Hi Scott — I work for CEA as the lead on EA Global and wanted to jump in here. 

Really appreciate the post — having a larger, more open EA event is something we’ve thought about for a while and are still considering. 

I think there are real trade-offs here. An event that’s more appealing to some people is more off-putting to others, and we’re trying to get the best balance we can. We’ve tried different things over the years, which can lead to some confusion (since people remember messaging from years ago) but also gives us some data about what worked well and badly when we’ve tried more open or more exclusive events.

1. We’ve asked people’s opinion on this. When we’ve polled our advisors including leaders from various EA organizations, they’ve favored more selective events. In our most recent feedback surveys, we’ve asked attendees whether they think we should have more attendees. For SF 2022, 34% said we should increase the number, 53% said it should stay the same, and 14% said it should be lower. Obviously there’s selection bias here since these are the people who got in, though.
2. To your “...because people will refuse to apply out of scrupulosity” point — I want to clarify that this isn’t how our admissions process works, and neither you nor anyone else we accept would be bumping anyone out of a spot. We simply have a specific bar for admissions and everyone above that bar gets admitted (though previous comms have unfortunately mentioned or implied capacity limits). This is why the events have been getting larger as the community grows.
3. I wanted to outline the case for having an admissions process and limiting the size of the event, which is roughly:
   1. We host different events for different purposes. EAG is intended as a more selective event for people who mostly already have a lot of context on EA and are taking significant action based on EA principles. The EAGx conference series (which will serve nearly 5000 unique attendees across the different events this year) is intended to reach a broader, newer-to-EA audience.
   2. EAG is primarily a networking event, as one-to-one conversations are consistently reported to be the most valuable experiences for attendees. I think there’s less value in very new folks having such conversations — a lot of the time they’re better off learning more about EA and EA cause areas first (similar to how I should probably learn how ML works before I go to an ML conference).
   3. Very involved and engaged EAs might be less eager to come to EAG if the event is not particularly selective. (This is a thing we sometimes get complaints about but it’s hard for people to voice this opinion publicly, because it can sound elitist). These are precisely the kinds of people we most need to come — they are the most in-demand people that attendees want to talk to (because they can offer mentorship, job opportunities, etc.).
   4. We think that some of our most promising newer attendees would also have a worse experience if the event were fully open.
   5. Using an admissions process lets us try to screen out applicants who have caused problems at past events or who seem likely to cause problems.
4. I don’t think this is really what your post is about, but I wanted to clarify: EAG exists to make the world a better place, rather than serve the EA community or make EAs happy. This unfortunately sometimes means EAs will be sad due to decisions we’ve made — though if this results in the world being a worse place overall, then we’ve clearly made a mistake.
5. I agree it’s hard to identify promising people reliably, but I don’t think it’s impossible to get some signal here. I do think our admissions process could improve though, and we adjust the process every year. We're currently in the process of revisiting the application/admissions process with the aim of identifying promising people more reliably — though of course it's hard to make this perfect.
6. “The conference is called "EA Global" and is universally billed as the place where EAs meet one another, learn more about the movement, and have a good time together.” It’s possible we should rename the event, and I agree this confusion and reputation is problematic, but I would like to clarify that we don’t define the event like this anywhere (though perhaps we used to in previous years). It’s now explicitly described as an event with a high bar for highly engaged EAs (see here). We also have the EAGx conference series, which is more introductory and has a lower bar for admissions. If someone is excited to learn more about EA, they’d likely be better suited to an EAGx event (and they’d be more likely to get accepted, too).
7. Having different levels of access to the conference app seems like it might worsen rather than improve the problem of some people feeling like second-class citizens.
8. Regarding the specific volunteer case you mentioned, I’m not exactly sure what the details were here and it’s not something anyone on the team recalls. It does sound like something that easily could have happened — just perhaps a few years ago. FWIW, as of 2019, all volunteers had to meet the general bar for admission.
9. I think I would also be in favor of other more specialized conferences, such as those on AI safety or global health, but these are unlikely to be things we’ll have capacity to run at the moment (though I encourage people to apply for CEA event support and run events like these).

Thanks again for the post, hope these points are helpful!

I think EA currently is much more likely to fail to achieve most of its goals by ending up with a culture that is ill-suited for its aims, being unable to change direction when new information comes in, and generally fail due to the problems of large communities and other forms of organization (like, as you mentioned, the community behind NeurIPS, which is currently on track to be an unstoppable behemoth racing towards human extinction that I so desperately wish was trying to be smaller and better coordinated). 

I think EA Global admissions is one of the few places where we can apply steering on how EA is growing and what kind of culture we are developing, and giving this up seems like a cost, without particularly strong commensurate benefits. 

On a more personal level, I do want to be clear that I am glad about having a bigger EA Global this year, but I would probably also just stop attending an open-invite EA Global since I don't expect it would really share my culture or be selected for people I would really want to be around. I think this year's EA Global came pretty close to exhausting my ability to be thrown into a large group of people with a quite different culture of differing priorities, and I expect less selection would cause me to hit that limit quite reliably. 

I do think there are potentially ways to address many of the problems you list in this post by changing the admissions process, which I do think is currently pretty far from perfect (in-particular, 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).

Not opinionating on the general point, but:

In her early 20s, Kelsey was taking leave from college for mental health reasons and babysitting her friends' kid for room and board. If either of us had been in the student group, we would have been the least promising of the lot

IIRC, Kelsey was in fact the president of the Stanford EA student group, and I do not think she would've been voted "least likely to succeed" by the other members. 

I had a pretty painful experience where I was in a pretty promising position in my career, already pretty involved in EA, and seeking direct work opportunities as a software developer and entrepreneur. I was rejected from EAG twice in a row while my partner, a newbie who just wanted to attend for fun (which I support!!!) was admitted both times. I definitely felt resentful and jealous in ways that I would say I coped with successfully but wow did it feel like the whole thing was lame and unnecessary. 

I felt rejected from EA at large and yeah I do think my life plans have adjusted in response. I know there were many such cases! In the height of my involvement I was a very devoted EA, really believed in giving as much as I could bear (time etc included). 

This level of devotion juxtaposed with being turned away from even hanging out with people, it's quite a shock. I think the high devotion version of my life would be quite fulfilling and beautiful, and I got into EA seeking a community for that, but never found it. EAG admissions is a pretty central example of this mismatch to me.  

I generally directionally agree with Eli Nathan and Habryka's responses. I also weak-downvoted this post (though felt borderline about that), for two reasons. 

(1) I would have preferred a post that tried harder to even-handedly discuss and weigh up upsides and downsides, whereas this mostly highlighted upsides of expansion, and (2) I think it's generally easier to publicly call for increased inclusivity than to publicly defend greater selectivity (the former will generally structurally have more advocates and defenders). In that context I feel worse about (1) and wish Scott had handled that asymmetry better.

But I wouldn't have downvoted if this had been written by someone new to the community, I hold Scott to a higher standard and I'm  pretty uncertain about the right policy with respect to voting differently in response to the same content on that basis. 

This comment (seen on Kerry Vaughan's Twitter) hit me hard:

That comment hit me hard too. 

In general, it hurts to make people feel bad and if I was optimizing the event for making myself/EAs feel good it would look different. 

I had an hour long call with the person who made that post and was able to connect them with resources and explain the admissions process and considerations that go into it in a way that seemed to help. I think we could do a better job of explaining these things publicly and I think we should do that.

We should at least try this once and see what happens

+100 on this. I think the screening processes for these conferences overweight legible in-groupy accomplishments like organizing an EA group in your local town/college, and underweights regular impressive people like startup founders who are EA-curious -- and this is really really bad for movement diversity.

Yes, I might be salty because I was rejected from both EAG London and Future Forum this year... 

But I also think the bar for me introducing friends to EA-curious is higher, because there isn't a cool thing I can invite them into. Anime conventions such as Anime Expo or Crunchyroll Expo are the opposite of this - everyone is welcome, bring your friends, have a good time -- and it works out quite well for keeping people interested in the subject.

I quite like the idea of an EAG: Open, but presumably as a complement, rather than replacement, to the current networking-focused EAGlobal.

One thing that seems missing from the EA ecosystem is a single place where there are talks which convey new information to lots of interested, relevant people in one go, and those ideas can be discussed.

This used to happen at EAGlobal, but it doesn't anymore because (for understandable reasons) the event is very networking focused, so talks basically got canned. I find it odd there's now so little public discussion at the EA community's flagship event. (The only major communication that happens is at the opening and closing ceremonies, and is (always?) done by Will.  Will is great, but it would be great to have a diversity of messages and messengers.) 

There is more content at EAGxs, but then only a fraction of people see those. I've realised I'm basically touring the world giving more-or-less the same talk so most people hear it once. In some ways, this is quite fun, but it's also pretty inefficient. I'd prefer to give that talk once and then be able to move onto other topics.

The EA forum currently serves as the central place for discussion, but it's not that widely used and stuff tends to disappear from view pretty fast. It certainly doesn't do the same thing as TED-style big talks do for communicating important ideas.

I think the people responsible for EA Global admissions (including Amy Labenz, Eli Nathan, and others) have added a bunch of value to me over the years by making it more likely that a conversation or meeting with somebody at EA Global who I don’t already know will end up being productive. Making admissions decisions at EAG (and being the public face of an exclusive admissions policy) sounds like a really thankless job and I know a bunch of the people involved end up having to make decisions that make them pretty sad because they think it’s best for the world. I mostly just wanted to express some appreciation for them and to mention that I’ve benefitted from it since it feels uncomfortable to say out loud so is probably under expressed.

One positive effect of selective admissions that I don’t often see discussed is that it makes me more likely to take meetings with folks I don’t already know. I’d guess that this increases the accessibility of EA leaders to a bunch of community members.

Fwiw, I’ve sometimes gotten overambitious with the number of meetings I take at EAG and ended up socially exhausted enough to be noticeably less productive for several days afterwards. This is a big enough cost that I’ve skipped some years. So, I think in the past I’ve probably been on the margin where if the people at EAG had not been selected for being people I could be helpful to, I’d have been less likely to go.

The Future Forum had a much worse version of this, eg: shifting language in their web pitch, missed self-set application review deadlines by 4-6 weeks, and then denying an unknown, suspected large, % of otherwise impressive applicants in relevant fields. I mention this here because, due to Future Forum’s proximity in date to EAG SF, the uncertainty around FF acceptance led me to delay travel arrangements, cancel pre-EAG meetings, and nearly cancel the trip to SF entirely.

Another impact was that two high-achieving colleagues on the cusp of joining EA came to believe that FF used its nomination form like a multi-level marketing ploy to “tell us who you know” and had no intention of sincerely evaluating most applications. I don’t share this view but wanted to share a case study of how tone shifts / missed comms deadlines during event applications can lead to the worst possible thing being assumed.

Author of “ How to Survive EAG: San Francisco FOMO,” here. In fairness to EAG organizers, I want to clarify that I did not apply for EAG SF this year. While I was bummed not to go, I was on a digital sabbatical during the application period, so I do not put any sort of blame on EAG organizers, as they had nothing to do with why I didn’t attend. I applied to two past EAGs and was accepted to both. While I support the general sentiment that it is a bummer to miss out on EAG, the post truly was written all in good fun, and I did actually have a great time putting that post together.

As I mentioned on one of those Facebook threads: At least don't bill the event as a global conference for EA people and then tell people no you can't come. Call it maybe the EA Professionals Networking Event or something, which (a) makes it clear this is for networking and not the kind of academic conference people might be used to, and (b) implies this might be exclusive. But if you bill it as a global conference, then make it be like a global conference. And at the very least make it very clear that it's exclusive! Personally I didn't notice any mention of exclusivity at all in any EA Global posts or advertising until I heard about people actually getting rejected and feeling bad about that.

Big fan of your blog. Some quick counterpoints/counterarguments (that are not meant to be decisive): 

Re: ...because it makes people upset.

1. As others noted, the point of EA(G) is to have the maximum impact on moral patients overall, not to be welcoming to individual EAs or make EAs happy. I think it's not impossible that aiming for community happiness is a better proxy goal than aiming for impact directly (e.g.) , but I think it'd be quite surprising at least to me and should be explicitly argued for more.
2. More to the point, I'm not convinced that having open EAGs will actually make people happier. To some degree, I read the exclusivity as part of an important signal for people to complain/be upset about, and that as long as we have rejections for reasons other than commitment, people will be similarly upset. I expect with open EAGs, the goalposts will move and people will instead be upset about:
   1. Getting rejected from directly important things like grants or jobs
   2. Networking "tiers" within EAG
   3. More illegible signals of status
   4. probably even EAF karma, downvotes, other social media stuff etc
3. I think it genuinely makes sense to be upset about these things. And it's unfortunate and I do think people's emotions matter. But ultimately we're here to reduce existential risk or end global poverty or stop factory farming or other important work. Not primarily to make each other happy, especially during work hours
   1. (with maybe a few exceptions, like if you're an EA therapist or something).

Re: ...because you can't identify promising people.

1. I think you're just wrong about the object-level point. Both you and Kelsey (and, I suspect, future analogues) were successful and high-potential in ways that are highly legible to EA-types.
2. However, I think your argument can basically be preserved by arguing a) that people who are legibly impressive in non-EA ways (a la Austin's point) will be rejected plus arguing that legibly impressive in non-EA ways is a better predictor of future counterfactual impact than being impressive in EA ways. Or b) people who aren't legibly impressive will often end up having a huge impact later, so the processes are just really bad at discernment. So I think #1 isn't my true rejection.
3. My more central rejection is like, man, all selection processes are imperfect. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have selection processes at all. Otherwise the same arguments applies to jobs and grants, and I think it's probably wrong for us to give grants and jobs without discernment.
4. More generally, I wish there's an attempt to grapple with the costs and benefits, rather than just look at the costs.

...because people will refuse to apply out of scrupulosity.

1. Yes, this is unfortunate. But again I would not guess that great people self-selecting out of something is particularly common.
   1. (I think I might be unusually blind to this type of thing however. For example, I have nearly zero imposter syndrome and I'm given to understand that imposter syndrome is a common thing in EA).
2. I also think this can be ameliorated through better messaging.

...because of Goodhart's Law

1. Oh man I should have a longer post about this at some point, but in general I think EAs and rationalists are too prone to invoke "Goodhart's Law" as a magic curse that suggests something is maximally bad in the limit, without considering more empirically how useful or bad is something in practice.
2. And there's a bunch of advantages of having people aim towards something (even if imperfect), like in general I think we're better off with more BOTECs and more evaluations, rather than less.
3. (weak-moderate strength argument) "If you only let people whose work fits the current paradigm to sit at the table, you're guaranteed not to get these." To some degree I think there's a bit of an internal contradiction: to the degree that our legible systems are poorly legibly incentivizing independent thinkers, this is a somewhat self-correcting problem. We'd expect the best independent thinkers to be less affected/damaged by our norms.

...because man does not live by networking alone

1. I actually don't have a clear understanding of this point, so I feel not ready to argue against it.
2. I do think some EAs are looking for EA events/community mostly from a "vibes" angle, where they find being effectively altruistic is very hard, and they want events that helps with maintaining altruistic commitment. I do have a lot of sympathy to this view, and I do agree it is quite important.

...because you can have your cake and eat it too.

1. I suspect this will not solve most of the emotional problems people have (for reasons I mentioned in that section), or Goodhart's Law, or the "can't identify promising people" problem. Though I agree there's a decent chance it can significantly ameliorate the "man doesn't live by networking alone" problem and the "people will refuse to apply out of scrupulosity" problem.

In general, I thought this post was interesting and talked about a serious potential issue/mistake in our community, and I'm glad that this conversation is started/re-ignited. I also appreciate having distinct sections that makes it easier to argue against. However, in some ways I find the post also one-sided, overly simplistic, and too rhetorical. I ended up neither upvoting nor downvoting this post as a result. 

Add my voice to the others who'd support an EACon with open registration (maybe with particular persona-non-grata being excluded, I would not support an event that made a big deal about 'excluding nobody' or some such).   Get some of the people who run successful science-fiction conventions, pick a relatively accessible and cheap location (Las Vegas, maybe?), have panels, invite merchants to bring by EA-relevant or just weird merchandise.

I actually agree that it would be good to try running an EAG:Open that is >3x bigger, with marketing, big-name speakers and an open invite list. But organising it would probably be >3x as much work, and <3x as valuable, so I don't think it's right to nag CEA into running it, nor should it replace current EAGs.

A few quick thoughts:

1. I always appreciate well-meaning discussion and thought this brought up some good points. That said, I overall don't really agree with it.
2. It's a lot of work to organize an event for many people. In the last year, total global attendance at EAGs (between all of them) seems to have grown by around an order of magnitude or so; from maybe ~500 ~3 years ago, to maybe ~6k this year? My impression is that it's been correspondingly tricky to scale the CEA team in charge of this growth. I imagine specific proposals to "Open EAGs" would look like some combination of charging a fair bit more for them and/or allowing 10k+ people at each event. This doesn't at all seem trivial. Maybe it would be easy to do a very minimalist/mediocre version of a huge event, but I imagine if that were done, people would find a lot of reasons to complain.
3. My personal proposal is that eventually, it would be nice (assuming there are people available to do it) to try out essentially an "EA Open", with 5k-15k people. If this works, then rename "EA Open" to "EA Global", and then continue having a smaller "EA Global event", but now named something more like, "Super boring detailed EA summit." This way the senior people could still have their event, and others can have some "EA" event to go to (that's called "EA Global", if they care about that so much). 
4. Even if a bigger conference isn't set up, I think "EA Global" might be a mediocre name for the current conference. The harm caused by the resentment of people not getting invited to it might outweigh the benefits of making it seem more accessible to some who do get in, but wouldn't have applied otherwise. The branding could likewise change to make the focus seem more professional/dedicated.
5. Some people treat "EAG" as "A professional venue to do work meetings", and others treat it as "the place for the cool kids to be cool with each other". I'd probably prioritize the former for a few reasons.
6. Most of the benefits of attending EAG get watered down when you increase the size. I imagine the 10k-person version would look very different. The senior people that do show up wouldn't have much time per person, and would be there for different reasons (recruitment, some very selective mentorship). The experience for most people would be "a chance to talk with many others who are vaguely interested in EA". This doesn't sound very exciting to me, but maybe it could be made to work somehow. 

I am sceptical about this, I think understanding the formula of EAG and EAGx helps contextualise and solve most of the issues in the post. 

There's currently 8 EAGx in the next 7 months, and probably many more in the pipework. EAGx events are designed to have a more inclusive bar to entry. It should be noted, that they not exactly small events. We are aiming for 1000 people in EAGxNordics in April next year. EAGx are also, notoriously, "weirder".  

With that in mind, I am not sure how less events, which are less targeted, but bigger  would be an advantage. But I have to admit, the quickest way to resolve this would be to try and run an event for 10,000 people, and collect feedback 

[EDIT: Eli from CEA has clarified that places are not currently a limitation for accepting people into EAG]

I agree it's a problem that 1) promising people and 2) established professionals in EA are not attending EAG because there aren't enough places.

The solution is not to make EAG open access. This is antithetical to keeping EA weird.

The solution is to plan bigger EAGs, and keep the selectiveness criteria the same (or even up the selectiveness). And being ok with not filling the planned quota - empty seats are much better than disgrunted people left out.

But then of course there is the question of what's keeping EAG organizers from making them twice the size. They will have a better insight here!

This comment (seen on Kerry Vaughan's Twitter) hit me hard:

I clicked through to the source. I feel this person. They made a significant commitment because they wanted to help others, and they followed through on it.

This is the type of person I would love to meet. But not at EAG, because I do not want to go to EAG. I don't fit there, and there are other events (e.g. EAGx or online events) that fit me better.

Late to the party, but I just came across this post and wanted to add another perspective. For context, I've been "living EA principles" for a while, but am not really involved in the community and have never applied to EAG.

The fact that the biggest EA conference is intentionally exclusive is something of a red flag for me and makes me significantly less likely to apply to EAG. In my experience, one of the strongest predictors of whether I will connect with a given community is how much they value inclusivity. (This has been true even in cases where I was part of the "in-group".)

I understand that there are tradeoffs, and I don't have enough context to form an opinion on whether the benefits of exclusivity are worth the costs in this case. My goal here isn't to argue for either position; I just wanted to add another data point for those costs.

Hi Scott, I truly appreciated your post on "Open EA Global" and am inclined to agree on most fronts. This is a month old, EAG DC has passed, and so I'll strive to focus on what's new or unique versus what has already been said:

I'm new to the EA community and have not been to EAG. In fact, I applied to EAGx Berlin this month and was told to apply to a local conference, then I applied to EAG DC and was told to apply to an EAGx. (No EAGx will be posted in my region until likely Boston in the spring; although I can look forward to the virtual conference coming up.) I was excited to dive in to the community and disappointed by the chicken-and-egg here and the impersonal rejection process. I still believe EA is a great cause, I understand the thankless job of the staff in these decisions, and I acknowledge the ways I can strengthen my personal candidacy. (But I wish the website had not invited me to apply with such cheer! And I wish I had spent less time on this particular process.)

Despite not being an EA, I possess professional experience around community engagement and customer service. I led massive Growth in two companies from obscurity through IPO. My teams have popularized challenging concepts to mainstream audiences and dealt with toxic customer service issues. I acknowledge I am one year into my EA journey and far from the smartest person in the room.

Being an EA is an identity, it's a personal choice. That sums up why EAG rejections may sting so badly compared to, say, getting passed over for a job offer or finding out Burning Man tix already sold out. The literature can state that this is merely admission to event and it's not intended to be a personal judgment, but the verdict might not feel that way to an individual. Even in these comments, I see lots of talk of "not meeting the bar" which personally makes me uncomfortable when the bar is so ill-defined. A "good enough EA" seems like a straightforward interpretation of this bar, so I get why some folks take it personally.

The overall objective of EA is to find the best ways to help people and put them into practice. Let's set aside costs, logistics, precedent and hurt feelings... for EA to find the most effective interventions and scale them, it benefits from casting a large net. This exposes the growing movement to new ideas which can be sifted through (and incorporated or discarded). So it seems to me, the larger, more open conference serves the overarching objective best. There are plenty of technologies that can and do help with matching in order to make the event "feel" smaller for various reasons. There are still plenty of ways to pamper the 800 pound gorillas.

To an outsider, it's not apparent how networking-heavy EAG is. It's only because I have multiple colleagues who have attended EAG in the past that I learned how the 1-1 matching is a key factor in doling out spaces. I approached the event with the mentality of "let's consume content, hear keynotes and absorb all that EA has to offer!" It's clear from some of the comments that this is relatively unimportant, but I do wonder if EAG misses a golden opportunity to amplify the content for general community-building (and as one comment mentions - to elevate voices besides Will's).

Is South by Southwest (Tech) a worthwhile template for EAG? The massive conference in Austin, TX has a growing share of detractors, but it did a lot of things right. The "Day Pass" is the front door for folks who are attending, learning, listening (and paying big bucks) to attend. Then there are all manner of networking events from semi-public lectures to exclusive gatherings on top of the Ritz. I don't feel bad that I didn't get a 1-1 with the CEO of X company, because I didn't even know that was going on. That conference has succeeded in letting anyone in and creating exclusivity at the same time.

Thanks again for the consideration and I hope you find this helpful, etc. -Steve

I disagreed when at the start of this post on the grounds that I strongly prefer smaller events, but updated towards agreeing fairly strongly, subject to the logistical issues Scott mentions at the start.

1. Saulius' point that we could try it once seems excellent
2. I really dislike the desire to police EA culture that people are expressing elsewhere in the comments. Hardcore vegans didn't stop being hardcore vegans when vegan circles started admitting reduceatarians et al, and I don't see any reason to think hardcore EAs would disappear or have trouble meeting each other just because less hardcore EAs started showing up.
3. If they did have trouble meeting each other, you could define one or more submovements that people could opt into, possibly with requirements for entry to their congresses.
4. The event's culture is still going to be heavily dominated by the talks, marketing, and prearranged norms.
5. You could raise the price to a profitmaking point, funding the smaller, weirder conferences, while still offering free/subsidised access to promising people who couldn't afford it.

Why not be creative and have a virtual parallel EA global event? There's lots of opportunity to be creative there. 

For example it could be as simple as specified times for people to hop on the EA Gather dot town. There are also a lot of opportunities to match people creatively with pre-survey work and such.