Tl;dr: This weekend (15-17 November), we will broadcast 30+ hours of live EAGxVirtual 2024 speaker talks! Everyone, including those that aren’t registered for the conference, can watch.
View the schedule and watch live here. Comment on this post to discuss the livestream.
This is part of our goal of making content and opportunities accessible to the global EA community.
The livestream is only a portion of the programming available to registered attendees. Full access includes 20+ office hours, 25+ meetups, workshops, and access to Swapcard networking with 1000+ attendees. Sign up to get notified about the next virtual conference.
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In our announcement post, we explained why we are hosting a virtual event – to connect the global EA community. We’ll do this by providing access to EA content, the ability to meet others through Swapcard 1-on-1s and cause area/affinity group meetups, giving visibility to high-impact opportunities, and other unique programming.
In our update post, we shared a preview of the programming, highlighting a few speakers, the organisation fair, meetups, lightning talk session, and mentorship program.
What we are excited about this weekend
Welcoming EA community members from 86 countries!
- 27 people are the only ones who registered from their country, so this may be one of the best opportunities they have to engage with EA ideas and community.
Seeing a record 100+ content sessions
- While in-person EAG events emphasize 1:1s, we are less certain this is the best focus for EAGxVirtual. Many attendees are newcomers to EA, so we’ve designed programming to help them start engaging with ideas and connect with their regional communities. We don’t have all the answers yet and hope to get some more in the coming weeks.
Why we’re publicly livestreaming the talks
EAGxVirtual 2024 offered free registration, so it might seem like everyone interested would already be signed up.
We’ve actually received emails from attendees asking if they should attend. For every question we received, there are likely others who have the same doubts. Here are some hesitations that people have expressed:
- They cannot commit to the entire weekend or confirm their schedule in advance
- Imposter syndrome/don’t feel qualified enough to attend
- Don’t want to take the place of others
- Uncertainty about the experience level/age of attendees
- Past online events didn’t meet expectations
We understand that people have different work and life circumstances. So in the interest of accessibility and transparency, we decided it was worthwhile to trial publicly streaming the live talk sessions. We welcome your feedback on this decision.
This does not provide access to the other portions of the conference, such as the virtual meetups, 1:1 booking function in Swapcard, or office hours.
These livestreamed talk recordings will be instantly available on Swapcard after a session ends.
Watch the livestreamHuge thanks to the EA Community for supporting us
Although the conference hasn’t ended, we’re already so grateful to the local EA groups, partner organizations, volunteers, and community members making this weekend possible.
Here are a few screenshots of from EA Manchester, AE Brasil, EA Christians, and EA Hong Kong 💙
How to participate
We hope that EAGxVirtual 2024 will help to seed conversations, collaborations, and new opportunities--even for people who don't attend.
- For registered attendees:
- Besides watching the content sessions, we encourage you to attend meetups, book 1:1s, and engage with other attendees
If you’ve attended this year’s conference, share your experience in this post's comments. It may help provide guidance or confidence to someone else in a similar situation
- For people watching the livestream only:
- Sign up to get notified about the next virtual conference
- Comment on this post below 👇 to discuss the livestreamed sessions
Lingering thoughts on the talk "How to Handle Worldview Uncertainty" by Hayley Clatterbuck (Rethink Priorities):
The talk proposed several ways that altruists with conflicting values can bargain in mutually beneficial ways, like loans, wagers, and trades, and suggested that the EA community should try to implement these more in practice and design institutions and mechanisms that incentivize them.
I think the EA Donation Election is an example of a community-wide mechanism for brokering trades between multiple anonymous donors. To illustrate this, consider a simple example of a trade, where Alice and Bob are donors with conflicting altruistic priorities. Alice's top charity is Direct Transfers Everywhere and her second favorite is Pandemics No More. Bob's top charity is Lawyers for Chickens, and his second favorite is Pandemics No More. Bob is concerned that Alice's donating to Direct Transfers Everywhere would cancel out the animal welfare benefits of his donating to Lawyers for Chickens, so he proposes that they both donate to their second choice, Pandemics No More.
The Donation Election does this in an automated, anonymous, community-wide way by using a mechanism like ranked-choice voting (RCV) to select winning charities. (The 2024 election uses RCV; the 2023 election used a points-based system similar to RCV.) Suppose that Alice and Bob are voting in the Donation Election—and for simplicity, we'll pretend that the election uses RCV. If their first-choice charities (Direct Transfers Everywhere and Lawyers for Chickens) are not that popular among the electorate, those candidates will be eliminated, and Alice and Bob's votes reallocated to Pandemics No More. This achieves the same outcome as the trade in the previous example automatically, even though Alice and Bob may not have ever personally met and agreed to that trade.
Update: The 2024 Donation Election is using straight-up ranked-choice voting; details here.