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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