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...
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...
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 !
Thanks for sharing this! It's great to hear about the growth of EA groups around the world. Good luck!
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.
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...
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...
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?
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.
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:
This means that the spring break is ...
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.
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!
I was at the career fair, hosted a workshop for first-timers and attended a few things.
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:
[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.
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:
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?
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.
I don't think I've become a lot more hard-working, but definitely more. A few things:
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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:
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.
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 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...
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.
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).
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.