All of OllieBase's Comments + Replies

Yes, unfortunately, the EAGxLondon team couldn't secure a date in early April. The university venue we were working with initially said that they had dates available in April but, frustratingly, this turned out not to be the case and the team didn't have enough time to find an alternative. We're exploring other options, including an event later this year.

Next month, two EAGx events are happening in new locations: Austin and Copenhagen!

Applications for these events are closing soon:

These conferences are primarily for people who are at least familiar with the core ideas of effective altruism and are interested in learning more about what to do with these ideas. We're particularly excited to welcome people working professionally in the EA space to connect with others nearby and provide mentorship to those new to the space.

If you want t... (read more)

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Yanni Kyriacos
13d
@OllieBase speaking of relatable, the boys are back 

Yes, we also run follow-up surveys, usually 3 months after the event. We think these are better for measuring impact.

We don't expect attendees to estimate the overall impact of the event for them while at the event, that's our mistake (we had written "The EA Global team uses several key metrics to estimate the impact of our events" but we've changed that to "The EA Global team tracks several key metrics for our events").

We do ask for valuable experiences, but we're not asking people to estimate the impact of the event, per se. Our post-event metrics primar... (read more)

Hi Kyle, I'm either working or will soon be working to make all of these events happen in the second half of this year. We don't have teams or specific locations confirmed for any yet.

If anyone here is excited to help make these events happen, please reach out to me on ollie@eaglobal.org !

Thank you! Fixed. I had forgotten what year we're in.

Thanks for sharing this! It's great to hear about the growth of EA groups around the world. Good luck!

I'm very excited about this! Where's that huge American flag emoji when you need one.

Thank you for flagging this!

We've now made this talk public. All EAGxVirtual 2023 talks were unlisted. I think (90% confidence) the team hadn't yet received confirmation from the speakers that they should post, and I'm just checking that with them. I've asked the team to post all the videos that they have received consent from the speaker to share.

This is broadly correct from an EAGx perspective :) (I run EAGx)

Minor correction: 

It is also my understanding that there will be an EAGxRotterdam in 2024.

CEA and EA Netherlands are planning an event in the Netherlands, but it won't necessarily be in Rotterdam.

I don't think I, as a reader, am obliged to review all the evidence here and adjudicate with full information. You certainly shouldn't read my comment as me implying I've done that.

This post struck me as unpleasant and off the mark in the ways I describe it, and I think it's okay for me to just say that.

OllieBase
4mo165
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I'm disappointed that much of this document involves attacking the people who've accused you of harmful actions, in place of a focus on disputing the evidence they provided (I appreciate that you also do the latter). I also really bounce off the distraction tactics at play here, where you encourage the reader to turn their attention back to the world's problems. It doesn't seem like you've reflected carefully and calmly about this situation; I don't see many places where you admit to making mistakes and it doesn't seem like you're willing to take ownership... (read more)

I want to push back on this framing, and I think it shows a lack of empathy with the position Nonlinear have been put in. (Though I do agree with your dislike of many of the stylistic choices made in this post)

This post is 15K words, and does a mix of attacking the credibility of Ben, Alice and Chloe and disputing the claims with evidence. The linked doc is 58K words, and seems predominantly about collecting an exhaustive array of evidence. Nonlinear have clearly put in a *lot* of work to the linked doc, and try hard to dispute the evidence. So it seems to... (read more)

I'm disappointed that much of this document involves attacking the people who've accused you of harmful actions, in place of a focus on disputing the evidence they provided 

The vast majority of what they gave is disputing the evidence. There is a whole 135 pages of basically nothing but that. You then even refer to it saying:

I don't have time to engage with all the evidence here

How can both these be true at once? Either it's a lot so you don't have time to go through it all or they haven't done much in which case you should be able to spend some time looking at it?

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Kat Woods
4mo
We tried to keep it to explaining how their claims were false or misleading, plus including an alternative hypothesis to explain what's going on. We have a section where we explain the things we're doing differently in the future.  We only tried to remind people about the bigger problems after we'd established that they'd told dozens of falsehoods and misleading claims about us.  I am disappointed that we've provided hundreds of pages of evidence that they lied to you and misled you and have shown no remorse or attempts to improve their behavior, but people are focusing on how we need to apologize for things we didn't do and improve on things we didn't do wrong.  

Thanks, Oli. Yes, I don't think we nailed it with the questions and as you say, that's always hard to do. Appreciate you adding this context for readers.

I agree. Of all of CEA's outputs this year, I think this could be the most useful for the community and I think it's worth bumping. It's our fault that it didn't get enough traction; it came out just before EAG and we didn't share it elsewhere.

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Habryka
4mo
(As someone who filled out the survey, I thought the framing of the questions was pretty off, and I felt like that jeopardized a lot of the value of the questions. I am not sure how much better you can do, I think a survey like this is inherently hard, but I at least don't feel like the survey results would help someone understand what I think much better)

Yes! We'll need to review footage and confirm with speakers, but they should be up soon :) 

Very cool to see Joey and Karolina on this list! Thoroughly deserved, congrats to both :)  

This is such devastating news and a huge loss to this community. Sebastian was deeply kind, thoughtful and selfless. He volunteered at several EAGs, and was always generous with his time; my colleagues and I learned of his passing because he was providing input on a project as a favour to us. 

Whenever I saw him, and once I'd learned about all the projects he was driving forward, his face would light up as he told me about all the new things his kids had learned or started saying.

I feel very lucky to have known him, and he will be sorely missed by so many.

perhaps that could be planned to co-incide with holidays from UK univerisites

Yes, this is the plan for any potential UK EAGx (though it's not yet confirmed). Other considerations include:

  • Running it late enough in the academic year such that students new to EA in the autumn terms can benefit.
  • Avoiding summer because many students travel/take internships/go on holiday.
  • Ensuring the organisers have capacity to run it (i.e. if they're students, organising doesn't heavily affect their studies)
  • The availability of (cheap) venues.

This means that the spring break is ... (read more)

Thanks, that makes sense.

I guess I don't interpret those bullets as "arguing against organising simple events" but rather "put your effort into supporting more engaged people" and that could even be consistent with running simple events, since it means less time on broad outreach compared to e.g. a high-effort welcoming event. 

I agree with the first part of your last sentence (the blend), I don't know how EA groups spend their time.

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James Herbert
4mo
Hmm, yeah, but by arguing for "put your effort into supporting more engaged people" you're effectively arguing against "relatively large events that require relatively shallow engagement". I think that's the mistake. I think it should be an even blend of the two. 

I agree!

> I have heard many people argue against organising relatively simple events such as, 'get a venue, get a speaker, invite people'.

Where have you heard this? I've not seen this.

> get an endorsement from someone like Bregman

Noting that this isn't easy and could be a large driver of the value!

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James Herbert
4mo
When I first started at EA Netherlands I was explicitly advised against it, and more generally it seems to be 'in the air'. For example: * The groups resource hub says "This also suggests that you should focus time and effort on deeply engaging the most committed members rather than just shifting some choices of many people." * Kuhan's widely shared post on 'lessons from running Stanford EA' has in its summary "Focus on retention and deep engagement over shallow engagement" * CEA's Groups Team's post on 'advice we give to new university organiser' says "We think it's good to do broad recruiting at the beginning of the semester, as with any club or activity. But beyond this big push of raising awareness, we think it’s most often better to pay more attention to people who seem very interested in - and willing to take significant action based on - EA ideas" Writing this out has made me realise something. I think this advice makes more sense in a university context, where students are time-rich and are going through an intense social experience, but it makes less sense when you're targeting professionals. I suspect it's still 'in the air' because, historically, CEA has been very good at targeting students.  As a consequence, very few national orgs (including ourselves) organise TPC-esque events (broad reach, low engagement). For us, this is because our strategy is to focus on supporting local organisers in organising their own events (the theory is that then we can have lots of events without having to organise all of them ourselves). But I don't think that's the case for other national organisations (other national CBs, please jump in and correct me if I'm wrong, e.g., I know @lynn at EA UK has been organising career talks).  Ultimately, I guess what I'm saying is what I've said elsewhere: you need a blend of ‘mobilising’ (broad reach, low engagement) and ‘organising’ (narrow reach, high engagement), and I think EA groups often do too much organising.

I was at the career fair, hosted a workshop for first-timers and attended a few things.

  • I was really happy to see the geographic diversity of attendees. My session was attended by people in India, Norway, Indonesia, Germany, Ethiopia, the Czech Republic, Austria, Spain, Finland, Canada, the US and the UK (from memory, I'm probably missing many more).
  • I spoke with someone who had spent a decade teaching English in China who was finding out how to contribute (spoiler: this is valuable work experience for a range of EA issues). 
  • I was part of a discussion b
... (read more)

Sounds cool, thanks for attending! 

Ollie from the CEA events team here. Thanks so much for writing this up! This is an unusually thorough retrospective (if personal) and we particularly appreciate the balanced defence of Swapcard :)

Hey Saul! 

I'll do my best, but there's a lot of variation in how people spend their time.

I think the main activities are:

  • Watching a talk live on Swapcard (some will be interactive workshops, so perhaps engaging with those)
  • Going to a 1–1 meeting with someone you can get advice from or who you can give advice to (or even just catching up with a friend). You can book these via Swapcard too.
  • Wandering around Gathertown and joining casual group conversations (a great way to meet new people you otherwise wouldn't).
  • Attending a meet-up or social event (some wi
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Answer by OllieBaseOct 31, 202369
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[Kinda self-promotion, and upstream of making the world better but whatever]

A full retrospective and video is coming soon, but EAGxPhilippines was a huge success. The event received the highest "likelihood to recommend" score of the year (9.3/10), the highest ever number of new connections per attendee (14.7, EAG Boston got 9.27) and the highest ever "welcomingness" score (4.74/5). 

This is super impressive for a first-time event in a new (up and coming!) location and I'm really grateful to everyone who helped make it happen. I'm particularly excited about events which help increase the global reach of EA ideas and make the community more diverse and inclusive.

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Nathan Young
5mo
Thanks to all who ran it!

No worries at all! I think always good to poke at this stuff, and I agree that per attendee hour, EAGxVirtual is less cost-effective than per $ spent.

I'm not quite sure I understand. EAGxVirtual is unusually cost-effective because:

  • Organising costs are >>2x lower (no catering, no venue, no AV etc.)
  • The time for attendees is considerably lower (~2x lower seems right, maybe more)
  • But the impact seems to be ~2x lower.

It seems like you're missing the organising costs in your last two questions? Or perhaps we disagree about the difference in the value of organising costs and attendee time? 

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Jamie_Harris
5mo
Ah yeah I think I wasn't counting organising costs.  I meant that if you measure cost-effectiveness in terms of impact per $, then EAGx looks way better , but if you measure cost-effectiveness in terms of impact per hour of (attendee) time, then EAGx looks similar. So there's a 'regression to the mean' type effect when you consider additional metrics.  But you're right I wasn't considering organiser time. Apologies for the "quick thought" comment ending up being confusing rather than helpful.

Daniel Dewey was a Program Officer for potential risks from advanced AI at OP for several years. I don't know how long he was there for, but he was there in 2017 and left before May 2021.

a podcast I find soporific so that I'm more liable to fall asleep easily

Huh, I find the 80k podcast pretty interesting.

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Michelle_Hutchinson
6mo
:-p
Answer by OllieBaseSep 25, 202313
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I don't think I've become a lot more hard-working, but definitely more. A few things:

  • Finding work I enjoy and which I'm good at. A cliché but probably still underrated. When I'm working on things I find interesting and which I'm good at, I'm noticeably more productive (10–100% more).
  • Strangely, I had overly strict work-life boundaries that actually backfired for me earlier in my career. If I thought I had to work post 6 pm to finish something, I'd start to become stressed and would worry about burning out. In fact, when I stopped worrying about that and wor
... (read more)

That's fair. I agree accomplishments probably wasn't the right word for this kind of post.

This is a reasonable question to ask, but it felt a bit unkind so I downvoted. I think it's okay to post things that are clearly framed as "here's the vibe of our community" and not "here's why we're impactful" and I wish you'd at least acknowledged that was the aim of the post before requesting more info. 

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Thomas Kwa
6mo
When I wrote the comment, it wasn't clear to me what the aim of the post was, and I thought Rockwell's reply clarified this. I just misinterpreted "accomplishments" at the top as being about impact rather than community. So I'm now glad this post exists, though citing metrics still bothers me a bit.

Thanks for doing all you do! You're always very responsive, very helpful and track lots of things so that staff like me (CEA) don't have to.

^ This should make you think that whatever Phoebe says here is probably decent advice for ops roles!

legitimize "fridge" causes 

He also has cold takes, presumably

2
Rebecca
6mo
What is a fridge cause?

The slide Nathan is referring to. "We didn't listen" feels a little strong; lots of people were working on policy detail or calling for it, it just seems ex post like it didn't get sufficient attention. I agree directionally though, and Richard's guesses at the causes (expecting fast take-off + business-as-usual politics) seem reasonable to me.

Also, *EAGxBerlin.

The CEA community health team does serve as a mediation function sometimes, I think. Maybe that's not enough, but it seems worth mentioning.

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Chris Leong
7mo
Community health is also like the legal system in that they enforce sanctions so I wonder if that reduces the chance that someone reaches out to them to mediate.

Yes, EAGxNYC was definitely higher production value than EAGxCambridge and many others. It probably was ~EAG-level production value. The venue was surprisingly cheap for such a central location, given the amenities.

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Spencer Ericson
7mo
Good to know, thanks! I've only been to EAGxNYC and EAGxBerkeley so far, so this is useful to help me calibrate. I did feel like it was fancier than we needed it to be. I loved it, it was a great experience! But now that I know how great it is to have Listerine at conferences, I feel like I can bring my own for cheap. I'd also be happy enough to see like, instant oatmeal next to a kettle for breakfast. "Bring your own lunch/dinner," especially if the venue was down the road from a market. I'm a foodie for sure, and there is something important about showing people that vegan catering can be awesome. Good food is a big part of what turned me vegan. But it also makes me feel weird to see the EA community pampering me. It was, however, important to me that it was in a central location. Living in Canada, any conference that I go to is probably going to be a travel situation. I don't have a license (in any country), so I wouldn't be able to rent a car if it was like, in the suburbs.

Thanks for sharing this. I've not been following your work closely, but running a new org with very ambitious goals must be challenging, and I appreciate you acknowledging and sharing your mistakes so far. It would be surprising if you hadn't made a few mistakes at this point. Good luck!

To follow up here, Eli recently published this post outlining recent costs and what we plan on doing to bring them down. 

1
Grumpy Squid
7mo
I was excited to see this post - appreciate the events team sharing this.

Thanks for copying this across!

Yep, your estimate was right for EAGxNYC (~$500k) but that was much cheaper than EA Global.

We haven't explicitly asked people whether weekends work better than weekdays

 

I ran a Twitter poll (n = 297), and the results were fairly decisive in favour of weekends:

  • 14.5% would be more likely to go to EAG if it was during the week
  • 65% would be more likely to go on a weekend
  • 20.5% were indifferent.

Obviously not a representative sample or a carefully crafted survey, and it's possible people are anchored on weekends because that's when EAGs have historically taken place, but that's quite a large margin.

Still, it sucks that this doesn't work for everyone!

Thanks for this comment, all seems basically right (I run the EAGx programme).

different groups could try different strategies and we could see what works best (e.g. minimize printing, have the many bored idle volunteers record talks with their phones instead of paying thousands per recorded talk, ...)

Yes, we do exactly this (EAGxNYC recorded talks on phones, in fact). We've even had a few instances where an EAGx team tried something, it worked really well and then EAG incorporated it. One example is that EAGxBerlin 2022 put up posters with contact information for the community health support team, which attendees appreciated and which EAG copied.

Firstly, I agree with Daniel that we should just do both. Smaller events like the one you're suggesting here are worth doing (and I expect local EA groups do exactly this)

But I think there are effects that kick in only when events reach a certain size, e.g.

  • Speakers/experts will travel if they can speak to hundreds of people, but not to a room.
  • Similarly, if travel is costly for attendees, they might only make the trip for one large event, but not for a small event.
  • If you're looking for new opportunities, you want to speak to a wide range of people, and you
... (read more)

Just want to add that many of the retreats organised by national organisations or uni groups are a fraction of the cost of the retreats analysed in the link Ollie posted. Our most expensive retreat had a per-person cost of around EUR 260. The average retreat analysed in that post had a per-person cost of just under EUR 1,500. See my comment for further details.  

I think the longer blog posts by Anthropic and OpenAI on their approaches to alignment are very important, under-appreciated and sometimes (I think falsely) dismissed as disingenuous.

Commentary from skeptical researchers about these plans could be interesting to include as well.

I say this at EAGx events and in various posts, but I still don't think I say it enough: running EAGx events is a huge amount of work, and most of this work is done by dedicated and hard-working EA community members and national group staff. My colleagues and I support these teams, but I think we get too much credit.

I'm continuously impressed by EAGx teams; their thoughtfulness, their focus on impact and the sheer amount of effort they put into ensuring these events go well (and they do). There's not been a team I haven't enjoyed working with.

I think there... (read more)

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Vaidehi Agarwalla
7mo
I know that at least at the events themselves, people attending are often grateful to the organizers, because they are often interacting with them before / during the event. But online, it might be nice to have a space to acknowledge individuals by name somewhere (e.g. in an impact report?)
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Kaleem
7mo
Thanks Ollie :) - they're also a lot of fun to work on, and its really fulfilling to see all the connections and potential impact being created at the end of the process as a result of the team's work.

Some good advice here, but I don't think it applies universally. I like forum posts that use (correct) technical language when it conveys important information, and I think some of the best forum posts are dense and carefully-argued. I think some amount of jargon is okay too, though probably worth trying to avoid.

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Kirsten
7mo
Very much agree that technical terms and jargon should be used when there's a reason!

Ollie here from the CEA events team, thanks for this nudge. We’re planning on sharing an update w.r.t to our costs here later this year. You can also see my recent sequence about the costs of EAGx and how we prioritise among events (this doesn’t cover EA Global though).

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OllieBase
7mo
To follow up here, Eli recently published this post outlining recent costs and what we plan on doing to bring them down. 
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