Unfortunately this competes with the importance of interventions failing fast. If it’s going to take several years before the expected benefits of an intervention are clearly distinguishable from noise, there is a high risk that you’ll waste a lot of time on it before finding out it didn’t actually help, you won’t be able to experiment with different variants of the intervention to find out which work best, and even if you’re confident it will help you might find it infeasible to maintain motivation when the reward feedback loop is so long.
Sorry, perhaps this wasn’t clear—I’m not suggesting investing heavily in a single intervention or cause area for a long time, rather building skills that will be useful for solving a variety of problems (e.g. research skills, experience working in teams etc.).
Unfortunately this competes with the importance of interventions failing fast. If it’s going to take several years before the expected benefits of an intervention are clearly distinguishable from noise, there is a high risk that you’ll waste a lot of time on it before finding out it didn’t actually help, you won’t be able to experiment with different variants of the intervention to find out which work best, and even if you’re confident it will help you might find it infeasible to maintain motivation when the reward feedback loop is so long.
Sorry, perhaps this wasn’t clear—I’m not suggesting investing heavily in a single intervention or cause area for a long time, rather building skills that will be useful for solving a variety of problems (e.g. research skills, experience working in teams etc.).