We looked a bit at running our events in other locations or further out from cities. Generally things didn’t seem sufficiently cheaper but this is something we’d like to explore further. I do also think there’s a fairly substantial cost to running our events in non-hub locations, because some of the best-networked people in the community (people who can provide mentorship, advice, funding, and so on) will be much less likely to attend. It would also take more time and travel costs for non-local people to attend, reducing the appeal of doing an event outside of a hub.
I believe you that this is the case, but I’m also curious as to why. At least in the private sector, more senior people (and even junior people) seem to spend a lot of their time traveling, to meet clients, do deals, visit conferences, and so on. And similarly academics seem happy to fly quite a long way to go to conferences. In fact attending conferences or offsites is often seen as a perk. So I don’t quite understand why senior EAs seem so averse to flying to Vegas or Atlanta. Do EA employers not let people expense the travel?
I’m not sure I count as ‘senior’, but I could understand some reluctance even if ‘all expenses paid’.
I consider my EAG(x) participation as an act of community service. Although there are diffuse benefits, I do not get that much out of it myself, professionally speaking. This is not that surprising: contacts at EAG (or knowledge at EAG, etc. etc.) matter a lot less on the margin of several years spent working in the field than just starting out. I spend most of my time at EAG trying to be helpful—typically, through the medium of several hours of 1-1s each day. I find this fulfilling, but not leisurely.
So from the selfish perspective EAG feels pretty marginal either re. ‘professional development’ or ‘fun’. I’d guess many could be dissuaded by small frictions. Non-hub locations probably fit the bill: “Oh, I could visit [hub] for EAG, and meet my professional contacts in [hub] whilst I’m in town” is a lot more tempting to the minds eye than a dedicated trip for EAG alone.
Speaking for myself, my org would definitely be happy to reimburse travel. But I very much dislike travelling for a number of reasons including travel time and jet lag increasing the cost significantly. I don’t want to be away from my family longer than necessary, in part because I already optimise fairly strongly for working long hours. So I’m most likely to go to EAGs nearby. Like Greg, going to another EA hub has advantages that sometimes offset the cost of needing to travel for me.
I currently work at a large EA-ish org that allows me to fully expense EAG travel and I (like some of the other commenters) am pretty strongly in the “prefer hub” camp. Like lots of EAs, I try to intensely optimize my time, and I’d prefer to optimize for work and play separately (so I would prefer to focus on work when going to EAGs, then separately take vacations optimized for being fun for me, e.g. by being in a place that’s a great fit for me and my primary partner). I am happy to travel occasionally if there’s a strong impact justification, but don’t want CEA trying to influence me to do travel for fun at a location and time it picks. In my experience, EAs in general are more intense about their time and possibly less into travel than most people in academia.
Even if you assume everyone would go, I don’t think it’s a clear win. I think a lot of professionals in the space place a lot of value on an hour of their labor; if they value it at $100/hour (i.e. equivalent to $200k/year in donations), and you make them travel e.g. 12 hours roundtrip to get to a conference location, and that affects 300 attendees who would otherwise have had reasonable in-city daily commutes, that’s $360k-equivalent added (though in reality I agree many just wouldn’t go, and some would also do the vacation thing so this would funge against hours they’d spend traveling for vacation anyway). Then additionally, you have EA orgs paying the travel costs themselves, which maybe looks better for CEA but is the same to EA funders (though maybe some people can also expense it to non-EA orgs?). If the orgs are paying $1000 per person (let’s say $400 on travel, $450 for 3 nights of hotel rooms at $150/night, the rest for meals and other incidental expenses) and 300 more people need to travel than otherwise would if the EAG were in a hub area, that’s another $300k.
Also, CEA staff probably benefit from specialist knowledge of cities they often run EAGs in, so either they are stuck in the same non-hub city repeatedly, or they probably suffer costs of trying to run conferences in cities they aren’t used to.
It’d be partly counterbalanced, in addition to being less expensive to CEA, by being less expensive for the people that would need to travel either way (lower hotel and meal costs in lower cost-of-living cities), to get to the EAG, so I don’t think it’s an obvious call.
I travel at most 5 times a year. This includes: all invited lectures, all NSF/Darpa investigator or panel meetings, conferences, special workshops, etc. Typically it looks something like this: I do one or two invited lectures at places where I really like the people, I go one full week to a main conference, I do maybe one NSF/Darpa event, and I reserve one wildcard to attend something I really care about (e.g. the Grace Hopper Conference, or a workshop on a special topic). It is *not easy* to say no that often, especially when the invitations are so attractive, or when the people asking are so ungraceful in accepting no for an answer. But when I didn’t have this limit I noticed other things. Like how exhausted and unhappy I was, how I got sick a lot, how it affected my kids and my husband, and how when I stopped traveling I had so much more time to pay real attention to my research and my amazing students.
The author of that post wound up getting tenure at Harvard on schedule, and then getting further promoted to full professor unusually fast.
Anyway, for my part, I have little kids, so traveling is a burden on my family, in addition to sucking up a surprising amount of time / energy (much more than you would think just the nominal travel time, because there’s also booking & planning, packing & unpacking, catching up on chores and sleep and taking notes afterwards, etc.). Big opportunity cost.
Thanks for sharing this!
I believe you that this is the case, but I’m also curious as to why. At least in the private sector, more senior people (and even junior people) seem to spend a lot of their time traveling, to meet clients, do deals, visit conferences, and so on. And similarly academics seem happy to fly quite a long way to go to conferences. In fact attending conferences or offsites is often seen as a perk. So I don’t quite understand why senior EAs seem so averse to flying to Vegas or Atlanta. Do EA employers not let people expense the travel?
I’m not sure I count as ‘senior’, but I could understand some reluctance even if ‘all expenses paid’.
I consider my EAG(x) participation as an act of community service. Although there are diffuse benefits, I do not get that much out of it myself, professionally speaking. This is not that surprising: contacts at EAG (or knowledge at EAG, etc. etc.) matter a lot less on the margin of several years spent working in the field than just starting out. I spend most of my time at EAG trying to be helpful—typically, through the medium of several hours of 1-1s each day. I find this fulfilling, but not leisurely.
So from the selfish perspective EAG feels pretty marginal either re. ‘professional development’ or ‘fun’. I’d guess many could be dissuaded by small frictions. Non-hub locations probably fit the bill: “Oh, I could visit [hub] for EAG, and meet my professional contacts in [hub] whilst I’m in town” is a lot more tempting to the minds eye than a dedicated trip for EAG alone.
Speaking for myself, my org would definitely be happy to reimburse travel. But I very much dislike travelling for a number of reasons including travel time and jet lag increasing the cost significantly. I don’t want to be away from my family longer than necessary, in part because I already optimise fairly strongly for working long hours. So I’m most likely to go to EAGs nearby. Like Greg, going to another EA hub has advantages that sometimes offset the cost of needing to travel for me.
I currently work at a large EA-ish org that allows me to fully expense EAG travel and I (like some of the other commenters) am pretty strongly in the “prefer hub” camp. Like lots of EAs, I try to intensely optimize my time, and I’d prefer to optimize for work and play separately (so I would prefer to focus on work when going to EAGs, then separately take vacations optimized for being fun for me, e.g. by being in a place that’s a great fit for me and my primary partner). I am happy to travel occasionally if there’s a strong impact justification, but don’t want CEA trying to influence me to do travel for fun at a location and time it picks. In my experience, EAs in general are more intense about their time and possibly less into travel than most people in academia.
Even if you assume everyone would go, I don’t think it’s a clear win. I think a lot of professionals in the space place a lot of value on an hour of their labor; if they value it at $100/hour (i.e. equivalent to $200k/year in donations), and you make them travel e.g. 12 hours roundtrip to get to a conference location, and that affects 300 attendees who would otherwise have had reasonable in-city daily commutes, that’s $360k-equivalent added (though in reality I agree many just wouldn’t go, and some would also do the vacation thing so this would funge against hours they’d spend traveling for vacation anyway). Then additionally, you have EA orgs paying the travel costs themselves, which maybe looks better for CEA but is the same to EA funders (though maybe some people can also expense it to non-EA orgs?). If the orgs are paying $1000 per person (let’s say $400 on travel, $450 for 3 nights of hotel rooms at $150/night, the rest for meals and other incidental expenses) and 300 more people need to travel than otherwise would if the EAG were in a hub area, that’s another $300k.
Also, CEA staff probably benefit from specialist knowledge of cities they often run EAGs in, so either they are stuck in the same non-hub city repeatedly, or they probably suffer costs of trying to run conferences in cities they aren’t used to.
It’d be partly counterbalanced, in addition to being less expensive to CEA, by being less expensive for the people that would need to travel either way (lower hotel and meal costs in lower cost-of-living cities), to get to the EAG, so I don’t think it’s an obvious call.
There’s a school of thought that academics travel much much more than optimal or healthy. See Cal Newport’s Deep Work, where he cites a claim that it’s “typical for junior faculty to travel twelve to twenty-four times a year”, and compares that to Radhika Nagpal’s blog post The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life which says:
The author of that post wound up getting tenure at Harvard on schedule, and then getting further promoted to full professor unusually fast.
Anyway, for my part, I have little kids, so traveling is a burden on my family, in addition to sucking up a surprising amount of time / energy (much more than you would think just the nominal travel time, because there’s also booking & planning, packing & unpacking, catching up on chores and sleep and taking notes afterwards, etc.). Big opportunity cost.