Dear people in MIRI, do you have anything resembling this?
We did when I was there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still in use. (It was in Asana, iirc.) I don’t think there was a meta-system of “check whether or not people are falling thru the cracks”. When I left and stopped handling one of the inboxes, it got handed to someone else, but I don’t think we ever had targets for things like ‘response time’ or ‘fraction of applicants responded to’ or so on that we checked how well people were doing on. A bunch of people who we didn’t have form responses to, or weren’t quite sure how to evaluate, I think spent a lot of time waiting for replies (or never got them).
[FWIW my sense is that Buck was better than I was at communicating with candidates, and I think the “rejection but here’s how to impress me” is a better response for everyone than “hmm I’m not quite sure what to do with this person, I’ll come back to this later”.]
One problem is that I don’t think keeping the public-facing messaging up-to-date was a priority for anyone, or a lot of things were in ‘maintenance mode’ and only barely getting maintained. Like, we had a MIRIx program, where we would pay for meals/snacks for people to talk about MIRI research; I don’t remember who started it, but I took over the ‘handle requested changes’ function (like if an organizer emailed us to change their email, or get taken off the list, or to get their reimbursement or w/e). But the page looks the same as it did when I left, and I’m pretty sure a lot of those are out of date (I’d be surprised if Tom Everitt is still running events in Canberra, given that he lives in the UK now, for example). It’d probably be good to update the page to reflect the actual level of interest from current-MIRI, but I’m not sure who would think that’s a high-priority thing for them to do (and so probably it wouldn’t seem good taking opportunity cost into account).
We did when I was there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still in use. (It was in Asana, iirc.) I don’t think there was a meta-system of “check whether or not people are falling thru the cracks”. When I left and stopped handling one of the inboxes, it got handed to someone else, but I don’t think we ever had targets for things like ‘response time’ or ‘fraction of applicants responded to’ or so on that we checked how well people were doing on. A bunch of people who we didn’t have form responses to, or weren’t quite sure how to evaluate, I think spent a lot of time waiting for replies (or never got them).
[FWIW my sense is that Buck was better than I was at communicating with candidates, and I think the “rejection but here’s how to impress me” is a better response for everyone than “hmm I’m not quite sure what to do with this person, I’ll come back to this later”.]
One problem is that I don’t think keeping the public-facing messaging up-to-date was a priority for anyone, or a lot of things were in ‘maintenance mode’ and only barely getting maintained. Like, we had a MIRIx program, where we would pay for meals/snacks for people to talk about MIRI research; I don’t remember who started it, but I took over the ‘handle requested changes’ function (like if an organizer emailed us to change their email, or get taken off the list, or to get their reimbursement or w/e). But the page looks the same as it did when I left, and I’m pretty sure a lot of those are out of date (I’d be surprised if Tom Everitt is still running events in Canberra, given that he lives in the UK now, for example). It’d probably be good to update the page to reflect the actual level of interest from current-MIRI, but I’m not sure who would think that’s a high-priority thing for them to do (and so probably it wouldn’t seem good taking opportunity cost into account).