University Groups Should Do More Retreats

By tlevin @ 2022-04-06T19:20 (+85)

[August 2023 edit: I basically don't endorse this post as currently written anymore for a few reasons:

  1. I think university groups should primarily be focused on encouraging people to learn a lot of things and becoming a venue/community for people to try to become excellent at things that the world really needs, and this will mostly look like creating exciting and welcoming environments for co-working and discussion on campus. In part this is driven by the things that I think made HAIST successful, and in part by thinking the post "University EA Groups Need Fixing" is right about what the role of retreats in the problems with EA groups.
  2. I also think retreats are more costly than I realized when writing, and (relatedly) if you're going to organize a retreat or workshop or whatever, it should probably have a theory of change and driven by a target audience's area of interest and background (e.g., "early-career people interested in AI policy who haven't spent time in DC come and meet AI policy people in DC") rather than general-purpose uni group bonding.
  3. I also think "retreat" is basically the wrong word for what these events are; at least the ones I've run have generally had enough subject-matter-driven content that "workshop" is a more appropriate term.
  4. That said, I do still think university groups should consider doing retreats/workshops, depending on their capacity, the specific needs of their group, and the extent to which they buy the arguments for/against prioritizing them over other programs. I'm leaving a lightly edited version of the post up in case it has some useful information.]

TL;DR, doing retreats should be a top priority (maybe the top priority) for university groups due to their unique effects on personal prioritization.

In the one-on-ones I’ve had at EAGs (most recently xBoston) and elsewhere, a recurring theme in people’s personal stories is that they include something like “Yeah, I basically thought this EA cause prioritization stuff was right, but kept working on my other stuff, and then I went on a retreat and I was like ‘Oh shit, I actually should change my life about this.’” Or, at a later stage, they were planning on doing some “EA-approved” thing but the retreat significantly shifted their priorities towards working harder on more impactful work.

This, in addition to the “theoretical” reasons below, leads me to think that retreats are massively more effective than other bread-and-butter EA group programming like intro fellowships, speakers, etc. Personal journeys that might have taken months or years can happen in 1-2 days. I’ve also seen important misunderstandings about EA that have persisted through most or all of an intro fellowship be corrected at retreats.

Why do retreats work?

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.

This is part of a broader observation that career decisions among high-achieving students are primarily identity-driven. Convincing people to do something different with their lives can mean opening them up to changing what feels like a core part of their identity. In my case, it needed to be safe for me to stop "forward-chaining" from an identity that said “I am a public policy generalist” and shift toward a mindset of “I try to do the most good, and I currently have certain ideas about the best path for me to do that.”

When done well, EA retreats bring together a bunch of people who might have been vaguely thinking “I really need to sit down and figure out some career stuff” or “I know deep down that the EA stuff is right but there’s something (like inertia, abstraction, or lack of peer support) stopping me from acting on it” and giving them a time for both internal and social deliberation that empowers them to move closer to the values they already want to live by.

Important characteristics for retreats to make this happen:

Things that seem good but that I'm less confident about

Resources for making your retreat go well:

Thanks to Marka Ellertson, Juan Gil, Leilani Bellamy, Nikola Jurkovic, and others for feedback.


levin @ 2023-08-24T20:01 (+10)

As of August 24, 2023, I no longer endorse this post for a few reasons.

  1. I think university groups should primarily be focused on encouraging people to learn a lot of things and becoming a venue/community for people to try to become excellent at things that the world really needs, and this will mostly look like creating exciting and welcoming environments for co-working and discussion on campus. In part this is driven by the things that I think made HAIST successful, and in part it's driven by thinking there's some merit to the unfavorable link to this post in "University EA Groups Need Fixing."
  2. I also think retreats are more costly than I realized when writing, and (relatedly) if you're going to organize a retreat or workshop or whatever, it should probably have a theory of change and driven by a target audience's area of interest and background (e.g., "early-career people interested in AI policy who haven't spent time in DC come and meet AI policy people in DC") rather than general-purpose uni group bonding.
  3. I also think "retreat" is basically the wrong word for what these events are; at least the ones I've run have generally had enough subject-matter-driven content that "workshop" is a more appropriate term.
  4. That said, I do still think university groups should consider doing retreats/workshops, depending on their capacity, the specific needs of their group, and the extent to which they buy the arguments for/against prioritizing them over other programs.

Edited the top of the post to reflect this.

Pablo @ 2022-04-26T19:03 (+4)

EA Retreats is now a "private site". Does anyone know what's going on?

KaseyShibayama @ 2022-04-26T20:38 (+14)

EA Retreats recently rebranded as Canopy Retreats (canopyretreats.org).

Charles He @ 2022-04-26T21:06 (+8)

If you expect to get nontrivial traffic, a URL redirect might be useful (you can do it at the domain level). A URL redirect adds some gravitas/decorum as well, which might be helpful.

It looks like your registrar is Google so it should be pretty easy?

https://www.whois.com/whois/earetreats.org

KaseyShibayama @ 2022-04-26T21:58 (+5)

I’m not affiliated with Canopy Retreats but I agree that’d be useful

Miranda_Zhang @ 2022-04-12T02:32 (+4)

Thanks for compiling all this in one compact post! Having just run a retreat, this seems like ~common knowledge among community-builders, but it'll be very useful to have a single post to point to instead of having to gather pieces of knowledge together. 

lennart @ 2022-04-06T19:57 (+3)

Great post Trevor! I share your message. :)

Especially:

The retreat features lots of people who are already “on board” with EA. At least a few should be at least moderately charismatic people for whom EA is a major consideration in how they make decisions.

That's also my experience. While "some buy-in" already helps a lot, people with more experience provide in my experience even "more value" - sharing their EA story, their connected struggles, and maybe how they managed to work on EA-adjacent stuff.
You bring something along these lines up later by saying "The retreat includes “professional EAs.”".

Therefore, I'd also encourage the more "senior people" to join retreats from time to time. You can provide an enormous value. And to all the organizers, reach out to them!

Trevor Levin @ 2022-04-06T19:59 (+2)

Re: "I'd also encourage the more "senior people" to join retreats from time to time," absolutely; not just (or even primarily) because you can provide value, but because retreats continue to be very useful in sharpening your cause prioritization, increasing your EA context, and building high-trust relationships with other EAs well after you're "senior"!

velutvulpes @ 2022-04-07T10:39 (+2)

Global Challenges Project have just released their Guide on Running a Retreat here: https://handbook.globalchallengesproject.org/packaged-programs/guide-to-running-a-retreatsummit 

Trevor Levin @ 2022-04-07T15:45 (+1)

Thanks, added to resources!

michaelchen @ 2022-04-06T22:50 (+2)

For me, the main value of retreats/conferences has been forming lots connections, but I haven't become significantly more motivated to be more productive, impactful, or ambitious. I have a couple questions which I think would be helpful for organizers to decide whether they should be running more retreats:

Trevor Levin @ 2022-04-06T23:47 (+13)

Yep, great questions -- thanks, Michael. To respond to your first thing, I definitely don't expect that they'll have those effects on everybody, just that they are much more likely to do so than pretty much any other standard EA group programming.

  • Depends on the retreat. HEA's spring retreat (50 registrations, ~32 attendees) involved booking and communicating with a retreat center (which took probably 3-4 hours), probably 5-6 hours of time communicating with attendees, and like 2 hours planning programming. I ran a policy retreat in DC that was much more time-consuming, probably like 35 hours in figuring out logistics, communicating with guests, etc. I would guess the latter would do better on CBA (unless policy turns out to be very low-value).
  • I think scenic walks are probably the closest thing you can do on campus, but you definitely don't get 80% of the value (even on a per-organizer-time basis). You get to tailor the conversation to their exact interests, but it's not really the kind of sustained interaction in a self-contained social world that retreats offer.
  • Not with much confidence. I get the sense that the median person gets slightly more into EA but I guess like 5-10% of attendees can have major priorities shifts on the level of "EA seems like a cool way of thinking about climate policy" to "holy shit, x-risk." I personally have shifted in a couple ways after retreats — from "optimize my time in grad school for generic policy career provided that I make some attempt at EA community-building" to "EA community-building should be one of my top two priorities" after the group organizer retreat and from "probably will work in biosecurity" to "probably will work in AI policy or EA meta" after Icecone. 
michaelchen @ 2022-04-07T01:24 (+2)

Got it, I'm surprised by how little time it took to organize HEA's spring retreat. What programming was involved?

Trevor Levin @ 2022-04-07T15:45 (+3)

Also should note that we had a bit of a head start: I had organized the DC retreat one month earlier so had some recent experience, we had lots of excited EAs already so we didn't even try to get professional EAs and we decided casual hangouts were probably very high-value, and the organizing team basically had workshops ready to go. We also had it at a retreat center that provided food (though not snacks). If any of these were different it would have taken much longer to plan.

Trevor Levin @ 2022-04-07T02:26 (+3)

It was very much an 80-20'd thing due to organizer capacity. The schedule was something like:

  • Friday evening arrivals + informal hangouts + board games (e.g. Pandemic)
  • Saturday morning: opening session, hikes/informal hangouts
  • Saturday afternoon: three sessions, each with multiple options:
    • 1-on-1 walks, Updating Session, AI policy workshop
    • 1-on-1 walks,  Concept Swap, forecasting workshop
    • 1-on-1 walks, AI policy workshop
  • Saturday evening: Hamming Circles, informal hangouts feat. hot tub and fire pit
  • Sunday morning: walks/hangouts
  • Sunday afternoon: career reflection, closing session, departure