Narration: Improving the EA-aligned research pipeline: Sequence introduction

Link post

Original post by Michael Aird

Read & edited by Sam Nolan


Podcast description

There are many people who have the skills and desire to do EA-aligned research, or who could develop such skills via some experience, mentorship, or similar. There are many potentially high-priority open research questions that have been identified. And there are many funders who would be happy to pay for high-quality research on such questions. Sounds like everything must be lining up perfectly, right? In my view, the answer is fairly clearly “No”, and getting closer to a “Yes” could be very valuable. The three ingredients mentioned above do regularly combine to give us new, high-quality research and researchers, but:

  • This is happening slower than we’d like

    • At any given time, we still have a lot of each ingredient left over

  • This is requiring more “overhead” than seems ideal

    • E.g., lots of 1-1 career advice, coaching, and mentorship from experienced people; time-consuming hiring and grant evaluation processes

  • There are more “misfires” than we’d like

    • E.g., aspiring researchers choosing low-priority questions or tackling questions poorly; great people and projects being passed over for hiring or funding

Links mentioned in the related previous work section

  • Posts tagged Scalably using labour and/​or Research Training Programs

  • Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs

  • A comment thread from an AMA with Owen Cotton-Barratt

  • Bottlenecks and Solutions for the X-Risk Ecosystem

  • Factored Cognition

  • Readings and notes on how to do high-impact research

  • Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams

  • After one year...

  • Get involved

  • Working at EA vs Non-EA Orgs

  • EA Hiring

  • A central directory for open research questions


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