Great post! While I agree with your main claims, I believe the numbers for the multipliers (especially in aggregate and for ex ante impact evaluations) are nowhere near as extreme in reality as your article suggests for the reasons that Brian Tomasik elaborates on in these two articles:
(i) Charity Cost-Effectiveness in an Uncertain World
(ii) Why Charities Usually Don’t Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness
I’d guess it is common for people to underweight the expected value (EV) of attending EA Globals, because they focus on the predictable and easy-to-measure benefits of doing so. However, the EV of attending these conferences (according to my intuitive model) is dominated by ‘Black Swan’-like benefits (i.e. low-probability, hard-to-predict, disproportionately-high-impact benefits). For this reason, it may be the case that even if (suppose) most EA Global attendees got little value out of the conference, there will likely be a few individuals reaping very large benefits that justify the whole event for everyone else.
These underappreciated benefits of attending EA Globals likely include: 1) starting a causal chain that will (eventually) result in a job or internship, 2) finding co-founders for highly valuable projects, 3) making new connections (or deepening existing ones) that will (eventually) provide you with substantial support (e.g. financial, advisory, emotional) or vice versa, 4) changing your mind about an empirical or philosophical crucial consideration that radically alters your priorities (e.g. by changing which cause area to focus on, or which interventions to prioritise).
To account for these potential Black Swan-like benefits when thinking about the opportunity cost of attending events such as EA Global, I deliberately attempt to follow the heuristic of asking myself: “Is this event more likely to give rise to Black Swan-like benefits compared to the best alternative use of my time?”. I prioritise events that have ‘Black Swan’-generating circumstances (e.g. meeting new people and organisations working on important topics, having opportunities to reflect on major life choices and philosophical beliefs, meeting smart and well-informed people who have major disagreements with my views).
I enjoyed reading this and would love to see more upbeat and celebratory posts like this. The EA community is very self-critical (which is good!) but we shouldn’t lose sight of all the awesome things community members accomplish.
I recently had to make an important and urgent career decision and found it tremendously valuable to speak with several dozen wonderful people about this at EA Global SF. I’m immensely grateful both to the people giving me advice and to CEA for organizing my favorite EA Global yet.
I’m surprised by how much low-hanging fruit there is still left to edit Wikipedia in order to make more people aware of (and provide them with a more sophisticated understanding of) important ideas that are relevant to EA. I’ve been adding and improving Wikipedia content on the side for two years now, with a clear focus on articles that are related to altruism.
In my experience, editing Wikipedia is really i) easy, ii) fun, iii) there are many content gaps left to fill, and iv) it exposes the content you write to a much larger audience (sometimes several orders of magnitude larger) than if you wrote instead for a private blog or the EA Forum. Against this background, I’m surprised that not more knowledgeable EAs contribute to Wikipedia (feel free to reach out to me if you would potentially like to do just that).
A word of caution: the quality control on Wikipedia is fairly strong and it is generally disliked if people make edits that come across as ideologically-motivated marketing rather than as useful information. For this reason, I aspire to genuinely improve the quality of the article with all the edits I make, though my choice of articles to edit is informed by my altruistic values.
A useful resource on this topic is Brian Tomasik’s “The Value of Wikipedia Contributions in Social Sciences”.
[I’m collaborating with Will on creating the content for utilitarianism.net, but this comment is written in my private capacity]
I just did this and can attest to it working and being as easy as described in the post. Thanks a lot for the recommendation!
Excellent post! I really appreciate your proposal and framing for a book on utilitarianism. In line with your point, William MacAskill and Richard Yetter Chappell also perceived a lack of accessible, modern, and high-quality resources on utilitarianism (and related ideas), motivating the creation of utilitarianism.net, an online textbook on utilitarianism. The website has been getting a lot of traction over the past year, and it’s still under development (including plans to experiment with non-text media and translations into other languages).
I want to express my deep gratitude to you, Patrick, for running EA Radio for all these years! 🙏 Early in my EA involvement (2015-16), I listened to all the EA Radio talks available at the time and found them very valuable.
This is an interesting question, though I am somewhat concerned that the responses will be biased towards high numbers because people who work relatively fewer hours may be less likely to respond. I would give much more weight to an anonymous survey.
On a different note, I have personally found it useful to track my working hours using Toggl Track (https://toggl.com/track/). This has given me a much more accurate sense of how many hours I usually work per week and how long I should expect projects to take.
Another indicator: Wikipedia pageviews show fairly stable interest in articles on EA and related topics over the last five years.
For inspiration, here are some other examples of TEDx talks given by EAs:
1. Beth Barnes (2015): “Effective Altruism”
2. Gabriella Overödder (2019): “How Using Science Can Radically Increase Your Social Impact”
3. Linh Chi Nguyen (2020): “5 Lessons for choosing an impactful career”
Feel free to add others below that I’m not aware of.
Brief meta comment: I would generally recommend being very cautious about (and mostly avoid) using language like “converting” others to EA, as in your sentence “Younger people might be easier to convert (...)”. This type of language seems fairly easy to avoid, whiled using it may make many people feel uncomfortable and even pose reputational risks for the community.