Thank you for completing your project description. Next you'll be presented two assessments: a 10-minute personality questionnaire, followed by a 20-minute brain teaser.
This part is an experiment. Selections will be driven by your project description, not your score on this test. However, you're required to complete this section to submit your application.
I agree it's weird. It seems like a classic personality test and pseudo (part of an) IQ test combined. Even collecting these results in the first place raises questions for me. Say that the results do indicate a personality disorder and/or a low IQ. Having that information tied in some random database you applied to for a "side project" raises privacy concerns. Note that the website has no clear (one I can easily find) privacy policy related directly to this aspect of the application. That's a red flag for me since this is highly personal data. In fact it's pretty unprofessional. A couple sentences saying you won't use the data is not sufficient (also why are you collecting it if you're not going to use it? More transparency please).
I would suggest to the creators of this that they immediately delete existing data collected through this part of the application until they can put together a proper privacy policy and be more transparent about how they're going to use the data.
I didn't care why, I cared because it was decietful. Eventually by the time they wanted an additional '20 minutes' AFTER already doing a ten question spatial awareness test I quit. Could go on forever. Very private stuff too. To not be upfront with things like that is wrong.
Please be transparent about the process, maybe add a "progress tracker". I'm grateful for the HN community saving me much time informing me there's a "personality questionnaire" (wtf is that?) awaiting at the other end of the funnel.
Thanks for the feedback! Some extra context: Since we’re hoping to scale the program one day, we’re looking for better ways to identify scientists we should support. Per the description, it’s very experimental and we’re open to any feedback you have.
Personally my views are you have a right to ask for whatever you want. Don't lie about it and call it a 'grant in minutes'. Sure there is 525,600 minutes in a year. That many?!! Spell out everything you want upfront. This is a dark design pattern and it's unethical and especially coming from you all you should know better. With sensitive information don't lead people on.
I think as long as you make it clear that there is a 10-minute questionnaire and 20-minute brain-teaser at the start of the application people probably won't mind.
Plus you might want to change your claim from 'minutes' to 'hours'. You won't put off people who really want to apply and you'll get less people who just want easy money, trying to apply and reacting angrily.
Is there a name for the pattern recognition section? I'd be interested in reading more about it and how you use it as a measurement/how the results correlate with the decision process. Does it tie in with the behavioral aspect at all or are they completely independent?
Agree that you would need a way to filter out applicants who are just half way there.
But I think such tests have no relation to the mission.
Mandating a short video on capabilities and need of problem area is likely to filter out most candidates.
Making video requires effort.
This will get you people who are serious.
Further you could add option to either take test or 15 min video.
Just a suggestion.
I think the process is great! It's super fast. I hope you do get to glance at the "IQ" test results - if someone is four standard deviations (160 IQ - doesn't describe me) above the mean, then you should fund them even if you don't understand one word of their description. Maybe nobody does in the entire world except for them.
all that IQ tests validate is how well someone can take an IQ test. It means absolutely nothing in terms of validity of ideas, business sense, self motivation, discipline, leadership skills etc.
You try a rebuttal, which I commend, but the approach of your rebuttal isn't strong enough! Height also correlates with "basically every good life outcome" but the application form didn't ask for our height: nor should it.
IQ is inherently different. I really support the IQ test they decided to give and I definitely think they should glance at the results - especially to basically approve any applications from people with great results even if the evaluators don't understand the proposed application exactly.
yeah? well I say: all a normal funding application does is test how well you can fill out a funding application!
So adding an IQ test changes that to something meaningful, that correlates with AI (what these applications are for). After all, how is a low-intelligence person supposed to make a project in artificial intelligence!
There might be a lower limit IQ you might need to be able to hold enough data in your head to archive specific thoughts but i don't think that this limit is very high.
There are enough dedicated human beings out there who are not that smart but dedicated. They are easily able to do projects in artificial intelligence.
AI is not that complicated. It takes probably more stamina than IQ as a lot of research does.
I am certain that you are factually mistaken and there is not one single AI researcher anyone in the world who has ever personally coded a single project without having a high IQ. Sorry.
I find it very funny that you would think I'm, like, super smart. That has literally never happened to me before :)
I'm not being modest. I'm lucky to have smart people around me and I know how smart they are and how smart I am, and I'm not that smart. Anyway I've learned not to worry about it. I'm tenacious. That's taken me a long way already.
If it helps, though, I once cheated on an online IQ test for a job. I took it with a friend and we got 130 points together (I didn't like the job).
I guess that means my IQ is somewhere around 65 :P
oh okay, so I guessed 127 for your IQ and you already got 130 on a test you took with a friend. don't take an IQ test for me if you don't want to but I'm done proving my case.
It's interesting and something we're investigating at my company. Merely building out the marketplace/exchange for this stuff raises a ton of questions (which is good).
I asked a friend if they would pay $1/mo for a facebook alternative, and they said no -- they would just start using instagram. When I explained facebook owned instagram, they still didn't think $1/mo would be worth it, citing:
"It's just another thing I have to pay per month: Netflix, Spotify, etc."
People have mental budgets, and maybe their psychological good will in balancing those budgets get drained over time for things like recurring payments that aren't on a bigger scale ($100+) and aren't 100% necessary like internet.
I see where you are going and don't disagree. However, let me throw two things out there:
1) No good sales pitch starts with the price. What benefits you offering that will entice them?
2) You don't need to do everything a larger competitor does to disrupt. You just need to do one area better and have a slice of the audience cares a lot about that thing. What's the thing?
this is already a grey comment for me, but I think your message is relevant.
People need "friends" and they get them where they can. As a society, we deserve and owe our selves better than this. There are FOSS alternatives which are nearly as good. This is as fine a time as any to turn up the pressure on our friends, and to work for solutions that don't/can't sell us out (intentionally, or accidentally).
There are also gnu social, hubzilla, friendica, movim, pleroma, postactiv, etc. And, oh by the way, before you think these different alternatives don't interact...well, they do actually can and do interact with each other...some of the interactions are not 100%. As an example, gnu social, pleroma, postactiv all interact seamlessly 100% with one another...and they all interact a bunch with mastodon, though a little less than 100%. But still there is interactivity, just like emails that can easily cross different systems. And, you can join a server for any of the above for free! The only exception would be if YOU choose to manage your own server - which entails server monthly fees, and your administration time...Otherwise, if you only wish to be a user on someone else's server, that's free. So, you see, you really don't need facebook (or twitter or instagram or snapchat, etc.).
If it's Synapse.ai you're talking about, and it's "legitimate", why did you run a time-limited whitelist application process to drive scarcity for the coin you're selling? Are you registered with the SEC? If not, what's an interpretation of what you're doing where you're not promoting an unregistered security to the investing public?
> If we could solve off-target side effects using AI, then we'd be in a whole different ballgame. Having banged my head against it for a while, I think it is possible, but will take a huge amount of investment.
Can you talk more about what you've been thinking about here?
Not sure what OP is thinking, but you can look at this example of a commercial product designed for the prediction of off-target effects (https://cyclicarx.com/ligandexpress/).
1) SAAS in the pharma world is mostly a waste of time. Culturally, they don't want to pay for anything except drugs. There is also a culture of sunk cost, where they do not want to prune drugs from their pipeline based on what some piece of software says.
2) This is a boil the ocean approach, which does not work statistically. There are 20,000 targets. Predicting bioavailability at each target is very difficult, and different populations have different expression patterns. Even if you have 99% precision/recall for each one, odds that you can help with selection enrichment are infinitesimal. Even if you restrict it to a handful of targets with strong known side effects, the state of the art predications are still not good enough to meaningfully improve the outcomes.
(My comment will get buried because I'm flagged but whatever)
I had drinks with a bunch of Hugo award winners and candidates a couple of years back (2015?) and we started talking about near-future stuff. Mainly that I was looking for more of it. (Diamond Age fans out there?)
A funny thing came up: It's getting harder and harder to predict near-future stuff for some authors. I don't understand why. Is it that technology is becoming more and more obscured from the requirements of interacting with it?
Once upon a time, a person had to divine the landscape of network protocols and unix command line to understand the mystery of the internet. Nowadays that tech is just one click or swipe away -- perhaps there is less imagination required to figure out what's happening behind the scene, or perhaps no imagination is required anymore -- things just are.
Maybe we're just inundated with the next big trivial far future click-bait article that the future seems... well always right around the corner and less futur-y(?).
Or perhaps we're at the precipice of something entirely new and incomprehensible. I run a decentralized AI startup and we have an exercise where we try to imagine a world with particular capabilities but it (for a large part of my peers) seems out of reach -- as if it exists beyond a great divide.
It makes me think that whatever is next is either really beyond the scope of understanding, or just non-existent. It's fun (and exciting) to try and think about regardless.
I think tech is hard to predict because it's more about economic and human factors rather than the actual difficulty of research. New tech doesn't truly change the world until it hits mass market.
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Experimental Assessments
Thank you for completing your project description. Next you'll be presented two assessments: a 10-minute personality questionnaire, followed by a 20-minute brain teaser.
This part is an experiment. Selections will be driven by your project description, not your score on this test. However, you're required to complete this section to submit your application.
---snip---