It is extremely upsetting for people to apply and get turned down, especially if they found 80k materials at some emotional time (releasing they are not satisfied with their current job or studies). It is very hard to not interpret this as "you are not good enough".

I am so sad that we are causing this. It is really tough to make yourself vulnerable to strangers and reach out for help, only to have your request rebuffed. That’s particularly hard when it feels like a judgement on someone’s worth, and more particularly on their ability to help others. And ... (read more)

By focusing on people "for whom you’ll have useful things to say", you talk to people who do not need additional resources (like guidance or introductions) for increasing their impact. The contrafactual impact is low. For example, testimonials on the website include PhD Student in Machine Learning at Cambridge and the President of Harvard Law School Effective Altruism.

I don’t quite agree here. I was counting ‘additional resources’ like guidance and introductions as ‘things to say’. So focusing on people for whom we have useful things to say should incre... (read more)

A month-long period of reviewing the application is prohibitive and disappointing.

I agree this is too long, and I’m sad that it was actually longer than this at times. Right now I’m mostly managing to review them within a week, and almost always within 2 weeks. I wouldn’t want to promise to always be able to do this, but it’s much easier now we have a team of people working on advising.

I have an impression that 80k accepted a long time ago that that wait time will just have to be pretty long.

I'm actually really keen to avoid us having long wait time... (read more)

Thanks for sharing your view. It’s useful for us to get an overall sense of whether others think our work is useful in order to sense check our views and continue figuring out whether this is the right thing for us to focus our time on. It's also important to hear detail about what the problems with it are so that we can try to address them. I’ll respond to your points in separate comments so that they’re easier to parse and engage with.

I can second feeling pretty heavy-hearted after my rejection, and really like the idea of vetting a crowd of volunteers. A similar idea would be to offer rejected people to share the info from their form, plus maybe their most important questions, with people who agreed to maybe take a look, e.g. via the EA Hub, where you could also filter relevant background. Or alternatively into a private group like „AI Safety Career Discussion“. I’m one of the shy people who would probably never do something like that themselves, but if it were an „official“ and recommended thing from 80,000Hours it would feel somehow much less scary.