david_reinstein
Bio
Participation2
I'm the Founder and Co-director of The Unjournal; We organize and fund public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects. We will focus on work that is highly relevant to global priorities (especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation). We will encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.
Previously I was a Senior Economist at Rethink Priorities, and before that n Economics lecturer/professor for 15 years.
I'm working to impact EA fundraising and marketing; see https://bit.ly/eamtt
And projects bridging EA, academia, and open science.. see bit.ly/eaprojects
My previous and ongoing research focuses on determinants and motivators of charitable giving (propensity, amounts, and 'to which cause?'), and drivers of/barriers to effective giving, as well as the impact of pro-social behavior and social preferences on market contexts.
Podcasts: "Found in the Struce" https://anchor.fm/david-reinstein
and the EA Forum podcast: https://anchor.fm/ea-forum-podcast (co-founder, regular reader)
Twitter: @givingtools
Posts 76
Comments949
Topic contributions9
It seems reasonable to think that there’s a >20% chance[1] that TAI will bring us a ‘technological roadmap’[2] to clean meat within the next 15 years.
it will make ending factory farming much easier, i.e. the cost-effectiveness of factory farming interventions will increase – perhaps by a factor of 2-10x.
I think the second part of this claim 'much easier ... 2-10x'. (albeit including a 'perhaps') merits a bit more justification and modeling.
I guess the argument runs
A. "once we have the roadmap to clean meat, we will know what the key bottlenecks to it are, and target our funding better"?
or perhaps
B. "once cost-parity clean meat is feasible (or available), campaigns to get companies to use it in their products and restaurants will be more effective than current corporate AW campaigns (for cage-free eggs, etc."
?
Thanks, I'd be up for hearing insights. This is related to a larger project (see https://llm-uj-research-eval.netlify.app/), but this part of it is still pretty early stage.
Will DM
Unjournal AI-assisted research prioritization dashboard (very early prototype)
We've been experimenting with using LLMs to help identify and prioritize research for Unjournal evaluation, to work with and complement human prioritization (and learn). We now have a public prototype dashboard:
uj-prioritization-dashboard.netlify.app
What it does: Automatically discovers recent papers from NBER, arXiv (econ), CEPR, SSRN, Semantic Scholar, EA Forum paper links, and OpenAlex, then scores them using AI models (GPT-5.4 family) against our prioritization criteria — decision relevance, prominence, timing value, and methodological potential.
Important caveats:
- This is very preliminary and the AI recommendations are not yet well-calibrated. Many of the suggestions are mediocre we're sharing it for transparency and feedback, not because it's producing great output yet.
- This is supplementary to our existing Public Database of Prioritized Research on Coda (https://coda.io/d/Unjournal-Public-Pages_ddIEzDONWdb/Public-Database-of-Prioritized-Research_sutD341G#_luToq6IH
- Scores reflect evaluation priority (expected value of commissioning an independent review), not research quality.
- ATM The AI only sees paper metadata and abstracts, not full texts.
There's also a statistics page showing the breakdown by source, cause area, and score distribution.
Feedback welcome. You can also comment directly on the page via Hypothes.is, and we'll adapt
By the way, The Unjournal is planning to host an online workshop/discussion on this. https://uj-cm-workshop.netlify.app/ (draft agenda)
If you're interested, please consider applying/expressing your interest: https://uj-cm-workshop.netlify.app/schedule
I appreciate this tool. Would it be possible to have a quick calibration tool that doesn't require any sign-in? It would be very helpful during presentations and conferences to be able to illustrate the concept.
Otherwise, this could be something helpful for someone to vibe code. I'd love to do it myself when I have a chance.
Thank you, this is the correct link: https://unjournal.pubpub.org/pub/evalsumleadexposure/
I need to check what's going on with our DOIs !
Project Idea: 'Cost to save a life' interactive calculator promotion
What about making and promoting a ‘how much does it cost to save a life’ quiz and calculator.
This could be adjustable/customizable (in my country, around the world, of an infant/child/adult, counting ‘value added life years’ etc.) … and trying to make it go viral (or at least bacterial) as in the ‘how rich am I’ calculator?
The case
While GiveWell has a page with a lot of tech details, but it’s not compelling or interactive in the way I suggest above, and I doubt they market it heavily.
GWWC probably doesn't have the design/engineering time for this (not to mention refining this for accuracy and communication). But if someone else (UX design, research support, IT) could do the legwork I think they might be very happy to host it.
It could also mesh well with academic-linked research so I may have some ‘Meta academic support ads’ funds that could work with this.
Tags/backlinks (~testing out this new feature)
@GiveWell @Giving What We Can
Projects I'd like to see
EA Projects I'd Like to See
Idea: Curated database of quick-win tangible, attributable projects