One type of intervention for improving the EA-aligned research pipeline is creating and/or improving research training programs. When doing so, I think three important, related questions are:
To what extent should the participants decide for themselves what projects to work on, vs deferring to the decisions/recommendations of others?
What fraction of each participant’s time should be spent tackling full research projects themselves, vs doing “delegated subtasks” / producing “intermediate products” (e.g., finding literature relevant to a question for someone else)?
(Maybe there’s a more elegant or standard way to describe this question.)
To what extent should participants be tackling a “fresh” question, vs tackling something closely related to what a mentor/manager is already working on?
I originally thought that, the more weight one puts on the goals of “credible signals of fit”, “knowledge and skills”, and “testing fit”, the more that would push in favour of participants deciding for themselves which projects to work on, tackling full research projects themselves, and tackling “fresh” questions. And I thought that putting more weight on “direct impact” would push in the opposite direction.
But after some further thinking, a call with someone who’s a research assistant to a great researcher, and some comments on a draft of this post, I now think this will vary a lot depending on the specifics. For example, doing “delegated subtasks” might lead to more and better feedback, since the delegator actually needs and will use what the aspiring/junior researcher produced, and that feedback should help with building knowledge and skills.
That said, I still think that thinking about the goals outlined in this post should help one think through the above questions in light of the specific situation they’re facing.
An example I originally had in the final section
One type of intervention for improving the EA-aligned research pipeline is creating and/or improving research training programs. When doing so, I think three important, related questions are:
To what extent should the participants decide for themselves what projects to work on, vs deferring to the decisions/recommendations of others?
What fraction of each participant’s time should be spent tackling full research projects themselves, vs doing “delegated subtasks” / producing “intermediate products” (e.g., finding literature relevant to a question for someone else)?
(Maybe there’s a more elegant or standard way to describe this question.)
To what extent should participants be tackling a “fresh” question, vs tackling something closely related to what a mentor/manager is already working on?
I originally thought that, the more weight one puts on the goals of “credible signals of fit”, “knowledge and skills”, and “testing fit”, the more that would push in favour of participants deciding for themselves which projects to work on, tackling full research projects themselves, and tackling “fresh” questions. And I thought that putting more weight on “direct impact” would push in the opposite direction.
But after some further thinking, a call with someone who’s a research assistant to a great researcher, and some comments on a draft of this post, I now think this will vary a lot depending on the specifics. For example, doing “delegated subtasks” might lead to more and better feedback, since the delegator actually needs and will use what the aspiring/junior researcher produced, and that feedback should help with building knowledge and skills.
That said, I still think that thinking about the goals outlined in this post should help one think through the above questions in light of the specific situation they’re facing.