I just want to say that this didn’t raise alarm bells as expensive or weird for me. It is last minute. Arranging things around the holidays sucks. Basically they can either rush to get it done or wait til mid-January at earliest. And, once organizers already know they want to do it, doing it earlier means value of information can be usable sooner too (eg, they can repeat it sooner or put people in contact with opportunities that crop up in January), it most likely makes it worth a good portion of dough to get it done ASAP.
Also, the referrals are basically no expense in the grand scheme. Assume they have 40 attendees and 80% of the attendees are found via referral: that will be $3,200[1]. If the rest of the event is worth doing so last minute, that DEFINITELY is to expand their short notice applicant pool and let readers consider who is well suited. It could say, double the quality of the average accepted person. It’s basically the best and most affordable last-minute marketing you can get.
Nothing raised a scammy flag for me. It’s what I expect a nontrivial number of last-minute workshops to look like (10%?), and I expect last-minute workshops to be much more common than scams in this community (maybe 30x as common?). I also think only a rare scam will use something like this post (maybe 2% of scammy/net-negative/risky community things will), as there are better and cheaper ways to scam or brainwash people. Crunch those numbers and this post looks to me to be about 150x as likely to be related to a good/legit workshop than a bad one. [2]
That said, I guess it is good to realize how nervous people might be about risk? I’m just surprised if people did find this scammy.
Rough numbers but yeah I think you have to be really ingratious to the LW community to get odds that are worse than 49:1 here, so def worth applying, and hardly even worth refining the ass-numbers more carefully at that initial estimate of distance between options
I don’t know what a good baseline is for expenses-paid workshops is—this is the first I’d seen. All workshops, and even last-minute workshops is the wrong comparison class—those are all attendee-paid (for travel and expenses, at least).
It really is unusual in my experience to see announcements of expense-paid attendance for this kind of events. If I’m wrong and they’re actually super-common, please link a few examples and I’ll update accordingly. Also, I look forward to posts here after the event, and I will update strongly on those.
Sure. Maybe it is cuz I am more in EA than LW that this is all normal to me. There are frequent retreats and workshops for different career niches and groups including student groups. Plus there are the EAG(x) conferences that, as tidy weekend events people fly in and get lodging reimbursed for, I’d say are comparable to this, and they happen at a scale 10-50x this one which has probably shaped my perception that this one is well within bounds of normal.
Examples: I am checking this on mobile so sorry for formatting and not precise examples. But you can use this link to search for terms “workshop”, “retreat”, “bootcamp”, and “weekend” to get an idea of how popular these weekend retreats have become. I think sharing this looks like a copout on my end, but it is almost better than me giving a few concrete examples because a few concrete examples still doesn’t really prove the 30x ratio I mentioned above: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/search
Also, Financially: the norm these days seems to be that weekend workshops are either free or the organizers may request some amount but it is made overt that people are not turned away for lack of ability to pay. This standard is kinda set by EAGs now I guess.
Also, just some personal thoughts as someone who plans EA events/workshops myself (relatively new to it): I think you just want more applicants, eg you don’t want to create friction and waste an ask on finances. You want absolute freedom and discretion to filter on the things you deem important and only those things, which will not be willingness to pay in this case. Holds true in many different situations: eg, if you are offering something for beginners/students, you’d lose a substantial number due to lack of ability to pay. While if you are offering something for prestigious or experienced people, they have a lot to compete for their time which probably fits their standard career path better. You can signal respect for this struggle and also signal that you are real (without having to waste a bunch of ops time on a beautiful website and all that stuff that normies usually use to signal) by offering all-expenses covered. If offering to the average Joe who would be happy to pay something and has time, you still filter some people with mandatory charge, because it is laborious enough to attend, and putting in your credit card info is always gonna be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for somebody.
I don’t think the FTX funding situation changes this. When workshops do happen they will probably keep being mostly all-expenses paid. EA still has billions of funding available via Open Phil and EA Infrastructure Fund still has private donors.
I just want to say that this didn’t raise alarm bells as expensive or weird for me. It is last minute. Arranging things around the holidays sucks. Basically they can either rush to get it done or wait til mid-January at earliest. And, once organizers already know they want to do it, doing it earlier means value of information can be usable sooner too (eg, they can repeat it sooner or put people in contact with opportunities that crop up in January), it most likely makes it worth a good portion of dough to get it done ASAP.
Also, the referrals are basically no expense in the grand scheme. Assume they have 40 attendees and 80% of the attendees are found via referral: that will be $3,200[1]. If the rest of the event is worth doing so last minute, that DEFINITELY is to expand their short notice applicant pool and let readers consider who is well suited. It could say, double the quality of the average accepted person. It’s basically the best and most affordable last-minute marketing you can get.
Nothing raised a scammy flag for me. It’s what I expect a nontrivial number of last-minute workshops to look like (10%?), and I expect last-minute workshops to be much more common than scams in this community (maybe 30x as common?). I also think only a rare scam will use something like this post (maybe 2% of scammy/net-negative/risky community things will), as there are better and cheaper ways to scam or brainwash people. Crunch those numbers and this post looks to me to be about 150x as likely to be related to a good/legit workshop than a bad one. [2]
That said, I guess it is good to realize how nervous people might be about risk? I’m just surprised if people did find this scammy.
In a comment, they’ve clarified they expect about 20 ppl, so actually it would be even less, $1600, but about 40 was my initial estimate
Rough numbers but yeah I think you have to be really ingratious to the LW community to get odds that are worse than 49:1 here, so def worth applying, and hardly even worth refining the ass-numbers more carefully at that initial estimate of distance between options
I don’t know what a good baseline is for expenses-paid workshops is—this is the first I’d seen. All workshops, and even last-minute workshops is the wrong comparison class—those are all attendee-paid (for travel and expenses, at least).
It really is unusual in my experience to see announcements of expense-paid attendance for this kind of events. If I’m wrong and they’re actually super-common, please link a few examples and I’ll update accordingly. Also, I look forward to posts here after the event, and I will update strongly on those.
Sure. Maybe it is cuz I am more in EA than LW that this is all normal to me. There are frequent retreats and workshops for different career niches and groups including student groups. Plus there are the EAG(x) conferences that, as tidy weekend events people fly in and get lodging reimbursed for, I’d say are comparable to this, and they happen at a scale 10-50x this one which has probably shaped my perception that this one is well within bounds of normal.
Examples: I am checking this on mobile so sorry for formatting and not precise examples. But you can use this link to search for terms “workshop”, “retreat”, “bootcamp”, and “weekend” to get an idea of how popular these weekend retreats have become. I think sharing this looks like a copout on my end, but it is almost better than me giving a few concrete examples because a few concrete examples still doesn’t really prove the 30x ratio I mentioned above:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/search
Also, Financially: the norm these days seems to be that weekend workshops are either free or the organizers may request some amount but it is made overt that people are not turned away for lack of ability to pay. This standard is kinda set by EAGs now I guess.
Also, just some personal thoughts as someone who plans EA events/workshops myself (relatively new to it): I think you just want more applicants, eg you don’t want to create friction and waste an ask on finances. You want absolute freedom and discretion to filter on the things you deem important and only those things, which will not be willingness to pay in this case. Holds true in many different situations: eg, if you are offering something for beginners/students, you’d lose a substantial number due to lack of ability to pay. While if you are offering something for prestigious or experienced people, they have a lot to compete for their time which probably fits their standard career path better. You can signal respect for this struggle and also signal that you are real (without having to waste a bunch of ops time on a beautiful website and all that stuff that normies usually use to signal) by offering all-expenses covered. If offering to the average Joe who would be happy to pay something and has time, you still filter some people with mandatory charge, because it is laborious enough to attend, and putting in your credit card info is always gonna be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for somebody.
I don’t think the FTX funding situation changes this. When workshops do happen they will probably keep being mostly all-expenses paid. EA still has billions of funding available via Open Phil and EA Infrastructure Fund still has private donors.