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’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).