Original post by Michael Aird

Read & edited by Sam Nolan


Podcast description

There are many people who have the skills and desire to do EA-aligned research, or who could develop such skills via some experience, mentorship, or similar. There are many potentially high-priority open research questions that have been identified. And there are many funders who would be happy to pay for high-quality research on such questions. Sounds like everything must be lining up perfectly, right? In my view, the answer is fairly clearly “No”, and getting closer to a “Yes” could be very valuable. The three ingredients mentioned above do regularly combine to give us new, high-quality research and researchers, but:

  • This is happening slower than we’d like

    • At any given time, we still have a lot of each ingredient left over
  • This is requiring more “overhead” than seems ideal

    • E.g., lots of 1-1 career advice, coaching, and mentorship from experienced people; time-consuming hiring and grant evaluation processes
  • There are more “misfires” than we’d like

    • E.g., aspiring researchers choosing low-priority questions or tackling questions poorly; great people and projects being passed over for hiring or funding

Links mentioned in the related previous work section

  • Posts tagged Scalably using labour and/or Research Training Programs
  • Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs
  • A comment thread from an AMA with Owen Cotton-Barratt
  • Bottlenecks and Solutions for the X-Risk Ecosystem
  • Factored Cognition
  • Readings and notes on how to do high-impact research
  • Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams
  • After one year...
  • Get involved
  • Working at EA vs Non-EA Orgs
  • EA Hiring
  • A central directory for open research questions

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Anchor link to podcast page: https://anchor.fm/ea-forum-podcast

RSS feed: https://anchor.fm/s/62cbeec4/podcast/rss

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Also listen to David's podcast Found in the Struce (RSS), where he narrates, and adds additional commentary to interesting EA Forum posts.

Comments1
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I said I wasn't going to publish this as a frontpage post, but I misclicked a button during the posting process. Sorry. It'd be nice if an moderator could take it off the frontpage.

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