All of Eli_Nathan's Comments + Replies

CEA is hiring for someone to lead the EA Global program. CEA's three flagship EAG conferences facilitate tens of thousands of highly impactful connections each year that help people build professional relationships, apply for jobs, and make other critical career decisions.

This is a role that comes with a large amount of autonomy, and one that plays a key role in shaping a key piece of the effective altruism community’s landscape. 

See more details and apply here!

Having this non-relevant experience is unlikely to harm someone's chances of getting a junior generalist ops role, but it might not help much either, and an application might be seen as weak overall if this is all they're putting forward.

Relevant experience might include: organizing some kind of student group (EA or otherwise), volunteering at a conference, working part time as someone's assistant, supporting or running a project where there would have been ops-type work (like running a cake delivery business), or doing any kind of service-related job like working in a coffee shop or restaurant.

As counterexamples, things that are not relevant experience might include: working on a challenging EA research project, academic credentials, building something technical where technical skills are not really part of the job.

For strong writing I'm thinking of things like: a near complete lack of typos, incorrect word choices, or writing-related formatting issues. I'm also thinking of whether the writing flows well, i.e., if I read it aloud (or in my head) does it make sense and sound good. In certain cases tone or register might matter too, for example whether the writing is too formal/informal for the required context. In many cases I expect applicants can actually write quite well but underperform, perhaps because they're stressed, tired, or don't realize how high the bar wi... (read more)

Applications are still open for upcoming EA Global conferences in 2024!

• EA Global: London (31 May–2 June) | Application deadline is in ~6 weeks

• EA Global: Boston (1–3 November)

Apply here and find more details on our website, you can also email the team at hello@eaglobal.org if you have any questions.

Applications for EA Global: Bay Area 2024 (Global Catastrophic Risks) are still open and close on January 21, at 11:59 pm PT (apply here)!

We’re excited to be hosting our first EA Global focussed on global catastrophic risks (GCRs). We'll be welcoming up to 1000 attendees at the Oakland Marriott City Center and platforming high-quality content related to GCRs, including AI safety, biorisks, nuclear security, and more.

We have limited travel funding available. More information can be found on the event page and EA Global FAQ. If you have any questions, please... (read more)

Thanks for the suggestion David — we've thought about this and might consider it for the future, but I worry it would be a fair amount of work for a low-quality product (that I expect wouldn't get many views). However for our recent Boston event we did take audio recordings of most talks and are planning to have many of them written up as Forum posts soon.

Hi Joie — unfortunately there won't be an option to attend this conference virtually, though we expect talks from the conference will be available on our YouTube channel after the event. It's also very likely that there'll be some sort of virtual EA conference in 2024 (an EAGxVirtual or an EAG Virtual or both).

Open to it for 2025, though looks like at least Oxford will still have exams then (exams often stretch until 1–2 weeks after the end of term). But early July might work and we can look into what dates we can get when we start booking.

It's possible we should move the US event to May/June, though it's not obvious to me that that's the best move as finals still do have some weight there — I know it's less than the UK but I don't know that people's behavior is going to shift that much if an exam season is worth 50% of their grade vs 100%.

The US also has more potential attendees in general than the UK, which I think counts for something here. There are also just other downsides to shifting our conference schedule around too much, and most of our attendees aren't students anyway.

Hi Oliver — thanks for the feedback! I agree with your general point here but want to flag a couple things on our end:

1. Currently we are still approving travel grants (for all conferences from any location), albeit at a more limited capacity than we were approving in 2022.
2. The point here also stands somewhat for our other conferences, and if we were to move the London conference to say October, we'd then need to move our other conferences around. This would likely position some conference in April/May/June (which is exam season in other countries too), especially as we generally like to host conferences in warmer seasons.

The main issue is that some DC-based stakeholders have expressed concern that an EAG DC would draw unwanted attention to their work, partly because EA has negative connotations in certain policy/politics crowds. We're trying to evaluate how serious these concerns (still) are before making a decision for 2024.

Just want to clarify — it's still possible that there is a cause-general EAG in the Americas next year (I expect slightly more than 50% likely, but this number is semi-made up).

Thanks for the questions Rocky! Will try to answer them below:

1. On whether to run an east coast EAG: I'd say cost is definitely the biggest factor here, though there are other smaller factors, such as whether a third EAG gets enough unique attendees and the general question of at what point we hit diminishing returns for number of EAGs per year. Re what city it would be hosted in, my guess is that Boston is the most likely option, followed by either NYC or DC, but I'm not sure. My rough sense is that the trade-offs aren't quite worth it to do the event in... (read more)

Thanks for the comment! I expect the main cause areas represented at the Bay Area event to be AI safety, biorisk, and nuclear security. I also expect there'll be some meta-related content, including things like community building, improving decision making, and careers in policy.

We weren't sure exactly what to call this event and were torn between this name and EA Global (X-Risk). We decided on EA Global (GCRs) because it was the majority preference of the advisors we polled, and because we felt it would more fully represent the types of ideas we expect to see at the event, as nuclear security and some types of risks from advanced AI or synthetic biology may not quite be considered to be existential in nature.

Hi Xavier — really sorry about this. We're aware of this as an issue and are working to resolve it ASAP. Basically had a big bug in our system that's spamming people with lots of fake emails. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Not sure, we don't have any particular measure for impact-adjusted plan changes per $, it's more just what in theory I think we should be aiming for. In practice we mostly just track connections, to what extent people find EAGs valuable, attendance, and other easy-to-track metrics.

Yeah that's right, I wouldn't want to raise the prices so much such that more senior folk/experts are put off (especially as they might be providing value, and as such it might feel weird to them to have to pay for that). Right now I expect we'll have a variety of ticket prices with optional discounts for those who need them, so I'm not too worried about more senior folks getting priced out here.

I think that's roughly right (I might put it as "impact-adjusted plan changes per $").

My understanding is that EAGxCambridge got an unusually cheap venue and as such was unusually cheap overall (it also only had ~500 attendees compared to 1000–1500 for EAGs). Other EAGx's often have quite small budgets because they're often held in countries that are much cheaper to hold events (and they also have fewer attendees).

Historically, EAGx's have also been scrappier and not been of as high production value — but I expect the gap to close here somewhat moving forwards.

It's not obvious to me whether larger venues cost more in a super-linear way, this is something I'm still confused about, but I expect it to not be the case overall.

No problem, all good! Re those venues:

• Fort Mason kinda works but has a similar issue of having lots of spaces kinda spread out over a wider area (some of which are kinda hard to find). The main networking area it has is the Festival Pavilion, which is huge but is also just an empty warehouse and would probably need to be built out a bit with lighting and furniture. This venue is weird and annoying enough that I'd only go for it if it was notably cheaper, but my understanding is that it's sort of similarly expensive to some of our other options.
• Moscone is g

Re your second bullet, a large part of it is that one of the two people in a new connection may be financial unempowered. That is, they're a student or other early career person who isn't really able to spend much money on anything (this represents a lot of our attendees and is where philanthropy can jump in to fill the gap).

Sorry yeah, they cost way less, and if we were purely optimizing for connections per dollar then virtual conferences might be all that we do. So we are going to think about doing more of these moving forwards, though I do think it would be a mistake to optimize solely for connections per dollar.

It's still a bit unclear to me at this point whether a 1500 person event would cost less per person than three 500 person events. My current sense is that it is, but I don't have massive confidence in our investigations here.

Re agglomeration effects, I think basically yes it's better to run a larger event all things equal — the main benefits that come to mind are staff time and making it easier for people to coordinate and meet in larger groups (i.e. everyone you want to meet is going to the same event).

I don't think it's quite that it's a side hustle for them — it's mostly just that it's only a minority of attendees are working for EA orgs that are likely to be okay with them taking time off for an EA conference. If you're a biology student planning on working in biosecurity in the future, my guess is that you won't easily be able to move or skip your classes. Similar things might apply for people working in government or people who are skilling up outside of EA (e.g. as a law clerk).

There are EAs at lots of different companies/universities, but they don't work for CEA itself. Perhaps we should be asking around to see if we could still pull this off, but I do expect coordinating with an external party to be kinda tricky and unreliable (e.g. when we used UC Berkeley, the university really didn't want to talk to anyone at CEA other than the student in question). 

I also have reservations about working with something that's not an explicit venue-for-hire — I expect their staff to not be experienced at things like working with AV, cate... (read more)

It’s more about functionality and capacity than anything else. For the Bay Area, the Google campus isn’t something that’s publicly available and you need to have a way in somehow. I’m not entirely sure how we managed to get it in 2015 (that was before my time). My understanding is that EAG 2015 only had ~400 attendees, and from chatting to people who were there, it seems pretty clear that the space they had couldn't host much more than that (though perhaps the complex has other rooms/spaces that can be used).

Re UC Berkeley, I'll note that I still see this ... (read more)

I want to quickly note that we often don't have that many options for what dates we can get. Large venues are often booked out well in advance, and sometimes you need to take what you can get. It's also pretty likely that you're gonna clash with something, such as a particular university's final exams. I also doubt expect that having it on Passover/Easter affected attendance that much. 

I'll note that I don't think the above is a great excuse — I still think it was suboptimal to host an event then, but it can be quite tricky to get everything right here!

Thanks for sharing this Sebastian! We haven't explicitly asked people whether weekends work better than weekdays, though this has now come up a couple of times such that I'd like to do so in the future.

But my expectation is that weekends would work much better for most of our attendees as few of them have children (even the more senior folks). A lot of our attendees are students who might have classes during the week and many others work jobs for which they can't easily take time off for our event (jobs in government or academia for example).

Thanks — and yep we're aware of them! We haven't gained much from their information previously though perhaps could be digging deeper here.

Also, one other thing we're thinking about here is trying to memorialize content in other (cheaper) ways, like having the talks written up as Forum posts.

Thanks for your thoughts here!

It is true that we haven't advertised our content much and could possibly get more views if we did. We are planning to do more here, but we estimated that we'd have to really get a lot more views for it to be worth it (recording each stage costs ~$50k) and we expect we won't succeed in getting the videos that much exposure.

And we considered your second (and third to some extent) points when making a decision here but still concluded we should cut back at this time.

Re the printing and signage — I'll note that EAG London was som... (read more)

Yep — this is basically my preferred option right now for what we should do (transparent options/honor-code basis).

No problem, thanks for your thoughts here! I'll note that in venues where we have a minimum spend, attendees aren't allowed to bring outside food into the venue unless they have serious allergies. So if we did hand out Soylent/snacks somewhere else, they'd have to consume this on the street or something (which may be a disaster if it's raining or cold).

Re reserving nearby restaurants — we did this at EAG Bay Area and plan to do it again in the future (we just reserved some restaurant tables but had attendees pay for their own meals). If we were to actually plan meals/do catering at multiple nearby restaurants, that would likely be a lot of work on our end and we probably wouldn't have capacity to pull it off well.

It depends on the venue, but for EAG Boston for example the food and beverage minimum spend is $540k, and we're planning to spend just a bit over this (we may go higher if more attendees end up registering).

I'm not sure how those academic conferences work — it's possible that they take place in venues without in-house caterers or that they pay more up front to avoid a minimum spend. Because we usually get a minimum spend, attendees aren't allowed to bring in their own food unless they have serious allergies (though of course people might still bring in their own food covertly).

Thanks — these are some great questions, I'll try to provide some more context on some of these below:

- We do currently have EAGxVirtual scheduled for November, though this is an EAGx rather than an EAG (and perhaps we should consider doing an EAG Virtual again). When we've looked at the stats, our virtual conferences do seem to get around half the connections per person. I also have the intuition that people are much less likely to make big career changes from virtual events (things like "I went to EAG London and it pushed me to drop out of my PhD"). But ... (read more)

We've looked into this very briefly for EAG, and my understanding is that there aren't many (large) venues for which this would work well. Most of our venues require us to spend a minimum amount of money on food and beverage, there often isn't a clear location where food trucks would park, and most venues don't let you bring in outside food into the venue (meaning that if it's raining for example, attendees would have to eat their food truck lunches outside).

These aren't slam down points, mostly because I'm not 100% confident how food trucks would work, an... (read more)

Applications for EAG Boston are still open (here), and our early bird registration deadline is on August 4th! If you were accepted to EAG Bay Area or London this year, you can register directly within our portal and won't need to apply again.

You can view our other events on our website, including EAGxNYC, EAGxBerlin, EAGxAustralia, and EAGxPhilippines.

If you have any questions, you can reach out to the team at hello@eaglobal.org.

Sorry for the delay, these talks are now live (here)!

Want to help CEA improve Swapcard? Swapcard is the networking and scheduling app currently used for EA Global and EAGx events, and their team are asking users for input on new features.

Two of these features are commonly requested by our attendees — calendar synchronization and automatically blocking your schedule if you RSVP for a session.

You can vote for these features to be added or give other feedback at the links below:

Entire Swapcard product roadmap: https://swapcard.notion.site/3ed5acc763e54ce2ad07e7563c0ee9c3?v=3f3b9d52f317449c828e4d4790dbf94d

Calend... (read more)

I think it was implied by this statement but I think it's a fair point that we could make this more explicit: "In interviews, don’t speak on behalf of the entire EA community, or anyone else in the EA community" (as if you were talking to an EA journalist, I think this wouldn't really apply).

Hi Keller — appreciate the thoughts here! I wanted to quickly note that we did actually give attendees a heads up about this in our attendee guide, and we've done similarly in most of our other recent conference attendee guides. 

Though I generally don't expect attendees to read this all the way through, we did share it multiple times, and I'm not sure whether it would have made sense to  email attendees about the journalist section specifically (if I was going to reiterate something, it probably wouldn't be this).

Hi sorry for the slow reply, we're currently not letting under 18s attend our events, sorry about that (you can see more detail in other comments below)!

This year we're doing our East Coast EA Global in Boston, but we're pretty open to shifting it back to DC in the future.

One type of event I'm provisionally excited about is a more introductory EA conference in DC targeted at mid-to-late career folks. Kinda like an EAGx but maybe more "professional" (everyone wears a suit and tie type of vibe). My sense from doing EA Global in DC was that there could be a fair amount of demand for something like this, but at this stage this is more of a vague idea than something I think we're likely to organize any time soon.

Name badges should have preferred names yes — this is the first time we're doing preferred names so if there are any technical issues you'll be able to pick up a blank badge at the event itself and write whatever name you like on it. 

Preferred names won't go onto Swapcard by default but we're looking into a way to make this happen (but anyone can change their own name on Swapcard if they like).

The previous recommendation for attendees to be double vaccinated was just written a while ago, and we hadn't updated it until now.

Hi — I can confirm we did update the website now as a result of you posting this, so thanks for flagging this!