A list of the main benefits (and costs?) of the event
Conferences are complicated things. I’d be curious to understand as a community what exactly we want to get out of them. The better an understanding there is, the more I imagine it could be optimized.
Some ideas:
Meeting new people (for future collaboration)
Introductions to Effective Altruism to those outside the movement
Staying in touch with people (this should be broken down)
Having the ‘experts’ discuss ideas with each other
Having new ideas proposed & evaluated
Skill-building for members
Encouragement to be ethical
It would be super sweet to see an EV breakdown of the main benefits.
I agree that thinking explicitly about the goals of the conference would be good. Fwiw, though, my instinct is that trying to quantify it into an EV estimate would be a bit of a distraction from the main benefits.
In my experience, in the cases where there are EV calcs, few people will pay attention to them anyway, though the ones that do seem to find them interesting & useful. It could be a distraction to the people who make it, but I don’t see it being harmful to more than 10 people (in the worst 10th percentile).
Sorry—I was unclear. I think it’d be a distraction to the EAG organizers themselves. Trying to come up with an explicit EV can increase the amount of work it takes to put something like this together by a lot and I think most of the benefits would come from just thinking hard about priorities.
There are also a reputation issues associated with presenting EV calculations which make your thing look good but whose numbers are extremely uncertain. Even with all the appropriate caveats, they can be read as taking more weight than they really deserve, and this can look self-serving.
For that matter, it could be interesting to have the participants just send a list in advance of what their main problems are, then the conference organizers try to figure out how to spend that three day period doing whatever necessary to solve those problems.
A list of the main benefits (and costs?) of the event
Conferences are complicated things. I’d be curious to understand as a community what exactly we want to get out of them. The better an understanding there is, the more I imagine it could be optimized.
Some ideas:
Meeting new people (for future collaboration)
Introductions to Effective Altruism to those outside the movement
Staying in touch with people (this should be broken down)
Having the ‘experts’ discuss ideas with each other
Having new ideas proposed & evaluated
Skill-building for members
Encouragement to be ethical
It would be super sweet to see an EV breakdown of the main benefits.
I agree that thinking explicitly about the goals of the conference would be good. Fwiw, though, my instinct is that trying to quantify it into an EV estimate would be a bit of a distraction from the main benefits.
In my experience, in the cases where there are EV calcs, few people will pay attention to them anyway, though the ones that do seem to find them interesting & useful. It could be a distraction to the people who make it, but I don’t see it being harmful to more than 10 people (in the worst 10th percentile).
Sorry—I was unclear. I think it’d be a distraction to the EAG organizers themselves. Trying to come up with an explicit EV can increase the amount of work it takes to put something like this together by a lot and I think most of the benefits would come from just thinking hard about priorities.
There are also a reputation issues associated with presenting EV calculations which make your thing look good but whose numbers are extremely uncertain. Even with all the appropriate caveats, they can be read as taking more weight than they really deserve, and this can look self-serving.
For that matter, it could be interesting to have the participants just send a list in advance of what their main problems are, then the conference organizers try to figure out how to spend that three day period doing whatever necessary to solve those problems.