I volunteered at the most recent EAG event and want to give an endorsement—the CEA staff I interacted with were very competent and fun to work with!
JalexStark
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JalexStark’s Quick takes
We simply have a specific bar for admissions and everyone above that bar gets admitted
In my experience on hiring committees, this is actually quite difficult to do. I think in practice it is much more common to operate with two clear bars: one above which everyone gets hired and one below which nobody gets hired. The ones in the middle get a bunch of situational criteria applied to them and it’s pretty impossible to keep “we’re feeling tight on space” out of the equation there.
The optimal allocation to mission hedging is proportional to: (Confidence: Likely)
the correlation between the hedge and the mission target being hedged;
the standard deviation of the mission target;
your degree of risk tolerance;
the inverse of the standard deviation of the hedge.
If you multiply 1, 3, and 4, you get beta (= the coefficient in a one factor linear regression from the hedge to the target). I think this means your notion of hedging is the same as the standard notion of hedging in finance.
In the google form, I think you should have a clickable link that goes back to the google doc.
Also, if you can host the content of the google doc at a static web page, that’s slightly better for passing people’s “is this a real / trustworthy organization” filters.
You can run your own events!
(Inspired by recent discussions about exclusivity of events run by CEA.)
It is possible to run your own events, including a conference with goals similar to the EAG and EAGx event series run by the Center for Effective Altruism.
I personally think the EAG event series run by the Center for Effective Altruism is pretty great, and that the space of EAG-like events is probably far from saturated. Here are some brief pointers to arguments, which I’m happy to expand on if anyone is interested:
- competitive markets for attendance/attention lead to diversity / positive-sum differentiation
- more is better (put differently, the market is labor-constrained) -- if individuals think attending your conference will add value for them, then you probably add value overall by running it
- different people may have different advantages in their organizing ability. If you live in Africa, then your understanding, connections, and legal status in your city and country make are valuable edge in the project of running a geographically African conference.