Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Save the Date: EAGxCambridge (UK), published by David Mears on December 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Save the dates: EAGxCambridge (part of the EA Global conference series) will take place March 17th-19th 2023 in Cambridge, UK. Official launch to follow soon.

What is EAGx?

EA Global conferences are not the only events for people interested in effective altruism! EAGx conferences are locally-organized conferences designed for a wider audience, primarily for people:

Familiar with the core ideas of effective altruism

Interested in learning more about what to do

From the region or country where the conference is taking place (or living there)

The event will feature:

Talks and workshops on pressing problems that the EA community is currently trying to address and ideas to help the community achieve its goals

The opportunity to meet and share advice with other EAs in the community, including meet-ups for people who share interests or backgrounds

Social events at and around the conference

Applications

We will post the application form shortly, along with more information about the conference. In the meantime, sign up here to be notified when applications open.

Content suggestions

What speakers, sessions, or topics would you like to see? Let us know your ideas in the comments below, or use this form. (You can also suggest yourself.)

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What you prioritise is mostly moral intuition, published by James Ozden on December 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Note: A linkpost from my blog. Epistemic status: A confused physicist trying to grapple with philosophy, and losing.

Effective Altruism is about doing as much good as possible with a given amount of resources, using reason and evidence. This sounds very appealing, but there’s the age-old problem, what counts as “the most good”? Despite the large focus on careful reasoning and rigorous evidence within Effective Altruism, I speculate that many people decide what is “the most good” based largely on moral intuitions.

I should also point out that these moral dilemmas don’t just plague Effective Altruists or those who prescribe to utilitarianism. These thorny moral issues apply to everyone who wants to help others or “do good”. As Richard Chappell neatly puts it, these are puzzles for everyone. If you want to cop-out, you could reject any philosophy where you try to rank how bad or good things are, but this seems extremely unappealing. Surely if we’re given the choice between saving ten people from a terrible disease like malaria and ten people from hiccups, we should be able to easily decide that one is worse than the other? Anything else seems very unhelpful to the world around us, where we allow grave suffering to continue as we don’t think comparing “bads” are possible.

To press on, let’s take one concrete example of a moral dilemma: How important is extending lives relative to improving lives? Put more simply, given limited resources, should we focus on averting deaths from easily preventable diseases or increasing people’s quality of life?

This is not a question that one can easily answer with randomised controlled trials, meta-analyses and other traditional forms of evidence! Despite this, it might strongly affect what you dedicate your life to working on, or the causes you choose to support. Happier Lives Institute have done some great research looking at this exact question and no surprises - your view on this moral question matters a lot. When looking at charities that might help people alive today, they find that it matters a lot whether you prioritise the youngest people (deprivationism), older children over infants (TRIA), or the view that death isn’t necessarily bad, but that living a better life is what matters most (Epicureanism). For context, the graph below shows the relative cost-effectiveness of various charities under different philosophical assumptions, using the metric WELLBYs, which taken into account the subjective experiences of people.

So, we have a problem. If this is a question that could affect what classifies as “the most good”, and I think it’s definitely up there, then how do we proceed? Do we just do some thought experiments, weigh up our intuitions against other beliefs we hold (using reflective equilibrium potentially), incorporate moral uncertainty, and go from there? For a movement based on doing “the most good”, this seems very unsatisfying! But sadly, I think this problem rears its head in several important places. To quote Michael Plant (a philosopher from the University of Oxford and director of Happier Lives Institute):

“Well, all disagreements in philosophy ultimately come down to intuitions, not just those in population ethics!”

To note, I think this is very different from empirical disagreements about doing “the most good”. For example, Effective Altruism (EA) is pretty good at using data and evidence to get to the bottom of how to do a certain kind of good. One great example is GiveWell, who have an extensive research process, drawing mostly on high-quality randomised control trials (see this spreadsheet for the cost-effectiveness of the Against Malaria Foundation) to find the most effective ways to hel...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Epigenetics of the mammalian germline, published by Metacelsus on December 23, 2022 on LessWrong.

This is a crosspost from my Substack and is is Part 2 of my epigenetics post series. Part 1 is here.

The year was 1984, and scientists were wondering: why is sperm, and not just eggs, necessary to make a baby mouse?

In non-mammalian species (notably several reptiles), unfertilized eggs can activate as if they were fertilized, copy their genomes, and produce viable offspring. This process is known as parthenogenesis, and scientists could induce it experimentally in mouse eggs, with one research group even reporting live offspring. But as other researchers tried it, it became clear that although parthenogenetic embryos developed to the blastocyst stage, they did not successfully grow to term, and in particular showed defects in the extra-embryonic tissues such as the placenta.

Three labs, led by Azim Surani at Cambridge, Davor Solter at the Wistar Institute, and Robin Lovell-Badge at University College London, were hard at work trying to understand why.

One hypothesis was that there was some necessary component missing from the egg cytoplasm which the sperm provided. But this was quickly ruled out, because when both the male and the female pronucleus were transplanted from normally fertilized eggs into enucleated recipient eggs, the resulting embryos developed normally. So what was going on?

Around the same time, the Surani and Solter labs performed basically the same experiment:

Take fertilized eggs and remove either the male or the female pronucleus using a tiny glass needle.

Transplant a new male or female pronucleus into each egg, generating eggs with two male pronuclei, two female pronuclei, or one of each (as a control).

See how the resulting embryos developed.

Both of these research groups came to the same conclusion: the only embryos that developed to term were ones containing both a male and a female pronucleus. These experiments were performed using inbred mouse lines, in which an X-bearing sperm is genetically identical to an egg. So, proper development required some characteristic that was associated with the male-derived and female-derived chromosomes, but was not related to their sequences. Hmm, sounds like epigenetics.

This result led Azim Surani to remark:

Our studies suggest that specific imprinting of the genome during gametogenesis is essential for full-term development in the mouse. At some point during embryonic development and formation of primordial germ cells, previous influences on the genome are presumably lost and new ones initiated during the production of gametes.

This was a remarkable conclusion to make in 1984, but it turned out to be entirely correct.

Epigenetic imprinting

By “imprinting”, Surani meant the phenomenon where some genes are expressed from only one parent’s copy. For example, the IGF2 gene we looked at last time is expressed only from the father’s copy, not the mother’s. Other genes such as UBE3A follow the opposite pattern, being expressed only from the mother’s copy. In 1984, the mechanism of imprinting was unknown, but it turned out to be mediated by DNA methylation. The promoters of certain genes contain imprinting control regions that regulate gene expression depending on their methylation status, which differs between eggs and sperm. In humans there are about 100 known imprinted protein-coding genes, out of a total of about 20,000.

As Surani noted, in order for imprinting to work, the parents’ imprinting marks need to be lost in the precursors of eggs or sperm, and sex-specific marks need to be written. Let’s take a closer look at how this is accomplished.

The cycle of the mammalian germline

Everything starts when a sperm fertilizes an egg, forming a zygote. The zygote undergoes a rapid series of cell divisions, forming a ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Löb's Lemma: an easier approach to Löb's Theorem, published by Andrew Critch on December 24, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum.

tl;dr: Löb's Theorem is much easier to grok if you separate the parts of the proof that use the assumption □pp from the parts that don't. The parts that don't use □pp can be extracted as a stand-alone result, which I hereby dub "Löb's Lemma".

Here's how it works.

Key properties of ⊢ and □

The proofs here will use the following standard properties of ⊢ and □ (source: Wikipedia), which respectively stand for provability and provability encoded within arithmetic:

(necessitation) From ⊢A, conclude ⊢□A. Informally, this says that if A can be proven, then it can be proven that it can be proven (by just writing out and checking the proof within arithmetic).

(internal necessitation) ⊢□A□□A . If A is provable, then it is provable that it is provable (basically the same as the previous point).

(box distributivity) ⊢□(AB)(□A□B). This rule allows one to apply modus ponens inside the provability operator. If it is provable that A implies B, and A is provable, then B is provable.

(deduction theorem) From A⊢B, conclude ⊢AB: if assuming A is enough to prove B, then it's possible to prove under no assumptions that AB.

Point 4 is helpful and pretty intuitive, but for whatever reason isn't used in the main Wikipedia article on Löb's Theorem.

Löb's Lemma

Claim: Assume Ψ and p are any statements satisfying ⊢Ψ↔□Ψp. Then ⊢□Ψ↔□p.

Intuition: By assumption, the sentence Ψ is equivalent to saying "If this sentence is provable, then p". Intuitively, Ψ has very little content, except for the p part at the end, so it makes sense that □Ψ boils down to nothing more than □p in terms of logical equivalence. Reminder: this does not use the assumption □pp from Löb's Theorem at all.

Proof:

Let's do the forward implication first:

□Ψ⊢□□Ψ by internal necessitation (□Ψ□□Ψ).

□Ψ⊢□(□Ψp) using box distributivity on the assumption, with A=Ψ and B=□Ψp.

□Ψ⊢□p from 1 and 2 by box distributivity.

⊢□Ψ□p from 3 by the deduction theorem.

Now for the backwards implication, which isn't needed for Löb's Theorem, but is handy anyway:

⊢p(□Ψp) is a tautology.

⊢□p□(□Ψp) by box distributivity on 1.

⊢□Ψ↔□(□Ψp) by box distributivity on the assumption.

⊢□p□Ψ by 2 and 3.

I like this result because both directions of the proof are fairly short, it doesn't use the assumption □pp at all, and the conclusion itself is also fairly intuitive. The statement Ψ just turns out to have no content except for p itself, from the perspective of writing proofs.

Löb's Theorem, now in just 6 lines

If you can remember Löb's Lemma, you can write a very straightforward proof of Löb's Theorem in just 6 lines:

Claim: If p is any sentence such that ⊢□pp, then ⊢p

Proof:

Let Ψ be any sentence satisfying ⊢Ψ↔(□Ψp), which exists by the existence of modal fixed points (or by the Diagonal Lemma).

⊢□Ψ□p by Löb's Lemma.

⊢□pp by assumption.

⊢□Ψp by 1 and 2 combined.

⊢Ψ by 3 and the defining property of Ψ

⊢□Ψ by necessitation.

⊢p by 3 and 5.

«mic drop»

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On sincerity, published by Joe Carlsmith on December 23, 2022 on LessWrong.

Cross-posted from my website. Audio version here, or search "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Rilke

1. Introduction

There’s a thing I call “sincerity” that matters a lot to me. In particular, it’s core to how I hope to orient towards the world. And it’s one of the main things I look for in people and communities.

My hope, in this essay, is to bring what I mean by sincerity into clearer view. But the term has a fairly rich set of associations for me, which I’m not sure will ultimately admit of a cleanly unified analysis. I start by discussing five of these associations. Sincerity seems to me closely related to:

Something like truth-seeking (“scout-mindset”), but for agency as a whole rather than just beliefs

“Not playing pretend”

One’s different motivations working in harmony

“Seriousness”

(Less confidently) Some stuff about non-ego/altruism/goodness

I then discuss whether we can unify these five associations under a single principle. I offer two possibilities for doing so. The first is conceptual, and takes scout-mindset-but-for-agency as the core thing. The second is empirical, and takes “not playing pretend” as the core thing. I’m not sure either is adequate.

I also discuss a few of the many failure modes nearby to sincerity: self-deception, extremism, over-confidence, “the-normal-rules-don’t-apply-to-me”-ness, sanctimony, over-concern with sincerity itself (both in others, and in yourself), and that most straightforward and fearsome of failures: just plain picking the wrong actions, even if you did the other stuff right.

Thanks to Katja Grace, Ketan Ramakrishnan, Claire Zabel, Samira Nedungadi, Cate Hall, Bill Zito, Nick Whitaker, and Dwarkesh Patel for discussion.

“Jeanne d’Arc écoutant les voix,” by Thirion, image source here.

2. Initial gestures

There is a true person of no rank who is always coming and going from the portals of your face.

Who is that true person of no rank?

Linji

Before jumping into the five associations above, I want to make a few more general gestures at the thing I have in mind when I say “sincerity,” to get us at least somewhat oriented. First, I’ll note and comment on some related words. Then, I’ll describe some related feelings.

2.1 Some words

The word “sincerity,” here, isn’t perfect. In particular, I think it over-evokes something directly social – e.g. whether you are accurately presenting your beliefs and motivations to others. Google says: “being free from pretense, hypocrisy, and deceit.”

I think something about pretense is important here, and I discuss it below. But sincerity in the main sense I have in mind is compatible with lying (indeed, this is one of the dangers I discuss in the final section).

Suppose, for example, that per grand thought-experimental tradition, you are living amongst the Nazis.You hate Nazism and have total, steely internal clarity about this. When you lie to your boss about your loyalty to Hitler, you are clearly being insincere in one sense – but it’s not the main sense I have in mind.

Also, “sincerity” tempts you to group candidates for sincerity into only two buckets: “sincere” and “insincere.” But much of life is neither actively sincere (at least in my sense), nor especially insincere – consider, for example, a casual greeting.

Still, despite these issues, “sincerity” is the term I actually use. And I don’t think this is an accident. So I’m going to keep using it.

Another word is “earnest.” This might be closer – though it can sound a bit breathless. The idea of being “in good faith” seems related, but also too social. “Genuine” is also too social. “Authentic” is too interested in the self. I’m tempted by “good will,” but unsure (more below).

S...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Animal Advocacy Africa’s 2022 Review - Our Achievements and 2023 Strategy, published by AnimalAdvocacyAfrica on December 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

1. Summary

Animal Advocacy Africa (AAA) works to empower animal advocates who are interested in or are working to reduce farmed animal suffering in African countries. AAA shares knowledge, provides connections, and helps advocates build the skills to run an impactful animal advocacy organisation.

This year, we:

Helped 17 partner organisations raise a total of ~US$83,000. We discuss how much of this we think may have counterfactually happened without AAA’s support in Section 3.

Provided strategic advice and feedback to 15 organisations, and influenced at least 2 of our partners to adopt high-impact interventions, with one adopting a high-impact intervention in preventing or slowing the growth of industrial animal agriculture in Uganda and one leading a cage-free campaign in Ghana.

Helped connect at least 6 of our partners to influential figures and organisations in the global Effective Altruism (EA) and animal advocacy movements, with the aim of improving the visibility of the farmed animal advocacy movement in Africa.

Released two research reports on farmed animal advocacy in the African and Asian contexts.

Next year we intend to:

Continue our current capacity-building programme, with changes and improvements made based on feedback and monitoring & evaluation findings.

Start regranting funds to especially promising African advocates and organisations to encourage effective programming and interventions that we think are most likely to help farmed animals in African countries.

Identify evidence-based strategies and work with local advocates to mitigate the rise of intensive animal farming in Africa as much as possible.

Our primary bottleneck, and that of our partner organisations, remains a lack of funding. Our total funding gap for 2023 is $290,000. We intend to mitigate this by:

Better emphasising the importance, neglectedness and tractability of farmed animal advocacy work in Africa. This includes improving overall visibility of the movement in Africa by highlighting the work that organisations are doing to funders and the wider international movement, and facilitating networking and connections between African organisations and international advocates.

Better demonstrating our added value to African groups and to the African movement more broadly. Consistently tracking our progress and showcasing monitoring & evaluation findings more clearly for potential donors. Relatedly, better highlighting our theory of change with key cruxes validated.

Hiring a full-time Fundraising & Communications staff.

Increasing and improving outreach to high-net-worth individuals who may be interested in supporting farmed animal welfare in Africa.

Registering in the United States to qualify for various matching opportunities offered during Giving Season.

2. Why farmed animal advocacy in Africa?

We believe that farmed animal advocacy in Africa is a highly impactful project to work on for several reasons:

The human population of Africa is expected to nearly triple by 2100. Meat production in Africa has nearly doubled since 2000, and this rate is expected to increase to match the growing population and growing wealth of the continent.

Of all continents, Africa has the highest growth rate in aquatic farming.

Farmed animal advocacy is incredibly neglected in Africa — in 2019, Open Philanthropy estimated that only $1 million went towards farmed animal advocacy work in Africa per year.

Building the farmed animal advocacy movement in Africa before intensive animal farming is locked-in may improve the lives of millions of animals in the near- and long-term future and potentially prevent millions of animals from being born in factory fa...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Can someone help me refine my goals and proposal to make the maximum impact in my cause area?, published by emmannaemeka on December 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

My name is Emmanuel, and I am a lecturer in Nigeria who is interested in how climate change is making fungi in the environment to be fit to cause diseases. The case of Candida auris is one, C. auris is the first known pathogen that has emerged as a result of climate change and phage therapy as a means of combating antibiotic resistance.

I've been unsuccessful with open philanthropy grants and EA funds, possibly because I don't understand what they actually fund or how to format my application to meet their requirements. In Nigeria, I recently established a phage bank with the goal of developing phage therapy-ready products that can be used to treat specific bacterial infections. A recent study has shown that western sub-Saharan Africa, has the highest all-age death rate attributable to resistance at 27·3 deaths per 100 000. We are beginning to see untreatable pathogens.

My first thought was that this is a good fit for the cause advocated by Open Philanthropy, but with few rejections. I'm having second thoughts. I'm proposing a lab that will produce phage-ready products for clinicians and will also develop low-cost phage-based solutions for treating water against Typhoid fevers and cleaning hospital environments. I'm wondering how to structure this so that it aligns with the goals of Effective altruism.

I require guidance. I'd like to speak with someone who is familiar with the process to get a head start, or can I obtain a sample of a successful proposal to use as a guide in the future? Who would be willing to review my proposal and offer suggestions for meeting EA objectives and making a maximum impact?

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: It's okay to leave, published by Nathan Young on December 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Aged 25, I leave the movement that has been most important in my life so far: Christianity.

Tl;dr

Some things I wish I’d said to myself:

If I leave, what will actually happen?

It’s probably gonna be okay

If it’s true, I need not fear examining it

If I am not happy, that matters

What can I learn by leaving that current me will be glad to know?

I will still have my friends and if I don’t then those friendships weren’t gonna survive

Are decisions reversible?

I can fear something and do it anyway

I like me

Context

I was a conservative evangelical Christian and had been since childhood. I stuck to a relatively literally interpretation of the Bible. I didn’t drink, I hadn’t had sex, I attended church several times a week. I lived in a community of 30 people who supported and critiqued one another about the most intimate details of our lives. I’ve written more here.

It was hard to leave:

I feared I’d go to Hell

I lived with friends from church and they had asked me to leave (which I agreed with) so I needed to find a new home

I didn’t know how to be a non-Chrisitan

Much of my social life revolved around my faith

I conception of the future was Christian also

I acknowledge this isn’t how Christianity is for everyone, though I will argue that conservative evangelicals aren’t exactly handing out pamphlets on how to leave. Making it hard to leave is a feature, not a bug and it’s one I’d like not to replicate.

This post is written about a specific belief system and a specific person. I also give advice to others who might leave communities.

Advice

“If I leave then ______ will happen”

I wish I had considered the actual outcomes. What were the things that I was fearing? I guess it was going to Hell, which is a trickier fear than most, a log jam in my brain, that I feared to touch, let alone remove.

I think it’s worth considering this for all kinds of decisions - jobs, relationships and communities. If your brain doesn’t know what you’ll lose by leaving, why are you there?

“It’s probably gonna be okay”

I wish someone had told me this. That it was probably gonna be fine.

Part of what took me so long was fare. I was scared of finding new friends, having sex, having money without having to beg my parents.

It was fine. I surprised myself by how capable and adaptable I am. I wish someone had held me and told me that I was going to do better than I’d have expected. Perhaps I’d have left a lot earlier than I did.

If you are going to leave a community, you are probably gonna do better than it seems. Solve problems 1 at a time. You’ve made it this far.

“If it’s true, you need not fear examining it”

I was terrified of actually thinking about my faith and ending up in Hell. Terrified of being disloyal, of having to explain my thoughts.

But if something is worth believing in, I think there has to be some chance it’s false. The Christianity I believed in was like an abusive partner, harassing and terrifying me about how I would be punished if I left or even considered leaving. I now see that as a clear red flag. If a community makes it hard to leave - get out. If it turns out to be good, you can always rejoin.

If your community is giving you good things, then you can write them down. And you can write down the bad things too. Because if it’s a thing your future self is gonna want, the good list should contain bigger things.

“You are not happy and that matters”

I wasn’t happy. And somehow people didn’t say that to me. And I didn’t say that to myself. Happiness isn’t everything, but it’s a useful internal signal. If I am not happy it is worth listening to my body and wondering why.

Are you sad? If so, that’s notable. Is your community making you sad? That’s notable too.

“Tell me what you find”

Threa...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Let’s think about slowing down AI, published by Katja Grace on December 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EAGx application community norms we'd like to see, published by Elika on December 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This post is part of an ongoing series: Events in EA: Learnings and Critiques. This post was co-written but is written in Elika's voice from her experience organising EAGxBerkeley. This was writen

Elika worked (as a contractor) for the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) to run EAGxBerkeley. These are written in her personal capacity running the conference and are not endorsed by CEA.

TL;DR: Cancel your EAGx ticket as early as possible if you can't attend.

Note: This isn’t true of all EAGx’s. Some of this likely applies to EAG’s but we don’t speak for the EAG process / team. This is based on organiser frustrations and feedback from EAGxBerkeley and EAGxBoston.

Why? It sometimes takes spots away from other (often new) EA's, it impacts the organisers and the other attendees, and wastes money and resources. We aren't saying don't apply to EAGx's, just apply and register only if you seriously plan on attending. And cancel your ticket as soon as you know you can’t make it.

Why This Matters

Conferences cost money.

A lot more money than people realise. The biggest costs are (in rough order): catering, travel grants, venue, organiser salaries, merch. Catering estimates are often given 1-2 months before the event (e.g. we will have 600-700 attendees for X meals), rough food orders are often placed a month before, and final catering numbers are usually due a week before the conference. This is tight timing with when admissions and registration close (which we try to keep open as late as possible to let the most number of people apply and attend, usually about a week - 10 days before the event).

For EAGxBerkeley, applications closed on November 21st. Registration formally closed on the 25th, and the conference started just 5 days later on December 1st. Our catering numbers of 600 were planned a month in advance and solidified at 630 a week before the conference due to a flurry of additional applications we we're extremely excited about. About 500-550 people attended the conference. We planned on 630.

We spent about $35,000 (lower bound) on meals for no-shows. We spent roughly $350-$500 per person on catering for EAGxBerkeley. The full estimates are about 100 extra meals at $67-$100 a meal x 5 meals = $33,500 - $50,000. EAGxBerkeley provided less meals than typical (5 instead of 8). With 8 meals, snacks, and drinks (which we didn't provide) that's roughly $60,000 - $100,000.

The same situation happened at EAGxBoston, which accepted 100 late applications in the week leading up to the conference. The team didn't know "the final number of attendees for the event until a few days before the event . vendors who needed quantities (such as catering, merchandise, security) were given rough estimates which had to be overestimations, further raising costs.".

It impacts the applicants who would be good fits and can come.

When events get to capacity and there's still applications left to review - which often happens for EAGx’s - organisers have two decisions: either increase event costs (which happened at EAGxBoston) or reject people (which happened at EAGxBerkeley). Letting in late applicants is often not logistically feasible.

When we run out of capacity, it’s often first time applicants (new EA’s or people exploring EA) who get rejected. This is because as we have fewer spots available, the bar (of what qualifies you to get in) for admissions often increases and many first time applicants apply close to the deadline (presumably because they are unsure about attending and the application can be overwhelming).

This is a separate post about why you should apply early to conferences, how you're more likely to get in, but most people apply the night before applications a...