Thanks for writing this! Well written :) 

I recently attended my third course and I echo the idea that Vipassana has made me a better activist (as well partner, friend, son, colleague, etc). 

I like your recommendation to implement this at an organizational level. While it might not be practical for all orgs, I think it's a neat idea to incentivize attendance (with the understanding that Vipassana might not be for everyone — though neither is a Project Management online course).

I also think the EA community is overrepresented on having attended at least one Vipassana course, compared to the general population; but that's just a guess/speculation.

Hey Molly,

Thanks for the post! 
Definitely agree that it would be valuable to explicate our models of the world, especially numerically!

Heads up that you have a repeat paragraph immediately after the probability graph for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

"When we’re estimating the risk of an extinction-causing asteroid impact..."

For now, the standard 12 signs is the easiest to implement. However, we will follow up with an Ophiuchus update in due course!

The implementation of Feng-Shui for venue spaces was considered to be out of budget; though this is something we will be keeping in mind for future conferences. We are still evaluating Numerology for effectiveness, though preliminary results suggest that the recursive reduction sum of your birth-date may be predictive of compatibility with others e.g. 11/11/1999 DD/MM/YYYY = 5+9+9+9 = 32 (3+2) = 5. Numbers closer to you (imagine 1–9 in a circle) may be more likely to be compatible.

It's been a long haul, but we've finally convinced their CEO (a Pisces), that redeveloping their core architecture to support star-sign matching would be a good business decision.

While our star signs may be relevant for optimizing 1-1 matches (sorry, we're not compatible), we don't have evidence to suggest there's any influence of star signs on the ability to evaluate the use of star signs to optimize 1-1 matches. We therefore recommend against using the lack of knowledge of our star signs as a reason to not believe our claims.

Do you think it was better?

Hi Caleb,

Ivan from the EAG team here — I'm responsible for a bunch of the systems we use at our events (including Swapcard).

Thanks for flagging this! It's useful to hear that this could do with more clarity. Unfortunately, there isn't a way we can add help text or sub text to the Swapcard fields due to Swapcard limitations. However, we could rename the labels/field names to make this clearer..?

For example

• Areas of Expertise (3+ months work experience)
• Areas of Interest (actively seeking to learn more)

Does that sound like something that would be helpful for you to know what to put down? I'll take this to the EAG team and see if we can come up with something better. Let me know if you have other suggestions!

This piqued my curiosity, so I looked into it — it seems that there's a pretty equal split between pre-conference meetings scheduled (2449) and during-conference meetings scheduled (2039), with meeting confirmation frequency peaking on the Friday of the event. This is just EA Global: Boston 2023 data and I haven't looked at the others — but it does indicate to me that we don't want to set up systems that favour one type of user and disadvantaging another.

Yeah this is a big one, and I have actually been pushing for this feature since January. Unfortunately, Swapcard don't see this as important enough to prioritize it. The last I heard, this was added to the Q3 roadmap, but knowing the timelines I don't expect this to be done any time soon (though I am following up about it!).