Questions about Effective Altruism in academia (RAQ)

Broadening it out a little, many EA organisations (at the very least GiveWell, CEA and Leverage Research) are heavily research-focused, and in some cases founded and staffed by people who were on the academic track and wanted to be academics or researchers. So it's worth considering them at the same time, partly as a related alternative which will appeal to some of those interested in this thread.

I've wondered lately whether there could be a future for crafty philosophers to carve out a niche in EA. Many economists of late have been able to utilize their skills to do things that, on their face, do not appear to be economics as traditionally conceived. There seems to be a similar opportunity in philosophy, given the skill set that philosophers bring to the table. However, I think the greatest difficulty would be the fact that philosophy (and philosophers) have typically been interested in advancing specific discussions about particular philosophical problems. In a sense, the goal is to discover what's true. In that light, EA simply isn't as interesting to many philosophers. It doesn't seem to pose great unanswered philosophical questions. The premise of EA is relatively simple, and it seems that, given many philosophers sympathies toward consequentialism, it may be met with wide acceptance. However, that doesn't leave anything to discuss philosophically, which is an obvious problem for philosophy as traditionally conceived. However, I see no good reason why at least some philosophers should not branch out in their line of work and become interested in a sort of "everyman" ethics. This wouldn't involve as much discussion about what is right, but would instead involve persuasion. I certainly think there's room in the field for it, and given the fact that many departments are on a sort of "justification treadmill" in having to justify their existence to the heads of their university and the general public, it may be exactly what the field needs.

I have actually heard some moral philosophers lament about how when people get sick, they call a doctor, when their car has problems, they call a mechanic, etc. When they have a moral predicament, however, no one calls a moral philosopher. It seems to me that EA is a perfect platform to be advanced by philosophers, and that at least some philosophers might welcome the opportunity. The question that needs to be answered is whether this can be done by a philosopher who is trying to build a career, or if it must be relegated to guys like Singer who already have successful careers.

Is it worthwhile to teach a class on effective altruism as a special course for undergrads? I recently saw a GWWC pledge party where many new undergrads had decided to take the pledge after a few months taking one. Though selection effects might have been a large part of it.

Is an academic's influence more important in creating new EAs or on the research they do themselves?

Alternatively, is trying to influence a field and cause other researchers to be more interested in useful research possible, how?

I'm starting a PHD in soon. That gives me freedom to research a large plethora of topics, some of which more valuable then others, ranging from information theory and the nature of information to the mathematics of altruism, and the formation of Singletons. In between all sorts of questions about genetic determination and behavioral genomics are allowed, as well as primatology. My current contention is to research potential paths for altruism in the future, where it can lead in naïve evolutionary models and in less naïve evolutionary models. I will also do research with other EAs on how to impart moral concepts to artificial general intelligences. Are there better counterfactual alternatives?

What are the unsolved problems related to infinite ethics that might be worth tackling as an academic? Some relevant writings on this topic to see what the field looks like

Are there tips for undergrads and graduate students on how to skip classes or do less during classes via mentioning that they are EAs and what they intend to accomplish with their time when classes don't align with their goals?

Would it be valuable to have edited books on many fields which are useful for EAs?

Things like Philosophy of Mind for Computationalists

Mega course for aspiring philosophers

Etc... but edited in a book. Like these here, here, and here.

Philosophy for EAs

Mathematics for EAs, a guide for the perplexed

Anthropology for EAs etc...

Papers X Books

Long ago I had decided against writing papers. I had written some 4 papers, of mediocre writing and decent idea quality. I decided against it for two reasons, one is that anything I publish on lesswrong.com or effective-altruism.com will be read by hundreds of people within 24 hours of publication.

The other is that Paper reading and citation follow a power law distribution: http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.3890

With median number of readers being around 10 (that is about 100 times less than overall reading of lesswrong.com and maybe 50 less than effective-altruism.com)

Add to that the enormous cost of writing papers, having them reviewed, the randomness involved, and the 3 year long cost of publication, and you have sure a recipe for me not wanting to do it.

I think there are fields like math and times like before 1970 where the truth was a sufficiently strong attractor that the terrible hedging writing of the sort used in academic papers could become prominent as long as it was true. That however was before TV Internet, marketing fads, blogs, and soon google glasses and virtual reality. The truth is still an attractor, but far less strong in comparison now to aesthetics, marketing and other variables. So we have to add those adornments to true ideas, or they will perish. Also if my ideas are all wrong, I want them to be known by enough people that they can notice, give me feedback and make me change my mind. I care about consequences. I want my ideas to be consequential, because this has positive feedback, which increases probability that I'll hit the truth over the long run. And if I don't, someone else will. Writing papers will give me none of that.

Books however seem to be a different beast. First of all they are long enough to convey interesting ideas (of a more philosophical type) second, though they also follow exponential distributions, there are several marketing strategies that can aid publication and increase number of readers. They can be, like papers and unlike blogs, cited as decent academic evidence in good standing.

They can be monetized as well, whereas one must pay to publish papers.

In 2009 I have thus convinced myself that writing books is superior to writing papers, so I stopped writing papers and wrote a book.

Two top academics (Bostrom and Deacon) recently recommended to me to write papers, I decided to revisit the case for papers versus books.

So it's 2015. On all accounts it seems to me that the case for papers is worse today than in 2008.

The power law continues for papers. Publishing them continues to be costly. Not paying to have them public is shooting oneself on the foot. Due to Kindle etc, authors have more control and a greater share of the money that goes for books. Though less money goes to printed books, more goes to authors. Paper's usage decays over time for most authors, specially on empirical matters. Even papers by authors as brilliant as Hilary Putnam as less read today than before. Books can be eternalized. People still read "word and object".

With exceptions that publish papers on places like arxiv.org (Garrett Lisi, Tegmark, Tononi) I don't know who rose to intellectual prominence via papers in the last many years.

I am glad to hear counterarguments, because as it stands, this seems like the ultimate no-brainer, there is not a single thing papers are better than books for.

Number of readers

Conveying complex ideas

Getting feedback on ideas

Money

Career prospects

Author's name being remembered and sought after

Resilience over long stretches of time

Compatibility with Technological advances (current and expected)

Odds of finding collaborators in virtue of having written them.

The few properties like "peer feedback" and "short and easier to write" that papers beat books at have are completely dominated by blogging, specially on public science or philosophy blogs.

My current evaluation is that in 2008 writing books was substantially better than papers, in 2015 I think writing books and not papers is the secret sauce of being a successful academic.

But I'm happy to be convinced otherwise if you think the arguments above don't hold, or there are even stronger ones I forgot to consider that dominate over them all.

I am not considering what Bostrom/Grace/Besinger/ do philosophy strictu sensu in this question.

After repleaceability considerations have been used at Ben Todd and Will Mac Askill's theses at Oxford, and Nick Beckstead made the philosophical case for the far future, is there still large marginal return to be had on doing research on something that is philosophy strictu sensu?

I ask this because my impression is that after Parfit, Singer, Unger, Ord, Mac Askill and Todd we have run out of efforts that have great consequential impacts in philosophical discourse. Not because improvements cannot be made, but because they would be minor in relation to using that time for other less strictu sensu endeavours.