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
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.
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.
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 Keller — appreciate the thoughts here! I wanted to quickly note that we did actually give attendees a heads up about this in our attendee guide, and we’ve done similarly in most of our other recent conference attendee guides.
Though I generally don’t expect attendees to read this all the way through, we did share it multiple times, and I’m not sure whether it would have made sense to email attendees about the journalist section specifically (if I was going to reiterate something, it probably wouldn’t be this).
Thanks for the post — I only sort of skimmed the post and comments, and crucially I don’t think this is what your post is really about, but it seems like you have the view that we’re kinda clueless about whether factory farmed animals have good or bad lives. In reference to this, you mention in a comment: “It’s hard to be confident of any view on this, when we understand so little about consciousness, animal cognition, or morality.”
As an aside, the term “factory farmed animals” is kind of weird category that includes both cows and chickens (among other animals). You could plausibly make the case that cows have net positive lives, but it seems pretty difficult to say the same for chickens.
Sure, we don’t understand everything and everything about morality, but given the evidence we do have with regards to animal suffering and a few other basic axioms and intuitions, it seems hard to put this at 50:50 or similar. There are a bunch of arguments in favor of factory farmed chickens having bad lives, and I’m not aware of many arguments saying that they have positive lives. I think the Holocaust case is interesting but a bit confusing because those people had (probably) happy/positive lives before the Holocaust, and could have had happy/positive lives if they had been released. If someone were to intentionally breed humans into existence in order to place them into concentration camps (and later kill them), I think most plausible ethical theories would consider this to be uncontroversially bad.
Applications are still open for upcoming EA Global conferences in 2024!
• EA Global: London (31 May–2 June) | Application deadline is in ~6 weeks
• EA Global: Boston (1–3 November)
Apply here and find more details on our website, you can also email the team at hello@eaglobal.org if you have any questions.
Minor, personal (non-CEA) take that isn’t really core to your post — I’m actually somewhat critical of the microCOVID project and don’t see it as a great example of EA in action. As I understand it, this involved people managing their personal risk exposure to a virus that at the time was considered to not be that dangerous to young and healthy people, rather than working on x-risk or another EA priority. While cool and interesting, it seems not that different to building an app for managing one’s exercise routine, for example.
This year we’re doing our East Coast EA Global in Boston, but we’re pretty open to shifting it back to DC in the future.
One type of event I’m provisionally excited about is a more introductory EA conference in DC targeted at mid-to-late career folks. Kinda like an EAGx but maybe more “professional” (everyone wears a suit and tie type of vibe). My sense from doing EA Global in DC was that there could be a fair amount of demand for something like this, but at this stage this is more of a vague idea than something I think we’re likely to organize any time soon.
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 — I’m Eli from the EA Global team. Thanks for your thoughts on this — appreciate your concerns here. I’ll try to chip in with some context that may be helpful. To address your main underlying point, my take is that EA Globals have incredibly high returns on investment — EA orgs and members of the community report incredibly large amounts of value from our events. For example:
An attendee from an EA-aligned org said they would probably trade $5 million in donations for the contacts they made at EAGxBoston.
Another EA-aligned org reporting that they’ve gotten a minimum of $1.25 million worth of value from connections they’ve made at EAG(x)’s.
This pushes me in the direction of spending more money if it will help make the event better and facilitate more connections between members of the community — though of course we don’t want to spend money unnecessarily or in any way that would be particularly flashy. Another point is that, whilst niceness/spending can be a turn off to some, the reverse can be a turn off to others (e.g., a poorly furnished/not as nice venue could turn off potential donors) — and it can be hard to trade off the preferences between these two groups. To address some other more minor details in your post:
It’s not actually feasible for us to collect sweatshirt sizes in advance, as many/most people apply and register quite late in the day (applications close two weeks before the event). Given that we were customizing such a large number of sweatshirts, these needed to be ordered several weeks in advance. I do think we could have gotten smaller sizes on the whole though, as most of the leftover sweatshirts were XL or similar.
Alcohol is generally done “on consumption” at EAG events (though I don’t know whether this was exactly the case this time) — meaning that CEA is only billed for the alcohol that is consumed, and any bottles of wine not used are not charged to us. Compared to most non-EA events, our attendees actually drink much less than average, and the caterers/beverage staff are always quite surprised by this. I think there’s a benefit to there being alcohol available (as it makes some people less socially anxious). An alternative to our current setup could be something like “each person gets two drinks”, but then we’d need to track this and it’s unlikely to come out to a significantly lower cost anyway. Another option is having people pay for their own drinks, but that seems unfair to those with less financial stability.
The security staff on site was fairly necessary as the venue had multiple entrances/exists and was adjacent to a public park frequented by tourists. Without the security team, members of the public would have just flooded into the venue (which would be bad for several reasons). We selected the venue in question because it had a bunch of outside space and we weren’t sure what the COVID situation was going to be so far in advance. Additionally, for a crowd of ~1500 people, there just aren’t that many suitable venues anyway (most are too small, some are too big).
At an event of ~1500 people, “staff taking away cups” is more of a cleaning exercise rather than a way to pamper attendees. Without this, the trash buildup would likely be substantial.
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.
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.
Hi Josh — jumping in as the lead organizer for EA Global. While I think this could be interesting, as someone else commented I’m skeptical this would be worth it for an event lasting only three days, and would be more excited about people trialing this in office spaces or something else more permanent.
Additionally, taking a lot of these actions for a three day event would be quite logistically challenging (though not impossible). I’m not sure there’s a way to rent air filtration equipment and it would be non-trivial to buy it and then store it or give it away — and I doubt it would be worth convincing a venue to undergo construction work to install air filtration systems in the building. With a lot of household air purifiers (i.e., the ones you can get on Amazon), there are also trade-offs re noise pollution — with an event the size of EA Global, we’d need a lot of these, and altogether these could be quite loud. We very frequently get complaints that people can’t hear each other at our events, so this could make things even more problematic. This means that at the end of the day there are other marginal improvements to the conference I’m more excited about making.
Hi Nathan, thanks for flagging this. What’s going on here is just that our comms/email templates were old, confusing, and out of date — I’ve now amended our acceptance email to remove the implication of capacity limits. It is helpful for people to let us know if they aren’t coming (for example, so that we can get accurate numbers for catering), but it’s not the case that people would be bumping each other in this way (for now at least — it’s possible that we get a weirdly large number of strong applications for a future EAG and have to turn away people due to capacity limits, I just don’t expect this to be the case any time soon).
I’ve also provided more context about capacity in my response to Jeff’s comment on this thread.
Thanks for sharing this Sebastian! We haven’t explicitly asked people whether weekends work better than weekdays, though this has now come up a couple of times such that I’d like to do so in the future.
But my expectation is that weekends would work much better for most of our attendees as few of them have children (even the more senior folks). A lot of our attendees are students who might have classes during the week and many others work jobs for which they can’t easily take time off for our event (jobs in government or academia for example).
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!
It doesn’t really add much cost, pricing for vegan vs non vegan items under standard large venue caterers is pretty similar.
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!