Another topic is the “design of EAG”, or something.
Again, my read is that the subtext of your comment is that the pool is being adversely affected by increasing the event size. Let’s fully accept this perspective.
So, regarding the “total value of the event for altruistic impact”. As touched on above, it’s not clear that decreasing match quality outweighs the value of quantity increases. If you’re straight up doubling the event size, that could allow for some decrease in average match quality.
Like, if EAG was 500 before, and 1,000 now, the “value for the 500 new people” might outweigh the “impact on the original 500 people”.
Obviously, a judgement about change in total value of the event is hard, but maybe you have a good guess or intuition about the sign of the change?
But there’s still more considerations:
EAG acceptance is seen as a badge of ingroupness, and this badge seems valuable for an decentralized movement. For example, being rejected hurts. Obviously, I understand if a dud like me gets culled. But I can think of many people, maybe who aren’t strong networkers or signallers, that EA should value, and many of them are not going to make it into a size 500 event and that seems bad.
You might think that EAG impact is driven by very very talented people, like the next Christiano or SBF and this affects your view of sizing and experience for these people. But there’s several special “programs”, that range from those explicitly run by formal EA orgs, as well as powerful de facto “programs” and personal recommendations, that find develop and connect talent at physical events, including EAGs. These exist among different cause areas. How these programs play out or could be improved in different conceptions of EAG seems pretty relevant.
I’m just some dude writing stuff onto an internet forum, but my guess is that a larger EAG is better given a view of a growing EA.
To the degree you think that previous executions of EAG are inadequate, I’m not sure that this is informative about the future.
It seems bad if a movement couldn’t scale a gathering beyond 500 or 1000 people. It seems like careful, high effort design, maybe new meeting formats or ways to improve match quality, could more than offset the downside of larger event sizes.
Hey, I think that these are all good comments, and I wouldn’t call you “a dud”. I agree with your thoughts around possible cofounders, though a decrease in average participant quality was the most salient explanation to me.
Another topic is the “design of EAG”, or something.
Again, my read is that the subtext of your comment is that the pool is being adversely affected by increasing the event size. Let’s fully accept this perspective.
So, regarding the “total value of the event for altruistic impact”. As touched on above, it’s not clear that decreasing match quality outweighs the value of quantity increases. If you’re straight up doubling the event size, that could allow for some decrease in average match quality.
Like, if EAG was 500 before, and 1,000 now, the “value for the 500 new people” might outweigh the “impact on the original 500 people”.
Obviously, a judgement about change in total value of the event is hard, but maybe you have a good guess or intuition about the sign of the change?
But there’s still more considerations:
EAG acceptance is seen as a badge of ingroupness, and this badge seems valuable for an decentralized movement. For example, being rejected hurts. Obviously, I understand if a dud like me gets culled. But I can think of many people, maybe who aren’t strong networkers or signallers, that EA should value, and many of them are not going to make it into a size 500 event and that seems bad.
You might think that EAG impact is driven by very very talented people, like the next Christiano or SBF and this affects your view of sizing and experience for these people. But there’s several special “programs”, that range from those explicitly run by formal EA orgs, as well as powerful de facto “programs” and personal recommendations, that find develop and connect talent at physical events, including EAGs. These exist among different cause areas. How these programs play out or could be improved in different conceptions of EAG seems pretty relevant.
I’m just some dude writing stuff onto an internet forum, but my guess is that a larger EAG is better given a view of a growing EA.
To the degree you think that previous executions of EAG are inadequate, I’m not sure that this is informative about the future.
It seems bad if a movement couldn’t scale a gathering beyond 500 or 1000 people. It seems like careful, high effort design, maybe new meeting formats or ways to improve match quality, could more than offset the downside of larger event sizes.
Hey, I think that these are all good comments, and I wouldn’t call you “a dud”. I agree with your thoughts around possible cofounders, though a decrease in average participant quality was the most salient explanation to me.