EA - Training for Good - Update and Plans for 2023 by Cillian Crosson

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Training for Good - Update & Plans for 2023, published by Cillian Crosson on November 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryTraining for Good will now focus exclusively on programmes that enable talented and altruistic early-career professionals to directly enter the first stage of high impact careers.Concretely, we will only run the following programmes in Sep 2022 - Aug 2023:1. EU Tech Policy Fellowship.2. Tarbell Fellowship (journalism)3. An unannounced 3rd programme which is still under developmentApplications for the 2023 EU Tech Policy Fellowship are open until December 11. Apply here.In year 1, we experimented with ~7 different programmes, 6 of which have now been discontinued. This is largely because we believe that focus is important & wanted to double-down on the most promising programme we had identified thus far (the EU Tech Policy Fellowship which successfully placed 7 fellows in relevant European think tanks focused on emerging technology policy).We plan to have an external review of Training for Good conducted between July 2023 - December 2023. We will default to sharing this publicly.IntroductionTraining for Good is an impact-focused training organisation, incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship in 2021.Quite a lot has changed since our launch in September 2021. We considered our first year to be an exploratory period in which we ran many, many different projects. We’ve now discontinued the majority of these programmes and have narrowed our focus to running fellowships that directly place early-career individuals in impactful careers.Now that TFG has a clearer focus, we're writing this post to update others in the EA community on our activities and the scope of our organisation.What we doTraining for Good runs fellowships that place talented professionals in impactful careers in policy, journalism & other areas. We do this by providing a combination of stipends, mentorship from experienced professionals, training and placements in relevant organisations.Between Sep 2022 - Aug 2023 (i.e. year 2), we plan to only run the following programmes:EU Tech Policy FellowshipTarbell FellowshipAn unannounced 3rd programme which is still under developmentWhy this might be importantMany high impact career paths are neglected by talented and altruistic people, often because they lack clear pathways for entry. This is limiting progress on some of the world’s most important problems: reducing existential risk, ending factory farming and tackling global poverty.TFG seeks to provide concrete opportunities for early-career professionals to gain entry level roles in impactful career paths that are difficult to enter. Building these talent pipelines could be important because:Direct progress on problems: Talented individuals in these career paths can directly contribute to progress on solving the world’s most important problemsCloser towards the “ideal portfolio”: We mostly take a portfolio approach to doing good. One could imagine an optimal distribution of talent within the effective altruism community, which might involve people pursuing a variety of different career paths. With our fellowships, we are attempting to move the effective altruism community closer towards this ideal allocation by enabling people to pursue paths that we believe are currently underrepresented (and expect to remain so) within this community’s portfolio. We believe that thinking in these terms is particularly useful partly due to:Diminishing returns from certain career pathsEpistemic uncertainty about which career paths are best (and the associated information value from reducing this uncertainty somewhat)Differing personal fit for individuals across different career pathsConcrete opportunities: The number of people interested in effective altruism has been g...