What proportion of the general population might fully buy in to EA principles if they came across them in the right way, and what proportion of people might buy in to some limited version (eg become happy to donate to evidence backed global poverty interventions)? I’ve been pretty surprised how much traction ‘EA’ as an overall concept has gotten. Whereas I’ve maybe been negatively surprised by some limited version of EA not getting more traction than it has. These questions would influence how excited I am about wide outreach, and about how much I think it should be optimising for transmitting a large number of ideas vs simply giving people an easy way to donate to great global development charities.
How much and in which cases research is translated into action. I have some hypothesis that it’s often pretty hard to translate research into action. Even in cases where someone is deliberating between actions and someone else in another corner of the community is researching a relevant consideration, I think it’s difficult to bring these together. I think maybe that inclines me towards funding more ‘getting things done’ and less research than I might naturally be tempted to. (Though I’m probably pretty far on the ‘do more research’ side to start with.) It also inclines me to fund things that might seem like good candidates for translating research into action.
How useful influencing academia is. On the one hand, there are a huge number of smart people in academia, who would like to spend their careers finding out the truth. Influencing them towards prioritising research based on impact seems like it could be really fruitful. On the other hand, it’s really hard to make it in academia, and there are strong incentives in place there, which don’t point towards impact. So maybe it would be more impactful for us to encourage people who want to do impactful work to leave academia and be able to focus their research purely on impact. Currently the fund managers have somewhat different intuitions on this question.
Interesting, thanks. (And all the other answers here have been really interesting too!)
What proportion of the general population might fully buy in to EA principles if they came across them in the right way, and what proportion of people might buy in to some limited version (eg become happy to donate to evidence backed global poverty interventions)?
Is what you have in mind the sort of thing the “awareness-inclination model” in How valuable is movement growth? was aiming to get at? Like further theorising and (especially?) empirical research along the lines of that model, making breaking things down further into particular bundles of EA ideas, particular populations, particular ways of introducing the ideas, etc.?
Here are a few things:
What proportion of the general population might fully buy in to EA principles if they came across them in the right way, and what proportion of people might buy in to some limited version (eg become happy to donate to evidence backed global poverty interventions)? I’ve been pretty surprised how much traction ‘EA’ as an overall concept has gotten. Whereas I’ve maybe been negatively surprised by some limited version of EA not getting more traction than it has. These questions would influence how excited I am about wide outreach, and about how much I think it should be optimising for transmitting a large number of ideas vs simply giving people an easy way to donate to great global development charities.
How much and in which cases research is translated into action. I have some hypothesis that it’s often pretty hard to translate research into action. Even in cases where someone is deliberating between actions and someone else in another corner of the community is researching a relevant consideration, I think it’s difficult to bring these together. I think maybe that inclines me towards funding more ‘getting things done’ and less research than I might naturally be tempted to. (Though I’m probably pretty far on the ‘do more research’ side to start with.) It also inclines me to fund things that might seem like good candidates for translating research into action.
How useful influencing academia is. On the one hand, there are a huge number of smart people in academia, who would like to spend their careers finding out the truth. Influencing them towards prioritising research based on impact seems like it could be really fruitful. On the other hand, it’s really hard to make it in academia, and there are strong incentives in place there, which don’t point towards impact. So maybe it would be more impactful for us to encourage people who want to do impactful work to leave academia and be able to focus their research purely on impact. Currently the fund managers have somewhat different intuitions on this question.
Interesting, thanks. (And all the other answers here have been really interesting too!)
Is what you have in mind the sort of thing the “awareness-inclination model” in How valuable is movement growth? was aiming to get at? Like further theorising and (especially?) empirical research along the lines of that model, making breaking things down further into particular bundles of EA ideas, particular populations, particular ways of introducing the ideas, etc.?