Some thoughts on EA outreach to high schoolers

If there were more orgs doing this, there’d be the risk of abuse working with minors if in-person.

I think this deserves more than a brief mention. One of the two high school programs mentioned (ESPR) failed to safeguard students from someone later credibly accused of serious abuse, as detailed in CFAR's write-up:

Of the interactions CFAR had with Brent, we consider the decision to let him assist at ESPR—a program we helped run for high school students—to have been particularly unwise ... We do not believe any students were harmed. However, Brent did invite a student (a minor) to leave camp early to join him at Burning Man. Beforehand, Brent had persuaded a CFAR staff member to ask the camp director for permission for Brent to invite the student. Multiple other staff members stepped in to prevent this, by which time the student had decided against attending anyway.

This is a terrible track record for this sort of outreach effort. I think it provides a strong reason against pursuing it further without a high degree of assurance that the appropriate lessons have been learned — something which doesn't seem to have been addressed in the post or comments.

EA seems reliant on nerdy millennial technology, namely long plaintext social media posts.

I'm interested in communicating in Gen Z ways, which I think roughly means "short amateur videos". I've had moderate success on TikTok (35,000 followers as of this writing), and I would encourage more people to try it out.

There's a nice self-selection where your content is only displayed to 16-year-olds who spend their free time watching math videos (or whatever niche you target), which I expect to be one of the best easily-available audiences of young people.

Brief meta comment: I would generally recommend being very cautious about (and mostly avoid) using language like "converting" others to EA, as in your sentence "Younger people might be easier to convert (...)". This type of language seems fairly easy to avoid, whiled using it may make many people feel uncomfortable and even pose reputational risks for the community.

Three not particularly important or related thoughts from having thought about SHIC a fair amount:

• One of the hardest parts of high school outreach I think will be getting people to continue to be engaged over their college career (assuming they go to college), which is four years of substantial chance of value drift before any direct impact happens. Whereas recruiting from college, the distance is much less.
• It seems like the typical "good student" high schoolers optimize a lot for having authority figures like them, which could easily lead them to endorse - even enthusiastically - EA views they don't end up holding all that strongly. This could skew outreach and the perception of success.
• I think one of the best things about hearing about EA pre-college is it would let you set up your college plan (e.g., major, internships) in an EA-directed way, which I think is one of the most useful things to do for an EA-career, as opposed to having to make some sort of more difficult within-college or post-college transition. (On reflection with full hindsight, I'm not sure what I would've done differently or how I would've had more impact if I had heard of EA in high school rather than halfway through college, but I certainly did feel off-guard in that respect.)

Hey Buck,

Upvoted - I think agree that people have become too negative about it, and I'd be interested in seeing another org in this space, though I think I prefer top university outreach still on average, so am probably still a bit more negative than you.

A. One reason is you didn't put much emphasis on what I see as some of the more significant downsides. One is what Peter Hurford says:

One of the hardest parts of high school outreach I think will be getting people to continue to be engaged over their college career (assuming they go to college), which is four years of substantial chance of value drift before any direct impact happens. Whereas recruiting from college, the distance is much less.

With a college student, you can talk to them about decisions like moving to an EA hub, working in an EA org etc., which are steps that tend to get people onto great long-term paths. With a high schooler, you'd need to hope they get involved in an EA group while at university, which suggests we'd ideally make the university groups good first, and even then I think would have higher chance of drifting away.

B. Another is that I think EA advice to high schoolers is less useful than what we have to say about later decisions. The common sense advice of things like "go to a prestigious university" and "quantitative subjects keep options open more" and "do internships / interesting projects / build CV material" already seems pretty good to me and are widely known.

In contrast, when someone is working out where to donate or which cause to work on, we think some options are over 100x better according to their values in a way that's not widely known. This isn't to say many people don't make mistakes in their choice of university / major or how to spend their time at college, but I still think the delta between having EA advice and not having it is smaller.

Our crux might be this:

I think the EA and rationality communities have lots of tools that help people become overall better at thinking, and potentially vastly increase their lifetime impact.

My take is more that this advice is useful, but it's not radically better (for most people) than other sources out there (plus the other downsides you mention). E.g. a bunch of value comes from ideas like 'actually optimize for your goals', but you can get this from other smart self-help advice, following top Silicon Valley people etc., reading Dalio's Principles.That's just one example, and to repeat, I still think it's better to have these ideas than not, just I don't think the delta is as big.

On the other hand, if people had 4 years longer to think about which cause to focus on, and to learn a lot about that topic, that seems pretty useful.

C. The age data I mention in the other comment.

D. I think the lack of track record is still a negative E.g. we have a lot of examples of great university groups bringing in great people, so I feel confident that starting another good university group will be useful. Doing more high school outreach is great as an experiment, but overall I'm less confident it'll work, and it's also harder to measure. (Though I haven't seen data from SPARC, which could change my mind.)

I agree with your upsides. On the failure modes though, I think the question of 'what do the parents think' is missing and important (I guess you maybe touch on it when saying it's politically delicate?). I can imagine all sorts of things high schoolers decide to do because of something they read related to EA that parents might be unhappy about and rally around, from donating their pocket money to moving country, or changing career plans (which many parents are opinionated about).

Regardless of whether the changes teenagers make in their life as a result of getting into EA will be good or bad or whether their parents are right or wrong, parents might with reason start rallying on Twitter or in the school union or something, with potential reputation costs, and making it harder for the next person trying to do it.

Young adults don't have this problem. Even though they may also do things that their parents disagree with as a result of getting into EA stuff, the parents will have a less strong mandate for rallying against it, especially in a public way.

I don't think this risk rules it out completely in my view, and there are likely things that can be done to minimise the risk. I know a teacher who runs an EA club at a specialist maths sixth-form in the UK (16-18yo), and it seems to be going quite well. I'll send him this post.

An interesting, but potentially contentious and risky, approach could be to target a small number of high schools whose pupils have historically tended to wield outsized influence on the world. Certainly in the UK, these schools are pretty well-known. Focussing outreach on them would seem, naively, to be very efficient - but also throw up reputational issues in terms of equity and inclusiveness.

Just a quick comment to say this sample doesn't seem representative to me:

Anecdotally, a large number of the most dedicated and promising longtermist EAs I know heard about EA in high school (at a workshop I ran for a small group of newish longtermist EAs, if I remember correctly about ⅔ raised their hands when asked if they’d heard about EA before age 18)

In the EA survey, for people who said they were 5/5 engaged, the median age at which they first heard about EA was 22 (mean 24). So a majority of the most engaged EAs became involved later than high school.

This is also matches my anecdotal experience, where university age seems more common than high school.

When we plotted average engagement against age first involved, the peak was at 20. People who first got involved at age 18 were less involved on average, and had a similar average level of engagement of people who first got involved at age 40 [edit: see my comment below]. It's hard to know what to draw from this (younger and older people probably get less engaged because the community is less well set up for them), but I think it means we don't have clear evidence that it's better to reach people younger.

David_Moss @ 2020-09-16T13:42 (+21)

When we plotted average engagement against age first involved, the peak was at 20. People who first got involved at age 18 were less involved on average, and had a similar average level of engagement of people who first got involved at age 40. 

 

Just for the benefit of people who haven't seen the graph, we also split this by cohort (which year they first heard of EA) and there was no cohort for which the peak was younger than 20.

It's hard to know what to draw from this (younger and older people probably get less engaged because the community is less well set up for them)

I think the fact that we see this effect across cohorts is some evidence for age (when they got involved) itself driving the effect. People who joined (when they were young) in earlier cohorts will be at least in their early 20s and maybe almost 30 by now. So you might think that they will now have been in EA during the ages which, ex hypothesi, the EA community is better set up for, and it seems like they are still, on average lower in self-reported engagement. Of course, it could also be that how well the EA community is set up for you when you first hear of it is really important, and so people who first hear about it earlier than university age never recover, but it's not clear to me what the mechanism would be there.

Of course, we are talking about a relatively small group of people who first hear about EA at these young ages: about 15% first heard of EA when they were younger than 20 (but that comfortably includes university age), but <5% first heard of EA when they were younger than 18 (and this is probably an over-estimate because age-first-heard is calculated from reported year when people first heard and their date of birth, so there's a bit of wiggle room as to exactly how old they were when they first heard.

Benjamin_Todd @ 2021-06-15T20:29 (+8)

Eli Rose helpfully looked more into the data more carefully, and found a mistake in what I said above. It looks like people who got involved in EA at age ~18 are substantially more engaged than those who got involved at 40. People who got involved at 15-17 are also more engaged than those who got involved at 40. So, this is an update in favour of outreach to young people.

Max_Daniel @ 2021-06-15T21:13 (+4)

Also, to be clear, are your original comment and this correction talking about the same survey population? I.e., EA survey takers in the same year(s)? Rather than comparing the results for different survey populations?

David_Moss @ 2021-06-16T09:43 (+4)

Yes, these are all based on analyses which I did on EAS 2019 data.

Max_Daniel @ 2021-06-15T21:10 (+3)

How do people who first got involved at 15-17 or 18 compare to people who first got involved age 20-25 (or something like that)? So "unusually young" vs. "median" rather than "unusually young vs. unusually old"?

David_Moss @ 2021-06-16T15:43 (+9)

People who first got involved at 18 (or 19) are about the same as people who got involved at 21 (i.e. a little bit lower than the peak at 20).

People who first got involved at 17 are about the same as people who first got involved 22-23.

For people who first got involved 15 or 16, the confidence intervals are getting pretty wide, because fewer respondents joined at these ages, but they're each a little less engaged, being most similar to those who first got involved in their mid-late 20s or 30s respectively.

In short, the trend is pretty smooth both before and after 20, but mid to late 30s it seems to level out a bit, temporarily.

You might want to open these images in new windows to see them full size.

And finally, this is  visually messy, but split by cohort, which could confound things otherwise.

We'll be presenting analyses of this using EAS2020 data in the Engagement post shortly.

Benjamin_Todd @ 2021-06-16T12:42 (+4)

I'm going to leave it to David Moss or Eli to answer questions about the data, since they've been doing the analysis.

DavidNash @ 2021-06-16T09:35 (+2)

Is engagement the thing you want to optimise for over impact or are the two highly correlated for you?

Benjamin_Todd @ 2021-06-16T12:44 (+6)

Ultimately I care about impact, but the engagement measures in the EA survey seem like the best proxy we have within that dataset.

(E.g. there is also donation data but I don't think it's very useful for assessing the potential impact of people who are too young to have donated much yet.)

A better analysis of this question should also look at things like people who made valuable career changes vs. age, which seems more closely related to impact.

FWIW I found and read the sequences when I was about 14, and went to a CFAR workshop before uni. I think if these things had happened later they'd have been less impactful for me in a number of ways.

Note: While I contributed to one of the posts about unsuccessful high-school outreach my experience with teaching EA concepts to high schoolers is much more limited than the others in the post. Most of my thoughts on this are based off of a few experiences teaching high schoolers, discussions with other people teaching high schoolers, my relative freshness out of high school (Graduated in 2017), and some extrapolations from running Yale EA and interacting with first-years.

As someone who contributed to one of the posts about unsuccessful high-school outreach I agree that outreach to high schoolers is not a lost cause (though I am inclined to think the majority of value would come from students in their last two years of high school since they will have a better grasp on topics and are closer to college).

I think even in just the few years after these posts were written we have learned a lot about movement building that could possibly contribute to more successful outreach. Particularly having more targeted outreach seems to be promising.

Catherine Low suggests here (though her opinions may have changed):

“This might be possible if you have a strong brand (such as an association with elite University) allowing you to attract suitable students through schools and other networks, and the resources to run a fellowship-type program with these students”

University group leaders have found that marketing their Fellowships as “prestigious” brings in more and better applicants. I imagine if you add prestige, the possibility of being able to add the program to college apps, and some selection process you could draw in a pretty promising high school crowd to a similar program. (However, if you did this I would disagree with your pro that there is “There’s less competition for the attention and time of younger people” since these types of students are often incredibly busy although they are more free in summers)

I agree with Peter’s concern about continued engagement. My inclination would be that a lot of the value would come from getting these students to then join their respective University group or start their own. This would probably require a bit more of a focus on community building as being particularly valuable.

As for concerns of the delicate nature of outreach to high schoolers, I think this should really be talked and thought about more. High schoolers being susceptible to ideas coming from older impressive people has its advantages and disadvantages. I haven’t thought about this enough to really contribute but would like to.

Lastly, most of my optimism around this would be specifically for EA outreach as opposed to rationality outreach. I pretty much agree with all of your concerns about rationality outreach listed in cons here and at least personally think they outweigh the pros of having purely rationality outreach rather than mainly EA outreach with some rationality concepts. I do think you can greatly minimize the concern of people losing intellectual hobbies as a result of getting involved in EA if this concern is built into the curriculum (ie: how to be sustainable in your altruism, the value of non-directly EA activities etc.)

Also, I believe it's much easier to become a teacher for high schoolers at top high schools than a teacher for students at top universities, because most teachers at top unis are professors, or at least lecturers with PhDs, while even at fancy high schools, most teachers don't have PhDs, and I think it's generally just much less selective. So EAs might have an easier time finding positions teaching high schoolers than uni students of a given eliteness level. (Of course, there are other ways to engage people, like student groups, for which different dynamics are at play.) 

I think outreach directed at high schoolers feels more ethically questionable to me than outreach directed at students. I roughly think that high-schoolers tend to be significantly more impressionable/vulnerable, especially when talking to people who they consider worthy of respect. Admittedly, this also seems true of college students, albeit to a lesser degree, so I think I'm drawing arbitrary lines in the sand. But it feels different to do it with a minor/somebody still in school.

With all that said, I went to ESPR, and had an incredibly positive experience, that I think has significantly increased my expected lifetime impact! (I first went at 17). But I know people who also had pretty negative experiences (much more with the rationality side than EA, which wasn't strongly emphasised)

An EA teaching pathway?

Building effective altruism is currently one of 80000 Hours's four top cause areas. One of the most promising avenues for doing this is to do safe and reputable high-school outreach - about a dozen people seem to be currently pursuing this. If at least a couple of people doing this had experience teaching, especially at a magnet school, or a gifted program, then their skills and credentials could move the needle on the quality of these summer programs, and have an impact via teaching itself. Especially so if one wanted to start a new school for kids interested in public service and EA.

So I think a teaching career, properly designed, could be pretty good by EA standards. Suppose you plan to teach at a gifted school, while helping with EA high-school summer programs, and eventually to make oneself available to work at any EA-leaning school. For such a career, I'd be inclined to update the 80,000 Hours' review rates teaching as follows:

• career capital: 1/5  -> 2/5
• earnings: 2/5 -> 3/5
• ease of competition: 5/5 -> 4/5
• direct impact: 2/5 -> 2/5
• advocacy potential: 2/5 -> 5/5 [assuming you count the effects of training up altruistic kids here]
• job satisfaction: 4/5 -> 4/5

I'd speculate that this could be a good idea for those EAs who love teaching, and are US-based, and want a career that's not extremely competitive - something like 0.3-1% of the EA community.

I think targeted high school outreach has always looked (incredibly) good a priori. The question is whether it works in practice. At least in UK/EU, I can't think of anyone who came through sparc/eurosparc/shic and is now working full-time on EA. Probably a couple of students, but their impact is still to be determined. Until a couple of years ago, people were saying the same thing in the Bay Area. Which would suggest all of these programs have a <1% conversion rate, and that high school outreach might have an even lower conversion rate than university group outreach (for whatever reasons). Your suggestiom that this is changed is interesting - if you can say more without getting into awkward "naming names" it'd be pretty useful.

One other random point: it strikes me as easier to filter college students for altruism, ambition, talent, etc. than for high school students.

Another approach that targets high-schoolers that I can think of is promoting philosophy education in schools. How does EA outreach in schools compare with this?

My impression is that outreach to (16-18 year old) high school students will be very difficult, but with very large rewards.

It is hard to 'break into' schools and introduce programs and organizations. This is for good reasons; these are public institutions, young people are vulnerable, etc.

But I think if one gets EA orgs and other programs (like Charity Elections) going in high schools it could have huge impact. It could...

• Scale easily
• Be very influential... these are seen as the 'formative years'
• Potentially bring in communities/parents/teachers
• Be 'trackable/measurable' to university level (can survey college students about whether they were part of it in HS)

Mostly agreeing with this article. Thx. I‘d be hoping, that high schoolers (make better choices on what to study) will find the ea-groups at university faster, if they know about ea already. But even if that „fails“, it‘s not only about “becoming ea“ or not. It‘s not binary. If people don‘t get involved in ea-stuff... but agree to only one concept more (like cause neutrality /animals are capable of suffering, so that should matter too / counterfactual thinking in making career choices / the fact, that donations can have different impacts etc. (maybe even spreading those ideas)) - then it might be worth the time. Thx for the article.