Regarding GPI, I guess it could have ended up different than it currently is. What were some major decisions related to how GPI is currently structured?
A couple of things I think have been really significant to its success are it being part of Oxford University and it having a very well respected and talented director (Hilary Greaves). I think this gave it a credibility from the get go which has allowed it to hire really top researchers. Doing that seems incredibly important if global priorities research is going to become a well respected field.
Fundraising-wise, we started off by applying for academic grants, since they have lower opportunity cost than being funded by EA funders. We had some early success with a small grant, but didn’t get any of the larger ones we applied for. We decided that that wasn’t worth the time commitment, since to get them we needed large time input from talented researchers, and EA funders actually preferred to pay for the time of those researchers to go towards actual research. In addition to the time commitment for fundraising from EA donors being smaller, it was extremely useful to get the input of those donors—they tended to have excellent advice, which they might not have had time to give us had we not been fundraising from them.
Two important ways in which GPI roles differ from many academic roles is that they require people only to do research (rather than teaching or admin) and that the institute functions pretty collaboratively—it has a central research agenda, mandatory seminars and an aim of research working together on papers. The former acts as an incentive to get top researchers to want to work there, as well as being a more valuable use of their time. The latter aims to make the research produced more goal oriented and impactful (central agenda) and to make the most of the fact that different people have different comparative advantages (some are great at coming up with ideas, others at meticulously working through a problem in detail).
One challenge we faced was getting economists as well as philosophers on board—our network was far more philosophy heavy, and Oxford’s Philosophy department is much stronger than its Econ one, so it’s harder to get economists to want to move there. We tried fairly hard to make it interdisciplinary from the get go, but I think it’s still something they’re keen to do more on.
Regarding GPI, I guess it could have ended up different than it currently is. What were some major decisions related to how GPI is currently structured?
A couple of things I think have been really significant to its success are it being part of Oxford University and it having a very well respected and talented director (Hilary Greaves). I think this gave it a credibility from the get go which has allowed it to hire really top researchers. Doing that seems incredibly important if global priorities research is going to become a well respected field.
Fundraising-wise, we started off by applying for academic grants, since they have lower opportunity cost than being funded by EA funders. We had some early success with a small grant, but didn’t get any of the larger ones we applied for. We decided that that wasn’t worth the time commitment, since to get them we needed large time input from talented researchers, and EA funders actually preferred to pay for the time of those researchers to go towards actual research. In addition to the time commitment for fundraising from EA donors being smaller, it was extremely useful to get the input of those donors—they tended to have excellent advice, which they might not have had time to give us had we not been fundraising from them.
Two important ways in which GPI roles differ from many academic roles is that they require people only to do research (rather than teaching or admin) and that the institute functions pretty collaboratively—it has a central research agenda, mandatory seminars and an aim of research working together on papers. The former acts as an incentive to get top researchers to want to work there, as well as being a more valuable use of their time. The latter aims to make the research produced more goal oriented and impactful (central agenda) and to make the most of the fact that different people have different comparative advantages (some are great at coming up with ideas, others at meticulously working through a problem in detail).
One challenge we faced was getting economists as well as philosophers on board—our network was far more philosophy heavy, and Oxford’s Philosophy department is much stronger than its Econ one, so it’s harder to get economists to want to move there. We tried fairly hard to make it interdisciplinary from the get go, but I think it’s still something they’re keen to do more on.