This was a very clear and helpful thread. I’d suggest something that a much higher amount of funding could allow EA to pursue:
Recruit more mid-career and late-career researchers into EA, particularly established academics who are already working on EA-related issues, but who might not be inside the EA community yet, and who never viewed EA as a potential funding source. Often these researchers have established track records of publishing and consulting, run large lab groups full of grad students and post-docs, and have high impact and visibility within their fields.
But they’re often spending huge amounts of time applying for government research grants that have very low funding rates (below 10%), to keep their labs going and to supplement their salaries (e.g. for teaching buy-outs & summer salaries). This is extremely frustrating for most of them. And they have to wrap their real research interests up in some kind of package that sounds appealing given the current NIH, NSF, EU, or UK Research Council funding priorities, which have heavy political biases & very narrow Overton windows.
If these researchers were more aware that EA can offer grants just as large as they could get from other funders, but where the funding rate was significantly higher (e.g. above 25%), they might shift their research focus into greater alignment with the EA ethos and EA cause areas. If they run high quality labs with high quality grad students, this could also be a great way to recruit more young talent into EA.
For example, I’ve given many talks about EA and X risk at various behavioral sciences conferences. Often, researchers will come up afterwards and ask how they can get involved. I can point them to the standard EA resources (e.g. EA Forum, 80k Hours, Open Phil, etc), but those resources seem designed mostly for students or early-career researchers. And the EA selection processes for grants often seem to weigh in-groupish EA credentials (EA social connections, buzzwords, familiarity with the cool cause areas) over established academic credentials, research capacity, and proof of research impact. This can be off-putting to anyone with an h-index above 30.
In other words, with increased funding comes the possibility of an expanded strategy for EA community building and recruitment. Instead of just trying to spot young talents and pay them modest salaries to do entry-level research, we can potentially recruit already established academic researchers, and support their labs to work on EA cause areas rather than cause areas considered important by government funding agencies.
There is an ocean of proven academic talent out there, dying to find a better way to support their lab, and to do more interesting research that’s truly high impact. They just need better on-ramps to figure out how to pivot into EA—and they need to feel genuinely welcome even if they don’t yet speak the EA dialect, if they don’t fully understand the EA ethos and cause areas, and even if they’re over the age of 40. (EA’s pervasive & obnoxious ageism is a topic for another time....)
This was a very clear and helpful thread. I’d suggest something that a much higher amount of funding could allow EA to pursue:
Recruit more mid-career and late-career researchers into EA, particularly established academics who are already working on EA-related issues, but who might not be inside the EA community yet, and who never viewed EA as a potential funding source. Often these researchers have established track records of publishing and consulting, run large lab groups full of grad students and post-docs, and have high impact and visibility within their fields.
But they’re often spending huge amounts of time applying for government research grants that have very low funding rates (below 10%), to keep their labs going and to supplement their salaries (e.g. for teaching buy-outs & summer salaries). This is extremely frustrating for most of them. And they have to wrap their real research interests up in some kind of package that sounds appealing given the current NIH, NSF, EU, or UK Research Council funding priorities, which have heavy political biases & very narrow Overton windows.
If these researchers were more aware that EA can offer grants just as large as they could get from other funders, but where the funding rate was significantly higher (e.g. above 25%), they might shift their research focus into greater alignment with the EA ethos and EA cause areas. If they run high quality labs with high quality grad students, this could also be a great way to recruit more young talent into EA.
For example, I’ve given many talks about EA and X risk at various behavioral sciences conferences. Often, researchers will come up afterwards and ask how they can get involved. I can point them to the standard EA resources (e.g. EA Forum, 80k Hours, Open Phil, etc), but those resources seem designed mostly for students or early-career researchers. And the EA selection processes for grants often seem to weigh in-groupish EA credentials (EA social connections, buzzwords, familiarity with the cool cause areas) over established academic credentials, research capacity, and proof of research impact. This can be off-putting to anyone with an h-index above 30.
In other words, with increased funding comes the possibility of an expanded strategy for EA community building and recruitment. Instead of just trying to spot young talents and pay them modest salaries to do entry-level research, we can potentially recruit already established academic researchers, and support their labs to work on EA cause areas rather than cause areas considered important by government funding agencies.
There is an ocean of proven academic talent out there, dying to find a better way to support their lab, and to do more interesting research that’s truly high impact. They just need better on-ramps to figure out how to pivot into EA—and they need to feel genuinely welcome even if they don’t yet speak the EA dialect, if they don’t fully understand the EA ethos and cause areas, and even if they’re over the age of 40. (EA’s pervasive & obnoxious ageism is a topic for another time....)