EA - Exceptional Research Award by Effective Thesis (ETERA): reflection by Effective Thesis

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: Exceptional Research Award by Effective Thesis (ETERA): reflection, published by Effective Thesis on January 18, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post was written by David Janků with contributions from Adéla Novotná (graphs and analyses on the background) and useful edits by Sophie Kirkham.SummaryIn autumn 2022, Effective Thesis held the Exceptional Research Award to encourage and recognize students conducting promising research that has the potential to significantly improve the world.We received 35 submissions, had 25 of them reviewed and chose 6 main prize winners and 4 commendation prize winners (see the winning submissions and winners’ profiles here).We received applications from across a variety of study disciplines and cause areas, though causes that have traditionally been prioritised by EA leaders - such as AI alignment, biosecurity, and animal welfare - were relatively underrepresented in our sample. It is unclear to us why this is the case (e.g. whether people working on those causes already have existing cause-specific prizes to apply to; or have different publication norms - like publishing mainly via blog posts - that our award is not compatible with; or to what extent some of these directions are not bottlenecked by the creation of new research ideas and understanding but rather by execution of existing ideas). We think this represents room for improvement in the future.Only 57 % of all applicants and 50 % of all winners had any engagement with Effective Thesis prior to applying for the award, suggesting the award was able to attract students who are doing valuable work but who have not interacted with Effective Thesis before.That being said, people previously coached by Effective Thesis scored higher in the reviews on “potentially having more impact with their research” than people who were not coached, suggesting our coaching might help people arrive at better ideas for research topics.The review scores indicated that the quality of the application pool was fairly high. The highest scores were usually given for rigour and novelty, and the lower scores were for the ability to make progress in the research field and potential positive impact in the world. This is to be expected since achieving impact is harder than achieving rigour and novelty.Both reviewers and applicants (successful and unsuccessful) seemed to be happy about their participation in this award, as reflected by their willingness to be associated with the award publicly, high ratings of the usefulness of the reviews by applicants, and a number of qualitative comments we received.What is ETERA and why did we decide to run it?The Effective Thesis Exceptional Research Award (ETERA) has been established to encourage and recognize promising research, conducted by students from undergraduate to PhD level, that has the potential to significantly improve the world. We accepted submissions of theses, dissertations and capstone papers. Entries were required to have been submitted to a university between 1st January 2021 - 1st September 2022 and to relate to one or multiple prioritised research directions on our site. We accepted entries from all countries, though all entries had to be submitted in English.A prize of 1000 USD was offered for winning entries (and 100 USD for commendation prizes). In addition, prize-winning entries would be featured on our website and promoted by us.We expected the award to have three primary positive impacts:Providing a career boost for aspiring researchers already focused on very impactful questions and producing high quality work. Winning this award would give them additional credentials and increase their chances of building a successful research career.Motivating additional aspiring researchers to begin exploring questions in some of the ...