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 What’s going on here is just that our comms/email templates were old, confusing, and out of date — I’ve now amended our acceptance email to remove the implication of capacity limits.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 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.