We did consider applying to join these organizations. I (Peter) am personally constrained more in what I can do as long as I want to keep my full-time data science job, as I doubt existing orgs would want to hire me for just 10hrs/week. Marcus is working full-time and has more flexibility to join an organization, but has decided not to.
Broadly, we think working at an organization (we’ve considered OpenPhil and ACE) has a lot of benefits and resources, but it also has a lot of costs. If we do research on our own, we are free to explore whatever we wish without restriction. Avoiding constraints early makes a lot of sense while we still figure things out and while we’re not yet sure which organizations’ research agenda we agree with and want to constrain ourselves to.
We’re also worried about the slow publication cycle of existing organizations and the lack of public discussion that occurs around EA cause prioritization content. Broadly, we’re in an early period where we want to experiment and fail fast, and if we fail, joining an existing organization may be an attractive way to keep going. We’re not sure yet if this project is the best path forward, and we’re committed to following up and shutting down if it doesn’t work out.
Lastly, we think doing this project could be a good way of building up our track record and CV for if and when we do apply to other organizations.
We did consider applying to join these organizations. I (Peter) am personally constrained more in what I can do as long as I want to keep my full-time data science job, as I doubt existing orgs would want to hire me for just 10hrs/week. Marcus is working full-time and has more flexibility to join an organization, but has decided not to.
Broadly, we think working at an organization (we’ve considered OpenPhil and ACE) has a lot of benefits and resources, but it also has a lot of costs. If we do research on our own, we are free to explore whatever we wish without restriction. Avoiding constraints early makes a lot of sense while we still figure things out and while we’re not yet sure which organizations’ research agenda we agree with and want to constrain ourselves to.
We’re also worried about the slow publication cycle of existing organizations and the lack of public discussion that occurs around EA cause prioritization content. Broadly, we’re in an early period where we want to experiment and fail fast, and if we fail, joining an existing organization may be an attractive way to keep going. We’re not sure yet if this project is the best path forward, and we’re committed to following up and shutting down if it doesn’t work out.
Lastly, we think doing this project could be a good way of building up our track record and CV for if and when we do apply to other organizations.