Arthur has been engaged with EA since before the movement settled on a name, and reoriented from academics/āmedicine toward supporting highly impactful work. He has since developed operations skills by working with EA-affiliated organizations and in the private sector. Alongside EA interests, Arthur finds inspiration in nerdy art about heroes trying to save the universe.
Arthur Malonešø
Karma: 1,076
Gearing up for announcement now! (Nov 22 on UCLA campus)
Itās a great suggestion to be transparent about how CEA supports Summit and EAGx organizers. Many published event retrospectives include full cost breakdowns, but we havenāt put out anything consolidated and I think youāre right that it would be very helpful for potential organizers to sense check.
The main blocker for presenting this info is that events are all essentially one-offs. Weāve put together standardized resources to help each event team try to estimate their eventās cost, but then we evaluate each event budget proposal independently. Our cross-event comparisons show large swings that depend on things like the cityās cost-of-living and whether there are already financially supported EA community builders working in the region. A single incidental factor, e.g. a student on the organizing team who can book low-cost university space as the venue, can change the projected cost by 30% and be the difference between whether we believe an event will be cost-effective or not.
Some very rough numbers from events in 2024ā2025 that might still help people considering applying to run an event:
EAGx event costs ranged from $70,000 to $280,000USD (including organizer pay and travel support). We aim for a paid team of 4ā6 to spend up to 1500 total combined hours over 4ā8 months. CEA supports these teams with regular check-ins and oversight.
Summit event costs ranged from $10,000 to $30,000USD, and CEA does not currently have the capacity to support them with as much staff time. These events can take between 150 and 400 hours to execute over the span of 2ā8 months.
We give significant autonomy to these events; we want everyone to feel fairly compensated and avoid any perception of being pressured to volunteer. But some events have organizers whose personal situation and belief in the eventās potential impact mean they choose to volunteer their time (or a portion of it) and dedicate more of their event funds to the production costs.
More about volunteering, because itās one of the things I want to communicate most to potential organizers: as someone who personally volunteered significant time to EA community building, I recognize that this helped my own career path and I certainly donāt want to stand in anyoneās way if they want to make that choice. Event organizing is a great way to test oneās fit for EA operations work and make connections in the EA professional network; one of my favorite elements of my job is to see organizers Iāve supported transition from the temporary work of event organization into full time careers in EA.
Being willing to volunteer is a signal of dedication that we take into account, and at the limited amounts we have to support Summits, reduced organizer pay can be the difference between being able to support an event or not. I want to be transparent about that, and also be very clear that we recognize that being able to volunteer is a privilege that most people donāt have. I want to stress our aim that no one feel pressured to volunteer their time. The majority of our event organizers are paid a fair wage, and I want applicants to feel confident that they can apply to run events with the expectation of getting paid if thatās best for them.
UpĀcomĀing EA conĀferĀences in 2025
The large number of EAs who respond āIām not focusing my career on impact right nowā seems a ripe field for more ETG. I think a small fraction of very talented direct workers in EA could have a higher counterfactual impact by switching to ETG (or Founding to Give) because their current position is likely to be filled by one of the many competent and dedicated EAs competing for scarce roles.
Hank Green on recĀogĀnizĀing inĀvisiĀble preĀvenĀtion and celĀeĀbratĀing counĀterĀfacĀtual lives saved
I really appreciate the value of reevaluating ideas from a beginnerās mind and doing oneās best to examine the status quo with as little bias as possible. That said, among the things to be evaluated at present when considering effective altruism include the existence of a community, professional network, funding, and momentum of active work. This all indicates the revealed preference of thousands of people that find motivation in the ideas and from other members. When trying to personally decide if āeffective altruism still has a reason to exist?ā one should take into account that it already does exist and provides resources that many people find valuable.
Along with many others, I donāt find any incompatibility between work on AI (and other) x-risk and global health, because I know Iām uncertain about the future. If the probability of TAI within 10 years is, as I believe, somewhere between 20ā80% (median 65%), and the probability of my GHWB donations helping people is ~95%, then it makes sense to prioritize both. The wider world understands the value of taking a portfolio approach to investing (e.g. I think a long recession is likely so I have more liquid assets than some recommend, but I still maintain a decent proportion of my worth in standard ETFs, and this is a ānormalā way to invest). But EA is the only place Iāve found that ātakes doing good under uncertaintyā seriously enough to consider impact portfolios as a way to maximize good, rather than primarily as a way to ease investorsā consciences while trying to generate returns.
Thereās also the EA Student Summit: London happening on April 5, applications open now!
The event is structured to benefit students but weād love established EA professionals to attend as mentors or representatives for their orgs; there will be time for professional networking and a reception for mentors in addition to the time spent speaking with students.
I think the examples you give are actually contrary to the useful message of āmore dakka.ā
Yours suggest āif something doesnāt work, try more of it,ā which in general is poor advice. Sometimes itās true that you need more of something before you hit a threshold that generates results. But most of the time, negative results are informative and should guide you to change your approach.
More dakka is about when something does work, but doesnāt solve the problem entirely, or is easy to drop off rather than continue. Itās a useful concept trying to correct for an observed tendency to ignore only-somewhat-positive results.Example: ābright lights seemed to help a bit, but my seasonal depression is still lingering.ā More dakka: āhave you tried even brighter lights?ā
Example: āwe brainstormed ten ideas and got some that seemed workable, but they still have issues.ā More dakka: āTry listing a 100 ideas before committing to a so-so one from the first ten.ā
@Joseph ādakkaā is just an onomatopoeic term for the sound of a machine gun (ādakka dakka dakkaā), and the phrase comes from the TV tropes entry. The fanciful names there are useful for fun, reference-based humor (and I use them a lot in my persona life!), but I do think porting them over to EA-jargon is probably net negative for clarity/āprofessionalism.
AnĀnouncĀing EA SumĀmits, a new CEA-supĀported loĀcal event series
Hi Linda! CEAās EAGx Coordinator here. This is definitely not a policy, and I also want everyone to know about events at the earliest date so they can make arrangements to attend. Itās one of my biggest goals to increase the lead-time for events, for both organizers and attendees, and Iām hoping that weāll be able to publicly announce more 2025 events soon.
Typically, we add an event to the webpage as soon as the event is āofficially confirmed,ā which is usually as soon as the contract with the venue is signed. This contract procedure sometimes drags on and we announce before everything is complete, but this risks the possibility that the event date is moved or cancelled (which has happened before, and is obviously disruptive for anyone who has made plans).
For EAGxNordics 2025, I approved the save-the-date announcement in early December before the venue contract was signed. Since then, weāve had delays in adding it to the webpage and applications opening which hopefully will be resolved shortly (in the next day or two). Sorry for any disruptions this may have caused for anyoneās planning, and I genuinely appreciate this flag (it would have been very valuable information to share if true!) and the acknowledgment that it could be a misunderstanding.
Where CEA staff are donatĀing in 2024
ApĀply to help run EAGxSinĀgaĀpore or EAGxVirĀtual!
Join us at EAGxInĀdia 2024 in BenĀgaluru, on 19ā20 OcĀtoĀber, 2024!
Iām extremely excited that EAGxIndia 2024 is confirmed for October 19ā20 in Bengaluru! The team will post a full forum post with more details in the coming days, but I wanted a quick note to get out immediately so people can begin considering travel plans. You can sign up to be notified about admissions opening, or to express interest in presenting, via the forms linked on the event page:
https://āāwww.effectivealtruism.org/āāea-global/āāevents/āāeagxindia-2024
Hope to see many of you there!!
Arthur Maloneās Quick takes
ApĀply to help run EAGxInĀdia or EAGxBerkeley!
Iām ambivalent about jargon; strongly pro when it seems sufficiently useful, but opposed to superfluous usage. One benefit I can see for MEARO is that it isnāt nominatively restricted to community building like most ālocal EA groups.ā
I recently attended a talk at EAGxLatAm by Doebem, a Brazilian based and locally focused equivalent of GiveWell, that made a decent case for the application of EA principles to āthink global, act local.ā Their work is very distinct from EA Brazil, but it falls solidly into regional and meta EA, and I think there is strong potential for other similar orgs that would work tightly with local CB groups but have different focus.
Thanks for the kind words!
To address the nit: Before changing it to āimpossible-to-optimize variables,ā I had āthings where it is impossible to please everyone.ā I think that claim is straightforwardly true, and maybe I should have left it there, but it doesnāt seem to communicate everything I was going for. Itās not just that attendees come in with mutually exclusive preferences, but from the organizers perspective it is practically impossible to chase optimality. We donāt have control over everything in presentersā talks, and donāt have intimate knowledge of every attendeesā preferences, so complaints are, IMHO, inevitable (and thatās what I wanted to communicate to future organizers).
That said, I think we could have done somewhat better with our content list, mostly via getting feedback from applicants earlier so we could try to match cause-area supply and demand. For content depth, we aimed for some spread but for the majority of talks to be clustered on the medium-to-high side of EA familiarity (i.e. if a ā1ā was āaccessible to anyone even if theyāve never heard of EAā and ā10ā was āonly useful to a handful of professional EA domain experts,ā then we aimed for a distribution centered around 7. We only included talks at the low end if we considered them uniquely useful, like a āHow to avoid burnoutā talk that, while being geared towards EAs, did not require lots of EA context).
I think, given that we selected for attendees with demonstrated EA activity, that this heuristic was pretty solid. Nothing in the feedback data would have me change it for the next go-around or advise other organizers to use a different protocol (unless, of course, they were aiming for a different sort of audience). But Iām happy for anyone to offer suggestions for improvement!
I really appreciate and agree with ātrying to be thoughtful at allā and ādirectionally correct,ā as the target group to be nudged is those who see a deadline and wait until the end of the window (to look at it charitably, maybe they donāt know that thereās a difference in when they apply. So weāre just bringing it to their attention.)
We appreciate that there are genuine cases where people are unsure. I think in your case, the right move wouldāve been to apply with that annotation; you likely would have been accepted and then been able to register as soon as you were sure.
@ChanaMessinger I think it would be good to add Hank Greenās interview with Nate and SciShowās entry!