Thanks, Austin :)
Results from the survey we conducted at the event (similar to the one you linked to) are still to come. Rethink Priorities led on that this year, and are still gathering data / putting it together.
OllieBase
Karma: 5,286
I want to add that my colleagues and I on the CEA events team were really impressed with this event.
The likelihood to recommend score for this event is the highest ever reported. Smaller events do typically get higher scores because there’s higher variance, but this is still a remarkable accomplishment for a team organising a conference for the first time.
The EA Nigeria team prepared this event autonomously, creating their own application form and identifying impressive speakers with minimal input from CEA.
This event attracted many more attendees than we expected, and I think that’s a result of the years of community-building that this team has done. It’s great to see that paying off!
I’m very excited to see more EA events in Nigeria!
(I helped organise this event)
Thanks for your feedback.Actually, I think this event went well because:
The organising team (CEA) were opinionated about which issues to focus on, and we chose issues that we and MCF attendees could make progress on.
Our content was centered around just two issues (brand and funding) which allowed for focus and more substantive progress.
Many attendees expressed a similar sentiment, and some people who’ve attended this event many times said this was one of the best iterations. With that context, I’ll respond to each point:
We wanted to focus on issues that were upstream of important object-level work in EA, and selected people working on those issues, rather than object-level work (though we had some attendees who were doing object-level work). I agree with you that a lot of (if not all!) the impact of the community is coming from people working at the object level, but this impact is directly affected by upstream issues such as the EA brand and funding diversity. Note that many other events we run, such as EA Global and the Summit on Existential Security, are more focused on object-level issues.
To the contrary, I think we made valuable progress, though this is fairly subjective and a bit hard to defend until more projects and initiatives play out. I’m not sure what the distinction is you’re pointing to here; you mention we should’ve considered “[EA]’s strategy with outreach and funding”, but these were the two core themes of the event.
This was a deliberate call, though we’re not confident it was the right one. CEA staff and our attendees spend a lot of time engaging with the community and getting input on what we should prioritise. We probably didn’t capture everything, but that context gives us a good grasp of which issues to work on.
I don’t think every event, project and meeting in EA spaces needs to be this stringent about measuring outcomes. We use similar metrics across all of our events, things like LTR/NPS are used in many other industries, so I think these are useful benchmarks for understanding how valuable attendees found the event.
On top of Jason’s point, this argument presupposes that animals are food and therefore not worthy of much if any moral concern, but there are many reasons to think animals are worthy of moral concern.
This is an excellent post, and I’m really grateful for RP’s work on these topics. I appreciate that this post is both opinionated but measured, flagging where the reader will want to inspect their own views and how that might affect various models’ recommendations.
Really happy to see this! Thanks for getting it going again :)
We chose brand and funding as themes in part because attendees flagged these as two of the biggest challenges facing the community. Sorry, I should’ve made that clearer.
Thanks for resurfacing this take, Guy.
There’s a trade-off here, but I think some attendees who can provide valuable input wouldn’t attend if their name was shared publicly and that would make the event less valuable for the community.
That said, perhaps one thing we can do is emphasise the benefits of sharing their name (increases trust in the event/leadership, greater visibility for the community about direction/influence) when they RSVP for the event, I’ll note that for next time as an idea.
Thanks! I think this note explains the gap:
Note that we have a few attendees at this year’s event who are specialists in one of our focus areas rather than leaders of an EA meta organization or team (though some attendees are both).
We were not trying to optimise the attendee list for connectedness or historical engagement with the community, but rather who can contribute to making progress on our core themes; brand and funding. When you see what roles these attendees have, I think it’s fairly evident why we invited them, given this lens.
I’ll also note that I think it’s healthy for there to be people joining for this event who haven’t bene in the community as long as you have. They can bring new perspectives, and offer expertise the community / organisational leaders has been lacking.
Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2024
Thanks, it wasn’t open at the time I posted this, but I’ve added the link now.
We’re not currently planning to run another GCR-focused EAG, but we do plan on continuing to investigate what other types of events we could run, including cause-specific (e.g. GCR-focused) events.
I think this post might benefit from some commentary, caveats and warnings about how to engage in politics sensibly e.g.
Campaign finance rules
How non-Americans can and can’t engage
PR risks to EA from doing this sort of thing
I don’t have any expertise here, but I don’t think this community will handle this all sensibly by default (see err 2022).
If you have some experience in a relevant field, you could also consider offering to speak at an event :) When I was organising my university group, I know I was pretty nervous about reaching out to people working in EA-aligned careers. I expect having alumni speak might make those career paths particularly salient (“I used to be exactly like you, and now I do this”).
Thanks Bryce!
Yes, we’re testing out another tier of event with Summits. Summits are typically smaller, operate on a smaller budget, are often 1 day instead of 2–3 days and don’t use CEA’s application platforms. The idea here is that we can see if a location might be suitable for an EAGx event before we invest significant resources in supporting an EAGx.We hope to share more about these events in a future post.
Thanks Cathy :)
Are there any concerns about nearby conferences cannibalizing each others’ potential audiences?
Yes, this is something we’re tracking. We try and coordinate the European conferences in particular so that there isn’t too much overlap. Most others serve very large regions so I’m less worried about those.
Is there a maximum number of conferences that we think will produce the most effective outcome?
We don’t have an answer to that but it’s also something we’re thinking about. We hope to run more EAGx events in the coming years, since a lot of people travel a long way to attend the nearest EAGx event, and the costs of that travel can sometimes exceed the costs of running another event. The bottlenecks are around our capacity to support more events and strong regional organising teams (please apply if you’re interested!). We aren’t currently planning to run more than three EA Globals a year.
A similar one was run last year, here :)
(Jumping in for our busy comms/exec team) Understanding the status of the EA brand and working to improve it is a top priority for CEA :) We hope to share more work on this in future.
First, 6 months is probably too short a timeframe to measure conference impact—many of my most valuable changes in behavior (e.g., starting new projects/collaborations, or providing (and getting) support/advice) occurred years after the conference where I met someone for the first time.
Possibly, though there is a trade-off here. We also hear in our 3–6 month follow-up surveys that people don’t really remember conversations from the event. Maybe that’s just a sign that nothing super valuable occurred but if you attend lots of events, questions about an event that occurred >6mo ago can be difficult to answer even if it was impactful. If we ask straight after the event, and 3–6 months later and a year later, I’d worry about survey fatigue.
We’re really excited to announce the following sessions for EA Global: Boston, which kicks off in just two weeks time:
- Fireside chat with Iqbal Dhaliwal, Global Executive Director of JPAL.
- Rachel Silverman Bonnifield, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, on the current state of the global movement to eliminate childhood lead poisoning.
- A workshop on Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy, led by Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Technical Staff at Anthropic.
Applications close Sunday! More info and how to apply on our website.