I’m quite sympathetic to your mission of developing a robust understanding of the parameters of cause prioritization. I do have a maybe-dumb question: what is your Theory of Change? You write,
“In GPI’s first few years, we have made a good start on producing high-quality and mission-aligned research papers. In 2022 we are planning to continue the momentum and have set ourselves ambitious targets on the number of papers we want to get through different stages of the publishing pipeline, as well as that we want to post as working papers on our website.”
What do you plan on doing with your research output? What would you like to see others do with it, concretely? Is the goal to let your research percolate throughout EA-space/academia and maybe influence others’ work? Is there a more direct policy or philanthropic goal of your research?
I suppose you answer some of these questions here:
“In 2021, we commenced a project to design and then begin tracking more sophisticated progress metrics. This project was put on hold, for reasons of capacity constraint, with the resignation of our Research Manager. We plan to continue the project once we have succeeded in hiring the successor of this role.”
But I’m still interested in, like, your top-level thinking around your theory of change, or maybe your gut-check.
I expect that different people at GPI have somewhat different goals for their own research, and that this varies a fair bit between philosophy and economics. But for my part,
my primarily goal is to do research that philanthropists find useful, and
my secondary goal is to do research that persuades other academics to see certain important questions in a more “EA” way, and to adjust their own curricula and research accordingly.
On the first point—and apologies if this sounds self-congratulatory or something, but I’m just providing the examples of GPI’s impact that I happen to have had a hand in, in case they’re helpful!—I’m (naturally) excited that my work on the allocation of philanthropic spending over time motivated Founders Pledge to launch the Patient Philanthropy Fund. I’m also glad that a few larger philanthropists have told me that it has had at least some impact on how they think about the question of how they should distribute their giving over time.
On the second point, I don’t really expect to be influencing econ professors much yet since I’m still just a PhD student, but my literature review on economic growth under AI will be used in a Coursera course on the economics of AI. (To illustrate what I have in mind of what’s possible, though, the philosophers already seem to have had a fair bit of success influencing curricula: professors at Yale and UMich are now offering whole courses on longtermism, largely drawing on GPI papers.)
I love that you are celebrating your successes here! Your parenthetical apologizing for potentially sounding self-congratulatory made me think, “Huh, I’d actually quite like to see more celebration of when theory turns to action.” The fact that your work influenced FP to start the Patient Philanthropy Fund is a clear connection demonstrating the potential impact of this kind of research; if you were to shout that from the rooftops, I wouldn’t begrudge you! If anything, clarity about real-world impacts of transformational research into the long-term future likely inspire others to pursue the field (citation needed).
Haha okay, thank you! I agree that it’ll be great if clear examples of impact like this inspire more people to do work along these lines. And I appreciate that aiming for clear impact is valuable for researchers in general for making sure our claims of impact aren’t just empty stories.
FWIW though, I also think it could be misleading to base our judgment of the impact of some research too much on particular projects with clear and immediate connections to the research—especially in philosophy, since it’s further “upstream”. As this 80k article argues, most philosophers have basically no impact, but some, like Locke, Marx, and Singer, seem to have had huge impact, most of it very indirect. In some cases (Marx especially I guess) the main impacts have even come from people reading their ideas long after they died.
Anyway, happy to celebrate clear impact (including my own!), just want to emphasize that I don’t think impact always has to be clear. :)
I’m quite sympathetic to your mission of developing a robust understanding of the parameters of cause prioritization. I do have a maybe-dumb question: what is your Theory of Change? You write,
“In GPI’s first few years, we have made a good start on producing high-quality and mission-aligned research papers. In 2022 we are planning to continue the momentum and have set ourselves ambitious targets on the number of papers we want to get through different stages of the publishing pipeline, as well as that we want to post as working papers on our website.”
What do you plan on doing with your research output? What would you like to see others do with it, concretely? Is the goal to let your research percolate throughout EA-space/academia and maybe influence others’ work? Is there a more direct policy or philanthropic goal of your research?
I suppose you answer some of these questions here:
“In 2021, we commenced a project to design and then begin tracking more sophisticated progress metrics. This project was put on hold, for reasons of capacity constraint, with the resignation of our Research Manager. We plan to continue the project once we have succeeded in hiring the successor of this role.”
But I’m still interested in, like, your top-level thinking around your theory of change, or maybe your gut-check.
I expect that different people at GPI have somewhat different goals for their own research, and that this varies a fair bit between philosophy and economics. But for my part,
my primarily goal is to do research that philanthropists find useful, and
my secondary goal is to do research that persuades other academics to see certain important questions in a more “EA” way, and to adjust their own curricula and research accordingly.
On the first point—and apologies if this sounds self-congratulatory or something, but I’m just providing the examples of GPI’s impact that I happen to have had a hand in, in case they’re helpful!—I’m (naturally) excited that my work on the allocation of philanthropic spending over time motivated Founders Pledge to launch the Patient Philanthropy Fund. I’m also glad that a few larger philanthropists have told me that it has had at least some impact on how they think about the question of how they should distribute their giving over time.
On the second point, I don’t really expect to be influencing econ professors much yet since I’m still just a PhD student, but my literature review on economic growth under AI will be used in a Coursera course on the economics of AI. (To illustrate what I have in mind of what’s possible, though, the philosophers already seem to have had a fair bit of success influencing curricula: professors at Yale and UMich are now offering whole courses on longtermism, largely drawing on GPI papers.)
I am not focused on attempting to change policy.
I love that you are celebrating your successes here! Your parenthetical apologizing for potentially sounding self-congratulatory made me think, “Huh, I’d actually quite like to see more celebration of when theory turns to action.” The fact that your work influenced FP to start the Patient Philanthropy Fund is a clear connection demonstrating the potential impact of this kind of research; if you were to shout that from the rooftops, I wouldn’t begrudge you! If anything, clarity about real-world impacts of transformational research into the long-term future likely inspire others to pursue the field (citation needed).
Haha okay, thank you! I agree that it’ll be great if clear examples of impact like this inspire more people to do work along these lines. And I appreciate that aiming for clear impact is valuable for researchers in general for making sure our claims of impact aren’t just empty stories.
FWIW though, I also think it could be misleading to base our judgment of the impact of some research too much on particular projects with clear and immediate connections to the research—especially in philosophy, since it’s further “upstream”. As this 80k article argues, most philosophers have basically no impact, but some, like Locke, Marx, and Singer, seem to have had huge impact, most of it very indirect. In some cases (Marx especially I guess) the main impacts have even come from people reading their ideas long after they died.
Anyway, happy to celebrate clear impact (including my own!), just want to emphasize that I don’t think impact always has to be clear. :)
Even though this is a bit outdated now, the first 10 minutes of this talk at EAG 2018 give a good overview of GPI’s high-level theory of change.