EA - Intro Fellowship as Retreat: Reasons, Retrospective, and Resources by Rachel Weinberg

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: Intro Fellowship as Retreat: Reasons, Retrospective, and Resources, published by Rachel Weinberg on November 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryIntroductory EA Fellowships are the default way that EA university groups introduce new members to EA concepts. These ~8-week-long discussion groups have some virtues: they’re scalable, high fidelity, accessible, and not that weird looking. But only 2-10% of students who start an intro fellowship end up engaging with EA afterwards; it feels like we can do better.I ran a 4-day retreat to get new people to the same level of EA knowledge as an intro fellowship would, inspired by the ideas in We Need Alternatives to Intro Fellowships and University Groups Should Run More Retreats. I had 8 fellows, 5 of whom were on the intro track and 3 of whom were on the in-depth track, plus 4 facilitators/organizers, and 4 professionals who came up for one day.With n=1, it’s hard to draw concrete conclusions, so I’m not intending to sell people on retreats vs. fellowships. Rather, I hope this post helps other group organizers generate ideas about alternatives to intro fellowship, and makes it easy to iterate and improve upon what I did.Retreats vs. Intro FellowshipsAdvantages of RetreatsHere are the main points in favor of retreats, which my experience running this event corroborates:Manic retreat magic:In Trevor’s words: “Retreats encourage the kind of sustained reflection, one-on-one conversations, and social network construction that actually get people to reevaluate their plans. Most other EA programming occurs in classroom-type settings where people are used to engaging with ideas intellectually but not taking them seriously as action-relevant, life-affecting things.”Or, in Duncan Sabien’s terms, retreats make people’s minds muddier—more flexible, open to new ideas.The flip side of intro fellowships being “accessible” or “not weird” is that there is no manic magic—instead, people show up, have intellectual debates often in a literal classroom setting, and never seem to realize how life-changing all those ideas would be if they really took them seriously.Faster/more interesting for fellows: this is a key point of Ashley’s post and is supported by ~2/10 of my closest engaged EA friends saying they would have never signed up for/made it through an intro fellowship, and wouldn’t have gotten into EA if that was the on-ramp presented to them. Worse, it seems that the most curious/driven/agentic people are most likely to feel this way. Retreats are less likely to lose that demographic.Social bonding: People are way more likely to feel drawn to engage with EA more if they have friends there, feel a sense of community there, and doing so lets them talk to people that they like. EA can also be intimidating—probably particularly for minority demographics in EA—so feeling comfortable reaching out/asking “dumb” questions to more highly engaged members of the group seems important. Retreats leave more time for socializing in general, in particular for late night mushy/emotional conversations, and have people together at more vulnerable/less put together times (sleeping in the same rooms, hanging out in PJs, eating all meals together). I felt far closer to these intro fellows after the retreat than I have ever felt to a typical cohort.Faster path to doing impactful things: getting people on board in 4 days instead of 8 weeks adds 52 days to their more impactful career.One notable thing I did with this retreat was to mix intro fellows with in-depth fellows, university EA organizers, and EA professionals. The advantages of this were:Less Dunning-Krueger effect: it’s common for people after the intro fellowship to feel like they understand EA pretty extensively, and having a bunch of in-depth people there shows them what’s comin...