Thanks for sharing those topic ideas, links to resources, and general thoughts on the intersection of history research and EA! I think this post is made substantially more useful by now having your comment attached. And your comment has also further increased how excited Iād be to see more EA-aligned history research (with the caveats that this doesnāt necessarily require having a history background, and that Iām not carefully thinking through how to prioritise this against other useful things EAs could be doing).
Itās long been on my to-do list to go through GPI and CLRās research agendas more thoroughly to work out if there are other suggestions for historical research on there. I havenāt done that to make this post so I may have missed things.
Yeah, that sounds valuable. I generated my list of 10 topics basically just āoff the top of my headā, without looking at various research agendas for questions/ātopics for which history is highly relevant. So doing that would likely be a relatively simple step to make a better, fuller version of a list like this.
Hopefully SIās work offers a second example of an exception to the ārecurring themeā you note in that 1) SIās case studies are effectively a ādeeper or more rigorous follow-up analysisā after ACEās social movement case study projectāif anything, I worry that theyāre too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading them, and 2) I at least had an undergraduate degree in history :D
Yeah, that makes sense to me. Iāve now edited in a mention of SI after AI Impacts. I hadnāt actively decided against mentioning SI, just didnāt think to do so. And the reason for thatis probably just that I havenāt read much of that work. (Which in turn is probably because (a) I lean longtermist but donāt prioritise s-risks over x-risks, so the work by SI that seems most directly intended to improve farm animal advocacy seems to me valuable but not a top priority for my own learning, and (b) I think not much of that work has been posted to the Forum?) But I read and enjoyed āHow tractable is changing the course of history?ā, and the rest of what you describe sounds cool and relevant.
Focusing in on āI worry that theyāre too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading themāādo you think that that canāt be resolved by e.g. cross-posting āexecutive summariesā to the EA Forum, so that people at least read those? (Genuine question; Iām working on developing my thoughts on how best to do and disseminate research.)
Also, that last point reminds me of another half-baked thought Iāve had but forgot to mention in this post: Perhaps the value of people whoāve done such history research wonāt entirely or primarily be in the write-ups which people can then read, but rather in EA then having āresident expertsā on various historical topics and methodologies, who can be the āgo-to personā for tailored recommendations and insights regarding specific decisions, other research projects, etc. Do you have thoughts on that (rather vague) hypothesis? For example, maybe even if few people read SIās work on those topics, if they at least know that SI did that research, they can come to SI when they have specific, relevant questions and thereby get a bunch of useful input in a quick, personalised way.
(This general idea could also perhaps apply to research more broadly, not just to history research for EA, but thatās the context in which Iāve thought about it recently.)
Thanks! And, of course, I understand that our lists look different in part because of the different cause areas that weāve each spent more time thinking about. Glad we could complement each othersā lists.
Focusing in on āI worry that theyāre too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading themāādo you think that that canāt be resolved by e.g. cross-posting āexecutive summariesā to the EA Forum, so that people at least read those? (Genuine question; Iām working on developing my thoughts on how best to do and disseminate research.)
Huh, weird, Iām not sure why I didnāt do that for either of the case studies Iāve done so farāIāve certainly done it for other projects. At some point, I was thinking that I might write some sort of summary post (a little like this one, for our tech adoption case studies) or do some sort of analysis of common themes etc, which I think would be much more easily readable and usable. Iād definitely post that to the Forum. I donāt think posting to the forum would make a lot of difference though, for us. This is mainly because my impression /ā intuition is that people who identify with EA and are focused on animal advocacy use the EA Forum less than people who identify with EA and are focused on extinction risk reduction, so it wouldnāt increase the reach to the main intended audience much over just posting the research to the Effective Animal AdvocacyāDiscussion Facebook group and our newsletter. But that concern probably doesnāt apply to many of the suggestions in your initial list.
Perhaps the value of people whoāve done such history research wonāt entirely or primarily be in the write-ups which people can then read, but rather in EA then having āresident expertsā on various historical topics and methodologies, who can be the āgo-to personā for tailored recommendations and insights regarding specific decisions, other research projects, etc.
I think thereās some value in that. A few concerns jump to mind:
Historical case studies tend to provide weak evidence for a bunch of different strategic questions. So while they might not single-handedly āresolveā some important debate or tradeoff, they should alter views on a number of different questions. So a lot of this value will just be missed if people donāt actually read the case studies themselves (or at least read a summary).
While I think Iām pretty good at doing these case studies to a relatively high standard in a relatively short amount of time (i.e. uncovering/āsummarising the empirical evidence), I donāt think Iām much better placed than anyone else to interpret what the evidence should suggest for individual decisions that an advocate or organisation might face.
In practice, Iāve hardly ever had people actually ask me for this sort of summary or recommendation. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two occasions where this has happened.
Slight tangent from the discussion here, but you might like to add āand their summary of āFoundational Questions for Effective Animal Advocacyā after where youāve listed SIās research agenda on that post. This is essentially a list of the key strategic issues in animal advocacy that we think could/āshould be explored through further research. Once Iāve published my literature review on artificial sentience, Iād be keen to add that too, since that contains a large list of potential further research topics.
Thanks for sharing those topic ideas, links to resources, and general thoughts on the intersection of history research and EA! I think this post is made substantially more useful by now having your comment attached. And your comment has also further increased how excited Iād be to see more EA-aligned history research (with the caveats that this doesnāt necessarily require having a history background, and that Iām not carefully thinking through how to prioritise this against other useful things EAs could be doing).
If you do end up making a top-level post related to your comment, please do comment about it here and on the central directory of open research questions.
Yeah, that sounds valuable. I generated my list of 10 topics basically just āoff the top of my headā, without looking at various research agendas for questions/ātopics for which history is highly relevant. So doing that would likely be a relatively simple step to make a better, fuller version of a list like this.
Yeah, that makes sense to me. Iāve now edited in a mention of SI after AI Impacts. I hadnāt actively decided against mentioning SI, just didnāt think to do so. And the reason for that is probably just that I havenāt read much of that work. (Which in turn is probably because (a) I lean longtermist but donāt prioritise s-risks over x-risks, so the work by SI that seems most directly intended to improve farm animal advocacy seems to me valuable but not a top priority for my own learning, and (b) I think not much of that work has been posted to the Forum?) But I read and enjoyed āHow tractable is changing the course of history?ā, and the rest of what you describe sounds cool and relevant.
Focusing in on āI worry that theyāre too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading themāādo you think that that canāt be resolved by e.g. cross-posting āexecutive summariesā to the EA Forum, so that people at least read those? (Genuine question; Iām working on developing my thoughts on how best to do and disseminate research.)
Also, that last point reminds me of another half-baked thought Iāve had but forgot to mention in this post: Perhaps the value of people whoāve done such history research wonāt entirely or primarily be in the write-ups which people can then read, but rather in EA then having āresident expertsā on various historical topics and methodologies, who can be the āgo-to personā for tailored recommendations and insights regarding specific decisions, other research projects, etc. Do you have thoughts on that (rather vague) hypothesis? For example, maybe even if few people read SIās work on those topics, if they at least know that SI did that research, they can come to SI when they have specific, relevant questions and thereby get a bunch of useful input in a quick, personalised way.
(This general idea could also perhaps apply to research more broadly, not just to history research for EA, but thatās the context in which Iāve thought about it recently.)
Thanks! And, of course, I understand that our lists look different in part because of the different cause areas that weāve each spent more time thinking about. Glad we could complement each othersā lists.
Huh, weird, Iām not sure why I didnāt do that for either of the case studies Iāve done so farāIāve certainly done it for other projects. At some point, I was thinking that I might write some sort of summary post (a little like this one, for our tech adoption case studies) or do some sort of analysis of common themes etc, which I think would be much more easily readable and usable. Iād definitely post that to the Forum. I donāt think posting to the forum would make a lot of difference though, for us. This is mainly because my impression /ā intuition is that people who identify with EA and are focused on animal advocacy use the EA Forum less than people who identify with EA and are focused on extinction risk reduction, so it wouldnāt increase the reach to the main intended audience much over just posting the research to the Effective Animal AdvocacyāDiscussion Facebook group and our newsletter. But that concern probably doesnāt apply to many of the suggestions in your initial list.
I think thereās some value in that. A few concerns jump to mind:
Historical case studies tend to provide weak evidence for a bunch of different strategic questions. So while they might not single-handedly āresolveā some important debate or tradeoff, they should alter views on a number of different questions. So a lot of this value will just be missed if people donāt actually read the case studies themselves (or at least read a summary).
While I think Iām pretty good at doing these case studies to a relatively high standard in a relatively short amount of time (i.e. uncovering/āsummarising the empirical evidence), I donāt think Iām much better placed than anyone else to interpret what the evidence should suggest for individual decisions that an advocate or organisation might face.
In practice, Iāve hardly ever had people actually ask me for this sort of summary or recommendation. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two occasions where this has happened.
Slight tangent from the discussion here, but you might like to add āand their summary of āFoundational Questions for Effective Animal Advocacyā after where youāve listed SIās research agenda on that post. This is essentially a list of the key strategic issues in animal advocacy that we think could/āshould be explored through further research. Once Iāve published my literature review on artificial sentience, Iād be keen to add that too, since that contains a large list of potential further research topics.
Thanks for those answers and thoughts!
And good idea to add the Foundational Questions link to the directoryāIāve now done so.