Since your take-away is about undercommunication, please consider the tremendous value you could create by revising the “no feedback on rejected proposals” approach.
Rational case: You clearly create a lot of useful insight on projects in the review process you described here, and are in a superb position to guide applicants to value creation. You may identify weaknesses, red flags, strengths, alternative opportunities which the applicant might not realise. With a relatively small investment on your side you could share constructive feedback with rejected people, in turn creating a lot of downstream value at a low actual cost. A case can be made it would be rational to hire an additional full-time person (doesn’t have to be an EA superstar) whose only job is to extract constructive feedback from the insights generated throughout the process.
Human, community-building case: You did say no feedback will be given, so one doesn’t expect one. Even so, when one receives a response and finds that it really contains nothing they can use to improve or simply disagree with, it does very strongly, and unnecessarily, contribute to the feeling of resentment mentioned in Will MacAskill’s recent post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfdnJ3sDbCSkShiSZ/ea-and-the-current-funding-situation
Since your take-away is about undercommunication, please consider the tremendous value you could create by revising the “no feedback on rejected proposals” approach.
Rational case: You clearly create a lot of useful insight on projects in the review process you described here, and are in a superb position to guide applicants to value creation. You may identify weaknesses, red flags, strengths, alternative opportunities which the applicant might not realise. With a relatively small investment on your side you could share constructive feedback with rejected people, in turn creating a lot of downstream value at a low actual cost. A case can be made it would be rational to hire an additional full-time person (doesn’t have to be an EA superstar) whose only job is to extract constructive feedback from the insights generated throughout the process.
Human, community-building case: You did say no feedback will be given, so one doesn’t expect one. Even so, when one receives a response and finds that it really contains nothing they can use to improve or simply disagree with, it does very strongly, and unnecessarily, contribute to the feeling of resentment mentioned in Will MacAskill’s recent post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfdnJ3sDbCSkShiSZ/ea-and-the-current-funding-situation