Here’s a copy of some quick notes I wrote earlier (and don’t plan to take any next steps on), in case this is useful to anyone:
“I see results from the IGM economics expert panels cited somewhat often, and it seems like that’s probably a really useful thing to have.
Idea 1: Does anyone know if there are similar things for other disciplines?
E.g., historians, psychologists, international relations scholars?
And if there isn’t, might it be highly valuable per unit effort to set that up?
Obviously lots of individual experts comment on individual things, and there’ll sometimes be surveys or the like. But it seems like it could make sense for this sort of thing to be institutionalised in the way the IGM panels are, rather than being ad hoc.
Idea 2: Does anyone know if it’s possible to submit questions to the IGM panel or other panels (if they exist), or to in some other way get them to respond to questions on topics of particular interest to EAs?
(If people think this sort of thing doesn’t exist yet but might be worth thinking more about, I might write a quick EA Forum post/question post/shortform on this.)”
“You hear a lot in the US from the US Army Corps of Engineers.”
“PhilPapers seems like a natural place to expand polls of philosophers.”
“I don’t know about historians, but wouldn’t it be cool if macrohistory/predictive history were more of a thing and they took surveys of their members?”
Thanks, that’s useful to me! E.g. I didn’t consider trying to convince those surveying institutions to ask about particularly important topics they might not have on their radar, or maybe paying them for the service.
As you don’t plan considering it further, did you make a guess how useful work on this seems? For fields that are particularly relevant for EAs (like epidemiology, AI, maybe international relations) it might be very valuable to take the initiative so that at least some share of the surveys will be informative for the most important issues.
I don’t have a particularly informed/informative stance on how useful it’d be, unfortunately. (I guess I can at least say it’d be nice if someone spent a few hours thinking further about it, but that’s true of many things.)
Thanks for this post.
Here’s a copy of some quick notes I wrote earlier (and don’t plan to take any next steps on), in case this is useful to anyone:
“I see results from the IGM economics expert panels cited somewhat often, and it seems like that’s probably a really useful thing to have.
Idea 1: Does anyone know if there are similar things for other disciplines?
E.g., historians, psychologists, international relations scholars?
And if there isn’t, might it be highly valuable per unit effort to set that up?
Obviously lots of individual experts comment on individual things, and there’ll sometimes be surveys or the like. But it seems like it could make sense for this sort of thing to be institutionalised in the way the IGM panels are, rather than being ad hoc.
Idea 2: Does anyone know if it’s possible to submit questions to the IGM panel or other panels (if they exist), or to in some other way get them to respond to questions on topics of particular interest to EAs?
(If people think this sort of thing doesn’t exist yet but might be worth thinking more about, I might write a quick EA Forum post/question post/shortform on this.)”
Replies from colleagues of mine included:
“In the US, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine does expert opinion in a more formal way for relevant issues e.g., https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25665/heritable-human-genome-editing”
“You hear a lot in the US from the US Army Corps of Engineers.”
“PhilPapers seems like a natural place to expand polls of philosophers.”
“I don’t know about historians, but wouldn’t it be cool if macrohistory/predictive history were more of a thing and they took surveys of their members?”
Thanks, that’s useful to me! E.g. I didn’t consider trying to convince those surveying institutions to ask about particularly important topics they might not have on their radar, or maybe paying them for the service.
As you don’t plan considering it further, did you make a guess how useful work on this seems? For fields that are particularly relevant for EAs (like epidemiology, AI, maybe international relations) it might be very valuable to take the initiative so that at least some share of the surveys will be informative for the most important issues.
I don’t have a particularly informed/informative stance on how useful it’d be, unfortunately. (I guess I can at least say it’d be nice if someone spent a few hours thinking further about it, but that’s true of many things.)