OllieBase

Karma: 5,458

OllieBase 12 Nov 2024 18:15 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: calebp’s comment on: Consider donating to whoever helped you
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).

OllieBase 12 Nov 2024 18:11 UTC
15 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Luke Moore 🔸’s comment on: Consider donating to whoever helped you
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.
1. ^
  Unless my post is so wildly persuasive that it changes the culture of the entire ecosystem overnight and brings in millions of dollars. Disastrous.

OllieBase 12 Nov 2024 18:09 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: OllieBase’s comment on: Consider donating to whoever helped you
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.

OllieBase 12 Nov 2024 17:59 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Angelina Li’s comment on: Consider donating to whoever helped you
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.

OllieBase 18 Oct 2024 17:42 UTC
12 points
1 ∶ 0
on: OllieBase’s Shortform
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.

OllieBase 11 Oct 2024 14:24 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Austin’s comment on: Meta Coordination Forum 2024: Post-Event Summary
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 11 Oct 2024 8:52 UTC
53 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Retrospective on EA Nigeria Summit: Our Successes and Learnings
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!

OllieBase 10 Oct 2024 14:04 UTC
10 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Indahouse’s comment on: Meta Coordination Forum 2024: Post-Event Summary
(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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

OllieBase 9 Oct 2024 11:12 UTC
6 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
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.

OllieBase 8 Oct 2024 9:49 UTC
18 points
3 ∶ 0
on: What do RP’s tools tell us about giving $100m to AW or GHD?
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.

OllieBase 24 Sep 2024 10:06 UTC
2 points
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on: EA Sheffield is restarting as a city group
Really happy to see this! Thanks for getting it going again :)

OllieBase 23 Sep 2024 10:30 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: Benevolent_Rain’s comment on: Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2024
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.

OllieBase 14 Sep 2024 17:31 UTC
17 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2024
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.

OllieBase 14 Sep 2024 17:26 UTC
13 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2024
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.

OllieBase 5 Sep 2024 7:44 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Adebayo Mubarak’s comment on: Upcoming EA conferences in 2024 and 2025
Thanks, it wasn’t open at the time I posted this, but I’ve added the link now.

OllieBase 4 Sep 2024 11:55 UTC
13 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: CEA will continue to take a “principles-first” approach to EA
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.

OllieBase 23 Aug 2024 12:38 UTC
28 points
6 ∶ 2
on: The case for contributing to the 2024 US election with your time & money
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).

OllieBase 20 Aug 2024 12:51 UTC
19 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joris P’s comment on: Joris P’s Quick takes
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”).

OllieBase 8 Aug 2024 10:43 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Bryce Robertson’s comment on: Upcoming EA conferences in 2024 and 2025
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.

OllieBase 8 Aug 2024 10:41 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Cathy Bogaart’s comment on: Upcoming EA conferences in 2024 and 2025
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.