EA - Some advice the CEA groups team gives to new university group organizers by jessica mccurdy

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: Some advice the CEA groups team gives to new university group organizers, published by jessica mccurdy on July 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: Here are some key ideas we tell new uni group organizers during UGAP kickoff: Prioritize truth-seeking by being honest, open, humble, and making learning a priority. Build a deep community that seriously engages with EA ideas by focusing on the most engaged group members, making sure they have the resources they need to take their engagement as far as they want to go, and fostering strong social bonds through genuine fun. Be serious but approachable by not being too salesy. Not everyone is going to agree with EA ideas, and that is okay. Your work matters, you aren’t alone, and we are excited to see what comes! The use of “I” in this refers to me (Jessica McCurdy). This post was reviewed by other members of the CEA groups team (Jesse Rothman, Rob Gledhill, and Jake McKinnon) but the mistakes are my own. This does not represent CEA’s opinions as a whole and wasn’t reviewed by people on other teams at CEA. Thank you to Matt Burtell for also giving feedback on an earlier draft of this post. I am incredibly grateful for Justis Mills who created the first draft of this based on our kickoff presentation. Intro Over the past quarter, the CEA uni groups team has been focusing on scaling up support for university EA groups. In particular, we publicly launched our University Group Accelerator Program (UGAP) which aims to help new groups get started and grow. One important function of UGAP is that it gives us an opportunity to make sure new university groups are aligned on current best practices and our best guesses at how we should be framing university community building. We hope that this increases the quality, epistemics, and impact of new university groups. In the UGAP kickoff session, we share some key framings and advice for organizing EA groups. We did not come up with this advice ourselves, rather we have pulled from various resources and highlighted the things that aligned with what we have seen from mentoring groups. In particular, a lot of the specific wording and framing comes from a presentation given by the Global Challenges Project, though some of what is written here may diverge from what they think. We also do not think this advice is exhaustive and we hope that it will grow and evolve along with exploration in community building. These are our current best guesses. This post won’t be able to go into full detail on why we think each of these things but we hope to produce more content like that in the future. I should also note that these suggestions are a bit more centered on “how to prevent your group from going poorly than how to make your group really great”. I think the latter is super important and I think that Kuhan’s reflections on running Stanford EA and SERI do a good job of this (and we have all the UGAP groups read this post too!). The advice in this post applies to many groups, but UGAP groups are typically very new which is why we first start with these key ideas. What we say in UGAP kickoff Prioritize Truth-seeking Stay Humble and Be Really Honest When you’re in a position of authority, such as a group leader, it can be tempting to project an aura of (over)-confidence. EA ideas are really complicated, and virtually nobody knows everything going on at the forefront. Beyond virtue and norm considerations, it is really difficult to reliably represent yourself to very smart people (or anyone, for that matter) as understanding something you really don’t. Furthermore, the most promising potential EAs are likely to think of questions that nobody has adequately posed or addressed yet; telling them you just don’t know the answer will likely signal that you are trustworthy and increase the chances tha...