It’s also important to be transparent about one’s rigor and to make the negative results findable for others. The second is obvious. The first is because the dead end may not actually be a dead end but only looked that way given the particular way in which you had resolved the optimal stopping problem of investigating it (even) further.
I agree with these points, and think that they might sometimes be under-appreciated (both in and outside of EA).
To sort-of restate your points:
I think it’s common for people to not publish explorations that turned out to seem to “not reveal anything important” (except of course that this direction of exploration might be worth skipping).
Much has been written about this sort of issue, and there can be valid reasons for that behaviour, but sometimes it seems unfortunate.
I think another failure mode is to provide some sort of public info of your belief that this direction of exploration seems worth skipping, but without sufficient reasoning transparency, which could make people rule this out too much/too early.
Again, there can be valid reasons for this (if you’re sufficiently confident that it’s worth ruling out this direction and you have sufficiently high-value other things to do, it might not be worth spending time on a write-up with high reasoning transparency), but sometimes it seems unfortunate.
I agree with these points, and think that they might sometimes be under-appreciated (both in and outside of EA).
To sort-of restate your points:
I think it’s common for people to not publish explorations that turned out to seem to “not reveal anything important” (except of course that this direction of exploration might be worth skipping).
Much has been written about this sort of issue, and there can be valid reasons for that behaviour, but sometimes it seems unfortunate.
I think another failure mode is to provide some sort of public info of your belief that this direction of exploration seems worth skipping, but without sufficient reasoning transparency, which could make people rule this out too much/too early.
Again, there can be valid reasons for this (if you’re sufficiently confident that it’s worth ruling out this direction and you have sufficiently high-value other things to do, it might not be worth spending time on a write-up with high reasoning transparency), but sometimes it seems unfortunate.