that seems reasonable, you're not throwing around as many and complex data types - and (strictly) typed programs that read from xml/json/etc are often very clunky as it more or less requires you make the data reader fully robust against malformed data
you could probably find some stats on what % of [recent] packages on PIP are typed
in a related vein, just putting up air quality/CO2 monitors (and maybe noise while you're on it) could be a quite cheap & scaleable intervention that might offer some valuable/interesting data. If attendees are getting unnecessarily fatigued from a bad environment it might cancel out a bunch of the value from the conference.
For doing this at an EAG, I think it could make sense to start doing this in a single (or a few) rooms as a trial. Should at least be much easier to convince venue & organizers that it's not gonna be a major burden.
Especially fitting if it's rooms used for biorisk discussions!
Since eag's are already volunteer-heavy (I just volunteered at EAGxBerlin), it feels relatively plausible for you/somebody to take ownership of this idea:
Not the author, but this is my understanding assuming the idea holds:
OpenPhil/FTX/etc currently spend a lot of time & effort on evaluating grants. The idea here is that it's easier to evaluate a project after it's finished, e.g. "the area where bednets were given out had X% lower mortality, lives are valued at Y$, so this bednet intervention was worth Z$" - but current status quo is that you have to predict the value of X when evaluating the grant, and make a prediction on the likelihood that it works at all. (technically you'd predict a probability distribution over different values of X), which is much harder than measuring X after the intervention.
Investors (which are VC's and other people) take over the role of predicting the future, and oracular funders (openphil/FTX/etc) get an easier job and can make more accurate donations - making a larger impact than they would do otherwise. And good charity entrepenurs are rewarded more accurately, making more good for the world than if money was wasted on charities that at first glance seemed like a good idea but in fact has bad expected value.
sure, I was mostly just disagreeing with "90% loss of a major coin" - but I suppose you can read that sentence more charitably. But focusing on the inherent value of FTT as the avenue of affecting customers I think is misguided.