Something similar perhaps worth exploring is putting up awards/​bounties for doing particular research projects. A central clearing-house of this could be interesting (I know myself and a couple of others have done this on an ad-hoc basis—that said, efforts to produce central repositories for self-contained projects etc. in EA have not been wildly successful).
A couple of related questions/​topics I’d be excited for someone to have a look at:
1. Is rationality a skill, or a trait? Stanovich’s RQ correlates with IQ fairly strongly, but I imagine going through the literature could uncover how much of a positive manifold there is between ‘features’ of rationality which is orthogonal to intelligence, and then investigation of how/​whether this can be trained (with sub-questions around transfer, what seems particularly promising, etc.
2. I think a lot of people have looked into the superforecasting literature for themselves, but a general write-up for public consumption (e.g. How ‘traity’ is superforecasting? What exactly does GJP do to get a reported 10% boost from pre-selected superforecasters? Are there useful heuristics people can borrow to improve their own performance beyond practice/​logging predictions? (And what is the returns curve to practice, anyway?)) could spare lots of private duplication.
3. More generally, I imagine lots of relevant books (e.g. Deep Work, superforecasting, better angels) could be concisely summarised. That said, I think there are already services that do this, so less clear if this already exists whether it is worth EA time to repeat ‘in house’.
Something similar perhaps worth exploring is putting up awards/​bounties for doing particular research projects. A central clearing-house of this could be interesting (I know myself and a couple of others have done this on an ad-hoc basis—that said, efforts to produce central repositories for self-contained projects etc. in EA have not been wildly successful).
A couple of related questions/​topics I’d be excited for someone to have a look at:
1. Is rationality a skill, or a trait? Stanovich’s RQ correlates with IQ fairly strongly, but I imagine going through the literature could uncover how much of a positive manifold there is between ‘features’ of rationality which is orthogonal to intelligence, and then investigation of how/​whether this can be trained (with sub-questions around transfer, what seems particularly promising, etc.
2. I think a lot of people have looked into the superforecasting literature for themselves, but a general write-up for public consumption (e.g. How ‘traity’ is superforecasting? What exactly does GJP do to get a reported 10% boost from pre-selected superforecasters? Are there useful heuristics people can borrow to improve their own performance beyond practice/​logging predictions? (And what is the returns curve to practice, anyway?)) could spare lots of private duplication.
3. More generally, I imagine lots of relevant books (e.g. Deep Work, superforecasting, better angels) could be concisely summarised. That said, I think there are already services that do this, so less clear if this already exists whether it is worth EA time to repeat ‘in house’.