In the EA Infrastructure Fundās Ask Us Anything, I asked for their thoughts on the sorts of topics covered in this sequence, e.g. their thoughts on the intervention options mentioned in this post. Iāll quote Buckās interesting reply in full. See here for precisely what I asked and for replies to Buckās reply (including me agreeing or pushing back on some things).
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āRe your 19 interventions, here are my quick takes on all of them
Creating, scaling, and/āor improving EA-aligned research orgs
Yes I am in favor of this, and my day job is helping to run a new org that aspires to be a scalable EA-aligned research org.
Creating, scaling, and/āor improving EA-aligned research training programs
I am in favor of this. I think one of the biggest bottlenecks here is finding people who are willing to mentor people in research. My current guess is that EAs who work as researchers should be more willing to mentor people in research, eg by mentoring people for an hour or two a week on projects that the mentor finds inside-view interesting (and therefore will be actually bought in to helping with). I think that in situations like this, itās very helpful for the mentor to be judged as Andrew Grov suggests, by the output of their organization + the output of neighboring organizations under their influence. That is, they should think that one of their key goals with their research interns as having the research interns do things that they actually think are useful. I think that not having this goal makes it much more tempting for the mentors to kind of snooze on the job and not really try to make the experience useful.
Yeah this seems good if you can do it, but I donāt think this is that much of the bottleneck on research. It doesnāt take very much time to evaluate a grant for someone to do research compared to how much time it takes to mentor them.
My current unconfident position is that I am very enthusiastic about funding people to do research if they have someone who wants to mentor them and be held somewhat accountable for whether they do anything useful. And so Iād love to get more grant applications from people describing their research proposal and saying who their mentor is; I can make that grant in like two hours (30 mins to talk to the grantee, 30 mins to talk to the mentor, 60 mins overhead). If the grants are for 4 months, then I can spend five hours a week and do all the grantmaking for 40 people. This feels pretty leveraged to me and I am happy to spend that time, and therefore I donāt feel much need to scale this up more.
I think that grantmaking capacity is more of a bottleneck for things other than research output.
Scaling Effective Thesis, improving it, and/āor creating new things sort-of like it
I donāt immediately feel excited by this for longtermist research; I wouldnāt be surprised if itās good for animal welfare stuff but Iām not qualified to judge. I think that most research areas relevant to longtermism require high context in order to contribute to, and I donāt think that pushing people in the direction of good thesis topics is very likely to produce extremely useful research.
Increasing and/āor improving research by non-EAs on high-priority topics
I think that it is quite hard to get non-EAs to do highly leveraged research of interest to EAs. I am not aware of many examples of it happening. (I actually canāt think of any offhand.) I think this is bottlenecked on EA having more problems that are well scoped and explained and can be handed off to less aligned people. Iām excited about work like The case for aligning narrowly superhuman models, because I think that this kind of work might make it easier to cause less aligned people to do useful stuff.
I feel pessimistic; I donāt think that this is the bottleneck. I think that people doing research projects without mentors is much worse, and if we had solved that problem, then we wouldnāt need this database as much. This database is mostly helpful in the very-little-supervision world, and so doesnāt seem like the key thing to work on.
I feel pessimistic, but idk maybe elicit is really amazing. (It seems at least pretty cool to me, but idk how useful it is.) Seems like if itās amazing we should expect it to be extremely commercially successful; I think Iāll wait to see if Iām hearing people rave about it and then try it if so.
I think this is worth doing to some extent, obviously; I think that my guess is that EAs arenāt as into forecasting as they should be (including me unfortunately.) Iād need to know your specific proposal in order to have more specific thoughts.
I think that facilitating junior researchers to connect with each other is somewhat good but doesnāt seem as good as having them connect more with senior researchers somehow.
Iām into this. I designed a noticeable fraction of the Triplebyte interview at one point (and delivered it hundreds of times); I wonder whether I should try making up an EA interview.
Seems cool. I think a major bottleneck here is people who are extremely extroverted and have lots of background and are willing to spend a huge amount of time talking to a huge amount of people. I think that the job āspend many hours a day talking to EAs who arenāt as well connected as would be ideal for 30 minutes each, in the hope of answering their questions and connecting them to people and encouraging themā is not as good as what Iām currently doing with my time, but it feels like a tempting alternative.
I am excited for people trying to organize retreats where they invite a mix of highly-connected senior researchers and junior researchers to one place to talk about things. I would be excited to receive grant applications for things like this.
Iām not sure that this is better than providing funding to people, though itās worth considering. Iām worried that it has some bad selection effects, where the most promising people are more likely to have money that they can spend living in closer proximity to EA hubs (and are more likely to have other sources of funding) and so the cheapo EA accommodations end up filtering for people who arenāt as promising.
Another way of putting this is that I think itās kind of unhealthy to have a bunch of people floating around trying unsuccessfully to get into EA research; Iād rather they tried to get funding to try it really hard for a while, and if it doesnāt go well, they have a clean break from the attempt and then try to do one of the many other useful things they could do with their lives, rather than slowly giving up over the course of years and infecting everyone else with despair.
I am a total sucker for this stuff, and would love to make it happen; I donāt think itās a very leveraged way of working on increasing the EA-aligned research pipeline though.
Yeah Iām into this; I think that strong web developers should consider reaching out to LessWrong and saying āhey do you want to hire me to make your site betterā.
I think Ben Todd is wrong here. I think that the number of extremely promising junior researchers is totally a bottleneck and we totally have mentorship capacity for them. For example, I have twice run across undergrads at EA Global who I was immediately extremely impressed by and wanted to hire (they both did MIRI internships and have IMO very impactful roles (not at MIRI) now). I think that I would happily spend ten hours a week managing three more of these people, and the bottleneck here is just that I donāt know many new people who are that talented (and to a lesser extent, who want to grow in the ways that align with my interests).
I think that increasing the number of people who are eg top 25% of research ability among Stanford undergrads is less helpful, because more of the bottleneck for these people is mentorship capacity. Though Iād still love to have more of these people. I think that I want people who are between 25th and 90th percentile intellectual promisingness among top schools to try first to acquire some specific and useful skill (like programming really well, or doing machine learning, or doing biology literature reviews, or clearly synthesizing disparate and confusing arguments), because they can learn these skills without needing as much mentorship from senior researchers and then they have more of a value proposition to those senior researchers later.
This seems almost entirely useless; I donāt think this would help at all.
discovering, writing, and/āor promoting positive case studies
Seems like a good use of someoneās time.
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This was a pretty good list of suggestions. I guess my takeaways from this are:
I care a lot about access to mentorship
I think that people who are willing to talk to lots of new people are a scarce and valuable resource
I think that most of the good that can be done in this space looks a lot more like ādo a long schlepā than āimplement this one relatively cheap thing, like making a website for a database of projectsā.ā
In the EA Infrastructure Fundās Ask Us Anything, I asked for their thoughts on the sorts of topics covered in this sequence, e.g. their thoughts on the intervention options mentioned in this post. Iāll quote Buckās interesting reply in full. See here for precisely what I asked and for replies to Buckās reply (including me agreeing or pushing back on some things).
---
āRe your 19 interventions, here are my quick takes on all of them
Yes I am in favor of this, and my day job is helping to run a new org that aspires to be a scalable EA-aligned research org.
I am in favor of this. I think one of the biggest bottlenecks here is finding people who are willing to mentor people in research. My current guess is that EAs who work as researchers should be more willing to mentor people in research, eg by mentoring people for an hour or two a week on projects that the mentor finds inside-view interesting (and therefore will be actually bought in to helping with). I think that in situations like this, itās very helpful for the mentor to be judged as Andrew Grov suggests, by the output of their organization + the output of neighboring organizations under their influence. That is, they should think that one of their key goals with their research interns as having the research interns do things that they actually think are useful. I think that not having this goal makes it much more tempting for the mentors to kind of snooze on the job and not really try to make the experience useful.
Yeah this seems good if you can do it, but I donāt think this is that much of the bottleneck on research. It doesnāt take very much time to evaluate a grant for someone to do research compared to how much time it takes to mentor them.
My current unconfident position is that I am very enthusiastic about funding people to do research if they have someone who wants to mentor them and be held somewhat accountable for whether they do anything useful. And so Iād love to get more grant applications from people describing their research proposal and saying who their mentor is; I can make that grant in like two hours (30 mins to talk to the grantee, 30 mins to talk to the mentor, 60 mins overhead). If the grants are for 4 months, then I can spend five hours a week and do all the grantmaking for 40 people. This feels pretty leveraged to me and I am happy to spend that time, and therefore I donāt feel much need to scale this up more.
I think that grantmaking capacity is more of a bottleneck for things other than research output.
I donāt immediately feel excited by this for longtermist research; I wouldnāt be surprised if itās good for animal welfare stuff but Iām not qualified to judge. I think that most research areas relevant to longtermism require high context in order to contribute to, and I donāt think that pushing people in the direction of good thesis topics is very likely to produce extremely useful research.
Iām not confident.
The post doesnāt seem to exist yet so idk
I think that it is quite hard to get non-EAs to do highly leveraged research of interest to EAs. I am not aware of many examples of it happening. (I actually canāt think of any offhand.) I think this is bottlenecked on EA having more problems that are well scoped and explained and can be handed off to less aligned people. Iām excited about work like The case for aligning narrowly superhuman models, because I think that this kind of work might make it easier to cause less aligned people to do useful stuff.
I feel pessimistic; I donāt think that this is the bottleneck. I think that people doing research projects without mentors is much worse, and if we had solved that problem, then we wouldnāt need this database as much. This database is mostly helpful in the very-little-supervision world, and so doesnāt seem like the key thing to work on.
I feel pessimistic, but idk maybe elicit is really amazing. (It seems at least pretty cool to me, but idk how useful it is.) Seems like if itās amazing we should expect it to be extremely commercially successful; I think Iāll wait to see if Iām hearing people rave about it and then try it if so.
I think this is worth doing to some extent, obviously; I think that my guess is that EAs arenāt as into forecasting as they should be (including me unfortunately.) Iād need to know your specific proposal in order to have more specific thoughts.
I think that facilitating junior researchers to connect with each other is somewhat good but doesnāt seem as good as having them connect more with senior researchers somehow.
Iām into this. I designed a noticeable fraction of the Triplebyte interview at one point (and delivered it hundreds of times); I wonder whether I should try making up an EA interview.
Seems cool. I think a major bottleneck here is people who are extremely extroverted and have lots of background and are willing to spend a huge amount of time talking to a huge amount of people. I think that the job āspend many hours a day talking to EAs who arenāt as well connected as would be ideal for 30 minutes each, in the hope of answering their questions and connecting them to people and encouraging themā is not as good as what Iām currently doing with my time, but it feels like a tempting alternative.
I am excited for people trying to organize retreats where they invite a mix of highly-connected senior researchers and junior researchers to one place to talk about things. I would be excited to receive grant applications for things like this.
Iām not sure that this is better than providing funding to people, though itās worth considering. Iām worried that it has some bad selection effects, where the most promising people are more likely to have money that they can spend living in closer proximity to EA hubs (and are more likely to have other sources of funding) and so the cheapo EA accommodations end up filtering for people who arenāt as promising.
Another way of putting this is that I think itās kind of unhealthy to have a bunch of people floating around trying unsuccessfully to get into EA research; Iād rather they tried to get funding to try it really hard for a while, and if it doesnāt go well, they have a clean break from the attempt and then try to do one of the many other useful things they could do with their lives, rather than slowly giving up over the course of years and infecting everyone else with despair.
Iām not sure; seems worth people making some materials, but Iād think that we should mostly be relying on materials not produced by EAs
I am a total sucker for this stuff, and would love to make it happen; I donāt think itās a very leveraged way of working on increasing the EA-aligned research pipeline though.
Yeah Iām into this; I think that strong web developers should consider reaching out to LessWrong and saying āhey do you want to hire me to make your site betterā.
I think Ben Todd is wrong here. I think that the number of extremely promising junior researchers is totally a bottleneck and we totally have mentorship capacity for them. For example, I have twice run across undergrads at EA Global who I was immediately extremely impressed by and wanted to hire (they both did MIRI internships and have IMO very impactful roles (not at MIRI) now). I think that I would happily spend ten hours a week managing three more of these people, and the bottleneck here is just that I donāt know many new people who are that talented (and to a lesser extent, who want to grow in the ways that align with my interests).
I think that increasing the number of people who are eg top 25% of research ability among Stanford undergrads is less helpful, because more of the bottleneck for these people is mentorship capacity. Though Iād still love to have more of these people. I think that I want people who are between 25th and 90th percentile intellectual promisingness among top schools to try first to acquire some specific and useful skill (like programming really well, or doing machine learning, or doing biology literature reviews, or clearly synthesizing disparate and confusing arguments), because they can learn these skills without needing as much mentorship from senior researchers and then they have more of a value proposition to those senior researchers later.
This seems almost entirely useless; I donāt think this would help at all.
Seems like a good use of someoneās time.
---------------
This was a pretty good list of suggestions. I guess my takeaways from this are:
I care a lot about access to mentorship
I think that people who are willing to talk to lots of new people are a scarce and valuable resource
I think that most of the good that can be done in this space looks a lot more like ādo a long schlepā than āimplement this one relatively cheap thing, like making a website for a database of projectsā.ā