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: Thoughts on the Purpose of EAGs, published by Tristan Williams on June 13, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

And Other Recommendations for EAGs Based on The Art of The Gathering

The Motivation: I read The Art of the Gathering awhile ago, and thought it had a lot of interesting insights for greater community building efforts. I realized that EAGs[1] might be a ripe place to try to apply some of these insights, and so I set out writing this piece.

What was meant to be 10 similar-in-length suggestions naturally turned into a piece focused on the purpose of EAGs, but I hope you'll still read over the other points too in the original spirit of the post, I think they have something to offer too.

Epistemic Status: All the principles themselves have strong grounding in the book and are things I feel quite confident Parker would endorse. I'll make concrete suggestions below for each, and also venture a long commentary on the potential purpose of EAGs, which are both attempts at applications of these principles and are more speculative and should be taken as "Tristan's best guess".

A brief note: CEA and individual EAGx organizers are already doing many of these things to some degree, and as such I hope to not only introduce new ideas or frames, but also highlight and reinforce some of the great things they're already doing.

1. EAGs should have a clear purpose.

I think this is the most important point, so I'll spend a great bit of time on it. To put it another way, every gathering needs a greater why that justifies the what. I don't think this is spelled out well for EAGs and has been the cause of some confusion, and I think it would be good to decide on, and then state, a clear why for EAGs. Below I'll mention four different whys I think are at play, and what prioritizing them (more) would mean.

For Learning:

Talks are consistently an important part of EAGs, and some have argued that they've been underrated[2] in the process of promoting 1-on-1s. Significant staff time is spent organizing the content, giving indication that even if 1-on-1s are considered to be more valuable, there's got to be something worthwhile about them.

I think the ToC here is that the talks afford a particularly good opportunity for others to further learn about a topic they're interested in but maybe haven't fully had the chance to explore yet, something likely to be especially valuable for those newer to the EA space.

But the talks do actually afford more than this[3]: they are also a sort of podium by which CEA can try to diffuse ideas throughout the community, whether that be promoting a new potential cause area, a better recognition of needs in the EA space, or desirable cultural norms. Focusing the content in 2017 on operations, for example, allowed the community to address a significant gap at the time.

They're also a way to expand impact outside the conference when recorded, which could be important as CEA begins to focus more on EA branding and outwards content.

Either way, I think many people only have a vague sense of the purpose Learning currently serves, and I think we're even further behind on figuring out how to measure the effectiveness of Learning specifically vs the general impact.

Implications:

Focus more content on connection. If talks aren't just informational, but also are used to mold the norms of the community both in and outside the conference, maybe more talks should be had in service of helping people make better/more connections. Yes, there's already some of this in the first timers meetup, and motivation in the introductory talks, but I still think far more content should go towards this end given 1-on-1s seems to be the greatest source of value.

Be more explicit about the purpose of content at a given EAG. Perhaps there could be some short statement placed in the attende...