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: Some intuitions about fellowship programs, published by Joel Becker on January 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Epistemic status: not sure how reliable my intuition is, but I do have more experience with these programs than most.

TL;DR

Making sure >30 participants have regular opportunities to spontaneously gather, active programming, basic food and medical amenities, and common knowledge about visit dates hugely increases the benefit of residential fellowship programs.

For transparency, I should note a stronger, less confident belief of mine that I will not defend here. My instinct is that all of the above factors are not merely beneficial but necessary in order for these programs to be worth their cost (assuming that their goals are indeed as I describe below). I am aware that some factors come with large time or money costs. If these costs are prohibitive, so be it.

Background

I ran one of these programs and participated in two others. So what follows is a post-mortem of my own mistakes as much as it is feedback for organizers and recommendations for funders and organizers considering future initiatives.

It’s worth emphasizing that I got lots out of each of these experiences, and that I feel very grateful to fellow participants and organizers!

Fellowship programs

I take the goals of these programs to be some combination of:

Increasing short-term productivity,

Generating counterfactual collaborations/relationships, and

Moving participants towards more impactful careers at an accelerated rate.

I take the method of these programs to be some combination of:

Hosting people who largely do not know each other in a new physical environment for a small number of months,

Covering the cost of accommodation, co-working space, and travel to-and-from, and

Organizing social and professional activities.

Things that I am not talking about include:

Communities where many people already know one another, and

Themed retreats, or other temporary communities organized around a professional aptitude/cause area/etc.

Number of participants

My intuition is that hosting 35 participants is much, much better than hosting 25. Not only in total, but on a per-participant basis.

Evidence for the directional claim:

In the program I ran, the overwhelming majority of reported positive impact anecdotes came during the ~50% of the time we hosted >30 participants.

In fact, I need to get to the joint-30th most subjectively impressive anecdote before finding one I think came about during the time we hosted <=30 participants.

A possible exception is the first few weeks of the program, when participants came across many novel ideas, relationships, and physical spaces even with smaller numbers of participants.

With >30 participants, shared spaces were often packed in evenings, participants participated in and ran a wider variety of well-attended activities, the office felt alive, and work felt urgent.

Among other ~vibes~ based on discussions with participants, my time as a participant, and my time as an organizer.

30 might feel like an arbitrary cut-off: readers might think that I don’t mean this literally. In fact, I am tempted to defend this close-to-literally. One piece of evidence: in my experience, there are almost no spontaneous gatherings of most participants below 25; these gatherings become somewhat more likely beyond this, then shoot up around 30. They continue increasing beyond 35, albeit more slowly.

My guess is that the effect runs through two mechanisms:

The chance that someone's professional experiences are highly complementary with your own increases sharply around this point.

Maybe because some small clusters of people with shared interests choose to participate at the same time — although I think this was largely not the case.

The chance that someone will join you if you spontaneo...