I’m not very familiar with the inner workings of think tanks, but I think you may be understating one aspect of the bad research consideration: If the incentives are sufficiently screwed up such that these organizations mostly aren’t trying to produce good, objective research, then they’re probably not doing a good job of teaching their staff to do that, nor selecting for staff that want to do that or are good at that. So you might not be able to get good research out of these institutions by just locally fixing the incentives.
But this depends a lot on how bad the situation is, and how important researcher judgment is for the project. It seems likely that folks at these institutions genuinely know a lot of facts about their topics of expertise, and for some projects that would be more important than e.g. overall judgment about what is important or likely, which seems more heavily affected by bad incentives. But at least the first three of your examples seem like the kind of projects where overall judgment is really important.
Maybe having these people on a advising or on a team with EAs or good forecasters might also help offset this?
Would be curious to hear thoughts on this from more people who’ve worked at these places. How bad are these problems in practice?
Yes, I agree, I don’t think this is a big problem at the best think tanks, though there are plenty of (generally very ideologically motivated) half-rate think tanks in London and DC.
Interesting post, thanks for writing it!
I’m not very familiar with the inner workings of think tanks, but I think you may be understating one aspect of the bad research consideration: If the incentives are sufficiently screwed up such that these organizations mostly aren’t trying to produce good, objective research, then they’re probably not doing a good job of teaching their staff to do that, nor selecting for staff that want to do that or are good at that. So you might not be able to get good research out of these institutions by just locally fixing the incentives.
But this depends a lot on how bad the situation is, and how important researcher judgment is for the project. It seems likely that folks at these institutions genuinely know a lot of facts about their topics of expertise, and for some projects that would be more important than e.g. overall judgment about what is important or likely, which seems more heavily affected by bad incentives. But at least the first three of your examples seem like the kind of projects where overall judgment is really important.
Maybe having these people on a advising or on a team with EAs or good forecasters might also help offset this?
Would be curious to hear thoughts on this from more people who’ve worked at these places. How bad are these problems in practice?
“How bad are these problems in practice?”
At good think tanks, not very.
Yes, I agree, I don’t think this is a big problem at the best think tanks, though there are plenty of (generally very ideologically motivated) half-rate think tanks in London and DC.