Explicitly asking for a reference the head organizer knows personally.
That feels pretty bad to me! I can imagine some reason that this would be necessary for some programs, but in general requiring this doesn’t seem healthy.
I find the request for references on the EA Funds’ application to be a good middle-ground. There’s several sentences to it, but the most relevant one is:
References by people who are directly involved in effective altruism and adjacent communities are particularly useful, especially if we are likely to be familiar with their work and thinking.
It’s clearly useful to already be in the fund managers’ network, but it’s also clearly not required. Of course there’s always a difference between the policy and the practice, but this is a pretty good public policy from my perspective.
I should probably be more precise and say the phrasing was something like “preferably someone who [organizer] knows”.
But since this is presented as the better option, I don’t think I see much difference between the two, as you’d expect the actual filtering process to favour exactly those people in the organiser’s network.
That feels pretty bad to me! I can imagine some reason that this would be necessary for some programs, but in general requiring this doesn’t seem healthy.
I find the request for references on the EA Funds’ application to be a good middle-ground. There’s several sentences to it, but the most relevant one is:
It’s clearly useful to already be in the fund managers’ network, but it’s also clearly not required. Of course there’s always a difference between the policy and the practice, but this is a pretty good public policy from my perspective.
I should probably be more precise and say the phrasing was something like “preferably someone who [organizer] knows”.
But since this is presented as the better option, I don’t think I see much difference between the two, as you’d expect the actual filtering process to favour exactly those people in the organiser’s network.