play on these swings do not understand what the silo is. Perhaps an older one asks: “what’s that?” and hears a tale of the Cold War. In this generation, the parents barely remember the Cold War; in two more, it will simply be a lesson from the history books. The extraordinary has been replaced by the ordinary. The sting of a baseball on your hand. The rush of a game of tag. The creak of a swing. Survival is banal, because it is everywhere. If we survive this century, as I hope we will, there will be no single point of survival. There will be no single monument to victory against the many risks we faced. If people go looking for the place where we survived, they won’t likely find it, because there will be many such places. Survival means that one day, the threats we face today will simply be background. Something that people remember, study, and occasionally commemorate, but mostly ignore. People ignore so that they do not have to be saddled by an old memory, so that they can experience the ordinary things that make life worth living. We fight now, so that they can ignore later. So that even if they cannot know where they survived, they can know what it means to be alive. That would be more than enough. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Help us make civilizational refuges happen, published by Linch on April 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. There are a number of overlapping reasons for why we might want really good refuges: Countermeasures refuges: In a global catastrophic biological event, we ought to have a secure facility where scientific personnel can develop medical countermeasures in a position of relative safety. Foundation-style refuges: In the case of an extreme global catastrophe, a civilizational refuge can protect a nucleus of people, information, and materials to increase the probability of rebuilding and recovery after civilization collapse. Values refuges: We would have a means to safeguard important cosmopolitan values and empirical or conceptual worldviews to survive and flourish after a civilizational collapse, assuming it is good to do so. Currently, we think all three reasons are plausible, which a focus on #1 and #3. In particular, we believe that building refuges can be an unusually effective broad-spectrum intervention for reducing existential risk from a wide range of non-agentic sources. We (a working group composed of Linch, Ajay, and a third, anonymous, collaborator) have worked part-time to deliver a temporary plan for refuges. We’ve made considerable progress, but we will greatly benefit from having a technically competent volunteer or short-term contractor help us refine our plans and make them much more detailed/precise/concrete. If you are interested, please message us or chat with us at EA Global London! Funders are potentially interested, assuming a good initial team and operational plan. Our two biggest bottlenecks: We have not yet identified great candidates for a sufficiently competent (interim) CEO who is both capable and willing to take ownership of the refuge project. Our technical requirements write-up is not yet detailed enough to a) attract top non-EA talent or b) discuss a feasibility study with an architecture firm in sufficient depth to be useful. This would require expanding out technical requirements from a ~10-pager to a ~40-pager in the next 4-6 weeks. Here are ways you can advance the refuge project: Reach out to us, either here or at EAGlobal if you’re interested in volunteering to help us build better plans or talent scout for a CEO to champion this. If you think you might make for a good CEO, definitely talk to us. Apply to Rethink Priority’s new temporary roles in General Longtermism or Special Projects, to potentially work full-time on this under Linch’s guidance. Note that the jobs won’t start until June/July, and we’d ideally want to make progress faster. Also it is not guaranteed that RP would work on this. Independently come up with your own plans/schema for civilizational refuges, and pitch it to funders. More competition in the EA ecosystem can be very valuable! E.g., impartial concern, the importance of existential risk reduction We can potentially help with funding small-scale experiments and preliminary research. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Go Republican, Young EA!, published by ColdButtonIssues on April 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Cross-posted from Cold Button Issues Young effective altruists in the United States interested in using public policy to make the world better should almost all be Republicans. They should not be Democrats, they should not be Greens, they should be Republicans. First, because the Republican Party matters a lot. Second, there is way less competition among young people to climb within the Republican Party, at least within key fields. There’s a pretty good chance that after 2024, we’ll see a Republican President, maybe a Trump Administration 2.0. Metacalus says it’s a tossup as of today. And Metacalus also thinks that Republicans will control Congress after 2022. There are already 23 states where Republicans control the legislature and the governorship (a trifecta). What the Republican party does is a huge deal! The other reason is that it will make you quirky and unique. No, really. Young people are so left-wing these days. 58% of millennials voted for Biden over Trump. And the tendency is even more extreme for those with more degrees or coming from elite universities. So young Democrats seeking internships on campaigns or in DC face intense competition for even entry-level roles. Young Republicans have a much more favorable labor market. Anecdotally, in the last week an acquaintance of mine with a CV full of liberal activism was even offered a job at conservative NGO, where she had been striking out with liberal organizations. I think this is probably because conservatives have to compete for young talent, whereas young liberal talent has to compete for positions. Right-wing groups put a fair amount of effort into trying to recruit young activists. You can join the College Republicans of course. But there are also paid fellowships offered by right-wing groups hoping to recruit Gen Z supporters such as the Hudson Institute. There are easy on-ramps to conservative politics to the United States, and given the scarcity of young conservatives it will be much easier for you to stand out and move up. The place where this advantage is the most obvious is probably the legal field. About 70% of lawyers who involve themselves in politics via political donations lean Democratic. Yale Law School is so left-leaning that events featuring dissenting speakers are mobbed by protesters. So being a conservative law student or lawyer is probably unpleasant. But if you want to be a judge, being a conservative in the legal field is great! Probably around half of all future federal judges will be Republican-appointees, and there are many states and counties across the country where being a Republican will help a lawyer become a judge. But what if you think the Republican Party is just a million times worse than the Democratic Party? Personally, I don’t think that’s true. And on a lot of issues effective altruists care about (artificial intelligence, the long-run future), there aren’t clear partisan lines and presidential candidates certainly aren’t using these issues as platform planks. Sure, one party as it currently stands is almost certainly better on average, but either party could shift on many issues. We don’t what the Republican Party will think about artificial intelligence in two years! But lots of important issues are so low-profile that if you rise in either party and land in the right spot in the federal bureaucracy, you could be making important decisions regardless of what your party thinks about abortion or healthcare. But for those effective altruists who are pretty sure the Democratic Party is way better, perhaps those championing open borders or stricter animal welfare laws, or those who think international cooperation via the United Nations is really amazing, I would ...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: CEA is discontinuing its focus university programming, passing funding to Open Philanthropy, published by JoanGass on April 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I’m writing this in my official capacity as the Head of the CEA Groups Team. Thanks to Asya Bergal, Claire Zabel, Aaron Gertler, Max Dalton, Alex Holness Tofts, Will Payne, Huw Thomas, Julia Wise, Will Fenning, and Ollie Base for their input on this draft. All opinions expressed are my own. CEA is discontinuing its focus university programming – this includes its Campus Specialist program and Campus Specialist Internship program (formerly known as the community-building grants program for focus universities). CEA will be redirecting university organizers who would like to be funded for their work to Open Philanthropy’s two new fellowships, which were launched in part to replace the funding aspects of the Campus Specialist and Campus Specialist Internship programs: The University Organizer Fellowship, which provides funding for organizers and groups expenses for part-time and full-time organizers helping with student groups focused on effective altruism, longtermism, rationality, or other relevant topics at any university (not just focus universities). (Intended to replace the Campus Specialist and Campus Specialist Internship programs.) The Century Fellowship, a selective 2-year program that gives resources and support (including $100K+/year in funding) to particularly promising people early in their careers who want to work in areas that could improve the long-term future. (Intended partially for particularly strong Campus Specialist applicants.) As before, all group organizers can also apply for group expenses from CEA’s Group Support Funding, and organizer funding and groups expenses from EA Infrastructure Fund. A detailed breakdown of potential funding options for organizers can be found here. CEA will continue to support early stage university groups via the University Group Accelerator Program and city and national groups in key locations via the Community Building Grants Program. The following post covers two sections: Why we made this shift Lessons learned I want to emphasise that this is a tactical shift about where funding for EA community building is coming from – not a signal about impact. CEA, Open Phil, and EAIF are just as excited about field-building work at focus universities as we were before – and we all still think advanced-stage university field building can be a very high impact opportunity. So why is CEA making this change? Ultimately, this was a decision related to organisational focus. I think that the CEA groups team will be more successful if we’re more focused. Over the last year we tried to cover three massive areas: focus university groups, early-stage university groups, and key city and national groups. It was challenging to provide excellent support to group leaders, who had different needs, in all of these areas simultaneously. We think we were more successful in early stage university groups and key city and national groups than focus university groups, who reported getting more value out of support and funding provided by other organisations. We want to encourage others who may be better-placed to provide focus university support to do so, and we worry that we may implicitly discourage this if it seems like we “own” the entire groups space When choosing where to focus across early-stage university groups, late stage university groups, and city/national groups, we looked at our track record and the number of other organisations working in a given space. Track record: Over the last 6 months, we think we’ve done a strong job in our early-stage university work (supporting 32 groups via our University Group Accelerator Program with a stellar user rating of 9.1/10) and better...