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.
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 value of avoiding minor harm to trust, for this specific case. It works by assuming that anyone put off from CEA simply shifts collaboration from one organisation to another, causing efficiency loss from wasting comparative advantages, not total loss. It also recognises that I made an unusually large update, and the average will be much smaller. Bracketed items are multiplied together to give an italicised item in the next line.
(present value of a GWWC pledge, $73,292 x number of pledges next year, 856) x size of CEA compared to GWWC proxied by headcount, 2.45 x (my unusually large update to engagement with CEA, 30% x perceived relative strength of other affected people's reactions, 17.5%) x relative advantage of CEA over competition, 17% x proportion of people with negative reactions, 48%
= (value realised by GWWC next year, $62,737,952 x size of CEA compared to GWWC proxied by headcount, 2.45) x (average affected person's shift from CEA to elsewhere, 5.25% x relative advantage of CEA over competition, 17%) x proportion of people with negative reactions, 48%
= value realised by CEA next year, $153,707,982 x (inefficiency from one affected person's shift, 0.88% x proportion of people with negative reactions, 48%)
= (value realised by CEA next year, $153,707,982 x proportion of CEA value lost 0.42%)
= value of one year of CEA minor reputation preservation, $638,849
This model does not incorporate the effects EAG marketing can have on other EA organisations' reputations (I suspect large), the value of not putting people off the movement entirely (unsure), or the effort required to clean up one's reputation in the unlikely case that lasting harm is incurred (low in expectation?) To handle overoptimisation, I have tried to keep inputs conservative rather than discounting explicitly.
My guess after public and private discussion is that the approach which captures the most total value would be something like aggressive marketing (including pushing known EAs hard to tell their friends, slightly-more-than-comfortable numbers of chaser emails to applicants, and focussing almost entirely on the positives of attending) while avoiding anyone feeling deliberately misled. Obviously CEA is better placed to make this call, and I hope the broad discussion will help guide future decisions.
I realized I never indicated what I thought after the discussion. I now endorse the position Kit suggests:
Thank for the very valuable discussion!