I think EA currently is much more likely to fail to achieve most of its goals by ending up with a culture that is ill-suited for its aims, being unable to change direction when new information comes in, and generally fail due to the problems of large communities and other forms of organization (like, as you mentioned, the community behind NeurIPS, which is currently on track to be an unstoppable behemoth racing towards human extinction that I so desperately wish was trying to be smaller and better coordinated).
I think EA Global admissions is one of the few places where we can apply steering on how EA is growing and what kind of culture we are developing, and giving this up seems like a cost, without particularly strong commensurate benefits.
On a more personal level, I do want to be clear that I am glad about having a bigger EA Global this year, but I would probably also just stop attending an open-invite EA Global since I don’t expect it would really share my culture or be selected for people I would really want to be around. I think this year’s EA Global came pretty close to exhausting my ability to be thrown into a large group of people with a quite different culture of differing priorities, and I expect less selection would cause me to hit that limit quite reliably.
I do think there are potentially ways to address many of the problems you list in this post by changing the admissions process, which I do think is currently pretty far from perfect (in-particular, I would like to increase the number of people who don’t need to apply to attend because they are part of some group or have some obvious signal that means they should pass the bar).
I think EA Global admissions is one of the few places where we can apply steering on how EA is growing and what kind of culture we are developing, and giving this up seems like a cost, without particularly strong commensurate benefits.
I wonder if this is overstated.
I feel like we have a number of other strong channels, including:
Yeah, I agree these are all candidates, though I think these are all actually somewhat downstream of general movement growth:
Funding has been getting a lot less centralized and in-general funding is a lot more flush, at least in the longtermist space, so I think this has been serving much less as a thing that meaningfully steers the culture
Frank discussion on the EA Forum I do think is quite important, though I also think that outside of a few people like Nuno we see very little actual critique of projects, and I think a lot of the people who tend to have written critical things have stopped in the last few years (Larks is stopping his AI Alignment review, I am no longer writing long LTFF writeups, and broadly I have a feeling that there is a lot more mincing of words on the forum than a few years ago), so while I do think this is quite important, I also think it’s becoming a weaker force
Leadership has also been growing and I think leadership is now actually distributed enough and large enough that I feel like this isn’t really doing a ton in terms of shaping culture and changing community growth. I feel far from getting to consensus with people at 80k on how they are thinking about community growth, and my sense is everyone is just really busy and very few people among the de-facto leadership think of themselves as actually responsible for shaping community culture and growth (at least I got a relatively strong feeling of powerlessness from people trying to shape community growth at the latest Coordination Forum, though I might also be projecting my own feelings too much here, so take this with a grain of salt)
I actually think the strongest channel we currently have for shaping culture and growth are things like Lightcone and Constellation, which are more consistent spaces with boundaries that allow some people to maintain more of a walled garden, though I also have complicated feelings about the dynamics here.
I basically agree with this comment, which makes me like the idea of an open EAG. Closed EAG is theoretically good for shaping culture by selecting good participants, but CEA faces a knowledge problem for which people are “good culture fits”, and it moves towards promoting some weird homogenization thing. I have some inchoate instinct that a more decentralized network of smaller walled gardens can preserve and signal good parts of culture, while avoiding frustrating “CEA as kingmaker” dynamics, and allowing an open EAG to introduce novelty into the system.
I would probably also just stop attending an open-invite EA Global since I don’t expect it would really share my culture or be selected for people I would really want to be around
I’m kind of surprised by this—if EAG was open, what sort of people do you think would come, and in what way would they not share your culture?
Like as an example: this year I didn’t get into EAG when I first applied, and then I reapplied when I got an internship at an EA org, and got in. This is understandable—I didn’t have very strong ‘legible’ signals of EA engagement apart from the internship, arguably. But also, like, my culture/who I am as a person clearly didn’t change much between the two applications! So I guess my expectation for who would come if it were open are:
-people who are engaged in their local EA communities and ‘into’ EA but haven’t shown legible enough signs of ‘promise’ to get accepted under the status quo -people like the person screenshotted in the post, who have changed their career on EA principles, who maybe wouldn’t get much out of networking, but who are excited to talk to others who share their values
(EDIT: Seems like in an above comment that current culture-steering is trying to encourage perspective and stuff, so what I’m irked about here isn’t really an issue). Limiting EA globals to only people that fit into certain cultures could severely limit perspective/diversity, and in bad cases could make EAs as “cult”-y as some people want to believe it is. I think this is probably only true for some misguided attempts to steer culture, and in fact you can steer culture through admissions to encourage things like diversity/perspective. Selecting attendees based on “people Oliver Habryka would hang out with outside the conference” does seem to be sort of narrow, but I’m guessing this wasn’t what you actually want admissions to look like?
In respone to “I would like to increase the number of people who don’t need to apply to attend because they are part of some group or have some obvious signal that means they should pass the bar”: I guess it depends what you mean here, but I agree with Zach in that it doesn’t seem obvious why this would actually help (although I’d be intersted in the specific details of what you mean). I mean, some ways of doing this could make people upset, since the outside perspective could be something like certain “inner circles” of EA have easy backdoor access to EAGs. This could also make even very impressive/high-impact EAs feel excluded if they’re not a part of said groups. Seems to me like there are tons of ways this could go wrong.
I guess it depends what you mean here, but I agree with Zach in that it doesn’t seem obvious why this would actually help (although I’d be intersted in the specific details of what you mean).
I think this means a good chunk of people don’t have to apply, and then those people don’t have to deal with the costs of applying. I do think it doesn’t address most of the things mentioned as problems in the OP.
I strong upvoted since this makes sense to me, but is EA global admissions actually making an effort to steer culture in any way? I was under the impression that EAG admissions was mostly just based on engagement with EA and how impressive someone is, which doesn’t really seem to qualify as steering culture. This certainly seems to line up with some things said in this post about people being rejected for not being impressive.
I think EA Global admissions is currently checking for something like “does this person have a very different impression of what EA is about than most of the current leadership?”, which I think has a pretty substantial effect on culture.
It is hard to talk about admissions in too much detail publicly. I agree that we want to make sure attendees have an understanding of EA but we also want to avoid the “guessing the teacher’s password” problem. We also check for reasoning skills/epistemics. In other words, some people don’t know much about EA principles, but manage to exhibit good reasoning skills as they make the case for a clear plan, or by explaining that they are uncertain and laying out which options they are thinking about.
Is there any attempt to increase diversity (of experience, perspectives, gender, race) through admissions?
I’m asking because this kind of idea was made in another comment here, and sounds good to me, but contrasts with your description.
It is hard to talk about admissions in too much detail publicly
I also have a bit of a hard time understanding this. If there are some objective criteria that you use to assess those other things you mentioned, then yeah, I wouldn’t want people to just start optimizing for them and ruin the process. But so far from CEA staff comments here, it sounds much more like a judgement call that you can’t really game.
Like, from my perspective as a musician, if I wanted to get into music school I know what the basic criteria in an audition would be, but they’re subjective and optimizing for them is almost identical to “training to be a good musician”, so there’s no problem in making them publicly known.
I think EA currently is much more likely to fail to achieve most of its goals by ending up with a culture that is ill-suited for its aims, being unable to change direction when new information comes in, and generally fail due to the problems of large communities and other forms of organization (like, as you mentioned, the community behind NeurIPS, which is currently on track to be an unstoppable behemoth racing towards human extinction that I so desperately wish was trying to be smaller and better coordinated).
I think EA Global admissions is one of the few places where we can apply steering on how EA is growing and what kind of culture we are developing, and giving this up seems like a cost, without particularly strong commensurate benefits.
On a more personal level, I do want to be clear that I am glad about having a bigger EA Global this year, but I would probably also just stop attending an open-invite EA Global since I don’t expect it would really share my culture or be selected for people I would really want to be around. I think this year’s EA Global came pretty close to exhausting my ability to be thrown into a large group of people with a quite different culture of differing priorities, and I expect less selection would cause me to hit that limit quite reliably.
I do think there are potentially ways to address many of the problems you list in this post by changing the admissions process, which I do think is currently pretty far from perfect (in-particular, I would like to increase the number of people who don’t need to apply to attend because they are part of some group or have some obvious signal that means they should pass the bar).
I wonder if this is overstated.
I feel like we have a number of other strong channels, including:
funding
frank discussions on EAF and other public fora
private discussions/coordination by leaders
Yeah, I agree these are all candidates, though I think these are all actually somewhat downstream of general movement growth:
Funding has been getting a lot less centralized and in-general funding is a lot more flush, at least in the longtermist space, so I think this has been serving much less as a thing that meaningfully steers the culture
Frank discussion on the EA Forum I do think is quite important, though I also think that outside of a few people like Nuno we see very little actual critique of projects, and I think a lot of the people who tend to have written critical things have stopped in the last few years (Larks is stopping his AI Alignment review, I am no longer writing long LTFF writeups, and broadly I have a feeling that there is a lot more mincing of words on the forum than a few years ago), so while I do think this is quite important, I also think it’s becoming a weaker force
Leadership has also been growing and I think leadership is now actually distributed enough and large enough that I feel like this isn’t really doing a ton in terms of shaping culture and changing community growth. I feel far from getting to consensus with people at 80k on how they are thinking about community growth, and my sense is everyone is just really busy and very few people among the de-facto leadership think of themselves as actually responsible for shaping community culture and growth (at least I got a relatively strong feeling of powerlessness from people trying to shape community growth at the latest Coordination Forum, though I might also be projecting my own feelings too much here, so take this with a grain of salt)
I actually think the strongest channel we currently have for shaping culture and growth are things like Lightcone and Constellation, which are more consistent spaces with boundaries that allow some people to maintain more of a walled garden, though I also have complicated feelings about the dynamics here.
[epistemic status: idle uninformed speculation]
I basically agree with this comment, which makes me like the idea of an open EAG. Closed EAG is theoretically good for shaping culture by selecting good participants, but CEA faces a knowledge problem for which people are “good culture fits”, and it moves towards promoting some weird homogenization thing. I have some inchoate instinct that a more decentralized network of smaller walled gardens can preserve and signal good parts of culture, while avoiding frustrating “CEA as kingmaker” dynamics, and allowing an open EAG to introduce novelty into the system.
I’m kind of surprised by this—if EAG was open, what sort of people do you think would come, and in what way would they not share your culture?
Like as an example: this year I didn’t get into EAG when I first applied, and then I reapplied when I got an internship at an EA org, and got in. This is understandable—I didn’t have very strong ‘legible’ signals of EA engagement apart from the internship, arguably. But also, like, my culture/who I am as a person clearly didn’t change much between the two applications! So I guess my expectation for who would come if it were open are:
-people who are engaged in their local EA communities and ‘into’ EA but haven’t shown legible enough signs of ‘promise’ to get accepted under the status quo
-people like the person screenshotted in the post, who have changed their career on EA principles, who maybe wouldn’t get much out of networking, but who are excited to talk to others who share their values
I’m mostly sympathetic to this point.
Your last paragraph doesn’t make sense to me; I don’t see how changing admissions in that way would help with the issues Scott discusses.
A few more thoughts:
(EDIT: Seems like in an above comment that current culture-steering is trying to encourage perspective and stuff, so what I’m irked about here isn’t really an issue). Limiting EA globals to only people that fit into certain cultures could severely limit perspective/diversity, and in bad cases could make EAs as “cult”-y as some people want to believe it is. I think this is probably only true for some misguided attempts to steer culture, and in fact you can steer culture through admissions to encourage things like diversity/perspective. Selecting attendees based on “people Oliver Habryka would hang out with outside the conference” does seem to be sort of narrow, but I’m guessing this wasn’t what you actually want admissions to look like?
In respone to “I would like to increase the number of people who don’t need to apply to attend because they are part of some group or have some obvious signal that means they should pass the bar”: I guess it depends what you mean here, but I agree with Zach in that it doesn’t seem obvious why this would actually help (although I’d be intersted in the specific details of what you mean). I mean, some ways of doing this could make people upset, since the outside perspective could be something like certain “inner circles” of EA have easy backdoor access to EAGs. This could also make even very impressive/high-impact EAs feel excluded if they’re not a part of said groups. Seems to me like there are tons of ways this could go wrong.
I think this means a good chunk of people don’t have to apply, and then those people don’t have to deal with the costs of applying. I do think it doesn’t address most of the things mentioned as problems in the OP.
Which chunks of people?
I strong upvoted since this makes sense to me, but is EA global admissions actually making an effort to steer culture in any way? I was under the impression that EAG admissions was mostly just based on engagement with EA and how impressive someone is, which doesn’t really seem to qualify as steering culture. This certainly seems to line up with some things said in this post about people being rejected for not being impressive.
I think EA Global admissions is currently checking for something like “does this person have a very different impression of what EA is about than most of the current leadership?”, which I think has a pretty substantial effect on culture.
It is hard to talk about admissions in too much detail publicly. I agree that we want to make sure attendees have an understanding of EA but we also want to avoid the “guessing the teacher’s password” problem. We also check for reasoning skills/epistemics. In other words, some people don’t know much about EA principles, but manage to exhibit good reasoning skills as they make the case for a clear plan, or by explaining that they are uncertain and laying out which options they are thinking about.
Is there any attempt to increase diversity (of experience, perspectives, gender, race) through admissions?
I’m asking because this kind of idea was made in another comment here, and sounds good to me, but contrasts with your description.
I also have a bit of a hard time understanding this. If there are some objective criteria that you use to assess those other things you mentioned, then yeah, I wouldn’t want people to just start optimizing for them and ruin the process. But so far from CEA staff comments here, it sounds much more like a judgement call that you can’t really game.
Like, from my perspective as a musician, if I wanted to get into music school I know what the basic criteria in an audition would be, but they’re subjective and optimizing for them is almost identical to “training to be a good musician”, so there’s no problem in making them publicly known.
Thanks! Makes sense.