The high impact PA: how anyone can bring about ground-breaking research

I understand why you want to make a counterintuitive point and agree with your assessment that PA’s, especially if they’re doing a job nobody else would have, can be very valuable. However, this,

Rather than attempt to personally become a researcher in that field, instead attempt to identify the very best researcher already working on the issue.

and this,

Even if qualified, if you pursue research directly, it’s very unlikely that you’ll end up as the best researcher in the best field.

Are not evidence-based, although they are empirical claims. In fact, much of the evidence we have runs contra to this.

Creativity in Science is a great book. I recommend it if you are interested in these issues. Here’s a review: http://www.amazon.com/review/RV4Y43WKRK6LO

Andy, do you mean that it is very difficult to identify the researcher who will in fact make the largest contribution? I think that this is true, but doesn’t detract all that much from Ben’s point. You can do as much good per hour as the person you think is doing the most high-impact research. That is pretty amazing.

I was just thinking that since only one person in each field ends up being the best, and there’s thousands of people in each field, it’s unlikely to be you.

It’s an interesting possibility, but I think it’s much too soon to make claims as grand as ‘one of your hours becomes one of their hours’.

In practice it’s surely going to be a worse ratio than that – they have to spend some amount of time telling you what they want etc. Also they might also want the time you spend ‘helping’ them as punctuation between serious bouts of research – or they might have reached or neared a saturation point with their work, so that extra free time won’t necessarily go into it. Plus if the planning fallacy makes you overestimate the amount you can help them so that they can’t rely on you you might actually hinder them in some cases. And where there are researchers who’d be worth doing this for and EAs who’d be suitable to do it for them, there’s an opportunity cost in finding them and setting yourself up to help them out.

As an anecdote, I effectively made this offer to you and a couple of other Oxford EAs for the duration of final exams, arguably one of the busiest periods of your life – for whatever reason no-one asked me to do even a single task. Whether that was because you didn’t think I could help much with anything, or you simply hadn’t internalised the idea that someone might actually do stuff for you, the same practical impediment/cognitive bias might affect anyone else you made a similar offer to.

None of this is to say it’s not a possibility worth looking at, but I think we should avoid (both here and in general) making big claims about the effectiveness of untested strategies, especially when they might have been quietly tested and rejected without anyone really mentioning it.

One other thought – there’s no shortage of people willing to do paid PA work, so if you can earn more per hour than a decent PA would, you’d presumably do better to do so and hire a PA. Then that raises the question of whether hiring PAs for people who haven’t done so themselves is better value than donating the money elsewhere.

There’s certainly a lot of practical issues to consider if one was actually going to do this. This post is not a practical recommendation, rather a demonstration of how different ethical careers become if one takes the counterfactual view.

Apart from the issues you raise, there seem to be options that are likely to be better. For instance, pursuing professional philanthropy and hiring PAs (though there are situations where this doesn’t work e.g. where one academic takes the teaching load of another). Or by forming a group of volunteers who carry out this activity.

Nice post. this is basically the reason I’ve decided not to study neuroscience and instead want to make social change that will hopefully, among other things, lead to other people doing the kind of research I want done

It’s helpful to spell out what you mean by an acronym the first time you use it - when I see PA I think “physician assistant”, not personal assistant.

I imagine some people feel weird about having a stranger do personal tasks for them (shopping, filing taxes, etc.) if they’re not from a culture where that’s common. I know I would feel weird about it. That may be some of what happened in Zander’s example.

This job used to be called “a wife.” There’s plenty of older motivational literature on what a noble task it is to help a great man (or a mediocre one…), but I don’t know how helpful that is in motivating current do-gooders.

I’ve been reading some of the facebook chatter about this post. The main criticism seems to be that it would be difficult to determine whether you should try to become the PA or become the researcher. It’s true that it would be difficult, but it’s worth noting that these kinds of judgements are made all the time. Whenever we run a phd application process or award grant funding, people are judging which of two applicants are more likely to produce good research. You could do a similar process if you were deciding between these two options.

A second related criticism is that it might be harmful to spread this idea, because it risks discouraging people from research who might be able to do a great deal of good some time in the future. The example might have this effect on some people, but I think many people find the idea that they can do this much good inspiring. Also note that overall 80k encourages people to take seriously even small probabilities that they become a high impact researcher. See this idea in action when applied to entrepreneurship in one of Carl’s posts: http://80000hours.org/blog/12-salary-or-startup-how-do-gooders-can-gain-more-from-risky-careers