Which EA organisations' research has been useful to you?

For donation decisions last year, especially for corporate campaigns for animal welfare, ACE, Founders Pledge, Rethink Priorities, Charity Entrepreneurship and Open Phil. I wrote up my donation plan last year here (which I ended up following pretty closely).

For career decisions, all of the above and also Humane League Labs. I'm currently an animal welfare research intern at Charity Entrepreneurship, I'm working on an econ project for them, I applied for positions/internships at some of the other orgs, and am studying econometrics. I think I'm most interested in doing research similar to HLL (and this and this), i.e. rigorous intervention research. I discussed my plans a bit here, too.

I also think Rethink Priorities' research on sentience and moral weight is important, I hope to see more research in this direction, and their sentience research was a factor in my donating to them last year. I take invertebrate welfare more seriously now and I'm slightly more careful with them when I encounter them in my daily life, but this hasn't really affected any other important decisions yet. Seeing this research, CRS's and GPI's has also gotten me thinking more about doing a PhD in philosophy (or economics), although I'd rather start working at an EA org instead, and I'm still pretty set on more applied econ/stats animal welfare research for now.

If you're interested in funding research like Charity Entrepreneurship has done, besides them, also consider their incubated charities. I think Animal Ask Institute will do research similar to Rethink Priorities' and Charity Entrepreneurship's animal welfare research.

When I asked, I was told you can also earmark donations to THL for Humane League Labs, but only donations over USD $15K. Maybe you can pool with others.

What I use research for: I advocate for Future Generations policy within the UK Parliament. This involves using cause priotisation research to decide where to focus my time and attention and using research on policy and governance to decide what to advocate for.

Most useful:

• CSER: Overall CSER do more UK / EU policy related research work than other EA long-termism groups. Eg: on longterm policy making,  on risk prevention policy, on defence procurement and AI. Also generally good to talk to on policy matters. Note I may be bias as I am a CSER Research Affiliate.

Next most useful:

• FHI: Work relevant to biosecurity policy like this. Some stuff on risk prevention eg The Precipice book and this survey.

Honourable mentions:

• Global Priorities Project: this summary paper on x-risks
• AllFed: this paper on food risks
• OpenPhil: this and this table on policy priorities
• EA Forum: general useful tool for feedback and new ideas.
• Useful background newsletters from CSET, on EuropeanAI and the x-risk.net newsletter (which led me to this interesting paper on Existential security)

Not as known in EA but a shout outs are deserved to:

• The Institute for Government
• Roman Krznaric’s book The Good Ancestor
• The School of International Futures
• The Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty.

How do you define "useful" if you're excluding impacts on both donation and career decisions? It seems like all that's left is what particular problems you work on directly, to the exclusion of career decisions. Like someone is already doing research or direct work, and their priotities are informed by research? E.g. animal charities deemphasized leafleting, 80,000 Hours shifted focus to longtermism, Rethink Priorities' research on sentience and moral weight builds on existing research, etc.. Maybe someone set on founding a new EA charity decides which to start based on research (like Charity Entrepreneurship's), or is that a career decisions?

I have found Charity Entrepreneurship's research useful for identifying high-impact charity ideas that people in the Philippines could potentially start. Their top charity ideas and cause area research also help me identify and research potentially pressing problems in the Philippines that people could contribute to.

Founders Pledge's research is also useful, and I especially like their climate change and mental health reports. I believe both charities still have room for more funding.

I sometimes worry that the feedback loop from do useful research all the way down to see a significant change in the world is very long and opaque. If people have general thoughts on this feedback loop or on evaluating research organisations do share.

Here are some posts I've found useful in relation to that or similar matters:

• Do research organisations make theory of change diagrams? Should they? (and the answers and comments there)
• Rethink Priorities Impact Survey
• Should surveys about the quality/impact of research outputs be more common? 
  • (this is one I wrote, rather than one I "found useful", though I found the process of thinking and writing about this topic useful)
• Can we intentionally improve the world? Planners vs. Hayekians
• AI Governance: Opportunity and Theory of Impact

Also relevant, but a bit more tangentially:

• Rethink Priorities 2019 Impact and Strategy
• Identifying Plausible Paths to Impact and their Strategic Implications
• Effective Altruism Foundation: Plans for 2020

UPDATE COMMENT:

I am currently leaning towards donating to somewhere like Charity Entrepreneurship where there is a clear path from research to real world output. I am sure the academic research has real world implications but I find it hard to judge this mechanism, and there is a limit to how much capacity I have  to investigate that topic.

Alternatively, given that I have such limits to my capacity for donation decisions I may just donate to the EA Infrastructure Fund.

I would be persuaded to donate elsewhere if this post, or other steps I take to investigate this topic, shows that the work of EA aligned research organisations was leading to real world outcomes.