I’d personally be pretty excited to see well-run analyses of this type, and would be excited for you or anyone who upvoted this to go for it. I think the reason why it hasn’t happened is simply that it’s always vastly easier to say that other people should do something than to actually do it yourself.
I completely agree that it is far easier to suggest an analysis than to execute one! I personally won’t have the capacity to do this in the next 12-18 months, but would be happy to give feedback on a proposal and/or the research as it develops if someone else is willing and able to take up the mantle.
I do think that this analysis is more likely to be done (and in a high quality way) if it was either done by, commissioned by, or executed with significant buy-in from CEA and other key stakeholders involved in community building and running local groups. This is partly a case of helping source data etc, but also gives important incentives for someone to do this research. If I had lots of free time over the next 6 months, I would only take this on if I was fairly confident that the people in charge of making decisions would value this research. One model would be for someone to write up a short proposal for the analysis and take it to the decision makers; another would be for the decision-makers to commission it (my guess is that this demand-driven approach is more likely to result in a well-funded, high quality study).
To be clear, I massively appreciate the work that many, many people (at CEA and many other orgs) do and have done on community building and professionalising the running of groups (sorry if the tone of my original comment was implicitly critical). I think such work is very likely very valuable. I also think the hits-based model is the correct one as we ramp up spending and that not all expenditure should be thoroughly evaluated. But in cases where it seems very likely that we’ll keep doing the same type of activity for many years and spend comparatively large resources on it (e.g. support for groups), it makes sense to bake self-evaluation into the design of programmes, to help improve their design in the future.
P.S. I’ve also just seen Joan’s write-up of the Focus University groups in the comments below, which suggests that there is already some decent self-evaluation, experimentation and feedback loops happening as part of these programmes’ designs. So it is very possible that there is a good amount of this going on that I (as a very casual observer) am just not aware of!
Agreed! Note, however, that in the case of the FTX grants it will be pretty hard to do this analysis oneself without access to at the very least the list of funded projects, if not the full applications.
I’d personally be pretty excited to see well-run analyses of this type, and would be excited for you or anyone who upvoted this to go for it. I think the reason why it hasn’t happened is simply that it’s always vastly easier to say that other people should do something than to actually do it yourself.
I completely agree that it is far easier to suggest an analysis than to execute one! I personally won’t have the capacity to do this in the next 12-18 months, but would be happy to give feedback on a proposal and/or the research as it develops if someone else is willing and able to take up the mantle.
I do think that this analysis is more likely to be done (and in a high quality way) if it was either done by, commissioned by, or executed with significant buy-in from CEA and other key stakeholders involved in community building and running local groups. This is partly a case of helping source data etc, but also gives important incentives for someone to do this research. If I had lots of free time over the next 6 months, I would only take this on if I was fairly confident that the people in charge of making decisions would value this research. One model would be for someone to write up a short proposal for the analysis and take it to the decision makers; another would be for the decision-makers to commission it (my guess is that this demand-driven approach is more likely to result in a well-funded, high quality study).
To be clear, I massively appreciate the work that many, many people (at CEA and many other orgs) do and have done on community building and professionalising the running of groups (sorry if the tone of my original comment was implicitly critical). I think such work is very likely very valuable. I also think the hits-based model is the correct one as we ramp up spending and that not all expenditure should be thoroughly evaluated. But in cases where it seems very likely that we’ll keep doing the same type of activity for many years and spend comparatively large resources on it (e.g. support for groups), it makes sense to bake self-evaluation into the design of programmes, to help improve their design in the future.
P.S. I’ve also just seen Joan’s write-up of the Focus University groups in the comments below, which suggests that there is already some decent self-evaluation, experimentation and feedback loops happening as part of these programmes’ designs. So it is very possible that there is a good amount of this going on that I (as a very casual observer) am just not aware of!
Agreed! Note, however, that in the case of the FTX grants it will be pretty hard to do this analysis oneself without access to at the very least the list of funded projects, if not the full applications.