(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.
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?