Update: We have finalized our selection of mentors.

I'll be looking forward to hearing more about your work on whistleblowing! I've heard some promising takes about this direction. Strikes me as broadly good and currently neglected.

This is so well-written! 

I'm cringing so hard already fr

Thanks for such a thorough response! I am also curious to hear Oscar's answer :)

When applicants requested feedback, did they do that in the application or by reaching out after receiving a rejection?

Is that lognormal distribution responsible for 

the cost-effectiveness is non-linearly related to speed-up time.

If yes, what's the intuition behind this distribution? If not, why is cost-effectiveness non-linear in speed-up time?

Something I found especially troubling when applying to many EA jobs is the sense that I am p-hacking my way in. Perhaps I am never the best candidate, but the hiring process is sufficiently noisy that I can expect to be hired somewhere if I apply to enough places. This feels like I am deceiving the organizations that I believe in and misallocating the community's resources. 

There might be some truth in this, but it's easy to take the idea too far. I like to remind myself:

1. The process is so noisy! A lot of the time the best applicant doesn't get the job, and sometimes that will be me. I ask myself, "do I really think they understand my abilities based on that cover letter and work test?"
2. A job is a high-dimensional object, and it's hard to screen for many of those dimensions. This means that the fact that you were rejected from one job might not be very strong evidence that you are a poor fit for another (even superficially similar) role. It also means that you can be an excellent fit in surprising ways: maybe you know that you're a talented public speaker, but no one ever asks you to prove it in an interview. So conditional on getting a job, I think you shouldn't feel like an imposter but rather eager to contribute your unique talents. My old manager was fond of saying "in a high-dimensional sphere, most of the points are close to the edge," by which he meant that most people have a unique skill profile: maybe I'm not the best at research or ops or comms, but I could still be the best at (research x ops x comms).

Thanks for the references! Looking forward to reading :)

Fantastic, thanks for sharing!