I’m working as the Interim Head of Operations at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), where I was previously the lead organizer 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.
Eli_Nathan
How much do EAGs cost (and why)?
Update on spending for CEA-run events
EA Global in 2022 and plans for 2023
Announcing EA Global plans for 2024
2022 EA conference talks are now live
Upcoming EA conferences in 2023 (and 2022)
Why you might be getting rejected from (junior) operations jobs
CEA is spinning out of Effective Ventures
Some Scattered Thoughts on Operations
When Planning Your Career, Start Early
We generally have to use the caterer the venue provides or recommends (or pay a fee) — and if that’s not the case we’re generally pretty limited in our options anyway. These caterers (e.g. the ones based out of a hotel) are usually not vegan only and we just get them to build out a vegan-specific menu. I’ve often seen the pricing for their standard non-vegan stuff (for hypothetical events a year in advance) and it doesn’t differ that much.
My guess of what’s going on here is that these venues often make a substantial amount of money through their catering, and they don’t have back to back meals (like a restaurant does), and so they charge a substantial mark up.
I’ve seen this discussed on some other comments, though I’ll just respond to this one point here: catered food as provided by most large venues and caterers (at least in the US) is generally much more expensive per person than people just buying meals on their own at normal restaurants, it’s not a simple case of economies of scale unfortunately — there’s a big mark up.
Apply to attend an EA conference!
I won’t go into too much detail here, but FWIW I lived in the Bay Area for ~2.5 years and found it somewhat difficult to network or get into various EA/rationalist social scenes (I think I was something of an outlier, but not extremely so). If you don’t have a clear pathway to meeting people (such as being invited to work out of an EA co-working space for the summer, or having friends already living out there) you might have a more difficult experience networking/socializing than the post describes.
That said, I think for many EAs, visiting the Bay Area for at least some period of time is a great idea.
EA Global and EAGx megathread
2023 EA conference talks are now live
Eli from the EA Global team here: For anyone that has travelled to London for the conference, we will reimburse you for any extra travel or accommodation costs that arise should you be stuck in town due to contracting COVID-19 (e.g. if you have to stay in your hotel for an extra week and book new flights due to contracting COVID-19 at or slightly before the event).
You can see more information in our COVID protocol here, though please feel free to reach out to hello@eaglobal.org should you have any questions or concerns — thanks!
CEA is hiring for someone to lead the EA Global program. CEA’s three flagship EAG conferences facilitate tens of thousands of highly impactful connections each year that help people build professional relationships, apply for jobs, and make other critical career decisions.
This is a role that comes with a large amount of autonomy, and one that plays a key role in shaping a key piece of the effective altruism community’s landscape.
See more details and apply here!
Hi Scott — I work for CEA as the lead on EA Global and wanted to jump in here.
Really appreciate the post — having a larger, more open EA event is something we’ve thought about for a while and are still considering.
I think there are real trade-offs here. An event that’s more appealing to some people is more off-putting to others, and we’re trying to get the best balance we can. We’ve tried different things over the years, which can lead to some confusion (since people remember messaging from years ago) but also gives us some data about what worked well and badly when we’ve tried more open or more exclusive events.
We’ve asked people’s opinion on this. When we’ve polled our advisors including leaders from various EA organizations, they’ve favored more selective events. In our most recent feedback surveys, we’ve asked attendees whether they think we should have more attendees. For SF 2022, 34% said we should increase the number, 53% said it should stay the same, and 14% said it should be lower. Obviously there’s selection bias here since these are the people who got in, though.
To your “...because people will refuse to apply out of scrupulosity” point — I want to clarify that this isn’t how our admissions process works, and neither you nor anyone else we accept would be bumping anyone out of a spot. We simply have a specific bar for admissions and everyone above that bar gets admitted (though previous comms have unfortunately mentioned or implied capacity limits). This is why the events have been getting larger as the community grows.
I wanted to outline the case for having an admissions process and limiting the size of the event, which is roughly:
We host different events for different purposes. EAG is intended as a more selective event for people who mostly already have a lot of context on EA and are taking significant action based on EA principles. The EAGx conference series (which will serve nearly 5000 unique attendees across the different events this year) is intended to reach a broader, newer-to-EA audience.
EAG is primarily a networking event, as one-to-one conversations are consistently reported to be the most valuable experiences for attendees. I think there’s less value in very new folks having such conversations — a lot of the time they’re better off learning more about EA and EA cause areas first (similar to how I should probably learn how ML works before I go to an ML conference).
Very involved and engaged EAs might be less eager to come to EAG if the event is not particularly selective. (This is a thing we sometimes get complaints about but it’s hard for people to voice this opinion publicly, because it can sound elitist). These are precisely the kinds of people we most need to come — they are the most in-demand people that attendees want to talk to (because they can offer mentorship, job opportunities, etc.).
We think that some of our most promising newer attendees would also have a worse experience if the event were fully open.
Using an admissions process lets us try to screen out applicants who have caused problems at past events or who seem likely to cause problems.
I don’t think this is really what your post is about, but I wanted to clarify: EAG exists to make the world a better place, rather than serve the EA community or make EAs happy. This unfortunately sometimes means EAs will be sad due to decisions we’ve made — though if this results in the world being a worse place overall, then we’ve clearly made a mistake.
I agree it’s hard to identify promising people reliably, but I don’t think it’s impossible to get some signal here. I do think our admissions process could improve though, and we adjust the process every year. We’re currently in the process of revisiting the application/admissions process with the aim of identifying promising people more reliably — though of course it’s hard to make this perfect.
“The conference is called “EA Global” and is universally billed as the place where EAs meet one another, learn more about the movement, and have a good time together.” It’s possible we should rename the event, and I agree this confusion and reputation is problematic, but I would like to clarify that we don’t define the event like this anywhere (though perhaps we used to in previous years). It’s now explicitly described as an event with a high bar for highly engaged EAs (see here). We also have the EAGx conference series, which is more introductory and has a lower bar for admissions. If someone is excited to learn more about EA, they’d likely be better suited to an EAGx event (and they’d be more likely to get accepted, too).
Having different levels of access to the conference app seems like it might worsen rather than improve the problem of some people feeling like second-class citizens.
Regarding the specific volunteer case you mentioned, I’m not exactly sure what the details were here and it’s not something anyone on the team recalls. It does sound like something that easily could have happened — just perhaps a few years ago. FWIW, as of 2019, all volunteers had to meet the general bar for admission.
I think I would also be in favor of other more specialized conferences, such as those on AI safety or global health, but these are unlikely to be things we’ll have capacity to run at the moment (though I encourage people to apply for CEA event support and run events like these).
Thanks again for the post, hope these points are helpful!