I’m the co-founder and operations director of WhiteBox Research. WhiteBox aims to develop more AI interpretability and safety researchers in Southeast Asia. I’m also a co-founder and board member of EA Philippines.
I previously was a Group Support Contractor for the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) for two years, where I helped support EA groups around the world.
You can reach out to me at brian@whiteboxresearch.org or find me on LinkedIn.
Congrats Leo, Juana, and the rest of the team on the event! I have a minor question about the writeup: It seems that the budget and cost per attendee do not include the team’s salaries, and I assume there were salaries/staff costs incurred. Are there reasons for not including staff costs in the calculations? (I noticed that this was also the case for EAGxLatAm 2024, though that was organized by a different team.)
I think including staff costs provides a better picture of the money spent organizing these events. Of course, there may be considerations I’m not aware of for presenting the budget this way, so I’d be curious to hear those. Thanks for your work and transparency in sharing this retrospective!
Got it, no problem!
Hi Dawn, thanks for your interest in donating to EA Philippines! I’m unsure if I understood you correctly, but EA PH’s minimum funding goal on Manifund is $500, as the team would appreciate any amount of funding. So I think if your donation is at least $400, then the project would indeed be funded, and you wouldn’t need to be refunded. Let me know if this answers your concern!
Hey James, sorry for the late reply, but thanks for the feedback!
Here are the averages across groups by country for each of the group measures:
It would be time-consuming to show how the group measures have changed by country across groups surveys, and some questions in the 2022 census weren’t asked previously, so I hope the above is useful enough for you.
I can share the number of groups founded per country by year since 2011 here though (for groups still currently active):
I only included countries with a minimum of 3 groups that filled out the 2022 census in both images above. I hope this helps!
Hey Manuel, sorry for the late reply, but thanks for your comment!
I agree it would be better for the results of EA surveys (including this one) to be published earlier. The reason the census results came out in June was because:
In January-March, I had to prioritize other tasks/projects instead of analyzing and writing the census results
Analyzing and writing the census results took longer than I expected
We’ll try to publish the results for this year’s census a bit earlier.
“This post by Joey” returns a 404 page btw!
I agree that it seems good for EA to have a career-focused pledge, and I wrote up a similar idea here on the Forum two years ago, which had mixed feedback then. I think some people thought it was a bad idea because of the “maximizing” language in the pledge’s name and the post though, but they may still be sympathetic to the idea of a career-focused pledge. I now think that a “do the most good” pledge is not an ideal name, and I’ve updated the post to say this.
One difference between your pledge idea and mine is that yours doesn’t sound like a lifetime pledge—it sounds focused on being taken and adhered to during the phase where they’re building career capital. Maybe that’s intentional and good, but possibly a lifetime career-focused pledge might be better?
The link to the Substack page at the top doesn’t work for me for some reason, even if it works on LessWrong. Maybe it’s a bug. Maybe you could get the link to work somehow?
In case you haven’t seen it, the Resource Centre has advice on doing 1-1′s! It also links some resources on 1-1′s, including the Global Challenges Project’s guide.
I see, yeah you might get better attendance for social events when the group is more established and has more regular members!
No worries, and I’ll keep an eye on it! Sorry, I missed out on your last question. During our first year, I think we viewed EA Philippines as a serious organization trying to market EA via well-run events (i.e. with speakers), rather than as a small, tight-knit community. Moreover, it was only in November that we started to feel we had enough regular attendees (i.e. 15-20) to organize a socials.
Looking back, we could have done one or two more social meetups that year. I only say one or two because I think other types of events (especially discussions of EA readings, like for an intro fellowship) are generally higher value than socials. I see higher value in socials now than in our first year, although Manila traffic can make it hard for people to meet in-person. I think it’s fine for your group to have a monthly social gathering.
In case you (or others) didn’t know, you can find the top Shortform posts every month or every year at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts, below the list of top posts. (There doesn’t seem to be a way to see the top ones all time though.)
Hey Mike, thanks for the kind feedback, and thanks for helping EA South Korea! I can answer your questions:
That $2,400 was via CEA’s group support funding. You’re correct though that the link is now different and is now here.
I now work for CEA as a group support contractor, and I process group support funding applications. EA South Korea can apply for group support funding from CEA for any expenses within our common expense guidelines.
Yes, I did speak. I don’t remember it well, but I think I gave an intro to EA and EA Philippines. I may have given reasons on why they should engage with EA Blue too.
Good question—I think we wanted people who were more certain they could go, so we decided to charge for it. We only charged around $12-16 for it. Possibly if we were to organize one again, we could consider not charging for it and using funding from CEA or the EA Infrastructure Fund for it.
We were mostly asking them questions about their interest in EA and their career, and getting to know our members on a personal level. We weren’t giving much career advice back then, or we caveated things more given we were still learning things about EA. For resources on doing 1-1′s, you can check this guide or this.
Hey Leo, sorry for the late reply, but thanks for explaining and updating the post!
I understand that you and Juana are funded as national coordinators, but I still think including staff costs in the event budget would give a better picture. Maybe you could estimate the time you and Juana spent on the event to calculate the staff cost and add that to the budget?
I think the cost per attendee would be more realistic and helpful if it included staff costs, or if it was shown both with and without staff costs. This could give others a more realistic idea of what it takes to run an event like this, especially if they need to fundraise or pay for paid organizer/s too.
What do you think about this? Thanks again for being open to feedback!