I am an experienced interdisciplinary researcher and have focused on using computational methods to derive insights into biological systems. My academic research took me from collecting insects in tropical rainforests to imaging them in synchrotrons. I have become progressively more involved with the Effective Altruism community over several years and I am now aiming to apply my expertise in areas that more directly benefit society. To that end, I have recently redirected my research towards exploring novel technical countermeasures against viral pandemics.
gavintaylor
Karma: 757
As all the replies so far have mentioned paying tax on grants, I think it is worthwhile noting that this probably isn’t required in many countries (although it is in the US). When I got a grant from the LTF Fund I contacted a tax lawyer to ask if I should pay income tax on it as, based on my experiences with income tax-free academic stipends/scholarships in Australia, Sweden, and Brazil, I assumed I wouldn’t. His reading of the CEA Grant agreement was that:
the money you receive from this research grant should be expended on the research, but it is not dependent on your performance of any services to the granter, and therefore does not represent a compensation for services you render to the granter nor does it represent to the granter any other type of economic advantage
I’m living in Brazil, where the tax code provides an income tax exemption for: ‘scholarships and research grants characterised as donations, when received exclusively to carry out studies or research and provided that the results of these activities do not represent an advantage for the donor, nor do they imply compensation for services’ (I never looked into the tax codes in Australia or Sweden, but I assume they included a similar exemption). This actually surprised the accountant who does the taxes for my company (which I used for research consulting), as he didn’t have any experience with people receiving academic scholarships and thought I would have to pay income tax on it.
Anyway, my assumption is that research grants from EA funders is likely to be tax-free in any country where it’s possible to get tax-free scholarships for PhD studies or postdoctoral research. I think it would be useful for EA Granters to advise recipients to check whether any academic scholarships are tax-free in their country, and if so, to seek advice from a tax professional familiar with the taxation of academic scholarships. I got a bit lucky with the tax lawyer I contacted, as he had advised Brazilians about receiving domestic scholarships to do research abroad, and so was generally familiar with this part of the tax code. Most students I know receiving tax-free scholarships don’t file taxes at all (or earn very much for that matter), so I assume that many tax professionals won’t be familiar with the situation.
See here for a similar discussion on accessing articles as an independent researcher. TLDR: The Unpaywall extension is a good alternative to scihub because it links to legal Green Open Access version of articles (and scihub is a bit intermittent with uploading new content). There are other options, but most are less efficient than these two.
Empirical research (probably qualitative): Are there systematic reviews of unusual governance structures tried out by companies, and what the results have been? Of smaller-scale experiments at co-ops, group houses and lunch tables?
Check out the Community Rules governance toolkit. It’s intended for communities (which probably leans towards the small side of the governance spectrum) and describes eight governance frameworks with three brief case studies of practioners, ranging from Ancient Athens to the Facebook Oversight Board, that have used each. Four of the governance frameworks have already been described in the post:
Elected board
Self-appointed board
Benevolent dictator (matches founder keeping control)
Jury (matches sortition?)
And there are four others:
Circles
Do-ocracy
Petition (basically governance only using ballot initiatives)
Consensus
I don’t know much about the groups that put together the toolkit, but they would probably be worth contacting to find further expertise:
CommunityRule is a project of the Media Enterprise Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, in collaboration with the Metagovernance Project.
Yeah, I haven’t looked into this much but I think goal would be getting as much soot as possible before it spread out across the whole stratosphere. For instance, dumping coagulant into the rising smoke plume so that it got carried up with the smoke could be a good option if one can respond while a city fire is still burning, as the coagulant is then going to get mixed in with most of the soot. IIRC from Robock’s paper it also takes a while (weeks/months) for the soot to completely spread out and self-loft into the upper stratosphere, so that gives more time to respond while it’s still fairly concentrated around the sources. Determining what an effective response would be at that stage is kind of the aim of the project—one suggestion would be to send up stratospheric weather balloons with high-voltage electrostatic fields (not 100% sure but I expect soot aerosol would be charged and could be electrostatically attracted) under areas of dense soot.
Infrastructure to support independent researchers
Epistemic Institutions, Empowering Exceptional People
The EA and Longtermist communities appear to contain a relatively large proportion of independent researchers compared to traditional academia. While working independently can provide the freedom to address impactful topics by liberating researchers from the perversive incentives, bureaucracy, and other constraints imposed on academics, the lack of institutional support can impose other difficulties that range from routine (e.g. difficulties accessing pay-walled publications) to restrictive (e.g. lack of mentorship, limited opportunities for professional development). Virtual independent scholarship institutes have recently emerged to provide institutional support (e.g. affiliation for submitting journal articles, grant management) for academic researchers working independently. We expect that facilitating additional and more productive independent EA and Longtermist research will increase the demographic diversity and expand the geographical inclusivity of these communities of researchers. Initially, we would like to determine the main needs and limitations independent researchers in these areas face and then support the creation of a virtual institute focussed on addressing those points.
This project was inspired by proposals written by Arika Virapongse and recent posts by Linch Zhang.
Refinement of project idea #8, Pathogen sterilization technology
Add: ‘We’d also be interested in the development of therapeutic techniques that could treat infections using these (e.g. relying on physical principles) or similar approaches.’
Stratospheric cleaning to mitigate nuclear winters
Recovery from Catastrophes
Proposals to recover from a nuclear winter have primarily focused on providing alternative means of food production until agriculture recovers. A complementary strategy would be to develop technologies to remove stratospheric soot, which could reduce the duration and severity of the nuclear winter if used soon after nuclear strikes while smoke remains concentrated above a relatively small geographic area. Stratospheric cleaning could also prove useful in the event of supervolcano eruptions, meteor impacts, or geoengineering accidents and would offer an option for non-nuclear and neutral states to mitigate the worst-case consequences of nuclear war between other states on both their own and the global population. This approach does not appear to have been explored, and we would like to fund initial feasibility studies and proof-of-concept projects on the possibility of stratospheric cleaning. Promising technology could be tested on ash plumes from volcanic eruptions or pyrocumulus clouds from wildfires. Current atmospheric models of nuclear winter scenarios may also need to be refined to guide a stratospheric cleaning response. We expect that mature technological solutions for stratospheric cleaning would be maintained as emergency response infrastructure at the national or intergovernmental level, and if the approach showed promising initial results, we would support lobbying governments to develop this capacity.
I actually reflected on what points were holding me back as independent research quite recently.
A major point seems to be a lack of research oversight. This isn’t so much about accountability for getting things done, more to have somebody thinking objectively and providing a detached perspective on which ways to address open-ended problems and when to change directions, etc. This kind of management isn’t necessarily well done in academic research (at least in my experience) but I have recently found that Jason Schukraft’s management style has been helpful for a project that I’m working on with him at RP.
Another I’ve noticed is that it can be hard to prioritize my independent research over competing projects that I already have in progress with academic researchers (or getting drawn into new projects with people who I’ve already published with—although I’m getting better at saying no to new things). In most cases, I think my independent research in physical virology is likely to have much more impact than continuing research in my former field of visual biophysicis, but dropping an in-progress academic project (particularly if I’ve been paid to do some work on it previously) feels like a strong violation of an academic norm so I tend to stick them out until they are done. These projects usually also involve working with a larger team of people, which is also appealing when you are used to working alone.
Seconded, independence offers freedom but creates many difficulties to work around as well.
That said, I never received any structured institutional support for proofing, editing, graphic design etc when working in academia although some of these tasks were supported by co-authors or supervisors.
Coincidentally the day after seeing this response I realized the replacement battery in my 2012 macbook pro was swollen and I had to replace it with the original (long dead) one. I probably should stop putting off getting a new laptop…
If it is possible to just get a check as an individual, I imagine that that’s the best option.
One other benefit of a virtual research institute is that they can act as formal employers for independent researchers, which may be desirable for things like receiving healthcare coverage or welfare benefits.
Thanks for mentioning Theiss, I didn’t know of them before. Their website doesn’t look so active now, but it’s good to know about the history of the independent research scene.
Thanks for the perspective, this is interesting and a useful update for me.
I’m glad to see interest in directing money to support impactful metascience projects—my intuition is that work on metascience could make a substantial contribution to advancing several EA cause areas, although I don’t think enough work has been done yet on developing an EA perspective to confidently indicate specific aspects worth pursuing. Still, in parallel to trying to conduct impactful scientific research myself, I’ve grown interested in open science and metascience over the last couple of years and am on the board of the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE), so I’ll throw out a few suggestions of donation ready Open Science projects that seem promising. However, I should note that while I think these initiatives could contribute to expanding OS, I haven’t evaluated the space comprehensively and I can’t say these are the best opportunities, nor could I claim that this will substantially contribute to any EA cause area beyond the general refrain of ‘making science more open and reproducible will generally be beneficial for society’.
One initiative I’m particularly excited about at the moment is Free Our Knowledge (FOK) - a platform for researchers to take collective action pledges that lead to positive changes in research culture. Although COS does have a 5-step pyramid for changing research culture, I think that FOK could go along way towards accelerating culture change towards Open Science. For instance, in one of Björn Brembs’s Open Science TV interviews (I think the 3rd or 4th) he comments that he often hears ‘I don’t care about these journals but everybody else does’ from physicists about why they continue to publish in pay-walled journals. Using a collective action pledge could break this coordination problem rapidly. (Interestingly, LessWrong also has a discussion on coordinated action which seems to be entirely disconnected from FOK.) Anyway, FOK is currently unfunded, and I’m sure a bit of funding would go a long way. The founder (Cooper Smout) has previously applied for funding with COS as a fiscal sponsor and could probably receive money via them, but as he is based in Brisbane and might be able to form a non-profit to receive an Australian tax-deductible donation directly. I can put you in touch with Cooper to talk further if you’d like.
Another initiative I’m quite enthusiastic about is the Open Science MOOC (OS MOOC). They have a good reputation in the OS community and are a grass-roots effort to develop educational courses on different aspects of OS. I’m not sure what their current funding situation is, but I do know that it’s mostly a volunteer-led project so I expect they could productively use some further funding. Unfortunately, as OS MOOC is EU based, I doubt there will be a way to make any donation tax-deductible. Again, I could put you in touch with somebody on the steering committee if this is of interest.
Lastly, while it’s a bit self-serving, I should point to IGDORE as a potential funding recipient as it’s another organisation I’m naturally quite excited about. We are a virtual institute committed to supporting and encouraging scientists to conduct open and replicable research, with the longer-term goal of providing services around good scientific practices and scientific education, and less EA relevant, to promote improved quality of life for scientists and support independent researchers. IGDORE members include both passionate advocates of open science, as well as students and researchers who wish to conduct open science but are either not supported or otherwise hindered in doing this at their primary academia institution. As the organisations above, we are unfunded and volunteer-led, so even a modest donation could substantially develop the organisation. Our immediate goals are to develop a package of OS Support Services to offer via a research consultancy and an educational platform that will initially host OS content and then be grown into a Massively Online Open Science Training (MOOST) service that provides supervised research training that goes beyond standard MOOCs. While both of these initiatives aim to generate revenue to make IGDORE self-sustainable in the long term, we need seed funding to higher administrative and technical services to move them forward. Let me know if you’d like to talk more about this. (while IGDORE is distributed, our financial address is in Sweden, so probably not tax-deductible). You are also more than welcome to post about this on the On Science and Academia forum, which is an open forum maintained by IGDORE and used by members of the other two organisations mentioned above, if you’d like to engage the OS community directly in discussing your donation.
I should also point out that besides being on the board of IGDORE, I know the people from FOK and OS MOOC quite well as several are also members of IGDORE. So my recommendations generally lean towards what would be considered the more ‘radially progressive’ branch of the OS community, that pushes for systemic reform of academia and publishing if they can’t adopt open and replicable principles in their current format. A more mainstream OS perspective is represented by the organisations that presented at Metascience 2019 (which includes COS). However, as the OS community is still quite small, I think it will be hard to find completely un-conflicted recommendations.
PS. I wouldn’t be so confident about COS’s funding security. While they do list many funders on their site, I have heard they are now more funding constrained and last year they started monetising most of the Open Science Framework services. This might not be a problem for services used by larger institutions, and I appreciate that COS needs to make its services financially sustainable, but this has put pressure on academic communities using OSF Preprints (particularly those from developing countries), and I believe some have now moved to other platforms (see more here).
I joined a few sessions at the AIMOS (Association for Interdisciplinary Metascience and Open Science) conference a few weeks ago. It was great and I wrote up some notes about the talks I caught here. That said, beyond hosting their annual conference, I’m not really sure what other plans AIMOS has. If it’s of interest I can put the OP in touch with the incoming 2021 president (Jason Chin from USyd Law School) to talk further.
Otherwise, many of the speakers were from Australia and you might find other ideas for local donation recipients on the AIMOS program. Paul Glasziou from Bond Uni mentioned something in his plenary that stood out to me—inefficient ethical reviews can be a huge source of wasted research time and money (to the tune of $160 million per annum in Australia) - if that’s of interest he may be able to suggest a way to spend the money to push for ethical review reforms in Australia.
I think they could help with some things. But as I wrote here, I am not sure if it would be appropriate to only fund academic research through lotteries.
I received my LTF grant while living in Brazil (I forwarded the details of the Brazilian tax lawyer I consulted to CEA staff). However, I built up my grantee expectations while doing research in Australia and Sweden, and was happy they were also valid in Brazil.
My intuition is that most countries that allow either PhD students or postdocs to receive tax-free income for doing research at universities will probably also allow CEA grants to individuals to be declared in a tax-free manner, at least if the grant is for a research project.
Several comments have mentioned that CEA provides good infrastructure for making tax-deductible grants to individuals and also that the LTF often does, and is well suited to, make grants to individual researchers. Would it make sense for either the LTF or CEA to develop some further guidelines about the practicalities of receiving and administering grants for individuals (or even non-charitable organisations) that are not familiar with this sort of income, to help funds get used effectively?
As a motivating example, when I recently received an LTF grant, I sought legal advice in my tax jurisdiction and found out the grant was tax-exempt. However, prior to that CEA staff said that many grantees do pay tax on grant funds and they would consider it reasonable for me to do so. I have been paid on scholarships and fellowships for nearly 10 years and had the strong expectation that such funding is typically tax-free, which lead me to follow this up with a taxation lawyer; still, I wonder if other people, who haven’t previously received grant income, come into this with different expectations and end up paying tax unnecessarily. While specifics vary between tax-jurisdictions, having the right set of expectations for being a grantee helped me a lot. Maybe there would also be other general areas of grant receipt/administration that would be useful to provide advice on.
Just to add a comment with regards to sustainable funding for independent researchers. There haven’t previously been many options available for this, however, there are a growing number of virtual research institutes through which affiliated researchers can apply to academic funding agencies. The virtual institute can then administer the grant for a researcher (usually for much lower overheads than a traditional institution), while they effectively still do independent work. The Ronin Institute administers funding from US granters, and I am a Board member at IGDORE which can receive funding from some European granters. That said, it may still be quite difficult for individuals to secure academic funding without having some traditional academic credentials (PhD, publications, etc.).
It seems like most progress to date has come from research in the natural/formal/applied sciences leading to technological advances (or correct me if I’m wrong?). Do you expect that trend to continue, or could you see a case for research in the social sciences/humanities (that lead to social advances) making a more prominent contribution to future progress?
I could relate to many of the reasons given in the post. Perhaps the biggest point for me is that writing on the forum often to takes me much longer than usual, as I seem to make myself write in a different style to what I use elsewhere (this also often leads me to spend almost as long editing any comments as I do writing them...). Additionally, I never feel good, and often feel rather embarrassed/silly, after having posted (admittedly few, and mostly link posts) or commented, regardless of how they are received. I’m not really sure why I experience this, but suspect it is a combination imposter syndrome with nervousness about my posts/comments being voted on. I mostly write on another forum where I don’t get this feeling; perhaps I should write more shortform here as that format is more similar to posts on the other forum which uses the Discourse platform.