A retrospective on EA at ENS Paris, focused on obstacles.

By Camille @ 2023-08-13T10:56 (+39)

Thanks to Lucie Philippon, Pete R., Irene H. and Liam E. for their useful feedback.

tl;dr

Building an EA group in non-English speaking countries means solving problems, being creative, and sometimes departing from the advice bearing on means and form. This advice can be culturally inadequate or fail. This is an opportunity to get creative. See numbered list at the end of the “Introduction” section to see innovations I tried. Most impactful activity was (imo) still career 1:1s.

Epistemic Status:

This is a description of my experience at EA ENS in Paris, which can hopefully be used as an extension of your models on how community building is done in different countries, and as a data point. I suspect that some of the key takeaways transfer to some other countries, and that my way of addressing the inadequacies might point towards a more universal approach for community building, one that insists on adapting to terrain. I try to stay descriptive all along, and adopt a more prescriptive tone at the end (Problem 7 and Conclusion).

Valence: 

This piece might sound a bit negative in that I’m focused mainly on problems. It’s rather the opposite for me. I need to say that my time organizing EA ENS was very enjoyable. It was only a bit stressful during the first two months, but ended up being a worthwhile experience. See “Mood Timeline” at the end for more details.

Introduction

I wanted to lead an EA group in my university. I looked up many of the resources that existed. And here, implicitly, a model appeared in my head: Look up resources. Choose which one to apply. Apply. Result: EA Group. Easy!

This model proved wrong. I wasn’t  living in a university which was very similar to prestigious English-speaking universities. A thus [potentially big] part of the community building advice sounded unconvincing, not applicable for some reason, or promised to fail. That's not because the advice was bad, but because the advice could not be universally applied – when it comes to building groups in different cultures, I felt I had some implicit knowledge that those who never interacted with it missed.

I came across what I first perceived was a lot of hurdles when trying to set up the EA Group of ENS Paris in 2022-2023 (I spent a full EAGx spamming other group organizers with my problems to get them sorted out). These hurdles weren't anticipated in the advice, and the aim of this post is to share my experience. Also, those constraints were fruitful, so I'm sharing with you a few of the ideas I had while adapting to what I felt was a particularly harsh environment.

For those who don't have time for the context, you'll find below a list of innovations that were worth trying:

1. If you’re non-English-speaking, choosing one’s words wisely, not translating literally.
2. Doing projects, at least for one semester.
3. If you can't run a fellowship because no one wants, considering it ok, and doubling sessions instead.
4. Recruiting outside one’s core institution.
5. You might need to distinguish yourself from other orgs by restricting your activities.
6. During presentations, doing workshops.
7. Teaching people Street Epistemology & co (insist on consent and transparency) 
8. Knowing whether your university is searching for a paid impact career adviser.

But further than this, the aim of this post is also to share that being a group organizer means facing unexpected challenges, being confused, seeking help, talking to people, and testing solutions. Your particular obstacles may be very different, and it’s also okay to feel like no one has been there before.

Problem 1: Français don't like English.

That's something European group organizers are starting to discuss, but there is a general feeling that France, Italy, and Spain (and possibly Portugal) have a higher rate of “hostility by default” when it comes to EA. These are countries where the term “utilitarianism” has, in popular thought, a clearly negative connotation.

There are several ways of explaining this: a hostility to English and therefore ideas coming from the anglosphere, a strong sense of national intellectualism, maybe a higher influence of continental philosophy, an influence of Vatican II / social Catholicism, more non-liberal progressives, what have you.

This stressed me when presenting the EA club. My main concern was to avoid misrepresentation, since I had the experience of people usually misunderstanding a lot of core concepts within EA due to the cultural shift. To give you some examples, these are a few of the phrases and words I'd never use, because of the typical misunderstandings it creates:

1. Maximizing
2. Objectivity
3. Critical Thinking
4. Moral
5. Good, Bad
6. Utilitarianism
7. Coaching

My basic pitch for presenting EA, instead of “Maximizing your impact” or “Doing good better” would rather be “Improving the world as much as possible by relying on reason, evidence and philosophy”. I'd then usually say that, given the method at hand, I was talking about analytic philosophy. I wouldn't talk about “Career Coaching”, but “accompanying you for your career choices, by getting to know your sincere desires and adding some rationality to the mix”.

We also decided early on, before having me work on it part-time, to remove donations entirely from our discussion. This is tricky, you have to end up explaining a few concepts with new frameworks, not to speak of giving games. Most guides advised us to focus on career orientation, and we thought talking about money would only breed misrepresentation. In hindsight, we did particularly well, since even without discussing it, some people thought we were the club of “weird people giving money to the poor in Africa”.

This didn't prevent some people from assuming we were utilitarians in the misrepresented sense, or big followers of Peter Singer (notably, Singer has a very mixed reputation in France, even among animal rights activists, and is sometimes depicted as being ableist). This usually made me anxious as, in some sense, most of us did read writings by Peter Singer and agree with part of it, but it's not a prerequisite to agree with him. In short, I wouldn't get worried if most EA club members turned out not to be utilitarians or disagreed with big parts of Singer's thinking. What counts for me is them questioning rationally their way of improving the world and engaging in it.

People's intuitive black-and-white thinking was relatively hard to overcome, and it did cause some confusion to have me say « you don't have to agree with Singer » and having Practical Ethics inside the student library in the EA club bookcase.

Problem 2: I didn’t [want to?] attend UGAP 

I'm thankful I was accompanied by Guillaume V. from EA France and Simon Dima, my main group co-organizer. None of them had led an EA club in France before, and the last person to have done so was taking a year off from EA-related activities for their own wellbeing and for focusing on their studies. The initial founders of the club were also pretty busy.

This is a bit of a blurry step. I attempted to attend UGAP, and some communication problems made me miss the starter program, and probably thus the program propper. Discussing with several people, including Joris Pijpers, got me to realize however that, given the hurdles I'm describing here (and probably my own approach), a UGAP mentor was probably not a good fit for me (80% confidence) nor for French group organizers in general (70% confidence). If I were to be told how to run a fellowship, it would indeed have turned out mostly useless (see paragraphs underneath for explanations). I’d rather not advise anyone however not to attend UGAP, because the counterfactual is, again, very blurry for me.

That also meant I was alone. I did attempt to contact people whose main problem would also be “adapting to a different culture”, but I think I still felt confused about this at that time, and it didn’t really help. The most interesting encounters I had on the topic were with people from EA Italia and someone who had French friends, but my efforts for meeting someone who’d face the same challenges was rather met with failure.

Problem 3: We're not a lot

ENS is a ten-year state-paid program meant to form elite researchers and government officials. And despite that, we're not a lot. When I say « we », I mean the « main reservoir » : ENS is in theory 4000 students total (400 students for every promotion), which means actually something like 2000 + a couple hundred externs and visiting students on site. Past their fifth year, students usually go abroad. In contrast, someone told me that the pool the Oxford EA club drew from was about 7000 students, while the webpage indicates something around 30000 (say, more realistically, 15000).

This implies that creating a group is hard. We can get students to come inside a classroom and talk about EA, but there won't be 8 of them, which is about the breakeven point to make people feel like they're in a group.

Solution? Recruiting within PSL, the “super-university” hosting ENS Paris – something partially inspired from the efforts of Jelle D. This wasn't intuitive at first – the guides you'll find do not mention this option, but it really is one if needed. Universities aren't a single network – they're a web of networks who regularly meet inside the physical world as club fairs, parties, etc. Getting where the different networks meet is a good idea, it might not be that far off from where you are. I’m planning on further extending the club next year, to ensure a stabler club and a nice group atmosphere.

This tactic allowed us to have 10 members total, getting us to an average of 4 or 5 members in each session. Ten, at least in a student club life in France, is still relatively fragile – in one or two sessions, only one person came.

How to account for that yet keep the club going? Cozy Sessions. Instead of going to the classroom we had booked, we simply sat in some couches near a blackboard and had a more informal version of the session. If there is only one person coming, that feels considerably less weird and more logical to do. You can even bring a boiler, some mugs, and make some tea! I also owe to Matthew R. the idea of focusing on a rolling average rather than the exact number of students, helping me to draw the outline of attendance during the year – there is a sharp fall in December and on the first week after the Christmas vacations.

Problem 4: “What do you do?”

Number one question while tabling. « We go rock-climbing ! », « We sing internet memes a capella together ! », « We do exclusively useless stuff ! », every club has their own shtick. You need to have a concrete answer.  Rabia A., GO at UCL, and Gidi Kadosh., lead of EA Israel whom I met at EAGxPrague, got me thinking early about this. But we didn't really have a clear answer – sure, we meet, we make presentations, we « think together », we can pay for travel if needed (no one needed), we « have books », we make projects, we accompany you for your career plan... Turns out the right answer to this social script was to add the room we met in, the hour we met at, and a couple of examples of what we did so far. Which we didn't have yet..

Problem 5: “What's the difference between…”

A second problem is that we are not the only organization worrying about the kinds of stuff EA worries about. I won't name them and kindly ask you not to name them in the comments, but in short another organization drew on the previous year's HEAs in university for strategic purposes, and that organization, despite not being officially affiliated with EA, was, 'lo and behold, operating within ENS, amongst other. Which meant we had a potential overlap problem.

Surprisingly, the overlap in terms of audience wasn't very big. People attending the other org's activities were largely not attending the EA club meetings. The choice I made to clarify the difference was suggested to me by a Nordic organizer I met in EAGxBerlin 2022 -since we're the EA club, let's be turbo-EA. Argh, but remember. I have to be cautious of signaling within a different culture, shouting « glorious transhumanist future » everywhere around is probably not a good idea. Well, anyhow, doing X is not about displaying one's belonging to X-doers, it's about doing X well. And here it also meant being cautious with words, that's all.

So I planned to basically discuss almost all of the themes existing within the EA conversation and to insist on epistemics, instrumental rationality and ethics.

Problem 6: Students don't have time

We sent first-name emails when people didn’t attend. This worked and proved crucial for the starting of our year: we had one session with zero people showing up. We sent an email individually to every single person on the mailing list, the 300 of them. Then eight people showed up. I think we should not send an email if the attendant lives near a group organizer. I think it’s better to ask the said group organizer to politely get in touch, because it can seem a bit creepy (we had this feedback).

But of course that wasn't enough. Let's be turbo-EA except students don't have time – in a typical week, they won't have the time to read even a single 80k article in full, lest the Sequences. We even tried Rational Animation videos – it didn't work. Solution? No readings. No fellowships. Denser sessions. Repeat the sessions.

This worked. Having the same session twice a week was a very good idea for us. People did come if they were too busy on the default session, and mixed with the habit of replacing a “standard” session with a “cozy” one, this becomes quickly useful and adaptive. We introduced the basics to everyone and, thanks to the students’ ability to quickly absorb information, no one felt behind. One person who joined around March had a harder time, but they eventually caught up. 
 

Problem 7: The club can easily become uninteresting.

Of course everything depends on what you're doing during the session itself. This is what I had to do (note that I sometimes recommend some of them to be more widely adopted within EA globally) :

1 – Convey information

That meant relying on a presentation – remember, readings were not read. I had to (re-)read all of the material on a subject matter, organize it mentally, make a nice presentation which was easy to follow, and cover in no time the most important material. I could afford to be very dense and technical since that’s how most graduate education is in France.

2 – Engage people

Talking in front of a presentation is a nice idea, but it's not a nice idea if it's all there is to see. People have to be engaged, so I'd have them do some exercises, going from guessing the secret meta-ethics of someone to playing Eleusis. My presentations were scattered with small exercises of that kind.

Interestingly, this is one of the things that received the most positive feedback. Workshops are fun, and they ingrain skills in a better way than presentations do.

3 – Let people debate

I can't place myself as the source of all knowledge. Making presentations is considerably more okay in France than in other countries in terms of epistemic risks, since the “teacher status” still means one can be questioned or directly antagonized with, at least intellectually. But I wasn't sure that was enough to avoid epistemic deference, and so wanted to let people debate together. Remember I'm already spending most of the session presenting and organizing a workshop. I attempted to free 30 minutes at the end of each session to let everyone discuss.

4 – Have people do stuff / develop skills

Special thanks for Per Ivar F. on this one, who I talked to during the post EAGxBerlin organizer retreat. 

Talking and thinking is nice. But actually doing stuff and getting new skills is the real goal of the club. My decision was simple: dedicate the entire second semester to projects. Well, hold on – students are usually bad at handing homework on time. I got to discuss with Alex C. from ENS (who is teaching a project-oriented class) and applied the following advice: at first, give them three weeks. Week 1: Find the project and its goal. Week 2: Do the project over the session's time. Week 3: Present the project.

That way, people were primed with finding doable tasks. The second round of projects had to do with their career, and they had already had some time to discuss it with me.

I also attempted something which ended up working poorly: most of the session was spent on object-level, but I would make regular pauses to have us think about what we were doing and whether that was the right way to do it. In hindsight, I think it might have proven more useful to have a different, more interactive form.

5 – Help people argue better and have good epistemics

I think good facilitation is not debating or formally scolding people for not being rigorous enough. I think it's about rephrasing what was just said by relying on the concepts we just saw, re-orienting the topic on point and moderating turn-taking. That's all. But that's already a bit hard to do consistently.

I highly recommend doing at least one Street Epistemology workshop to see what people think of it. My club was incredibly receptive and found it a rare opportunity to practice something they lack the mastery of. This, however, has to be done responsibly, Street Epistemology should not be understood as a way to secretly “debunk” others belief, but an announced, transparent, and consented way to collaborate to get to the truth. I also did workshops on forecasting and epistemic rationality. 

I think argumentation is a very important skill to master, and that a lot of EAs take it too trivially. Being a good rationalist is also about being able to talk to opponents and collaborate to get to the truth, and simply politely voicing the points you disagree with seems to me like a very bad strategy most of the time.

This, along with the concept of Weirdness Points, was also a way for me to attempt to control the group's reputation. Indeed, when someone at some point complained about the EA club existing (despite not interacting with us), the members had a good reaction and didn't engage in adversarial argumentation.

6– Create a strong group

Since they had no free time, members would rarely come to meet-ups, retreats, even less so EAG(x) events. You might say that socials have this precise role, but there was still something missing.

This thing was a feeling of contribution. I think presenting projects is important partly because of that, and that if anything, you should at least have one session of that kind during the year.

Someone was hiring

We had planned to contact the university to discuss visibility at some point. I contacted the departments, as heavily suggested to me by Ram Eirik G. from EA Sussex, which sadly didn’t get answers. We needed each and every of the 400 students of each class of ENS to know we existed, and that was a bit difficult. Since I was busy running the club for most of the year, we did it during the month of May, thinking about possibilities for September. We contacted several members of the administration – as directly suggested by someone during EAGxBerlin, including the delegate director for impact – whose existence was hardly foreseeable, but who does exist.
But it didn't turn out as expected. The “career guidance” office of the university (which we didn't know existed either) was searching for someone who'd be put in charge of high-impact careers. We considered the offer – if it wasn't me, it would probably be someone else, someone who is not aligned with EA values. It would create a slightly weird situation if the club’s advising started conflicting with the official career advisors.

I took some time to think, layed out my plan and we made deals. I'll teach a seminar and have 1:1s with students following it, and doing additional career advising for the students asking for some. The club stays. The university pays me. I didn't conceal anything. The administration heard « Effective Altruism », « no actual expertise on orienting students » and went « okay ». The only thing they want is me not refusing to orient a student, which sounds like good work ethics to me.

Note: I don’t think this is systematically a good idea to pursue – I think the EA Club has to stay important in case the seminar just leaves students bored and going through it for the credits. Here, the counterfactual influenced us, we estimated the impact it’d have and how hard it would be to motivate students when career advising is already a given.

Conclusion

A common pattern

I’ll conclude by pointing at a pattern I’ve noticed while writing this post. Stuff usually goes this way : 

1. The Group Organizer resources suggest doing X.
   1. Case 1: X seems fairly sensible and is done.
      1.  No results. X mutates to take a new form or is given less weight.
      2. Results. X may mutate to become more ambitious.
   2. Case 2: X seems fairly weird and bizarre.
      1. I don’t do it, then meet someone who insist I do it, I argue, they argue then I do it or b.ii.
      2. I try a softened, adapted version of X (go to a. Case 1)
      3. I don’t do it, then meet someone who insists I do it, I argue, they argue, I’m unconvinced, I try b.ii.

What to advise ?

Given the above description, I think that community building advice could potentially gain from an update (I’m not a CB specialist, however, so take this with a grain of salt). This could be in personalizing the advice according to types of countries, or by finding some general rules aimed to adapt to a new terrain. In general, I think that a section insisting on creativity in case of the advice being ill-suited is important.

I’d also like to hammer the fact that EA needs more social scientists, and not only ones who redact surveys, but ones who are ready to do several field observations, and have a strong background in studying cultural differences.

If anything, I think the only good response to constraints is creativity. If you feel that your environment is tricky, try new things. A lot of things will fail, but you will incrementally get to something that works, if you try again, differently, and talk your problems through with someone who listens and summarizes. It’s still a prerequisite to stick to the goals and principles of EA while doing so, of course.

What is hard is that there isn’t a clear “ontology” to play with, there isn’t a collection of small parts that you can arrange in a different order, but this doesn’t mean it’s not solvable. 

Actual Community Building is Constant Fixing

I’m worried about doing bad CB. 

There are tons of criticisms of different EA groups out there: your group can end up with bad epistemics, poor meta-ethics, lack of trust, or even unethical behavior. I think a bad heuristic to follow is to notice the criticisms, and then argue or mention them.

Rather, I think it is better to notice the criticism, evaluate it, then change the program accordingly, observe the result, then argue. I attempted to apply this all throughout this year.

A good community builder should not feel ashamed to update their processes in light of new criticisms. I think I attempted to take in account all credible criticisms of current CB I could find on the forum (according to my own credence) by changing the way I was "doing" EA. I have the general impression that there aren’t a lot of group organizers doing that, and that most would rather add caveats while communicating. I think group organizers should not be afraid of answering to criticism with local reform, all the while avoiding to “water down” EA. Yes, it’s difficult, but it’s also fun and a good opportunity to learn.

[Annex : Mood Timeline]

September: Relatively Stressful, tabling is tiring. Sometimes, a bit of despair when the club was still trying to get stabilized, in case there wasn’t enough attendants. I felt extremely relieved to discover the calendar tool for planning group organizer work. This is when peer support was extremely valuable. EAGxBerlin and the group organizer retreat also helped me gain motivation and insights on my main personal blocks.

October: A bit stressful, I had succeeded to create a group but wasn’t sure where to take it next. I was working on the theory of change and trying to make sure it made sense. I attented a CFAR workshop and the French national retreat which ultimately lead to me spending money more wisely (rather than never spending money) and to take my mental health even more seriously, despite these realisations being very (very) challenging. I think this is probably one of the best things that ever occurred to me so far.

November: Happy, working on the sessions started to become easier.

December: A bit worried, less attendants.

January: Relieved, at that point the group really “locked in”.

February: A bit more stressed as we were trying to shift onto projects and career advising. I had a very blurry program in my head.

March: Progressively more happy as I was progressing on the career 1:1 and the projects were getting worked on.

April: Same as march.

May: A bit more stressed as I felt I needed to buckle up the 1:1s rapidly. I still think I started them a month too late.

June: Less attendants, however those who missed sessions did come to catch up. EAGxWarsaw allowed me to realize what I had done and how far I had come to compared to last year. Thanks to Nina A. for noticing the change ;)