The Nonlinear Library EA - A lot of EA-orientated research doesn't seem sufficiently focused on impact by jamesw
Mar 4, 2024
05:39
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A lot of EA-orientated research doesn't seem sufficiently focused on impact, published by jamesw on March 4, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Cross posted from: https://open.substack.com/pub/gamingthesystem/p/a-lot-of-ea-orientated-research-doesnt?r=9079y&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
NB: This post would be clearer if I gave specific examples but I'm not going to call out specific organisations or individuals to avoid making this post unnecessarily antagonistic.
Summary: On the margin more resources should be put towards action-guiding research instead of abstract research areas that don't have a clear path to impact. More resources should also be put towards communicating that research to decision-makers and ensuring that the research actually gets used.
Doing research that improves the world is really hard. Collectively as a movement I think EA does better than any other group. However, too many person-hours are going into research that doesn't seem appropriately focused on actually causing positive change in the world.
Soon after the initial ChatGPT launch probably wasn't the right time for governments to regulate AI, but given the amount of funding that has gone into AI governance research it seems like a bad sign that there weren't many (if any) viable AI governance proposals that were ready for policymakers to take off-the-shelf and implement.
Research aimed at doing good could fall in two buckets (or somewhere inbetween):
Fundamental research that improves our understanding about how to think about a problem or how to prioritise between cause areas
Action-guiding research that analyses which path forward is best and comes up with a proposal
Feedback loops between research and impact are poor so there is a risk of falling prey to motivated reasoning as fundamental research can be more appealing for a couple of different reasons:
Culturally EA seems to reward people for doing work that seems very clever and complicated, and sometimes this can be a not-terrible proxy for important research. But this isn't the same as doing work that actually moves the needle on the issues that matter.
Academic research far worse for this and rewards researchers for writing papers that sound clever (hence why a lot of academic writing is so unnecessarily unintelligible), but EA shouldn't be falling into this trap of conflating complexity with impact.
People also enjoy discussing interesting ideas, and EAs in particular enjoy discussing abstract concepts. But intellectually stimulating work is not the same as impactful research, even if the research is looking into an important area.
Given that action-guiding research has a clearer path to impact, arguably the bar should be pretty high to focus on fundamental research over action-guiding research. If it's unlikely that a decision maker would look at the findings of a piece of research and change their actions as a result of it then there should be a very strong alternative reason why the research is worthwhile.
There is also a difference between research that you think should change the behaviour of decision makers, and what will actually influence them. While it might be clear to you that your research on some obscure form of decision theory has implications for the actions that key decision makers should take, if there is a negligible chance of them seeing this research or taking this on board then this research has very little value.
This is fine if the theory of change for your research having an impact doesn't rely on the relevant people being convinced of your work (e.g. policymakers), but most research does rely on important people actually reading the findings, understanding them, and being convinced that they should take an alternative action to what they would have taken otherwise.
This is especially true of resea...
Cross posted from: https://open.substack.com/pub/gamingthesystem/p/a-lot-of-ea-orientated-research-doesnt?r=9079y&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
NB: This post would be clearer if I gave specific examples but I'm not going to call out specific organisations or individuals to avoid making this post unnecessarily antagonistic.
Summary: On the margin more resources should be put towards action-guiding research instead of abstract research areas that don't have a clear path to impact. More resources should also be put towards communicating that research to decision-makers and ensuring that the research actually gets used.
Doing research that improves the world is really hard. Collectively as a movement I think EA does better than any other group. However, too many person-hours are going into research that doesn't seem appropriately focused on actually causing positive change in the world.
Soon after the initial ChatGPT launch probably wasn't the right time for governments to regulate AI, but given the amount of funding that has gone into AI governance research it seems like a bad sign that there weren't many (if any) viable AI governance proposals that were ready for policymakers to take off-the-shelf and implement.
Research aimed at doing good could fall in two buckets (or somewhere inbetween):
Fundamental research that improves our understanding about how to think about a problem or how to prioritise between cause areas
Action-guiding research that analyses which path forward is best and comes up with a proposal
Feedback loops between research and impact are poor so there is a risk of falling prey to motivated reasoning as fundamental research can be more appealing for a couple of different reasons:
Culturally EA seems to reward people for doing work that seems very clever and complicated, and sometimes this can be a not-terrible proxy for important research. But this isn't the same as doing work that actually moves the needle on the issues that matter.
Academic research far worse for this and rewards researchers for writing papers that sound clever (hence why a lot of academic writing is so unnecessarily unintelligible), but EA shouldn't be falling into this trap of conflating complexity with impact.
People also enjoy discussing interesting ideas, and EAs in particular enjoy discussing abstract concepts. But intellectually stimulating work is not the same as impactful research, even if the research is looking into an important area.
Given that action-guiding research has a clearer path to impact, arguably the bar should be pretty high to focus on fundamental research over action-guiding research. If it's unlikely that a decision maker would look at the findings of a piece of research and change their actions as a result of it then there should be a very strong alternative reason why the research is worthwhile.
There is also a difference between research that you think should change the behaviour of decision makers, and what will actually influence them. While it might be clear to you that your research on some obscure form of decision theory has implications for the actions that key decision makers should take, if there is a negligible chance of them seeing this research or taking this on board then this research has very little value.
This is fine if the theory of change for your research having an impact doesn't rely on the relevant people being convinced of your work (e.g. policymakers), but most research does rely on important people actually reading the findings, understanding them, and being convinced that they should take an alternative action to what they would have taken otherwise.
This is especially true of resea...