First, I wanted to thank all of the Effective Altruism Global organizers and participants. I found it to be very valuable and overall well put together. There was obviously a ton of work put into it, most by conference organizers who I don't believe will get that much credit for it, and I very much commend their work.
That said, there's always a lot of room for new ideas, and I find I often get a bunch of ideas at and after these conferences. Because of the EAGx events, ideas described now may be able to be put into action somewhat soon and experimented with.
As may be expected, I recommend that people make all of their ideas be independent comments, then upvote the ideas that they think would be the most useful.
Honesty, because community norms
The conference itself was incredible, specifically the best weekend I can remember. Dishonest elements in the marketing beforehand seemed destructive to long-term coordination. Less important short-term effects included
I switched from 'trust everyone at CEA except...' to 'distrust everyone at CEA except...', which is a wasteful position to have to take
dodgy emails convinced approximately -1 of the 12 people I nominated to attend, and now some of my friends who were interested in EA associate it with deception
I believe we should be truly honest when feasible, but at the very least we should not lie outside of extreme circumstances.
[Clarification: I still think it's correct to assign higher default credence to the claims of CEA staff than those of most people, just not the extremely high credence I would like to use. I used the term 'distrust' in an idiosyncratic fashion, which was dumb, and I apologise for not picking this up earlier. 'Be sceptical' would have been more appropriate.]
Hi Benito, Howie -- sure, some highlights I'd recommend all EAs avoid in the future:
Sending emails 'from' other people. Friends I recommended received emails with 'from' name 'Kit Surname via EAG'. Given that I did not create the content of these emails, this seemed somewhat creepy, and harmed outreach.
Untruths, e.g. fake deadlines, 'we trust Kit's judgement', 'I was looking through our attendee database', etc. (My vanity fooled me for a solid few seconds, by the way!)
I can believe that whoever designed the strategy believed this the right thing to do, because the second bullet point are standard marketing tricks. However, the willingness to say things which are not true is evidence for... a willingness to say things which are not true. That's annoying for anyone who wants to collaborate.
One counter-consideration: perhaps many donors and collaborators have a much better feel for the lines which people will or won't cross, hence would still assume complete trustworthiness on bigger issues. Conversely, people less familiar than myself might assume this behavour pervades EA.
Hi Kerry! Congratulations again for the exceptional conference, and thanks for adding detail.
Updates I've made:
... (read more)while in my tiny sample of 13 the emails with 'from' names like 'Kit Surname via EAG' worked out badly, it looks like you produced the most reasonable emails of that form possible without the benefit of hindsight. In answer to your question, I call this dishonest primarily because it gives the appearance of endorsement of content which I do not endorse. I would still not do this.
the deadlines at first appeared to be mainly to generate haste, but some or all had operational function. My blanket terming 'fake deadlines' was therefore wrong.
aside from 'we trust Kit's judgement', I see that most/all other statements made in the campaign were true in a technical sense. However, I maintain that this is insufficient. 'I was looking through our attendee database' is a great example, precisely because the whole message implies specificity to the recipient, while it appears that the looking could have been replaced by a single filter for people who hadn't bought tickets. Likewise for 'ideal participant'. At the very least, I'd bin these along with the "you're a cool perso
Split at least one day of the conference into streams:
People who are lobbying on policy have a lot in common whether they are working in animal rights or xrisk so this could bring separate strands of the movement together. This would also help bring together startup founders and successful businesspeople who want to run their companies more effectively (and otherwise might not meet each other because they're obscured by heaps of students). The charity segment would discuss public outreach, fundraising, and some impact evaluation.
Everyone would spend more time with the people who can help them do better at their jobs, and there's more likelihood of collaboration. It seems like a big win.
Lots of small discussion sessions with 6-20 people.
I personally get the most value of conferences from talking to people. One thing I've found works well at unconferences is that there's more socializing during the 'talks'. There have been some small discussion groups; I think these were quite useful, but I feel they often wandered more than they should have and quality decreased over time.
I'd propose something more like there be 20-minute or 30-minute specific discussion groups led by one person, scheduled back-to-back in 5-30 rooms. Maybe some could be exclusive to specific sets of people (VCs, entrepreneurs).
A guarantee that all the talks/panels will be recorded.
The booklet this year stated that "almost" all the talks would be recorded, which left me worried that, if I missed a talk, I wouldn't be able to watch it in the future (this might just be me). I probably would have skipped more talks and talked to more people if I had a guarantee that all the talks would be recorded.
Also, it would be nice to have a set schedule that didn't change so much during the conference. The online schedule was pretty convenient and was (for the most part) up to date, but people using the physical booklet may have been confused.
Personal effectiveness discussions
In a more ideal world, most effective altruists wouldn't have to know much about cause selection. They would trust the group best at deciding, then spend their time being more effective.
As such, there's a difference between aspect of these conferences aimed at people interested in cause selection, and people interested in being effective, effective altruists. I would bet that discussions on 'effective study habits', 'effective networking', 'leveling up in software engineering', and similar would provide more decision value than ones on cause topics.
Walking groups?
This would probably not be super easy, but I do like walking meetings a lot, and conferences are typically in pretty areas. It could be interesting to schedule very small (2-5 people) discussions or something, have them in walking sessions. Maybe a GPS could track them or something so others could join in.
A list of the main benefits (and costs?) of the event
Conferences are complicated things. I'd be curious to understand as a community what exactly we want to get out of them. The better an understanding there is, the more I imagine it could be optimized.
Some ideas:
- Meeting new people (for future collaboration)
- Introductions to Effective Altruism to those outside the movement
- Staying in touch with people (this should be broken down)
- Having the 'experts' discuss ideas with each other
- Having new ideas proposed & evaluated
- Skill-building for members
- Enco
... (read more)A public list of ways people could give/take help.
Many people may be looking for specific things at the conference, or able to offer things. I imagine having a big list of these somewhere may help for organizing.
Badges with kinds of info on what you do (not just your name)
Names don't reveal much about people. It would be useful to have a little bit about a person's background on their badge, so you don't need to keep on asking for that.
Better yet, maybe they would have a numeric ID on their badge (832), which could be searched on the app/website to learn a lot more about them (via mobile app)
Find better ways of helping people meet other people they'd want to meet.
Probably the most useful part of conferences is meeting other people who are relevant to you and your work. However, this is surprisingly hard to do: even if you go to a talk in your area(s), it's still hard to meet the other audience members. Networking is basically random, which isn't very satisfying.
Potential solutions and there may be others out there:
-1 minute pitches where people can say who they are, what they're working on and what sort of people they want to speak to ("I... (read more)
A minimalist theme
I think the branding of Effective Altruism has never really been figured out. I'm going to propose a general design schema that's very minimalist, which I think fits into a stoic nature that I associate with Effective Altruism.
This was some of the inspiration for the .impact brand. http://dotimpact.im/
A bias for expected value calculations in (most) talks
I (somewhat obviously) have a large preference for numeric estimates. I strongly prefer when people presenting their organizations give cost effectiveness numbers in their talks. That said, for the few talks I have seen at EA conferences, I haven't seen this that much (still much more than other conferences, but that's not saying that much.)
I would find it very interesting if there could be a standard for most talks proposing or discussing some program to end their talk with some cost effectiveness values or standard types of quantifications.
EA Org Update Sessions
There are a bunch of nonprofits/orgs involved in the movement. This has happened a bit before, but I think it could be quite nice to have a long panel or two where lots of EA orgs go up for 5-15 min each to explain how the last year went for them and to answer questions.
Automatic meeting booking
I've found meeting specific people to be a bit painful, there were a lot of coordination issues. I imagine some kind of 'speed dating', where you choose / are matched up with a bunch of specific people before the conference, then during there's a specific time periods where people are assigned to meet each other at specific locations.
Recorded talks pre-conference
I prefer watching the talks at 2x speed, so don't like watching them at 1x speed at the conference. I imagine it would be interesting to assign people 'homework' and have some talks available before the event. Then at the event there would be discussion meetings about those talks instead.
Period of office hours that isn't in competition with any (or few) talks near the end of the conference.
While I know that this year's EAG had office hours with different organizations scattered throughout the weekend, I thought that this aspect of the conference was actually handled better in 2015.
Office hours seem to be done better when they have their own time allotted to them that isn't in competition with any other talk. People new to EA seem to routinely not take advantage of the benefits of meeting the leaders of EA Orgs at EAG, both because they un... (read more)
Quick feedback forms for workshops/discussion groups would be nice; I think most of the workshops I attended didn't allow any opportunity for feedback, and I would have had comments for them.
Panel on ways that lightning talk members could be more effective.
Imagine there are 2-5 'experts', then 4 to 15 people would publicly come up to them and discuss their challenges or efforts. Then the experts brainstorm ways for those individuals/groups to be more effective.
Doesn't have to be public.
Public Giving What We Can Pledges
Someone else mentioned this, and a few conferences do this, but maybe more could.
Basically, have some time for people to publicly make the GWWC pledge or similar.
Not having the group photo.
The group photo always seems to take 20 minutes or so. It's kind of fun, but times the number of participants, (1k?), that's ~300 hours, or around $10k of value. Is it worth it? I'm skeptical, but could see it.
A ban on misused words like 'need' (in talks)
I'm watching a few EAG videos now and repeatedly witness the word 'need' get used for things. Like, "our industry needs people to research topic X", or "we need more money to field X".
I'm still not sure what need actually means, but have found that when it's used it's often essentially a logical fallacy. For instance, compare the phrase, "we need people to research topic X", with the phrase, "we believe there's a level of cost-effective opportunity for research topic X".... (read more)