I’m starting a PhD in Bioengineering soon, so my question mainly relates to academia. Are there any specific benefits that academic collaborations could provide the EA movement that currently aren’t available? How can we encourage researchers to join the EA movement without making it seem as though we might be condemning some of their research for being too low-impact?
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.
How can we encourage researchers to join the EA movement without making it seem as though we might be condemning some of their research for being too low-impact?
Nice questions. I think academia is moving in a promising direction in thinking about impact more. This affects funding, and means that individual academics are encouraged to engage with the question of the routes from their work to impact. How to measure the impact of research is a hard question, though, and the academic community is still learning how to do that. We can help people to take a big-picture perspective on choosing impactful research questions, rather than just choosing the most interesting questions.
I think it’s important to collaborate with researchers here rather than to judge from outside. They will know their area better than outsiders, and this expertise should help them identify the best questions. Most academics I know genuinely want their research to be high-impact, so would be open to this if framed properly.
The increased focus on impact from funding bodies may also provide a good opportunity for us to liaise with them about how we can most appropriately assess impact. If we can improve the practices that drive funding decisions, that will help make academic incentives line up even more with finding the most valuable research.
I’m starting a PhD in Bioengineering soon, so my question mainly relates to academia. Are there any specific benefits that academic collaborations could provide the EA movement that currently aren’t available? How can we encourage researchers to join the EA movement without making it seem as though we might be condemning some of their research for being too low-impact?
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.
Nice questions. I think academia is moving in a promising direction in thinking about impact more. This affects funding, and means that individual academics are encouraged to engage with the question of the routes from their work to impact. How to measure the impact of research is a hard question, though, and the academic community is still learning how to do that. We can help people to take a big-picture perspective on choosing impactful research questions, rather than just choosing the most interesting questions.
I think it’s important to collaborate with researchers here rather than to judge from outside. They will know their area better than outsiders, and this expertise should help them identify the best questions. Most academics I know genuinely want their research to be high-impact, so would be open to this if framed properly.
The increased focus on impact from funding bodies may also provide a good opportunity for us to liaise with them about how we can most appropriately assess impact. If we can improve the practices that drive funding decisions, that will help make academic incentives line up even more with finding the most valuable research.