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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 think this falls into a broader class of behaviors I'd call aspirational inclusiveness.
I do think shifting the relative weight from welcoming to clear is good. But I'd frame it as a "yes and" kind of shift. The encouragement message should be followed up with a dose of hard numbers.
Something I've appreciated from a few applications is the hiring manager's initial guess for how the process will turn out. Something like "Stage 1 has X people and our very tentative guess is future stages will go like this".
Scenarios can also substitute in areas where numbers may be misleading or hard to obtain. I've gotten this from mentors before, like here's what could happen if your new job goes great. Here's what could happen if your new job goes badly. Here's the stuff you can control and here's the stuff you can't control.
Something I've tried to practice in my advice is giving some ballpark number and reference class. I tell someone they should consider skilling up in hard area or pursuing competitive field, then I tell them I expect success in <5% of people I give the advice to, and then say you may still want to do it because of certain reasons
Yes, it's all very noisy. But numbers seem far far better than expecting applicants to read between the lines on what a heartwarming message is supposed to mean, especially early-career folks who would understandably assign a high probability of success with it
One thing is just that discouragement is culturally quite hard and there are strong disincentives to do so; eg I think I definitely get more flak for telling people they shouldn't do X than telling them they should (including a recent incidence which was rather personally costly). And I think I'm much more capable of diplomatic language than the median person in such situations; some of my critical or discouraging comments on this forum are popular.
I also know at least 2 different people who were told (probably wrongly) many years ago that they can't be good researchers, and they still bring it up as recently as this year. Presumably people falsely told they can be good researchers (or correctly told that they cannot) are less likely to e.g. show up at EA Global. So it's easier for people in positions of relative power or prestige to see the positive consequences of encouragement, and the negative consequences of discouragement, than the reverse.
Sometimes when people ask me about their chances, I try to give them off-the-cuff numerical probabilities. Usually the people I'm talking to appreciate it but sometimes people around them (or around me) get mad at me.
(Tbf, I have never tried scoring these fast guesses, so I have no idea how accurate they are).
None of my principled arguments against "only care about big projects" have convinced anyone, but in practice Google reorganized around that exact policy ("don't start a project unless it could conceivably have 1b+ users, kill if it's ever not on track to reach that") and they haven't grown an interesting thing since.
My guess is the benefits of immediately aiming high are overwhelmed by the costs of less contact with reality.
the policy was commonly announced when I worked at google (2014), I'm sure anyone else who was there at the time would confirm its existence. In terms of "haven't grown anything since", I haven't kept close track but can't name one and frequently hear people say the same.
I like the Google Pixels. Well specifically I liked 2 and 3a but my current one (6a) is a bit of a disappointment. My house also uses Google Nest and Chromecast regularly. Tensorflow is okay. But yeah, overall certainly nothing as big as Gmail or Google Maps, never mind their core product.
Google was producing the Android OS and its own flagship phones well before the Pixel, so I consider it to predate my knowledge of the policy (although maybe the policy started before I got there, which I've now dated to 4/1/2013)
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 think this falls into a broader class of behaviors I'd call aspirational inclusiveness.
I do think shifting the relative weight from welcoming to clear is good. But I'd frame it as a "yes and" kind of shift. The encouragement message should be followed up with a dose of hard numbers.
Something I've appreciated from a few applications is the hiring manager's initial guess for how the process will turn out. Something like "Stage 1 has X people and our very tentative guess is future stages will go like this".
Scenarios can also substitute in areas where numbers may be misleading or hard to obtain. I've gotten this from mentors before, like here's what could happen if your new job goes great. Here's what could happen if your new job goes badly. Here's the stuff you can control and here's the stuff you can't control.
Something I've tried to practice in my advice is giving some ballpark number and reference class. I tell someone they should consider skilling up in hard area or pursuing competitive field, then I tell them I expect success in <5% of people I give the advice to, and then say you may still want to do it because of certain reasons
Yes, it's all very noisy. But numbers seem far far better than expecting applicants to read between the lines on what a heartwarming message is supposed to mean, especially early-career folks who would understandably assign a high probability of success with it
Oh I like this phrase a lot
Yeah this sounds right.
One thing is just that discouragement is culturally quite hard and there are strong disincentives to do so; eg I think I definitely get more flak for telling people they shouldn't do X than telling them they should (including a recent incidence which was rather personally costly). And I think I'm much more capable of diplomatic language than the median person in such situations; some of my critical or discouraging comments on this forum are popular.
I also know at least 2 different people who were told (probably wrongly) many years ago that they can't be good researchers, and they still bring it up as recently as this year. Presumably people falsely told they can be good researchers (or correctly told that they cannot) are less likely to e.g. show up at EA Global. So it's easier for people in positions of relative power or prestige to see the positive consequences of encouragement, and the negative consequences of discouragement, than the reverse.
Sometimes when people ask me about their chances, I try to give them off-the-cuff numerical probabilities. Usually the people I'm talking to appreciate it but sometimes people around them (or around me) get mad at me.
(Tbf, I have never tried scoring these fast guesses, so I have no idea how accurate they are).
None of my principled arguments against "only care about big projects" have convinced anyone, but in practice Google reorganized around that exact policy ("don't start a project unless it could conceivably have 1b+ users, kill if it's ever not on track to reach that") and they haven't grown an interesting thing since.
My guess is the benefits of immediately aiming high are overwhelmed by the costs of less contact with reality.
Can you link to a source about this?
the policy was commonly announced when I worked at google (2014), I'm sure anyone else who was there at the time would confirm its existence. In terms of "haven't grown anything since", I haven't kept close track but can't name one and frequently hear people say the same.
I like the Google Pixels. Well specifically I liked 2 and 3a but my current one (6a) is a bit of a disappointment. My house also uses Google Nest and Chromecast regularly. Tensorflow is okay. But yeah, overall certainly nothing as big as Gmail or Google Maps, never mind their core product.
Google was producing the Android OS and its own flagship phones well before the Pixel, so I consider it to predate my knowledge of the policy (although maybe the policy started before I got there, which I've now dated to 4/1/2013)