One thing I’d say in response is that, as a person who’s been on multiple hiring committees and evaluated many grant applications, I’m pretty confident hirers and grantmakers would be excited for people to apply even if there’s a decent chance they’ll ultimately pull out or decline an offer!
E.g., even if someone has a 75% chance of pulling our or declining, that just reduces the EV for the hirer/​grantmaker of the person applying by a factor of 4. And that probably isn’t a very big deal, given that hirers and grantmakers typically don’t have to spend long on each application unless someone has a pretty good shot of being worth hiring/​funding (in which case the EV is then fairly good).
I’m aware that feelings of aversion are not always easily dispelled by logical arguments, so I’m not expecting this comment to totally fix the point you raise. But I’d guess it’d be somewhat helpful to make it more widely known/​salient that (I think) hirers and grantmakers are often quite happy to have someone make somewhat speculative applications and then see what happens, and will be fine with just the fact that ex ante this was a good move.
Thanks for sharing your perspective from the hiring & evaluation side!
FWIW I already had some belief of this shape, which is why I added the caveat ‘things that I imagine will disappoint people’ - some part of me knows that the hirers are very unlikely to actually care, but another part worries & feels aversion to this.
Yeah, that seems a fair point.
One thing I’d say in response is that, as a person who’s been on multiple hiring committees and evaluated many grant applications, I’m pretty confident hirers and grantmakers would be excited for people to apply even if there’s a decent chance they’ll ultimately pull out or decline an offer!
E.g., even if someone has a 75% chance of pulling our or declining, that just reduces the EV for the hirer/​grantmaker of the person applying by a factor of 4. And that probably isn’t a very big deal, given that hirers and grantmakers typically don’t have to spend long on each application unless someone has a pretty good shot of being worth hiring/​funding (in which case the EV is then fairly good).
I’m aware that feelings of aversion are not always easily dispelled by logical arguments, so I’m not expecting this comment to totally fix the point you raise. But I’d guess it’d be somewhat helpful to make it more widely known/​salient that (I think) hirers and grantmakers are often quite happy to have someone make somewhat speculative applications and then see what happens, and will be fine with just the fact that ex ante this was a good move.
Thanks for sharing your perspective from the hiring & evaluation side!
FWIW I already had some belief of this shape, which is why I added the caveat ‘things that I imagine will disappoint people’ - some part of me knows that the hirers are very unlikely to actually care, but another part worries & feels aversion to this.