I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I’ve interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear.
Blog: aaronbergman.net
A little while ago I posted this quick take:
I didn’t have a good response to @DanielFilan, and I’m pretty inclined to defer to orgs like CEA to make decisions about how to use their own scarce resources.
At least for EA Global Boston 2024 (which ended yesterday), there was the option to pay a “cost covering” ticket fee (of what I’m told is $1000).[1]
All this is to say that I am now more confident (although still <80%) that marginal rejected applicants who are willing to pay their cost-covering fee would be good to admit.[2]
In part this stems from an only semi-legible background stance that, on the whole, less impressive-seeming people have more ~potential~ and more to offer than I think “elite EA” (which would those running EAG admissions) tend to think. And this, in turn, has a lot to do with the endogeneity/path dependence of I’d hastily summarize as “EA involvement.”
That is, many (most?) people need a break-in point to move from something like “basically convinced that EA is good, interested in the ideas and consuming content, maybe donating 10%” to anything more ambitious.
For some, that comes in the form of going to an elite college with a vibrant EA group/community. Attending EAG is another—or at least could be. But if admission is dependent on doing the kind of things and/or having the kinds of connections that a person might only pursue after getting on such an on-ramp, you have a vicious cycle of endogenous rejection.
The impetus for writing this is seeing a person who was rejected with some characteristics that seem plausibly pretty representative of a typical marginal EAG rejectee:
College educated but not via an elite university
Donates 10%, mostly to global health
Normal-looking middle or upper-middle class career
Interested in EA ideas but not a huge amount to show for it
Never attended EAG
Of course n=1, this isn’t a tremendous amount of evidence, I don’t have strictly more information than the admissions folks, the optimal number of false-negatives is not zero, etc., etc. But if a person with those above characteristics who is willing to write a reasonably thoughtful application and spend their personal time and money traveling to and taking part in EA Global (and, again, covering their cost)[3] is indeed likely to get rejected, I just straightforwardly think that admission has too high a bar; does CEA really think such a person is actively harmful to the event on net?
I don’t want to say that there is literally zero potential downside from admitting more people and “diluting the attendee pool” for lack of a more thoughtful term, but it’s not immediately obvious to me what that downside would be especially at the current margin (say for example a 25% increase in the number of attendees, not a 2000% increase). And, needless to say, there is a lot of potential upside via both the impact of this marginal attendee themselves and via the information/experience/etc. that they bring to the whole group.
I’m not sure if this was an option when I wrote my previous take, and if so whether I just didn’t know about it or what.
To be clear none of this is because I’ve ever been rejected (I haven’t). Kinda cringe to say but worth the clarification I think.
If this were an econ paper, I’d probably want to discuss the fiscal relevance of marginal vs average cost-covering tickets. I suspect that the “cost covering ticket” actually advertised is based on the average cost, but I’m not sure.
If this is true, and marginal cost < average cost as seems intuitive, then admitting a marginal attendee who then pays the average cost would be financially net-positive for CEA.