I’ve just started working at 80,000 Hours (November 2024) in preparation to take on the Head of Business Operations role there in early 2025.
Before that I was the Interim Head of Operations at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), where I also was previously the lead organiser for EA Global. Before working at CEA I was an Operations Assistant at Open Philanthropy, and prior to that was involved in various community building projects at EA Oxford.
Thanks for the questions Rocky! Will try to answer them below:
1. On whether to run an east coast EAG: I’d say cost is definitely the biggest factor here, though there are other smaller factors, such as whether a third EAG gets enough unique attendees and the general question of at what point we hit diminishing returns for number of EAGs per year. Re what city it would be hosted in, my guess is that Boston is the most likely option, followed by either NYC or DC, but I’m not sure. My rough sense is that the trade-offs aren’t quite worth it to do the event in a cheaper city because it likely wouldn’t be sufficiently cheaper, though I’m open to it and haven’t thought about this super deeply.
2. If we had a much larger budget I do think we’d at least push harder for a cause-neutral EAGx in the Bay Area (this is something we’re considering anyway, though we’d need to find a team to run the event, as well as funding for it). Though with a much larger budget the thing I’d probably do first is provide more travel grants for our events, as we currently only provide these on a fairly limited basis. I’m not sure that funding would strongly affect our proportions of cause-specific vs big-tent events at this stage, especially as I see the GCR event as a test (and as such am not that keen to run two of them in one year).
3. I’m open to content on digital sentience and s-risks at the GCR EA Global, as well as some of the other sub-topics you mention — and I do expect they would be within the scope of the event. The main question would be whether there are any specific talks or sessions within those areas we’re sufficiently excited about hosting (and whether we think there are high quality and eager speakers who would do these topics justice).
Thanks for the comment! I expect the main cause areas represented at the Bay Area event to be AI safety, biorisk, and nuclear security. I also expect there’ll be some meta-related content, including things like community building, improving decision making, and careers in policy.
We weren’t sure exactly what to call this event and were torn between this name and EA Global (X-Risk). We decided on EA Global (GCRs) because it was the majority preference of the advisors we polled, and because we felt it would more fully represent the types of ideas we expect to see at the event, as nuclear security and some types of risks from advanced AI or synthetic biology may not quite be considered to be existential in nature.
Hi Mahendra — we’re hoping to get a post out about this shortly, sorry for the delay here. The next EAG Bay Area will take place from Feb 2–4, 2024. We’re planning for this event to have a more x-risk/global catastrophic risk focus than our standard EAGs, though will explain this in more detail in our upcoming post.
Hi Xavier — really sorry about this. We’re aware of this as an issue and are working to resolve it ASAP. Basically had a big bug in our system that’s spamming people with lots of fake emails. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Not sure, we don’t have any particular measure for impact-adjusted plan changes per $, it’s more just what in theory I think we should be aiming for. In practice we mostly just track connections, to what extent people find EAGs valuable, attendance, and other easy-to-track metrics.
Yeah that’s right, I wouldn’t want to raise the prices so much such that more senior folk/experts are put off (especially as they might be providing value, and as such it might feel weird to them to have to pay for that). Right now I expect we’ll have a variety of ticket prices with optional discounts for those who need them, so I’m not too worried about more senior folks getting priced out here.
I think that’s roughly right (I might put it as “impact-adjusted plan changes per $”).
My understanding is that EAGxCambridge got an unusually cheap venue and as such was unusually cheap overall (it also only had ~500 attendees compared to 1000–1500 for EAGs). Other EAGx’s often have quite small budgets because they’re often held in countries that are much cheaper to hold events (and they also have fewer attendees).
Historically, EAGx’s have also been scrappier and not been of as high production value — but I expect the gap to close here somewhat moving forwards.
It’s not obvious to me whether larger venues cost more in a super-linear way, this is something I’m still confused about, but I expect it to not be the case overall.
No problem, all good! Re those venues:
Fort Mason kinda works but has a similar issue of having lots of spaces kinda spread out over a wider area (some of which are kinda hard to find). The main networking area it has is the Festival Pavilion, which is huge but is also just an empty warehouse and would probably need to be built out a bit with lighting and furniture. This venue is weird and annoying enough that I’d only go for it if it was notably cheaper, but my understanding is that it’s sort of similarly expensive to some of our other options.
Moscone is great but yeah it’s too big. To host an event there you need to commit to something like >1000 hotel rooms at their partner hotels. As you mention, you can apparently split the venue or like sub-let out rooms if a bigger event is going on. We tried investigating this for 2024 but it seemed risky (you’d sort of be at the larger events whim, and perhaps only getting confirmation very close to the dates themselves). I would be keen to investigate this further, but my guess is that it’s not likely to be worth it (unless our event got much bigger).
Yerba Buena is too small as you suggest.
South San Francisco Conference Center is also a bit too small (but closer to the necessary size than Yerba Buena). They only have three proper rooms (though these can be subdivided with air walls), the largest of which can only fit 1200 people. I would be down to use this venue if it was sufficiently cheap (we’d have to limit capacity and change the event structure a fair bit), but my sense is that it’s not quite worth it. There is an adjacent hotel (Hilton DoubleTree) that we could run a combined event with to have more session spaces, but my understanding is that this wouldn’t let us go up to 1500 people either. And then I do think the location of these two venues isn’t optimal — they’re in South San Francisco and are difficult to get to by public transit, but I’d say this is a minor concern overall.
Re your second bullet, a large part of it is that one of the two people in a new connection may be financial unempowered. That is, they’re a student or other early career person who isn’t really able to spend much money on anything (this represents a lot of our attendees and is where philanthropy can jump in to fill the gap).
Sorry yeah, they cost way less, and if we were purely optimizing for connections per dollar then virtual conferences might be all that we do. So we are going to think about doing more of these moving forwards, though I do think it would be a mistake to optimize solely for connections per dollar.
It’s still a bit unclear to me at this point whether a 1500 person event would cost less per person than three 500 person events. My current sense is that it is, but I don’t have massive confidence in our investigations here.
Re agglomeration effects, I think basically yes it’s better to run a larger event all things equal — the main benefits that come to mind are staff time and making it easier for people to coordinate and meet in larger groups (i.e. everyone you want to meet is going to the same event).
I don’t think it’s quite that it’s a side hustle for them — it’s mostly just that it’s only a minority of attendees are working for EA orgs that are likely to be okay with them taking time off for an EA conference. If you’re a biology student planning on working in biosecurity in the future, my guess is that you won’t easily be able to move or skip your classes. Similar things might apply for people working in government or people who are skilling up outside of EA (e.g. as a law clerk).
There are EAs at lots of different companies/universities, but they don’t work for CEA itself. Perhaps we should be asking around to see if we could still pull this off, but I do expect coordinating with an external party to be kinda tricky and unreliable (e.g. when we used UC Berkeley, the university really didn’t want to talk to anyone at CEA other than the student in question).
I also have reservations about working with something that’s not an explicit venue-for-hire — I expect their staff to not be experienced at things like working with AV, catering, loading and unloading policies, and so on (example annoying scenario: we randomly get kicked out at 8pm because that’s when the security team close everything down but this was never communicated to us even when we asked about it).
I’m not too sure about the Google campus, and perhaps we should look into this further. I do think lots of these options would involve multiple different spaces separated by ~10 minute walks. This might be fine for veteran EAs but might come across as wacky to any more external experts we were trying to engage with.
For the Harvard campus, my understanding is that the Science Center couldn’t stretch to much more than a thousand. But yes in theory we could use multiple venues across the campus — this would likely involve coordinating and contracting with multiple parties (often the venues are managed by different groups) which is possible but not trivial. Klarman Hall appears to just be a large theater — generally schools are great at offering those but tend to be lacking in large networking/catering spaces.
However if any of the above options would be sufficiently cheap, then these downsides might be worth it, and I take your point about exploring more unconventional venue setups if it would save money (this is something that we’re planning to explore in the future).
It’s more about functionality and capacity than anything else. For the Bay Area, the Google campus isn’t something that’s publicly available and you need to have a way in somehow. I’m not entirely sure how we managed to get it in 2015 (that was before my time). My understanding is that EAG 2015 only had ~400 attendees, and from chatting to people who were there, it seems pretty clear that the space they had couldn’t host much more than that (though perhaps the complex has other rooms/spaces that can be used).
Re UC Berkeley, I’ll note that I still see this one as a near-viable option — the space has a bunch of issues but could work for something EAG-like in the future. With EAGs current setup it seems like it’d be tricky to fit 1500 people or more — we’d have to cut down on a lot of the sit-down seating and the number of session rooms. It’s also challenging in other ways, as a large event there could only be held at specific times of the year when school isn’t in session and the venue is also spread across several different buildings and levels. When it was used in 2016 one of CEA’s staff was a student at the university, so we got better access and reduced pricing that would be hard for us to get now. (But to clarify, I’m still somewhat excited about UC Berkeley as an option in the future.)
Re the Harvard campus, my understanding is that couldn’t fit 1500 people either — IIRC EAG Boston 2017 only had 300 people or so.
I want to quickly note that we often don’t have that many options for what dates we can get. Large venues are often booked out well in advance, and sometimes you need to take what you can get. It’s also pretty likely that you’re gonna clash with something, such as a particular university’s final exams. I also doubt expect that having it on Passover/Easter affected attendance that much.
I’ll note that I don’t think the above is a great excuse — I still think it was suboptimal to host an event then, but it can be quite tricky to get everything right here!
Just want to clarify — it’s still possible that there is a cause-general EAG in the Americas next year (I expect slightly more than 50% likely, but this number is semi-made up).