For calibration, so far no one has contacted me to take on one of the research projects in the list of concrete researchy projects. And even in 1-1s, with people that are interested in joining EA Israel and are interested in taking on research project, it had very limited success going over this list and thinking together about possible research questions.
Yeah, I’ve seen that sort of thing mentioned a few times, such that I no longer find it surprising, though I initially did, and I still don’t fully understand why it’s the case.*
That’s why I included “I think we could do more to inspire and support people to actually investigate these questions than just assemble a big list”, and the points after that. But I’d definitely be keen to hear more thoughts on how to provide effective inspiration and support for that. (Indeed, it seems that could be a research question in itself. Now, if only we could inspire and support people to investigate it...)
*It does seem there are a lot of interesting and important questions to be explored, many of which may not require extremely specialised skills. As well as a lot of intellectually curious, research-minded EAs interested in having more EA-y things to do. So my guess before hearing that sort of thing mentioned a few times probably would’ve been that there’d be more uptake of these sorts of lists, and I’m not entirely sure what ingredients are missing.
Obviously payment and organisational infrastructures would be very helpful for most people, and necessary for many. But I wouldn’t guess they’d be necessary for all curious EAs with some slices of free time? I wonder if there are other levers that could be pulled to unlock some of this extra talent that seems to be floating around?
My current model is something like this. #BetterWrongThanVague
It is difficult to make noticeable research contribution. Even small incremental steps can be intimidating and time consuming.
It is hard to motivate oneself to work alone on someone else’s problems. I think that most people probably have their own passions and model of what’s important, and it’s unclear why subquestion 3.5.1 should be the single thing that they focus on. Three of the main motivators that might mitigate that here are recognition for completing the work well and presenting something interesting, better career capital (learning something new or displaying skills) and socializing/partnering.
One thing which I thought about trying which might be related is to take on a small scale research problem and set up an open call to globally collaborate on this. To make it successful, we can set up something formal that some organisation is interested in this result (and better yet, possibly supply a prize—doesn’t have to be monetary) and coordinate with local groups to collect an initial team.
That could be fun and engaging, but I’m not sure how scalable this is and how much impact we can expect from that (which is uncertainty probably worth of testing out). I’ve tried to start a small ALLFED-directed research group locally, as part of our research team, but that also didn’t work out. I think that going global might possibly work though.
For calibration, so far no one has contacted me to take on one of the research projects in the list of concrete researchy projects. And even in 1-1s, with people that are interested in joining EA Israel and are interested in taking on research project, it had very limited success going over this list and thinking together about possible research questions.
(Upvoted)
Yeah, I’ve seen that sort of thing mentioned a few times, such that I no longer find it surprising, though I initially did, and I still don’t fully understand why it’s the case.*
That’s why I included “I think we could do more to inspire and support people to actually investigate these questions than just assemble a big list”, and the points after that. But I’d definitely be keen to hear more thoughts on how to provide effective inspiration and support for that. (Indeed, it seems that could be a research question in itself. Now, if only we could inspire and support people to investigate it...)
*It does seem there are a lot of interesting and important questions to be explored, many of which may not require extremely specialised skills. As well as a lot of intellectually curious, research-minded EAs interested in having more EA-y things to do. So my guess before hearing that sort of thing mentioned a few times probably would’ve been that there’d be more uptake of these sorts of lists, and I’m not entirely sure what ingredients are missing.
Obviously payment and organisational infrastructures would be very helpful for most people, and necessary for many. But I wouldn’t guess they’d be necessary for all curious EAs with some slices of free time? I wonder if there are other levers that could be pulled to unlock some of this extra talent that seems to be floating around?
My current model is something like this. #BetterWrongThanVague
It is difficult to make noticeable research contribution. Even small incremental steps can be intimidating and time consuming.
It is hard to motivate oneself to work alone on someone else’s problems. I think that most people probably have their own passions and model of what’s important, and it’s unclear why subquestion 3.5.1 should be the single thing that they focus on.
Three of the main motivators that might mitigate that here are recognition for completing the work well and presenting something interesting, better career capital (learning something new or displaying skills) and socializing/partnering.
One thing which I thought about trying which might be related is to take on a small scale research problem and set up an open call to globally collaborate on this. To make it successful, we can set up something formal that some organisation is interested in this result (and better yet, possibly supply a prize—doesn’t have to be monetary) and coordinate with local groups to collect an initial team.
That could be fun and engaging, but I’m not sure how scalable this is and how much impact we can expect from that (which is uncertainty probably worth of testing out). I’ve tried to start a small ALLFED-directed research group locally, as part of our research team, but that also didn’t work out. I think that going global might possibly work though.