I just happened upon this long bygone research institute in my own research. Established by Pitirim A. Sorokin - established and headed the first sociology department at the university - at Harvard sometime around the mid-twentieth century. Unfortunately, I don't have time to pursue its archives/work at the moment. Thought I would throw it out here if anyone else was interested.

From my impression, a lot of the output is methodologically suspect if not subsumed or transcended by subsequent work. Nevertheless, some real intellects work at the institute. Might be worth briefly excavating, if only for a very interesting historical antecedent- a footnote in effective altruism.

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Hi Geuss, thanks for sharing this, we (Harvard EA) will try to find out more about it.

Great to hear!

I personally feel like this would be more appropriate in an Open Thread. As this forum is new, it's important we decide on norms of where things belong as a community.

I'm unsure, as I don't know how many people see late additions to the open threads. It's the sort of thing which'd go in LessWrong Discussion versus. LessWrong main so maybe its a data point for creating a discussion section.