I’m sorry it took you so long to fill out! I hope you’re correct that you were slower than the median by a decent amount, since I don’t want the application to take up quite so much of people’s time. However, definitely appreciate you letting us know how long it took you.
We want to try and get a sense of people’s experience in AI safety, future career plans, and see how they engage with AI safety material through the application (as well as their technical experience, since it can be a pretty technically demanding course), as well as a bunch of logistical stuff, of course.
I find that we tend to get a lot of signal from virtually all the parts of the application (apart from some of the logistical stuff, but I imagine that stuff is relatively quick to fill out). We have thought about trying to cut it down somewhat, but found it difficult to remove anything.
Another great example from Tarski, Frechet, and Lebesgue here!