First, I wanted to thank all of the Effective Altruism Global organizers and participants. I found it to be very valuable and overall well put together. There was obviously a ton of work put into it, most by conference organizers who I don't believe will get that much credit for it, and I very much commend their work.
That said, there's always a lot of room for new ideas, and I find I often get a bunch of ideas at and after these conferences. Because of the EAGx events, ideas described now may be able to be put into action somewhat soon and experimented with.
As may be expected, I recommend that people make all of their ideas be independent comments, then upvote the ideas that they think would be the most useful.
A ban on misused words like 'need' (in talks)
I'm watching a few EAG videos now and repeatedly witness the word 'need' get used for things. Like, "our industry needs people to research topic X", or "we need more money to field X".
I'm still not sure what need actually means, but have found that when it's used it's often essentially a logical fallacy. For instance, compare the phrase, "we need people to research topic X", with the phrase, "we believe there's a level of cost-effective opportunity for research topic X".
"Need" is not really a falsifiable or arguable word and generally makes things seem more important than they actually are.
There's a lot of BS that goes on in the typical conference circuit. The EA events bring in speakers of other events who bring in a lot of this with them. I would propose that we shouldn't allow this to be an excuse for poor thinking, and should instead act as encouragement to these people to be more honest, at least for EA events. It could also help as a reminder for how dishonest other events are.
Wait, where do you watch the EAG videos? They're old ones I presume?