To me this is interesting evidence suggesting that one purpose of pain in humans is to be visible (attracting help). It doesn’t go very far to suggest that this is pain’s only purpose, which I think is what would be needed for me to hypothesize that solitary animals feel little or no pain.
I’m currently in school for physical therapy assisting; as you might imagine, pain is a big topic for us! The standard hypothesis we’ve been taught is that pain is most typically experienced as a signal to the person experiencing it that something needs to be done. (This is the model where the pain you feel on burning your hand is what causes you to take it off the hot stove—or more accurately, what causes you not to put your hand right back on the stove, because you’ve probably had a reflex reaction that removed your hand from the hot stove before the signal reached your conscious awareness.) It’s easy to see how in humans “something needs to be done” can include a much broader range of behaviors than simply moving away from something unpleasant, avoiding immediate weight-bearing on a sprained ankle, etc. But the pain is already useful even if the reaction to it is smaller. If you’ve sprained your ankle, it’s a good idea to be a bit more sedentary than usual the next day even if you never cry and try hard not to limp. It seems to me like a lot of animals that we think of as showing less pain may show it in subtle behavioral ways that would not be noticeable to their typical predators. (These may also be harder to observe in situations that don’t allow for normal behavior, such as a laboratory.)
But you’re right that pain is very complicated, and it doesn’t always correspond to tissue damage, especially in the case of chronic pain. It may be that some situations in which humans feel pain have evolved specifically in tandem with our complex social behavior. I would just be very wary of extending that to acute pain in general, which does seem to be strongly associated with tissue damage in humans in a broad variety of cases—and for which there is often a direct physical response the pain seems adapted to provoke.
I appreciate how thoughtful the admissions team seems to be about creating a useful experience for attendees!
With this explanation (maybe moreso than in previous years when the average applicant was less involved in EA), it sounds like there are some large categories of people where your message is “We’d like you to apply, but you probably won’t get in, and we know that’s discouraging you from applying.” That seems like a tough spot to put applicants in, particularly given that individual EAs can be very self-critical and might be inclined to forgo applying if they imagine you might mistakenly decide they’re a better applicant than someone else in the same loose category.
One question I have related to this is about what steps you’ve considered or taken (other than this post!) towards encouraging applications from people who might be discouraged about their likelihood of getting in. For example, have you adjusted the way you promote the conference in general? Do you suggest that colleges, organizations, or local groups try to encourage every member who would like to attend EAG to apply, or conversely that they try to coordinate so that not too many people from their group apply? Have you made changes to the application itself to make it easier to fill out or more clear about the range of people you want to see apply? Other things?
I’m also curious whether you have considered more strongly theming some EAG or EAGx events in order to provide a clearer signal about who would get the most benefit out of a particular conference and perhaps provide more focused environments for attendees. (Any type of theme, whether focusing on some range of cause areas, some stage of attendee careers, some common concern like research implementation...) Or if you have tried themes in the past, have they had any of that type of effect, or were people still looking for an experience that felt like it covered a broad spectrum of EA topics and concerns?