What are the community’s thoughts on making the application super long so that only the most interested people apply (and basically accept everyone who applies)? Would this be considered selective in the same way as rejecting people?
It’s an interesting idea, but even if this ends up producing very engaged participants you have to be careful.
If you (deliberately and successfully) only select for people who are super keen, you end up with a super keen cohort but potentially only minimal counterfactual impact as all those you selected would have ended up really involved anyway. This was briefly mentioned in the post and I think is worth exploring further.
Thank you so much for the insights! We’ve tried longer applications to ensure that the fellows are more engaged due to bad experiences of fellows dropping out / derailing the conversation in the past. However, the point about counterfactual impact has nudged me to shorten our application!
I agree that exactly that tradeoff is important! There’s definitely a balance to be struck, and you certainly wouldn’t want to exclude those who already very aligned on the basis of low counterfactual impact, as the participation of those people will likely be very positive for other members!
I don’t have a strong opinion about this in the context of fellowships, but I can refer to setting a high entry bar in recruiting community members and volunteers in general, and specifically, by asking them to invest time in reading content. I hope this helps and not completely off-topic.
Though EA is a complex set of ideas and we want people to have a good understanding of what it’s all about, demanding a lot from new people can be fairly offputting and counterproductive.
From my experience, people who are of high potential to be both highly-engaged and of high value to the community are often both quite busy people and relatively normal human beings.
As for the first point, if you sent someone a long list of content, he/she might just say “this is too demanding, can’t handle this right now”. As for the second point, we have to accept that people have much shorter attention spans than we would like to imagine, especially if they are not really familiar with the content.
Me and Gidon Kadosh from EA Israel have thought long and hard about how to lower the perceived effort of people who come to our website by creating this “Learn More” page on our website. Though it’s in Hebrew, you might be able to understand what we tried to do here on a structural level. We plan to make it even more attractive for readers, possibly by splitting this page into individual pages focusing on a specific subject, and allowing the user to conveniently move on to the next/previous subject—This way we both lower perceived effort of reading this content and create a feeling of progress for the user.
I’m really not sure there is a correlation between the willingness of someone to invest a lot of time in reading lots of content or filling a long application before they have a clear view of the value in doing this. Going back to recruiting new community members and volunteers, there are brilliant people who are value-aligned, but just don’t have the time (or are not willing) to invest the time needed to fill in a highly-demanding application, or read 20 articles about something they are not sure they care about yet.
Thank you so much for the insights! We’ve tried longer applications to ensure that the fellows are more engaged due to bad experiences of fellows dropping out / derailing the conversation in the past. However, the point about high-potential people being busy has convinced me to shorten our application!
What are the community’s thoughts on making the application super long so that only the most interested people apply (and basically accept everyone who applies)? Would this be considered selective in the same way as rejecting people?
It’s an interesting idea, but even if this ends up producing very engaged participants you have to be careful.
If you (deliberately and successfully) only select for people who are super keen, you end up with a super keen cohort but potentially only minimal counterfactual impact as all those you selected would have ended up really involved anyway. This was briefly mentioned in the post and I think is worth exploring further.
Thank you so much for the insights! We’ve tried longer applications to ensure that the fellows are more engaged due to bad experiences of fellows dropping out / derailing the conversation in the past. However, the point about counterfactual impact has nudged me to shorten our application!
I agree that exactly that tradeoff is important! There’s definitely a balance to be struck, and you certainly wouldn’t want to exclude those who already very aligned on the basis of low counterfactual impact, as the participation of those people will likely be very positive for other members!
I don’t have a strong opinion about this in the context of fellowships, but I can refer to setting a high entry bar in recruiting community members and volunteers in general, and specifically, by asking them to invest time in reading content. I hope this helps and not completely off-topic.
Though EA is a complex set of ideas and we want people to have a good understanding of what it’s all about, demanding a lot from new people can be fairly offputting and counterproductive.
From my experience, people who are of high potential to be both highly-engaged and of high value to the community are often both quite busy people and relatively normal human beings.
As for the first point, if you sent someone a long list of content, he/she might just say “this is too demanding, can’t handle this right now”. As for the second point, we have to accept that people have much shorter attention spans than we would like to imagine, especially if they are not really familiar with the content.
Me and Gidon Kadosh from EA Israel have thought long and hard about how to lower the perceived effort of people who come to our website by creating this “Learn More” page on our website. Though it’s in Hebrew, you might be able to understand what we tried to do here on a structural level. We plan to make it even more attractive for readers, possibly by splitting this page into individual pages focusing on a specific subject, and allowing the user to conveniently move on to the next/previous subject—This way we both lower perceived effort of reading this content and create a feeling of progress for the user.
I’m really not sure there is a correlation between the willingness of someone to invest a lot of time in reading lots of content or filling a long application before they have a clear view of the value in doing this. Going back to recruiting new community members and volunteers, there are brilliant people who are value-aligned, but just don’t have the time (or are not willing) to invest the time needed to fill in a highly-demanding application, or read 20 articles about something they are not sure they care about yet.
Thank you so much for the insights! We’ve tried longer applications to ensure that the fellows are more engaged due to bad experiences of fellows dropping out / derailing the conversation in the past. However, the point about high-potential people being busy has convinced me to shorten our application!