There’s a thing in EA where encouraging someone to apply for a job or grant gets coded as “supportive”, maybe even a very tiny gift. But that’s only true when [chance of getting job/grant] x [value of job/grant over next best alternative] > [cost of applying].
One really clear case was when I was encouraged to apply for a grant my project wasn’t a natural fit for, because “it’s quick and there are few applicants”. This seemed safe, since the deadline was in a few hours. But in those few hours the number of applications skyrocketed- I want to say 5x but my memory is shaky- presumably because I wasn’t the only person the grantmaker encouraged. I ended up wasting several hours of my and co-founders time before dropping out, because the project really was not a good fit for the grant.
[if the grantmaker is reading this and recognizes themselves: I’m not mad at you personally].
I’ve been guilty of this too, defaulting to encouraging people to try for something without considering the costs of making the attempt, or the chance of success. It feels so much nicer than telling someone “yeah you’re probably not good enough”.
A lot of EA job postings encourage people to apply even if they don’t think they’re a good fit. I expect this is done partially because orgs genuinely don’t want to lose great applicants who underestimate themselves, and partially because it’s an extremely cheap way to feel anti-elitist.
I don’t know what the solution is here. Many people are miscalibrated on their value or their competition, all else being equal you do want to catch those people. But casting wider net entails more bycatch.
It’s hard to accuse an org of being mean to someone who they encouraged to apply for a job or grant. But I think that should be in the space of possibilities, and we should put more emphasis on invitations to apply for jobs/grants/etc being clear, and less on welcoming. This avoids wasting the time of people who were predictably never going to get the job.
I’m not sure supportive/helpful vs mean is a useful framing. It’s not reasonable for a grant-maker or recruiter to have much knowledge about your costs, let alone to weight them equal to the large value (though small probability) of a successful application.
I think the responsibility is always going to fall on the applicant to make these choices. Grantmakers and recruiters SHOULD be as clear as possible about the criteria for acceptance, in order to make the value side (chance of success) easier to predict, but the cost side isn’t something they are going to understand well.
Note that there is an adversarial/competitive aspect to such matches, so the application-evaluator can’t be as transparent as they might like, in order to reduce Goodhart or fraud in the applications they get.
This behavior from orgs is close enough to somethingI’ve been talking aboutfor a while as being potentially maladaptive that I think I agree that we should keep a close eye on this. (In general, we should try and avoid situations where there are far more applicants for something than the number accepted.)
There’s a thing in EA where encouraging someone to apply for a job or grant gets coded as “supportive”, maybe even a very tiny gift. But that’s only true when [chance of getting job/grant] x [value of job/grant over next best alternative] > [cost of applying].
One really clear case was when I was encouraged to apply for a grant my project wasn’t a natural fit for, because “it’s quick and there are few applicants”. This seemed safe, since the deadline was in a few hours. But in those few hours the number of applications skyrocketed- I want to say 5x but my memory is shaky- presumably because I wasn’t the only person the grantmaker encouraged. I ended up wasting several hours of my and co-founders time before dropping out, because the project really was not a good fit for the grant.
[if the grantmaker is reading this and recognizes themselves: I’m not mad at you personally].
I’ve been guilty of this too, defaulting to encouraging people to try for something without considering the costs of making the attempt, or the chance of success. It feels so much nicer than telling someone “yeah you’re probably not good enough”.
A lot of EA job postings encourage people to apply even if they don’t think they’re a good fit. I expect this is done partially because orgs genuinely don’t want to lose great applicants who underestimate themselves, and partially because it’s an extremely cheap way to feel anti-elitist.
I don’t know what the solution is here. Many people are miscalibrated on their value or their competition, all else being equal you do want to catch those people. But casting wider net entails more bycatch.
It’s hard to accuse an org of being mean to someone who they encouraged to apply for a job or grant. But I think that should be in the space of possibilities, and we should put more emphasis on invitations to apply for jobs/grants/etc being clear, and less on welcoming. This avoids wasting the time of people who were predictably never going to get the job.
I’m not sure supportive/helpful vs mean is a useful framing. It’s not reasonable for a grant-maker or recruiter to have much knowledge about your costs, let alone to weight them equal to the large value (though small probability) of a successful application.
I think the responsibility is always going to fall on the applicant to make these choices. Grantmakers and recruiters SHOULD be as clear as possible about the criteria for acceptance, in order to make the value side (chance of success) easier to predict, but the cost side isn’t something they are going to understand well.
Note that there is an adversarial/competitive aspect to such matches, so the application-evaluator can’t be as transparent as they might like, in order to reduce Goodhart or fraud in the applications they get.
This behavior from orgs is close enough to something I’ve been talking about for a while as being potentially maladaptive that I think I agree that we should keep a close eye on this. (In general, we should try and avoid situations where there are far more applicants for something than the number accepted.)