Original post by Michael Aird

Read & edited by Sam Nolan


Podcast description

There are many people who have the skills and desire to do EA-aligned research, or who could develop such skills via some experience, mentorship, or similar. There are many potentially high-priority open research questions that have been identified. And there are many funders who would be happy to pay for high-quality research on such questions. Sounds like everything must be lining up perfectly, right? In my view, the answer is fairly clearly “No”, and getting closer to a “Yes” could be very valuable. The three ingredients mentioned above do regularly combine to give us new, high-quality research and researchers, but:

  • This is happening slower than we’d like

    • At any given time, we still have a lot of each ingredient left over
  • This is requiring more “overhead” than seems ideal

    • E.g., lots of 1-1 career advice, coaching, and mentorship from experienced people; time-consuming hiring and grant evaluation processes
  • There are more “misfires” than we’d like

    • E.g., aspiring researchers choosing low-priority questions or tackling questions poorly; great people and projects being passed over for hiring or funding

Links mentioned in the related previous work section

  • Posts tagged Scalably using labour and/or Research Training Programs
  • Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs
  • A comment thread from an AMA with Owen Cotton-Barratt
  • Bottlenecks and Solutions for the X-Risk Ecosystem
  • Factored Cognition
  • Readings and notes on how to do high-impact research
  • Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams
  • After one year...
  • Get involved
  • Working at EA vs Non-EA Orgs
  • EA Hiring
  • A central directory for open research questions

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Anchor link to podcast page: https://anchor.fm/ea-forum-podcast

RSS feed: https://anchor.fm/s/62cbeec4/podcast/rss

If you are interested in narrating posts yourself, editing, organizing, or anything else which could help with production, sign up using this form. Alternatively, you can comment on this post, or simply message me or @david_reinstein if perchance you dislike filling out forms.

Also listen to David's podcast Found in the Struce (RSS), where he narrates, and adds additional commentary to interesting EA Forum posts.

Comments1
Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 7:28 PM

I said I wasn't going to publish this as a frontpage post, but I misclicked a button during the posting process. Sorry. It'd be nice if an moderator could take it off the frontpage.