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.
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.
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.
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.