Relatedly, I’m quite keen on the idea of writing and posting short literature reviews. I suspect that when people look into a topic, they sometimes spend 10-40 hours looking into particular sub-topics, just to inform their own decision-making. It doesn’t take much more time input to write your own notes in the format of a literature review, then spend a little while editing it at the end for clarity.
That’s what I did with my short lit reviews on issues related to developing and training management and leadership expertise. Charity Entrepreneurship also write short reports on each of the main options that they consider in various stages of their recommendation process.
One danger of this approach is that by formatting it as a literature review you might come across as over-confident in your findings (even with lots of caveats), and you leave yourself open to accusations of low rigour.
Yeah, I think that’d be another great thing for people to do. Although I’d add that that might be especially valuable when there’s no existing non-EA lit review on the topic (e.g., when the topic is somewhat obscure, or you’re taking a particular angle on a topic that EAs are unusually interested in).
E.g., perhaps there’s already a fairly good lit review on hiring practices in general, and you could add some value by writing a more summarised or updated version. But you might also be able to capture a lot of that value just by making a link post to that review on the forum and noting/summarising a few key points. Meanwhile, there might be no lit review that’s focused on hiring practices for start-up-style nonprofits in particular, so writing that might be especially worthwhile (if that’s roughly the subtopic/angle you were interested in anyway).
On the other hand, I think I would’ve guessed that the topic “how to create a highly impactful/disruptive research team” would be quite far from obscure, and would already have a solid, up-to-date lit review covering what EA people would want to know. But this post suggests there wasn’t an existing lit review with that particular angle, and the post seemed quite interesting and useful to me. So there are probably more “gaps” than I would naively expect, and thus substantial value in lit reviews on certain topics I would naively expect are already “covered”.
Relatedly, I’m quite keen on the idea of writing and posting short literature reviews. I suspect that when people look into a topic, they sometimes spend 10-40 hours looking into particular sub-topics, just to inform their own decision-making. It doesn’t take much more time input to write your own notes in the format of a literature review, then spend a little while editing it at the end for clarity.
That’s what I did with my short lit reviews on issues related to developing and training management and leadership expertise. Charity Entrepreneurship also write short reports on each of the main options that they consider in various stages of their recommendation process.
One danger of this approach is that by formatting it as a literature review you might come across as over-confident in your findings (even with lots of caveats), and you leave yourself open to accusations of low rigour.
Yeah, I think that’d be another great thing for people to do. Although I’d add that that might be especially valuable when there’s no existing non-EA lit review on the topic (e.g., when the topic is somewhat obscure, or you’re taking a particular angle on a topic that EAs are unusually interested in).
E.g., perhaps there’s already a fairly good lit review on hiring practices in general, and you could add some value by writing a more summarised or updated version. But you might also be able to capture a lot of that value just by making a link post to that review on the forum and noting/summarising a few key points. Meanwhile, there might be no lit review that’s focused on hiring practices for start-up-style nonprofits in particular, so writing that might be especially worthwhile (if that’s roughly the subtopic/angle you were interested in anyway).
On the other hand, I think I would’ve guessed that the topic “how to create a highly impactful/disruptive research team” would be quite far from obscure, and would already have a solid, up-to-date lit review covering what EA people would want to know. But this post suggests there wasn’t an existing lit review with that particular angle, and the post seemed quite interesting and useful to me. So there are probably more “gaps” than I would naively expect, and thus substantial value in lit reviews on certain topics I would naively expect are already “covered”.