A commenter on a draft of this post highlighted that Iād said:
For convenience, I will sometimes lump all such people together under the label āaspiring/ājunior researchersā. But itās important to note that that includes several quite different groups of people, who face different pain points and would benefit from different āsolutionsā.
And the commenter said:
this leaves me a bit confused about/āinterested in on what dimensions you see there being different groups; e.g. different research domains (e.g. animal suffering vs longtermism), or something else?
This a good question. My responses:
The dimensions of difference I was mainly thinking of when I wrote those sentences were:
whether the person has never done research (āaspiringā) vs having done some but not being very experienced (ājuniorā)
the extent to which the points listed in section 3 apply to them (i.e., to what extent do they want to do EA-relevant research long-term, want to test their fit for doing EA-relevant research, want to do a bit of EA-relevant research in order to gain knowledge and skills that will improve their ability to do other high-impact things, or want to do a bit of EA-relevant research because that research could itself be valuable)
But in reality, there are many other dimensions that would be relevant when analysing issues with the EA-aligned research pipeline and prioritising and implementing solutions to it
Including but not limited to what cause area the person wants to focus on, what fields or methodologies they have experience with or want to use, whether they want to do research in think tanks or academia or explicitly EA orgs or elsewhere, etc.
Relatedly, Iām tracking that the term āresearchā itself is broad and fuzzy, and Iāve seen it leading to non-constructive confusion. E.g. the skill and role of āworking out what strategies and interventions to pursue amongst the innumerable possibilitiesā* is often referred to as research within EA, but can in practice look very different what we commonly understand academic research to look like. (And in fact, I also think optimizing for one or the other can look fairly different.)
Is this a āsubgroupā of people you have in mind here? I think it might be worth clarifying this, though I acknowledge you do gesture at this a bit in (4) and maybe thatās enough
I do think that research borders on many other things, that āresearchersā tend to also do other things, and that some other types of people also do some research-y things
But Iām focused in this sequence on activities and roles that are quite clearly primarily āresearchā or āresearchersā, rather than using broader senses of those terms
That said, much of my analysis of the problem and the possible interventions would probably also apply somewhat to other types of activities and roles
And more so the closer they are to being EA-aligned research activities and roles
But I wasnāt writing with that in mind, and wouldāve written at least somewhat different things if I was
A commenter on a draft of this post highlighted that Iād said:
And the commenter said:
This a good question. My responses:
The dimensions of difference I was mainly thinking of when I wrote those sentences were:
whether the person has never done research (āaspiringā) vs having done some but not being very experienced (ājuniorā)
the extent to which the points listed in section 3 apply to them (i.e., to what extent do they want to do EA-relevant research long-term, want to test their fit for doing EA-relevant research, want to do a bit of EA-relevant research in order to gain knowledge and skills that will improve their ability to do other high-impact things, or want to do a bit of EA-relevant research because that research could itself be valuable)
But in reality, there are many other dimensions that would be relevant when analysing issues with the EA-aligned research pipeline and prioritising and implementing solutions to it
Including but not limited to what cause area the person wants to focus on, what fields or methodologies they have experience with or want to use, whether they want to do research in think tanks or academia or explicitly EA orgs or elsewhere, etc.
(See also footnote 2)
The commenter also said:
My reactions:
I do think that research borders on many other things, that āresearchersā tend to also do other things, and that some other types of people also do some research-y things
But Iām focused in this sequence on activities and roles that are quite clearly primarily āresearchā or āresearchersā, rather than using broader senses of those terms
That said, much of my analysis of the problem and the possible interventions would probably also apply somewhat to other types of activities and roles
And more so the closer they are to being EA-aligned research activities and roles
But I wasnāt writing with that in mind, and wouldāve written at least somewhat different things if I was