First, I wanted to thank all of the Effective Altruism Global organizers and participants. I found it to be very valuable and overall well put together. There was obviously a ton of work put into it, most by conference organizers who I don't believe will get that much credit for it, and I very much commend their work.
That said, there's always a lot of room for new ideas, and I find I often get a bunch of ideas at and after these conferences. Because of the EAGx events, ideas described now may be able to be put into action somewhat soon and experimented with.
As may be expected, I recommend that people make all of their ideas be independent comments, then upvote the ideas that they think would be the most useful.
My take is that there's a trade-off here between being most effective for short-term value (getting more attendees at EA global) and most effective building a powerful and supported long-term brand. We have better data on what's effective for the short-term value, because the feedback loops are tighter. This could mean that it should get more weight (because we actually know what we're doing), but there's a danger that it means we swing too far towards it. The off-putting messaging could in some low-grade ways lower a whole lot of people's opinions towards EA/CEA/EAG. For a movement that trades so much on intellectual leadership this worries me.
Here's one guesstimate. Take with a vast amount of salt, and I don't even really believe the framework I'm using, I just want to show how you might get going with these comparisons: Damage to brand = 0.1% of brand value; brand value = ~$1B; so would be willing to switch if generating >$1M [Also of course it's not binary. We can probably look for compromise solutions which get a lot of the marketing value and a lot of the long-term brand value]
There's even a case that at the margin we should prefer more consolidation over more growth (of EA community generally and EAG specifically), in which case it would be good to have emails which are differentially attractive to people (like Howie and Kit) who are/could become high-value community members, rather than differentially off-putting to them.
I think a stronger argument can be made in favour of the chosen marketing methods. It would probably conclude with something like 'the huge value of a small number of extra links formed between otherwise-disjoint groups outweighed the minor weakening of cooperation standards across the community'.
Owen's comment shows that the numbers can be big on the other side too, but valuing brands is a notoriously hard problem. In the hope that people refer back to this discussion when considering future strategies, here is an explicit estimate of one component of the... (read more)