My impression is EAGx Prague 22 managed to balance 1:1s with other content simply by not offering SwapCard 1:1s slots part of the time, having a lot of spaces for small group conversations, and suggesting to attendees they should aim for something like balanced diet. (Turning off SwapCard slots does not prevent people from scheduling 1:1, just adds a little friction; empirically it seems enough to prevent the mode where people just fill their time by 1:1s).

As far as I understand this will most likely not happen, because weight given to / goodharting on metrics like people reporting 1:1s is the most valuable use of time, metrics tracking "connections formed" and weird psychological effect of 1:1 fests. (People feel stimulated, connected, energized,... Part of the effect is superficial).  Also the counterfactual value lost from lack of conversational energy at scales ~3 to 12ppl is not visible and likely not tracked in feedback  (I think this has predictable  effects on what types of collaborations do start and which do not, and the effect is on the margin bad.) The whole is downstream of problems like  Don't Over-Optimize Things / We can do better than argmax.

Btw I think you are too apologetic / self-deprecating ("inexperienced event organisers complaining about features of the conference").  I have decent experience running events and all what you wrote is spot on. 

(written v quickly, sorry for informal tone/etc)

i think that a happy medium is getting small-group conversations (that are useful, effective, etc) of size 3–4 people. this includes 1-1s, but the vibe of a Formal, Thirty Minute One on One is a very different vibe from floating through 10–15, 3–4-person conversations in a day, each that last varying amounts of time.

• much more information can flow with 3-4 ppl than with just 2 ppl
• people can dip in and out of small conversations more than they can with 1-1s
• more-organic time blocks means that particularly unhelpful conversations can end after 5-10m, and particularly helpful ones can last the duration that would be good for them to last (even many hours!)
• 3-4 person conversations naturally select for a good 1-1. once 1-2 people have left a 3-4 person conversation, the conversation is then just a 1-1 of the two people who've engaged in the conversation longest — which seems like some evidence of their being a good match for a 1-1.

however, i think that this is operationally much harder to do for organizers than just 1-1s. my understanding is that this is much of the reason EAGs (& other conferences) do 1-1s, instead of small group conversations.

• i think Writehaven did a mediocre job of this at LessOnline this past year (but, tbc, it did vastly better than any other piece of software i've encountered).
• i think Lighthaven as a venue forces this sort of thing to happen, since there are so so so many nooks for 2-4 people to sit and chat, and the space is set up to make 10+ person conversations less likely to happen.

i know that The Curve (from @Rachel Weinberg) created some "Curated Conversations:" they manually selected people to have predetermined conversations for some set amount of time. iirc this was typically 3-6 people for ~1h, but i could be wrong on the details. rachel: how did these end up going, relative to the cost of putting them together?

Create nice zones for spontaneous conversations (not sure how to do this well)

I've tried pushing for this without much success unfortunately.

It really is a lot more effort to have spontaneous conversations when almost all pairs are a one-on-one and almost all people by themselves are waiting for a one-on-one.

I've seen attempts to declare a space an area that's not for one-on-ones, but people have one-on-ones there anyway. Then again, organisers normally put up one or two small signs.

Honestly, the only way to stop people having one-on-ones in the area for spontaneous conversation might be to have an absurd number of big and obvious signs.

I completely agree and have tried so set up some small group meetings - you can have up to 24 people in one 1:1 meeting on swapcard. This works especially well if you create a 1:1 with one person and then add others rather than immediately creating one with 24 people because the latter does not show you whether invitees are actually free at the planned time while the former does. 

On the organiser side, it might be cool to move the cause area/work specific meetups earlier in the conference.

I've "only" been to 2 EAGs and 4 EAGx's so take this with that as context

For previous EAGs I always booked my schedule full of 1-1's to ask people about their experience, resolve uncertainties, and just generally network with people in similar roles. This EAG (NYC 2025) I didn't find as many people on Swapcard that I wanted to talk to and received much less requests for 1-1s, so I also ended up having just 7 1-1s in total. This was a fun experiment. I found it much more relaxed, and I enjoyed being able to have spontaneous conversations with people I ran into, but I think overall I got less value out of this EAG than if I had booked more meetings: I have less actionable insights and met less people than during other EAG(x) conferences I have attended. However, I'm definitely in favour of less 1-1 cramming.

I do think if this was one of my first EAGs and I didn't know anyone, I would've been quite lost without the structure of the 1-1's and the explicit encouragement that it is normal to book a lot. I also feel weird about just joining a conversation in case it was people having a private 1-1. Having an improved spontaneous conversations area with bigger signs/cause area specific areas (or time slots?) sounds like a great solution for both of these problems.

Tangentially, my favourite meetups are also those where you just stand and mingle, ideally with specific areas in specific corners, rather than do forced speed meets or roundtable discussions. This makes it much easier to leave if you don't like a conversation and move on to a different one until you find one you like.

I'm not especially pro-criticism but this seems way overstated.

Almost all EA projects have low downside risk in absolute terms

I might agree with this on a technicality, in that depending on your bar or standard, I could imagine agreeing that almost all EA projects (at least for more speculative causes) have negligible impact in absolute terms.

But presumably you mean that almost all EA projects are such that their plausible good outcomes are way bigger in magnitude than their plausible bad outcomes, or something like that. This seems false, e.g.

• FTX
• Any kind of political action can backfire if a different political party gains power
• AI safety research could be used as a form of safety washing
• AI evaluations could primarily end up as a mechanism to speed up timelines (not saying that's necessarily bad, but certainly under some models it's very bad)
• Movement building can kill the movement by making it too diffuse and regressing to the mean, and by creating opponents to the movement
• Vegan advocacy could polarize people, such that factory farming lasts longer than it would be default (e.g. if cheap and tasty substitutes would have caused people to switch over if they weren't polarized)

There are almost no examples of criticism clearly mattering

• ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can’t
• Habryka on Anthropic non-disparagements
• FrontierMath was funded by OpenAI
• Concerns with Intentional Insights
• It's hard to tell, but I'd guess Critiques of Prominent AI Safety Labs changed who applied to the critiqued organizations
• Gossip-based criticism of Leverage clearly mattered and imo it would have been better if it was more public
• Sharing Information About Nonlinear clearly mattered in the sense of having some impact, though the sign is unclear
• Same deal for Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?
• Back in the era when EA discussions happened mainly on Facebook there were all sorts of critiques and flame wars between protest-tactics and incremental-change-tactics for animal advocacy, I don't think this particularly changed what any given organization tried to do, but it surely changed views of individual people

I'd be happy to endorse something like "public criticism rarely causes an organization to choose to do something different in a major org-defining way" (but note that's primarily because people in a good position to change an organization through criticism will just do so privately, not because criticism is totally ineffective).

I think I agree with your overall point but some counterexamples:

1. EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest winners. E.g. GiveWell said "We believe HLI’s feedback is likely to change some of our funding recommendations, at least marginally, and perhaps more importantly improve our decision-making across multiple interventions"
2. GiveWell said of their Change Our Mind contest "To give a general sense of the magnitude of the changes we currently anticipate, our best guess is that Matthew Romer and Paul Romer Present's entry will change our estimate of the cost-effectiveness of Dispensers for Safe Water by very roughly 5 to 10% and that Noah Haber's entry may lead to an overall shift in how we account for uncertainty (but it's too early to say how it would impact any given intervention)."
3. HLI discussed some meaningful ways they changed as the result of criticism here.

I feel like you are missing some important causal avenues through which plentiful criticism can be good:

• If the expectation of harsh future criticism is a major deterrent from engagement, presumably it disproportionately deters the type of projects that expect to be especially criticized.
• Criticism is educational for third parties reading and can help improve their future projects.

• There are almost no examples of criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)

I don't know what "clearly mattering" means, but I think this characterization unduly tips the scales. People who don't like being criticized are often going to be open about that fact, which makes it easier to build an anti-criticism case under a "clearly" standard.

Also, "criticism" covers a lot of ground -- you may have a somewhat narrower definition in mind, but (even after limiting to EA projects with <10 FTEs) people are understandably reacting to a pretty broad definition.

The most obvious use of criticism is probably to deter and respond to inappropriate conduct. Setting aside whether the allegations were sustained, I think that was a major intended mechanism of action in several critical pieces. I can't prove that having a somewhat pro-criticism culture furthers this goal, but I think it's appropriate to give it some weight. It does seem plausible on the margin that (e.g.) orgs will be less likely to exaggerate their claims and cost-effectiveness analyses given the risk of someone posting criticism with receipts. 

A softer version of this purpose could be phrased as follows: criticism is a means by which the community expresses how it expects others to act (and hopefully influences future actions by third parties even if not by the criticized organization). In your model, "public critique clearly creates barriers to starting new projects," so one would expect public critique (or the fear thereof) to influence decisions by existing orgs as well. Then we have to decide whether that critique is on the whole good or not.

Criticism can help direct resources away from certain orgs to more productive uses. The StrongMinds-related criticisms of 2023 come to mind here. The resources could include not only funding but also mindshare (e.g., how much do I want to defer to this org?) and decisions by talent. This kind of criticism doesn't generally pay in financial terms, so it's reasonable to be generous in granting social credit to compensate for that. These outcomes could be measured, but doing so will often be resource-intensive and so they may not make the cut under a "clearly" standard either.

Criticism can also serve the function of market research. The usual response to people who aren't happy about how orgs are doing their work is to go start their own org. That's a costly response -- for both the unhappy person and for the ecosystem! Suppose someone isn't happy about CEA and EA Funds spinning off together and is thinking about trying to stand up an independent grantmaker. First off, they need to test their ideas against people who have different perspectives. They would also need to know whether a critical mass of people would move their donations over to an independent grantmaker for this or other reasons. (I think it would also be fair for someone not in a position to lead a new org to signal support for the idea, hoping that it might inspire someone else.) 

It's probably better for the market-research function to happen in public rather than in back channels. Among other things, it gives the org a chance to defend its position, and gives it a chance to adjust course if too many relevant stakeholders agree with the critic. The counterargument to this one is that little criticism actually makes it into a new organization. But I'm not sure what success rate we should expect given considerable incumbency advantage in some domains.

Do you have an alternate suggestion for how flaws and mistakes made by projects in the EA sphere can be discovered?

As a scientist, one of the reasons people trust our work is the expectation that the work we publish has been vetted and checked by other experts in the field (and even with peer review, sloppy work gets published all the time). Isn't one of the goals of the EA forum to crowdsource at least some of this valuable scrutiny? 

I think this is excellent criticism!

As I'm sure many would imagine, I think I disagree.

There are almost no examples of criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)

There's a lot here I take issue with:
1. I'm not sure where the line is between "criticism" and "critique" or "feedback." Would any judgements about a project that aren't positive be considered "criticism"? We don't have specific examples, so I don't know what you refer to. 
2. This jumps from "criticism matters" to "criticism clearly matters" (which is more easily defensible, but less important), to "criticism clearly mattering (e.g. getting someone to significantly improve their project)", which is one of several ways that criticism could matter, clearly or otherwise. The latter seems like an incredibly specific claim that misses much of the discussion/benefits of criticism/critique/feedback. 

I'd rate this post decently high on the "provocative to clarity" measure, as in it's fairly provocative while also being short. This isn't something I take issue with, but I just wouldn't spend too much attention/effort on it, given this. But I would be a bit curious what a much longer and detailed version of this post would be like. 

I don't think it's obvious that less chance of criticism implies a higher chance of starting a project. There are many things in the world that are prestigious precisely because they have a high quality bar.

"public critique clearly created barriers to starting new projects" In what sense? People read criticism of other projects and decide that starting their own isn't worth it? People with new active projects discouraged by critique?

Update- looks like this seemed like a particular issue this week because some part of the refactor broke the algo. Should be fixed now. 

I don't think so. Best bet is to use the all posts page, weekly, sort by karma. Then close your eyes when you scroll down to posts below 15 karma. 

What was the use case here? 

https://forum.nunosempere.com/frontpage?minScore=15

(quick thoughts, may be missing something obvious)

Relative the scale of the long term future, the number of AIs deployed in the near term is very small, so to me it seems like there's pretty limited upside to improving that. In the long term, it seems like we have AIs to figure out the nature of consciousness for us. 

Maybe I'm missing the case that lock-in is plausible, it currently seems pretty unlikely to me because the singularity seems like it will transform the ways the AIs are running. So in my mind it mostly matters what happens after the singularity. 

I'm also not sure about the tractability, but the scale is my major crux. 

I do think understanding AI consciousness might be valuable for alignment, I'm just arguing against work on nearterm AI suffering.

I'm really glad you wrote this; I've been worried about the same thing. I'm particularly worried at how few people are working on it given the potential scale and urgency of the problem. It also seems like an area where the EA ecosystem has a strong comparative advantage — it deals with issues many in this field are familiar with, requires a blend of technical and philosophical skills, and is still too weird and nascent for the wider world to touch (for now). I'd be very excited to see more research and work done here, ideally quite soon.

I hadn't seen this until now, but it's good to see that you've come to the same conclusion I have. I've just started my DPhil in Philosophy and plan on working on AI mental states and welfare.

Very strong +1 to all this. I honestly think it's the most neglected area relative to its importance right now. It seems plausible that the vast majority of future beings will be digital, so it would be surprising if longtermism does not imply much more attention to the issue.

Will's list from his recent post has good candidates too: 

• AI character^[5]
• AI welfare / digital minds
• the economic and political rights of AIs
• AI-driven persuasion and epistemic disruption
• AI for better reasoning, decision-making and coordination
• the risk of (AI-enabled) human coups
• democracy preservation
• gradual disempowerment
• biorisk
• space governance
• s-risks
• macrostrategy
• meta

What do you think is causing the ball to be dropped?

What's "SMA" in this context?

I might call that "meritocratic about ideas".

While I agree that it's not "elitist" in the sense that anyone can put forward ideas and be considered by significant people in the community (which I think is great!), I would say there's still some expectations that need to be met in that the "good idea" generally must accept several commonly agreed up premises that represent what I'd call the "orthodoxy" of EA / rationality / AI safety.

For instance, I noticed way back when I first joined Less Wrong that the Orthogonality Thesis and Instrumental Convergence are more or less doctrines, and challenging them tends to receive a negative or at best lukewarm reception, or at least, demand a very strong case to be made.

In that sense, there is still a bit of elitism in the sense that some of the ideas of the sorta co-founders of the movements, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill and such, are likely to be treated with notably more deference. It used to be the case, for instance, that on Less Wrong, posts that challenged these views would lead to somewhat dismissive "Read The Sequences" responses, although I admit I haven't seen that particular refrain in quite a while, so the community might have improved in this regard.

And admittedly, I do think compared to say, most political ideological movements and religions, the EA / rationality / AI safety communities are MUCH more open to dissenting views and good productive debates. This is one thing I do like about us.

This is true, and I've appreciated it personally. I've been pleasantly surprised how people have responded to a couple of things I've written, even when they didn't know me from a bar of soap. I think this was unlikely to happen in academia or in the high brow public health world where status games often prevail like you said.

There is still though an element of being "known" which helps your ideas get traction. This does make sense as if someone has written something decent in the past, there's a higher chance that other things they write may also be decent, so we are more likely to give their next idea a read. This is why we follow certain people on Substack and Twitter and don't just read things at random (to state the obvious).

So I think there can still a hill to climb a the beginning to get good ideas seen, especially for very new people. 

Agreed. I’d extend the claim past ideas and say that EA is very non-elitist (or at least better than most professional fields) at any point of evaluation. 

Maybe because of that, it seems more elitist elsewhere. 

Have you read Holden's classic on this topic? It sounds like you are describing what he calls "Influence matching".

It's understandable for a donor to have that concern. However, I submit that this goes both ways -- it's also reasonable for smaller donors to be concerned that the big donors will adjust their own funding levels to account for smaller donations, reducing the big donor's incentives to donate. It's not obvious to me which of these concerns predominates, although my starting assumption is that the big donors are more capable of adjusting than a large number of smaller donors.

Much electronic ink has been spilled over the need for more diversification of funding control. Given that, I'd be hesitant to endorse anything that gives even more influence over funding levels to the entities that already have a lot of it. Unless paired with something else, I worry that embracing matching campaigns would worsen the problem of funding influence being too concentrated.

Seems plausible that EA Funds should explore offering matches to larger projects that it wants to fund to help increase the project’s funding diversity.

A couple of considerations I've thought about, at least for myself

(1) Fundamentally, giving helps save/improve lives, and that's a very strong consideration that we need equally strong philosophical or practical reasons to overcome.

(2) I think value drift is a significant concern. For less engaged EAs, the risk is about becoming non-EA altogether; for more engaged EAs, it's more about becoming someone less focused on doing good and more concerned with other considerations (e.g. status); this doesn't have to be an explicit thing, but rather biases the way we reason and decide in a way that means we end up rationalizing choices that helps ourselves over the greater good. Giving (e.g. at the standard 10%) helps anchor against that.

(3) From a grantmaking/donor advisory perspective, I think it's hard to have moral credibility, which can be absolutely necessary (e.g. advising grantees to put up modest salaries in their project proposals, not just to increase project runway but also the chances that our donor partners approve the funding request). And this is both psychologically and practically hard to do this if you're not just earning more but earning far more and not giving to charity! Why would they listen to you? The LMIC grantees especially may be turned off - disillusioned, by the fact that they have to accept peanuts while those of us with power over them draw fat stacks of cash! The least we can do is donate! Relatedly, I think part of Charity Entrepreneurship's success is absolutely down to Joey and co leading by example and taking low salaries.

(4) Runway is a legitimate consideration, especially since there are a lot of potentially impactful things one can do but which won't be funded upfront (so you need to do it on savings, prove viability and then get it funded). However, I don't think this is sufficient to outweigh points 1-3.

(5) In general, I think it's not useful at all to compare with how much others are earning - that only leads to resentment, unhappiness, and less impactful choices. For myself, the vast majority of my friends are non-EAs; we have similar backgrounds (elite education, worked for the Singapore government as policy officers/scholars at one point or another) and yet since leaving government I've had a riskier career, earn far less, have fewer savings, and am forced to delay having a family/kids because of all those reasons. All of this is downstream of choices I've made an EA, particularly in avoiding job offers that paid very well but which didn't have impact (or in fact, had negative impact). Is the conclusion I'm supposed to draw that I've made a mistake with my life? I don't think so, because statistically speaking, some random African kid out there is alive as a result of my donations (and hopefully, my work), and that's good enough for me.

Hey Caleb!

(I'm writing this in my personal capacity, though I work at GWWC)

On 1: While I think that giving 10% is a great norm for us to have in the community (and to inspire people worldwide who are able to do the same), I don't think there should be pressure for people to take a pledge or donate who don't feel inspired to do so - I'd like to see a community where people can engage in ways that make sense for them and feel welcomed regardless of their donation habits or career choices, as long as they are genuinely engaging with wanting to do good effectively. 

On 3: I think it makes sense for people to build up some runway or sense of financial stability, and that they should generally factor this in when considering donating or taking a pledge. I personally only increased my donations to >10% after I felt I had enough financial stability to manage ongoing health issues. 

I do think that people should consider how much runway or savings they really need though, and whether small adjustments in lifestyle could increase their savings and allow for more funds to donate - after all, many of us are still in the top few % of global income earners even after taking jobs that are less than we would getting in the private sector.

It may be that building runway is, in fact, the best way to do good in the long term. And maybe certain levels of personal consumption make you more able to sustainably do good through your work.

But just engage seriously with the cost of that runway. With straightforward Givewell charities, that might mean someone dies annually that you could have saved.

To share another perspective: As an independent alignment researcher, I also feel really conflicted. I could be making several multiples of my salary if my focus was to get a role on an alignment team at an AGI lab. My other option would be building startups trying to hit it big and providing more funding to what I think is needed.

Like, I could say, "well, I'm already working directly on something and taking a big pay-cut so I shouldn't need to donate close to 10%", but something about that doesn't feel right... But then to counter-balance that, I'm constantly worried that I just won't get funding anymore at some point and would be in need of money to pay for expenses during a transition.

Concerning 2 I think from an organization’s perspective it might be even helpful to have a salary agreed with you that makes it easier to replace you and so calculate a realistic runway for the organization.Then you can still voluntarily reduce the salary and claim it as donation. This is what I’m doing and it helps with my own budgeting and with that of my org. I was inspired by this post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GxRcKACcJuLBEJPmE/consider-earning-less

(About 85% confident, not a tax professional)

At least in the US I'm pretty sure this has very poor tax treatment. The company match portion would be taxable to the employee while also not qualifying for the charitable tax deduction. The idea is they can offer a consistent match as policy, but if they're offering a higher match for a specific employee that's taxable compensation. And the employee can only deduct contributions they make, which this isn't quite.

Agree!

My best idea for solving this is making an alternative view for 80k's job board that has some reasons to obviously prefer it, and to add features to it like "here's a link to the org's AMA post", where I hope the community can comment on things like "this org is trying to build an AGI with little concern for safety", and lots of people can upvote it. No political problems for 80k. Lots of good high quality discussions. Hopefully.

What do you think?

FYI there is a super-linear prize for an automated jobs board. https://www.super-linear.org/prize?recordId=recSFgbnu7VzAHCqY

Every now and then I'm reminded of this comment from a few years ago: "One person's Value Drift is another person's Bayesian Updating"

I probably agree with this idea, but I wouldn't label it it "value drift" myself.

From my perspective I would call what  you're describing more keeping a scout mindset around our values, and trying to ever improve.

"Value drift" for me signals the negative process of switching off our moral radar and almost unconscious drifting towards the worlds norms of selfishness, status, blissful ignorance etc. Reversion towards the mean. Hence the the "drift". I'm not sure I've ever seen someone drift their way to better values. Within the church I have seen big downsides of beligerent soldier mindsetting of values, but even then I would say "value drift" towards the mean has been even more harmful.

Somewhat paridoxically looking at my own life, crystallising what I think are my values at certain points in time, has helped me realise when I don't really believe that any more and the change them.

Related LW thread: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYYyzgyuRH5rFN64K/what-makes-people-intellectually-active