I started out as a animal advocate in 2001 at the age of 12. Nearly a decade later, I discovered effective altruism and decided to start down an earning to give career path as a physician. Currently, I own a health services business and donate my time and money to direct work in animal advocacy. You usually can find me at the Impactful Animal Advocacy slack community.
Constance Li
Karma: 961
Case Study of EA Global Rejection + Criticisms/Solutions
Hi Evie,
I appreciate that you decided to post this.
Tone—I did worry that the tone might read like that. To me, getting into EAG was only instrumental for my greater goal of making the world a better place. I do have a tendency to focus a lot of energy into on perceived barriers to efficicacy so it might have come off like getting into EAG was my final objective. Please feel free to point out various parts of the post that seem to suggest otherwise and I can update them.
Making the world a better place—This is a really difficult thing to measure and there is not a lot of transparency around how they are measuring it. Part of why I made this post was to provide more data points to answer Eli’s other question of, “how costly is rejection?” That needs to be factored into calculating how much good EAG is producing. I just don’t think it is properly accounted for.
Hesitant to criticize—I would agree with Vaidehi and say that there are many factors to consider in how comfortable individuals are to criticize EA organizations. Just to add my own data point, there were a couple people that reviewed this post to that were hesitant to be identified in one way or another out of concern for a negative consequence in the future. Starting 1-2 weeks ago since I found out about my rejection, I have probably talked to 15-20 EA’s and about 80% have expressed wariness about saying/doing something that would upset a large EA organization.
Hi Amy,
I’m still trying to figure out how to best use the comments on this forum, but I did make a reply with a clarification on what you said about me not being interested in EAGx. I just want to comment it again here to make sure that it is seen.
“I also want to mention that I am actually open to going to EAx conferences and was just talking to Dion today about my desire to go to EAxSingapore next year. I think I might have said I wasn’t able to go to EAGxVirtual because it is the same weekend as the AVA Summit, which I am a speaker for. It might also have been that I didn’t have a desire to travel so far for a conference at that time and all the EAx conferences that were listed on the events page would have required me to fly since I’m in the US on the east coast. EAxBoston had already passed at that point so the only conference left on the list that would have been readily accessible to me in terms of location was EAG DC. This might have been construed as a lack of interest in attending EAx events in general, but I assure you this is not the case. I do not have an exact memory of what was said, but hopefully, this provides some clarity.”
I agree with Kevin. The main goal of EAG is reportedly to “make the world a better place” and they have processes in place to filter out people that they don’t think will add to that goal. Other conferences like the academic and political conferences you mentioned may be trying to optimize for other metrics like more exposure, inclusiveness, profit, diversity, etc.
I do believe CEA should be more transparent with these processes and try harder to measure the harm that can result from a high rejection rate conference that people’s identitites are closely tied to.
Hi Lauren,
I’ve also heard some off-putting anecdotes about the internal operations of the conference. One example is the presence of staff that monitor all interactions in order to enforce certain norms. I’ve heard that they can seem a bit intimidating at times. Of course, I’ve never been to an EAG conference and cannot corroborate that first hand so please factor that in.
I agree that transparency to the public is really lacking. I happen to know there is an internal justification for this opaqueness, but still believe that there are a lot more details they could be making public without jeopardizing their objectives. I’d love to see some metrics on this and some feedback surveys for rejected applicants to ensure they are making an effort to measure the “cost of rejection.”
Thank you! And yeah I noticed one link was broken and fixed that. Otherwise I think I agree with Rebecca that it is probably just a mobile issue unfortunately.
Hi Peter,
Throughout making this post (especially when writing the criticisms/solutions section) I did experience an expansion of my circle of compassion towards large organizations. It can be really difficult to make everyone happy when the scale of an event is so large. However, I still think that “customer service” has been undervalued and the downstream consequences of rejection have not adequately been taken into account. EA’s expect to rely on CEA as a central organization (and other large EA orgs) in a way that is tied into their identity, career, funding, community, etc. How they interact with individual EA’s really matters.
While I have weighed the pros and cons of posting this, I think ultimately it was a net pro to increase accountability, transparency, and help other rejected applicants not feel so upset. The tradeoff is that the CEA staff involved can experience some discomfort from being publicly criticized despite trying their best to do a good job. I have tried to minimize through not mentioning names directly in my post. I’ve also considered that others may view me in a more negative light for saying something controversial, but I do have to accept that as a potential consequence of my decision.
And thank you for your appreciation of my work! I do plan to keep on going and developing my projects. Hopefully we get a chance to meet in the future!
Hi Amy,
Thank you for the quick response in clarifying this. If I find out more from the person I got the anecdote from, I can let you know and perhaps it can be looked into more.
I agree. This could start off with a simple statistic like rejection rate and then also be subdivided into comparison of accepted/rejected applicants in terms of location, experience, favored cause areas, race, citizenship, age, etc. It could raise some pretty important questions that could then be discussed rationally. More transparency can help balance out the tendency towards in-group/out-group dynamics.
Thank you!
Thank you for those kind words! I plan to continue taking significant action to help the world become a better place. While I was hoping that attending EAG could help me in that journey, I’ve come to learn that there are many other avenues available.
I initially wanted to comment about diversity, but opted not to because it would distract from the overall message of the post.
Yes that is a good caveat to include. It is deinitely easy to conflate effectiveness of a person vs effectiveness of a person at a given point in time. I think that would be an important point to emphasize in rejection emails.
Hi Jeff! I am just seeing your comment now and am glad we were able to meet the other day during the EA NYC dinner. I’ll send you a pm and we can talk a little bit more in depth about your experience and what could be done to overcome it.
Thanks. I think I erred on the side of providing more information than needed to show enthusiasm and commitment. Perhaps I’ll try your suggestion next time and hope for a different result.
Perhaps if the norms were posted somewhere upfront, then the EA curious types could self select for attendance. I’m still not sure what the norms are after doing all the research for this post. A video of the conference with narration of the setup/interviews with attendees or just a list of norms on the EAG information page would be helpful to understand what the conference is like.
Amy, I knew this would be at least a bit uncomfortable for you. I tried to minimize that through anonymizing your identity in the screenshots and sharing the google doc draft with you the night before I posted it.
Ultimately, I was very disappointed in the quality of communication around the application decision making process. When it was made clear that there would be no further ability to discuss the reason for my rejection privately, I decided to make a public post. My primary goal is to increase transparency and reduce the likelihood that other rejected applicants would have a negative experience. I thought the screenshots would be necessary to do that, but didn’t think your identity was necessary for it. I did see that you identified yourself in the comments shortly after the post went up so I appreciate your sense of accountability for what it’s worth.
I recently made my first forum post and ran into some formatting barriers. I was able to overcome them with experimentation that cost 30-60 minutes of my time. For example, making a line completely bold automatically puts the text in the outline and putting asterixes (I put the * around this word in mobile and it just ended up italicizing it) centers it and puts it in the outline. I had some sections I wanted to bold, but leave out of the outline so I found a workaround by unbolding just the colon at the end. I was also a bit confused on how to use the link post option and had to search up examples to find out if I should be using it. That added another 10 minutes of time.
It would be great if there was a video tutorial for using the interface. It could significantly reduce the barrier for first time posters.
Working on a forum post about animals and longtermism. I have an outline on a google doc and would love to have collaborators or just people to give feedback about the content.
Hi Amy,
I appreciate you taking the time to comment. I know you must be really busy with running EAG DC AND taking care of your child. I think it is fair to say from our conversation, I came to understand that there is a distinct reason that could be pointed to for my rejection from EAG. However, I lack the institutional trust to believe this is the only reason or that it is a good reason to support the goal of EAG “to make the world a better place.” I have updated my closing thoughts to reflect this better.
I also want to mention that I am actually open to going to EAx conferences and was just talking to Dion today about my desire to go to EAxSingapore next year. I think I might have said I wasn’t able to go to EAGxVirtual because it is the same weekend as the AVA Summit, which I am a speaker for. It might also have been that I didn’t have a desire to travel so far for a conference at that time and all the EAx conferences that were listed on the events page would have required me to fly since I’m in the US on the east coast. EAxBoston had already passed at that point so the only conference left on the list that would have been readily accessible to me in terms of location was EAG DC. This might have been construed as a lack of interest in attending EAx events in general, but I assure you this is not the case. I do not have an exact memory of what was said, but hopefully, this provides some clarity.
I hope the event goes smoothly and I would be happy to give my input on any discussion around structural changes for the process going for future events!