I think this is the right advice for most people here.
However, I think a small percentage of people may over update on this advice in the following dimension. Particularly if we are applying for a job with an impactful/EA employer, we don’t want to waste their time and flood their applications process.
I suggest it’s worth doing at least 15 minutes of research about each employer, check their basic About Us page et cetera, before you apply or do an informational interview.
That said, I think most people here already do far more than this, so the above ‘steer’ is in the right direction.
I basically just think it’s a bad idea to say “we don’t want to waste [evaluators’] time and flood their applications process” (even with your caveats). I think there’s 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 that’s 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 there’s a high enough chance they would accept the role that evaluating them at that stage is worth the hirer/grantmaker’s time.
I do think it will often make sense to spend at least 15 minutes on basic research, at least if you don’t have “background knowledge” on the org/funder/opportunity.
E.g., I think some EA Funds applicants clearly haven’t done that and don’t have “background knowledge” on what kind of thing EA Funds is probably are, and that combo is a problem.
But that’s hardly a “wasting evaluators time” problem because such applications tend to be easy to quickly reject; it’s more so a problem of the applicant wasting their own time, or being much less likely to get funding than they could’ve.
And I think that particular problem matters less for job applications because those have far fewer “degrees of freedom”; you’re 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 it’s a bad idea to say “we don’t want to waste [evaluators’] time and flood their applications process” (even with your caveats). I think there’s only a small kernel of truth to this in practice, and that the statement is far more likely to mislead than enlighten people.
I’m not saying we telegraph “don’t waste our time”, 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 …
I said “we don’t want to waste their time and flood their applications process.” … (emphasis added). And maybe “waste” is 40% too strong a word; just consider ‘it is a potential cost.’
I also think that ‘self filtering’ (for the right reasons) is sometimes useful to the ecosystem, as we know vetting is hard. Often it goes too far.
But I don’t want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater and move to a heuristic of ‘just apply to everything and let the other side sort it out’.
Because there are real costs on the other side;
perhaps not mainly the actual time spent on the ‘don’t think’ (DT) applications,
but because a large volume of applications makes it harder to spend time on the high-value applications
… and ‘filtering out the DT applications’ 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 ‘precision versus recall’ in classification problems/ML)
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 “I could almost surely not be able to accept a job in X field/Y org because of a strong overriding reason”
In such situations it may be very hard for the employer/funder 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 think this is the right advice for most people here. However, I think a small percentage of people may over update on this advice in the following dimension. Particularly if we are applying for a job with an impactful/EA employer, we don’t want to waste their time and flood their applications process.
I suggest it’s worth doing at least 15 minutes of research about each employer, check their basic About Us page et cetera, before you apply or do an informational interview.
That said, I think most people here already do far more than this, so the above ‘steer’ is in the right direction.
I basically just think it’s a bad idea to say “we don’t want to waste [evaluators’] time and flood their applications process” (even with your caveats). I think there’s 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 that’s 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 there’s a high enough chance they would accept the role that evaluating them at that stage is worth the hirer/grantmaker’s time.
I do think it will often make sense to spend at least 15 minutes on basic research, at least if you don’t have “background knowledge” on the org/funder/opportunity.
E.g., I think some EA Funds applicants clearly haven’t done that and don’t have “background knowledge” on what kind of thing EA Funds is probably are, and that combo is a problem.
But that’s hardly a “wasting evaluators time” problem because such applications tend to be easy to quickly reject; it’s more so a problem of the applicant wasting their own time, or being much less likely to get funding than they could’ve.
And I think that particular problem matters less for job applications because those have far fewer “degrees of freedom”; you’re 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’m not saying we telegraph “don’t waste our time”, 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 … I said “we don’t want to waste their time and flood their applications process.” … (emphasis added). And maybe “waste” is 40% too strong a word; just consider ‘it is a potential cost.’
I also think that ‘self filtering’ (for the right reasons) is sometimes useful to the ecosystem, as we know vetting is hard. Often it goes too far.
But I don’t want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater and move to a heuristic of ‘just apply to everything and let the other side sort it out’.
Because there are real costs on the other side;
perhaps not mainly the actual time spent on the ‘don’t think’ (DT) applications,
but because a large volume of applications makes it harder to spend time on the high-value applications
… and ‘filtering out the DT applications’ 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 ‘precision versus recall’ in classification problems/ML)
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 “I could almost surely not be able to accept a job in X field/Y org because of a strong overriding reason”
In such situations it may be very hard for the employer/funder 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 ‘imposter syndrome’ (IS).