Thanks, I think this is a great topic and this seems like a useful list (although I do find reading through 19 different types of options without much structure a bit overwhelming!).
I’ll just ~repost a private comment I made before.
Encouraging and facilitating aspiring/junior researchers and more experienced researchers to connect in similar ways
This feels like an especially promising area to me. I’d guess there are lots of cases where this would be very beneficial for the junior researcher and at least a bit beneficial for the experienced researcher. It just needs facilitation (or something else, e.g. a culture change where people try harder to make this happen themselves, some strong public encouragement to juniors to make this happen, …).
This isn’t based on really strong evidence, maybe mostly my own (limited) experience + assuming at least some experienced researchers are similar to me. And that there are lots of excellent junior researcher candidates out there (again from first hand impressions).
Improving the vetting of (potential) researchers, and/or better “sharing” that vetting
This also seems like a big deal and an area where maybe you could improve things significantly with a relatively small amount of effort. I don’t have great context here though.
although I do find reading through 19 different types of options without much structure a bit overwhelming!
Interesting. I received similar feedback on the previous post in the sequence, and re-organised it into “clusters” in response to that. And I’ve received similar feedback on a separate, upcoming draft of mine that also has a big list of things, and due to that feedback I plan to organise that list into clusters before publishing the post. Maybe this is a recurring issue with my writing that I should be on the lookout for. So thanks for that feedback :)
I guess this also relates to my caveat that “There are various other ways to carve up the space of options, various complementary framings that can be useful, etc.”, and to me trying to produce these posts relatively quickly and to be relatively thorough. I expect with more time, I could come up with better ways to organise the space of options—e.g. via creating diagrams representing various different pathways to getting more EA-aligned research or researchers, showing how each intervention could connect to one or more steps on those pathways, and then somehow using that to organise the interventions into broad types and then subtypes. (And if someone else did that, I’d be interested to read what they come up with!)
One (maybe?) low-effort thing that could be nice would be saying “these are my top 5” or “these are listed in order of how promising I think they are” or something (you may well have done that already and I missed it).
Ah, yes, this is probably useful and definitely low-effort (I’ve now done it in 1 minute, due to your comment).
The list was actually already in order of how promising I think they are, and I mentioned that in footnote 1. But I shouldn’t expect people to read footnotes, and your feedback plus that other feedback I got on other posts suggests that readers want that sort of thing enough / find it useful enough that that should be said in the main text. So I’ve now moved that info to the main text (in the summary, before I list the 19 interventions).
I think the main reason I originally put it in a footnote is that it’s hard to know what my ranking really means (since each intervention could be done in many different ways, which would vary in their value) or how much to trust it. But my ranking is still probably better than the ranking a reader would form, or than an absence of ranking, given that I’ve spent more time thinking about this. Going forward, I’ll be more inclined to just clearly tell readers things like my ranking, and less focused on avoiding “anchoring” them or things like that.
Thanks, I think this is a great topic and this seems like a useful list (although I do find reading through 19 different types of options without much structure a bit overwhelming!).
I’ll just ~repost a private comment I made before.
This feels like an especially promising area to me. I’d guess there are lots of cases where this would be very beneficial for the junior researcher and at least a bit beneficial for the experienced researcher. It just needs facilitation (or something else, e.g. a culture change where people try harder to make this happen themselves, some strong public encouragement to juniors to make this happen, …).
This isn’t based on really strong evidence, maybe mostly my own (limited) experience + assuming at least some experienced researchers are similar to me. And that there are lots of excellent junior researcher candidates out there (again from first hand impressions).
This also seems like a big deal and an area where maybe you could improve things significantly with a relatively small amount of effort. I don’t have great context here though.
Thanks for these thoughts!
Interesting. I received similar feedback on the previous post in the sequence, and re-organised it into “clusters” in response to that. And I’ve received similar feedback on a separate, upcoming draft of mine that also has a big list of things, and due to that feedback I plan to organise that list into clusters before publishing the post. Maybe this is a recurring issue with my writing that I should be on the lookout for. So thanks for that feedback :)
I guess this also relates to my caveat that “There are various other ways to carve up the space of options, various complementary framings that can be useful, etc.”, and to me trying to produce these posts relatively quickly and to be relatively thorough. I expect with more time, I could come up with better ways to organise the space of options—e.g. via creating diagrams representing various different pathways to getting more EA-aligned research or researchers, showing how each intervention could connect to one or more steps on those pathways, and then somehow using that to organise the interventions into broad types and then subtypes. (And if someone else did that, I’d be interested to read what they come up with!)
One (maybe?) low-effort thing that could be nice would be saying “these are my top 5” or “these are listed in order of how promising I think they are” or something (you may well have done that already and I missed it).
Ah, yes, this is probably useful and definitely low-effort (I’ve now done it in 1 minute, due to your comment).
The list was actually already in order of how promising I think they are, and I mentioned that in footnote 1. But I shouldn’t expect people to read footnotes, and your feedback plus that other feedback I got on other posts suggests that readers want that sort of thing enough / find it useful enough that that should be said in the main text. So I’ve now moved that info to the main text (in the summary, before I list the 19 interventions).
I think the main reason I originally put it in a footnote is that it’s hard to know what my ranking really means (since each intervention could be done in many different ways, which would vary in their value) or how much to trust it. But my ranking is still probably better than the ranking a reader would form, or than an absence of ranking, given that I’ve spent more time thinking about this. Going forward, I’ll be more inclined to just clearly tell readers things like my ranking, and less focused on avoiding “anchoring” them or things like that.
(So thanks again for the feedback!)