Because of the way you’d framed the problem—that people have rarely evaluated thousands of causes—I was expecting the “shallow” research round to be a lot shorter than a week. At that rate, if you wanted to do shallow research on 1000 causes a year, you’d need 20 researchers.
You’re absolutely right that the shallow research part is fairly time-intensive, and not at all ideal. I had started out thinking one could get away with <=1 day’s worth of research at the shallow stage, but I found that just wasn’t sufficient to get a high-confidence evaluation (taking into consider the research, the construction of a CEA, the double-checking of all calculations, writing up a report, etc). To put things in context, Open Phil takes a couple of weeks for their shallow research, and bringing that down to 1 week already involves considerable sacrifice (not being able to get expert opinions beyond what is already published), and getting it further down to 1-3 days would be too detrimental to research quality, I think.
Aside from attempting to shorten the research process, ramping up the size of the research team would be the obvious solution, as you say, and it’s what I’ll be trying to pursue in the near term. Of course, funding constraints (at the organizational level) and general talent constraint (at the movement level) probably constrain us. Hence, I’m fairly enthusiastic about Akhil’s and Leonie’s Cause Innovation Bootcamp!
Love to see it.
Because of the way you’d framed the problem—that people have rarely evaluated thousands of causes—I was expecting the “shallow” research round to be a lot shorter than a week. At that rate, if you wanted to do shallow research on 1000 causes a year, you’d need 20 researchers.
You’re absolutely right that the shallow research part is fairly time-intensive, and not at all ideal. I had started out thinking one could get away with <=1 day’s worth of research at the shallow stage, but I found that just wasn’t sufficient to get a high-confidence evaluation (taking into consider the research, the construction of a CEA, the double-checking of all calculations, writing up a report, etc). To put things in context, Open Phil takes a couple of weeks for their shallow research, and bringing that down to 1 week already involves considerable sacrifice (not being able to get expert opinions beyond what is already published), and getting it further down to 1-3 days would be too detrimental to research quality, I think.
Aside from attempting to shorten the research process, ramping up the size of the research team would be the obvious solution, as you say, and it’s what I’ll be trying to pursue in the near term. Of course, funding constraints (at the organizational level) and general talent constraint (at the movement level) probably constrain us. Hence, I’m fairly enthusiastic about Akhil’s and Leonie’s Cause Innovation Bootcamp!
That makes a lot of sense. I find things often take what feels like a long time, even when you’re trying to go fast.