Are there any specific benefits that academic collaborations could provide the EA movement that currently aren’t available?
Academic discourse is (with some justification) seen as the gold-standard for answering intellectually challenging questions in our society. Because effective altruism often cares about such questions, it’s going to be important to try to answer them in that venue. Otherwise after some years have passed we will be open to the reasonable criticism that if the ideas were worthwhile, they’d have stronger defence in the literature, and this could lead to people dismissing us.
There are some other benefits:
Getting critiques from academics is a valuable route to improving the robustness of our ideas.
Academia is generally quite open to well-justified ideas. There is a large group of potential collaborators here!
Because we may want to comment on social questions touching on a large range of specialties, it’s helpful to be able to talk to and work with these specialists.
Academic discourse is (with some justification) seen as the gold-standard for answering intellectually challenging questions in our society. Because effective altruism often cares about such questions, it’s going to be important to try to answer them in that venue. Otherwise after some years have passed we will be open to the reasonable criticism that if the ideas were worthwhile, they’d have stronger defence in the literature, and this could lead to people dismissing us.
There are some other benefits:
Getting critiques from academics is a valuable route to improving the robustness of our ideas.
Academia is generally quite open to well-justified ideas. There is a large group of potential collaborators here!
Because we may want to comment on social questions touching on a large range of specialties, it’s helpful to be able to talk to and work with these specialists.