Event Review: EA Global: London (2018)

By Jamie_Harris @ 2018-12-17T22:29 (+7)

This is a linkpost to https://butcantheysuffer.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/event-review-effective-altruism-global-london-26th-to-28th-october-2018/

Price: ***
Ease of use: ***
Value for EAA beginners: ****
Value for EAA pros: *****

As ever, this post reflects my own views, not those of my employer.

I previously reviewed Effective Altruism Global (London, 2017) here. I also attended EAG in 2018, and I wanted to update the review. If you’re interested, read the 2017 review first for context on how EAG works; this additional review is intended to add further comment after EAG has had time to change and develop and after I have been involved in the EA community for a further year, including taking on a full time role at Sentience Institute. Note that other people have written better guides about how to make the most out of EAG, such as here. These posts cover my own perspective and experience, mainly to help people decide whether it is worth them attending an EAG conference or not.

In summary, I found the 2018 EAG more exciting and less demoralising than the 2017 EAG, and I suspect that it was also more useful for me. This was primarily due to changes in my own approach to EAG, rather than changes in the structure of the event. Otherwise, my broad recommendations remain the same: “I would encourage interested people to attend, but to make the most of your networking opportunities while you are there and to prepare some ideas and questions [and meetings] in advance.”

The main difference in my experience came from additional preparation for the event. Last year, I turned up on the Friday with very little idea of what to expect and having done no preparation. This year, I booked in several meetings in advance, and arranged extra meetings as the conference progressed (12 scheduled meetings this year, compared to none last year). This was partially with the help of a new system implemented by CEA to support one-to-one conversations. One-to-ones often seem form the most useful part of many EA events that I attend, and EAG 2018 was no exception. As well as making the conference more useful, I also found that this made me less stressed, because I prefer structured events with clear plans to lengthy periods of unstructured conversations.

Last year, I wrote that “some of the most useful conversations that I had were with those who shared a primary focus and interest in reducing animal suffering.” This year, I think that I gained more from conversations, meetups, and talks involving researchers working in areas beyond animal advocacy. This is because I had clearer career similarities with them, which led to fruitful conversations about productivity tips and research habits or approaches. In this sense, a key difference also came from my personal increased clarity regarding my own career, and deeper involvement in the EA community; this enabled me to prioritise conversations like this.

It’s worth noting that I think that I underestimated some of the long-term benefits that I gained from meeting others involved in animal advocacy in 2017. Some of these conversations have been useful in terms of organising events in London and in terms of being more able to contact others for advice or to share thoughts. Some of these connections almost led directly to career opportunities for me too.

Practical notes

This year my ticket wasp cheaper because I booked earlier. Given that discounts are also available, I’ve improved the price rating.

I didn’t feel (notice?) that there were major changes to the organisation or style of EAG this year compared to last year. There were slightly fewer workshops and there were more “meetup” events. I actually found these meetup events to be slightly more structured than I would have liked; I probably would have preferred more unstructured networking, perhaps focused around a wider array of topics.

I’ve upgraded the “ease of use” rating. I think that as long as you make use of the app and information provided beforehand to plan your time at EAG, it’s self-explanatory and easy to use. Gaining maximum value out of the event probably does depend on being proactive, though. There were also some technical difficulties with the Bizzabo app this year that I didn’t notice previously.