@Wormhole Hi Dony, thanks for your question about how Effective Thesis has evolved. While we have provided coaching, newsletters, research area guides, and other services since our founding 5.5 years ago, our team and offerings have adapted to serve students and future researchers more cost-effectively.

Until mid-2023, we operated with a 5.5 FTE team. However, due to funding constraints, we had to scale down and now function with 1.75 FTE under my direction as the new director. This transition led us to focus on more direct service offerings, such as helping students select well-defined research questions and interact in our Slack community while maintaining existing resources like our website research area guides.

Our impact is demonstrated through our reach and student success stories. We have around 70,000 to 90,000 unique website visitors annually and have provided one-to-one coaching to over 2,000 students. Many of these students have credited Effective Thesis as instrumental in their choice of thesis topic, supervisor, funding, or postgraduate program. We have numerous examples of theses submitted by students who have used our services, representing just a small fraction of those we've helped.

We are operating at a minimal burn rate with runway until late 2024 and are dedicated to continuing our mission of supporting students and researchers in pursuing high-impact work. Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Dear Jason,

Thank you for your thoughtful inquiry about the potential impact of additional funding for our project. Your observation that the "funding utilization" section could benefit from more specificity is greatly appreciated. Let me explain further how extra funding would significantly bolster our efforts.

Effective Thesis operates on an extremely lean budget, dedicating every available resource to maintaining our core operations. This strict funding constraint severely limits our ability to pursue the development of the research questions database. This project would greatly amplify our impact by providing a crucial resource to the student, academic, and altruistic communities.

The funds we seek to raise through this campaign would be allocated directly to developing and maintaining this database for public use. Without this additional targeted funding, we lack the resources and capacity to bring this high-potential tool to fruition and to maintain it continuously as required.

To be more precise, supplementary funding would empower our team to:

1. Collaborate extensively with a wider network of academics and cause area experts to identify the highest-leverage research questions across disciplines.

2. Develop a robust, user-friendly platform to host the curated question repository and facilitate research collaboration.

3. Conduct targeted outreach to universities, think tanks, non-profits, and student groups to drive engagement with the platform and the high-impact research opportunities it highlights.

4. Implement a rigorous question evaluation methodology and maintain the database with the most up-to-date, relevant content.

In essence, incremental funding would make the critical difference between this high-potential resource existing in a well-developed, publicly accessible form or not coming into being. It would unlock our ability to deliver a powerful tool for advancing pivotal research into the hands of the academic and altruistic communities, accelerating progress on the most pressing global challenges.

I hope this added context illustrates the counterfactual value that your support would provide. We are committed to maximizing the impact of every dollar entrusted to us. Funding from partners like you makes work like this possible.

Please let me know if you have any other questions. I would be more than happy to discuss this further.

@aaronl Hi Aaron, thank you for your thoughtful comment and for supporting our mission. It's important for us to align our work with the priorities of those who share our vision for impactful research. Could you share more about your priorities in terms of causes? Understanding diverse perspectives helps us refine our approach and ensure we're inclusive of a broad range of impactful research areas.

The cause areas have a big emphasis on animal welfare, which isn't something that ranks very high up in my personal moral calculus. My top priorities mostly fall under the "global health and wellbeing" category, which admittedly is represented on the site, but only at the same level of prominence as e.g. "insect welfare in farmed, wild, and research context".

@aaronl Hi Aaron, thank you for sharing your concerns and priorities. We appreciate your focus on global health and wellbeing, which indeed is a crucial area. I wanted to inform you that since August 2023, Effective Thesis has undergone significant changes in our team and focus areas. Specifically, projects related to animal welfare are now primarily managed by a separate organization, Vegan Thesis, which we helped co-found. You can explore their work at veganthesis.org.

This shift allows Effective Thesis to broaden our emphasis on a diverse range of cause areas, including a stronger focus on global health and wellbeing, among others. The previous emphasis on animal welfare on our platform was a reflection of our past scope, which, thanks to our division of labor with Vegan Thesis, now enables us to better align with a wider array of impactful research areas, including those you've highlighted as your top priorities.

We're committed to facilitating research that tackles the world's most pressing challenges across all cause areas, with the aim to include and prioritize high-impact opportunities in global health and wellbeing. Your feedback is helpful to us in reviewing our approach and ensuring our resources are directed towards facilitating impactful research that resonates with the diverse priorities of our community.

Our Effective Thesis website is back up! I'm happy to chat for more info. Email me at joel@effectivethesis.org
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