Joey, thanks for your post! I work for CEA and am the Curator of EA Global. I manage content for the event so I’m responding to that part of the post.
When deciding which speakers to solicit, I try to consider things like cause area representation, presenter diversity, and the development of community norms, among other things. It is really hard to get this right, and I know that I’ve fallen short of where I’d like to be on all of these.
I do think we’ve managed to improve on the representativeness dimension over the past couple of years. I know there’s room for reasonable disagreement about how to categorize talks, and I think you and I must be looking at the talk categories differently because I’m coming up with a very different distribution than you mention. For talks at EA Global 2018, I count 21% animals, 18% meta/rationality, 25% AI/x-risk/GCRs, 14% global health and development, 7% government/policy and 14% other topics. Across the four events in 2017 and 2018, my breakdown shows 15% animals, 20% AI/x-risk/GCRs, 14% health and development, 11% government/policy, 23% meta/rationality, and 19% other. Here is a link to a categorization of all of the talks from 2017 and 2018 by cause area so that you can see how I’m thinking about the talk distribution (in the interest of time, and since you mentioned talks, I haven’t included meetups, office hours, workshops, or whiteboard sessions). I haven’t done the breakdown for 2015 and 2016, but I think we are representing the community’s interests better in recent years than we did in the past.
This year I’ve commissioned recommendations from EAs with subject matter expertise in the different cause areas to try to improve further. We also welcome speaker and content suggestions from the community. Please submit ideas for EA Global London here.
On the topic of Effective Altruism Global, I’m not just concerned about the lower representation of non-x-risk cause areas, but also the speaker selection for those cause areas. In 2016 as an example, the main animal welfare speaker was a parrot intelligence researcher who seemed, I’m sorry to say this, uninformed about animal welfare, even of birds. I think the animal welfare speakers over the years have been more selected for looking cool to the organizers (who didn’t know much about animal welfare) and/or increasing speaker demographic diversity (Not that this is a bad thing, but it’s unhelpful to just get diversity in one cause area.), instead of actually having the leading experts on EA and animal welfare.
I agree that our selection process for animal-focused speakers in 2015 and 2016 left a lot to be desired. In 2017 we began working with advisors from specific fields to be sure we’re reaching out to speakers with expertise on the topics that conference attendees most want to hear about. This year we’ve expanded to a larger advisory board with the hope that we can continue to improve the EA Global content.
Thank you for the explanation. I still believe the 2017 and 2018 animal welfare and global poverty line-ups left a lot to be desired, but those years might have been better than 2016 at least in the choice of keynote speaker.
Maybe there could be more transparency in regards to the advisory board, because without knowing those details, I don’t know how to evaluate the situation. I do feel concern from CEA’s history that the advisory board may favor people with close ties to CEA rather than actual meaningful representation from those fields. But I can’t be confident in that without knowing the details.
I think what conference attendees most want to hear about but also worth considering what potential attendees would want to hear about. Personally i would prefer more diversity within the cause area to look at various challenges to conventional EAA whilst focussing more on philosophy and demandingness. I think in this way people could become somewhat more familiar with the broader cause area rather than in my view a tendency to focus on a fairly narrow group of organisations and individuals.
Would it be possible to say who is on the advisory board?
Thanks for your comment. To improve the breadth of EAA topics covered at EA Global, I started working with Tyler John as my first advisor in 2017. This year we have an advisory board consisting of ~25 people outside of CEA with expertise in AI, animals, biosecurity, global health & development, horizon scanning (topics that push the frontiers of EA), and meta EA, as well as a “wild card” section for additional suggestions. I’d need to check with the rest of the advisors before sharing their names.
Hi Amy, is there any progress in terms of presenting who is on the advisory boards? Or if people don’t want to be named that would be useful information too.
Joey, thanks for your post! I work for CEA and am the Curator of EA Global. I manage content for the event so I’m responding to that part of the post.
When deciding which speakers to solicit, I try to consider things like cause area representation, presenter diversity, and the development of community norms, among other things. It is really hard to get this right, and I know that I’ve fallen short of where I’d like to be on all of these.
I do think we’ve managed to improve on the representativeness dimension over the past couple of years. I know there’s room for reasonable disagreement about how to categorize talks, and I think you and I must be looking at the talk categories differently because I’m coming up with a very different distribution than you mention. For talks at EA Global 2018, I count 21% animals, 18% meta/rationality, 25% AI/x-risk/GCRs, 14% global health and development, 7% government/policy and 14% other topics. Across the four events in 2017 and 2018, my breakdown shows 15% animals, 20% AI/x-risk/GCRs, 14% health and development, 11% government/policy, 23% meta/rationality, and 19% other. Here is a link to a categorization of all of the talks from 2017 and 2018 by cause area so that you can see how I’m thinking about the talk distribution (in the interest of time, and since you mentioned talks, I haven’t included meetups, office hours, workshops, or whiteboard sessions). I haven’t done the breakdown for 2015 and 2016, but I think we are representing the community’s interests better in recent years than we did in the past.
This year I’ve commissioned recommendations from EAs with subject matter expertise in the different cause areas to try to improve further. We also welcome speaker and content suggestions from the community. Please submit ideas for EA Global London here.
On the topic of Effective Altruism Global, I’m not just concerned about the lower representation of non-x-risk cause areas, but also the speaker selection for those cause areas. In 2016 as an example, the main animal welfare speaker was a parrot intelligence researcher who seemed, I’m sorry to say this, uninformed about animal welfare, even of birds. I think the animal welfare speakers over the years have been more selected for looking cool to the organizers (who didn’t know much about animal welfare) and/or increasing speaker demographic diversity (Not that this is a bad thing, but it’s unhelpful to just get diversity in one cause area.), instead of actually having the leading experts on EA and animal welfare.
I agree that our selection process for animal-focused speakers in 2015 and 2016 left a lot to be desired. In 2017 we began working with advisors from specific fields to be sure we’re reaching out to speakers with expertise on the topics that conference attendees most want to hear about. This year we’ve expanded to a larger advisory board with the hope that we can continue to improve the EA Global content.
Thank you for the explanation. I still believe the 2017 and 2018 animal welfare and global poverty line-ups left a lot to be desired, but those years might have been better than 2016 at least in the choice of keynote speaker.
Maybe there could be more transparency in regards to the advisory board, because without knowing those details, I don’t know how to evaluate the situation. I do feel concern from CEA’s history that the advisory board may favor people with close ties to CEA rather than actual meaningful representation from those fields. But I can’t be confident in that without knowing the details.
I think what conference attendees most want to hear about but also worth considering what potential attendees would want to hear about. Personally i would prefer more diversity within the cause area to look at various challenges to conventional EAA whilst focussing more on philosophy and demandingness. I think in this way people could become somewhat more familiar with the broader cause area rather than in my view a tendency to focus on a fairly narrow group of organisations and individuals.
Would it be possible to say who is on the advisory board?
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for your comment. To improve the breadth of EAA topics covered at EA Global, I started working with Tyler John as my first advisor in 2017. This year we have an advisory board consisting of ~25 people outside of CEA with expertise in AI, animals, biosecurity, global health & development, horizon scanning (topics that push the frontiers of EA), and meta EA, as well as a “wild card” section for additional suggestions. I’d need to check with the rest of the advisors before sharing their names.
Hi Amy, is there any progress in terms of presenting who is on the advisory boards? Or if people don’t want to be named that would be useful information too.