The book “Loonshots” also has useful lessons for anyone running/starting a research team or research lab.
nonzerosum
Karma: 355
Gotcha. I wonder whether it could create substantially more impact from doing over the long term yourself, or setting it up well for someone else to run long term. Obviously I have no context and your goals on the project but I’ve seen things where people do a short term project aiming for impact creation and where in the end they feel that they could’ve created much more impact by doing the thing in a more ongoing manner. So this note may or may not be relevant depending on the project and your goals :)
I’d offer that whatever you can do to make it possible to iterate on your grantmaking loop quickly will be useful. Perhaps starting with smaller grants on a month or even week cycle, running a few rounds there, and then scaling up. Don’t try and make it near-perfect from the start, instead try and make it something that can become near-perfect because of iterations and improvements.
This fiscal sponsor org would get to learn a lot about what different EA aligned donors do and don’t like donating to, so you could imagine it providing a helpful service to donors (and EA orgs) of suggesting them orgs that they may be interested in checking out, based on their donation patterns. I could imagine this being appreciated by the donors given that it could have enough data points to make genuinely useful recommendations when those opportunities arise.
Oops—thanks!
A comment to add to my OP: It seems like a really useful concept and I can imagine that having a central place that defines what disentanglement research is may be useful, and the concept generally becoming more known may also be useful, so that then people can easily reference that, and others will understand what someone means when they say a field needs disentanglement research or they’re doing disentanglement research, people can share advice or host events focused on disentanglement research, funders can self-identify as funders interested in supporting disentanglement research in specific or various fields, etc.
Another possible answer (and an example of where the term is being used!): “What is needed in an early stage is disentanglement- structuring the research field, identifying the central questions, and clarifying concepts.” https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oovy5XXdCL3TPwgLE/a-case-for-strategy-research-what-it-is-and-why-we-need-more
Answer from Helen Toner: “structuring concrete agendas out of an amorphous blob of worries” https://twitter.com/Effect_Altruism/status/927219486201085957
Answer from carrickflynn who originally used the term: “This is a squishy made-up term I am using only for this post that is sort of trying to gesture at a type of research that involves disentangling ideas and questions in a “pre-paradigmatic” area where the core concepts, questions, and methodologies are under-defined. (Nick Bostrom is a fantastic example of someone who is excellent at this type of research.)” https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RCvetzfDnBNFX7pLH/personal-thoughts-on-careers-in-ai-policy-and-strategy#rxAi3ssD8DtSHJtMG
Possible answer: It’s taking a space and answering questions like – what’s possible, what could & what should our goals be, main hypotheses and things that would inform what the best directions are, etc.
Other thoughts:
Benefit of people writing public posts on their topics of interest is that it forces thoughts to be clarified and to “come face to face with reality”
Downside of public writing is that it could lead to consistency bias / ossification of opinions
Another upside of public writing on things is that it builds momentum, provides positive feedback and rewards. Which is probably very beneficial and may seem small but the power of positive feedback loops seems important to not underestimate.
I’m really glad to see this post – it’s what I was thinking of when I asked this question on the forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/icTEffSCdtLSoSrqi/might-the-ea-community-be-undervaluing-meta-research-on-how
This is a very unstructured thought that came into my head this morning. Normally I might avoid posting it until it’s more polished, but comments on this forum have given me the sense that it can actually be good to err on the side of sharing even if unpolished, contributing to the community zeitgeist where someone else may then be able to polish or remix or make use of the thought.
And I’m also very interested in the direct impact, too.
Thanks for that question! Weakly held. Some sense that we’re under-invested in “improving coordination” (see: http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.pdf).
But it’s a good point that it would be hard! And I agree that tightly knit groups may be a better approach for this.
e.g. trauma reduction for a group of AI safety researchers to help them better coordinate, or something like that.
I mean EA impact of reducing trauma, not impact of MDMA therapy on trauma (which I agree seems large).
Similar to how 80000hours gives a ranking of the ‘impact’ of different causes, I wonder how “reducing trauma” would compare on their impact assessment.
Yes, agreed. In particular though I’m wondering about the “impact” piece and separate of possible interventions/tractability, how trauma might rate on the “impact” and “neglectedness” pieces.
more than as something which “improves coordination”
What makes you say that? I have the sense that the less trauma people have, the easier they’ll find it, and the more desire they’ll have, to co-operate and coordinate.
Please do link it!