I’m curious if you have examples of “norms, ideas, or future plans” which were successfully shared in 2016 (when we had just the one large EA Global) that you think would not have successfully been shared if we had multiple events?
I think EAG 2016 was the last time that I felt like there was a strong shared EA culture. These days I feel quite isolated from the european EA culture, and feel like there is a significant amount of tension between the different cultural clusters (though this is probably worsened by me no longer visiting the UK very much, which I tended to do more during my time at CEA). I think that tension has always been there, but I feel like I am now much more disconnected from how EA is going in other places around the world (and more broadly, don’t see a path forward for cultural recombination and reconciliation) because the two clusters just have their own events. I also feel somewhat similar about east-coast and west-coast cultural differences.
More concrete examples would be propagating ongoing shifts in cause-priorities. Many surveys suggest there has been an ongoing shift to more long-term causes, and my sense is that there is a buildup of social tension associated with that, that I think is hard to resolve without building common knowledge.
I think EAG 2016 very concretely actually did a lot by creating common-knowledge of that shift in cause-priorities, as well as a broader shift towards more macro-scale modeling, instead of more narrow RCT-based thinking that I think many assumed to be “what EA is about”. I.e. I think EAG 2016 did a lot to establish that EA wasn’t just primarily GiveWell and GiveWell style approaches.
A lot of the information I expect to be exchanged here is not going to be straightforward facts, but much more related to attitudes and social expectations, so it’s hard to be very concrete about these things, which I regret.
Importantly, I think a lot of this information spreads even when not everyone is attending the same talk. At all EAGs I went to, basically everyone knew by the end what the main points of the opening talks were, because people talked to each other about the content of the opening talks (if they were well-delivered), even if they didn’t attend, so there is a lot of diffusion of information that makes literally everyone being in the same talk not fully necessary (and where probabilistic common-knowledge can still be built). The information flow of people who attended separate EA Globals is still present, just many orders of magnitude weaker.
At least in recent years, the comparison of the Net Promoter Score of EAG and EAGx events indicate that the attendees themselves are positive about EAGx, though there are obviously lots of confounding factors:
These graphs are great and surprising to me. I don’t yet have great models of how I expect the Net Promoter Score to vary for different types of events like this, so I am not sure yet how to update.
Echoing Denise, I would be curious for evidence here. My intuition is that marginal returns are diminishing, not increasing, and I think this is a common view
At this year’s EAG there were many core people in EA that I had hoped I could talk to, but that weren’t attending, and when I inquired about their presence, they said they were just planning to attend EAG London, since that was more convenient for them. I also heard other people say that they weren’t attending because they didn’t really expect a lot of the “best people” to be around, which is a negative feedback loop that I think is at least partially caused by having many events, without one clear Schelling event that everyone is expected to show up to.
(e.g. ticket prices for conferences don’t seem to scale with the square of the number of attendees).
This assumes a model of perfect monopoly for conferences. In a perfectly competitive conference landscape, you expect ticket prices to be equal to marginal costs, which would be decreasing with size. I expect the actual conference landscape to be somewhere in-between, with a curve that does increase in prize proportional to size for a bit, but definitely not completely. Because of that, I don’t think price is much evidence either way on this issue.
Do you have examples of groups (events, programs, etc.) which use EA Global attendance as a “significant” membership criterion?
I think I do to some significant extend. I definitely have a significantly different relationship to how I treat people who I met at EA Global. I also think that if someone tells me that they tried to get into EA Global but didn’t get in, then I do make a pretty significant update on the degree to which they are core to EA, though the post above has definitely changed that some for me (since it made it more clear that CEA was handling acceptances quite differently than I thought they were). But I don’t expect everyone to have read the post in as much detail as I have, and I expect people will continue to think that EAG attendance is in significant parts screening for involvement and knowledge about EA.
I have a variety of other thoughts, but probably won’t have time to engage much more. So this will most likely be my last comment on the thread (unless someone asks a question or makes a comment that ends up feeling particularly easy or fun to reply to).
I think EAG 2016 was the last time that I felt like there was a strong shared EA culture. These days I feel quite isolated from the european EA culture, and feel like there is a significant amount of tension between the different cultural clusters (though this is probably worsened by me no longer visiting the UK very much, which I tended to do more during my time at CEA). I think that tension has always been there, but I feel like I am now much more disconnected from how EA is going in other places around the world (and more broadly, don’t see a path forward for cultural recombination and reconciliation) because the two clusters just have their own events. I also feel somewhat similar about east-coast and west-coast cultural differences.
More concrete examples would be propagating ongoing shifts in cause-priorities. Many surveys suggest there has been an ongoing shift to more long-term causes, and my sense is that there is a buildup of social tension associated with that, that I think is hard to resolve without building common knowledge.
I think EAG 2016 very concretely actually did a lot by creating common-knowledge of that shift in cause-priorities, as well as a broader shift towards more macro-scale modeling, instead of more narrow RCT-based thinking that I think many assumed to be “what EA is about”. I.e. I think EAG 2016 did a lot to establish that EA wasn’t just primarily GiveWell and GiveWell style approaches.
A lot of the information I expect to be exchanged here is not going to be straightforward facts, but much more related to attitudes and social expectations, so it’s hard to be very concrete about these things, which I regret.
Importantly, I think a lot of this information spreads even when not everyone is attending the same talk. At all EAGs I went to, basically everyone knew by the end what the main points of the opening talks were, because people talked to each other about the content of the opening talks (if they were well-delivered), even if they didn’t attend, so there is a lot of diffusion of information that makes literally everyone being in the same talk not fully necessary (and where probabilistic common-knowledge can still be built). The information flow of people who attended separate EA Globals is still present, just many orders of magnitude weaker.
These graphs are great and surprising to me. I don’t yet have great models of how I expect the Net Promoter Score to vary for different types of events like this, so I am not sure yet how to update.
At this year’s EAG there were many core people in EA that I had hoped I could talk to, but that weren’t attending, and when I inquired about their presence, they said they were just planning to attend EAG London, since that was more convenient for them. I also heard other people say that they weren’t attending because they didn’t really expect a lot of the “best people” to be around, which is a negative feedback loop that I think is at least partially caused by having many events, without one clear Schelling event that everyone is expected to show up to.
This assumes a model of perfect monopoly for conferences. In a perfectly competitive conference landscape, you expect ticket prices to be equal to marginal costs, which would be decreasing with size. I expect the actual conference landscape to be somewhere in-between, with a curve that does increase in prize proportional to size for a bit, but definitely not completely. Because of that, I don’t think price is much evidence either way on this issue.
I think I do to some significant extend. I definitely have a significantly different relationship to how I treat people who I met at EA Global. I also think that if someone tells me that they tried to get into EA Global but didn’t get in, then I do make a pretty significant update on the degree to which they are core to EA, though the post above has definitely changed that some for me (since it made it more clear that CEA was handling acceptances quite differently than I thought they were). But I don’t expect everyone to have read the post in as much detail as I have, and I expect people will continue to think that EAG attendance is in significant parts screening for involvement and knowledge about EA.
I have a variety of other thoughts, but probably won’t have time to engage much more. So this will most likely be my last comment on the thread (unless someone asks a question or makes a comment that ends up feeling particularly easy or fun to reply to).