Here’s one heuristic I heard at a retreat several months ago: “If you’re ever running an event that you are not excited to be part of, something has gone wrong.”
Obviously, it’s just a heuristic, but I actually found it to be a pretty useful one. I think a lot of organizers spend time hosting events that feel more like “teaching” rather than “learning together or working on interesting unsolved problems together.”
And my impression is that the groups that have fostered more of a “let’s learn together and do things together” mentality have tended to have the most success.
(Though for an intro talk I would probably just modify the heuristic to “is the the kind of intro talk that would’ve actually excited a younger version of me.”)
Thanks, Akash! I haven’t thought a lot about how this might apply to larger-scale events like retreats, but this makes a lot of sense to me. Somewhat unrelatedly, I think it’d be nice to have a catalog / google doc of workshops that are all about skill-building (or “learning together or working on interesting unsolved problems together.” as you put it). I felt like the Bright Futures Retreat had a lot of good examples of this. University group organizers then have a good reference of what types of events are useful, and they can either 1) use the catalog as inspiration for spin-off workshops 2) host workshops from the catalog as one-off events during term, or 3) compile their favorites for a retreat. This would likely save them a lot of time and diminish the amount of ops-related work they do.
Thanks for writing this, Emma! Upvoted :)
Here’s one heuristic I heard at a retreat several months ago: “If you’re ever running an event that you are not excited to be part of, something has gone wrong.”
Obviously, it’s just a heuristic, but I actually found it to be a pretty useful one. I think a lot of organizers spend time hosting events that feel more like “teaching” rather than “learning together or working on interesting unsolved problems together.”
And my impression is that the groups that have fostered more of a “let’s learn together and do things together” mentality have tended to have the most success.
This seems like a good time to amplify Ashley’s We need alternatives to intro EA Fellowships, Trevor’s University groups should do more retreats, Lenny’s We Ran an AI Timelines Retreat, and Kuhan’s Lessons from Running Stanford EA and SERI.
This seems way too strong to me. Eg, reasonable and effective intro talks feel like they wouldn’t be much fun for me to do, yet seem likely high value
+1. The heuristic doesn’t always work.
(Though for an intro talk I would probably just modify the heuristic to “is the the kind of intro talk that would’ve actually excited a younger version of me.”)
Thanks, Akash! I haven’t thought a lot about how this might apply to larger-scale events like retreats, but this makes a lot of sense to me. Somewhat unrelatedly, I think it’d be nice to have a catalog / google doc of workshops that are all about skill-building (or “learning together or working on interesting unsolved problems together.” as you put it). I felt like the Bright Futures Retreat had a lot of good examples of this. University group organizers then have a good reference of what types of events are useful, and they can either 1) use the catalog as inspiration for spin-off workshops 2) host workshops from the catalog as one-off events during term, or 3) compile their favorites for a retreat. This would likely save them a lot of time and diminish the amount of ops-related work they do.
I’d also love to see such a catalog