I ran another "EA in the Lakes" event. This basically entailed renting a community hostel (Pardshaw Quaker Centre) in the Lake District, UK, for 3 nights Friday-Monday. I posted some adverts up to attract some EAs looking for a holiday and did not evaluate applications. Here's my report on how it went.

We followed the same format as last time of keeping morning and evenings open for attendee-contributed sessions (one EA and one non-EA topic in each timeslot), while spending afternoons out walking by / swimming in a lake, Loweswater or Ennerdale. We had a couple of repeat attendees but mostly new people - although several of the new people were there by a personal referral of a previous attendee, which is a function both of where I posted the adverts and also a good sign that the last one had been at the very least enjoyable.

Reflections on Depth-First Networking

Overall I think the event went really well. One of the longer-term EA attendees came up with "depth-first networking" to describe the event format I am trying to cultivate. I basically agree with this trio:

• encouragement and capacity to speak up with what's really on your heart
• encouragement and capacity to criticise the ideas of others openly and good-naturedly
• giving additional time and space for conversations that seem to have caught a depth to play out to conclusion, and allowing an audience to witness them if particularly interested - this involves breaks from structured activity, shared meals, going for walks, staying up late chatting, etc.

to be hallmarks of what I'd consider depth-first networking. There is a degree of authenticity to it that I consider key to engaging people who have or are developing expertise. However it really does require that the average engagement and reflection capacity of your group is already high, and that your group has a good enough balance between people who prefer to come up with ideas and people who prefer to evaluate them (and enough people who can take either role as required) to generate deep conversations regularly. Most EA stuff I've been to lacks evaluative community capacity, so needs more effective givers in attendance (or grantmakers, but I hear they're very busy). Otherwise you end up feeling like you're in an endless series of overlapping pitch meetings over half-baked misguided ideas.

I recommend pairing depth-first networking with a library of easily accessible "the well-formatted basic concepts" so that you can handle newcomers, because people who are way into it are generally pretty terrible at explaining concepts to newcomers without a structured prompt. In my case I brought a physical library of various EA books to the event.

Attendee feedback

My favoured feedback style these days is the "What did you like the most?", "What would you have liked more of?", "What did you find the most helpful?", "What would it have been helpful to have more of?" format. I feel it is somewhat easy for people to answer and also talk about their answers, and gives a useful summary of impressions. Here's my main impression takeaways:

• People very clearly liked the lake trips and other nature walks.
• People would have liked more attendees, more activities, more general bustle.
• People found it helpful to have time to genuinely think and reflect, make EA friends, and ask questions about EA.
• People would have found it helpful to have a more structured process of allocating event chores (cooking etc).

All in all, this is about what I expected from the event - the balance between structured and unstructured time is a difficult one to strike, and I think people tend to like (good) structure more but find (good) unstructure more helpful. Some individual anonymised feedback sheets are below, if you're interested in more details or about the implied process of collection:

Somewhat spiritual Kes thoughts on event organising:

I take a very heavy principles-first stance on EA organising. This is following the line that if you persuade someone on a cause they'll stick with it only until someone else persuades them on the next cause, but if you develop their own capacity to do good better (and get them to understand the immense value this can bring to them) they're basically stuck to this idea and skillset for life - it's like riding a bike - and then over the entirety of the rest of their life they'll go and have a lot of positive impact, within or outside of formal EA spaces.

Some people say (often somewhat disparagingly) that EA is a religion. I would offer a counterpoint - that principles-first EA done right is half a religion, being composed of fairly demanding virtue-based spiritual guidance about acting with ambition and sacrificing things to achieve more good plus a corresponding community that operates on something roughly like these principles, but almost no corresponding guidance on interpersonal life conduct. It therefore operates quite well when plugged into existing religious, spiritual and psychological frameworks (good ones, anyways) that provide the guidance on interpersonal life conduct needed to stick with EA's moral demandingness without getting very depressed or committing fraud. A variety of possible religious spiritual or psychological frameworks could work, meaning EA has expansion potential in lots of places, and this is why EA only being half a religion is a huge strength of EA not a weakness.

For this event I have chosen the fairly neutral spiritual nature-connection framework of "let's all periodically touch grass and go look at a lake and watch the sunset", combined with a grab bag collection of archetypally Quaker religious principles operating in the background ("we don't drink alcohol in social time",  "we abolish the appearance of hierarchies in the spaces we share with each other", "we simplify structural complexity down to the absolute minimum required", "we focus on substance over symbol", "we communally meet below our means and disdain unnecessary purchases", "we talk about our personal lives with each other and admit our own messy faults and failings", "we encourage deep reflection on whatever you want to say or have said but permit you to say it") that are, I should emphasise, in no way mandatory parts of EA. But they work for this kind of event, and also many of the non-EA events run up at the Quaker centre, and I'm good at working with them as an organiser.

At some point I will go round up all the effective altruist Quakers I know and we might start a (Friendly) schism.

Cost:

I know there's ongoing discourse about EA retreat costs, so I figure I'd lay down some transparency.

Total cost £450 for site rental + about £250 for food ingredients + estimated £200 for travel and sundry activities expenses + my time and energy. The financial cost was entirely covered by tickets which ran at £100 non-concession /£50 concession (you are a concession if £100 for a 3-night catered holiday sounds off-puttingly expensive).

My time and energy cost was covered by me putting about £900 of my pledge money towards paying for the site's rental by other EA groups - so that's two free weekend rentals (want one? ask me!). I always find it rather difficult to work out how to account for my time and energy as a volunteer EA community organiser, but I am coming around to the idea that I should be accounting for it somehow, even if it's just waiving pledge money from an EA activity I don't connect with much to one that I do. It helps my internal life accounting to budget that I have done something, and I think it was worth about this much.

Cost-effectiveness: idk, infinite? I certainly feel no need to do a formal analysis.

Other thoughts that may be of practical use to someone running something similar but that don't fit in this narrative:

• Over half the attendees continue to be in the self-rated "can't afford £100 for a 3-night catered holiday" finances bracket. I basically continue to believe this - most of those in this bracket are students or jobseekers. Nonetheless, having a concession / non-concession rate means in practice that the present effective givers of the group (who tend to be older and established in work) are pretty much bankrolling the event, rather than an EA grant doing it (which I'll note is effective givers with extra steps).
• Not using a grant also means that people at the event can openly criticise any EA structures they want without implying a threat to the event's funding source. This is key to depth-first networking (of people who have or want expertise in EA infrastructure). Our icebreaker round was "Name, an interesting thing about you, and what part of EA you disagree with the most" which was a hoot and immediately broke a lot of ice.
• Notably, the effective givers of the group still seem 100% happy to go somewhere with simple facilities, in order to keep the overall infrastructure costs down, even though I'm sure some of them could afford much fancier places if they so wanted. Maybe there's self-selection in who signed up, but they were all happy with simple facilities and not put off by the idea of crashing on a floor bed with a sleeping bag. I get this myself - since signing my giving pledge a few years ago, overly luxurious and expensive holiday ideas have started seeming more and more inherently soulless to me, and I've found a lot of personal joy in simpler ways of relaxing and spending time in community and with nature. Who the hell actually wants to fly somewhere and stay in a fancy hotel - flights are stressful and tedious, while fancy hotels have shit vegan options and I prefer home cooking actually. I feel there's something about taking effective giving seriously that opts you out of the status games common to higher-income social circles, in ways that are ultimately really good for your overall wellbeing.
• Some people at the event would have preferred more top-down structured activities / less unstructured time, introductions focused more around finding collaboration partners, and generally more of the "enacting" side of EA rather than the "seeking" side. I could also see this working as an "EA in Nature" kind of event but it would probably have to be cause area specific rather than principles-first, and some cause areas might work better than others. Someone there had a conversation with me about an AI safety retreat they'd been to that was in a really nice nature spot, yet basically all the attendees never went outside.
• EAs on the whole don't have sleeping bags. This is a large difference from my usual crowd and one that baffles me. In the end I was bringing 7 sets of sleeping gear and loaning out 6 of them (my housemates and I all have a variety of different thicknesses of sleeping bags for camping in different seasons so all together I have a pretty impressive stash to loan out). I highly recommend owning at least one sleeping bag, even if you're a city kid through and through - it makes crashing on your mate's sofa a far more viable proposition and so opens up a lot of cheap travel opportunities. But if you're organising something like this for EAs that's bigger, or you don't have a sleeping bag stash, maybe do it in a youth hostel that provides bedding.
• EAs on the whole don't have cars. This means I was doing a bunch of shuttling to lakes again. I see it hit various people's feedback sheets. I really need to start constructing a list of local EAs with cars who I can specifically invite to all my stuff to sort my car problems.
• We had better overall cooking skills this time around. I find the best cooks in EA tend to roughly be from the animal advocacy side of EA, on account of the ethical veganism (or at least lacto-vegetarianism) that necessitates either learning to cook, or having a dull and unhealthy life. This time the event food was advertised as all vegan. Maybe this was the reason we had more people who could cook vegan food well, or maybe not.
• I have talked about this event / event series with a bunch of non-EAs (mostly, but not exclusively, Quakers and those who run in that circle, so vaguely leftist in political orientation and 50+ in age). I have told them I was "trying to encourage a bunch of young adults who want to do good in the world to deeply reflect on what life choices would be required to actually do it". Everyone is very happy about that, even people who would normally baulk very hard at utilitarian thinking. I think this means something for improving EA reputational comms.

Conclusion

Touching grass can be a high-EV activity.