In a short Google Form, posted on the Effective Altruism Researchers and EA Academia Facebook groups, I provided the above paragraph and then asked: “If, as well as an undergraduate/bachelor’s degree, they start their research career at EA nonprofits with a master’s degree in a relevant field, how many “units” of impact do you expect that they would produce each year for the first ~10 years of work?”* The average response, from the 8 respondents, was 1.7.
The mechanism may not be causal. If you’re conditioning on type of person who can get accepted into graduate programs + get funding + manage to stick with a PhD program, you are implicitly drawing on a very different pool of people than if you don’t condition on this.
That’s a good point—my intention was that it would be the same individual in each instance, just with or without the training, but I didn’t word the survey question clearly to reflect that.
The mechanism may not be causal. If you’re conditioning on type of person who can get accepted into graduate programs + get funding + manage to stick with a PhD program, you are implicitly drawing on a very different pool of people than if you don’t condition on this.
That’s a good point—my intention was that it would be the same individual in each instance, just with or without the training, but I didn’t word the survey question clearly to reflect that.