Yep, great questions—thanks, Michael. To respond to your first thing, I definitely don’t expect that they’ll have those effects on everybody, just that they are much more likely to do so than pretty much any other standard EA group programming.
Depends on the retreat. HEA’s spring retreat (50 registrations, ~32 attendees) involved booking and communicating with a retreat center (which took probably 3-4 hours), probably 5-6 hours of time communicating with attendees, and like 2 hours planning programming. I ran a policy retreat in DC that was much more time-consuming, probably like 35 hours in figuring out logistics, communicating with guests, etc. I would guess the latter would do better on CBA (unless policy turns out to be very low-value).
I think scenic walks are probably the closest thing you can do on campus, but you definitely don’t get 80% of the value (even on a per-organizer-time basis). You get to tailor the conversation to their exact interests, but it’s not really the kind of sustained interaction in a self-contained social world that retreats offer.
Not with much confidence. I get the sense that the median person gets slightly more into EA but I guess like 5-10% of attendees can have major priorities shifts on the level of “EA seems like a cool way of thinking about climate policy” to “holy shit, x-risk.” I personally have shifted in a couple ways after retreats — from “optimize my time in grad school for generic policy career provided that I make some attempt at EA community-building” to “EA community-building should be one of my top two priorities” after the group organizer retreat and from “probably will work in biosecurity” to “probably will work in AI policy or EA meta” after Icecone.
Also should note that we had a bit of a head start: I had organized the DC retreat one month earlier so had some recent experience, we had lots of excited EAs already so we didn’t even try to get professional EAs and we decided casual hangouts were probably very high-value, and the organizing team basically had workshops ready to go. We also had it at a retreat center that provided food (though not snacks). If any of these were different it would have taken much longer to plan.
Yep, great questions—thanks, Michael. To respond to your first thing, I definitely don’t expect that they’ll have those effects on everybody, just that they are much more likely to do so than pretty much any other standard EA group programming.
Depends on the retreat. HEA’s spring retreat (50 registrations, ~32 attendees) involved booking and communicating with a retreat center (which took probably 3-4 hours), probably 5-6 hours of time communicating with attendees, and like 2 hours planning programming. I ran a policy retreat in DC that was much more time-consuming, probably like 35 hours in figuring out logistics, communicating with guests, etc. I would guess the latter would do better on CBA (unless policy turns out to be very low-value).
I think scenic walks are probably the closest thing you can do on campus, but you definitely don’t get 80% of the value (even on a per-organizer-time basis). You get to tailor the conversation to their exact interests, but it’s not really the kind of sustained interaction in a self-contained social world that retreats offer.
Not with much confidence. I get the sense that the median person gets slightly more into EA but I guess like 5-10% of attendees can have major priorities shifts on the level of “EA seems like a cool way of thinking about climate policy” to “holy shit, x-risk.” I personally have shifted in a couple ways after retreats — from “optimize my time in grad school for generic policy career provided that I make some attempt at EA community-building” to “EA community-building should be one of my top two priorities” after the group organizer retreat and from “probably will work in biosecurity” to “probably will work in AI policy or EA meta” after Icecone.
Got it, I’m surprised by how little time it took to organize HEA’s spring retreat. What programming was involved?
Also should note that we had a bit of a head start: I had organized the DC retreat one month earlier so had some recent experience, we had lots of excited EAs already so we didn’t even try to get professional EAs and we decided casual hangouts were probably very high-value, and the organizing team basically had workshops ready to go. We also had it at a retreat center that provided food (though not snacks). If any of these were different it would have taken much longer to plan.
It was very much an 80-20′d thing due to organizer capacity. The schedule was something like:
Friday evening arrivals + informal hangouts + board games (e.g. Pandemic)
Saturday morning: opening session, hikes/informal hangouts
Saturday afternoon: three sessions, each with multiple options:
1-on-1 walks, Updating Session, AI policy workshop
1-on-1 walks, Concept Swap, forecasting workshop
1-on-1 walks, AI policy workshop
Saturday evening: Hamming Circles, informal hangouts feat. hot tub and fire pit
Sunday morning: walks/hangouts
Sunday afternoon: career reflection, closing session, departure