I nudged RP last week, and they had a bunch of other projects going on so hadn’t got to posting. Nudged again :)
OllieBase
Karma: 6,064
It’s impressive that this post was published before the end of January for the quarter prior. Would love to see that kept up for this and other funds!
“Why I’m long-term bullish on the Middle East” by Noah Smith has some great good news stories
- Wars in the Middle East are becoming less violent (contrary to many media narratives)
- The Middle East is building a ton of desalination plants to provide fresh drinking water
- Investment in solar energy is booming
”In other words, with solar power rising and oil becoming less important, and with its demographics in a favorable position, the Middle East is primed for an economic and political reinvention.”
Good question! Yes, TL;DR large venues in major US/UK cities are more expensive per-attendee than smaller venues in other cities.
Eli covered this a bit in our last post about costs. There aren’t that many venues big enough for EA Globals, and the venues that are big enough force you to use their in-house catering company, generally have a minimum mandatory spend, and significantly mark up the costs of their services. Our best guesses at why (from Eli’s post):
Big venues are just generally quite expensive to run (big properties, lots of staff, etc.).
These venues are often empty, forcing them to charge more when they actually do host events.
Catering costs are marked up in order to mark venue costs down. Many customers will anchor on an initial venue cost; by the time they hear the exorbitant catering fees later, they may feel it’s too late to switch. (We always ask to see both venue and catering costs up front.)
I suspect straightforward lack of competition also plays a role. As an extreme example, if there’s only one venue in a city large enough for conferences and you want to run a conference there, they can basically charge what they want to.
Meanwhile, venues that can host 200–600 people (EAGx events) are easier to come by. EAGx organizers often secure university venues which are cheap but often more difficult to work with. Location does play a role, of course. You may not be surprised to learn that Mexico City, Bangalore and Berlin are cheaper than Oakland, London and Boston. But we also hosted events in Sydney and Copenhagen this year, so I think the above cost vs. size factor / availability of space plays a bigger role.
I do want to add that we are consistently impressed by EAGx and EA Summit organizers when it comes to resourcefulness and the LTR scores they generate given the lower CPA. The EA Brazil Summit team, for example, had food donated by the Brazilian Vegetarian Society. The bar for hustling in service of impact is continuously being raised, and we hustle on.
(Other team members or EAGx organizers should feel free to jump in here and push back / add more details.)
Well said!
Unfortunately, I think the uncertainty we all face goes even deeper. There’s no EA sorting hat, and there’s also no one who can tell you whether you really made the right call or had the kind of impact you wanted to have. No one will find you after your career, shake your hand and offer you an impact scorecard.Maybe it’s a bit easier to figure this out, because you can look at the work you’ve done, estimate some counterfactuals and weigh it up yourself, but I also see some people saying things like “I got the EA-aligned job someone recommended, so hooray I’m now having a bunch of impact”. Maybe! But hard to say, and I recommend getting comfortable with that uncertainty.
Thanks!
I don’t know much about LW/ESPR/SPARC but I suspect a lot of their impact flows through convincing people of important ideas and/or the social aspect rather than their impact on community epistemics/integrity?
Some of the sorts of outcomes I have in mind are just things like altered cause prioritisation, different projects getting funded, generally better decision-making.
Similarly, if the goal is to help people think about cause prioritisation, I think fairly standard EA retreats / fellowships are quite good at this? I’m not sure we need some intermediary step like “improve community epistemics”.
Appreciate you responding and tracking this concern though!
EA is vulnerable to groupthink, echo chambers, and excessive deference to authority.
A bunch of big EA mistakes and failures were perhaps (partly) due to these things.
A lot of external criticism of EA stems back to this.
I’m a bit skeptical that funding small projects that try to tackle this are really stronger than other community-building work on the margin. Is there an example of a small project focused on epistemics that had a really meaningful impact? Perhaps by steering an important decision or helping someone (re)consider pursuing high-impact work?
I’m worried there’s not a strong track record here. Maybe you want to do some exploratory funding here, but I’m still interested in what you think the outcomes might be.
This year, 216 people cancelled their ticket (~30% of cancellations) because they couldn’t afford to attend, though this might have meant ticket costs rather than travel support. There were 360 people from BA and London (sorry, I don’t have Boston data to hand) who had travel support rejected who didn’t attend, though they might not have attended for other reasons. So, I’d guess in the hundreds.
If more attendees opted to buy a higher-priced ticket, we could spend more on the event beyond what we fundraise. We don’t directly allocate marginal revenue to a specific line item though travel support is something we would likely consider spending more on if we had more funding available. Note though that ticket revenue makes up a small % of our budget (~16% in 2024).
Thanks! I like this idea, seems like a helpful public resource. I’ll see if our team can put together some kind of deck.
I do think the situation is significantly more complicated with orgs that receive substantial institutional funding so I think the original post applies a bit less to orgs like CEA, and more to specific EA groups or small-scale projects (including projects that the EAIF funds).
Agree
I suggested to various regional EA groups that they should try and cover some fraction of their costs from members, but there was quite a lot of negative push back (e.g. fundraising distracting them from their main jobs).[1]
That’s a shame. I think we’re in a strange situation if non-profits / charitable projects don’t think fundraising should be at least a non-trivial portion of their time. I also think fundraising forces projects to more clearly define their vision, goals, funding needs etc.
Perhaps I’d feel differently if they were several funders fighting over who gets to fund each EA Group, but that doesn’t seem to be the case (at least not any more).
Hm, this strikes me as worrying about drought during a flood (is that a saying? It should be).
Currently, I’m pretty worried about funding diversity. A large number of EA groups rely on funding from a very small number of donors and, as covered in the post, it’s hard for those funders to allocate funds efficiently. This pot also doesn’t seem to be growing.
Moving a bit more in the direction of my post will help with this situation, but I’m not yet worried about a scenario where EA groups have costs (incl. several full-time staff and large events in many cases) covered by membership fees.[1] So, I still expect funders tracking impact to retain strong influence over the group’s impact.
Also, as mentioned in my reply to Angelina, I don’t think we should assume that members/alumni/smaller donors won’t also care a lot about outcomes.
- ^
Unless my post is so wildly persuasive that it changes the culture of the entire ecosystem overnight and brings in millions of dollars. Disastrous.
- ^
Reading again though, maybe what you mean is “the group that helped you might not be the best group to support any more”. Yeah, that makes sense.
Thanks!
There seems to be an assumption here along the lines of “EA funders will continually track the impact of EA university groups and steer them well, while alumni donors won’t”.
I don’t think that’s correct. EA funders are busy and have to make decisions about groups with limited context and information. You might even get alumni donors who care more about the quality of the organisers, the long-term outcomes and operations of the group relative to the EA funder who has many options available, and doesn’t have the capacity to invest in and support a group.
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.
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.
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.
It worked! Thanks for the nudge to nudge :)