The Nonlinear Library EA - Review of EA Global Bay Area 2024 (Global Catastrophic Risks) by frances lorenz
Mar 1, 2024
06:33
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Review of EA Global Bay Area 2024 (Global Catastrophic Risks), published by frances lorenz on March 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
EA Global: Bay Area (Global Catastrophic Risks) took place February 2-4. We hosted 820 attendees, 47 of whom volunteered over the weekend to help run the event. Thank you to everyone who attended and a special thank you to our volunteers - we hope it was a valuable weekend!
Photos and recorded talks
You can now check out
photos from the event.
Recorded talks, such as the media panel on impactful GCR communication, Tessa Alexanian's talk on preventing engineered pandemics, Joe Carlsmith's discussion of scheming AIs, and more, are now available on our
Youtube channel.
A brief summary of attendee feedback
Our post-event feedback survey received 184 responses. This is lower than our average completion rate - we're still accepting feedback responses and would love to hear from all our attendees. Each response helps us get better summary metrics and we look through each short answer.
To submit your feedback, you can visit the Swapcard event page and click the Feedback Survey button. The survey link can also be found in a post-event email sent to all attendees with the subject line, "EA Global: Bay Area 2024 | Thank you for attending!"
Key metrics
The EA Global team uses a several key metrics to estimate the impact of our events. These metrics, and the questions we use in our feedback survey to measure them, include:
Likelihood to recommend (How likely is it that you would recommend EA Global to a friend or colleague with similar interests to your own? Discrete scale from 0 to 10, 0 being not at all likely and 10 being extremely likely)
Number of new connections[1] (How many new connections did you make at this event?)
Number of impactful connections[2] (Of those new connections, how many do you think might be impactful connections?)
Number of Swapcard meetings per person (This data is pulled from Swapcard)
Counterfactual use of attendee time (To what extent was this EA Global a good use of your time, compared to how you would have otherwise spent your time? A discrete scale ranging from, "a waste of my time, <10% the counterfactual" to, "a much better use of my time, >10x the counterfactual")
The likelihood to recommend for this event was higher compared to last year's EA Global: Bay Area and our EA Global 2023 average (i.e. the average across the three EA Globals we hosted in 2023) (see Table 1). Number of new connections was slightly down compared to the 2023 average, while the number of impactful connections was slightly up.
The counterfactual use of time reported by attendees was slightly higher overall than Boston 2023 (the first EA Global we used this metric at), though there was also an increase in the number of reports that the event was a worse use of attendees' time (see Figure 1).
Metric (average of all respondents)
EAG BA 2024 (GCR)
EAG BA 2023
EAG 2023 average
Likelihood to recommend (0 - 10)
8.78
8.54
8.70
Number of new connections
9.05
11.5
9.72
Number of impactful connections
4.15
4.8
4.09
Swapcard meetings per person
6.73
5.26
5.24
Table 1. A summary of key metrics from the post-event feedback surveys for EA Global: Bay Area 2024 (GCRs), EA Global: Bay Area 2023, and the average from all three EA Globals hosted in 2023.
Feedback on the GCRs focus
37% of respondents rated this event more valuable than a standard EA Global, 34% rated it roughly as valuable and 9% as less valuable. 20% of respondents had not attended an EA Global event previously (Figure 2).
If the event had been a regular EA Global (i.e. not focussed on GCRs), most respondents predicted they would have still attended. To be more precise, approximately 90% of respondents reported having over 50% probability of attending the event in the absence of a GCR ...
EA Global: Bay Area (Global Catastrophic Risks) took place February 2-4. We hosted 820 attendees, 47 of whom volunteered over the weekend to help run the event. Thank you to everyone who attended and a special thank you to our volunteers - we hope it was a valuable weekend!
Photos and recorded talks
You can now check out
photos from the event.
Recorded talks, such as the media panel on impactful GCR communication, Tessa Alexanian's talk on preventing engineered pandemics, Joe Carlsmith's discussion of scheming AIs, and more, are now available on our
Youtube channel.
A brief summary of attendee feedback
Our post-event feedback survey received 184 responses. This is lower than our average completion rate - we're still accepting feedback responses and would love to hear from all our attendees. Each response helps us get better summary metrics and we look through each short answer.
To submit your feedback, you can visit the Swapcard event page and click the Feedback Survey button. The survey link can also be found in a post-event email sent to all attendees with the subject line, "EA Global: Bay Area 2024 | Thank you for attending!"
Key metrics
The EA Global team uses a several key metrics to estimate the impact of our events. These metrics, and the questions we use in our feedback survey to measure them, include:
Likelihood to recommend (How likely is it that you would recommend EA Global to a friend or colleague with similar interests to your own? Discrete scale from 0 to 10, 0 being not at all likely and 10 being extremely likely)
Number of new connections[1] (How many new connections did you make at this event?)
Number of impactful connections[2] (Of those new connections, how many do you think might be impactful connections?)
Number of Swapcard meetings per person (This data is pulled from Swapcard)
Counterfactual use of attendee time (To what extent was this EA Global a good use of your time, compared to how you would have otherwise spent your time? A discrete scale ranging from, "a waste of my time, <10% the counterfactual" to, "a much better use of my time, >10x the counterfactual")
The likelihood to recommend for this event was higher compared to last year's EA Global: Bay Area and our EA Global 2023 average (i.e. the average across the three EA Globals we hosted in 2023) (see Table 1). Number of new connections was slightly down compared to the 2023 average, while the number of impactful connections was slightly up.
The counterfactual use of time reported by attendees was slightly higher overall than Boston 2023 (the first EA Global we used this metric at), though there was also an increase in the number of reports that the event was a worse use of attendees' time (see Figure 1).
Metric (average of all respondents)
EAG BA 2024 (GCR)
EAG BA 2023
EAG 2023 average
Likelihood to recommend (0 - 10)
8.78
8.54
8.70
Number of new connections
9.05
11.5
9.72
Number of impactful connections
4.15
4.8
4.09
Swapcard meetings per person
6.73
5.26
5.24
Table 1. A summary of key metrics from the post-event feedback surveys for EA Global: Bay Area 2024 (GCRs), EA Global: Bay Area 2023, and the average from all three EA Globals hosted in 2023.
Feedback on the GCRs focus
37% of respondents rated this event more valuable than a standard EA Global, 34% rated it roughly as valuable and 9% as less valuable. 20% of respondents had not attended an EA Global event previously (Figure 2).
If the event had been a regular EA Global (i.e. not focussed on GCRs), most respondents predicted they would have still attended. To be more precise, approximately 90% of respondents reported having over 50% probability of attending the event in the absence of a GCR ...