There are certainly people on both ends of the (confidence / ability) spectrum. I suspect that “skilled people deciding not to try entering EA work” is a bigger problem than “people trying to push ahead when they shouldn’t”.
Reasoning:
From an individual’s perspective, “wasting time trying to enter a field” doesn’t seem much worse than “missing your chance to enter a field where you’d have had a much higher impact than you did otherwise”.
From an org’s perspective, it’s much more costly to miss out on a great employee than to say “no” to one more person.
But there are a lot of other ways you could look at the issue, and this is just my first impression.
There are certainly people on both ends of the (confidence / ability) spectrum. I suspect that “skilled people deciding not to try entering EA work” is a bigger problem than “people trying to push ahead when they shouldn’t”.
Reasoning:
From an individual’s perspective, “wasting time trying to enter a field” doesn’t seem much worse than “missing your chance to enter a field where you’d have had a much higher impact than you did otherwise”.
From an org’s perspective, it’s much more costly to miss out on a great employee than to say “no” to one more person.
But there are a lot of other ways you could look at the issue, and this is just my first impression.