I basically just think itās a bad idea to say āwe donāt want to waste [evaluatorsā] time and flood their applications processā (even with your caveats). I think thereās only a small kernel of truth to this in practice, and that the statement is far more likely to mislead than enlighten people.
To elaborate:
If an application is clearly bad, then it costs very little time from the hirer or grantmaker or whatever, if they have a good process.
If the application is good but the person might pull out of the role or decline an offer later, I think thatās probably still a good bet ex ante too; if the person is willing to put the time into each application stage, then that probably means thereās a high enough chance they would accept the role that evaluating them at that stage is worth the hirer/āgrantmakerās time.
I do think it will often make sense to spend at least 15 minutes on basic research, at least if you donāt have ābackground knowledgeā on the org/āfunder/āopportunity.
E.g., I think some EA Funds applicants clearly havenāt done that and donāt have ābackground knowledgeā on what kind of thing EA Funds is probably are, and that combo is a problem.
But thatās hardly a āwasting evaluators timeā problem because such applications tend to be easy to quickly reject; itās more so a problem of the applicant wasting their own time, or being much less likely to get funding than they couldāve.
And I think that particular problem matters less for job applications because those have far fewer ādegrees of freedomā; youāre just seeing how you do in a crafted selection process for a given role, not proposing any project you want and responding to some very open prompts.
I basically just think itās a bad idea to say āwe donāt want to waste [evaluatorsā] time and flood their applications processā (even with your caveats). I think thereās only a small kernel of truth to this in practice, and that the statement is far more likely to mislead than enlighten people.
Iām not saying we telegraph ādonāt waste our timeā, and this should not be conveyed in broad communications obviously. But here in the EA forum we can afford to be nuanced and subtle, and think about the whole ecosystem ā¦
I said āwe donāt want to waste their time and flood their applications process.ā ā¦ (emphasis added). And maybe āwasteā is 40% too strong a word; just consider āit is a potential cost.ā
I also think that āself filteringā (for the right reasons) is sometimes useful to the ecosystem, as we know vetting is hard. Often it goes too far.
But I donāt want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater and move to a heuristic of ājust apply to everything and let the other side sort it outā.
Because there are real costs on the other side;
perhaps not mainly the actual time spent on the ādonāt thinkā (DT) applications,
but because a large volume of applications makes it harder to spend time on the high-value applications
ā¦ and āfiltering out the DT applicationsā will usually lead to some good applications being mistakenly filtered out. This type-1 error can be minimized by good processes, but there is always some tradeoff (see āprecision versus recallā in classification problems/āML)
I think the self filtering is particularly useful where
You have strong information about yourself that is not easy to see on a CV or even in work tasks
Particularly where this is of the nature āI could almost surely not be able to accept a job in X field/āY org because of a strong overriding reasonā
In such situations it may be very hard for the employer/āfunder to detect these things through your application and work tasks. Furthermore, if they are fully compensating you for the work-tasks, and encouraging you, this may not cause you to want to self-filter along the way.
I basically just think itās a bad idea to say āwe donāt want to waste [evaluatorsā] time and flood their applications processā (even with your caveats). I think thereās only a small kernel of truth to this in practice, and that the statement is far more likely to mislead than enlighten people.
To elaborate:
If an application is clearly bad, then it costs very little time from the hirer or grantmaker or whatever, if they have a good process.
If the application is good but the person might pull out of the role or decline an offer later, I think thatās probably still a good bet ex ante too; if the person is willing to put the time into each application stage, then that probably means thereās a high enough chance they would accept the role that evaluating them at that stage is worth the hirer/āgrantmakerās time.
I do think it will often make sense to spend at least 15 minutes on basic research, at least if you donāt have ābackground knowledgeā on the org/āfunder/āopportunity.
E.g., I think some EA Funds applicants clearly havenāt done that and donāt have ābackground knowledgeā on what kind of thing EA Funds is probably are, and that combo is a problem.
But thatās hardly a āwasting evaluators timeā problem because such applications tend to be easy to quickly reject; itās more so a problem of the applicant wasting their own time, or being much less likely to get funding than they couldāve.
And I think that particular problem matters less for job applications because those have far fewer ādegrees of freedomā; youāre just seeing how you do in a crafted selection process for a given role, not proposing any project you want and responding to some very open prompts.
Iām not saying we telegraph ādonāt waste our timeā, and this should not be conveyed in broad communications obviously. But here in the EA forum we can afford to be nuanced and subtle, and think about the whole ecosystem ā¦ I said āwe donāt want to waste their time and flood their applications process.ā ā¦ (emphasis added). And maybe āwasteā is 40% too strong a word; just consider āit is a potential cost.ā
I also think that āself filteringā (for the right reasons) is sometimes useful to the ecosystem, as we know vetting is hard. Often it goes too far.
But I donāt want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater and move to a heuristic of ājust apply to everything and let the other side sort it outā.
Because there are real costs on the other side;
perhaps not mainly the actual time spent on the ādonāt thinkā (DT) applications,
but because a large volume of applications makes it harder to spend time on the high-value applications
ā¦ and āfiltering out the DT applicationsā will usually lead to some good applications being mistakenly filtered out. This type-1 error can be minimized by good processes, but there is always some tradeoff (see āprecision versus recallā in classification problems/āML)
I think the self filtering is particularly useful where
You have strong information about yourself that is not easy to see on a CV or even in work tasks
Particularly where this is of the nature āI could almost surely not be able to accept a job in X field/āY org because of a strong overriding reasonā
In such situations it may be very hard for the employer/āfunder to detect these things through your application and work tasks. Furthermore, if they are fully compensating you for the work-tasks, and encouraging you, this may not cause you to want to self-filter along the way.
This falls closely to my thoughts on not overcorrecting on āimposter syndromeā (IS).