Estimating the value of research seems really hard to me (and this is significantly true even in retrospect).
That said, some candidates are:
Work making the point that we should give outsized attention to mitigating risks that might manifest unexpectedly soon, since we’re the only ones who can
At the time it didn’t seem unusually valuable, but I think it was relatively soon after (a few months) that I saw some people changing behaviour in light of the point, which increased my sense of its importance
Felt sort-of important at the time, although I think the kind of value I anticipated hasn’t really manifested
I have felt like it’s been useful for my thinking in a variety of domains, thinking about pragmatic prioritisation (and I’ve seen some others get some value from that); however logarithm is an obvious-enough functional form that maybe it didn’t really add much
Maybe something where it was more about dissemination of ideas than finding deep novel insights (I think it’s very hard to draw a line between what counts as “research” or what doesn’t), such as Prospecting for Gold, or How valuable is movement growth?
Quite a few people have told me that they got something out of one or both of those pieces, although it’s extremely hard to assess the counterfactuals
I felt like I was doing something significant in these cases (particularly when writing the talk Prospecting for Gold)
Overall I’d be hard pressed to decide between choosing one of the above, although I’d tend to guess these are more valuable than most other pieces I’ve done (excepting some recent work that I don’t yet want to judge, and with the caveat that I’m surely forgetting some)
That said, some of the more policy-ish pieces of research might still turn out to be the most valuable, if they got picked up somewhere important, but so far I’ll not count them
What do you think is the most valuable research you’ve produced so far? Did you think it would be so valuable at the time?
Estimating the value of research seems really hard to me (and this is significantly true even in retrospect).
That said, some candidates are:
Work making the point that we should give outsized attention to mitigating risks that might manifest unexpectedly soon, since we’re the only ones who can
At the time it didn’t seem unusually valuable, but I think it was relatively soon after (a few months) that I saw some people changing behaviour in light of the point, which increased my sense of its importance
Work on cost-effectiveness of research of unknown difficulty, particularly the principle of using log returns when you don’t know where to start
Felt sort-of important at the time, although I think the kind of value I anticipated hasn’t really manifested
I have felt like it’s been useful for my thinking in a variety of domains, thinking about pragmatic prioritisation (and I’ve seen some others get some value from that); however logarithm is an obvious-enough functional form that maybe it didn’t really add much
Maybe something where it was more about dissemination of ideas than finding deep novel insights (I think it’s very hard to draw a line between what counts as “research” or what doesn’t), such as Prospecting for Gold, or How valuable is movement growth?
Quite a few people have told me that they got something out of one or both of those pieces, although it’s extremely hard to assess the counterfactuals
I felt like I was doing something significant in these cases (particularly when writing the talk Prospecting for Gold)
Overall I’d be hard pressed to decide between choosing one of the above, although I’d tend to guess these are more valuable than most other pieces I’ve done (excepting some recent work that I don’t yet want to judge, and with the caveat that I’m surely forgetting some)
That said, some of the more policy-ish pieces of research might still turn out to be the most valuable, if they got picked up somewhere important, but so far I’ll not count them