Good question! I think it’s definitely high impact and will give a couple anecdotes to illustrate it below:
When I was looking back on the last ten years and what were the highest impact mind changes I had in that period of time, around 30% of them came from conversations at EAGs, directly leading to me founding two of the charities I’ve started.
This isn’t counting other benefits, including meeting my best friend of the last 6 years (who introduced me to my romantic partner), and hiring some of my best hires.
A second anecdote, is I remember this question coming up years back and about how it seemed self-serving. If it was truly high impact, then you’d fund the tickets for other people to go. Somebody found this persuasive and funded other people’s tickets. Including one person who ended up being one of our best hires and who since went on to start his own charity that is quite high impact.
Of course, hard to tell the counterfactuals, but I think for a lot of these there’s a very high chance they wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Good question! I think it’s definitely high impact and will give a couple anecdotes to illustrate it below:
When I was looking back on the last ten years and what were the highest impact mind changes I had in that period of time, around 30% of them came from conversations at EAGs, directly leading to me founding two of the charities I’ve started.
This isn’t counting other benefits, including meeting my best friend of the last 6 years (who introduced me to my romantic partner), and hiring some of my best hires.
A second anecdote, is I remember this question coming up years back and about how it seemed self-serving. If it was truly high impact, then you’d fund the tickets for other people to go. Somebody found this persuasive and funded other people’s tickets. Including one person who ended up being one of our best hires and who since went on to start his own charity that is quite high impact.
Of course, hard to tell the counterfactuals, but I think for a lot of these there’s a very high chance they wouldn’t have happened otherwise.