Who would you like to see speak at EA Global?

I really would like to see more communication with the Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building Team at Open Philanthropy, given that they're the ones in charge of funding much of the EA space. Ideally there would be a lot of capacity for Q&A here. 

Personally I'd be very interested in more content from policymakers or people who regularly influence policymakers! I don't normally go to EAGs because they don't really speak to my career but I would be much more interested in this kind of content.

Personally, I think EA's global health and development wing has become stale. There are very few new ideas these days, very little dynamism or experimentation with things beyond the typical GW/OP grant. In that spirit, I think we should invite health and development researchers and policymakers, who work on important development questions that EAs have not historically engaged much with. Here are my suggestions:

1. Doug Gollin is the foremost expert on agriculture in developing countries. Agriculture is the largest sector, so improving agricultural productivity could dramatically increase people's incomes. At the same time, the agricultural sector is a constraint on growth, limiting people's movement into higher value sectors that can power economic growth. How do we improve agriculture? Doug Gollin can tell us.

2. David McKenzie is the foremost expert on businesses in developing countries. If we want people to be able to earn more money, the most important constraint is that businesses have to expand to create more jobs that can hire people. How do we make businesses more productive? David McKenzie can tell us.

3. Pinelopi Goldberg is the foremost expert on globalization and development. The biggest tectonic shift in development in the past 50 years is the rapid globalization that followed the end of the Cold War; India and China arguably gathered a lot of steam in their growth paths from globalization that they otherwise wouldn't have had. But today we are in a de-globalizing world where the EU puts up "carbon tariffs" that mostly affect developing countries, and the US wants to "friend-shore" its supply chains. What can developing countries do to advance growth and alleviate poverty in a de-globalizing world? Pinelopi Goldberg can tell us.

In addition, I see some really promising agendas from younger scholars, who might also be more willing to talk at EAG:

4. Lauren Bergquist is at the vanguard of research on market-level interventions in developing countries. Traditionally, EAs and development economists focused on interventions that directly deliver some health commodity or income-generating support to households. But you can get an unparalleled amount of leverage by intervening at the market level, addressing market-level inefficiencies that reduce people's incomes. What are these inefficiencies and can we find cost-effective ways to address them at scale? Lauren Bergquist can tell us.

5. Jacob Moscona is at the vanguard of research on technology in developing countries. The rich world has invented technologies that improve life beyond the wildest imaginations of people who lived a hundred years ago, but most of these technologies are absent from developing countries. Why don't technologies flow from rich countries to poor countries? Jacob Moscona can tell us.

6. Ben Faber is at the vanguard of research on economic integration within developing countries. Countries cannot prosper as a collection of isolated villages. The flow of goods and people between rural and urban areas is essential for both of them to become richer. How do we facilitate this flow? Ben Faber can tell us. (Disclosure: Ben is one of my advisors.)

I've named development economists since those are the people whose work I am aware of. But I am sure that global health also has more exciting areas than EA is aware of, and I encourage people with expertise in global health to recommend global health experts in the same vein.

Some ideas:
1. What are the main big mistakes that EAs are making? Maybe have a few people give 30-minute talks or something.
2. A summary of the funding ecosystem and key strategic considerations around EA. Who are the most powerful actors, how competent are they, what are our main bottlenecks at the moment?
3. I'd like frank discussions about how to grow funding in the EA ecosystem, outside of the current donors. I think this is pretty key.
4. It would be neat to have a debate or similar on AI policy legislation. We're facing a lot of resistance here, and some of it is uncertain.
5. Is there any decent 5-10 year plan of what EA itself should be? Right now most of the funding ultimately comes from OP, and there's very little non-OP community funding or power. Are there ideas/plans to change this?

I generally think that EA Globals have had far too little disagreeable content. It feels like they've been very focused on making things seem positive for new people, instead of focusing more on candid and more raw disagreements and improvement ideas.

I'd love to see Oliver Habryka get a forum to discuss some of his criticisms of EA, as has been suggested on facebook

David Goldberg - he started one of the most successful EA organisations both in terms of money moved and research quality, but as far as I know has never presented at an EAG.

Vaclav Smil. I would ask him what is the best intervention to improve global welfare, what are the largest risk, etc. A guy that truly has the biosphere in his brain.

Speakers who are Top Academics and policy makers in in Global Health, even if they aren't very EA affiliated. I've been to one EAG and the most impactful connection was with a professor who I think isn't super EA affiliated. I think she was one of perhaps 2 in that category - I think at least 5 could have been great.

This has the benefits of connecting EA people with powerful people in the Global Health world, drawing powerful people perhaps a little closer to the EA community and way of thinking, and also gives us a bit of perspective out of the echo chamber we might be in.

Ezra Klein

I work in this space, but I would like to see some Profit for Good (companies that donate the vast majority of profits to (effective) charities) company executives. Most of these companies don't donate in ways that EA's would call effective but that makes it more interesting imo to invite them. 

With billions in market value (Bosch, Patagonia, Carl Zeiss, Newman's Own alone are worth around 10B I believe, all pledged to charity) in this space these are some of the biggest future donors and an interesting alternative to classic philanthropy. There's a bunch of smaller PFG's as well and Humanitix is a well known EA example who are quickly growing their donations and market value. 

There's some critics of PFG in EA as well and I would enjoy a panel with both sides too.
 

I'd like to see any speaker that will talk about democracy protection and political system reform as these topics seem neglected at EAGs given the amount of EAs that actually engage with the topic

I think an ongoing challenge for EAGxes is figuring out who and what they're optimising for. The talks can be interesting, but in practice very few of them have practical value. 

As far as I can tell, the format was approximately lifted from TED talks without much experimentation with alternatives. Also, the 'connections' metric seems to have been developed more in response to the existence of the format (measuring shallow, short term interactions rather than longer term effects or deeper developments of intra-community trust)

So I would suggest thinking more broadly about 

• who EAGxes are for
• what those people need (if you want to develop careers)
• what those people want (if you want to build a welcoming community)
• what alternative approaches than 'formal 1-hour talks, 30-min one-ones, generic social areas' might be worth trying
• how to measure whether those approaches are doing something valuable

Maybe you'll find that the current format is the optimal approach. But I don't feel like there's currently sufficient evidence to justify that assumption, especially given this recent analysis.

Brigitte Gothière, Sébastian Arsac and Marek Voršilka

Was also thinking would be great to invite and even fund one or 2 good faith, respected critics of EA. I mean serious critics who don't like EA, not just people on the fringes with lots of criticisms.

I would love to see their best presentation and be able to meet with them one on one.

Understanding what turns people off and what people don't like helps me think about how great to frame both my content and style when I present EA ideas.

• Presentations from any of the individuals who work on evaluation, getting "into the weeds" of how decisions are made, and recent work
• Presentations from Givewell grantees on what they're currently working on
• Bill / Melinda Gates, or otherwise someone from the Gates foundation
• Elon Musk, or people from Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX
• People from pharmaceutical companies
• Board members of EVF
• Sal Khan
• A talk from successful edutainment/social media people who discuss EA-adjacent ideas like CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, etc. (who did not necessarily start out EA-funded)
• Podcast interviewers who discuss EA-relevant content, eg. Ezra Klein (as already mentioned), Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan.
• People running non-cause area EA interest groups, eg. SEADS, High Impact [Engineers, Law, Professionals, Medicine, etc], Religious EA groups, on what they're working on/how EA is different in their communities

I don't think Andreas Morgesen ever gave a talk on his (imo underrated) work on maximal cluelessness which has staggering implications for longtermists. And I find all the arguments that have been given against his conclusions (see e.g the comments under the above-linked post or under this LW question from Anthony DiGiovanni) quite unconvincing.

I think EAG would benefit more from sharing expertise in management and organisational effectiveness. More and more EA organisations are switching from generating interesting ideas and steering decisions by publishing analysis to actually carrying out plans and trying to have a direct impact on the world. This requires a different set of skills and organisational norms. 

I think Jon Stewart would be a great speaker. 

It can be hard to discuss EA ideas with non-EA people or just introduce them to the community. I have not yet found anyone (in the EA community) who can effectively communicate it's purpose, philosophy or why it's worth joining to people who aren't already in the mindset or have advanced degrees etc.

I know Jon Stewart is aligned with EA in many ways (animal welfare, AI safety, climate change action to mention a few) His unique ability to take somewhat boring, complex and polarizing issues and distilling them through a comedic filter to then present, educate and inspire others. I believe the community could benefit greatly by someone like this. 

Lewis Bollard! I would like to hear (and I think others would find it useful) to hear about especially impactful initiatives in animal welfare/rights (and maybe also cover things that people thought would make a difference, which didn't). He works as program officer at Open Philanthropy but I am not suggesting him in an official capacity, just as someone who has a good overview of this area and has researched it (Lewis - sorry if you see this and you aren't keen!).  Or someone else who can speak about how to gauge what is effective in improving animal welfare/rights and perhaps has a point of view about what has been effective.

Have you considered having an open, competitive process to submit talk abstracts, similarly to academic conferences?  

Daniel Schmachtenbeger! He is more EA than most of us. Freakin leagues above most other intellectuals I've encountered anywhere

John Vervaeke, talking about solutions to AI through distributed cognition or modern approaches to wisdom (as an extension of rationality)

Peter Turchin. He was the first guest on Julia Galef's Rationally Speaking podcast and Scott Alexander did an article on his work. But outside of that I doubt he even knows EA as a movement exists. Would love to see him understand AI timelines and see how that influences his thinking and his models and vice-versa how respected members of our community make updates (or don't) to their timelines based on Turchin's models (and why).

• Damon Centola (Change: How to Make Big Things Happen)
• Policy speakers (US Congress, European Commission, ...)
• More about biosecurity (projects and funders)
• Maybe a bit more people not focusing on US or UK? (not sure if the current balance is actually suboptimal)