Brief thoughts: 1. Very thankful for the teams that run these! I got a lot of value from them. 2. Obvious comment, but I’d be interested in more EAG Virtual conferences. It’s possible they don’t seem as cool, but maybe that’s partially fixable. I’d expect this to cut down on much of the expense. I liked the EAG Virtual, during the pandemic, that I went to. 3. It seems healthy to me to raise prices over time, maybe up to full-cost or even over (small profit margin)? I think EA would be better if people paid more for services they used. 4. If one were to estimate the value of EAG in terms of something like, “quality-adjusted person times interaction-time”, I would expect that there could be more small events that could be cost-effective. 5. I’d feel good about experimentation. Even, take a year or two off from EAGs and try out very different kinds of events. We’re in this for the long-term, I think more exploration could make sense. 6. If OP is paying for much of it, I’d really like for them to state what their logic model for what they think the value is. I feel nervous being subsidized to do something, when it’s not very clear to me exactly what that reasoning is. 7. On that note, I’d of course be interested to better understand the model of where CEA is thinking the value comes from. I have multiple hypotheses here. 8. I’ve noticed that at some of the EAGs I attended, the venues would kick us out pretty early, which seems to have created some lost value.
+1 that I’d love to know the assumptions behind the subsidies. I’d also like information that makes it easier for people to self-select into different EA events, beyond simply “knowledge of EA”. Historically, what kind of people in what kind of situations have gotten the most value out going to an EAG conference? Who’s added the most value? What kind of people do you really wish would attend? Obviously it couldn’t be exhaustive, and maybe this would end up in the same kind of bad place as people over-indexing on 80k’s advice, but I’d definitely be curious!
Thanks — these are some great questions, I’ll try to provide some more context on some of these below:
- We do currently have EAGxVirtual scheduled for November, though this is an EAGx rather than an EAG (and perhaps we should consider doing an EAG Virtual again). When we’ve looked at the stats, our virtual conferences do seem to get around half the connections per person. I also have the intuition that people are much less likely to make big career changes from virtual events (things like “I went to EAG London and it pushed me to drop out of my PhD”). But naturally given how cheap virtual events are, I agree we could be exploring these more.
- To discuss subsidies (somewhat mentioned here but also mentioned elsewhere and in the replies): I see there as being two main (connected) reasons here. One reason is that a lot of attendees are providing value to other people as well as than themselves, meaning that the value to them is maybe $500 but the total value of their attendance is maybe $1000 (made up numbers). This may be especially true for more senior members of the community who can provide a lot for others but perhaps have little to gain for themselves. The second reason is that a lot of our attendees don’t have that much disposable income — a lot of the people who can get the most value from advice and new connections are students, unemployed, or just generally not in a stable enough career path to be able to spend much money. But I’ll note that I generally agree that it would be better if more EAs paid for the services they used, hence why we’re planning to raise ticket prices (and are likely going to ask people who can afford it to pay for their ticket in its entirety).
- I’ll note that we are somewhat experimenting with other types of events on other parts of the events team, with things like EAGx’s in new regions and various retreats/smaller events (like the Summit on Existential Security) — and we continue to keep doing this in the future.
- We see the main route to impact for EAGs as (briefly): people forming new connections and having conversations that shift or accelerate them into higher-impact career paths. Though naturally this isn’t a super in-depth explanation, and perhaps we should share something more extensive in the future (I expect such a post to discuss a lot of concrete past examples of the above). I also feel like it could be a mistake to isolate the routes to impact down to just one or a few items, as part of me sees large events like this as somewhat nebulous, and likely to create impact in surprising or unexpected ways.
- And then to briefly touch on the venue closing thing — at least for the past two years we’ve closed our doors at ~10pm each day, largely because we need to move around furniture and set stuff up for the next day (as well as let staff sleep). Though I’d guess there’s some previous EAG or EAGx event pre-2022 that you’re referring to here that had earlier closing times (this may have been due to cost or staff capacity, not sure).
Sorry yeah, they cost way less, and if we were purely optimizing for connections per dollar then virtual conferences might be all that we do. So we are going to think about doing more of these moving forwards, though I do think it would be a mistake to optimize solely for connections per dollar.
Not sure, we don’t have any particular measure for impact-adjusted plan changes per $, it’s more just what in theory I think we should be aiming for. In practice we mostly just track connections, to what extent people find EAGs valuable, attendance, and other easy-to-track metrics.
I enjoyed this, thanks!
Brief thoughts:
1. Very thankful for the teams that run these! I got a lot of value from them.
2. Obvious comment, but I’d be interested in more EAG Virtual conferences. It’s possible they don’t seem as cool, but maybe that’s partially fixable. I’d expect this to cut down on much of the expense. I liked the EAG Virtual, during the pandemic, that I went to.
3. It seems healthy to me to raise prices over time, maybe up to full-cost or even over (small profit margin)? I think EA would be better if people paid more for services they used.
4. If one were to estimate the value of EAG in terms of something like, “quality-adjusted person times interaction-time”, I would expect that there could be more small events that could be cost-effective.
5. I’d feel good about experimentation. Even, take a year or two off from EAGs and try out very different kinds of events. We’re in this for the long-term, I think more exploration could make sense.
6. If OP is paying for much of it, I’d really like for them to state what their logic model for what they think the value is. I feel nervous being subsidized to do something, when it’s not very clear to me exactly what that reasoning is.
7. On that note, I’d of course be interested to better understand the model of where CEA is thinking the value comes from. I have multiple hypotheses here.
8. I’ve noticed that at some of the EAGs I attended, the venues would kick us out pretty early, which seems to have created some lost value.
+1 that I’d love to know the assumptions behind the subsidies. I’d also like information that makes it easier for people to self-select into different EA events, beyond simply “knowledge of EA”. Historically, what kind of people in what kind of situations have gotten the most value out going to an EAG conference? Who’s added the most value? What kind of people do you really wish would attend? Obviously it couldn’t be exhaustive, and maybe this would end up in the same kind of bad place as people over-indexing on 80k’s advice, but I’d definitely be curious!
Thanks — these are some great questions, I’ll try to provide some more context on some of these below:
- We do currently have EAGxVirtual scheduled for November, though this is an EAGx rather than an EAG (and perhaps we should consider doing an EAG Virtual again). When we’ve looked at the stats, our virtual conferences do seem to get around half the connections per person. I also have the intuition that people are much less likely to make big career changes from virtual events (things like “I went to EAG London and it pushed me to drop out of my PhD”). But naturally given how cheap virtual events are, I agree we could be exploring these more.
- To discuss subsidies (somewhat mentioned here but also mentioned elsewhere and in the replies): I see there as being two main (connected) reasons here. One reason is that a lot of attendees are providing value to other people as well as than themselves, meaning that the value to them is maybe $500 but the total value of their attendance is maybe $1000 (made up numbers). This may be especially true for more senior members of the community who can provide a lot for others but perhaps have little to gain for themselves. The second reason is that a lot of our attendees don’t have that much disposable income — a lot of the people who can get the most value from advice and new connections are students, unemployed, or just generally not in a stable enough career path to be able to spend much money. But I’ll note that I generally agree that it would be better if more EAs paid for the services they used, hence why we’re planning to raise ticket prices (and are likely going to ask people who can afford it to pay for their ticket in its entirety).
- I’ll note that we are somewhat experimenting with other types of events on other parts of the events team, with things like EAGx’s in new regions and various retreats/smaller events (like the Summit on Existential Security) — and we continue to keep doing this in the future.
- We see the main route to impact for EAGs as (briefly): people forming new connections and having conversations that shift or accelerate them into higher-impact career paths. Though naturally this isn’t a super in-depth explanation, and perhaps we should share something more extensive in the future (I expect such a post to discuss a lot of concrete past examples of the above). I also feel like it could be a mistake to isolate the routes to impact down to just one or a few items, as part of me sees large events like this as somewhat nebulous, and likely to create impact in surprising or unexpected ways.
- And then to briefly touch on the venue closing thing — at least for the past two years we’ve closed our doors at ~10pm each day, largely because we need to move around furniture and set stuff up for the next day (as well as let staff sleep). Though I’d guess there’s some previous EAG or EAGx event pre-2022 that you’re referring to here that had earlier closing times (this may have been due to cost or staff capacity, not sure).
Surely they cost much less though? Do you think it isn’t worth it even without this price difference?
Sorry yeah, they cost way less, and if we were purely optimizing for connections per dollar then virtual conferences might be all that we do. So we are going to think about doing more of these moving forwards, though I do think it would be a mistake to optimize solely for connections per dollar.
So you are mainly optimising for plan changes per $?
I think that’s roughly right (I might put it as “impact-adjusted plan changes per $”).
Do you know how EAGs compare to 80k in this regard?
Not sure, we don’t have any particular measure for impact-adjusted plan changes per $, it’s more just what in theory I think we should be aiming for. In practice we mostly just track connections, to what extent people find EAGs valuable, attendance, and other easy-to-track metrics.
There’s not even a vague feel on the cost effectiveness of EAGs? Or a price at which CEA/OP no longer think they’d be cost effective to run?
There’s also the implicit cost of people’s time that is not similarly reduced.