Thanks for posting! I liked the note at the beginning, which gave me a good sense for your confidence levels and purpose. As usual, this comment will highlight areas where I disagree or saw room for expansion, rather than agreement.
Expose # of applicants in each stage of hiring process
This wouldn’t be hard to do in most cases, but it might be risky for smaller hiring processes. For example, if only three people apply for Position X, it might be possible for someone to infer who they were based on their knowledge of the community, and therefore to know who was rejected. (Ideally, not getting a job wouldn’t expose someone to any embarrassment in the EA community, but I don’t think that’s the case right now.)
Publish resumes and application notes of past acceptances
As others have noted in the comments, candidates can get a good amount of information by looking at public bios/LinkedIn pages/other information about current employees. There’s also a risk that seeing what got someone hired in 2016 won’t be very informative for “what will get someone hired in 2019”. Organizations often raise their standards as they grow and professionalize.
We should also ask our institutions to expose themselves to feedback and regulation from the community where possible. I think we should be allowed to see the labor cost on the community of MIRI or OpenAI’s current recruitment process, we should be allowed to grade 80k hours on the outcomes of its career recommendations, et cetera.
I’m very wary about recommendations that lead to EA organizations having to consider the entire community’s opinion on internal decisions. MIRI and OpenAI seems like especially strange organizations to ask for this data; they have many fewer applicants than, say, Open Phil or GiveWell, and are much less likely to hire for “generalist” roles that offer more flexible approaches to hiring. (That is, Open Phil probably has more degrees of freedom in finding good generalist researchers than OpenAI does in finding machine learning experts.)
Also, it seems like the most appropriate group of people to make this kind of demand of MIRI would be “MIRI’s donors”, and they haven’t done so that I know of.
As for 80K: If you want to grade them based on the outcomes of their recommendations, you can already do so. They get plenty of feedback from community members on their strategy. Is there particular data you want them to collect that they currently don’t?
Thanks for posting! I liked the note at the beginning, which gave me a good sense for your confidence levels and purpose. As usual, this comment will highlight areas where I disagree or saw room for expansion, rather than agreement.
This wouldn’t be hard to do in most cases, but it might be risky for smaller hiring processes. For example, if only three people apply for Position X, it might be possible for someone to infer who they were based on their knowledge of the community, and therefore to know who was rejected. (Ideally, not getting a job wouldn’t expose someone to any embarrassment in the EA community, but I don’t think that’s the case right now.)
As others have noted in the comments, candidates can get a good amount of information by looking at public bios/LinkedIn pages/other information about current employees. There’s also a risk that seeing what got someone hired in 2016 won’t be very informative for “what will get someone hired in 2019”. Organizations often raise their standards as they grow and professionalize.
I’m very wary about recommendations that lead to EA organizations having to consider the entire community’s opinion on internal decisions. MIRI and OpenAI seems like especially strange organizations to ask for this data; they have many fewer applicants than, say, Open Phil or GiveWell, and are much less likely to hire for “generalist” roles that offer more flexible approaches to hiring. (That is, Open Phil probably has more degrees of freedom in finding good generalist researchers than OpenAI does in finding machine learning experts.)
Also, it seems like the most appropriate group of people to make this kind of demand of MIRI would be “MIRI’s donors”, and they haven’t done so that I know of.
As for 80K: If you want to grade them based on the outcomes of their recommendations, you can already do so. They get plenty of feedback from community members on their strategy. Is there particular data you want them to collect that they currently don’t?