Dinesh Natesan 🔹
Bio
I am a scientist with expertise in neuroscience, data science, and computational modelling. I have spent the last decade thinking about the neural circuits and the computation they before to produce animal behavior. I have led independent research to better understand neural circuits by using techniques from several disciplines, often by assembling collaborative multidisciplinary teams.
I recently have been disillusioned with academia and began a self-exploratory journey of improving my societal impact. Through 80,000 hrs and HIP's impact accelerator program, I came across the EA movement and its cause areas.
I want to use the skillsets I developed over the last decade to help bring in a safe and equitable world.
How others can help me
- Help me connect to organizations/projects/volunteer positions where I can test out my skillsets. Any projects you want help with?
- Help figure out areas where I need to upskill to make a successful career pivot.
- Help me identify high-impact career paths and positions that suit my skillset, especially ones I might not have considered.
How I can help others
- Multidisciplinary expertise across several engineering and life science disciplines.
- Neuroscience perspective of ML/AI
- A bunch of technical skills - hardware (electronics, optics, engineering design) and software - can help build prototypes.
- Extracting insights from datasets by analyzing and visualizing data, building models, and validating ideas.
- Connections and contacts in the academic neuroscience community
Posts 1
Comments2
Thanks for sharing the example, Saulie (and for creating an account to comment)! It is a very illustrative example of how simple feedback can be very useful for self-growth.
Is "Applied" a platform that some organizations use? It seems to be a convenient way of evaluating and providing feedback.
I think there is definitely an opportunity! The big question is whether hiring managers will take the risk to work with an external recruiter (or a new platform) in order to provide candidates with more feedback? Particularly in the starting stages where there is little push, due to misaligned incentives.
I am optimistic here simply because EA organizations care about impact, and providing feedback has a multiplicative impact on candidates.
Great feedback, thanks for sharing, Vinoy!
I agree with your first point partially - a broad funnel provides orgs with optionality. They can find good candidates even when the hiring processes are not optimized - e.g. job descriptions are not well written, etc.
That said, I do feel that the advantages of a broad funnel fall off when the number of applications/position scales moves from 10-100x to >100x. This is more an intuitive reasoning - I do not have a good rationale for it. The closest is that every application pool is a biased sampling of the population distribution. Good sampling would provide distributions with means closest to the hiring needs. Just broadening the funnel would provide sampling distributions closer to the population distribution. Practically, this would mean a lot of manual filtering work to sub-select candidates for next stages of applications. In these scenarios, incentives of hiring committees and candidates might be more aligned.
You mentioned that feedback of the 95th or 10th percentile is useful, but not the 50th percentile. But I do think the feedback is actionable - it tells that the applicant is scoring average and they do not have any counterfactual impact for that position. I agree, it doesn't tell the applicant how to improve, but it does provide some information on how they fare in the applicant pool.
However, I completely agree that real life is too noisy/messy and applicants need more information on why they were scored in a particular way. Saulie's comment shows a nice way this can be done - providing some information about scores with respect to the key requirements of the job.
My optimistic hope is that once orgs start doing a simple percentile rank-based feedback, they can be pushed towards more feedback with respect to the key application requirements. This is slowly moving the bottom line, from no feedback to something useful. And an automated, easy-to-setup percentile rank system might provide just a low enough barrier to get the ball rolling...