EA - [AMA] Announcing Open Phil’s University Group Organizer and Century Fellowships by abergal

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: [AMA] Announcing Open Phil’s University Group Organizer and Century Fellowships, published by abergal on July 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Open Philanthropy recently launched two new fellowships intended to provide funding for university group organizers: the University Group Organizer Fellowship (apply here), and the Century Fellowship (apply here). This post is intended to give some more color on the two programs, and our reasoning behind them. In the post, we cover: What these programs are and are not Current thoughts on who we should be funding What we’d like to achieve with these programs Some of our concerns about this work We’d also like this post to function as an AMA for our university student-focused work. We’ll be answering questions August 4 - August 6, and will try to get through most of the highest-voted questions, though we may not get to everything. We welcome questions at any level, including questions about our future plans, criticisms of our funding strategy, logistical questions about the programs, etc. If you’re a university group organizer or potential university group organizer and want to talk to us, I (Asya) will also be hosting virtual office hours August 5th and 6th – sign up to talk to me for 10 minutes here.[Note about this post: The first two sections of this post were written by Asya Bergal, and the latter two were written by Claire Zabel; confusingly, both use the first-person pronouns “I” and “my”. We indicate in the post when the author switches.] What these programs are and are not [The following sections of this post were written by Asya Bergal.] The University Group Organizer Fellowship The University Group Organizer Fellowship provides funding for organizers and group 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. Unlike CEA’s previous program in this space: We’re interested in funding a much wider set of student groups that we think are on the path to making sure the long-term future is as good as possible, e.g. groups about longtermism, existential risk reduction, rationality, AI safety, forecasting, etc. For reasons discussed below, we think it’s possible that groups not focused on effective altruism (particularly those focused directly on risks from transformative technology), could also be highly effective in terms of getting promising people to consider careers working on the long-term future, by appealing more to people with a slightly different set of interests and motivations. As far as we know, there are currently relatively few efforts of this kind in the student group space right now, so there’s particular information value from experimenting. (And we’re excited about some new efforts in this space, e.g. the Harvard AI Safety Team.) We also continue to be interested in funding effective altruism groups, including those with a primarily neartermist focus. We’re interested in funding any college or university, including universities outside of the US or UK. We’re not providing mentorship, retreats, or other kinds of hands-on support for groups as part of these programs (at least for now). More on the last point: while we ourselves are not providing this kind of support, we have and expect to refer groups we fund to others who are, including CEA’s University Group Accelerator Program, the Global Challenges Project, EA Cambridge, and other one-off programs and retreats. Our current aim is to provide a smooth funding experience for strong group organizers who want to do this work, while mitigating potential negative impact from organizers who we don’t think are a good fit. We don’t plan or intend to “cover” the groups space, and actively encourage others in the space to consider pro...