Rethink’s cost per published research report (again total org cost not amount spent on a specific projects, divided by the number of published reports where a research heavy EA Forum post of typical Rethink quality would count as a published report).
Collectively, RP’s AI work, global health + development work, animal work, worldview investigations work, and survey work lead to the generation of 90 reports in 2023.
The budget for these six departments was $7,838,001.20, including all relevant management and operations.
This results in $87,088.90 per report.
This excludes the XST and special projects departments because their core outputs are not intended to be research papers.
To be clear, many of our outputs weren’t public, but I tried to norm the count to a sense of what a substantial EA Forum report would be.
If I may add some editorialization, I’d note that I’m sure we or other organizations could produce a report more cheaply, but we’ve found that investing a lot more per report in doing presentations, outreach, networking, etc. has magnified the impact per report. I worry that looking at outputs per dollar is more of a vanity metric and we actually need to do more to quantify impact per report.
Collectively, RP’s AI work, global health + development work, animal work, worldview investigations work, and survey work lead to the generation of 90 reports in 2023.
The budget for these six departments was $7,838,001.20, including all relevant management and operations.
This results in $87,088.90 per report.
This excludes the XST and special projects departments because their core outputs are not intended to be research papers.
To be clear, many of our outputs weren’t public, but I tried to norm the count to a sense of what a substantial EA Forum report would be.
If I may add some editorialization, I’d note that I’m sure we or other organizations could produce a report more cheaply, but we’ve found that investing a lot more per report in doing presentations, outreach, networking, etc. has magnified the impact per report. I worry that looking at outputs per dollar is more of a vanity metric and we actually need to do more to quantify impact per report.