First off, I want to thank everyone who has participated so far. Aside from a very small number of annoying people, most of you were great. Of the 1,500 people who had the opportunity to participate in Round 2, about 800 finished and returned the application on time. This was the Round 2 application:

Well, I got over 4,000 emails responding to my research assistant gig posting. It genuinely flabbergasted me, especially after I took pains to explain to people that this was not a job that involved any sort of goofy partying with me or whatever, and though it pays, it isn’t much at all. I was hoping to get 500 responses.

Of over 4,000 emails sent to me, only about 1,500 got replies back inviting them to the second round. Yes, you read that correctly: Only 37.5% of the people who responded could follow the extremely basic instructions I gave.

Since I have closed the first round and the second round has started, I’m going to go through each instruction and explain how people got them wrong, because I think it might be beneficial to people who are in the second round to understand my thinking. It also might help some of those people who fucked up to understand what they look like to an objective employment source, and learn something from their mistakes.

Here are the full instructions I put up: