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.
+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.