We do want the participants on ARENA to have quite a strong interest in AI safety, which is why we ask people to evidence some substantial engagement with AI safety agendas (which is what that question is designed to do). However, we’re not looking for perfect answers for either of the questions, nothing that should take hours of research if you’re engaged consistently on LessWrong/Alignment Forum.
However, it’s not that you must finish the application within 60-90 minutes, this is just a rough estimate of how long it would take someone who’s engaged with AI and AI safety to complete it (which may be wrong, sorry that this was the case!). We aren’t presuming in this estimate that people are doing a lot of research to provide the highest quality answers to these questions, since that’s really not what we’re expecting. Although of course you’re free to spend as much or as little time as you want on the application.
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.