Past surveys (e.g. Open Phil’s survey) suggest that connections between individuals are the key source of impact from our events. So we focus on the number of new connections we make at our events.
I’d be curious which survey result you’re thinking of here. Aside from a couple of qualitative responses , I don’t remember a question in the OP survey that I would think addresses this.
To my recollection (which may be mistaken) the OP survey didn’t include the question which more explicitly addresses this, which the EA Survey did.
See the question on whether people received important connections vs important information which we included, here.
To make the contrast for EAG / EAGx clearer. Here are the figures on a single graph, with raw totals rather than percentages of respondent (ordered by connections).
EAG and EAGx are among the top sources for new connections, after personal connections and EA groups (though the gap is quite marked, with those two categories each indicated as being the source of a new connection twice as often, this may be partly explained by more EAs encountering personal connections or local groups than encountering EAG, since many EAs have not attended an EAG).
And EAG and EAGx are more connection-leaning than they are learning new information-leaning. But it might be worth noting that the tendency is not dramatic. Only about 1.6 people report making an important new connection from EAG or EAGx for every 1 person reporting learning something new.
Indeed, virtually no sources seem particularly connection-leaning (the most connection-leaning sources only account for 2x more people indicating an important connection than important information). Moreover, there seems relatively little difference between sources’ propensity to lead to more connections or more information. Even the most learning-leaning sources only account for 3-5x more cases of people interesting they learned something important than that they made an important new connection and those are cases where the source almost necessarily could not lead to a new connection in most cases (most people won’t make a new connection from reading a book or listening to a podcast).
This may suggest that the learning something important vs making a new connection distinction may be of relatively little relevance at the level of individual sources. Instead, it might seem like, in most cases where people could make a connection, it’s also similarly likely they might learn something new (put this way I think this seems very intuitive).
(Of course, it is important to recall that this only refers to the ratio within sources- which might be relevant when considering which metrics are important for different sources- and not differences between sources. Some sources lead to 10x more people making a new connection from them and 10x more people learning something new from them).
It’s also important to bear in mind that this doesn’t speak to the magnitude of the number of new connections or important new things being learned (it could be that the number of important new things each individual learns is typically much higher than the number of new connections each person makes, or vice versa) or the magnitude of the importance of each of these (it could be that the connections are, on average, much more important than new important information or vice versa). However, this is a limitation that applies to OP data as well as far as I know.
I’d be curious which survey result you’re thinking of here. Aside from a couple of qualitative responses , I don’t remember a question in the OP survey that I would think addresses this.
To my recollection (which may be mistaken) the OP survey didn’t include the question which more explicitly addresses this, which the EA Survey did.
See the question on whether people received important connections vs important information which we included, here.
To make the contrast for EAG / EAGx clearer. Here are the figures on a single graph, with raw totals rather than percentages of respondent (ordered by connections).
EAG and EAGx are among the top sources for new connections, after personal connections and EA groups (though the gap is quite marked, with those two categories each indicated as being the source of a new connection twice as often, this may be partly explained by more EAs encountering personal connections or local groups than encountering EAG, since many EAs have not attended an EAG).
And EAG and EAGx are more connection-leaning than they are learning new information-leaning. But it might be worth noting that the tendency is not dramatic. Only about 1.6 people report making an important new connection from EAG or EAGx for every 1 person reporting learning something new.
Indeed, virtually no sources seem particularly connection-leaning (the most connection-leaning sources only account for 2x more people indicating an important connection than important information). Moreover, there seems relatively little difference between sources’ propensity to lead to more connections or more information. Even the most learning-leaning sources only account for 3-5x more cases of people interesting they learned something important than that they made an important new connection and those are cases where the source almost necessarily could not lead to a new connection in most cases (most people won’t make a new connection from reading a book or listening to a podcast).
This may suggest that the learning something important vs making a new connection distinction may be of relatively little relevance at the level of individual sources. Instead, it might seem like, in most cases where people could make a connection, it’s also similarly likely they might learn something new (put this way I think this seems very intuitive).
(Of course, it is important to recall that this only refers to the ratio within sources- which might be relevant when considering which metrics are important for different sources- and not differences between sources. Some sources lead to 10x more people making a new connection from them and 10x more people learning something new from them).
It’s also important to bear in mind that this doesn’t speak to the magnitude of the number of new connections or important new things being learned (it could be that the number of important new things each individual learns is typically much higher than the number of new connections each person makes, or vice versa) or the magnitude of the importance of each of these (it could be that the connections are, on average, much more important than new important information or vice versa). However, this is a limitation that applies to OP data as well as far as I know.
(This isn’t a full response to your comment.) I think we were mostly referring to the qualitative data from the OP survey.