Thanks for posting this! If you’re comfortable sharing this, could you say more about how you ranked applicants in the first place?
Edit: Follow-up:
These generally seem like very relevant criteria, so I’m definitely surprised by the results.
The only part I can think of that might have contributed to lower predictiveness of engagement is the “experience” criteria—I’d guess there might have been people who were very into EA since before the fellowship, and that this made them both score poorly on this metric and get very involved with the group later on. I wonder what the correlations look like after controlling for experience (although it’s probably not that different, since it was only one of seven criteria).
I’m also curious: I’d guess that familiarity with EA-related books/blogs/cause areas/philosophies is a strong (positive) predictor of receptiveness to EA. Do you think this mostly factored into the scores as a negative contributor to the experience score, or was it also a big consideration for some of the other scores?
Thanks for posting this! If you’re comfortable sharing this, could you say more about how you ranked applicants in the first place?
Edit: Follow-up:
These generally seem like very relevant criteria, so I’m definitely surprised by the results.
The only part I can think of that might have contributed to lower predictiveness of engagement is the “experience” criteria—I’d guess there might have been people who were very into EA since before the fellowship, and that this made them both score poorly on this metric and get very involved with the group later on. I wonder what the correlations look like after controlling for experience (although it’s probably not that different, since it was only one of seven criteria).
I’m also curious: I’d guess that familiarity with EA-related books/blogs/cause areas/philosophies is a strong (positive) predictor of receptiveness to EA. Do you think this mostly factored into the scores as a negative contributor to the experience score, or was it also a big consideration for some of the other scores?
Hi Mauricio! More details are in the post linked at the top: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/N6cXCLDPKzoGiuDET/yale-ea-virtual-fellowship-retrospective-summer-2020#Selectiveness