Hmm reasonable counterargument, I may become convinced after pondering. In this context, my mental representative[1] of “put it in the email” says:
Sure, I’ll bite that bullet. Put something to this effect:
We understand that not getting funded or mentored is frustrating. Unfortunately, we have no money, no researchers, and more applicants than there are grains of sand on earth. Don’t wait around for someone to fund you, the world needs bootstrappers. If you’re sufficiently motivated and can self-fund such that you have time to {study, research, policy, activism, genius weird ideas, wording unfinished—should be single word covering all these cases}, consider volunteering your thinking and agency to whatever gap you can identify. We hope people doing good work somehow get retroactive funding, though this is not on the horizon.
Basically I want these funding and mentoring opportunities to be apologetic about their very existence being near-unavoidably misleading. I want this as part of an ensemble of small tweaks to hopefully prepare to not depend on official connections to find people who can contribute. There are a lot of brilliant insights not being attempted because people aren’t getting mental hero licenses, (though the literal phrase hero license is a bad prompt for many). They see opportunity, apply, get discouraged about the whole thing, because they’re humans. I want the rejection to pump them up to sit down and think about the problem end to end as part of open community. probably also needs links to some tsvi/wentworth/wei dai getting-started posts.
edit: and I agree with Katalina downthread that this needs to also be written so that it is clear it only asks for what makes sense to the reader. I mean it to be a call to agency.
Mental representative: whatever ensemble in my head that represents a thing as a coherent simulator of that thing. Subcircuit which has temporarily allocated to represent something I encounter. Compare “representation”, which can include representations too low resolution to qualify as being a representative.
Basically I want these funding and mentoring opportunities to be apologetic about their very existence being near-unavoidably misleading.
Super agree! I wanna say something like “please respect the time of people who are doing everything in their power to have a maximally positive impact in the world”. Bottom line: It’s unethical to waste a fellow altruist’s time.
I’d really like to see orgs change how they describe positions to candidates. E.g. being way more transparent about how many applicants they’ve had in the past, what are the deciding factors in their selection, and whether it’s actually even remotely possible that they would consider someone without a relevant visa/residency, or someone who doesn’t meet the exact preferred qualifications listed.[1]
I’m saying this while keeping in mind that it’s hard to predict the quality and quantity of applicants, but my broad intuition still is that common sense alone should nudge towards this direction.
An example of a win-win would be for orgs to use extremely brief screening forms at the first application stage, ones that would actually take a person <15 minutes to fill out, and didn’t leave any room for overcompensation.[2]
“Even if you don’t meet all the requirements, we still strongly encourage you to apply” does not give a clear enough idea of the probability or circumstances under which this would be possible. I find it a bit unethical at this stage to be signaling fake inclusivity when the truth is more like “yeah, on paper, you don’t need to have experience, but in practice, there’s a <1% chance we’ll select you if you don’t”.
Hmm reasonable counterargument, I may become convinced after pondering. In this context, my mental representative[1] of “put it in the email” says:
Sure, I’ll bite that bullet. Put something to this effect:
Basically I want these funding and mentoring opportunities to be apologetic about their very existence being near-unavoidably misleading. I want this as part of an ensemble of small tweaks to hopefully prepare to not depend on official connections to find people who can contribute. There are a lot of brilliant insights not being attempted because people aren’t getting mental hero licenses, (though the literal phrase hero license is a bad prompt for many). They see opportunity, apply, get discouraged about the whole thing, because they’re humans. I want the rejection to pump them up to sit down and think about the problem end to end as part of open community. probably also needs links to some tsvi/wentworth/wei dai getting-started posts.
edit: and I agree with Katalina downthread that this needs to also be written so that it is clear it only asks for what makes sense to the reader. I mean it to be a call to agency.
Mental representative: whatever ensemble in my head that represents a thing as a coherent simulator of that thing. Subcircuit which has temporarily allocated to represent something I encounter. Compare “representation”, which can include representations too low resolution to qualify as being a representative.
Super agree! I wanna say something like “please respect the time of people who are doing everything in their power to have a maximally positive impact in the world”. Bottom line: It’s unethical to waste a fellow altruist’s time.
I’d really like to see orgs change how they describe positions to candidates. E.g. being way more transparent about how many applicants they’ve had in the past, what are the deciding factors in their selection, and whether it’s actually even remotely possible that they would consider someone without a relevant visa/residency, or someone who doesn’t meet the exact preferred qualifications listed.[1]
I’m saying this while keeping in mind that it’s hard to predict the quality and quantity of applicants, but my broad intuition still is that common sense alone should nudge towards this direction.
An example of a win-win would be for orgs to use extremely brief screening forms at the first application stage, ones that would actually take a person <15 minutes to fill out, and didn’t leave any room for overcompensation.[2]
“Even if you don’t meet all the requirements, we still strongly encourage you to apply” does not give a clear enough idea of the probability or circumstances under which this would be possible. I find it a bit unethical at this stage to be signaling fake inclusivity when the truth is more like “yeah, on paper, you don’t need to have experience, but in practice, there’s a <1% chance we’ll select you if you don’t”.
Like don’t ask for a CV—that way you prevent people from wasting their time tailoring one for the position.