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

[MichaelA🔸]

An idea from Buck (see also the comments on the linked shortform itself):

Here’s a crazy idea. I haven’t run it by any EAIF people yet.

I want to have a program to fund people to write book reviews and post them to the EA Forum or LessWrong. (This idea came out of a conversation with a bunch of people at a retreat; I can’t remember exactly whose idea it was.)

Basic structure:

• Someone picks a book they want to review.

• Optionally, they email me asking how on-topic I think the book is (to reduce the probability of not getting the prize later).

• They write a review, and send it to me.

• If it’s the kind of review I want, I give them $500 in return for them posting the review to EA Forum or LW with a “This post sponsored by the EAIF” banner at the top. (I’d also love to set up an impact purchase thing but that’s probably too complicated).

• If I don’t want to give them the money, they can do whatever with the review.

What books are on topic: Anything of interest to people who want to have a massive altruistic impact on the world. More specifically:

• Things directly related to traditional EA topics

• Things about the world more generally. Eg macrohistory, how do governments work, The Doomsday Machine, history of science (eg Asimov’s “A Short History of Chemistry”)

• I think that books about self-help, productivity, or skill-building (eg management) are dubiously on topic.

Goals:

• I think that these book reviews might be directly useful. There are many topics where I’d love to know the basic EA-relevant takeaways, especially when combined with basic fact-checking.

• It might encourage people to practice useful skills, like writing, quickly learning about new topics, and thinking through what topics would be useful to know more about.

• I think it would be healthy for EA’s culture. I worry sometimes that EAs aren’t sufficiently interested in learning facts about the world that aren’t directly related to EA stuff. I think that this might be improved both by people writing these reviews and people reading them.

  • Conversely, sometimes I worry that rationalists are too interested in thinking about the world by introspection or weird analogies relative to learning many facts about different aspects of the world; I think book reviews would maybe be a healthier way to direct energy towards intellectual development.

• It might surface some talented writers and thinkers who weren’t otherwise known to EA.

• It might produce good content on the EA Forum and LW that engages intellectually curious people.

Suggested elements of a book review:

• One paragraph summary of the book

• How compelling you found the book’s thesis, and why

• The main takeaways that relate to vastly improving the world, with emphasis on the surprising ones

• Optionally, epistemic spot checks

• Optionally, “book adversarial collaborations”, where you actually review two different books on the same topic.