EA Virtual Programs Associate
Conducting community building work in Malaysia
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A service/consultancy that calculates the value of information of research projects
Epistemic Institutions, Research That Can Help Us Improve
When undertaking any research or investigations, we want to know whether it's worth spending money or time on it. There are a lot of research-type projects in EA and the best way to evaluate and prioritise them is to calculate their value of information (VOI). However, VoI calculations can be complex and we need to build a team of experts that can form a VoI consultancy or service provider.
Examples of use cases:
1. A grant maker wants to know whether it's worth spending 0.5FTE on investigating cause area Y vs cause area X.
2. A thinktank has generated a list of policy ideas to investigate but is uncertain which to prioritise.
3. A research org also has a list of research questions but want to know which one has the highest VoI.
In each of this use case, I suspect a VoI consultancy can be extremely valuable.
David Manheim has written more about VoI here.
I think there might be harder meta-problem: should we even spend time and money on calculating the VoI of certain investigations? A failure mode is where the VoI consultancy calculates a bunch of research projects that turn out to have very low VoI.
I guess figuring out baseline, the cost of doing VoI calculations, and having a cheap heuristic as a preliminary calculation could help, but I'm highly uncertain.
Hi Naomi! Do the participants engage with any required learning materials outside of group discussions in this version of the fellowship? Something like the usual 8 week virtual programs version.
Agree with this! I can definitely see that there's some kind of fine tuning you can do, like making it less challenging so your motivation and probability of success goes up.
(1), (2) great points!
(3) Possibly, I definitely took some inspiration from 80K's career planning guide too.
A low-energy version of this could be a co-working retreat
Oh interesting! I see a few examples of this when Googling. If you have a go-to resource for organising this, would love to check it out.
Less tailor-made events and more consistent simple meetups (socials, YT watch parties, etc).
Less tailor-made targeted outreach and more advertising.
An animal welfare one! But more heavily modified to an amateur philosophy audience.
This! https://flourish.studio/visualisations/sankey-charts/
Hi Pride, I'm Yi-Yang and I run EA VP. Unfortunately, we don't usually let folks apply late. EA VP does run programs every month so you could catch the upcoming one. The next deadline is on Sun, June 26th.