Thanks for this feedback! It’s really useful to know that this would make it easier to put yourself out there. We’re in the process of changing the application form to connect better with our career planning process, to hopefully make filling it out a commitment mechanism for getting started on making a career plan (since doing so is often aversive). As part of that, we aim to send people a google doc of the relevant answers in a readily shareable format and encourage people to send it to friends and others whose judgement they trust.
I also find it pretty scary to email people out of the blue, even if I know them, particularly to ask them for something. But my hope is that if someone already has a doc they want comments on, and it’s been explicitly suggested they send that to friends, it will make it a bit easier to ask for this kind of help. Increasing the extent to which people do that seems good to me, since my impression is that although people find it hard to reach out, most people would actually be happy to give their friends comments on something like this!
Great idea. What did you think about the idea to somehow streamline a process to share that Google Doc with others who might have something to say? A process that might require relatively little effort would be asking people in those forms “Would you be interested in receiving career plans from other people that are looking for feedback?”. That might make it relatively effortless for people from a particular field, e.g. Cognitive Science in my case, to be matched to other people who might have valuable feedback.
It might be a bit effortful to match people, though I suppose you have information about the general field and that might already suffice? Or you might worry that people will receive unhelpful feedback and that this might reflect badly on you? Though I suppose you could emphasize that the people who you’d share the Google Doc are not vetted at all and are only fellow 80,000Hours fans who clicked on “I’d be down to look over other people’s career plans”.
Thanks for this feedback! It’s really useful to know that this would make it easier to put yourself out there. We’re in the process of changing the application form to connect better with our career planning process, to hopefully make filling it out a commitment mechanism for getting started on making a career plan (since doing so is often aversive). As part of that, we aim to send people a google doc of the relevant answers in a readily shareable format and encourage people to send it to friends and others whose judgement they trust.
I also find it pretty scary to email people out of the blue, even if I know them, particularly to ask them for something. But my hope is that if someone already has a doc they want comments on, and it’s been explicitly suggested they send that to friends, it will make it a bit easier to ask for this kind of help. Increasing the extent to which people do that seems good to me, since my impression is that although people find it hard to reach out, most people would actually be happy to give their friends comments on something like this!
Great idea. What did you think about the idea to somehow streamline a process to share that Google Doc with others who might have something to say? A process that might require relatively little effort would be asking people in those forms “Would you be interested in receiving career plans from other people that are looking for feedback?”. That might make it relatively effortless for people from a particular field, e.g. Cognitive Science in my case, to be matched to other people who might have valuable feedback.
It might be a bit effortful to match people, though I suppose you have information about the general field and that might already suffice? Or you might worry that people will receive unhelpful feedback and that this might reflect badly on you? Though I suppose you could emphasize that the people who you’d share the Google Doc are not vetted at all and are only fellow 80,000Hours fans who clicked on “I’d be down to look over other people’s career plans”.