The Nonlinear Library EA - Lessons from two years of talent search pilots by Jamie Harris
May 10, 2024
15:08
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: Lessons from two years of talent search pilots, published by Jamie Harris on May 10, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Tl;dr:
Leaf supports exceptional teenagers to explore how they can do the most good.
We've run 3 residential programmes and 4 different types of online fellowship: general to having high positive impact, focused on university decision-making, cause-specific, and subject-specific.
I'm excited about the online programmes (especially subject-specific) as being cost-effective and highly scalable.
I plan to actually scale these! You might be able to help through:
Advising Leaf
Being a facilitator or guest speaker
Working for Leaf later this year
Funding Leaf
There are lots of other mini insights and updates, summarised below.
I wrote this post quickly, adapting from an existing internal doc, so that I could do an '80:20' version of sharing insights. Please message me if you'd like access to the original doc with lots more detail (it's 50 pages, mostly of summary tables of metrics I track), evidence, and reasoning transparency. Please briefly explain who you are and why you're interested in access.
Background on Leaf
I'm Managing Director of Leaf; we support exceptional teenagers to explore how they can best help others, save lives, or change the course of history.
In conventional educational systems, teenagers don't have support or mentorship to explore how they can do good. The incentives and encouragement for smart teens are mostly about getting into uni and demonstrating their intelligence, not thinking through how to use those gifts.
And yet they're already making decisions relevant to doing good, like what subjects to study at university, what sort of internships to get or project to pursue, and just which problems to focus on finding out more about.
Meanwhile, many of the world's most pressing problems are constrained by not having access to enough talented applicants and entrepreneurs. There's a need to ensure that smart students explore important and neglected problems, rather than just defaulting to family- or status-driven careers, or tackling the problems made most salient to them through the media.
Leaf supports these exceptional teenagers to start exploring, make better decisions and get on a high-impact trajectory.
Programmes summary
Programme
Dates
Motivation and goals
Key lessons
Residential pilot, 2021:
"Building a Better Future"
(Not me) July to October 2021 (active October 2021)
I didn't set this up so can't really comment, but I think it was similar to the reasons here.
Students seemed brighter and more engaged with the content than I expected.
Turns out that you can get really high quality applicants to programmes if you contact lots of different places, even with cold outreach methods, no demonstrable track record, and a very MVP website with stock images. The previous team contacted ~200 schools and received ~70 applications, of which they accepted 16.
There was fuller attendance than I expected - all 16 applicants offered a place made it to the residential, whereas I had expected closer to ~50% drop out, as often happens with free events.
(Also it seemed plausibly my comparative advantage given my experience in teaching and talent search / community building.)
Summer residential, 2022:
"Building a Better Future, 2022"
February to September 2022 (active August 2022) with some subsequent follow-up and strategic planning
Try out slightly scaling what seemed like a successful model for talent search and community building.
I took on Leaf, handed over from Alex Holness-Tofts; it was partly just about replicating the success of the pilot in the summer without doing anything too ambitious.
Managed to identify a reasonably promising group of young people, and successfully encouraged some engagement with effective altruism and longtermi...
Tl;dr:
Leaf supports exceptional teenagers to explore how they can do the most good.
We've run 3 residential programmes and 4 different types of online fellowship: general to having high positive impact, focused on university decision-making, cause-specific, and subject-specific.
I'm excited about the online programmes (especially subject-specific) as being cost-effective and highly scalable.
I plan to actually scale these! You might be able to help through:
Advising Leaf
Being a facilitator or guest speaker
Working for Leaf later this year
Funding Leaf
There are lots of other mini insights and updates, summarised below.
I wrote this post quickly, adapting from an existing internal doc, so that I could do an '80:20' version of sharing insights. Please message me if you'd like access to the original doc with lots more detail (it's 50 pages, mostly of summary tables of metrics I track), evidence, and reasoning transparency. Please briefly explain who you are and why you're interested in access.
Background on Leaf
I'm Managing Director of Leaf; we support exceptional teenagers to explore how they can best help others, save lives, or change the course of history.
In conventional educational systems, teenagers don't have support or mentorship to explore how they can do good. The incentives and encouragement for smart teens are mostly about getting into uni and demonstrating their intelligence, not thinking through how to use those gifts.
And yet they're already making decisions relevant to doing good, like what subjects to study at university, what sort of internships to get or project to pursue, and just which problems to focus on finding out more about.
Meanwhile, many of the world's most pressing problems are constrained by not having access to enough talented applicants and entrepreneurs. There's a need to ensure that smart students explore important and neglected problems, rather than just defaulting to family- or status-driven careers, or tackling the problems made most salient to them through the media.
Leaf supports these exceptional teenagers to start exploring, make better decisions and get on a high-impact trajectory.
Programmes summary
Programme
Dates
Motivation and goals
Key lessons
Residential pilot, 2021:
"Building a Better Future"
(Not me) July to October 2021 (active October 2021)
I didn't set this up so can't really comment, but I think it was similar to the reasons here.
Students seemed brighter and more engaged with the content than I expected.
Turns out that you can get really high quality applicants to programmes if you contact lots of different places, even with cold outreach methods, no demonstrable track record, and a very MVP website with stock images. The previous team contacted ~200 schools and received ~70 applications, of which they accepted 16.
There was fuller attendance than I expected - all 16 applicants offered a place made it to the residential, whereas I had expected closer to ~50% drop out, as often happens with free events.
(Also it seemed plausibly my comparative advantage given my experience in teaching and talent search / community building.)
Summer residential, 2022:
"Building a Better Future, 2022"
February to September 2022 (active August 2022) with some subsequent follow-up and strategic planning
Try out slightly scaling what seemed like a successful model for talent search and community building.
I took on Leaf, handed over from Alex Holness-Tofts; it was partly just about replicating the success of the pilot in the summer without doing anything too ambitious.
Managed to identify a reasonably promising group of young people, and successfully encouraged some engagement with effective altruism and longtermi...