Thanks for writing up the project! I liked the idea of Effective Thesis when I first heard about it, but I wasnāt sure how well a small team would be able to advise a large number of students with varying backgrounds and majors. It sounds as though the results have exceeded my expectations. (Also, the āAgendasā page of the website has been a really handy resource for me.)
1ā3 of students appreciated general advice on research direction, 1ā3 appreciated academic career-related advice and 1ā3 appreciated guidance in the topic they came up with themselves.
This is an interesting statistic. Iād have thought that nearly all the students would mostly benefit from āgeneral advice on research directionā, since specialized EA knowledge is something Effective Thesis has that professors and career offices donāt.
1. Can you give an example of what āguidance in the topic they came up with themselvesā might look like? Particularly in a case where the coach isnāt an expert on the topic?
2. Do you have any general observations of where your applications came from? Iād be interested in both the country/āregional breakdown and a breakdown of applicant school rankings (e.g. ā1/ā3 from schools in or around the top 100 of this list, most of the rest from other private American/āEuropean schools, a few from other continentsā).
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Finally, thanks for linking to your interview questions; it helps put the answers you got in context, and I like being able to see the back-end infrastructure of EA projects.
Iād have thought that nearly all the students would mostly benefit from āgeneral advice on research directionā, since specialized EA knowledge is something Effective Thesis has that professors and career offices donāt.
That would be my guess as well. Maybe the average advice they would get would not be that good or they would get as good advice anyway from professors and career offices but they got it first from the Effective Thesis and therefore attributed the value to Effective Thesis. However, when trying to estimate the overall counterfactual impact, I have usually rated cases which referred ācareer adviceā or āhelp with topic they came up with themselvesā as the main sources of value they got from Effective Thesis as being less impacted by Effective Thesis than cases which appreciated and used āgeneral advice on research directionā.
1. Can you give an example of what āguidance in the topic they came up with themselvesā might look like? Particularly in a case where the coach isnāt an expert on the topic?
Usually Iāve tried to match student with a coach who would be expert on the broader domain of the topic student came up with. Example could be a philosophy student who came up with 3 different topic ideas related to global priorities research. The coaching helped him prioritise between these 3 topics and choose the one which would be best in studentās situation. Another student came up with a broader topic and coaching helped him take a perspective of the topic, use a specific methodology and/āor focus on a specific issue within the topic.
2. Do you have any general observations of where your applications came from? Iād be interested in both the country/āregional breakdown and a breakdown of applicant school rankings (e.g. ā1/ā3 from schools in or around the top 100 of this list, most of the rest from other private American/āEuropean schools, a few from other continentsā).
Iāve asked people āWhere did you learn about the Effective Thesis fromā in the application form but the results show no specific trend and there are too few cases to draw conclusions from. 5 most frequent channels were word of mouth (14 people), university referral (12), non EA online blog postāThesis Whisperer (11), facebook referral (11), personal connections/āindividual outreach (10) and all produced candidates of similar qualities in terms of chance of getting through the funnel, desire to continue in research career and involvement in EA.
I havenāt done breakdown by country and school rankings systematically yet, but I will take a closer look and update the post soon. My impression was that people are applying from many countries around the world, even those where there is not visibly large or active EA group and I havenāt noticed any strong trend (e.g. that half of the people would be from the UK or something like that). Regarding school rankings, prevalence of candidates from top rated schools is much higher than chance which is in my opinion the result of sampling people from the EA community, however, I need to crunch the numbers to get a more specific information.
Thanks for writing up the project! I liked the idea of Effective Thesis when I first heard about it, but I wasnāt sure how well a small team would be able to advise a large number of students with varying backgrounds and majors. It sounds as though the results have exceeded my expectations. (Also, the āAgendasā page of the website has been a really handy resource for me.)
This is an interesting statistic. Iād have thought that nearly all the students would mostly benefit from āgeneral advice on research directionā, since specialized EA knowledge is something Effective Thesis has that professors and career offices donāt.
1. Can you give an example of what āguidance in the topic they came up with themselvesā might look like? Particularly in a case where the coach isnāt an expert on the topic?
2. Do you have any general observations of where your applications came from? Iād be interested in both the country/āregional breakdown and a breakdown of applicant school rankings (e.g. ā1/ā3 from schools in or around the top 100 of this list, most of the rest from other private American/āEuropean schools, a few from other continentsā).
--
Finally, thanks for linking to your interview questions; it helps put the answers you got in context, and I like being able to see the back-end infrastructure of EA projects.
That would be my guess as well. Maybe the average advice they would get would not be that good or they would get as good advice anyway from professors and career offices but they got it first from the Effective Thesis and therefore attributed the value to Effective Thesis. However, when trying to estimate the overall counterfactual impact, I have usually rated cases which referred ācareer adviceā or āhelp with topic they came up with themselvesā as the main sources of value they got from Effective Thesis as being less impacted by Effective Thesis than cases which appreciated and used āgeneral advice on research directionā.
Usually Iāve tried to match student with a coach who would be expert on the broader domain of the topic student came up with. Example could be a philosophy student who came up with 3 different topic ideas related to global priorities research. The coaching helped him prioritise between these 3 topics and choose the one which would be best in studentās situation. Another student came up with a broader topic and coaching helped him take a perspective of the topic, use a specific methodology and/āor focus on a specific issue within the topic.
Iāve asked people āWhere did you learn about the Effective Thesis fromā in the application form but the results show no specific trend and there are too few cases to draw conclusions from. 5 most frequent channels were word of mouth (14 people), university referral (12), non EA online blog postāThesis Whisperer (11), facebook referral (11), personal connections/āindividual outreach (10) and all produced candidates of similar qualities in terms of chance of getting through the funnel, desire to continue in research career and involvement in EA.
I havenāt done breakdown by country and school rankings systematically yet, but I will take a closer look and update the post soon. My impression was that people are applying from many countries around the world, even those where there is not visibly large or active EA group and I havenāt noticed any strong trend (e.g. that half of the people would be from the UK or something like that). Regarding school rankings, prevalence of candidates from top rated schools is much higher than chance which is in my opinion the result of sampling people from the EA community, however, I need to crunch the numbers to get a more specific information.
Thanks for the comment!
The update is on, in the section Promotion of the project.