OP agreed to fund CEA’s work on this retroactively.
From the page I linked, it seems OP agreed to recompensate the Future Forum and not CEA (although the Future Forum may have paid CEA for their time).
I have some hindsight bias in hearing the event was a disaster with...
Many people who showing up on Day 1 then not showing up on Day 2, 3, or 4 because it didn’t seem to be a good use of their time.
No forethought about potential noise complaints in a quiet neighbourhood with a nearby country club and stuck-up rich people.
Volunteers being pressured into working through the night to move equipment between venues.
The main organiser asking the speakers really dumb and basic questions about their work with many people in the audience reportedly cringing.
And much more that went wrong.
So I believe it’d be better for organisers to plan more, stick to their budget, and not use their strong grantor connections to get bailed out.
I’m just going on your description, but what would you have liked CEA and/or OP to do differently?
I’m not sure what the best solution is, nor do I want to spend hours thinking about this based on the limited information I have.
My comment addresses strong and unfair connections and using the bailing out of this event in particular (which gives me some reason to believe other projects that have gone into debt have been bailed out because of strong grantor-grantee relationships).
I would have personally filed for bankruptcy and not made use of connections to get bailed out.
Obviously it would have been better if those organizers had planned better. It’s not clear to me that it would have been better for the event to just go down in flames; OP apparently agreed with me, which is why they stepped in with more funding.
I don’t think the Future Forum organizers have particularly strong relationships with OP.
“I would have personally filed for bankruptcy and not made use of connections to get bailed out.”
Well that’s super weird and self-flagellating. Like I’d ask you to please not, but I have a feeling you wouldn’t do that in that situation actually. Like, really, you forgot to do due diligence about noise and you think this one mistake in your career is worth bankruptcy?
For-profit example: Someone is hired to throw a conference on cereals for kellogs and they fuck it up and need a second venue. They call some higherup for budget approval and the answer is “omg no.. fuck well I guess we have to, here’s some money.” The extra money is spent to fix the fuckup as best as possible. The organiser is either fired for using too much money, or they’d get a bad performance review and lose future opportunities (my guess is this happened in the actual EA example to at least some extent, if the person didn’t already say to themselves “dang maybe I should try a different role or something”). If the fuckup is not their fault, maybe they get commended for handling it well, or not, but the company chalks it up to one of those investments where the roll of the dice just came up snake eyes. Unlucky.
I feel like in the for-profit world if you said that you’d take on bankruptcy rather than get the higher-ups involved, they’d be like “dude get a grip, your reaction is way out of scale and that’s kind of a bad standard to set for our employees working under you btw, they’re gonna burn out” and EA should say similar
The event being a disaster doesn’t match my experience of myself attending and talking to other attendees who—on the contrary - all seemed to find it very valuable, too.
Also, given the circumstances, the venue swap seemed to have been professionally handled IMO.
data point: I attended, and while I’m glad I did I felt misled by the promotional material. I know of at least two other people who felt the same, and attributed some of the blame to EA as a whole rather than the organizers.
I went in expecting to be able to find mid-career people to hire, but there weren’t any there. Attendees were either senior people looking to hire (broadly defined), or too junior for all but charitable internships (charitable meaning you don’t expect them to be positive EV for your own company, ever, and offer it strictly as a service to the intern). I like mentoring and would very plausibly have signed up for a mentor mixer type thing, but was much worse at it because I was in a hiring mindset.
As I said, I ended up having good conversations with both ultra-junior and senior people, and if offered the chance to redo I’d still go to the days at the first venue. But I know at least two people who had also come to hire mid-career people and felt bait and switched, and one of those… I forget if they literally used the word “exploited”, but it was at least something close to that.
I would have personally filed for bankruptcy and not made use of connections to get bailed out
So you would have avoided paying the venue that rescued you in an emergency? That seems worse than letting open phil give you money.
Or you could have just ended the conference, screwing over people who rearranged their lives and paid for flights for the conference? Even if you think the reputational damage will hit only the organizers and not EA in general, that’s a lot of damage to people who did nothing wrong.
I think there are very reasonable questions to be asked about the organizers and the process that got them funding in the first place. But once they were at day 2 of a conference, OP paying for a second venue seems like the best of a bad set of options.
I absolutely believe my above comment, but am unhappy that it is my only response to this post.
I have a lot of disagreements with this post, both factually and in principle, and I wish it had been written very differently. But my guess is that many people who read this will walk away with a more accurate picture of the world. Not a pareto improvement, they’ll have less accurate impressions of some parts, but it overall represents an improvement, and that’s good. And people can correct the false parts, so the net improvement might be even higher.
From the page I linked, it seems OP agreed to recompensate the Future Forum and not CEA (although the Future Forum may have paid CEA for their time).
I have some hindsight bias in hearing the event was a disaster with...
Many people who showing up on Day 1 then not showing up on Day 2, 3, or 4 because it didn’t seem to be a good use of their time.
No forethought about potential noise complaints in a quiet neighbourhood with a nearby country club and stuck-up rich people.
Volunteers being pressured into working through the night to move equipment between venues.
The main organiser asking the speakers really dumb and basic questions about their work with many people in the audience reportedly cringing.
And much more that went wrong.
So I believe it’d be better for organisers to plan more, stick to their budget, and not use their strong grantor connections to get bailed out.
I’m not sure what the best solution is, nor do I want to spend hours thinking about this based on the limited information I have.
My comment addresses strong and unfair connections and using the bailing out of this event in particular (which gives me some reason to believe other projects that have gone into debt have been bailed out because of strong grantor-grantee relationships).
I would have personally filed for bankruptcy and not made use of connections to get bailed out.
Obviously it would have been better if those organizers had planned better. It’s not clear to me that it would have been better for the event to just go down in flames; OP apparently agreed with me, which is why they stepped in with more funding.
I don’t think the Future Forum organizers have particularly strong relationships with OP.
“I would have personally filed for bankruptcy and not made use of connections to get bailed out.”
Well that’s super weird and self-flagellating. Like I’d ask you to please not, but I have a feeling you wouldn’t do that in that situation actually. Like, really, you forgot to do due diligence about noise and you think this one mistake in your career is worth bankruptcy?
For-profit example: Someone is hired to throw a conference on cereals for kellogs and they fuck it up and need a second venue. They call some higherup for budget approval and the answer is “omg no.. fuck well I guess we have to, here’s some money.” The extra money is spent to fix the fuckup as best as possible. The organiser is either fired for using too much money, or they’d get a bad performance review and lose future opportunities (my guess is this happened in the actual EA example to at least some extent, if the person didn’t already say to themselves “dang maybe I should try a different role or something”). If the fuckup is not their fault, maybe they get commended for handling it well, or not, but the company chalks it up to one of those investments where the roll of the dice just came up snake eyes. Unlucky.
I feel like in the for-profit world if you said that you’d take on bankruptcy rather than get the higher-ups involved, they’d be like “dude get a grip, your reaction is way out of scale and that’s kind of a bad standard to set for our employees working under you btw, they’re gonna burn out” and EA should say similar
Agree, although it should be noted that the grantor is not obliged to pick up the overrun in cost.
The event being a disaster doesn’t match my experience of myself attending and talking to other attendees who—on the contrary - all seemed to find it very valuable, too. Also, given the circumstances, the venue swap seemed to have been professionally handled IMO.
data point: I attended, and while I’m glad I did I felt misled by the promotional material. I know of at least two other people who felt the same, and attributed some of the blame to EA as a whole rather than the organizers.
Could you say more about the disconnect between promo and reality?
I went in expecting to be able to find mid-career people to hire, but there weren’t any there. Attendees were either senior people looking to hire (broadly defined), or too junior for all but charitable internships (charitable meaning you don’t expect them to be positive EV for your own company, ever, and offer it strictly as a service to the intern). I like mentoring and would very plausibly have signed up for a mentor mixer type thing, but was much worse at it because I was in a hiring mindset.
As I said, I ended up having good conversations with both ultra-junior and senior people, and if offered the chance to redo I’d still go to the days at the first venue. But I know at least two people who had also come to hire mid-career people and felt bait and switched, and one of those… I forget if they literally used the word “exploited”, but it was at least something close to that.
So you would have avoided paying the venue that rescued you in an emergency? That seems worse than letting open phil give you money.
Or you could have just ended the conference, screwing over people who rearranged their lives and paid for flights for the conference? Even if you think the reputational damage will hit only the organizers and not EA in general, that’s a lot of damage to people who did nothing wrong.
I think there are very reasonable questions to be asked about the organizers and the process that got them funding in the first place. But once they were at day 2 of a conference, OP paying for a second venue seems like the best of a bad set of options.
I absolutely believe my above comment, but am unhappy that it is my only response to this post.
I have a lot of disagreements with this post, both factually and in principle, and I wish it had been written very differently. But my guess is that many people who read this will walk away with a more accurate picture of the world. Not a pareto improvement, they’ll have less accurate impressions of some parts, but it overall represents an improvement, and that’s good. And people can correct the false parts, so the net improvement might be even higher.