I think more EAs should consider operations/management/doer careers over research careers, and that operations/management/doer careers should be higher status within the community.

I get a general vibe that in EA (and probably the world at large), that being a "deep thinking researcher"-type is way higher status than being an "operations/management/doer"-type. Yet the latter is also very high impact work, often higher impact than research (especially on the margin).

I see many EAs erroneously try to go into research and stick to research despite having very clear strengths on the operational side and insist that they shouldn't do operations work unless they clearly fail at research first.

I've personally felt this at times where I started my career very oriented towards research, was honestly only average or even below-average at it, and then switched into management, which I think has been much higher impact (and likely counterfactually generated at least a dozen or more researchers).

I really appreciate these dates being announced in advance - it makes it much easier to plan!

I'm not sure I understand the expectations enough about what these questions are looking for to answer.

Firstly, I don't think "the movement" is centralized enough to explicitly acknowledge things as a whole - that may be a bad expectation. I think some individual people and organizations have done some reflection (see here and here for prominent examples), though I would agree that there likely should be more.

Secondly, It definitely seems very wrong to me though to say that EA has had no new ideas in the past two years. Back in 2022 the main answer to "how do we reduce AI risk?" was "I don't know, I guess we should urgently figure that out" and now there's been an explosion of analysis, threat modeling, and policy ideas - for example Luke's 12 tentative ideas were basically all created within the past two years. On top of that, a lot of EAs were involved in the development of Responsible Scaling Policies which is now the predominant risk management framework for AI. And there's way more too.

Unfortunately I can mainly only speak to AI as it is my current area of expertise, but there's been updates in other areas as well. For example, at just Rethink Priorities, welfare ranges, CRAFT, and CURVE were all done within the past two years. Additionally, the Rethink Priorities model estimating the value of research influencing funders flew under the EA radar IMO but actually has led to very significant internal shifts in Rethink Priorities's thinking on which funders to work for and why.

I also think a lot of the genesis of the current focus on lead started in 2021 but significant work on pushing this forward happened in the 2022-2024 window.

As for new effective organizations, a bit of this depends on your opinions about what is "effective" and to what extent new organizations are "EA", but there are many new initiatives around, especially in the AI space.

I agree with all this advice. I also want to emphasize that I think researchers ought to spend more time talking to people relevant to their work.

Once you’ve identified your target audience, spend a bunch of time talking to them at the beginning, middle, and end of the project. At the beginning learn and take into account their constraints, at the middle refine your ideas, and at the end actually try to get your research into action.

I think it’s not crazy to spend half of your time on the research project talking.

That’s fair - you’re right to make this distinction where I failed and I’m sorry. I think I have a good point but I got heated in describing it and strayed further from charitableness than I should. I regret that.

Thanks Linch. I appreciate the chance to step back here. So I want to apologize to @Austin and @Rachel Weinberg and @Saul Munn if I stressed them out with my comments. (Tagging means they'll see it, right?)

I want to be very clear that while I disagree with some of the choices made, I have absolutely no ill will towards them or any other Manifest organizer, I very much want Manifold and Manifest to succeed, and I very much respect their rights to have their conference the way they want. If I see any of them I will be very warm and friendly and there's really no need from me to talk about this further if they don't want to. I hope we can be friends and engage productively in other areas - even if I don't attend Manifest or trade on Manifold, I'd be happy to interact with them in other ways that don't involve Hanania.

While I dislike Hanania's ideas greatly, and I still think inviting Hanania was a mistake, and I still will not attend events or participate in places where Hanania is given a platform... I don't want to practice guilt by association for those who do not hold Hanania's detestable ideas. Just because someone interacted with him does not make them also bad people. I apologize for not being clear about this from the beginning and I regret that I may have lead people to think otherwise.

BTW I want to add -- to all those who champion Hanania because they think free speech should mean that anyone should be able to be platformed without criticism or condemnation, Hanania is no ally to those principles:

Here's Hanania:

I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter [pre-Musk] is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.

(Source)

Yeah, because there's such a geographically clustered dichotomy in views between the London set and the SF set, it seems pretty important to me to give it 24 hours yeah.

Also just a general generic caution: we should know that this poll will mainly be seen by only the most active and most engaged people, which may not be representative enough to generalize.