Thanks! And, of course, I understand that our lists look different in part because of the different cause areas that we’ve each spent more time thinking about. Glad we could complement each others’ lists.
Focusing in on “I worry that they’re too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading them”—do you think that that can’t be resolved by e.g. cross-posting “executive summaries” to the EA Forum, so that people at least read those? (Genuine question; I’m working on developing my thoughts on how best to do and disseminate research.)
Huh, weird, I’m not sure why I didn’t do that for either of the case studies I’ve done so far—I’ve 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. I’d definitely post that to the Forum. I don’t think posting to the forum would make a lot of difference though, for us. This is mainly because my impression / 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 wouldn’t increase the reach to the main intended audience much over just posting the research to the Effective Animal Advocacy—Discussion Facebook group and our newsletter. But that concern probably doesn’t apply to many of the suggestions in your initial list.
Perhaps the value of people who’ve done such history research won’t entirely or primarily be in the write-ups which people can then read, but rather in EA then having “resident experts” on various historical topics and methodologies, who can be the “go-to person” for tailored recommendations and insights regarding specific decisions, other research projects, etc.
I think there’s 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 “resolve” 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 don’t actually read the case studies themselves (or at least read a summary).
While I think I’m pretty good at doing these case studies to a relatively high standard in a relatively short amount of time (i.e. uncovering/summarising the empirical evidence), I don’t think I’m 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, I’ve 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 “and their summary of “Foundational Questions for Effective Animal Advocacy” after where you’ve listed SI’s research agenda on that post. This is essentially a list of the key strategic issues in animal advocacy that we think could/should be explored through further research. Once I’ve published my literature review on artificial sentience, I’d be keen to add that too, since that contains a large list of potential further research topics.
Thanks! And, of course, I understand that our lists look different in part because of the different cause areas that we’ve each spent more time thinking about. Glad we could complement each others’ lists.
Huh, weird, I’m not sure why I didn’t do that for either of the case studies I’ve done so far—I’ve 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. I’d definitely post that to the Forum. I don’t think posting to the forum would make a lot of difference though, for us. This is mainly because my impression / 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 wouldn’t increase the reach to the main intended audience much over just posting the research to the Effective Animal Advocacy—Discussion Facebook group and our newsletter. But that concern probably doesn’t apply to many of the suggestions in your initial list.
I think there’s 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 “resolve” 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 don’t actually read the case studies themselves (or at least read a summary).
While I think I’m pretty good at doing these case studies to a relatively high standard in a relatively short amount of time (i.e. uncovering/summarising the empirical evidence), I don’t think I’m 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, I’ve 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 “and their summary of “Foundational Questions for Effective Animal Advocacy” after where you’ve listed SI’s research agenda on that post. This is essentially a list of the key strategic issues in animal advocacy that we think could/should be explored through further research. Once I’ve published my literature review on artificial sentience, I’d 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 directory—I’ve now done so.