Solidarity for those Rejected from EA Global
This time of year, there are surely many folks out there upset they didn’t get into EA Global (EAG). As the year continues, there will be plenty more people who get rejected, and feel hurt. I am one of them.
I’m writing this post to briefly share my experience, and give space for others to vent and commiserate about not being able to attend EAG.
As a quick aside, I understand that not everyone can get into EAG due to the high standards the admittance committee has. (at least with the way it’s currently structured.) I also understand that with funding constraints many people had to be rejected, almost definitely more than in previous years. I’m sure that it’s not easy being on the EAG team and making these decisions.
That being said, as many of us know, being rejected from EAG can be miserable. Last year, after reading and learning about Effective Altruism for many years, I upended my entire life to work towards having a larger impact. I started an EA group in my local city. I quit my lucrative job and joined an early stage, mission driven AI startup, working for free for months until we secured funding. All this in the hopes I would have more impact and be able to give more to the EA community, and the world.
Unfortunately despite all of this effort, I was rejected from EAG. Surprisingly I got in last year, despite being much less involved and having less potential impact from my own perspective. It stings, and I’m frustrated. I don’t blame the people making the decision as I’m sure they had good reasons not to accept my application. But it still hurts. It feels like I devoted hundreds of hours of my life and tied my identity to a group, only to be told I wasn’t good enough.
As I said, I want to invite others feeling the same way to comment. I don’t want to encourage destructive or vindictive dog piling on CEA or the EAG team, but I do think it’s important to share what a rejection from EAG means to people.
I’d also like to encourage people who did get invited to EAG, or look down on this type of post as complaining, to try and have charity towards folks like me. A bit of empathy can go a long way.
I want to write a quick note encouraging people not to view EA Global application decisions as overall evaluations of themselves, their status or identity “as EAs”, or their potential for having a significant impact.
I should also say that I was rejected from the first EA conference that I applied to.
(I don’t think my experience with this was as bad as it was for some others and don’t want to use this fact to say that it’s not reasonable to be sad about a rejection — I absolutely think it is! — but maybe it’s a useful data point for what I’m saying, and useful context.)
I also know of cases where rejections seem, in retrospect, wrong, or were interpreted incorrectly — at some point, I was collecting these stories to see if we could improve the situation (unfortunately, this was at a time when I was overloaded and transitioning jobs, and the project went nowhere).
I don’t know what criteria are being used to evaluate applications, but my impression is that the process tries to answer questions like, “is this person facing decisions that an EAG will help them with?” “Will their experience add to the balance of attendees and let others learn from them in a way that’s hard to learn from others’ experiences?” These are hard, aren’t measures of “is this person a ‘good EA,’” don’t mean that someone is not impactful, and also mean that the same person can be rejected now and then accepted at future conferences.
And I want to cite the EA Global FAQ on admissions:
Relevant disclaimers: I work at the Centre for Effective Altruism (on the Online Team), and I was on the Events Team before that. This isn’t an official response from the Events Team or anything like that, though!
FWIW core EAs have openly said a major reason to keep EAG small is the ‘quality of conversation’ at the event. This is a big reason they made EAG smaller again. So there is definitely a level of judgment going on.
Which “core EAs”? Many engaged EAs have their own preferences and theories re. EAG size, but in the end, only the CEA events team decides on admissions (sometimes consulting others afaik).
Some comments below that might be reasonably interpreted as being about ‘quality of conversation’:
Eli Nathan:
Habryka:
Howie Lempel:
Though in response to “there is definitely a level of judgement going on”, it may be worth noting that the original claim in the EAG FAQ is that “this is not a judgement about the value of your work or your potential impact in effective altruism”, rather than something like “this is not a judgement at all.”[1]
This isn’t at all to suggest that what people are feeling aren’t valid though—I can definitely see how these might not feel like a meaningful difference.
Edit: MaxRa’s comment about how these measures may in fact be (or seen to be) correlated with social standing may be of interest.
Clearly, answering questions like “is this person facing decisions that an EAG will help them with?” “Will their experience add to the balance of attendees and let others learn from them in a way that’s hard to learn from others’ experiences?” require some level of judgement, and I don’t think Lizka is trying to dispute this.
You can ask buck for his list of the core EAs.
I spontaneously want to push back a little against this, as I feel like this comment is missing that empirically EAG admissions do in fact non-accidentally correlate at least moderately with social standing in EA. So I’d say me being rejected would therefore generally be evidence of lower social standing and I’d want to acknowledge a rejection as such an update to myself, as opposed to try to bring myself to not see it this way, as you suggest.
(Though this update can in general be explained away by specific considerations, such as if you’re seeking a career in a niche where you won’t be able to give or receive much useful feedback.)
Elaborating a bit on why I think rejections correlate with social standing within the EA community, I think that even if the past and current admission criteria don’t explicitly measure social standing, I think that
a) stuff like “Will their experience add to the balance of attendees and let others learn from them in a way that’s hard to learn from others’ experiences?” correlates moderately to strongly with things like career success in EA top priorities and general competence, and
b) “is this person facing decisions that an EAG will help them with?” correlates moderately to strongly with intelligence, education and promise for prusuing a career that the EA community prioritises.
And a) and b) in turn seem to me like fairly central factors of social standing within EA.
Upvoted this comment to make this message clear (though perhaps read sapphire’s comment for an alternative take).
But I think the strongest point from Scott’s Open EA Global remains a core problem:
The impression that getting EAG admission is a sign of your EA-worthiness is probably not going away soon. It almost feels like there should be 2 global conferences—one for EA networking so that people who might be highly impactful can have productive conversations/meetings etc, and then another one for the community as a whole to come together, meet new people, discuss issues broadly and be part of a community. The latter sounds like ‘EA Global’ to me, the former sounds like it should be called ‘EA Co-ordination Conference’ or something along those lines.[1]
This is just my impression of the situation, I know logistically it would be a lot more work for CEA to do—and I don’t even know if that ought to be CEA’s job to set up that kind of event.
There are two EA global conferences.
EAG with high restriction and EAGx with a much lower bar for attendance and higher frequency.
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global/faq
Well yes, but actually no...
I think there’s definitely a clear two-level distinction going on here, where EAGx is for people early on in the EA-conveyor-belt, and once they’ve fully internalised and working on impact that they can move onto EAG. Furthermore, I don’t think this distinction is properly internalised by the community, partly because it doesn’t actually line up with all the facts. Many people rejected from EA Global “have a solid understanding of the core ideas of EA and who are taking significant actions based on those ideas”, and are thus understandably upset when their application is rejected.
Making the distinction between the two much more clear in branding would make the distinction and the stakes more clear. I also think that having the big event for all EAs should be the biggest ones from a community building perspective! While the more regional, local ones might make more sense for network events for people working in the same field in similar geographical areas. But that’s currently the other way around.
Tl;dr: I still don’t think the EA Global/EAGx distinction is getting at what Scott’s pointing out in the quote
But the proposed access free EAG would result in something with the vibe of an EAGx.
EAG career conference for folks already working in high impact areas.
EAGx community conference for everyone.
Is an EAG so different from an EAGx that we need a single huge EAG somewhere, where everyone can attend? And wouldn’t this undermine the distinction?
Which need is not addressed in an EAGx?
I empathize with you, and I think it might be good to have this place to vent.
But I also think, as Lizka wrote, that being rejected from EAG isn’t about failing some high standards. Rather it’s about the conference being useful for you, and you being useful for other attendees (in the eyes of the admissions team).
I was also admitted to (and attended) one EAG and then rejected from the next one. Afterwards I did attend an EAGx and some other international EA programs. I don’t feel that that one rejection meant anything about my worth. I haven’t applied this year, but if I do end up applying and I get rejected, it’d still not mean anything about me personally.
I’m not writing this to erase your experience, but rather to offer others who apply another lens to look at it through.
Also I’m not affiliated with CEA, this is just my interpretation of how they work. But even if I were wrong and they did try to admit people by how “worthy” they were, CEA is just one small group of people, and they determine neither your real worth nor your impact on the world.
I agree that nobody is trying to evaluate my worth as a person with this admission, perhaps I should’ve phrased things more carefully. For what it’s worth I do think I’d be highly impactful at the conference, but my skillset is outside the scope of what I’m trying to get at in this post.
No matter how many carefully crafted rebuttals and distinctions people make, the fact remains that I have spent years of my life working to improve my impact, and then have not gotten accepted into a conference that’s focused on people with high impact.
I do appreciate you and Lizka trying to soften the blow, but I want to emphasize that it’s a blow nonetheless. Even if I take what you both are saying as a given (that it’s a judgment on my usefulness and not me as a person) the rejection is still difficult to handle. It’s basically saying that my skillset, career, work I’ve done, etc, is not important or impactful enough to make a difference at EAG.
All that being said, it’s a whole different ballgame discussing this coldly and rationally, versus being in the seat and dealing with the emotions. I applaud you for being able to fully separate the rejection from your own worth, but that’s not realistic for me and I would guess for most people it isn’t realistic either.
100%. Thinking “rationally” about whether you should or shouldn’t be hurt by something doesn’t make you less hurt by it.
I will just push back on the idea, in a top-level post, that EAG admissions are not a judgment on people as EAs. CEA is very concerned about the most promising/influential EAs having useful conversations. If you are one of the people they consider especially promising or influential you will get invited. Otherwise, they might let you in if EAG seems especially useful for shaping your career. But they will also be worried that you are lowering the quality of the conversations. Here are some quotes from Eli, the lead on EA global at CEA.
Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dsCTSCbfHWxmAr2ZT/open-ea-global?commentId=cRSPmzcyXWNhWGz46#BEBbtG9hDrxmJnawa
Its also admitted that it is ‘hard to discuss this publicly’. ITs against EA style but to me the posts about how this isn’t a judgment are bordering on gaslighting. Even CEA’s public comms state they have a ‘bar for admission’.
I’m sorry you didn’t get invited.
My roommate is the chapter organizer for our city’s Humane League Changemakers, inspired down that path because of involvement with effective altruism and having gone to previous EA Globals. He got a form letter rejection from EA Global saying he should learn more about EA and reapply in the future. Make it make sense.
Sorry to hear that! I wish I could make it make sense, I really do.
They’ve listed the reasons people get into EAG a few times but it’s still very illegible. Form emails don’t help for sure.
I’m going to flip the script a bit.
Are you doing important, impactful, good things?
Does EAG recognize them as novel, unexplored, needing a boost?
You are doing important impactful good things! That’s what matters!! Of course recognition is important and you absolutely deserve recognition. In addition you are completely reasonable to feel bad about things you know technically shouldn’t be so hurtful. But you’re human and they ARE hurtful. It’s okay to feel hurt. Please recognize your desires and needs. Live your best life for yourself and everyone.
EAG isn’t measuring how good you are, at best how communicable your efforts are. Some things are crutial but mundane. (They can be the most important!) Some things are exciting but too in-depth. Some things are simply not communicated verbally. Some things have finally achieved recognition and success. And some things are neglected within EA.
Congratulations on being in one of these (or other) vital areas!
Keep up the good work, we need you! And others like you!
Additional thoughts: If I’m one of the people with best EA ideas, then I’d be much more worried about how dire the situation is! It’s perfectly normal not to be one of the hundreds of people out of the millions best suited for this years conversation. The movement has gotten huge. It is tracking so many subjects, and that’s a wonderful thing. Unfortunately not everyone gets to go. That’s reality and it’s not your or anyone’s fault.
I’m happiest thinking of it as a great event for great people doing some specialized things. They aren’t perfect and EA is so. so. SO. much bigger than EAG.
Take care. I’m excited for you and where you go next.
Rejections always suck, I feel you! :(
If you still want to go, is there an EAGx nearby you could apply to? In my experience as EAGxBerlin 2022 organiser, for most people EAGx conferences provide about the same amount of value than EAG’s but the admission bar is lower.
EAGx’s also get similarly high average participant ratings—our EAGxBerlin last year had ~900 attendees (similar to pre-pandemic EAG London) and was rated 8.7/10, and I heard that some smaller EAGx’s got even better ratings up to 9.x/10.
The closest one will be Boston, which I will most likely apply to if they do an EAGx. I’ve heard EAG might switch from DC to Boston this year though so there may not be any in my area.
I have a lot of thoughts on why EAGx’s are not a substitute or equivalent to having a worldwide, big event billed for all EAs. May write up a post about it.
I was accepted this year, but I’ve been rejected for a past conference, so I certainly understand the sting. Question: Would it make sense to organise some kind of online event to lessen the sting for those who were rejected? Obviously, this wouldn’t be comparable to EAG, but it would be something.
I don’t like online conferences, so for me it would not help. Maybe others feel differently.