Hello Tom, thanks very much for this write up. Three comments:
I very much admire your ability to self-criticise, but I think you’re being overly harsh on yourself. It didn’t turn out as well as you hoped, but you couldn’t have known that in advance, which was the point. I think this is a good example of what is sometimes called ‘hits-based charity’: EAs trying new things with a high expected value but a low probability of success. I also hesitate to call this a failure because, as you noted, quite a few lessons were learnt. I think your (only?) substantial mistake was in having too high expectations about what a part-time student group could achieve. Perhaps you took “EAs”, who are typically smart, consciousness and driven as your reference group, rather than “student club/society” which no one really expects to be very productive or world-changing.
On reflection, I wonder if OxPrio fell into a sort of research no-man’s land. It was too detailed for student, average EAs to engage with, but maybe not in depth enough to attract critical commentary and engagement from full-time researchers, such as those in CEA or GiveWell, whose research you were, to some extent, replicating. I’m not sure who you thought the target audience of your research was.
I think a contributing factor to not having much local, Oxford university engagement is that you’d selected a team. Presumably the people who would be most interested in OxPrio’s research applied. I imagine many of the people who applied, but you rejected from the team, then decided that, as a standard psychological reflex, that they didn’t want to be involved further (disclaimer: I applied and was rejected, but ended up being really curious about what was OxPrio were doing anyway). Hence the process of selecting alienated much of your intended audience. I don’t have suggestion for what would have been better, I just think this is worth factoring in.
I will echo the conclusion of this, in that OxPrio was likely a counterfactually net positive way to spend your time. Actually running a real team project with a deadline and things depending on you, learning basic management and realising the difference between how you expect a group of people to behave and how they actually behave, are rare life lessons that many people don’t learn, or at least not until much older.
Hello Tom, thanks very much for this write up. Three comments:
I very much admire your ability to self-criticise, but I think you’re being overly harsh on yourself. It didn’t turn out as well as you hoped, but you couldn’t have known that in advance, which was the point. I think this is a good example of what is sometimes called ‘hits-based charity’: EAs trying new things with a high expected value but a low probability of success. I also hesitate to call this a failure because, as you noted, quite a few lessons were learnt. I think your (only?) substantial mistake was in having too high expectations about what a part-time student group could achieve. Perhaps you took “EAs”, who are typically smart, consciousness and driven as your reference group, rather than “student club/society” which no one really expects to be very productive or world-changing.
On reflection, I wonder if OxPrio fell into a sort of research no-man’s land. It was too detailed for student, average EAs to engage with, but maybe not in depth enough to attract critical commentary and engagement from full-time researchers, such as those in CEA or GiveWell, whose research you were, to some extent, replicating. I’m not sure who you thought the target audience of your research was.
I think a contributing factor to not having much local, Oxford university engagement is that you’d selected a team. Presumably the people who would be most interested in OxPrio’s research applied. I imagine many of the people who applied, but you rejected from the team, then decided that, as a standard psychological reflex, that they didn’t want to be involved further (disclaimer: I applied and was rejected, but ended up being really curious about what was OxPrio were doing anyway). Hence the process of selecting alienated much of your intended audience. I don’t have suggestion for what would have been better, I just think this is worth factoring in.
I will echo the conclusion of this, in that OxPrio was likely a counterfactually net positive way to spend your time. Actually running a real team project with a deadline and things depending on you, learning basic management and realising the difference between how you expect a group of people to behave and how they actually behave, are rare life lessons that many people don’t learn, or at least not until much older.