MichaelA🔸 comments on Intervention options for improving the EA-aligned research pipeline

[MichaelA🔸]

An idea from Linch:

Red teaming papers as an EA training exercise?

I think a plausibly good training exercise for EAs wanting to be better at empirical/​conceptual research is to deep dive into seminal papers/​blog posts and attempt to identify all the empirical and conceptual errors in past work, especially writings by either a) other respected EAs or b) other stuff that we otherwise think of as especially important.

I’m not sure how knowledgeable you have to be to do this well, but I suspect it’s approachable for smart people who finish high school, and certainly by the time they finish undergrad with a decent science or social science degree.

I think this is good career building for various reasons:

• you can develop a healthy skepticism of the existing EA orthodoxy

  • I mean skepticism that’s grounded in specific beliefs about why things ought to be different, rather than just vague “weirdness heuristics” or feeling like the goals of EA conflict with other tribal goals.

• you actually deeply understand at least one topic well enough to point out errors

• creates legible career capital (at least within EA)

• requires relatively little training/​guidance from external mentors, meaning

  • our movement devotes less scarce mentorship resources into this

  • people with worse social skills/​network/​geographical situation don’t feel (as much) at a disadvantage for getting the relevant training

• you can start forming your own opinions/​intuitions of both object-level and meta-level heuristics for what things are likely to be correct vs wrong.

• In some cases, the errors are actually quite big, and worth correcting (relevant parts of ) the EA movement on.

Main “cons” I can think of:

• I’m not aware of anybody successfully doing a really good critique for the sake of doing a really good critique. The most exciting things I’m aware of (publicly, zdgroff’s critique of Ng’s original paper on wild animal suffering, alexrjl’s critique of Giving Green. I also have private examples) mostly comes from people trying to deeply understand a thing for themselves, and then along the way spotting errors with existing work.

• It’s possible that doing deliberate “red-teaming” would make one predisposed to spot trivial issues rather than serious ones, or falsely identify issues where there aren’t any.

• Maybe critiques are a less important skill to develop than forming your own vision/​research direction and executing on it, and telling people to train for this skill might actively hinder their ability to be bold & imaginative?

(See also the comments on the shortform.)