Thanks for these questions. This probably falls on me to answer, though I am leaving GPI (I have tendered my resignation for personal reasons; Adam Bales will be Acting Director in the interim).
The funding environment is not as free as it was previously. That does suggest some recalibration and different decisions on the margin. However, I’m afraid your message paints a misleading picture and I’m concerned about the potential for inaccurate gossip. I won’t correct every inaccuracy, but funding was never as concentrated as your citation of OP’s website suggests. For one thing, they are not our only funder, grants support activities that can be many years out into the future, and their timeline does not correspond to when we applied for or received funds. For another example, the decision about the Global Priorities Fellowship was not taken due to money but due to a) the massive amounts of researcher time it took to run (which is not easily compensated for because it was focused at one time of year), b) a judgment that the program could run less frequently and still capture most of the benefits by raising the bar and being more selective. We had observed that—as is common in recruitment—the “returns” from the top few participants were much higher than the “returns” from the average participant. PhD students are in school for many years (in my field, economics, 6 years is common), and while in some of those years they may be more focused on their dissertations, running the program only occasionally still leaves ample opportunity to try to catch the students who might be a particularly good fit while they are in their PhD. Running it less frequently certainly implies lower monetary costs, but in this case that was a side benefit rather than the main consideration.
To return to your main question, the broadening of the agenda is a natural result of both a) broadening the team and b) trying to build an agenda for global priorities research that can inform external researchers. As we’ve engaged with more and more exceptional researchers at other institutions, it has shifted our overall strategy and the extent to which we try to produce research “in-house” vs. build and support an external network for global priorities research. This varies somewhat by discipline, but think of there as just being “stubs” for economics and psychology at GPI, with most of the work that we support done outside of it. I don’t mean “support” monetarily (though we have benefited from an active visitors program), but support with ideas and convenings and discussion. In the past few years, we have been actively expanding our external network, mostly in economics and psychology but also in philosophy, and we anticipate that this external engagement will be the main way through which we have impact. I can talk at length about the structural reasons why this approach makes sense in academia, but that is probably a discussion for another day. (Some considerations: faculty tend to be naturally spread out, and while one might like to have agglomeration effects, this happens more through workshops and the free exchange of ideas, or collaborations, because faculty are tied to institutions whose own incentives are to diversify. You can try to make progress with just focused work by postdocs and pre-docs, but that misses a huge swath of people, and even postdocs and pre-docs become faculty over time. In the long run, if you are being successful, the bulk of your impact has to come from external places. The fact this research is mostly done at other institutions now is a sign that global priorities research has matured.)
As a final note, consider the purpose of this research agenda. It takes time to write a good research agenda—we embarked on it when I arrived almost two years ago, and we quickly did some initial brainstorming, but then we continued on a longer and more thorough deliberative process, such as through working groups focused on exploring whether a certain topic appeared promising. In each of the growth areas you highlight—AI and psychology—we made a few hires. Those hires hit the ground running with their own research, but they also helped further develop and refine the agenda. Developing this agenda helped shape our internal priorities (though not every topic on the agenda is something we want to pursue ourselves), but the main purpose of this agenda is external. We wouldn’t have needed to put nearly so much effort into it if it were for internal use. The agenda is simultaneously forward-looking and naturally driven by the hires we already made.
Hope this helps. With apologies, I’m not likely to get into follow-ups as it takes a long time to respond.
Thanks for your very thoughtful response. I’ll revise my initial comment to correct the point I made about funding; I apologize for portraying this inaccurately.
Your points about the broadening of the research agenda make sense. I think GPI is, in many ways, the academic cornerstone of EA, and it makes sense for GPI’s efforts to map onto the efforts of researchers working at other institutions and in a broader range of fields.
And thanks also for clarifying the purpose of the agenda; I had read it as a document describing GPI’s priorities for itself, but it makes more sense to read it as a statement of priorities for the field of Global Priorities Research writ large. (I wonder if, in future iterations of the document—or even just on the landing page—it might be helpful to clarify this latter point, because the documents themselves read to me as more internal facing, e.g., “This document outlines some of the core research priorities for the economics team at GPI.” Outside researchers not affiliated with GPI might, perhaps, be more inclined to engage with these documents if they were more explicitly laying out a research agenda for researchers in philosophy, economics, and psychology aiming to do impactful research.)
Thanks for these questions. This probably falls on me to answer, though I am leaving GPI (I have tendered my resignation for personal reasons; Adam Bales will be Acting Director in the interim).
The funding environment is not as free as it was previously. That does suggest some recalibration and different decisions on the margin. However, I’m afraid your message paints a misleading picture and I’m concerned about the potential for inaccurate gossip. I won’t correct every inaccuracy, but funding was never as concentrated as your citation of OP’s website suggests. For one thing, they are not our only funder, grants support activities that can be many years out into the future, and their timeline does not correspond to when we applied for or received funds. For another example, the decision about the Global Priorities Fellowship was not taken due to money but due to a) the massive amounts of researcher time it took to run (which is not easily compensated for because it was focused at one time of year), b) a judgment that the program could run less frequently and still capture most of the benefits by raising the bar and being more selective. We had observed that—as is common in recruitment—the “returns” from the top few participants were much higher than the “returns” from the average participant. PhD students are in school for many years (in my field, economics, 6 years is common), and while in some of those years they may be more focused on their dissertations, running the program only occasionally still leaves ample opportunity to try to catch the students who might be a particularly good fit while they are in their PhD. Running it less frequently certainly implies lower monetary costs, but in this case that was a side benefit rather than the main consideration.
To return to your main question, the broadening of the agenda is a natural result of both a) broadening the team and b) trying to build an agenda for global priorities research that can inform external researchers. As we’ve engaged with more and more exceptional researchers at other institutions, it has shifted our overall strategy and the extent to which we try to produce research “in-house” vs. build and support an external network for global priorities research. This varies somewhat by discipline, but think of there as just being “stubs” for economics and psychology at GPI, with most of the work that we support done outside of it. I don’t mean “support” monetarily (though we have benefited from an active visitors program), but support with ideas and convenings and discussion. In the past few years, we have been actively expanding our external network, mostly in economics and psychology but also in philosophy, and we anticipate that this external engagement will be the main way through which we have impact. I can talk at length about the structural reasons why this approach makes sense in academia, but that is probably a discussion for another day. (Some considerations: faculty tend to be naturally spread out, and while one might like to have agglomeration effects, this happens more through workshops and the free exchange of ideas, or collaborations, because faculty are tied to institutions whose own incentives are to diversify. You can try to make progress with just focused work by postdocs and pre-docs, but that misses a huge swath of people, and even postdocs and pre-docs become faculty over time. In the long run, if you are being successful, the bulk of your impact has to come from external places. The fact this research is mostly done at other institutions now is a sign that global priorities research has matured.)
As a final note, consider the purpose of this research agenda. It takes time to write a good research agenda—we embarked on it when I arrived almost two years ago, and we quickly did some initial brainstorming, but then we continued on a longer and more thorough deliberative process, such as through working groups focused on exploring whether a certain topic appeared promising. In each of the growth areas you highlight—AI and psychology—we made a few hires. Those hires hit the ground running with their own research, but they also helped further develop and refine the agenda. Developing this agenda helped shape our internal priorities (though not every topic on the agenda is something we want to pursue ourselves), but the main purpose of this agenda is external. We wouldn’t have needed to put nearly so much effort into it if it were for internal use. The agenda is simultaneously forward-looking and naturally driven by the hires we already made.
Hope this helps. With apologies, I’m not likely to get into follow-ups as it takes a long time to respond.
Thanks for your very thoughtful response. I’ll revise my initial comment to correct the point I made about funding; I apologize for portraying this inaccurately.
Your points about the broadening of the research agenda make sense. I think GPI is, in many ways, the academic cornerstone of EA, and it makes sense for GPI’s efforts to map onto the efforts of researchers working at other institutions and in a broader range of fields.
And thanks also for clarifying the purpose of the agenda; I had read it as a document describing GPI’s priorities for itself, but it makes more sense to read it as a statement of priorities for the field of Global Priorities Research writ large. (I wonder if, in future iterations of the document—or even just on the landing page—it might be helpful to clarify this latter point, because the documents themselves read to me as more internal facing, e.g., “This document outlines some of the core research priorities for the economics team at GPI.” Outside researchers not affiliated with GPI might, perhaps, be more inclined to engage with these documents if they were more explicitly laying out a research agenda for researchers in philosophy, economics, and psychology aiming to do impactful research.)