This RA says they definitely learned more from this RA role than they wouldāve if doing a PhD
Mainly due to tight feedback loops
And strong incentives for the senior researcher to give good feedback
The RA is doing producing āintermediate productsā for thesenior researcher. So the senior researcher needs and uses what the RA produces. So the feedback is better and different.
In contrast, if the RA was working on their own, separate projects, it would be more like the senior researcher just looks at it and grades it.
The RA has mostly just had to do literature reviews of all sorts of stuff related to the broad topic the senior researcher focuses on
So the RA person was incentivised more than pretty much anyone else to just get familiar with all the stuff under this umbrella
They wouldnāt be able or encouraged to do that in a PhD
The thing the RA hasnāt liked is that he hasnāt been producing his own work
He hasnāt had to deal with figuring out project choices for himself, facing a blank page, etc., so he hasnāt learned to handle that better
Also, he doesnāt have publicly viewable stuff heās worked on that has his name on it
So this has been a bit of an ego-style difficulty for him
I said: Matthew VDM is also very positive about this sort of RA role. So now I think 2 out of the 2 people who Iāve heard from whoāve done such roles have been very positive about it. Should that update me a lot? Should this be like one of the five career paths we often mention to EAs, roughly as often as PhDs? Or maybe itās like thereās a certain kind of person whoāll gravitate towards such roles, and thisāll work well for them and seem great to them, but that wouldnāt generalise?
This RA wouldnāt have guessed that this would be a good role for him
E.g. he likes having his name on stuff
So that means that this is more evidence. More of an update. Rather than it just being that heās predictably the sort of person for whom this fits.
I said: How should this update me on things like the level of guidance vs self-direction that should occur in researcher training programs?
Hard to say
Main tradeoff is building skill doing self-directed projects vs building skills for each of the intermediate products
(As noted above, feedback loops for intermediate products might tend to be better)
Maybe the theoretically ideal situation would be to have some people specialise for indefinitely being RAs and some indefinitely specialise for being principal investigators
This is maybe sort of like what lab model looks like in hard sciences
Could perhaps be a good way to go in the social sciences.
But itād be a quite radical departure.
And thereās ego constraints.
Perhaps there could be even more specialisation, e.g. into:
PI
Theyād be generalists too to some extent
Brainstorming ideas guy
Data analysis people
Etc.
(Though this is then an even more āout thereā idea)
For the last few years, Iāve been an RA in the general domain of ~economics at a major research university, and I think that while a lot of what youāre saying makes sense, itās important to note that the quality of oneās experience as an RA will always depend to a very significant extent on oneās supervising researcher. In fact, I think this dependency might be just about the only thing every RA role has in common. Your data points/ātestimonials reasonably represent what itās like to RA for a good supervisor, but bad supervisors abound (at least/āespecially in academia), and RAing for a bad supervisor can be positively nightmarish. Furthermore, itās harder than youād think to screen for this in advance of taking an RA job. I feel particularly lucky to be working for a great supervisor, but/ābecause I am quite familiar with how much the alternative sucks.
On a separate note, regarding your comment about people potentially specializing in RAing as a career, I donāt really think this would yield much in the way of productivity gains relative to the current state of affairs in academia (where postdocs often already fill the role that I think you envision for career RAs). I do, however, think that it makes a lot of sense for some RAs to go into careers in research management. Though most RAs probably lack the requisite management aptitude, the ones who can effectively manage people, I think, can substantially increase the productivity of mid-to-large academic labs/āresearch groups by working in management roles (I know J-PAL has employed former RAs in this capacity). A lot of academic research is severely management-constrained, in large part because management duties are often foisted upon PIs (and no one goes into academia because they want to be a manager, nor do PIs typically receive any management training, so the people responsible for management often enough lack both relevant interest and relevant skill). Moreover, productivity losses to bad management often go unrecognized because how well their research group is being managed is, like, literally at the very bottom of most PIsā lists of things to think about (not just because theyāre not interested in it, also because theyāre often very busy and have many different things competing for their attention). Finally, one consequence of this is that bad RAs (at least in the social sciences) can unproductively consume a research groupās resources for extended periods of time without anyone taking much notice. On the other hand, even if the group tries to avoid this by employing a more active management approach, in that case a bad RA can meaningfully impede the groupās productivity by requiring more of their supervisorās time to manage them than they save through their work. My sense is that fear of this situation pervades RA hiring processes in many corners of academia.
itās important to note that the quality of oneās experience as an RA will always depend to a very significant extent on oneās supervising researcher. p...] but bad supervisors abound (at least/āespecially in academia), and RAing for a bad supervisor can be positively nightmarish.
Thanks, I think this provides a useful counterpoint/ānuance that I think should help people make informed decisions about whether to try to get RA roles, how to choose which roles to aim for/āaccept, and whether and how to facilitate/āencourage other people to offer or seek RA roles.
Your second paragraph is also interesting. I hadnāt previously thought about how there may be overlap between the skills/āmindsets that are useful for RAs and those useful for research management, and that seems like an useful point to raise.
regarding your comment about people potentially specializing in RAing as a career, I donāt really think this would yield much in the way of productivity gains relative to the current state of affairs in academia
Minor point: That point was from the RA I spoke to, not from me. (But I do endorse the idea that such specialisation might be a good thing.)
More substantive point: Itās worth noting is that, while a lot of the research and research training I particularly care about happens in traditional academia, a lot also happens in EA parts of academia (e.g., FHI, GPI), in EA orgs, in think tanks, among independent researchers, and maybe elsewhere. So even if this specialisation wouldnāt yield much productivity gains compared to the current state of affairs in one of those āsectorsā, it could perhaps do so in others. (I donāt know if it actually would, thoughāI havenāt looked into it enough, and am just making the relatively weak claim that it might.)
Yeah, I think itās very plausible that career RAs could yield meaningful productivity gains in organizations that differ structurally from ātraditionalā academic research groups, including, importantly, many EA research institutions. I think this depends a lot on the kinds of research that these organizations are conducting (in particular, the methods being employed and the intended audiences of published work), how the senior researchersā jobs are designed, what the talent pipeline looks like, etc., but itās certainly at least plausible that this could be the case.
On the parallels/āoverlap between what makes for a good RA and what makes for a good research manager, my view is actually probably weaker than I may have suggested in my initial comment. The reason why RAs are sometimes promoted into research management positions, as I understand it, is that effective research management is believed to require an understanding of what the research process, workflow, etc. look like in the relevant discipline and academic setting, and RAs are typically the only people without PhDs who have that context-specific understanding. Plus, theyāll also have relevant domain knowledge about the substance of the research, which is quite useful in a research manager, too. I think these are pretty much all of the reasons why RAs may make for good research managers. I donāt really think itās a matter of skills or of mindset anywhere near as much as itās about knowledge (both tacit and not). In fact, I think one difficulty with promoting RAs to research management roles is that often, being a successful RA seems to select for traits associated with not having good management skills (e.g., being happy spending oneās days reading academic papers alone with very limited opportunities for interpersonal contact). This is why I limited my original comment on this to RAs who can effectively manage people, who, as I suggested, I think are probably a small minority. Because good research managers are so rare, though, and because research is so management-constrained without them, if someone is such an RA and they have the opportunity, I would think that moving into research management could be quite an impactful path for them.
One idea that comes to mind is to set up an organization that hires RAs-as-a-service. Say, a nonprofit that works with multiple EA orgs and employees several RAs, some full-time and others part-time (think, a student job). This org can then handle recruiting, basic training, employment and some of the management. RAs could work on multiple projects with perhaps multiple different people, and tasks could be delegated to the organization as a whole to find the right RA to fit.
A financial model could be something like EA orgs pay 25-50% of the relevant salaries for projects they recruit RAs for, and the rest is complemented by donations to the non-profit itself.
Yeah, I definitely think this is worth someone spending at least a couple hours seriously thinking about doing, including maybe sending out a survey to or conducting interviews with non-junior researchers[1] to gauge interest in having an RA if it was arranged via this service.
I previously suggested a somewhat similar idea as a project to improve the long-term future:
Research or writing assistance for researchers (especially senior ones) at orgs like FHI, Forethought, MIRI, CHAI
This might allow them to complete additional valuable projects
This also might help the research or writing assistants build career capital and test fit for valuable roles
Itās possible itās not worth being proactive about this, and instead waiting for people to decide they want an assistant and create a job ad for one. But Iād guess that some proactiveness would be useful (i.e., that there are cases where someone would benefit from such an assistant but hasnāt thought of it, or doesnāt think the overhead of a long search for one is worthwhile)
See also this comment from someone who did this sort of role for Toby Ord
And Daniel Eth replied there:
As a senior research scholar at FHI, I would find this valuable if the assistant was competent and the arrangement was low cost to me (in terms of time, effort, and money). I havenāt tried to set up anything like this since I expect finding someone competent, working out the details, and managing them would not be low cost, but I could imagine that if someone else (such as BERI) took care of details, it very well may be low cost. I support efforts to try to set something like this up, and Iād like to throw my hat into the ring of āresearchers who would plausibly be interested in assistantsā if anyone does set this up.
Iām going to now flag this idea to someone who I think might be able to actually make it happen.
Someone pointed out to me that BERI already do some amount of this. E.g., they recently hired for or are hiring for RAs for Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom at FHI.
It seems plausible that theyāre doing all the stuff thatās worth doing, but also seems plausible (probable?) that thereās room for more, or for trying out different models. I think anyone interested in potentially actually starting an initiative like this should probably touch base with BERI before investing lots of time into it.
Ah, right! There still might be a need outside of longtermist research, but I definitely agree that itād be very useful to reach out to them to learn more.
For further context for people who might potentially go ahead with this, BERI is a nonprofit that supports researchers working on existential risk. I guess that Sawyer is the person to reach out to.
Btw, the other person I suggested this idea to today is apparently already considering doing this. So if someone else is interested, maybe contact both Sawyer and me, and I can put you in touch with this person.
And this person would do it for longtermist researchers, so yeah, it seems plausible/ālikely to me that thereās more room for this for researchers focused on other cause area.
These feel like they should be obvious points and yet I hadnāt thought about them before. So this was also an update for me! Iāve been considering PhDs, and your stated downsides donāt seem like big downsides for me personally, so it could be relevant to me too.
Ok, so the imagine you/āwe (the EA community) successfully make the case and encourage demand for RA positions. Is there supply?
I donāt recall ever seeing an RA position formally advertised (though I havenāt been looking out for them per se, donāt check the 80k job board very regularly, etc)
If I imagine myself or my colleagues at Sentience Institute with an RA, I can imagine that weād periodically find an RA helpful, but not enough for a full-time role.
Might be different at other EA/ālongtermist nonprofits but weāre primarily funding constrained. Apart from the sense that they might accept a slightly lower salary, why would we hire an RA when we could hire a full blown researcher (who might sometimes have to do the lit reviews and grunt-work themselves)?
I actually think full-time RA roles are very commonly (probably more often than not?) publicly advertised. Some fields even have centralizedjob boards that aggregate RA roles across the discipline, and on top of that, there are a growing number of formalized predoctoralRA programs at major research universities in the U.S. I am actually currently working as an RA in an academic research group that has had roles posted on the 80,000 Hours job board. While I think it is common for students to approach professors in their academic program and request RA work, my sense is that non-students seeking full-time RA positions very rarely have success cold-emailing professors and asking if they need any help. Most professors do not have both ongoing need for an (additional) RA and the funding to hire one (whereas in the case of their own students, universities often have special funding set aside for studentsā research training, and professors face an expectation that they help interested students to develop as researchers).
Separately, regarding the second bullet point, I think it is extremely common for even full-time RAs to only periodically be meaningfully useful and to spend the rest of their time working on relatively low-priority āback burnerā projects. In general, my sense is that work for academic RAs often comes in waves; some weeks, your PI will hand you loads of things to do, and youāll be working late, but some weeks, there will be very little for you to do at all. In many cases, I think RAs are hired at least to some extent for the value of having them effectively on call.
In regards to the third bullet point, there might be a nontrivial boost to the senior researchersā productivity and well-being.
Doing grunt-work can be disproportionally (to its time) tiring and demotivating, and most people have some type of work that they dislike or just not good at which could perhaps be delegated. Additionally, having a (strong and motivated) RA might just be more fun and help with making personal research projects more social and meaningful.
Regarding the salary, Iāve quickly checked GiveWellās salaries at Glassdoor
So from that Iād guess that an RA could cost about 60% as much as a senior researcher. (Iām sure that there is better and more relevant information out there)
Ok, so the imagine you/āwe (the EA community) successfully make the case and encourage demand for RA positions. Is there supply?
I think youāre asking ā...encourage that people seekRA positions. Would there be enough demand for those aspiring RAs?ā? Is that right? (I ask because I think Iām more used to thinking of demand for a type of worker, and supply of candidates for those positions.)
I donāt have confident answers to those questions, but here are some quick, tentative thoughts:
Iāve seen some RA positions formally advertised (e.g., on the 80k job board)
I remember one for Nick Bostrom and I think one for an economics professor, and I think Iāve seen others
I also know of at least two cases where an RA positions was opened but not widely advertised, including one case where the researcher was only a couple years into their research career
I have a vague memory of someone saying that proactively reaching out to researchers to ask if theyād want you to be an RA might work surprisingly often
I also have a vague impression that this is common with university students and professors
But I think this person was saying it in relation to EA researchers
(Of course, a vague memory of someone saying this is not very strong evidence that itās true)
I do think there are a decent number of EA/ālongtermist orgs which have or could get more funding than they are currently able or willing to spend on their research efforts, e.g. due to how much time from senior people would be consumed for hiring rounds or managing and training new employees
Some of these constraints would also constrain the org from taking on RAs
But maybe there are cases where the constraint is smaller for RAs than for more independent researchers?
One could think of this in terms of the org having already identified a full researcher whose judgement, choices, output, etc. the org is happy with, and theyāve then done further work to get that researcher on the same page with the org, more trained up, etc. The RA can slot in under that researcher and help them do their work better. So there may be less need to carefully screen them up front, and they may take up less management time from the most senior staff (instead being managed by the researcher themselves).
I think this can also help answer āApart from the sense that they might accept a slightly lower salary, why would we hire an RA when we could hire a full blown researcherā? Sometimes it may be easier to find someone who would be a fit for an RA role than someone whoād be a fit for a full researcher role.
(Itās worth noting that this is partly about the extent to which the person already has credible signals of fit, already has developed good judgement and research taste, etc. So some of those RAs may then later be great fits for full researcher roles. Though also some could perhaps remain as RAs and just keep providing more and more value in such roles.)
But again, these are quick, tentative thoughts. Iāve neither worked as nor had an RA, havenāt been closely involved with any RA hiring decisions, havenāt done research into how RAing works and what value it provides in non-EA academia, etc.
Notes from a call with someone whoās a research assistant to a great researcher
(See also Matthew van der Merweās thoughts. Iām sharing this because I think it might be useful to some people by itself, and so I can link to it from parts of my sequence on Improving the EA-Aligned Research Pipeline.)
This RA says they definitely learned more from this RA role than they wouldāve if doing a PhD
Mainly due to tight feedback loops
And strong incentives for the senior researcher to give good feedback
The RA is doing producing āintermediate productsā for the senior researcher. So the senior researcher needs and uses what the RA produces. So the feedback is better and different.
In contrast, if the RA was working on their own, separate projects, it would be more like the senior researcher just looks at it and grades it.
The RA has mostly just had to do literature reviews of all sorts of stuff related to the broad topic the senior researcher focuses on
So the RA person was incentivised more than pretty much anyone else to just get familiar with all the stuff under this umbrella
They wouldnāt be able or encouraged to do that in a PhD
The thing the RA hasnāt liked is that he hasnāt been producing his own work
He hasnāt had to deal with figuring out project choices for himself, facing a blank page, etc., so he hasnāt learned to handle that better
Also, he doesnāt have publicly viewable stuff heās worked on that has his name on it
So this has been a bit of an ego-style difficulty for him
I said: Matthew VDM is also very positive about this sort of RA role. So now I think 2 out of the 2 people who Iāve heard from whoāve done such roles have been very positive about it. Should that update me a lot? Should this be like one of the five career paths we often mention to EAs, roughly as often as PhDs? Or maybe itās like thereās a certain kind of person whoāll gravitate towards such roles, and thisāll work well for them and seem great to them, but that wouldnāt generalise?
This RA wouldnāt have guessed that this would be a good role for him
E.g. he likes having his name on stuff
So that means that this is more evidence. More of an update. Rather than it just being that heās predictably the sort of person for whom this fits.
I said: How should this update me on things like the level of guidance vs self-direction that should occur in researcher training programs?
Hard to say
Main tradeoff is building skill doing self-directed projects vs building skills for each of the intermediate products
(As noted above, feedback loops for intermediate products might tend to be better)
Maybe the theoretically ideal situation would be to have some people specialise for indefinitely being RAs and some indefinitely specialise for being principal investigators
This is maybe sort of like what lab model looks like in hard sciences
Could perhaps be a good way to go in the social sciences.
But itād be a quite radical departure.
And thereās ego constraints.
Perhaps there could be even more specialisation, e.g. into:
PI
Theyād be generalists too to some extent
Brainstorming ideas guy
Data analysis people
Etc.
(Though this is then an even more āout thereā idea)
For the last few years, Iāve been an RA in the general domain of ~economics at a major research university, and I think that while a lot of what youāre saying makes sense, itās important to note that the quality of oneās experience as an RA will always depend to a very significant extent on oneās supervising researcher. In fact, I think this dependency might be just about the only thing every RA role has in common. Your data points/ātestimonials reasonably represent what itās like to RA for a good supervisor, but bad supervisors abound (at least/āespecially in academia), and RAing for a bad supervisor can be positively nightmarish. Furthermore, itās harder than youād think to screen for this in advance of taking an RA job. I feel particularly lucky to be working for a great supervisor, but/ābecause I am quite familiar with how much the alternative sucks.
On a separate note, regarding your comment about people potentially specializing in RAing as a career, I donāt really think this would yield much in the way of productivity gains relative to the current state of affairs in academia (where postdocs often already fill the role that I think you envision for career RAs). I do, however, think that it makes a lot of sense for some RAs to go into careers in research management. Though most RAs probably lack the requisite management aptitude, the ones who can effectively manage people, I think, can substantially increase the productivity of mid-to-large academic labs/āresearch groups by working in management roles (I know J-PAL has employed former RAs in this capacity). A lot of academic research is severely management-constrained, in large part because management duties are often foisted upon PIs (and no one goes into academia because they want to be a manager, nor do PIs typically receive any management training, so the people responsible for management often enough lack both relevant interest and relevant skill). Moreover, productivity losses to bad management often go unrecognized because how well their research group is being managed is, like, literally at the very bottom of most PIsā lists of things to think about (not just because theyāre not interested in it, also because theyāre often very busy and have many different things competing for their attention). Finally, one consequence of this is that bad RAs (at least in the social sciences) can unproductively consume a research groupās resources for extended periods of time without anyone taking much notice. On the other hand, even if the group tries to avoid this by employing a more active management approach, in that case a bad RA can meaningfully impede the groupās productivity by requiring more of their supervisorās time to manage them than they save through their work. My sense is that fear of this situation pervades RA hiring processes in many corners of academia.
Thanks, I think this provides a useful counterpoint/ānuance that I think should help people make informed decisions about whether to try to get RA roles, how to choose which roles to aim for/āaccept, and whether and how to facilitate/āencourage other people to offer or seek RA roles.
Your second paragraph is also interesting. I hadnāt previously thought about how there may be overlap between the skills/āmindsets that are useful for RAs and those useful for research management, and that seems like an useful point to raise.
Minor point: That point was from the RA I spoke to, not from me. (But I do endorse the idea that such specialisation might be a good thing.)
More substantive point: Itās worth noting is that, while a lot of the research and research training I particularly care about happens in traditional academia, a lot also happens in EA parts of academia (e.g., FHI, GPI), in EA orgs, in think tanks, among independent researchers, and maybe elsewhere. So even if this specialisation wouldnāt yield much productivity gains compared to the current state of affairs in one of those āsectorsā, it could perhaps do so in others. (I donāt know if it actually would, thoughāI havenāt looked into it enough, and am just making the relatively weak claim that it might.)
Yeah, I think itās very plausible that career RAs could yield meaningful productivity gains in organizations that differ structurally from ātraditionalā academic research groups, including, importantly, many EA research institutions. I think this depends a lot on the kinds of research that these organizations are conducting (in particular, the methods being employed and the intended audiences of published work), how the senior researchersā jobs are designed, what the talent pipeline looks like, etc., but itās certainly at least plausible that this could be the case.
On the parallels/āoverlap between what makes for a good RA and what makes for a good research manager, my view is actually probably weaker than I may have suggested in my initial comment. The reason why RAs are sometimes promoted into research management positions, as I understand it, is that effective research management is believed to require an understanding of what the research process, workflow, etc. look like in the relevant discipline and academic setting, and RAs are typically the only people without PhDs who have that context-specific understanding. Plus, theyāll also have relevant domain knowledge about the substance of the research, which is quite useful in a research manager, too. I think these are pretty much all of the reasons why RAs may make for good research managers. I donāt really think itās a matter of skills or of mindset anywhere near as much as itās about knowledge (both tacit and not). In fact, I think one difficulty with promoting RAs to research management roles is that often, being a successful RA seems to select for traits associated with not having good management skills (e.g., being happy spending oneās days reading academic papers alone with very limited opportunities for interpersonal contact). This is why I limited my original comment on this to RAs who can effectively manage people, who, as I suggested, I think are probably a small minority. Because good research managers are so rare, though, and because research is so management-constrained without them, if someone is such an RA and they have the opportunity, I would think that moving into research management could be quite an impactful path for them.
Ah, thanks for that clarification! Your comments here continue to be interesting food for thought :)
One idea that comes to mind is to set up an organization that hires RAs-as-a-service. Say, a nonprofit that works with multiple EA orgs and employees several RAs, some full-time and others part-time (think, a student job). This org can then handle recruiting, basic training, employment and some of the management. RAs could work on multiple projects with perhaps multiple different people, and tasks could be delegated to the organization as a whole to find the right RA to fit.
A financial model could be something like EA orgs pay 25-50% of the relevant salaries for projects they recruit RAs for, and the rest is complemented by donations to the non-profit itself.
Yeah, I definitely think this is worth someone spending at least a couple hours seriously thinking about doing, including maybe sending out a survey to or conducting interviews with non-junior researchers[1] to gauge interest in having an RA if it was arranged via this service.
I previously suggested a somewhat similar idea as a project to improve the long-term future:
And Daniel Eth replied there:
Iām going to now flag this idea to someone who I think might be able to actually make it happen.
Someone pointed out to me that BERI already do some amount of this. E.g., they recently hired for or are hiring for RAs for Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom at FHI.
It seems plausible that theyāre doing all the stuff thatās worth doing, but also seems plausible (probable?) that thereās room for more, or for trying out different models. I think anyone interested in potentially actually starting an initiative like this should probably touch base with BERI before investing lots of time into it.
Ah, right! There still might be a need outside of longtermist research, but I definitely agree that itād be very useful to reach out to them to learn more.
For further context for people who might potentially go ahead with this, BERI is a nonprofit that supports researchers working on existential risk. I guess that Sawyer is the person to reach out to.
Btw, the other person I suggested this idea to today is apparently already considering doing this. So if someone else is interested, maybe contact both Sawyer and me, and I can put you in touch with this person.
And this person would do it for longtermist researchers, so yeah, it seems plausible/ālikely to me that thereās more room for this for researchers focused on other cause area.
These feel like they should be obvious points and yet I hadnāt thought about them before. So this was also an update for me! Iāve been considering PhDs, and your stated downsides donāt seem like big downsides for me personally, so it could be relevant to me too.
Ok, so the imagine you/āwe (the EA community) successfully make the case and encourage demand for RA positions. Is there supply?
I donāt recall ever seeing an RA position formally advertised (though I havenāt been looking out for them per se, donāt check the 80k job board very regularly, etc)
If I imagine myself or my colleagues at Sentience Institute with an RA, I can imagine that weād periodically find an RA helpful, but not enough for a full-time role.
Might be different at other EA/ālongtermist nonprofits but weāre primarily funding constrained. Apart from the sense that they might accept a slightly lower salary, why would we hire an RA when we could hire a full blown researcher (who might sometimes have to do the lit reviews and grunt-work themselves)?
I actually think full-time RA roles are very commonly (probably more often than not?) publicly advertised. Some fields even have centralized job boards that aggregate RA roles across the discipline, and on top of that, there are a growing number of formalized predoctoral RA programs at major research universities in the U.S. I am actually currently working as an RA in an academic research group that has had roles posted on the 80,000 Hours job board. While I think it is common for students to approach professors in their academic program and request RA work, my sense is that non-students seeking full-time RA positions very rarely have success cold-emailing professors and asking if they need any help. Most professors do not have both ongoing need for an (additional) RA and the funding to hire one (whereas in the case of their own students, universities often have special funding set aside for studentsā research training, and professors face an expectation that they help interested students to develop as researchers).
Separately, regarding the second bullet point, I think it is extremely common for even full-time RAs to only periodically be meaningfully useful and to spend the rest of their time working on relatively low-priority āback burnerā projects. In general, my sense is that work for academic RAs often comes in waves; some weeks, your PI will hand you loads of things to do, and youāll be working late, but some weeks, there will be very little for you to do at all. In many cases, I think RAs are hired at least to some extent for the value of having them effectively on call.
In regards to the third bullet point, there might be a nontrivial boost to the senior researchersā productivity and well-being.
Doing grunt-work can be disproportionally (to its time) tiring and demotivating, and most people have some type of work that they dislike or just not good at which could perhaps be delegated. Additionally, having a (strong and motivated) RA might just be more fun and help with making personal research projects more social and meaningful.
Regarding the salary, Iāve quickly checked GiveWellās salaries at Glassdoor
So from that Iād guess that an RA could cost about 60% as much as a senior researcher. (Iām sure that there is better and more relevant information out there)
I think youāre asking ā...encourage that people seek RA positions. Would there be enough demand for those aspiring RAs?ā? Is that right? (I ask because I think Iām more used to thinking of demand for a type of worker, and supply of candidates for those positions.)
I donāt have confident answers to those questions, but here are some quick, tentative thoughts:
Iāve seen some RA positions formally advertised (e.g., on the 80k job board)
I remember one for Nick Bostrom and I think one for an economics professor, and I think Iāve seen others
I also know of at least two cases where an RA positions was opened but not widely advertised, including one case where the researcher was only a couple years into their research career
I have a vague memory of someone saying that proactively reaching out to researchers to ask if theyād want you to be an RA might work surprisingly often
I also have a vague impression that this is common with university students and professors
But I think this person was saying it in relation to EA researchers
(Of course, a vague memory of someone saying this is not very strong evidence that itās true)
I do think there are a decent number of EA/ālongtermist orgs which have or could get more funding than they are currently able or willing to spend on their research efforts, e.g. due to how much time from senior people would be consumed for hiring rounds or managing and training new employees
Some of these constraints would also constrain the org from taking on RAs
But maybe there are cases where the constraint is smaller for RAs than for more independent researchers?
One could think of this in terms of the org having already identified a full researcher whose judgement, choices, output, etc. the org is happy with, and theyāve then done further work to get that researcher on the same page with the org, more trained up, etc. The RA can slot in under that researcher and help them do their work better. So there may be less need to carefully screen them up front, and they may take up less management time from the most senior staff (instead being managed by the researcher themselves).
I think this can also help answer āApart from the sense that they might accept a slightly lower salary, why would we hire an RA when we could hire a full blown researcherā? Sometimes it may be easier to find someone who would be a fit for an RA role than someone whoād be a fit for a full researcher role.
(Itās worth noting that this is partly about the extent to which the person already has credible signals of fit, already has developed good judgement and research taste, etc. So some of those RAs may then later be great fits for full researcher roles. Though also some could perhaps remain as RAs and just keep providing more and more value in such roles.)
But again, these are quick, tentative thoughts. Iāve neither worked as nor had an RA, havenāt been closely involved with any RA hiring decisions, havenāt done research into how RAing works and what value it provides in non-EA academia, etc.
See also 80k on the career idea āBe research manager or a PA for someone doing really valuable workā.