Just came here to comment something that’s been on my mind that I didn’t recall being suggested in the post, though it partly overlaps with your suggestions 1, 2, 4, 11, and 19.
Suggestion: Paid literature reviews with some (relatively low level) supervision.
Context: Since working at Sentience Institute, I’ve done quite a few literature reviews. (I’ve also done some more “rough and ready” ones at Animal Advocacy Careers.) I think that these have given me a much better understanding of how social sciences academia works, what sort of information is most helpful etc. A lot of the knowledge comes in handy in places that I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted, too. This makes me feel like the benefits might be comparable to the sorts of benefits that I expect lots of people get from PhDs—some methodological training / familiarity, and some useful knowledge. It wouldn’t give you some benefits of PhDs like signalling value, familiarity with the peer review process, or close mentorship relationships, but if you tried to get the literature reviews published in peer-reviewed journals, then that would add some of those benefits back in (and maybe help to improve the end product too).
Lit reviews can be quite time-consuming, but don’t necessarily require any very special skills—just willingness to spend time on it and look things up (e.g. methodological aspects) when you don’t know or understand them, rather than plowing on regardless. Obviously some methodological background in the topic would be helpful, but doesn’t always seem necessary; I’m a history grad and have done literature reviews on subjects from psychology to ethics to management.
It might be quite easy to explicitly offer (1) funding and (2) facilitation for independent researchers to be connected to potential reviewers of the end product. It could be up to the individual to suggest topics, or to some centralised body (as in your suggestion 7).
I’m not sure whose responsibility this should be. It could be EA Funds, Effective Thesis, or individual research orgs.
Caveats
I have found review + comments from colleagues helpful, so some supervision may be necessary, but these have tended to cluster at the start and end of projects with the vast majority of the work being independent.
To do rigorous systematic reviews, you generally want more than one person actually checking through the data, coding decisions etc, which would require more coordination. But this is not always necessary. Indeed, one of my lit reviews is currently going through the peer review process (and looks likely to be accepted) and didn’t use multiple author checks on these decisions. And less formal/systematic literature reviews can still be valuable, I think, both for the researcher and the readers.
True! I’d forgotten about that page. I think some sort of fairly minimal infrastructure might notably increase the number of people actually doing it though.
(Yeah, I didn’t mean that this meant your comment wasn’t useful or that it wouldn’t be a good idea to set up some sort of intervention to support this idea. I do hope someone sets up such an intervention, and I may try to help that happen sometime in future if I get more time or think of a particularly easy and high-leverage way to do so.)
Just came here to comment something that’s been on my mind that I didn’t recall being suggested in the post, though it partly overlaps with your suggestions 1, 2, 4, 11, and 19.
Suggestion: Paid literature reviews with some (relatively low level) supervision.
Context: Since working at Sentience Institute, I’ve done quite a few literature reviews. (I’ve also done some more “rough and ready” ones at Animal Advocacy Careers.) I think that these have given me a much better understanding of how social sciences academia works, what sort of information is most helpful etc. A lot of the knowledge comes in handy in places that I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted, too. This makes me feel like the benefits might be comparable to the sorts of benefits that I expect lots of people get from PhDs—some methodological training / familiarity, and some useful knowledge. It wouldn’t give you some benefits of PhDs like signalling value, familiarity with the peer review process, or close mentorship relationships, but if you tried to get the literature reviews published in peer-reviewed journals, then that would add some of those benefits back in (and maybe help to improve the end product too).
Lit reviews can be quite time-consuming, but don’t necessarily require any very special skills—just willingness to spend time on it and look things up (e.g. methodological aspects) when you don’t know or understand them, rather than plowing on regardless. Obviously some methodological background in the topic would be helpful, but doesn’t always seem necessary; I’m a history grad and have done literature reviews on subjects from psychology to ethics to management.
It might be quite easy to explicitly offer (1) funding and (2) facilitation for independent researchers to be connected to potential reviewers of the end product. It could be up to the individual to suggest topics, or to some centralised body (as in your suggestion 7).
I’m not sure whose responsibility this should be. It could be EA Funds, Effective Thesis, or individual research orgs.
Caveats
I have found review + comments from colleagues helpful, so some supervision may be necessary, but these have tended to cluster at the start and end of projects with the vast majority of the work being independent.
To do rigorous systematic reviews, you generally want more than one person actually checking through the data, coding decisions etc, which would require more coordination. But this is not always necessary. Indeed, one of my lit reviews is currently going through the peer review process (and looks likely to be accepted) and didn’t use multiple author checks on these decisions. And less formal/systematic literature reviews can still be valuable, I think, both for the researcher and the readers.
Thanks! Yeah, this seems like a handy idea.
I was recently reminded of the “Take action” / “Get involved” page on effectivealtruism.org, and I now see that that actually includes a page on Write a literature review or meta-analysis. That Take action page seems useful, and should maybe be highlighted more often. In retrospect, I probably should’ve linked to various bits of it from this post.
True! I’d forgotten about that page. I think some sort of fairly minimal infrastructure might notably increase the number of people actually doing it though.
(Yeah, I didn’t mean that this meant your comment wasn’t useful or that it wouldn’t be a good idea to set up some sort of intervention to support this idea. I do hope someone sets up such an intervention, and I may try to help that happen sometime in future if I get more time or think of a particularly easy and high-leverage way to do so.)