They drifted away from the community, but are they still working towards EA goals?

• If they have stopped working towards EA goals, going to this event could be an opportunity to explore whether this is a decision they [still] endorse.

• If they have continued to work towards EA goals on their own, going to this event could be a good opportunity to learn & share the kind of things that are most readily learned & shared through face-to-face chitchat. (A fairly large set of things, in my experience.) Additionally, making new face-to-face connections with people lets you trade favors and establish collaborative relationships that are harder to establish through e.g. sending them a cold email. (See: EA is vetting-constrained.) I expect the benefit here will be high variance. There's a high probability you have a weekend full of friendly-but-useless video calls (which will hopefully help with quarantine blues at least!) There's a small probability that you end up learning or sharing something that makes a big difference for you or someone else, or making an important new connection. (If someone hasn't been interacting with the community as much, I expect this probability to be higher, since the backlog of conversations they haven't had and new people they haven't met is gonna be larger.)

Might be worth noting the conventional wisdom in the business world, that networking is really important. As EAs we might have a bias towards things which are more measurable and legible, and I don't think the benefits of networking are always like that.

I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

Richard Hamming, Turing award winner, on what he observed at Bell Labs

There are a number of reasons that people drift away from the community. Ben West has a sequence of posts about this here.

I don’t know what led your friends to drift away, but it’s often the case that people are still interested in EA ideas but other events in their life take higher priority for a while. If that applies to your friends, then we think the main benefits of attending this event are:

• Give and receive feedback on career, study, or donation plans
• Make new connections and reconnect with old contacts
• Discover and discuss interesting ideas

We’ll also have a session at the event exploring the different retention factors that Ben identifies in his posts (e.g. balancing parenting with EA, or finding a way to contribute if you don’t have experience that’s relevant to the field you want to work in). Hearing different people in the community sharing their experiences about this may also be helpful to your friends.

Thanks for letting us know Josh. Your application has been received. We're investigating the issue further but it seems it's not affecting all users.