EA - Feedback I've been giving to junior x-risk researchers by Will Aldred

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Feedback I've been giving to junior x-risk researchers, published by Will Aldred on August 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Context The CERI and SERI summer research fellowships are each coming to a close. My roles - co-leading CERI, and leading SERI's nuclear risk cause area - involve giving feedback to fellows on their research. I found myself giving similar-ish feedback to different fellows, and so I'm writing up some of the feedback I gave (as best as I can remember, most of it was verbal) since I suspect this might be useful to aspiring or junior EA/x-risk researchers. Feedback examples "Looks like your target audience for your paper is grantmaker x. You should reach out to them (early!), explain what your research project is about, and ask for their feedback on what bottom lines would be most useful/decision-relevant to them." "I can see a couple immediate counterarguments to your claim [in section y in your draft], which you don't appear to acknowledge. I suggest you set a 5 minute timer to brainstorm counterarguments (note: don't also brainstorm responses to the counters in those 5 mins)." "It's not clear how the project you've proposed, even if executed really well, will result in anyone in the world taking any action. You say your aim is to reduce hostility and increase peace between [redacted]... what is the step immediately prior to this increased peace? Who are the actors? What is the backward chain from these actors to your research project? [response from fellow] Ah, okay, so you see advocacy as a route to influencing these actors... Do you have a sense for how much this kind of advocacy would cost? [Followed by further questions to tease out the plausability of their implicit model for path to impact.]" "[different project to the above] Who are the 'we' you repeatedly refer to? Seems to me that pinning down this 'we' would be really helpful for crisping up your theory of change." "You should form and state a bottom line view. Even if you're not confident, you now know more about this topic than ~anyone who'll read your paper, so in expectation your bottom line will update your readers in the direction of truth." "Write a summary at the top of your post. Your summary should include your bottom lines and any actionable insights. Ideally, the summary should give the reader ~80% of the value of the whole post: this means the summary should be more informative than an academic paper's abstract. I like to include a table in my summaries, see, for example, here. And for more examples of good summaries, see here, here, and here. The same goes for each section of your post. Put your bottom lines up front in each section. And, if your sections are long, I'd recommend you write a summary at the start of each." "Feel free to include an epistemic status at the top of your post, and/or even at various points throughout your post, to let readers know how confident you are in what you've written." "Where you've written 'likely', 'possibly', 'plausibly', you should try to attach a quantitative estimate (e.g., 30% likely)." "Try to make clear the scope of your paper. Resist the temptation to increase the scope of your paper as you go. You can't tackle everything, and that's fine: better a well-executed narrow paper than a rough or unfinished broader paper." "Make clear how what you're working on fits into the overall project of solving x-risk. Think of your project as one rung in the EA/x-risk community's ladder. More concretely, flag what you see as cruxes or important considerations, but probably don't attempt to figure out a bottom line for all of them. State the ones you don't tackle as directions for future work." "Where you're constraining the scope of your research, be sure you make this clear. Otherwise, readers might be left confused by why you've lef...