Would you agree with the statement: ”EA made an attempt to attract as many students and young people as possible, and therefore neglected older groups. As a result, the movement to a huge extent: a) has a too small proportion of emotionally mature people, which makes it more turbulent, and, as a result, less effective; b) makes it not very attractive to mid-career and mature people, who—even if impressed by young prodigies, don’t regard them as their thought partners (due to lack of life experience); c) puts too much pressure on young people, as they are sometimes put into leadership positions which they are emotionally not ready for” .
For the record, I don’t know if I agree with this statement. But I’m curious what do you guys think.
Having gotten into an EA leadership position in my late 40s last year these statements ring true. I’m very grateful to be able to work with young and smart people but I see the same risks and downsides I faced when running my first startup in my early twenties. I learned a lot when it failed and hope to be able to use this experience in building a more resilient EA organization.
Liv—I agree. I’ve complained about EA’s ageism a few times on EA Forum—an ageism that seems fairly common, but that is also perhaps only mild to moderate in its strength.
There seems to be a lot more EA effort invested in recruiting young people into EA (e.g. through 80k Hours) than to recruiting mid-career and late-career professionals who could offer a little wisdom, perspective, life experience, mentorship, professional contacts, etc.
I’ve sometimes seen this pro-youth bias justified in terms of expected future decades of useful contributions, e.g. ‘If we recruit a 20-year-old into EA, they can contribute for at least 50 years (assuming retirement at 70), whereas a 60-year-old might only contribute for another 10 years, so the 20-year-old has 5x the ROI on recruitment effort.’
That might be a misleading calculation, insofar as a 20-year-old might get enthused about EA for a couple of years, but then drift off into other passions; whereas a 60-year-old who pivots into EA late in their career, despite the barriers to entry and the professional disincentives to do so, might be more likely to stick around.
And the 60-year-old might have a lot more to offer right from the start, in terms of professional expertise, connections, money, leadership experience, etc.
(Epistemic status: I’m 57, so I’m probably biased about this issue. On the other hand, young people are generally pretty oblivious to their ageism, so they might not recognize it when it’s being expressed.).
I still think of EA as a youth movement, though this label is gradually fading as the “founding cohort” matures.
It a trope that the youth are sometimes too quick to dismiss the wiser counsel of their elders.
I’ve witnessed many cases where, to my mind, people were (admirably) looking for good explicit arguments that they can easily understand, but (regrettably) forgetting that things like inferential distance sometimes make it hard to understand the views of people who are wiser or more expert than you are.
I’m sure I’ve made this mistake too. That said: my intellectual style is fairly slow and conservative compared to many of my peers, and I’m often happy to trust inarticulate holistic judgements over apparently solid explicit arguments. These traits insulate somewhat me from this youthful failure mode, though they expose me to similarly grave errors in other directions :/
Peter—nice point about inferential distance. This can lead to misunderstandings from both directions:
Youth can hear elders make an argument that sounds overly opaque, technical, and unfamiliar to them, given the big inferential distance involved (although it would sound utterly clear & persuasive to the elder’s professional colleagues), and dismiss it as incoherent.
Elders can see youth ignoring their arguments (which seem utterly clear & persuasive to them), get exasperated that they’ve invested decades learning about something only to be dismissed by people who don’t know nearly as much, and who can’t be bothered to do the work to overcome the inferential distance, and then the elders go into ‘trust my authority’ mode, which sounds domineering & irrational to the youth.
It’s worth being careful about both of these failure modes (which I’ve been guilty of, plenty of times, from both sides, at different ages).
To Peter and Geoffrey, I agree but I don’t think the dynamics of old and young working together are really an issue until you have young and old working together!
I don’t think there’s been a problematic effort to avoid hiring the more experienced, I just think a youthful movement will naturally do as EA has done...but when it reaches a crossroads as it has now, then it’s time for some new thinking. As a practical consideration, some organizations might not be able to afford hiring more senior people, but EA surely can.
Hi Liv. I think there’s a lot of truth in these statements, but I think there’s another side balancing it that is kind of hard to avoid—movements just start and grow, the grow from where they started, they attract people that were where they started—same dynamic happened in my past movement which I mention...EA started with young academics on campuses, that’s who populated it, it could have been much smaller and not controversial, but fate happened and big money came in and that’s what put it on it’s course toward all that’s happening now...You kind of just can’t help where you came from. So the question isn’t how can I change where I came from, but now that I’m here in my current reality, what can I do going forward to improve things? I have no real criticisms of how EA has done things, I love it, think it’s amazing, so grateful for it...I applaud the amazing young people who created it...but now with success it’s found itself in a new kind of crazy place...so maybe it’s time for some new energies within the group, I think diversity of all kinds and governance which empowers the new diversity is the path.
The problem with some criticisms is they imagine you could go back and change where you came from...the statements you gathered here that you’re asking for comment on kind of have that feeling for me...but I think some of it is very true now in the current reality...and it would be good to change some things, but it wasn’t planned or some huge mistake, it’s just how things developed from where it started.
Would you agree with the statement:
”EA made an attempt to attract as many students and young people as possible, and therefore neglected older groups. As a result, the movement to a huge extent:
a) has a too small proportion of emotionally mature people, which makes it more turbulent, and, as a result, less effective;
b) makes it not very attractive to mid-career and mature people, who—even if impressed by young prodigies, don’t regard them as their thought partners (due to lack of life experience);
c) puts too much pressure on young people, as they are sometimes put into leadership positions which they are emotionally not ready for”
.
For the record, I don’t know if I agree with this statement. But I’m curious what do you guys think.
Having gotten into an EA leadership position in my late 40s last year these statements ring true. I’m very grateful to be able to work with young and smart people but I see the same risks and downsides I faced when running my first startup in my early twenties. I learned a lot when it failed and hope to be able to use this experience in building a more resilient EA organization.
As a mid-career EA, I strongly agree with this.
Liv—I agree. I’ve complained about EA’s ageism a few times on EA Forum—an ageism that seems fairly common, but that is also perhaps only mild to moderate in its strength.
There seems to be a lot more EA effort invested in recruiting young people into EA (e.g. through 80k Hours) than to recruiting mid-career and late-career professionals who could offer a little wisdom, perspective, life experience, mentorship, professional contacts, etc.
I’ve sometimes seen this pro-youth bias justified in terms of expected future decades of useful contributions, e.g. ‘If we recruit a 20-year-old into EA, they can contribute for at least 50 years (assuming retirement at 70), whereas a 60-year-old might only contribute for another 10 years, so the 20-year-old has 5x the ROI on recruitment effort.’
That might be a misleading calculation, insofar as a 20-year-old might get enthused about EA for a couple of years, but then drift off into other passions; whereas a 60-year-old who pivots into EA late in their career, despite the barriers to entry and the professional disincentives to do so, might be more likely to stick around.
And the 60-year-old might have a lot more to offer right from the start, in terms of professional expertise, connections, money, leadership experience, etc.
(Epistemic status: I’m 57, so I’m probably biased about this issue. On the other hand, young people are generally pretty oblivious to their ageism, so they might not recognize it when it’s being expressed.).
+1 to Geoffrey here.
I still think of EA as a youth movement, though this label is gradually fading as the “founding cohort” matures.
It a trope that the youth are sometimes too quick to dismiss the wiser counsel of their elders.
I’ve witnessed many cases where, to my mind, people were (admirably) looking for good explicit arguments that they can easily understand, but (regrettably) forgetting that things like inferential distance sometimes make it hard to understand the views of people who are wiser or more expert than you are.
I’m sure I’ve made this mistake too. That said: my intellectual style is fairly slow and conservative compared to many of my peers, and I’m often happy to trust inarticulate holistic judgements over apparently solid explicit arguments. These traits insulate somewhat me from this youthful failure mode, though they expose me to similarly grave errors in other directions :/
Peter—nice point about inferential distance. This can lead to misunderstandings from both directions:
Youth can hear elders make an argument that sounds overly opaque, technical, and unfamiliar to them, given the big inferential distance involved (although it would sound utterly clear & persuasive to the elder’s professional colleagues), and dismiss it as incoherent.
Elders can see youth ignoring their arguments (which seem utterly clear & persuasive to them), get exasperated that they’ve invested decades learning about something only to be dismissed by people who don’t know nearly as much, and who can’t be bothered to do the work to overcome the inferential distance, and then the elders go into ‘trust my authority’ mode, which sounds domineering & irrational to the youth.
It’s worth being careful about both of these failure modes (which I’ve been guilty of, plenty of times, from both sides, at different ages).
To Peter and Geoffrey, I agree but I don’t think the dynamics of old and young working together are really an issue until you have young and old working together!
I don’t think there’s been a problematic effort to avoid hiring the more experienced, I just think a youthful movement will naturally do as EA has done...but when it reaches a crossroads as it has now, then it’s time for some new thinking. As a practical consideration, some organizations might not be able to afford hiring more senior people, but EA surely can.
Hi Liv. I think there’s a lot of truth in these statements, but I think there’s another side balancing it that is kind of hard to avoid—movements just start and grow, the grow from where they started, they attract people that were where they started—same dynamic happened in my past movement which I mention...EA started with young academics on campuses, that’s who populated it, it could have been much smaller and not controversial, but fate happened and big money came in and that’s what put it on it’s course toward all that’s happening now...You kind of just can’t help where you came from. So the question isn’t how can I change where I came from, but now that I’m here in my current reality, what can I do going forward to improve things? I have no real criticisms of how EA has done things, I love it, think it’s amazing, so grateful for it...I applaud the amazing young people who created it...but now with success it’s found itself in a new kind of crazy place...so maybe it’s time for some new energies within the group, I think diversity of all kinds and governance which empowers the new diversity is the path.
The problem with some criticisms is they imagine you could go back and change where you came from...the statements you gathered here that you’re asking for comment on kind of have that feeling for me...but I think some of it is very true now in the current reality...and it would be good to change some things, but it wasn’t planned or some huge mistake, it’s just how things developed from where it started.