You’re right that these aren’t the same kinds of events. My claim is about prioritisation under limited time and resources: communities should focus on the events that are more cost-effective.

If a community only has the capacity to run one event per year, I would prefer it to be a summit rather than a retreat. If the community is large enough to run an EAGx, I would prioritise that, and then add a summit around six months later if capacity allows.

I'm not sure if CEA gives out travel funding for EA summits, but my take is that they should do so only in very rare cases. One-day conferences, at least in most places, should focus on people who live in the city they are held.where 

Thanks for these comments!

I agree that retreat costs can vary a lot, and it’s quite possible that many retreats are cheaper today than the ones Ollie looked at. That said, the best data we currently have still suggests that retreats-as-they’ve-typically-been-run are relatively expensive per person per connection compared to larger events.

I’m very open to updating on newer or more representative data. My prior, though, is that while retreats may have become more frugal, conferences and summits have as well — EA events overall seem meaningfully leaner than they were a few years ago.

On outcomes: I don’t think I claimed that larger events produce better outcomes per person. As you note, Ollie finds those are roughly similar. My claim is instead about scale: one-day summits produce many more total positive outcomes for a similar or lower cost, largely because they involve more people and avoid subsidised travel and accommodation. (Or they should)

Given that, I would be surprised if a typical 2–3 day, fully subsidised retreat (which is the default in EA) ends up more cost-effective per person per connection than a one-day, local summit — even if some individual retreats are run quite cheaply.

I see the extent of badness of social media platforms (for mental health or society at large) as orthogonal to the question of whether they can be used to cost-effectively attract talent to EA.

Short-form content doesn't have to sacrifice fidelity! It's going to contain less information, but the way to use it is to attract people to go onto engaging with long-form content.

I think probably most users don’t want the friction of clicking through to another platform.

There are ad formats where people don't have to leave the platform, just quickly share their contact information in an in-built form and then continue the mindless scrolling :-) Once they are in a better place mentally, they can read our follow-up email! 

There is also a whole "science" behind landing page optimisation, where if people click on your ad, you take them elsewhere but make it as low-friction as possible to sign up to your thing afterwards.

Amplify has a number of impact stories on people who ended up taking significant action, who originally "just saw an ad" on social media. I occasionally run into people who saw an 80K ad (as opposed to searching for it proactively) and are now doing impressive things.

The problem is that EA marketing is still in its infancy. We have some research (e.g. by Rethink) on what framings of EA work better, but that's really far from being able to answer the question of "How do we maximise attracting talent to EA per dollar spent?". Only now Amplify is doing some small tests on comparing the cost-effectiveness of LinkedIn vs Meta ads and measuring long-term outcomes, but there is so much more to do.

Aw, I wish I knew about it! Thanks for organising.

Thanks for the kind words, Moneer, and it was a pleasure to be working with you during those 6 months!:)

Thanks for the kind words!