EA - Future Academy - Successes, Challenges, and Recommendations to the Community by SebastianSchmidt

Welcome 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: Future Academy - Successes, Challenges, and Recommendations to the Community, published by SebastianSchmidt on July 9, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.IntroductionImpact Academy is a new field-building and educational institution seeking to enable people to become world-class leaders, thinkers, and doers, using their careers and character to solve the world’s most pressing problems and create the best possible future. Impact Academy was founded by Vilhelm Skoglund, Sebastian Schmidt, and Lowe Lundin. We have already secured significant funding to set up the organization and carry out ambitious projects in 2023 and beyond. Please read this document for more about Impact Academy, our Theory of Change, and our two upcoming projects.The purpose of this document is to provide an extensive evaluation and reflection on Future Academy - our first program (and experiment). Future Academy aimed to equip university students and early-career professionals worldwide with the thinking, skills, and resources they need to pursue ambitious and impactful careers. It was a free six-month program consisting of four in-person weekends with workshops, presentations, socials, and monthly digital events. Furthermore, the 21 fellows worked on an impact project with an experienced mentor and received professional coaching to empower them to increase their impact and become their best selves. Upon completion of the program, all participants went to a global impact conference (EAGx Nordics) where four fellows presented their projects. We awarded stipends of a total of $20,000 to the best projects.The projects included a sentiment analysis of public perception of AI risk, a philosophy AI alignment paper, and an organization idea for improving research talent in Tanzania. Our faculty included entrepreneurs and professors from Oxford University and UC Berkeley.Note that this document attempts to assess to what extent we’ve served the world. This involves an assessment of the wonderful fellows who participated in Future Academy, and our ability to help them. This is not meant as an evaluation of peoples’ worth nor a definite score of general abilities, but an evaluation of our ability to help. We hope we do not offend anyone and have tried our best not to do so, but if you think we write anything inappropriate, please let us know in the comments or by reaching out to sebastian [at] impactacademy.org.Main results and successesWe confirmed a key hypothesis underlying Future Academy - namely that we can attract promising and talented people who i) have no to moderate knowledge of Effective Altruism and longtermism, ii) are coming from underserved regions (e.g., 40% came from Southern and Eastern Europe), and are more diverse (e.g., 56% were female).We created a bespoke primary metric called counterfactual expected career contribution (CECC) inspired by 80,000 hours’ IASPC metric and Centre for Effective Altruism’s HEA metric. We think the total score was 22.8, and ~ four fellows made up the majority of that score.To give an understanding of the CECC metric, we’ll give an example. Take an imaginary fellow, Alice. Before the intervention, based on our surveys and initial interactions, we expected that she may have an impactful career, but that she is unlikely to pursue a priority path based on IA principles. We rate her Expected Career Contribution (ECC) to be 2. After the program, based on surveys and interactions, we rate her as 10 (ECC) because we have seen that she’s now applying for a full-time junior role in a priority path guided by impartial altruism. We also asked her (and ourselves) to what extent that change was due to IA and estimated that to be 10%. To get our final Counterfactual Expected Career Contribution (CECC) for Alice, we subtract her initial ECC score of 2 from her fi...