This time of year, there are surely many folks out there upset they didn’t get into EA Global (EAG). As the year continues, there will be plenty more people who get rejected, and feel hurt. I am one of them.
I'm writing this post to briefly share my experience, and give space for others to vent and commiserate about not being able to attend EAG.
As a quick aside, I understand that not everyone can get into EAG due to the high standards the admittance committee has. (at least with the way it’s currently structured.) I also understand that with funding constraints many people had to be rejected, almost definitely more than in previous years. I’m sure that it’s not easy being on the EAG team and making these decisions.
That being said, as many of us know, being rejected from EAG can be miserable. Last year, after reading and learning about Effective Altruism for many years, I upended my entire life to work towards having a larger impact. I started an EA group in my local city. I quit my lucrative job and joined an early stage, mission driven AI startup, working for free for months until we secured funding. All this in the hopes I would have more impact and be able to give more to the EA community, and the world.
Unfortunately despite all of this effort, I was rejected from EAG. Surprisingly I got in last year, despite being much less involved and having less potential impact from my own perspective. It stings, and I’m frustrated. I don’t blame the people making the decision as I’m sure they had good reasons not to accept my application. But it still hurts. It feels like I devoted hundreds of hours of my life and tied my identity to a group, only to be told I wasn’t good enough.
As I said, I want to invite others feeling the same way to comment. I don’t want to encourage destructive or vindictive dog piling on CEA or the EAG team, but I do think it’s important to share what a rejection from EAG means to people.
I'd also like to encourage people who did get invited to EAG, or look down on this type of post as complaining, to try and have charity towards folks like me. A bit of empathy can go a long way.
I agree that nobody is trying to evaluate my worth as a person with this admission, perhaps I should've phrased things more carefully. For what it's worth I do think I'd be highly impactful at the conference, but my skillset is outside the scope of what I'm trying to get at in this post.
No matter how many carefully crafted rebuttals and distinctions people make, the fact remains that I have spent years of my life working to improve my impact, and then have not gotten accepted into a conference that's focused on people with high impact.
I do appreciate you and Lizka trying to soften the blow, but I want to emphasize that it's a blow nonetheless. Even if I take what you both are saying as a given (that it's a judgment on my usefulness and not me as a person) the rejection is still difficult to handle. It's basically saying that my skillset, career, work I've done, etc, is not important or impactful enough to make a difference at EAG.
All that being said, it's a whole different ballgame discussing this coldly and rationally, versus being in the seat and dealing with the emotions. I applaud you for being able to fully separate the rejection from your own worth, but that's not realistic for me and I would guess for most people it isn't realistic either.