Our website:
What is Let’s Fund?
Let’s Fund helps you discover, learn about and fund breakthrough research, policy and advocacy projects.
We’re Hauke (formerly at CEA and the Center for Global Development) and Henry (software engineer, founder of EA Work Club). We created Let’s Fund as an alternative to “safe” donation options – to find high-risk, high-reward projects that are in need of more funding.
Our first crowdfunding campaign, Let’s Fund #1, is now online. We're raising funds for Professor Chris Chambers at Cardiff University. Chambers is a leading proponent of a new and better way of doing and publishing research, called ‘Registered Reports’, where scientific papers are peer-reviewed before the results are known.
This might:
- make science more theory-driven, open and transparent
- find methodological weaknesses prior to publication
- get more papers published that fail to confirm the original hypothesis
- increase the credibility of non-randomized natural experiments using observational data
The funds will free up his time to focus on accelerating the widespread adoption of Registered Reports by leading scientific journals.
This ‘meta-research’ project might be exceptionally high-impact because we can cause a paradigm shift in scientific culture, where Registered Reports become the gold standard for hypothesis-driven science.
Check out our website to read our in-depth research on the value of science funding, meta-research, discussion of Registered Reports advocacy, and a cost-effectiveness estimate of Chris Chambers’ advocacy efforts.
Project Rationale
We want to move money to effective projects and spread EA memes. We give people an option to donate to high-risk, high-reward projects over established, risk-averse charities outside the mainstream EA cause areas. It’s also for those people who want to learn about where their money goes in advance.
We are looking for help from the EA community. In particular, we're looking for:
- Concrete feedback on our research
- High-level feedback on our first project in particular
- High-level feedback about the idea of Let's Fund in general
- Donations to our first project
- Help in promoting our first campaign
We are happy to answer any questions there or in the comments below.
Hi, I really like this (shared this in my social media channels). I am working on another new research methods project and great to see others working in this area. ( we ( regivolution.org ) presented our work in EA Global London last month, and we hope to make forum post in here soon as well about us as well as our rigorous ultra-rapid review methods ) We might even use this as an inspiration for some materials we will generate in future (We will of course cite/link to this resource)!
General feedback about the project and content:
Some improvement suggestions - Note: In general I want to say that I really like the quality and I didn't see almost any red flags in the quality of your work, you have gone in to detail, and cite pretty much similar material I would cite myself as well and have good material I wasn't even aware of before. Also, these comments are at general level, I did not go through individual studies, except that I noticed one likely quite a problematic study in the page why fund research. I added this comment straight to the google docs document
Are you aware of the Oxford prioritisation project’s short assessment of open science also posted to EA forums? They pretty much stated that there would be in general no room for funding for open science including registered reports. However, they mentioned things that could change their mind and I think your case falls to these categories. I think this could be worth mentioning.
See here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/x87EKumG8gS4aH7xP/daniel-may-open-science-little-room-for-more-funding
Transparency of literature review methods: I would like to hear more about the procedure you had for choosing this meta-research cause over other causes. Now it seems to me that you were interested about the possibilities of meta-research did some preliminary, very fast review of 4 options, then you chose that this researcher and pre-registration would be the best bet and then wrote detailed analyses only about this topic and nothing about others. It would be interesting to get a better impression of your "protocol/pre-notes" (:D ) what you planned, and what post-hoc changes you did during the way. I think this would be important, but this would be particularly important as you are advocating for pre-registration policies. (of course, I would not expect full-pre-registration but just some even very rough description of your process along the way, no matter how chaotic it was). One other thing you should probably be quite transparent is how you assess the quality of your references, if you do not assess each one of them carefully this is fine (based on this one quite clearly problematic study I noticed, this is probably likely), but in my opinion you should be transparent about this.
One alternative funding option (note: I have intellectual conflicts of interest as I am involved in both initiatives mentioned, also I think that it is not necessarily better than this very carefully chosen the one you have): Advocating for the use of evidence frameworks/systems. My opinion currently is that in the end for reaching superb scientific research impact we need to advocate for evidence frameworks/systems. The rationale is similar to why we should advocate for meta-science. Meta-science has potential to improve multiple research areas simultaneously. Evidence frameworks have potential to improve multiple methodological aspects simultaneously in a flexible way that can easily and transparently be improved, (e.g. when new meta-research evidence comes up) these can also be applicable to multiple research areas, improve the level of collaboration and improve the transparency of research findings. GRADE in evidence-based medicine is one quite successful example of this although it was still a lot of issues. Curate science is a database and framework in development that specifically designed to assess the credibility of replication studies (particularly in psychology)
European Union has also funded meta-science quite aggressively recently (see this quite large Mirror, research project)
http://miror-ejd.eu/ec-documents/
Things I am less certain about and you might have considered them already
What would make you change your mind: I think this is more concrete and actionable than just listing out what are problems.
The degree of confidence: I personally like the way to present ones confidence to claims e.g. 80% certain.
Functionality of the website
Small thing - feature where you can see a footnote when you hover a mouse over number would be good, also confirmation to move another website was slightly irritating, when you wanted to look what the references actually are in laptop fast, but I think these may be more preference issues.
As I mentioned, in general, I think your work is good, and I didn't see many red flags in the quality of your work, you have done detailed work, and cite pretty much similar material I would cite myself as well. Even though I have read quite a bit of research in this area there was even new interesting stuff for me.
Thanks so much for the detailed comments and feedback!
1) I'm aware of Oxford Prio's research into this and had read their research. They looked more into Open Science which is related but slightly different from meta-research. There are many more funders funding transparancy, openness and data sharing than meta-research. I do not recall that Oxford prio looked Registered Reports specifically. I think it's an interesting analysis but I think the funders they listed in their analysis are neglecting Registered Reports.
2) re: the literature revi... (read more)