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I've been looking at papers involving a lot of 'controlling for confounders' recently and am unsure about how much weight to give their results.
Does anyone have recommendations about how to judge the robustness of these kind of studies?
Also, I was considering doing some tests of my own based on random causal graphs, testing what happens to regressions when you control for a limited subset of confounders, varying the size/depth of graph and so on. I can't seem to find any similar papers but I don't know the area, does anyone know of similar work?
Suggestion:
Eliezer has huge respect in the community; he has strong, well thought-out opinions (often negative) on a lot of the safety research being done (with exceptions, Chris Olah mentioned a few times); but he's not able to work full time on research directly (or so I understand, could be way off).
Perhaps he should institute some kind of prize for work done, trying to give extra prestige and funding to work going in his preferred direction? Does this exist in some form without my noticing? Is there a reason it'd be bad? Time/energy usage for Eliezer combined with difficulty of delegation?