Hey everyone who is following this closely- I’ve been sprinting madly for the last six weeks and hit my limit. You can expect a retrospective post and perhaps a phase 2 agenda in the next few weeks, but for now I am resting.
Welp, I did not make that deadline. Unfortunately the conditions that led me and the LW team to miss that deadline- high opportunity costs- are not likely to change soon, so instead of holding out for perfection I’m just going to share a couple of thoughts.
I was brought on to lead covid research efforts at LW as an experiment. The hope was that there was significant untapped research capacity, which could be unlocked by providing some structure (hence the research agenda). The structure was not only supposed to give people a sense of what would be useful to research, but reassurance that their research would actually be used, and social reinforcement. This mostly did not pan out- I think I did useful research during the time in question, I think other people produced useful research during that time, but questions I asked tended to be answered by only me.
The experiment was well worth running, and the team got a lot of information on infrastructure useful to support coordinated research (most notably it led to some reworks of Questions). But after 6 weeks it was not achieving its stated goal and had not found something clearly high value to pivot to, so I called it.
Hey everyone who is following this closely- I’ve been sprinting madly for the last six weeks and hit my limit. You can expect a retrospective post and perhaps a phase 2 agenda in the next few weeks, but for now I am resting.
Welp, I did not make that deadline. Unfortunately the conditions that led me and the LW team to miss that deadline- high opportunity costs- are not likely to change soon, so instead of holding out for perfection I’m just going to share a couple of thoughts.
I was brought on to lead covid research efforts at LW as an experiment. The hope was that there was significant untapped research capacity, which could be unlocked by providing some structure (hence the research agenda). The structure was not only supposed to give people a sense of what would be useful to research, but reassurance that their research would actually be used, and social reinforcement. This mostly did not pan out- I think I did useful research during the time in question, I think other people produced useful research during that time, but questions I asked tended to be answered by only me.
The experiment was well worth running, and the team got a lot of information on infrastructure useful to support coordinated research (most notably it led to some reworks of Questions). But after 6 weeks it was not achieving its stated goal and had not found something clearly high value to pivot to, so I called it.