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: The Cost of Rejection, published by Daystar Eld on the effective altruism forum.

For those that don't know, I've worked as a therapist for the rationality and EA community for over two years now, first part time, then full time in early 2020. I often get asked about my observations and thoughts on what sorts of issues are particularly prevalent or unique to the community, and while any short answer to that would be oversimplifying the myriad of issues I've treated, I do feel comfortable saying that "concern with impact" is a theme that runs pretty wide and deep no matter what people come to sessions to talk about.

Seeing how this plays out in various different ways has motivated me to write on some aspects of it, starting with this broad generalization; rejection hurts. Specifically, rejection from a job that's considered high impact (which, for many, implicitly includes all jobs with EA organizations) hurts a lot. And I think that hurt has a negative impact that goes beyond the suffering involved.

In addition to basing this post off of my own observations, I’ve written it with the help of/on behalf of clients who have been affected by this, some of whom reviewed and commented on drafts.

I. Premises

There are a few premises that I’m taking for granted that I want to list out in case people disagree with any specific ones:

The EA population is growing, as are EA organizations in number and size.

This seems overall to be a very good thing.

In absolute numbers, EA organizations are growing slower or at pace with the overall EA population.

Even with massive increases in funding this seems inevitable, and also probably good? There are many high impact jobs outside of EA orgs that we would want people in the community to have.

(By EA orgs I specifically mean organizations headed by and largely made up of people who self-identify as Effective Altruists, not just those using evidence-and-reason-to-do-the-most-good)

((Also there’s a world in which more people self-identify as EAs and therefore more organizations are considered EA and by that metric it’s bad that EA orgs are growing slower than overall population, but that’s also not what I mean))

Even with more funding being available, there will continue to be many more people applying to EA jobs than getting them.

I don’t have clear numbers for this, but asking around at a few places got me estimates between ~47-124 applications for specific positions (one of which noted that ~¾ of them were from people clearly within and familiar with the EA community), and hundreds of applications for specific grants (at least once breaking a thousand).

This is good for the organizations and community as a whole, but has bad side effects, such as:

Rejection hurts, and that hurt matters.

For many people, rejection is easily accepted as part of trying new things, shooting for the moon, and challenging oneself to continually grow.

For many others, it can be incredibly demoralizing, sometimes to the point of reducing motivation to continue even trying to do difficult things.

So when I say the hurt matters, I don’t just mean that it’s suffering and we should try to reduce suffering wherever we can. I also mean that as the number of EAs grows faster than the number of positions in EA orgs, the knock-on effects of rejection will slow community and org growth, particularly since:

The number of EAs who receive rejections from EA orgs will likely continue to grow, both absolutely and proportionally.

Hence, this article.

II. Models

There are a number of models I have for all of this that could be totally wrong. I think it’s worth spelling them out a bit more so that people can point to more bits and let me know if they are important, or why they might not be as important as I think they are.

Difficulty in Self Organization

First, I think it’s import...