I think this is a good guide, and thank you for writing it. I found the bit on how to phrase event advertising particularly helpful.
One thing I would like to elaborate on is the ‘rent-seekers’ bit. I’m going to say something that disagrees with a lot of the other comments here. I think we need to be careful about how we approach such ‘rent-seeking’ conversations. This isn’t a criticism of what you wrote, as you explained it really well, but more of a trend I’ve noticed recently in EA discourse and this is a good opportunity to mention it.
It’s important to highlight that not all groups are equal, demographically. I co-lead a group in a city where the child poverty rate has gone from 24% to a whopping 42% in 5 years, and remains one of the poorest cities in the UK. I volunteer my time at a food bank and can tell you that it’s never been under stronger demand. Simply put, things are tough here. One of the things I am proudest about in our EA group is we’ve done a load of outreach to people who face extra barriers to participating in academia and research, and as a result have a group with a great range of life backgrounds. I’m sure it’s not the only EA group to achieve this, because I’ve spoken to other group leads who have made an effort to achieve the same effect.
We’ve adapted our strategies and events a bit to enable this—eg. pre-buying public transport tickets for people to attend our events, or wage replacement where if they attend a day-long event, we’ll pay a micro-stipend equivalent of a 10 or 12 hour shift of minimum wage (though this is rare as we’re careful about when we arrange stuff). This was because some people literally couldn’t afford a day off to attend conferences, or present their research, because that lost day had significant consequences for them. As a result, we’ve had some fantastic things come from people who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to contribute their valuable ideas and work.
My point is that a lack of funding is an extremely real barrier to many people’s participation not just in EA, but in academia/research in general. I understand that there is a very real risk of people using EA events as a ‘free holiday’ type deal, and it’s something that bears mitigating, but we also have to be really careful about unfairly tarring people who rely on full funding to attend events. I fully expect to encourage as many members of my group as possible to attend the conferences because they have lots to gain and lots to contribute. I understand the ‘rent-seeking’ fear is that people will use EA conferences to pursue jobs or grant funding for projects, but I don’t think this is as high a risk as people say because those are EA-aligned jobs and grants, and those organisations have their own safeguards. They can see through false interest fairly easily. As for reducing the quality of conferences, I’m not sure how you could reliably tell the difference between a ‘rent-seeker’ and someone who just doesn’t know EA in-depth yet, or who is nervous.
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that in some groups only a few people may be suitable to attend the conferences as in your example. However, there are contextual and geographical factors at play which means that some groups may make more applications than others, and it may not necessarily be a ‘rent-seekers’ issue. Some groups may just need more help for more people. As a result, higher numbers of people from x group over y group isn’t necessarily an indication of ‘rent-seeking’.
I’m always extremely apprehensive about any ‘rent-seekers’ discourse because it seems to follow a similar trend as to class warfare in mainstream media. For example, the demonisation of people on benefits despite that fact that benefits fraud makes up a microscopic rate of overall fraud. The idea of someone taking advantage of the group (whether that’s society or an organisation etc) is often overinflated compared to its actual risk. I would be very interested to see any confirmed examples of rent-seeking to try and gauge how big the current threat is. I assume the grant-makers check the hotels people are claiming for (not 5-star etc) and length of stay (not booking 8 days for a 2-day event). You also sign in to events via a QR code, so checking that people actually went to the event is fairly easy. I assume EA can also access people’s agendas, to a degree, and are able to see if people are actively engaging with others. These various safeguards should make this issue quite trackable. If it’s a matter of engaging in good faith, that’s so immensely hard to measure I’m not even sure it’s possible.
A final bit I would like to expand on is this:
”I’ve seen cases where people seem more motivated by the free flight than the conference itself”
There is also a risk of mistaking excitement for motivation. For many people, an EA conference will be the first time they’ve travelled away to another country (or even city), and so lots of excitement surrounding the actual trip is normal. My first ever EAG London was my first time travelling to my own nation’s capital. You can bet I had a walk around the tourist sites after my agenda for the day was finished. And that’s okay. I understand there’s a concern of people doing it just for the flight, travel, hotel, whatever—but the amount of safeguards would (I assume) prevent this from being the case.
You make really good points, and I think the ‘rent-seekers’ risk bears watching to see if it becomes a genuine threat, but I am concerned about it becoming an increasing part of EA discourse and if we’re not careful it could drive away otherwise great contributors because of entrenched social and class issues. EA already has intellectual diversity issues, and we need to be careful about exacerbating rather than fixing these. I also understand that ‘rent-seeker’ in no way is intended to mean ‘low economic background’ - however, my point is that many of the ‘rent-seeker’ red flags listed here and elsewhere could also be signs of someone overcoming class and social barriers and so there’s a risk of mistakenly alienating people from certain backgrounds over others.
Again—I 100% know this isn’t what you meant and this was a really helpful guide, but I’m commenting more on the general discourse trend I’m noticing on the forum, on the Twitter group, and in some blogs. I am concerned that the fears of rent-seekers could be overblown compared to the real proportion of the risk, and would be interested to see some evidence-based research in this area.
I agree that it’s very important to continue using EA money to enable people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to participate in EA to do so, and it certainly sounds like in your case you’re doing this to great effect on socioeconomic representation. And I agree that the amount of funding a group member requests is a very bad proxy for whether they’re rent-seeking. But I don’t agree with several of the next steps here, and as a result, I think the implication — that increased attention to rent-seeking in EA is dangerous for socioeconomic inclusion — is wrong.
I think my disagreement boils down to the claim:
I’m not sure how you could reliably tell the difference between a ‘rent-seeker’ and someone who just doesn’t know EA in-depth yet, or who is nervous.
In my experience, it is actually pretty easy for group organizers to differentiate. People who are excited about EA and excited about the free flight or their first major travel experience/etc do not set off “rent-seeking alarms” in my gut. People who ask a lot of questions about getting reimbursed for stuff do not set these alarms off, either. You’re right that these correlate with socioeconomic status (or youth, or random other factors) more than rent-seeking.
It’s people who do these things and don’t seem that excited about EA that set off these alarms. And assessing how interested someone is in EA is, like, one of the absolute essential functions of group organizers.
I think EA group organizers tend to be hyper-cooperators who strongly default towards trusting people, and generally this is fine. It’s pretty harmless to allow a suspected rent-seeker to eat the free food at a discussion, and can be pretty costly to stop them (in social capital, time, drama, and possibly getting it wrong). But it’s actually pretty harmful, I think, for them to come to EAGs, where the opportunity costs of people’s time and attention — and the default trust people give to unfamiliar faces — are much higher. For me, it takes consciously asking the question, “Wait, do I trust this person?” for my decision-making brain to acknowledge the information that my social-observational brain has been gathering that the person doesn’t actually seem very interested. But I think this gut-level thing is generally pretty reliable. I’ll put it this way: I would be pretty surprised if EA group organizers incorrectly excluded basically anyone from EAGs in the past year, and I think it’s very likely that the bar should be moved in the direction of scrutiny — of just checking in with our gut about whether the person seems sincere.
That’s a good point, about community organisers being kind of a filter. I like to think I’d know if someone was looking to extract profit. To be honest we usually have the other problem. I’ve heard a few times before from people they ‘dont want to take the p*ss’ and I have to convince them it’s alright to stay at a 2 star instead of a 1 star! I think the groups function well because it’s (in theory for me, never happened yet) possible to tell when someone’s shifty. So I agree with that point.
I do still think though that too much focus on the discourse risks socioeconomic exclusion. I know people don’t intend it this way, but sometimes the discourse can come off quite elitist in writing when worded incorrectly. It’s a risk. But at the same time I would hate to chill someone’s free speech, and valid concerns. Communities are always a delicate balancing act! Difficult to get right.
I think you’re probably right that there are elitism risks depending on how it’s phrased. Seems like there should be ways to talk about the problem without sounding alienating in this way. Since I’m claiming that the focus really should just be on detecting insincerity, I think a good way to synthesize this would just be to talk about keeping an eye out for insincerity rather than “rent-seeking” per se.
Agreed. I’m gonna channel my inner Ollie Base here and say “it’s the EAG team’s job to accept and pay for those they think will create the most value by attending”. I think currently if you get accepted go, go joyfully and enjoy the city you go to.
I went to the zoo on the Sunday of EAG Prague. Some of my flights were paid for by CEA because I was cash strapped at the time. I could have decided that was an inappropriate use of the time, but I think it made me enjoy the EAG more, I still talked to lots of people and I would be more likely to fly to another EAGx. Signalling masters, yes, but counterfactual impact is more important. If someone applies to an EAG partly for the holiday, then as long as they intend to take the EAG seriously and are honest on their application, more power to them. CEA can read their application and accept them if they want.
As the real Ollie Base, I agree with this (assuming personal leisure doesn’t add non-negligible costs).
Having skimmed Luke’s parent comment I also agree and upvoted. Anecdotally, I encounter more people who I wish had applied for travel funding (or more funding) than people who applied for too much. This weakly suggests to me we should worry more about making sure people are aware of our travel grant policy (and that’s on us) than free-riders, though I could imagine the latter being more costly from a PR/community health perspective per instance.
I’m actually going to reply to my own comment here with the cardinal sin of thinking of another point after hitting ‘post’, but not wanting to disrupt the flow of the original comment!
I believe there IS a case to be made for teaching organisers how to better spend funds smartly. I have been to larger EA events before where I’ve thought to myself ‘this could have been done at half the price’. Maybe it’s the fact I grew up in an environment where you had to make every penny stretch as far as possible, but it blew me away when another group leader mentioned to me they don’t negotiate costs with vendors! Like haggle on price for room fees, food etc. Some find it distasteful, and I get that, but a lot could be saved.
Also, some events can be unnecessarily ostentatious. Like do we really need a room with this much gold and antique clocks? You could have rented a soviet-style office room at half the price like 2 miles away.
Then again, it’s very easy for me to criticise others given my near-zero large-scale event planning experience. Maybe there are other factors I’m not considering. That said, maybe give group leaders some books on negotiation or on frugality tips. That may help a range of the issues highlighted in this post.
Thank you for such an informative and well-thought-out reply. I appreciate you taking the time :)
I think you raise some good points here, and yes I have personally found getting access to money much easier than with most other orgs. I still do think that there may be an unintentional chilling effect on people from rent-seeker discourse, but I think we can both agree with @Levin that perhaps using a different term related to good and bad faith may be a good avenue to pursue.
All in all I think you do raise really good points both in the original post and in this reply, but do also think it’s worth being mindful, as always, of unintended consequences :)
I think this is a good guide, and thank you for writing it. I found the bit on how to phrase event advertising particularly helpful.
One thing I would like to elaborate on is the ‘rent-seekers’ bit. I’m going to say something that disagrees with a lot of the other comments here. I think we need to be careful about how we approach such ‘rent-seeking’ conversations. This isn’t a criticism of what you wrote, as you explained it really well, but more of a trend I’ve noticed recently in EA discourse and this is a good opportunity to mention it.
It’s important to highlight that not all groups are equal, demographically. I co-lead a group in a city where the child poverty rate has gone from 24% to a whopping 42% in 5 years, and remains one of the poorest cities in the UK. I volunteer my time at a food bank and can tell you that it’s never been under stronger demand. Simply put, things are tough here. One of the things I am proudest about in our EA group is we’ve done a load of outreach to people who face extra barriers to participating in academia and research, and as a result have a group with a great range of life backgrounds. I’m sure it’s not the only EA group to achieve this, because I’ve spoken to other group leads who have made an effort to achieve the same effect.
We’ve adapted our strategies and events a bit to enable this—eg. pre-buying public transport tickets for people to attend our events, or wage replacement where if they attend a day-long event, we’ll pay a micro-stipend equivalent of a 10 or 12 hour shift of minimum wage (though this is rare as we’re careful about when we arrange stuff). This was because some people literally couldn’t afford a day off to attend conferences, or present their research, because that lost day had significant consequences for them. As a result, we’ve had some fantastic things come from people who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to contribute their valuable ideas and work.
My point is that a lack of funding is an extremely real barrier to many people’s participation not just in EA, but in academia/research in general. I understand that there is a very real risk of people using EA events as a ‘free holiday’ type deal, and it’s something that bears mitigating, but we also have to be really careful about unfairly tarring people who rely on full funding to attend events. I fully expect to encourage as many members of my group as possible to attend the conferences because they have lots to gain and lots to contribute. I understand the ‘rent-seeking’ fear is that people will use EA conferences to pursue jobs or grant funding for projects, but I don’t think this is as high a risk as people say because those are EA-aligned jobs and grants, and those organisations have their own safeguards. They can see through false interest fairly easily. As for reducing the quality of conferences, I’m not sure how you could reliably tell the difference between a ‘rent-seeker’ and someone who just doesn’t know EA in-depth yet, or who is nervous.
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that in some groups only a few people may be suitable to attend the conferences as in your example. However, there are contextual and geographical factors at play which means that some groups may make more applications than others, and it may not necessarily be a ‘rent-seekers’ issue. Some groups may just need more help for more people. As a result, higher numbers of people from x group over y group isn’t necessarily an indication of ‘rent-seeking’.
I’m always extremely apprehensive about any ‘rent-seekers’ discourse because it seems to follow a similar trend as to class warfare in mainstream media. For example, the demonisation of people on benefits despite that fact that benefits fraud makes up a microscopic rate of overall fraud. The idea of someone taking advantage of the group (whether that’s society or an organisation etc) is often overinflated compared to its actual risk. I would be very interested to see any confirmed examples of rent-seeking to try and gauge how big the current threat is. I assume the grant-makers check the hotels people are claiming for (not 5-star etc) and length of stay (not booking 8 days for a 2-day event). You also sign in to events via a QR code, so checking that people actually went to the event is fairly easy. I assume EA can also access people’s agendas, to a degree, and are able to see if people are actively engaging with others. These various safeguards should make this issue quite trackable. If it’s a matter of engaging in good faith, that’s so immensely hard to measure I’m not even sure it’s possible.
A final bit I would like to expand on is this:
”I’ve seen cases where people seem more motivated by the free flight than the conference itself”
There is also a risk of mistaking excitement for motivation. For many people, an EA conference will be the first time they’ve travelled away to another country (or even city), and so lots of excitement surrounding the actual trip is normal. My first ever EAG London was my first time travelling to my own nation’s capital. You can bet I had a walk around the tourist sites after my agenda for the day was finished. And that’s okay. I understand there’s a concern of people doing it just for the flight, travel, hotel, whatever—but the amount of safeguards would (I assume) prevent this from being the case.
You make really good points, and I think the ‘rent-seekers’ risk bears watching to see if it becomes a genuine threat, but I am concerned about it becoming an increasing part of EA discourse and if we’re not careful it could drive away otherwise great contributors because of entrenched social and class issues. EA already has intellectual diversity issues, and we need to be careful about exacerbating rather than fixing these. I also understand that ‘rent-seeker’ in no way is intended to mean ‘low economic background’ - however, my point is that many of the ‘rent-seeker’ red flags listed here and elsewhere could also be signs of someone overcoming class and social barriers and so there’s a risk of mistakenly alienating people from certain backgrounds over others.
Again—I 100% know this isn’t what you meant and this was a really helpful guide, but I’m commenting more on the general discourse trend I’m noticing on the forum, on the Twitter group, and in some blogs. I am concerned that the fears of rent-seekers could be overblown compared to the real proportion of the risk, and would be interested to see some evidence-based research in this area.
I agree that it’s very important to continue using EA money to enable people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to participate in EA to do so, and it certainly sounds like in your case you’re doing this to great effect on socioeconomic representation. And I agree that the amount of funding a group member requests is a very bad proxy for whether they’re rent-seeking. But I don’t agree with several of the next steps here, and as a result, I think the implication — that increased attention to rent-seeking in EA is dangerous for socioeconomic inclusion — is wrong.
I think my disagreement boils down to the claim:
In my experience, it is actually pretty easy for group organizers to differentiate. People who are excited about EA and excited about the free flight or their first major travel experience/etc do not set off “rent-seeking alarms” in my gut. People who ask a lot of questions about getting reimbursed for stuff do not set these alarms off, either. You’re right that these correlate with socioeconomic status (or youth, or random other factors) more than rent-seeking.
It’s people who do these things and don’t seem that excited about EA that set off these alarms. And assessing how interested someone is in EA is, like, one of the absolute essential functions of group organizers.
I think EA group organizers tend to be hyper-cooperators who strongly default towards trusting people, and generally this is fine. It’s pretty harmless to allow a suspected rent-seeker to eat the free food at a discussion, and can be pretty costly to stop them (in social capital, time, drama, and possibly getting it wrong). But it’s actually pretty harmful, I think, for them to come to EAGs, where the opportunity costs of people’s time and attention — and the default trust people give to unfamiliar faces — are much higher. For me, it takes consciously asking the question, “Wait, do I trust this person?” for my decision-making brain to acknowledge the information that my social-observational brain has been gathering that the person doesn’t actually seem very interested. But I think this gut-level thing is generally pretty reliable. I’ll put it this way: I would be pretty surprised if EA group organizers incorrectly excluded basically anyone from EAGs in the past year, and I think it’s very likely that the bar should be moved in the direction of scrutiny — of just checking in with our gut about whether the person seems sincere.
That’s a good point, about community organisers being kind of a filter. I like to think I’d know if someone was looking to extract profit. To be honest we usually have the other problem. I’ve heard a few times before from people they ‘dont want to take the p*ss’ and I have to convince them it’s alright to stay at a 2 star instead of a 1 star! I think the groups function well because it’s (in theory for me, never happened yet) possible to tell when someone’s shifty. So I agree with that point.
I do still think though that too much focus on the discourse risks socioeconomic exclusion. I know people don’t intend it this way, but sometimes the discourse can come off quite elitist in writing when worded incorrectly. It’s a risk. But at the same time I would hate to chill someone’s free speech, and valid concerns. Communities are always a delicate balancing act! Difficult to get right.
I think you’re probably right that there are elitism risks depending on how it’s phrased. Seems like there should be ways to talk about the problem without sounding alienating in this way. Since I’m claiming that the focus really should just be on detecting insincerity, I think a good way to synthesize this would just be to talk about keeping an eye out for insincerity rather than “rent-seeking” per se.
This is a great comment and I think would make a good standalone Forum post—I’d certainly like to link to it.
It’s something I would be willing to write if others wanted to read it, unless the original poster would rather do it.
Please do—at a minimum you could post what you’ve already written as a comment, but if you have more to say I’d be interested.
Agreed. I’m gonna channel my inner Ollie Base here and say “it’s the EAG team’s job to accept and pay for those they think will create the most value by attending”. I think currently if you get accepted go, go joyfully and enjoy the city you go to.
I went to the zoo on the Sunday of EAG Prague. Some of my flights were paid for by CEA because I was cash strapped at the time. I could have decided that was an inappropriate use of the time, but I think it made me enjoy the EAG more, I still talked to lots of people and I would be more likely to fly to another EAGx. Signalling masters, yes, but counterfactual impact is more important. If someone applies to an EAG partly for the holiday, then as long as they intend to take the EAG seriously and are honest on their application, more power to them. CEA can read their application and accept them if they want.
As the real Ollie Base, I agree with this (assuming personal leisure doesn’t add non-negligible costs).
Having skimmed Luke’s parent comment I also agree and upvoted. Anecdotally, I encounter more people who I wish had applied for travel funding (or more funding) than people who applied for too much. This weakly suggests to me we should worry more about making sure people are aware of our travel grant policy (and that’s on us) than free-riders, though I could imagine the latter being more costly from a PR/community health perspective per instance.
That’s an interesting tie-in to the ‘burnout’ discourse we’ve been seeing lately that I had not even considered.
I’m actually going to reply to my own comment here with the cardinal sin of thinking of another point after hitting ‘post’, but not wanting to disrupt the flow of the original comment!
I believe there IS a case to be made for teaching organisers how to better spend funds smartly. I have been to larger EA events before where I’ve thought to myself ‘this could have been done at half the price’. Maybe it’s the fact I grew up in an environment where you had to make every penny stretch as far as possible, but it blew me away when another group leader mentioned to me they don’t negotiate costs with vendors! Like haggle on price for room fees, food etc. Some find it distasteful, and I get that, but a lot could be saved.
Also, some events can be unnecessarily ostentatious. Like do we really need a room with this much gold and antique clocks? You could have rented a soviet-style office room at half the price like 2 miles away.
Then again, it’s very easy for me to criticise others given my near-zero large-scale event planning experience. Maybe there are other factors I’m not considering. That said, maybe give group leaders some books on negotiation or on frugality tips. That may help a range of the issues highlighted in this post.
Thank you for such an informative and well-thought-out reply. I appreciate you taking the time :)
I think you raise some good points here, and yes I have personally found getting access to money much easier than with most other orgs. I still do think that there may be an unintentional chilling effect on people from rent-seeker discourse, but I think we can both agree with @Levin that perhaps using a different term related to good and bad faith may be a good avenue to pursue.
All in all I think you do raise really good points both in the original post and in this reply, but do also think it’s worth being mindful, as always, of unintended consequences :)