Michelle or Hauke can add more, but part of the answer is that being across the best research out there is crucial to our outreach.
People are willing to take our recommendations seriously because we show that we understand why these charities are excellent and are keeping tabs on them. We also need to be able to explain how these cost effectiveness estimates are arrived at, and generally say other smart things to be taken seriously. That isn’t possible without someone working almost full time understanding the research that GiveWell and others are producing.
As a result, even if the research had no value in discovering new knowledge (which isn’t true of course) and we were only focussed on outreach, we would probably want to have a researcher on our team (especially as we now have six people working on GWWC so can afford some specialisation).
Of course Hauke is actually turning up new points and looking into approaches for reducing poverty that we haven’t looked at properly before and should be able to say something intelligent about.
Michelle or Hauke can add more, but part of the answer is that being across the best research out there is crucial to our outreach.
People are willing to take our recommendations seriously because we show that we understand why these charities are excellent and are keeping tabs on them. We also need to be able to explain how these cost effectiveness estimates are arrived at, and generally say other smart things to be taken seriously. That isn’t possible without someone working almost full time understanding the research that GiveWell and others are producing.
As a result, even if the research had no value in discovering new knowledge (which isn’t true of course) and we were only focussed on outreach, we would probably want to have a researcher on our team (especially as we now have six people working on GWWC so can afford some specialisation).
Of course Hauke is actually turning up new points and looking into approaches for reducing poverty that we haven’t looked at properly before and should be able to say something intelligent about.