Hide table of contents

Update: we have added a kickstarter bounty incentive: After the first eight quality submissions (or by January 1, 2025 - whichever comes later) we will award a prize of $500 to the most valuable evaluation.

The Unjournal is now inviting, facilitating, and rewarding people to do "independent evaluations". This will happen in parallel with our main mode (commissioning expert evaluations, guided by an ‘evaluation manager’ and compensating people for their work.  

We are also now sharing a database of ~‘all the research we are considering, evaluating, or evaluated’ here.

The Unjournal focuses on commissioning expert evaluations, guided by an ‘evaluation manager’ and compensating people for their work.  

However, we see a range of benefits from also encouraging independent evaluation work, thus we're trying out this new initiative.  

We're looking for your interest, questions, and feedback on the proposed (linked) initiative.  Comments here or in the Gdoc are very welcome! We aim to follow  up with a more detailed post, as we also flesh out some of the details and guidelines.

 

Excerpts from the proposal doc

The Unjournal is seeking academics, researchers, and students to submit structured evaluations of the most impactful research emerging in the social sciences. Strong evaluations will be posted or linked on our PubPub community, offering readers a perspective on the implications, strengths, and limitations of the research.  

[Also] keen to work with students and professors to integrate ‘independent evaluation assignments’ (aka ‘learn to do peer reviews’) into research training.

 

We aim to provide feedback to help you become a better researcher and reviewer. We’ll also give prizes for the strongest evaluations. Lastly, writing evaluations will help you build a portfolio with The Unjournal, making it more likely we will commission you for paid evaluation work in the future. 

 

... See “What specific areas do we cover?” .... We’re especially eager to receive independent evaluations of:

  1. Research we publicly prioritize
  2. Research we previously evaluated (see pubpub.unjournal.org)...
  3. Work that other people and organizations suggest as having high potential for impact/value of information  ...
Comments


No comments on this post yet.
Be the first to respond.
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 12m read
 · 
Economic growth is a unique field, because it is relevant to both the global development side of EA and the AI side of EA. Global development policy can be informed by models that offer helpful diagnostics into the drivers of growth, while growth models can also inform us about how AI progress will affect society. My friend asked me to create a growth theory reading list for an average EA who is interested in applying growth theory to EA concerns. This is my list. (It's shorter and more balanced between AI/GHD than this list) I hope it helps anyone who wants to dig into growth questions themselves. These papers require a fair amount of mathematical maturity. If you don't feel confident about your math, I encourage you to start with Jones 2016 to get a really strong grounding in the facts of growth, with some explanations in words for how growth economists think about fitting them into theories. Basics of growth These two papers cover the foundations of growth theory. They aren't strictly essential for understanding the other papers, but they're helpful and likely where you should start if you have no background in growth. Jones 2016 Sociologically, growth theory is all about finding facts that beg to be explained. For half a century, growth theory was almost singularly oriented around explaining the "Kaldor facts" of growth. These facts organize what theories are entertained, even though they cannot actually validate a theory – after all, a totally incorrect theory could arrive at the right answer by chance. In this way, growth theorists are engaged in detective work; they try to piece together the stories that make sense given the facts, making leaps when they have to. This places the facts of growth squarely in the center of theorizing, and Jones 2016 is the most comprehensive treatment of those facts, with accessible descriptions of how growth models try to represent those facts. You will notice that I recommend more than a few papers by Chad Jones in this
 ·  · 1m read
 · 
(Audio version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.) > “There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall?”  > > - C.S. Lewis “The Human Condition,” by René Magritte (Image source here) 1. Introduction Sometimes, my thinking feels more “real” to me; and sometimes, it feels more “fake.” I want to do the real version, so I want to understand this spectrum better. This essay offers some reflections.  I give a bunch of examples of this “fake vs. real” spectrum below -- in AI, philosophy, competitive debate, everyday life, and religion. My current sense is that it brings together a cluster of related dimensions, namely: * Map vs. world: Is my mind directed at an abstraction, or it is trying to see past its model to the world beyond? * Hollow vs. solid: Am I using concepts/premises/frames that I secretly suspect are bullshit, or do I expect them to point at basically real stuff, even if imperfectly? * Rote vs. new: Is the thinking pre-computed, or is new processing occurring? * Soldier vs. scout: Is the thinking trying to defend a pre-chosen position, or is it just trying to get to the truth? * Dry vs. visceral: Does the content feel abstract and heady, or does it grip me at some more gut level? These dimensions aren’t the same. But I think they’re correlated – and I offer some speculations about why. In particular, I speculate about their relationship to the “telos” of thinking – that is, to the thing that thinking is “supposed to” do.  I also describe some tags I’m currently using when I remind myself to “really think.” In particular:  * Going slow * Following curiosity/aliveness * Staying in touch with why I’m thinking about something * Tethering my concepts to referents that feel “real” to me * Reminding myself that “arguments are lenses on the world” * Tuning into a relaxing sense of “helplessness” about the truth * Just actually imagining differ
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
There’s something deeply wrong with the world, when the median US college graduate’s starting salary is a dozen times higher than the price to save another person’s entire life. The enduring presence of such low-hanging fruit reflects a basic societal failure to allocate resources in a way that reflects valuing those lives appropriately. (If you personally earn over $60k, and agree that your least-important $5k of personal spending is not nearly as important as a young child’s entire life, I’d encourage you to reallocate your budget accordingly and save someone’s life today. Then, if you’re happy with the results, consider taking the🔸10% Pledge to make it a regular thing. This should be the norm for anyone who is financially comfortable.) It’s a tricky thing. If you really let yourself internalize this fact—that children are dying for want of $5000—it can be hard to think of anything else. How can life just go on as normal, when children are dying and we could easily prevent it? Why don’t more people treat this as the ongoing moral emergency that it is? Where is the urgency? Why aren’t most of the people around us doing anything? Will you break through the barrier? Psychological Defense 1: moral delusion In order to live anything approximating a “normal life”, in these circumstances, we need to develop psychological defenses to block out the cacophony of global demands. And so we do. (Few are willing to be the sorts of radical altruists profiled in Strangers Drowning. I know I’m not!) We learn to turn away, and ignore the needs of the world outside our local bubble. If people try to draw our attention back, we may even react with hostility: accusing them of being “preachy”, or “holier-than-thou”, or engaging in some kind of underhanded “guilt-tripping.” (How dare you break the social contract of mutually supporting each other’s delusions of decency, as we sip champagne while children starve?) We find—and elevate—other moral causes, preferably ones “closer to h