Hi Scott — I work for CEA as the lead on EA Global and wanted to jump in here.
Really appreciate the post — having a larger, more open EA event is something we’ve thought about for a while and are still considering.
I think there are real trade-offs here. An event that’s more appealing to some people is more off-putting to others, and we’re trying to get the best balance we can. We’ve tried different things over the years, which can lead to some confusion (since people remember messaging from years ago) but also gives us some data about what worked well and badly when we’ve tried more open or more exclusive events.
We’ve asked people’s opinion on this. When we’ve polled our advisors including leaders from various EA organizations, they’ve favored more selective events. In our most recent feedback surveys, we’ve asked attendees whether they think we should have more attendees. For SF 2022, 34% said we should increase the number, 53% said it should stay the same, and 14% said it should be lower. Obviously there’s selection bias here since these are the people who got in, though.
To your “...because people will refuse to apply out of scrupulosity” point — I want to clarify that this isn’t how our admissions process works, and neither you nor anyone else we accept would be bumping anyone out of a spot. We simply have a specific bar for admissions and everyone above that bar gets admitted (though previous comms have unfortunately mentioned or implied capacity limits).This is why the events have been getting larger as the community grows.
I wanted to outline the case for having an admissions process and limiting the size of the event, which is roughly:
We host different events for different purposes. EAG is intended as a more selective event for people who mostly already have a lot of context on EA and are taking significant action based on EA principles. The EAGx conference series (which will serve nearly 5000 unique attendees across the different events this year) is intended to reach a broader, newer-to-EA audience.
EAG is primarily a networking event, as one-to-one conversations are consistently reported to be the most valuable experiences for attendees. I think there’s less value in very new folks having such conversations — a lot of the time they’re better off learning more about EA and EA cause areas first (similar to how I should probably learn how ML works before I go to an ML conference).
Very involved and engaged EAs might be less eager to come to EAG if the event is not particularly selective. (This is a thing we sometimes get complaints about but it’s hard for people to voice this opinion publicly, because it can sound elitist). These are precisely the kinds of people we most need to come — they are the most in-demand people that attendees want to talk to (because they can offer mentorship, job opportunities, etc.).
We think that some of our most promising newer attendees would also have a worse experience if the event were fully open.
Using an admissions process lets us try to screen out applicants who have caused problems at past events or who seem likely to cause problems.
I don’t think this is really what your post is about, but I wanted to clarify: EAG exists to make the world a better place, rather than serve the EA community or make EAs happy. This unfortunately sometimes means EAs will be sad due to decisions we’ve made — though if this results in the world being a worse place overall, then we’ve clearly made a mistake.
I agree it’s hard to identify promising people reliably, but I don’t think it’s impossible to get some signal here. I do think our admissions process could improve though, and we adjust the process every year. We’re currently in the process of revisiting the application/admissions process with the aim of identifying promising people more reliably — though of course it’s hard to make this perfect.
“The conference is called “EA Global” and is universally billed as the place where EAs meet one another, learn more about the movement, and have a good time together.” It’s possible we should rename the event, and I agree this confusion and reputation is problematic, but I would like to clarify that we don’t define the event like this anywhere (though perhaps we used to in previous years). It’s now explicitly described as an event with a high bar for highly engaged EAs (see here). We also have the EAGx conference series, which is more introductory and has a lower bar for admissions. If someone is excited to learn more about EA, they’d likely be better suited to an EAGx event (and they’d be more likely to get accepted, too).
Having different levels of access to the conference app seems like it might worsen rather than improve the problem of some people feeling like second-class citizens.
Regarding the specific volunteer case you mentioned, I’m not exactly sure what the details were here and it’s not something anyone on the team recalls. It does sound like something that easily could have happened — just perhaps a few years ago. FWIW, as of 2019, all volunteers had to meet the general bar for admission.
I think I would also be in favor of other more specialized conferences, such as those on AI safety or global health, but these are unlikely to be things we’ll have capacity to run at the moment (though I encourage people to apply for CEA event support and run events like these).
Thanks again for the post, hope these points are helpful!
I suspect that 2x or 3x will happen naturally within a year, given that there is a bar on fit for the event rather than a bar on quantity. People who aren’t getting in this year will surely, if they are dedicated EAs, have more to list on their EAG applications next year.
I’m a bit confused by one of your points here. You say: “I want to clarify that this isn’t how our admissions process works, and neither you nor anyone else we accept would be bumping anyone out of a spot”. OK, cool.
However, when I received my acceptance email to EAG it included the words “If you find that you can’t make it to the event after all, please let us know so that we can give your spot to another applicant.”
That sure sounds like a request that you make when you have a limited number of spots and accepting one person means bumping another.
To be clear, I think it’s completely reasonable to have a set number of places—logistics are a thing, and planning an event for an unknown number of people is extremely challenging. I’m just surprised by your statement that it doesn’t work that way.
I also want to make a side note that I strongly believe that making EA fun is important. The movement asks people to give away huge amounts of money, reorient their whole careers, and dedicate themselves to changing the world. Those are big asks! It’s very easy for people to just not do them!
It’s hard to get people to voluntarily do even small, easy things when they feel unappreciated or excluded. I agree that making EAs happy is not and should not be a terminal value but it absolutely should be an instrumental value.
Hi Nathan, thanks for flagging this. What’s going on here is just that our comms/email templates were old, confusing, and out of date — I’ve now amended our acceptance email to remove the implication of capacity limits. It is helpful for people to let us know if they aren’t coming (for example, so that we can get accurate numbers for catering), but it’s not the case that people would be bumping each other in this way (for now at least — it’s possible that we get a weirdly large number of strong applications for a future EAG and have to turn away people due to capacity limits, I just don’t expect this to be the case any time soon).
I’ve also provided more context about capacity in my response to Jeff’s comment on this thread.
Maybe the conference could be renamed or its description amended to say “for EA leaders”. Then people who get rejected would take it less personally that they weren’t accepted.
Thanks for your response. I agree that the goal should be trying to hold the conference in a way that’s best for the world and for EA’s goals. If I were to frame my argument more formally, it would be something like—suppose that you reject 1000 people per year (I have no idea if this is close to the right number). 5% get either angry or discouraged and drop out of EA. Another 5% leave EA on their own for unrelated reasons, but would have stayed if they had gone to the conference because of some good experience they had there. So my totally made up Fermi estimate is that we lose 100 people from EA each time we run a closed conference. Are the benefits of the closed conference great enough to compensate for that?
I’m not sure, because I still don’t understand what those benefits are. I mentioned in the post that I’d be in favor of continuing to have a high admissions bar for the networking app (or maybe just sorting networkers by promise level). You write that:
Very involved and engaged EAs might be less eager to come to EAG if the event is not particularly selective. (This is a thing we sometimes get complaints about but it’s hard for people to voice this opinion publicly, because it can sound elitist). These are precisely the kinds of people we most need to come — they are the most in-demand people that attendees want to talk to (because they can offer mentorship, job opportunities, etc.).
I think maybe our crux is that I don’t understand this impulse, beyond the networking thing I mentioned above. Is the concern that the unpromising people will force promising people into boring conversations and take up too much of their time? That they’ll disrupt talks?
We also have the EAGx conference series, which is more introductory and has a lower bar for admissions. If someone is excited to learn more about EA, they’d likely be better suited to an EAGx event (and they’d be more likely to get accepted, too).
My understanding is that people also sometimes get rejected from EAGx and there is no open admission conference, is this correct?
Hi Scott — it’s hard to talk about these things publicly, but yes a big concern of opening up the conference is that attendees’ time won’t end up spent on the most valuable conversations they could be having. I also worry that a two-tiered app system would cause more tension and hurt feelings than it would prevent. A lot of conversations aren’t scheduled through the app but happen serendipitously throughout the event. (Of the things you mentioned, I’m not particularly worried about attendees disrupting talks.)
We’ve thought a fair bit about the “how costly is rejection” question, and think there’s a real but relatively small discouragement effect where rejected applicants are less likely to re-apply to our events (or engage with EA in general). In an internal report we wrote recently about this, we felt more concerned about whether rejection makes it less likely for people to apply in the first place (but we think we can reduce this with clearer comms about the admissions bar).
It is true that people can get rejected from EAGx’s, but the bar is lower — and often people get rejected from EAGx’s because some of these events are for specific regions (such as for EAs based in India). It’s correct that there is currently no open admission conference.
For what it’s worth, I still don’t feel like I understand CEA’s model of how having extra people present hurts the most prestigious attendees.
If you are (say) a plant-based meat expert, you are already surrounded by many AI researchers, epidemiologists, developmental economists, biosecurity analyists, community-builders, PR people, journalists, anti-factory-farm-activists, et cetera. You are probably going to have to plan your conversations pretty deliberately to stick to people within your same field, or who you are likely to have interesting things to say to. If the conference were twice as big, or three times, and filled with eg people who weren’t quite sure yet what they wanted to do with their careers, would that be the difference between that expert having a high chance of productive serendipitious conversations vs. not?
In an internal report we wrote recently about this, we felt more concerned about whether rejection makes it less likely for people to apply in the first place (but we think we can reduce this with clearer comms about the admissions bar).
I’m not sure I agree with Scott that EAG should be open access, but since you mention this as a concern, I thought I’d mention that, yep, I haven’t bothered applying to EAG for several years. The discussion around EAG the last few years made it seem incredibly obvious that I wouldn’t be wanted anyway, so I didn’t even bother weighing the pros and cons of trying to attend. Now that I actually think about it, I’m not at all sure that I should have been so convinced I couldn’t get in. I attended EAG in 2018 as a volunteer because I was told that the organizers couldn’t find anyone more qualified to run a discussion group about EA and religion, and I still have my 2018 EAG name tag that labels me a “Speaker”. In terms of more recent involvement, I won a second prize in the recent EA forum writing contest, I’m theoretically a mod for the EA Corner discord server, and I’ve been working on putting together an essay about the most effective ways of preventing miscarriages for people who place high credence on the possibility unborn children having moral worth (though I’m still working on contacting various people involved in that work and getting cost estimates of their operations, so it’s not ready yet).
...but I figured that Everyone Knows that you don’t get a spot unless you’re professionally involved in EA direct work, have been involved in one of the various formal EA fellowships, or have a bunch of personal brand recognition, so I never got to the point of weighing the pros and cons of attendance; I assumed that I couldn’t attend, and immediately turned my attention to being okay with not being an important EA member like some of my friends are.
Not sure this is anyone’s fault, or whether I would have wanted to go to EAG even if I could—I assume there’s an attendance fee, and I might not have wanted to shell out—but I saw your comment and wanted to mention it as an experience that some people do have right now.
but I figured that Everyone Knows that you don’t get a spot unless you’re professionally involved in EA direct work, have been involved in one of the various formal EA fellowships, or have a bunch of personal brand recognition...
For what it’s worth, my experience is that this is entirely not the case. Most people from my country who have gone to EAG were not any of those.
I assume there’s an attendance fee, and I might not have wanted to shell out
There’s a ticket fee, but you can choose to pay a discounted amount, and if you receive financial aid to come to the conference, the ticket fee is waived.
I don’t know if you still want to attend EAGs, but I hope this tells you that you can definitely apply.
I want to clarify that this isn’t how our admissions process works, and neither you nor anyone else we accept would be bumping anyone out of a spot. We simply have a specific bar for admissions and everyone above that bar gets admitted.
This doesn’t seem right to me? For example:
In setting the bar I expect you consider, among other things, the desired conference size. For example, if you got a lot of “this conference felt too big” feedback, you’d probably respond by raising the bar for the next one.
If someone applies late, I would expect whether you’re able to make room for the would depend on whether you have capacity.
In setting the bar, desired conference size is not really a factor in our decision making, though perhaps it should be (and it possibly will be if the events get much larger) — we mostly just think about what type of applicants would be a good fit for the event. We seem to receive more feedback about the types of attendees that come (or don’t come) rather than feedback about the raw size of the conference, and so we mostly action on the former. If we started receiving lots of “this conference felt too big” feedback, then yes we would possibly action on that, but that hasn’t really happened yet and I don’t expect it to in the near future.
For EAG SF 2022, it looked like we might hit capacity limits for the venue, but we actually never needed to turn people away because of capacity. For the next few EAGs we’ve selected venues that can expand to be much larger than our expected needs (e.g., for our next bay area conference, a venue that could fit at least 2500 people if we really needed), so I’m not expecting us to need to think about capacity limits in this way in the near future.
To clarify, I’m referring to the EA Global conferences only. EAGx admissions and processes are handled differently between events, and different organizers may have different requirements or setups (such as perhaps actually needing to reject people for capacity reasons).
If we started receiving lots of “this conference felt too big” feedback, then yes we would possibly action on that, but that hasn’t really happened yet
The largest EA Global was about 1000 people in 2016, and we got feedback that it was too big and that it was easy to get lost in the shuffle. Our recent events have been between 500 − 650 people including speakers, volunteers, and staff.
Venues above that size tend to be significantly more expensive, or less suited to the event. We already subsidize tickets and provide financial aid to keep prices reasonable, so more attendees cost CEA more. (We know there are a variety of opinions about the tradeoffs between cost and the quality of the venue/logistics/catering, and we’ll continue to look at those tradeoffs carefully.)
We’ll continue exploring the question of how big the event should be, including ways to help people connect better even within a large event.
I’m not too familiar with EA Global 2016 but I’ll note that we did ask attendees whether they felt the conference was too big at EA Global: SF 2022 and they generally thought the size of the event was fine.
Since 2016, we introduced Swapcard (our networking app), which changes the dynamic somewhat and allows people to more easily find relevant people to meet (and hence make people feel less lost in the shuffle). We’ve also introduced more production staff and overall support since 2016, meaning we’ve gotten larger venues with spaces that are more suitable for bigger audiences.
I was definitely apprehensive going to a larger EAG more recently, so was pleasantly surprised at how Swapcard enabled the conference to be scaled up while maintaining the high rate of useful connections of a smaller more curated conference.
This year I was waitlisted for EAG London, and then promptly rejected. I didn’t assign it much importance as the time because I assumed it was caused by capacity limits and I had applied relatively late.
How does having a waitlist make sense if every applicant is considered by a uniform bar independent of capacity?
The rejection email did say I could update my application, but I didn’t understand it at the time and only noticed it after reading this thread. I think maybe the communication around this could be improved, although I’m only one data point. The main point is that it only appears after a bunch of other text and can be easily ignored when you already know that the main message is “you got rejected”.
Hi Guy — thanks for the feedback. I’m not entirely sure what happened re your London application, as I wasn’t on the team then. However we didn’t really use the waitlist for SF and I don’t expect us to use it for the foreseeable future. We’ve since updated a lot of our email templates, so I’m hoping the issue you mentioned is at least partially resolved.
If nothing else presumably at some point venues have fire code capacity limits, though maybe past conferences have been small enough these haven’t been binding.
Two points of feedback on how EA Global is currently presented a little bit more like an event for the EA community:
“The conference is called “EA Global” and is universally billed as the place where EAs meet one another, learn more about the movement, and have a good time together.” It’s possible we should rename the event, and I agree this confusion and reputation is problematic, but I would like to clarify that we don’t define the event like this anywhere
EA Global is the conference series for the effective altruism community.
Our events are designed for community members who already have a solid understanding of effective altruism but would like to make new connections, discuss ideas, develop their skills, or move into new roles.
I think from this description I personally interpret more Scott’s caricature than EAG being intended as a high bar networking event:
“for the effective altruism community” → makes it sound like it’s a community event, which I’d expect to be inclusive
“community members who already have a solid understanding” → does not sound particularly exclusive to me
“make connections, discuss ideas, develop skills” → sounds somewhat vague and general for me, and “make connections” sounds to me like “connect to your fellow EAs”
Secondly, the first picture series on the website also makes it look to me more like a community event and less like a professional networking event. Half of them are photos of large groups and speakers. Only one of the pictures seems to be a 1-to-1 conversation.
Thanks for the thoughts here — a lot of what’s going on is just that our website is pretty out of date, and we’re in the process of refreshing/updating it currently. We’re also going to make some slight edits to our front page ~now to make things a bit clearer.
As Eli said, we are planning to revamp our website.
In the meantime, I’ve edited the homepage to be more accurate / to match the information on our FAQ page and admissions page to say:
”EA Global is designed for people who have a solid understanding of the main concepts of effective altruism, and who are making decisions and taking significant actions based on them.
EA Global conferences are not the only events for people interested in effective altruism! EAGx conferences are locally-organized conferences designed primarily for people:
Familiar with the core ideas of effective altruism
Interested in learning more about what to do
From the region or country where the conference is taking place (or living there)
I’ve edited the homepage to be more accurate / to match the information on our FAQ page and admissions page to say:
”EA Global is designed for people who have a solid understanding of the main concepts of effective altruism, and who are making decisions and taking significant actions based on them.
From my understanding, this new description seems fairly misleading, given the following EA Forum comments:
I can second the vibe of Zach’s ‘Data point’ comment. I know/met a few (<5 but I suspect more were there based on my sampling) students at EAG SF who had only recently engaged with EA ideas and had not (yet) taken any ‘significant action’ based on them.
We simply have a specific bar for admissions and everyone above that bar gets admitted
In my experience on hiring committees, this is actually quite difficult to do. I think in practice it is much more common to operate with two clear bars: one above which everyone gets hired and one below which nobody gets hired. The ones in the middle get a bunch of situational criteria applied to them and it’s pretty impossible to keep “we’re feeling tight on space” out of the equation there.
Whether or not the admissions process actually is capacity constrained and has replacement effects, most people will assume it does because:
The vast majority of other admissions processes are capacity-constrained.
Past and current messaging says so.
Here is a quote from the admissions FAQ https://www.eaglobal.org/admissions/:
“The most common reason for rejecting someone is that we have limited space and think other applicants would get more out of the conference. We don’t have any particular concerns about applicants we reject for this reason, but simply need to save the space for attendees who might be a better fit for the event.”
Thanks for the flag here — I’ve amended the language on the admissions FAQ accordingly (note that we’re planning on revamping our website soon anyway). I’m not aware of any other messaging that implies replacement effects, but LMK if you’re aware of anything.
We simply have a specific bar for admissions and everyone above that bar gets admitted
A) Does this represent a change from previous years? Previous comms have gestured at a desire to get a certain mixture of credentials, including beginners. This is also consistent with private comms and my personal experience.
B) Its pretty surprising that Austin, a current founder of a startup that received 1M in EA related funding from FTX regrants, would be below that bar!
Maybe you are saying that there is a bar above which you will get in, but below which you may or may not get in.
I think lack of clarity and mixed signals around this stuff might contribute unnecessarily to hurt feelings.
A) Yes we had different admissions standards a few years ago. I agree that’s confusing and I think we could have done better communication around the admissions standards. I think our FAQ page and admissions page are the most up-to-date resources.
B) I can’t comment in too much depth on other people’s admissions, but I’ll note that Austin was accepted into SF and DC 22 after updating his application.
It’s currently the case that there’s a particular bar for which we’ll admit people, though it’s not an exact science and we make each judgement call on its own — but regardless, capacity limits will not be a reason people get rejected (at least for the next few EAGs). I’m not entirely sure what you mean here, but it’s not the case that there’s a separate bar for which we’ll sometimes let people in depending on capacity. Apologies for any confusion caused here!
So me and some other EAs just talked to the person in the tweet that got rejected.
Far as I could tell they have a stellar “EA resume” and was even encouraged to apply by leaders in their EA community.
Why were they rejected? What is this “specific bar for admissions and everyone above that bar gets admitted” and why are so many applying and then surprised when they don’t meet this bar? Or is my perception off here?
This isn’t an accusation. I’m in the camp that thinks the conference should not be a free-for-all. But I can’t figure out why the person in the tweet would be rejected from EAG. And as a community organiser it would be great if I can know how best to help the bright-eyed enthusiastic young promising students in my community get into EAG.
See also my other comment asking if the rejection process is possibly too opaque. Maybe that’s the real issue here. Imagine if every person who got rejected knew exactly why and what they could do to not get rejected next time. I almost feel like we wouldn’t be having this discussion because far fewer people would be upset.
I can see why people are confused by this situation. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to give more detail publicly — it’s our policy to not discuss the specifics of people’s applications with other people besides them.
We do want people who aren’t sure if they’ll get in, including students, to apply! But we suggest they should also consider applying to their nearest EAGx and not only to EAG.
We don’t plan to tell people a recipe for getting accepted beyond the overall info we share with everyone about the event and the application process, and info about getting more involved in events like EAGx and local groups for people who have been away from the community for a while or who aren’t yet that involved.
In some cases, the things that would need to change aren’t realistic to change. In other cases, telling people essentially what we want to hear would largely defeat the purpose of those aspects of the application.
We know people are concerned and confused sometimes about EAG rejections. Sometimes there are genuine uncertainties. In our experience, in many of the cases where people have been upset, there were clear reasons to reject them that we cannot share based on background or behavior, and we would recommend keeping that hypothesis in mind.
Somewhat of a tangential question but what is the point of making EAGx region-specific? If these are the only events with a relatively low bar of entry, why are we not letting people attend them until one happens to come along near where they live? Without this restriction I could easily see EAGx solving most of the problems Scott is bringing up with EAG.
[I run the EAGx conference series] - I think there are significant benefits to local coordination - It’s very expensive to fly everyone from around the world to one location - I think attending 1-2 conferences a year is probably the right amount (I’m aiming to eventually have 1 conference per region per year, with lots of overlap with other regions)
EAGxVirtual does kind of solve the problem Scott is bringing up, and I’m very excited about it.
Just flagging that in my view the goal to have just 1 EAGx per region, and make the EAGx regionally focused, with taking very few people from outside the region, is really bad, in my view. Reasons for this are in the effects on network topology, and subsequently on the core/periphery dynamic.
I find the argument about the cost of “flying everyone from around the world to one location” particularly puzzling, because this is not what happens by default: even if you don’t try to push events to being regional at all, they naturally are, just because people will choose the event which is more conveniently located closer to them. So it’s not like everyone flying everywhere all the time (which may be the experience of the events team, but not of typical participants).
EAGx events are primarily for people in that region, but not exclusively. We do invite some speakers and contributors from outside the region and some others.
the effects on network topology, and subsequently on the core/periphery dynamic.
Sorry, could you spell these out? I don’t know what you mean.
even if you don’t try to push events to being regional at all, they naturally are, just because people will choose the event which is more conveniently located closer to them
Yes, that’s what I expect too, though we do see lots of people apply for conferences very far away from them.
Sorry, I think “flying everyone from around the world to one location” was a bit of a strawman. I expect they’ll mostly look like EAGxPrague did this year, which had a strong continental European swing but wasn’t exclusively for continental Europeans.
On the one hand, I was accepted to two EAGx’s this year, both in Europe (and could eventually attend one of them). I’m not sure if Israel counts as “in the region” of Oxford or Prague, but I suspect it doesn’t. So some EAGx are probably not really region-specific.
On the other hand, some of these conferences were (or will be) in places which are far away from EA hubs, like India, Latin America, or Kenya. And in that case there’s some trade-off between connecting the local community to other EAs, and strengthening the local community itself. If you let too many people from EA hubs come (and they will), you’ll get another EAG that just happens to be further away, leaving behind the local community that’s being built.
Just to clarify: EAGx conferences earlier this year have been accepting some applicants from outside their region when the applicant’s region doesn’t have a conference yet.
Oxford and Prague were primarily for the UK and continental Europe respectively, but accepted some people from e.g. Israel because there isn’t a conference in Israel (yet...) :)
Eli, has CEA looked at their admission rates according to age and gender? Are you willing to share this data? It would be interesting to see if there is any systemic bias in the admissions process.
Hi Scott — I work for CEA as the lead on EA Global and wanted to jump in here.
Really appreciate the post — having a larger, more open EA event is something we’ve thought about for a while and are still considering.
I think there are real trade-offs here. An event that’s more appealing to some people is more off-putting to others, and we’re trying to get the best balance we can. We’ve tried different things over the years, which can lead to some confusion (since people remember messaging from years ago) but also gives us some data about what worked well and badly when we’ve tried more open or more exclusive events.
We’ve asked people’s opinion on this. When we’ve polled our advisors including leaders from various EA organizations, they’ve favored more selective events. In our most recent feedback surveys, we’ve asked attendees whether they think we should have more attendees. For SF 2022, 34% said we should increase the number, 53% said it should stay the same, and 14% said it should be lower. Obviously there’s selection bias here since these are the people who got in, though.
To your “...because people will refuse to apply out of scrupulosity” point — I want to clarify that this isn’t how our admissions process works, and neither you nor anyone else we accept would be bumping anyone out of a spot. We simply have a specific bar for admissions and everyone above that bar gets admitted (though previous comms have unfortunately mentioned or implied capacity limits). This is why the events have been getting larger as the community grows.
I wanted to outline the case for having an admissions process and limiting the size of the event, which is roughly:
We host different events for different purposes. EAG is intended as a more selective event for people who mostly already have a lot of context on EA and are taking significant action based on EA principles. The EAGx conference series (which will serve nearly 5000 unique attendees across the different events this year) is intended to reach a broader, newer-to-EA audience.
EAG is primarily a networking event, as one-to-one conversations are consistently reported to be the most valuable experiences for attendees. I think there’s less value in very new folks having such conversations — a lot of the time they’re better off learning more about EA and EA cause areas first (similar to how I should probably learn how ML works before I go to an ML conference).
Very involved and engaged EAs might be less eager to come to EAG if the event is not particularly selective. (This is a thing we sometimes get complaints about but it’s hard for people to voice this opinion publicly, because it can sound elitist). These are precisely the kinds of people we most need to come — they are the most in-demand people that attendees want to talk to (because they can offer mentorship, job opportunities, etc.).
We think that some of our most promising newer attendees would also have a worse experience if the event were fully open.
Using an admissions process lets us try to screen out applicants who have caused problems at past events or who seem likely to cause problems.
I don’t think this is really what your post is about, but I wanted to clarify: EAG exists to make the world a better place, rather than serve the EA community or make EAs happy. This unfortunately sometimes means EAs will be sad due to decisions we’ve made — though if this results in the world being a worse place overall, then we’ve clearly made a mistake.
I agree it’s hard to identify promising people reliably, but I don’t think it’s impossible to get some signal here. I do think our admissions process could improve though, and we adjust the process every year. We’re currently in the process of revisiting the application/admissions process with the aim of identifying promising people more reliably — though of course it’s hard to make this perfect.
“The conference is called “EA Global” and is universally billed as the place where EAs meet one another, learn more about the movement, and have a good time together.” It’s possible we should rename the event, and I agree this confusion and reputation is problematic, but I would like to clarify that we don’t define the event like this anywhere (though perhaps we used to in previous years). It’s now explicitly described as an event with a high bar for highly engaged EAs (see here). We also have the EAGx conference series, which is more introductory and has a lower bar for admissions. If someone is excited to learn more about EA, they’d likely be better suited to an EAGx event (and they’d be more likely to get accepted, too).
Having different levels of access to the conference app seems like it might worsen rather than improve the problem of some people feeling like second-class citizens.
Regarding the specific volunteer case you mentioned, I’m not exactly sure what the details were here and it’s not something anyone on the team recalls. It does sound like something that easily could have happened — just perhaps a few years ago. FWIW, as of 2019, all volunteers had to meet the general bar for admission.
I think I would also be in favor of other more specialized conferences, such as those on AI safety or global health, but these are unlikely to be things we’ll have capacity to run at the moment (though I encourage people to apply for CEA event support and run events like these).
Thanks again for the post, hope these points are helpful!
FWIW I generally agree with Eli’s reply here. I think maybe EAG should 2x or 3x in size, but I’d lobby for it to not be fully open.
I suspect that 2x or 3x will happen naturally within a year, given that there is a bar on fit for the event rather than a bar on quantity. People who aren’t getting in this year will surely, if they are dedicated EAs, have more to list on their EAG applications next year.
Thanks for commenting, Eli.
I’m a bit confused by one of your points here. You say: “I want to clarify that this isn’t how our admissions process works, and neither you nor anyone else we accept would be bumping anyone out of a spot”. OK, cool.
However, when I received my acceptance email to EAG it included the words “If you find that you can’t make it to the event after all, please let us know so that we can give your spot to another applicant.”
That sure sounds like a request that you make when you have a limited number of spots and accepting one person means bumping another.
To be clear, I think it’s completely reasonable to have a set number of places—logistics are a thing, and planning an event for an unknown number of people is extremely challenging. I’m just surprised by your statement that it doesn’t work that way.
I also want to make a side note that I strongly believe that making EA fun is important. The movement asks people to give away huge amounts of money, reorient their whole careers, and dedicate themselves to changing the world. Those are big asks! It’s very easy for people to just not do them!
It’s hard to get people to voluntarily do even small, easy things when they feel unappreciated or excluded. I agree that making EAs happy is not and should not be a terminal value but it absolutely should be an instrumental value.
Hi Nathan, thanks for flagging this. What’s going on here is just that our comms/email templates were old, confusing, and out of date — I’ve now amended our acceptance email to remove the implication of capacity limits. It is helpful for people to let us know if they aren’t coming (for example, so that we can get accurate numbers for catering), but it’s not the case that people would be bumping each other in this way (for now at least — it’s possible that we get a weirdly large number of strong applications for a future EAG and have to turn away people due to capacity limits, I just don’t expect this to be the case any time soon).
I’ve also provided more context about capacity in my response to Jeff’s comment on this thread.
This is an EAG DC email from 5 days ago. The term “release” suggests to me that someone else can now use it.
I think this is probably new wording, but I think it still implies the thing you were trying to avoid.
Thanks for the flag — I’ve edited the wording now!
Maybe the conference could be renamed or its description amended to say “for EA leaders”. Then people who get rejected would take it less personally that they weren’t accepted.
Thanks for your response. I agree that the goal should be trying to hold the conference in a way that’s best for the world and for EA’s goals. If I were to frame my argument more formally, it would be something like—suppose that you reject 1000 people per year (I have no idea if this is close to the right number). 5% get either angry or discouraged and drop out of EA. Another 5% leave EA on their own for unrelated reasons, but would have stayed if they had gone to the conference because of some good experience they had there. So my totally made up Fermi estimate is that we lose 100 people from EA each time we run a closed conference. Are the benefits of the closed conference great enough to compensate for that?
I’m not sure, because I still don’t understand what those benefits are. I mentioned in the post that I’d be in favor of continuing to have a high admissions bar for the networking app (or maybe just sorting networkers by promise level). You write that:
I think maybe our crux is that I don’t understand this impulse, beyond the networking thing I mentioned above. Is the concern that the unpromising people will force promising people into boring conversations and take up too much of their time? That they’ll disrupt talks?
My understanding is that people also sometimes get rejected from EAGx and there is no open admission conference, is this correct?
Hi Scott — it’s hard to talk about these things publicly, but yes a big concern of opening up the conference is that attendees’ time won’t end up spent on the most valuable conversations they could be having. I also worry that a two-tiered app system would cause more tension and hurt feelings than it would prevent. A lot of conversations aren’t scheduled through the app but happen serendipitously throughout the event. (Of the things you mentioned, I’m not particularly worried about attendees disrupting talks.)
We’ve thought a fair bit about the “how costly is rejection” question, and think there’s a real but relatively small discouragement effect where rejected applicants are less likely to re-apply to our events (or engage with EA in general). In an internal report we wrote recently about this, we felt more concerned about whether rejection makes it less likely for people to apply in the first place (but we think we can reduce this with clearer comms about the admissions bar).
It is true that people can get rejected from EAGx’s, but the bar is lower — and often people get rejected from EAGx’s because some of these events are for specific regions (such as for EAs based in India). It’s correct that there is currently no open admission conference.
For what it’s worth, I still don’t feel like I understand CEA’s model of how having extra people present hurts the most prestigious attendees.
If you are (say) a plant-based meat expert, you are already surrounded by many AI researchers, epidemiologists, developmental economists, biosecurity analyists, community-builders, PR people, journalists, anti-factory-farm-activists, et cetera. You are probably going to have to plan your conversations pretty deliberately to stick to people within your same field, or who you are likely to have interesting things to say to. If the conference were twice as big, or three times, and filled with eg people who weren’t quite sure yet what they wanted to do with their careers, would that be the difference between that expert having a high chance of productive serendipitious conversations vs. not?
I also don’t get this. I can;t help thinking about the Inner Ring essay by C.S. Lewis. I hope that’s not what’s happening.
I’m not sure I agree with Scott that EAG should be open access, but since you mention this as a concern, I thought I’d mention that, yep, I haven’t bothered applying to EAG for several years. The discussion around EAG the last few years made it seem incredibly obvious that I wouldn’t be wanted anyway, so I didn’t even bother weighing the pros and cons of trying to attend. Now that I actually think about it, I’m not at all sure that I should have been so convinced I couldn’t get in. I attended EAG in 2018 as a volunteer because I was told that the organizers couldn’t find anyone more qualified to run a discussion group about EA and religion, and I still have my 2018 EAG name tag that labels me a “Speaker”. In terms of more recent involvement, I won a second prize in the recent EA forum writing contest, I’m theoretically a mod for the EA Corner discord server, and I’ve been working on putting together an essay about the most effective ways of preventing miscarriages for people who place high credence on the possibility unborn children having moral worth (though I’m still working on contacting various people involved in that work and getting cost estimates of their operations, so it’s not ready yet).
...but I figured that Everyone Knows that you don’t get a spot unless you’re professionally involved in EA direct work, have been involved in one of the various formal EA fellowships, or have a bunch of personal brand recognition, so I never got to the point of weighing the pros and cons of attendance; I assumed that I couldn’t attend, and immediately turned my attention to being okay with not being an important EA member like some of my friends are.
Not sure this is anyone’s fault, or whether I would have wanted to go to EAG even if I could—I assume there’s an attendance fee, and I might not have wanted to shell out—but I saw your comment and wanted to mention it as an experience that some people do have right now.
For what it’s worth, my experience is that this is entirely not the case. Most people from my country who have gone to EAG were not any of those.
There’s a ticket fee, but you can choose to pay a discounted amount, and if you receive financial aid to come to the conference, the ticket fee is waived.
I don’t know if you still want to attend EAGs, but I hope this tells you that you can definitely apply.
This doesn’t seem right to me? For example:
In setting the bar I expect you consider, among other things, the desired conference size. For example, if you got a lot of “this conference felt too big” feedback, you’d probably respond by raising the bar for the next one.
If someone applies late, I would expect whether you’re able to make room for the would depend on whether you have capacity.
In setting the bar, desired conference size is not really a factor in our decision making, though perhaps it should be (and it possibly will be if the events get much larger) — we mostly just think about what type of applicants would be a good fit for the event. We seem to receive more feedback about the types of attendees that come (or don’t come) rather than feedback about the raw size of the conference, and so we mostly action on the former. If we started receiving lots of “this conference felt too big” feedback, then yes we would possibly action on that, but that hasn’t really happened yet and I don’t expect it to in the near future.
For EAG SF 2022, it looked like we might hit capacity limits for the venue, but we actually never needed to turn people away because of capacity. For the next few EAGs we’ve selected venues that can expand to be much larger than our expected needs (e.g., for our next bay area conference, a venue that could fit at least 2500 people if we really needed), so I’m not expecting us to need to think about capacity limits in this way in the near future.
To clarify, I’m referring to the EA Global conferences only. EAGx admissions and processes are handled differently between events, and different organizers may have different requirements or setups (such as perhaps actually needing to reject people for capacity reasons).
This directly contradicts this December 2019 EA Forum post about EAG admissions, which has the following as a reply to “Why not make [EAG] larger?” (emphasis mine):
I’m not too familiar with EA Global 2016 but I’ll note that we did ask attendees whether they felt the conference was too big at EA Global: SF 2022 and they generally thought the size of the event was fine.
Since 2016, we introduced Swapcard (our networking app), which changes the dynamic somewhat and allows people to more easily find relevant people to meet (and hence make people feel less lost in the shuffle). We’ve also introduced more production staff and overall support since 2016, meaning we’ve gotten larger venues with spaces that are more suitable for bigger audiences.
I was definitely apprehensive going to a larger EAG more recently, so was pleasantly surprised at how Swapcard enabled the conference to be scaled up while maintaining the high rate of useful connections of a smaller more curated conference.
Hi Eli, Thanks for your detailed replies here!
This year I was waitlisted for EAG London, and then promptly rejected. I didn’t assign it much importance as the time because I assumed it was caused by capacity limits and I had applied relatively late.
How does having a waitlist make sense if every applicant is considered by a uniform bar independent of capacity?
The rejection email did say I could update my application, but I didn’t understand it at the time and only noticed it after reading this thread. I think maybe the communication around this could be improved, although I’m only one data point. The main point is that it only appears after a bunch of other text and can be easily ignored when you already know that the main message is “you got rejected”.
Hi Guy — thanks for the feedback. I’m not entirely sure what happened re your London application, as I wasn’t on the team then. However we didn’t really use the waitlist for SF and I don’t expect us to use it for the foreseeable future. We’ve since updated a lot of our email templates, so I’m hoping the issue you mentioned is at least partially resolved.
Thanks, glad to hear that.
If nothing else presumably at some point venues have fire code capacity limits, though maybe past conferences have been small enough these haven’t been binding.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to elaborate!
Two points of feedback on how EA Global is currently presented a little bit more like an event for the EA community:
This is the headline description from https://www.eaglobal.org :
I think from this description I personally interpret more Scott’s caricature than EAG being intended as a high bar networking event:
“for the effective altruism community” → makes it sound like it’s a community event, which I’d expect to be inclusive
“community members who already have a solid understanding” → does not sound particularly exclusive to me
“make connections, discuss ideas, develop skills” → sounds somewhat vague and general for me, and “make connections” sounds to me like “connect to your fellow EAs”
Secondly, the first picture series on the website also makes it look to me more like a community event and less like a professional networking event. Half of them are photos of large groups and speakers. Only one of the pictures seems to be a 1-to-1 conversation.
Thanks for the thoughts here — a lot of what’s going on is just that our website is pretty out of date, and we’re in the process of refreshing/updating it currently. We’re also going to make some slight edits to our front page ~now to make things a bit clearer.
Thanks, Max! I agree that’s confusing.
As Eli said, we are planning to revamp our website.
In the meantime, I’ve edited the homepage to be more accurate / to match the information on our FAQ page and admissions page to say:
”EA Global is designed for people who have a solid understanding of the main concepts of effective altruism, and who are making decisions and taking significant actions based on them.
EA Global conferences are not the only events for people interested in effective altruism! EAGx conferences are locally-organized conferences designed primarily for people:
Familiar with the core ideas of effective altruism
Interested in learning more about what to do
From the region or country where the conference is taking place (or living there)
See our FAQ page for more information.”
The edits should show up shortly if they haven’t already.
From my understanding, this new description seems fairly misleading, given the following EA Forum comments:
From Zach Stein-Perlman:
From Kevin Kuruc:
From Lauren Maria:
Cool, thanks for the extremely quick responses! :)
In my experience on hiring committees, this is actually quite difficult to do. I think in practice it is much more common to operate with two clear bars: one above which everyone gets hired and one below which nobody gets hired. The ones in the middle get a bunch of situational criteria applied to them and it’s pretty impossible to keep “we’re feeling tight on space” out of the equation there.
Whether or not the admissions process actually is capacity constrained and has replacement effects, most people will assume it does because:
The vast majority of other admissions processes are capacity-constrained.
Past and current messaging says so.
Here is a quote from the admissions FAQ https://www.eaglobal.org/admissions/: “The most common reason for rejecting someone is that we have limited space and think other applicants would get more out of the conference. We don’t have any particular concerns about applicants we reject for this reason, but simply need to save the space for attendees who might be a better fit for the event.”
Thanks for the flag here — I’ve amended the language on the admissions FAQ accordingly (note that we’re planning on revamping our website soon anyway). I’m not aware of any other messaging that implies replacement effects, but LMK if you’re aware of anything.
A) Does this represent a change from previous years? Previous comms have gestured at a desire to get a certain mixture of credentials, including beginners. This is also consistent with private comms and my personal experience.
B) Its pretty surprising that Austin, a current founder of a startup that received 1M in EA related funding from FTX regrants, would be below that bar!
Maybe you are saying that there is a bar above which you will get in, but below which you may or may not get in.
I think lack of clarity and mixed signals around this stuff might contribute unnecessarily to hurt feelings.
A) Yes we had different admissions standards a few years ago. I agree that’s confusing and I think we could have done better communication around the admissions standards. I think our FAQ page and admissions page are the most up-to-date resources.
B) I can’t comment in too much depth on other people’s admissions, but I’ll note that Austin was accepted into SF and DC 22 after updating his application.
It’s currently the case that there’s a particular bar for which we’ll admit people, though it’s not an exact science and we make each judgement call on its own — but regardless, capacity limits will not be a reason people get rejected (at least for the next few EAGs). I’m not entirely sure what you mean here, but it’s not the case that there’s a separate bar for which we’ll sometimes let people in depending on capacity. Apologies for any confusion caused here!
Thanks for clarifying
So me and some other EAs just talked to the person in the tweet that got rejected.
Far as I could tell they have a stellar “EA resume” and was even encouraged to apply by leaders in their EA community.
Why were they rejected? What is this “specific bar for admissions and everyone above that bar gets admitted” and why are so many applying and then surprised when they don’t meet this bar? Or is my perception off here?
This isn’t an accusation. I’m in the camp that thinks the conference should not be a free-for-all. But I can’t figure out why the person in the tweet would be rejected from EAG. And as a community organiser it would be great if I can know how best to help the bright-eyed enthusiastic young promising students in my community get into EAG.
See also my other comment asking if the rejection process is possibly too opaque. Maybe that’s the real issue here. Imagine if every person who got rejected knew exactly why and what they could do to not get rejected next time. I almost feel like we wouldn’t be having this discussion because far fewer people would be upset.
I can see why people are confused by this situation. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to give more detail publicly — it’s our policy to not discuss the specifics of people’s applications with other people besides them.
We do want people who aren’t sure if they’ll get in, including students, to apply! But we suggest they should also consider applying to their nearest EAGx and not only to EAG.
We don’t plan to tell people a recipe for getting accepted beyond the overall info we share with everyone about the event and the application process, and info about getting more involved in events like EAGx and local groups for people who have been away from the community for a while or who aren’t yet that involved.
In some cases, the things that would need to change aren’t realistic to change. In other cases, telling people essentially what we want to hear would largely defeat the purpose of those aspects of the application.
We know people are concerned and confused sometimes about EAG rejections. Sometimes there are genuine uncertainties. In our experience, in many of the cases where people have been upset, there were clear reasons to reject them that we cannot share based on background or behavior, and we would recommend keeping that hypothesis in mind.
Somewhat of a tangential question but what is the point of making EAGx region-specific? If these are the only events with a relatively low bar of entry, why are we not letting people attend them until one happens to come along near where they live? Without this restriction I could easily see EAGx solving most of the problems Scott is bringing up with EAG.
[I run the EAGx conference series]
- I think there are significant benefits to local coordination
- It’s very expensive to fly everyone from around the world to one location
- I think attending 1-2 conferences a year is probably the right amount (I’m aiming to eventually have 1 conference per region per year, with lots of overlap with other regions)
EAGxVirtual does kind of solve the problem Scott is bringing up, and I’m very excited about it.
Just flagging that in my view the goal to have just 1 EAGx per region, and make the EAGx regionally focused, with taking very few people from outside the region, is really bad, in my view. Reasons for this are in the effects on network topology, and subsequently on the core/periphery dynamic.
I find the argument about the cost of “flying everyone from around the world to one location” particularly puzzling, because this is not what happens by default: even if you don’t try to push events to being regional at all, they naturally are, just because people will choose the event which is more conveniently located closer to them. So it’s not like everyone flying everywhere all the time (which may be the experience of the events team, but not of typical participants).
EAGx events are primarily for people in that region, but not exclusively. We do invite some speakers and contributors from outside the region and some others.
Sorry, could you spell these out? I don’t know what you mean.
Yes, that’s what I expect too, though we do see lots of people apply for conferences very far away from them.
Sorry, I think “flying everyone from around the world to one location” was a bit of a strawman. I expect they’ll mostly look like EAGxPrague did this year, which had a strong continental European swing but wasn’t exclusively for continental Europeans.
There is an EAGx Virtual. This EAGx happens online.
I hope they are friendly for the less western timezones as well!
I’m not answering on their behalf, only guessing.
On the one hand, I was accepted to two EAGx’s this year, both in Europe (and could eventually attend one of them). I’m not sure if Israel counts as “in the region” of Oxford or Prague, but I suspect it doesn’t. So some EAGx are probably not really region-specific.
On the other hand, some of these conferences were (or will be) in places which are far away from EA hubs, like India, Latin America, or Kenya. And in that case there’s some trade-off between connecting the local community to other EAs, and strengthening the local community itself. If you let too many people from EA hubs come (and they will), you’ll get another EAG that just happens to be further away, leaving behind the local community that’s being built.
Just to clarify: EAGx conferences earlier this year have been accepting some applicants from outside their region when the applicant’s region doesn’t have a conference yet.
Oxford and Prague were primarily for the UK and continental Europe respectively, but accepted some people from e.g. Israel because there isn’t a conference in Israel (yet...) :)
There were people from Israel at EAGx Prague. There were also people from further away.
Eli, has CEA looked at their admission rates according to age and gender? Are you willing to share this data? It would be interesting to see if there is any systemic bias in the admissions process.