I'm starting to think that the EA Global meetup format might not be optimal. At the very least, I didn't get as much out of it this year as I was hoping to, and the same thing happened last year, and I suspect others might have been in the same position. (At one meetup, others I talked to expressed frustrations similar to my own.) Here are some thoughts on why, and how it might be improved.

For context: Meetups are the most frequent type of event on the EA Global schedule other than talks. There are meetups for people working in a particular cause area (e.g., nuclear risk, digital sentience, or community building) or with a particular skillset (e.g., earning to give, operations, or communications). There are also affinity-group meetups (e.g., for particular demographic minority groups), but I didn't attend any of those and the theory of what they're for seems different, so here I'm primarily talking about the cause area and skillset ones.

The way the meetups I attended worked was this: There were a bunch of tables in a room, and people sat around them and were encouraged to have conversations. Every ten to fifteen minutes, the organizer would ring a bell and tell people to stop their current conversations and switch to a different table with different people. At some meetups, the tables had cards indicating a particular conversation topic; at others, the organizer would offer a discussion prompt for the whole room at the start of each round; at others, it was entirely freeform.

(There were also meetups that had a different, "speed meeting" format; I didn't attend any of these, but my understanding is that you'd have a series of time-limited one-on-one conversations with a random person, instead of group conversations. Interestingly, the meetups that used this format were the ones for the largest cause areas (e.g., global poverty, animal welfare, or AI safety); I'm not sure if there was a specific reason for that or if it was just a coincidence.)

I'm of course not in a position to know what are the intended outcomes of this format, but I have a vague guess. CEA's events team has indicated fairly consistently that they think that most of the value of EA Global comes from one-on-one meetings; attendees are strongly encouraged to schedule a lot of these. A ten-minute conversation is just long enough to establish some amount of common interest and exchange contact information (or just names, given the availability of Swapcard), and so the meetup format could serve as a way of generating 1:1 connections. The "speed meeting" format probably does this more effectively in any given case, but with fewer people, so maybe the group-discussion format maximizes surface area for 1:1 connections.

I personally didn't find this, or more generally a 1:1-centric approach to EA Global, especially useful, for two reasons:

• I think it works better if everyone involved is a social butterfly who likes doing open-ended networking. This does not describe me; although I don't get a lot of 1:1 invitations anymore, I did in earlier years when I was more actively involved in EA community building, and while I had a good experience when someone had a specific agenda, I found ones without one unpleasant, stressful, and draining. I don't know exactly how prevalent it is, but my suspicion is that it's probably not all that rare. I'll also observe that the advice around 1:1s has softened in recent years; although it's still encouraged to schedule a lot of them, it's also now more encouraged to have a specific purpose for each one, and it's more explicitly stated that it's okay to turn down 1:1s.
• There exist situations where a group conversation is more directly useful than a 1:1. In my case, for example, I was hoping to get a better general sense of the state of EA community building, what people's theories of change are, and what kind of work they think should be getting done but isn't; this is the kind of thing that I'd hope could help me get back into the space after a several-year hiatus. This is a poor fit for 1:1s because I didn't know who to talk to (just looking up the "EA community building" category on Swapcard didn't really provide enough specifics to answer this) and also didn't have a specific ask or agenda. Talking to a bunch of people at once, where any of them can contribute whatever relevant perspective they have, seems more valuable for this use case.

The following ideas could possibly make meetups more conducive to substantive conversations on decision-relevant topics:

• Don't interrupt conversations every ten minutes. If a substantive conversation is happening, it will have just started to gain momentum by then. People should instead be encouraged to circulate tables if they haven't found a conversation worth sticking with.
• Prefer the format where each table is for a different topic or question, so that people can self-sort by what conversations they want to have.
• Use discussion questions that are substantive and decision-relevant. Some meetups I attended (like the earning-to-give one) were already doing this, but others were not.
• Going further, it might be worth finding out in advance from attendees what kinds of discussion topics are decision-relevant to them. (E.g., in a previous year, there was a community-building meetup where strategy/theory-of-change was not one of the topics; I suspect I wasn't the only one there who would have found this relevant.) Maybe there's a way to do this in Swapcard with the question-submission feature or something similar.

One other possibility that occurs to me is that there might be capacity constraints in play; the current format isn't very demanding of volunteer time, and that might be important since volunteer time is presumably at a premium during the event. I'm not sure what to do about this, but I do think there's probably someone at the event who's sufficiently invested in any given meetup that they'd be willing to put in the time to make it go well. Possibly it might be worth recruiting people specifically to run meetups, separately from the regular volunteer pool. (In particular, you'd recruit someone who's an expert in the relevant cause area or skillset, and is sufficiently interested in doing community-building around it to have some idea of what conversations are useful for people to have.)

I think this leaves an important open question, which is, what should the norm be if someone thinks someone else is not merely being less-than-maximally effective, but actually doing harm.

The basic premise of this post: It's better to solve 0.00001% of a $7 billion problem than to solve 100% of a $500 problem. (One could quibble with various oversimplifications that this formulation makes for the sake of pithiness, but the basic point is uncontroversial within EA.)

The key question: If this point is both true and obvious, why do so many people outside EA not buy it, and why do so many people within EA harbor inner doubts or feelings of failure when acting in accordance with it?

We should ask ourselves this not only to better inspire and motivate each other, or to better persuade outsiders, but also because it's possible that this phenomenon is a hint that we've missed some important consideration.

I think the point about Aristides de Sousa Mendes is a bit of a red herring.

It seems like more-or-less a historical accident that Sousa Mendes is more obscure than, e.g., Oskar Schindler. Even so, he's fairly well-known, and has pretty definitively gone down in history as a great hero. I don't think "but he only solved 0.1% of a six-million-life problem" is an objection that anyone actually has. Saving 10,000 lives impresses people, and it doesn't seem to impress them less just because another six million people were still going on dying in the background.

(The main counterargument that I can think of is the findings of the heuristics-and-biases literature on scope neglect, e.g., Daniel Kahneman's experiment asking people to donate to save oil-soaked birds. I think that this kind of situation is a little different; here, you're not appealing to something that people already care about, you're producing a new problem out of thin air and asking people to quickly figure out how to fit it into their existing priorities. I think it makes sense that this setup doesn't elicit careful thought about prioritization, since that's hard, and instead people fall back on scope-insensitive heuristics. But this is a very rough argument and possibly there's more literature here that I should be reading.)

When people are skeptical, either vocally or internally in the backs of their minds, of the efficacy of donating $500 to the Rapid Response Fund, I don't think it's because they think the effects will be analogous to what Sousa Mendes did, but that that's not good enough. I think it's because they suspect that the effects won't be analogous to what Sousa Mendes did.

In a post about a different topic (behavioral economics), Scott Alexander writes:

1% of a small number isn’t worth it! 1% of a big number is very worth it, especially if that big number is a number of lives!

A few caveats. First, a small number only matters if it’s real. It’s very easy to get spurious small effects, so much so that any time you see a small effect you should wonder if it’s real.

I think people are worried about something like this, and I think it's not unreasonable for them to worry.

I once observed an argument on a work mailing list with someone who was skeptical of EA. The core of this person's disagreement with us is that they think we've underestimated the insidiousness of the winner's curse. From this perspective, GiveWell's top charity selection process doesn't identify the best interventions—it identifies the interventions whose proponents are most willing to engage in p-hacking. Therefore, you should instead support local charities that you have personally volunteered for and whose beneficiaries you have personally met—not because of some moral-philosophical idea of greater obligations to people near you, but because this is the only kind of charity that you can know is doing any good at all.

GiveWell in particular is careful enough that I don't worry too much that they've fallen into this trap. But ACE, in its earlier years, infamously recommended interventions whose efficacy turned out to have been massively overestimated. I suspect that this is also true of some interventions that are still getting significant attention and resources from within EA, even if I can't confidently say which ones.

And then of course there's just that big problems are complicated and the argument for why any particular intervention is effective typically has a lot of steps and/or requires you to trust various institutions whose inner workings you don't understand that well. All this adds up to a sense that small donations to solve a big problem wind up just throwing money into a black hole, with no one really helped.

This, I think, is the real challenge that EA needs to overcome: not the small size of our best efforts relative to the scope of the problem, but skepticism, implicit or explicit, loud or quiet, justified or unjustified, that our best efforts produce real results at all.

Cross-posting my comment from Substack:

When an industry is fragmented, it will struggle to coordinate lobbying efforts against legislative welfare reforms.

How sure are we that this is the case? Matt Yglesias argues:

[Reader question]: "I just bought a used car from a dealership and it was pretty miserable experience. Why do you think there hasn't been more of a push to allow car manufacturers to sell directly to consumers? It doesn't seem like the car dealership lobby could be thaaat strong (especially compared to home owners associations or other areas of regulatory capture)"

No, it really is that strong.

There’s a very widespread misperception that the biggest companies have the most clout in politics, when actually highly fragmented industries like auto dealers have more clout as a collective. Just a small example is that when congress was putting the Dodd-Frank financial regulation overhaul together, Elizabeth Warren rolled the entire financial services industry and got her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created. But to round up the votes in congress, she had to swallow an exemption from CFPB oversight for auto loans because the car dealerships had the clout to demand that.

The key to dealership strength is that there’s a dealership owner (or several) in every district, and they are rooted in the local community — often involved in sponsoring sports teams, visible on local television news, and generally playing a major role as a local influencer. People feel sentimental about local businesses. Republicans like free markets but they love businessmen, so if businessmen want to back an anti-market policy, Republicans are inclined to agree. Democrats are more skeptical of businessmen but less enthusiastic about markets, so it lands in the same place.

Maybe the political economy around mid-size factory farms is different from that around car dealerships, such that these dynamics don't apply or apply differently. But I would want to better understand the differences. (Is it just that factory farms don't sell directly to consumers? But my hometown had a membrane filter manufacturing plant when I was growing up, and I think it was similarly locally influential.)

A number of people invited me to 1:1s to ask me for career advice in my field, which is software engineering. Mostly of the "how do I get hired" kind rather than the "how do I pick a career path that's most in line with EA strategic priorities" kind that 80,000 Hours specializes in. Unfortunately I'm not very good at this kind of advice (I haven't looked for a new job in more than eight years) and haven't been able to find anywhere else I could send people to that would be more helpful. I think there used to be an affinity group or something for EA software engineers, but I don't think it's active anymore.

Anyone know of anything like this? If not, and if you're the kind of person who's well-positioned to start a group like this, consider this a request for one.

Honestly it seems kind of weird that on the EA Forum there isn't just a checkbox for this.

I've often thought that there should be separate "phatic" and "substantive" comment sections.

What does "IMPCO" mean? Search engines are failing me.

The Fun Theory Sequence (which is on a similar topic) had some things to say about the Culture.

Obligatory link to Scott Alexander's "Ambijectivity" regarding the contentiousness of defining great art.