I also haven’t thought much about how much one should typically expect in a random field, how that should increase or decrease for this field in the last 5 years just because of how many people and dollars it got (compared to other fields), or how what was produced in the last 5 years in this field compares to that.
But one thing that strikes me is that longtermist macrostrategy/GPR researchers over the past 5 years have probably had substantially less training and experience than researchers in most academic fields we’d probably compare this to. (I haven’t really checked this, but I’d guess it’s true.)
So maybe if there was less novel or less major insights from this field than we should typically expect of a field with the same amount of people and dollars, this can be explained by the people having less human capital, rather than by the field being intrinsically harder to make progress on?
(It could also perhaps be explained if the unusual approaches that are decently often taken in this field tend to be less effective—e.g., more generalist/shallow work rather than deeper dives into narrower topics, and more blog post style work.)
I also haven’t thought much about how much one should typically expect in a random field, how that should increase or decrease for this field in the last 5 years just because of how many people and dollars it got (compared to other fields), or how what was produced in the last 5 years in this field compares to that.
But one thing that strikes me is that longtermist macrostrategy/GPR researchers over the past 5 years have probably had substantially less training and experience than researchers in most academic fields we’d probably compare this to. (I haven’t really checked this, but I’d guess it’s true.)
So maybe if there was less novel or less major insights from this field than we should typically expect of a field with the same amount of people and dollars, this can be explained by the people having less human capital, rather than by the field being intrinsically harder to make progress on?
(It could also perhaps be explained if the unusual approaches that are decently often taken in this field tend to be less effective—e.g., more generalist/shallow work rather than deeper dives into narrower topics, and more blog post style work.)