Connor Flexman

Perform independent research in collaboration with John Salvatier

I am recommending this grant with more hesitation than most of the other grants in this round. The reasons for hesitation are as follows:

• I was the primary person on the grant committee on whose recommendation this grant was made.
• Connor lives in the same group house that I live in, which I think adds a complicating conflict of interest to my recommendation.
• I have generally positive impressions of Connor, but I have not personally seen concrete, externally verifiable evidence that clearly demonstrates his good judgment and competence, which in combination with the other two factors makes me more hesitant than usual.

However, despite these reservations, I think this grant is a good choice. The two primary reasons are:

• Connor himself has worked on a variety of research and community building projects, and both by my own assessment and other people I talked to, has significant potential in becoming a strong generalist researcher, which I think is an axis on which a lot of important projects are bottlenecked.
• This grant was strongly recommended to me by John Salvatier, who is funded by an EA Grant and whose work I am generally excited about.

John did some very valuable community organizing while he lived in Seattle and is now working on developing techniques to facilitate skill transfer between experts in different domains. I think it is exceptionally hard to develop effective techniques for skill transfer, and more broadly techniques to improve people’s rationality and reasoning skills, but am sufficiently impressed with John’s thinking that I think he might be able to do it anyway (though I still have some reservations).

John is currently collaborating with Connor and requested funding to hire him to collaborate on his projects. After talking to Connor I decided it would be better to recommend a grant to Connor directly, encouraging him to continue working with John but also allowing him to switch towards other research projects if he finds he can’t contribute as productively to John’s research as he expects.

Overall, while I feel some hesitation about this grant, I think it’s very unlikely to have any significant negative consequences, and I assign some significant probability that this grant can help Connor develop into an excellent generalist researcher of a type that I feel like EA is currently quite bottlenecked on.