Word on the grapevine is that many universities have really poor operations capacity, including R1 research universities in the US and equivalent ones in Europe. It’s unclear to me if an EA university can do better (eg by paying for more ops staff, by thinking harder about incentives), but it’s at least not implausible.
Rethink Priorities, Open Phil, and MIRI all naively appear to have better ops than my personal impression of what ops at EA-affliated departments in research universities look like.
Promotion tracks in most (but not all) elite American universities are based on either a) (this is typical) paper publication record or b) (especially in liberal arts colleges) teaching. This can be bad if we (e.g.) want our researchers to study topics that may be unusually sensitive. So we might want to have more options like a more typical “research with management” track (like in thinktanks or non-academic EA research orgs), or prize funding like Thiel/All Souls (though maybe less extreme).
Having EAs work together seems potentially really good for wasting less time of both researchers and students.
Universities often just do a lot of things that I personally perceive as pretty immoral and dumb (eg in student admissions, possibly discriminate a lot against Asian descent or non-Americans, have punitive mental health services). Maybe this is just youthful optimism, but I would hope that an EA university can do better on those fronts.
Some quick thoughts:
Word on the grapevine is that many universities have really poor operations capacity, including R1 research universities in the US and equivalent ones in Europe. It’s unclear to me if an EA university can do better (eg by paying for more ops staff, by thinking harder about incentives), but it’s at least not implausible.
Rethink Priorities, Open Phil, and MIRI all naively appear to have better ops than my personal impression of what ops at EA-affliated departments in research universities look like.
Promotion tracks in most (but not all) elite American universities are based on either a) (this is typical) paper publication record or b) (especially in liberal arts colleges) teaching. This can be bad if we (e.g.) want our researchers to study topics that may be unusually sensitive. So we might want to have more options like a more typical “research with management” track (like in thinktanks or non-academic EA research orgs), or prize funding like Thiel/All Souls (though maybe less extreme).
Having EAs work together seems potentially really good for wasting less time of both researchers and students.
Universities often just do a lot of things that I personally perceive as pretty immoral and dumb (eg in student admissions, possibly discriminate a lot against Asian descent or non-Americans, have punitive mental health services). Maybe this is just youthful optimism, but I would hope that an EA university can do better on those fronts.