Good question! One consideration: in many cases, mentorship may not trade off directly against direct work. Many people report that there is a limited number of hours of research/writing/‘deep work’/hard thinking that they can do in a day (people often say 2-5 hours); but they can do other, not so focussed work on top of that. This is certainly the case for me! (Not that I’m a senior researcher). I suspect this is why in academia, it’s customary for professors to both research and teach—they wouldn’t spend all their time researching anyway.
So, while it’s certainly possible for mentorship responsibilities to be distracting and seriously trade off against research, I suspect that with the right balance, many researchers will be able to do research at their full capacity and also do a limited amount of mentorship.
Right. There are definitely some helpful heuristics and analogies but I was wondering if anyone took a deep dive and looked at research or conducted their own experiments. Seems like a potentially pretty big question for EA orgs and if some strategies are 10% more effective than others (measured by output over time) it could make a big difference to the movement.
Good question! One consideration: in many cases, mentorship may not trade off directly against direct work. Many people report that there is a limited number of hours of research/writing/‘deep work’/hard thinking that they can do in a day (people often say 2-5 hours); but they can do other, not so focussed work on top of that. This is certainly the case for me! (Not that I’m a senior researcher). I suspect this is why in academia, it’s customary for professors to both research and teach—they wouldn’t spend all their time researching anyway.
So, while it’s certainly possible for mentorship responsibilities to be distracting and seriously trade off against research, I suspect that with the right balance, many researchers will be able to do research at their full capacity and also do a limited amount of mentorship.
Right. There are definitely some helpful heuristics and analogies but I was wondering if anyone took a deep dive and looked at research or conducted their own experiments. Seems like a potentially pretty big question for EA orgs and if some strategies are 10% more effective than others (measured by output over time) it could make a big difference to the movement.
Maybe Lynette Bye would be interested in doing this type of research (or has already started doing it)?