I think you might have replied on the wrong subthread but a few things.
This is the post I was referring to. At the time of extension, they claim they had ~3k applicants. They also infer that they had way fewer (in quantity or quality) applicants for the fish welfare and tobacco taxation projects but I’m not sure exactly how to interpret their claim.
Did you end up accepting late applicants? Did they replace earlier applicants who would otherwise have been accepted, or increase the total class size? Do you have a guess for the effects of the new participants?
using some pretty crude math + assuming both applicant pools are the same, each additional applicant has ~.7% chance of being one of the 20 best applicants (I think they take 10 or 20). so like 150 applicants to get one replaced. if they had to internalize the costs to the candidates, and lets be conservative and say 20 bucks a candidate, then that would be about 3k per extra candidate replaced.
and this doesn’t included the fact that the returns consistently diminish. and they also have to spend more time reviewing candidates, and even if a candidate is actually better, this doesn’t guarantee they will correctly pick them. you can probably add another couple thousands for these considerations so maybe we go with ~5k?
Then you get into issues of fit vs quality, grabbing better quality candidates might help CE counterfactual value but doesn’t help the EA movement much since your pulling from the talent pool. And lastly it’s sort of unfair to the people who applied on time but that’s hard to quantify.
and I think 20 bucks per candidate is really really conservative. I value my time closer to 50$ an hour than 2$ and I’d bet most people applying would probably say something above 15$.
So my very general and crude estimate IMO is they are implicitly saying they value replacing a candidate at 2k-100k, and most likely somewhere between 5-50k. I wonder if we asked them how much they would have to pay for one candidate getting replaced at the time they extended what they would say.
if anyone thinks I missed super obvious considerations or made a mistake lmk.
If we don’t find more potential founders we may not be able to launch charities in Tobacco Taxation and Fish Welfare
This is apparently a pattern
In recent years we have had more charity ideas than we have been able to find founders for.
Seems pretty plausible they value a marginal new charity at $100k, or even $1m, given the amount of staff time and seed funding that go into each participant.
I also suspect they’re more limited by applicant quality than number of spaces.
That post further says
it is true that we get a lot of applicants (~3 thousand). But, and it’s a big but, ~80% of the applications are speculative, from people outside the EA community and don’t even really understand what we do. Of the 300 relevant candidates we receive, maybe 20 or so will make it onto the program.
If you assume that the late applicants recruited by posting on EAF are in the “relevant” pool, those aren’t terrible odds.[1] And they provide feedback even to first round applicants, which is a real service to applicants and cost to CE.
I don’t know if they’re doing the ideal thing here, but they are doing way better than I imagined from your comment.
I don’t love treating relevant and “within EA” as synonyms, but my guess is this that the real point is “don’t even really understand what we do”, and EA is a shorthand for the group that does.
I think you might have replied on the wrong subthread but a few things.
This is the post I was referring to. At the time of extension, they claim they had ~3k applicants. They also infer that they had way fewer (in quantity or quality) applicants for the fish welfare and tobacco taxation projects but I’m not sure exactly how to interpret their claim.
using some pretty crude math + assuming both applicant pools are the same, each additional applicant has ~.7% chance of being one of the 20 best applicants (I think they take 10 or 20). so like 150 applicants to get one replaced. if they had to internalize the costs to the candidates, and lets be conservative and say 20 bucks a candidate, then that would be about 3k per extra candidate replaced.
and this doesn’t included the fact that the returns consistently diminish. and they also have to spend more time reviewing candidates, and even if a candidate is actually better, this doesn’t guarantee they will correctly pick them. you can probably add another couple thousands for these considerations so maybe we go with ~5k?
Then you get into issues of fit vs quality, grabbing better quality candidates might help CE counterfactual value but doesn’t help the EA movement much since your pulling from the talent pool. And lastly it’s sort of unfair to the people who applied on time but that’s hard to quantify.
and I think 20 bucks per candidate is really really conservative. I value my time closer to 50$ an hour than 2$ and I’d bet most people applying would probably say something above 15$.
So my very general and crude estimate IMO is they are implicitly saying they value replacing a candidate at 2k-100k, and most likely somewhere between 5-50k. I wonder if we asked them how much they would have to pay for one candidate getting replaced at the time they extended what they would say.
if anyone thinks I missed super obvious considerations or made a mistake lmk.
That post says opens with
This is apparently a pattern
Seems pretty plausible they value a marginal new charity at $100k, or even $1m, given the amount of staff time and seed funding that go into each participant.
I also suspect they’re more limited by applicant quality than number of spaces.
That post further says
If you assume that the late applicants recruited by posting on EAF are in the “relevant” pool, those aren’t terrible odds.[1] And they provide feedback even to first round applicants, which is a real service to applicants and cost to CE.
I don’t know if they’re doing the ideal thing here, but they are doing way better than I imagined from your comment.
I don’t love treating relevant and “within EA” as synonyms, but my guess is this that the real point is “don’t even really understand what we do”, and EA is a shorthand for the group that does.
Yep after walking through it in my head plus re- reading the post, doesn’t seem egregious to me.