No one on the team knew the donor, though he had donated to EA causes in the past and was acquainted with relevant people at CEA. We offered him VIP tickets and then he put $2,000 in the pay-what-you-want box in our online ticketing system. I think it was primarily thought of as defraying conference costs, and indeed we came in less than $2,000 under budget.
The organizers included Matt Reardon (OP and lead organizer) from Harvard Law School, Jen Eason and Vanessa Ruales from Harvard College, Juan Gil from MIT, Rebecca Baron from Tufts, and myself (no institutional affiliation).
When writing this postmortem, we actually did devote a section of it to a discussion of how the content was received, including individual presentations. Because most of the speakers were invited guests, this section will not be made public. I can share a few overall conclusions.
Overall, reception of the content in aggregate was positive. Some attendees were surprised by, and in a few cases critical of, the proportion of it devoted to animal welfare. This was not by design; most of the conference organizers are interested in animal welfare, but not moreso than other EA focus areas. Rather, it was determined primarily by the availability of speakers (most notably keynote speaker Bruce Friedrich). A few talks were also criticized by some attendees for being overly technical or of narrow interest.
Most of the panels were moderated by members of the organizing team; I think it would have been better to have these be moderated by people with deeper knowledge of the respective topics.
The anti-debate was an interesting idea whose specific workings we kind of just made up ad-hoc. I’d like to see it tried again, but only after further refinement of the format and clarity on how exactly it is supposed to work.
I don’t think there was necessarily anything wrong with it, I’d just encourage future organizers to consider more explicitly what the goal is and how to achieve it.
No one on the team knew the donor, though he had donated to EA causes in the past and was acquainted with relevant people at CEA. We offered him VIP tickets and then he put $2,000 in the pay-what-you-want box in our online ticketing system. I think it was primarily thought of as defraying conference costs, and indeed we came in less than $2,000 under budget.
The organizers included Matt Reardon (OP and lead organizer) from Harvard Law School, Jen Eason and Vanessa Ruales from Harvard College, Juan Gil from MIT, Rebecca Baron from Tufts, and myself (no institutional affiliation).
When writing this postmortem, we actually did devote a section of it to a discussion of how the content was received, including individual presentations. Because most of the speakers were invited guests, this section will not be made public. I can share a few overall conclusions.
Overall, reception of the content in aggregate was positive. Some attendees were surprised by, and in a few cases critical of, the proportion of it devoted to animal welfare. This was not by design; most of the conference organizers are interested in animal welfare, but not moreso than other EA focus areas. Rather, it was determined primarily by the availability of speakers (most notably keynote speaker Bruce Friedrich). A few talks were also criticized by some attendees for being overly technical or of narrow interest.
Most of the panels were moderated by members of the organizing team; I think it would have been better to have these be moderated by people with deeper knowledge of the respective topics.
The anti-debate was an interesting idea whose specific workings we kind of just made up ad-hoc. I’d like to see it tried again, but only after further refinement of the format and clarity on how exactly it is supposed to work.
What was the issue with the anti-debate?
I don’t think there was necessarily anything wrong with it, I’d just encourage future organizers to consider more explicitly what the goal is and how to achieve it.