TL;DR Underrepresented groups are underrepresented because they self-select into EA circles at lower rates due to divergent values. Concerted initiatives to increase diversity are strongly biased towards the values of the people running the initiative. Communities are exclusionary by necessity.
I hope as one of the rare developing world EAs, my perspective is useful here. This post is a nice thought, but like many nice thoughts relating to diversity I believe it collapses on deeper consideration of how it would be implemented. There is a reason EA mainly consists of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people, and underrepresented groups are not underrepresented due to some conspiracy to exclude them. It’s because EA is based on a set of assumptions derived from WEIRD patterns of thought that are not common outside certain groups. For example, statements such as “All people’s lives should be valued equally regardless of their age, gender, sexuality, religion etc.” or “Empirical reasoning is the best path towards truth” would receive very different levels of agreement at Germany universities and Bangladeshi villages. Be careful what you wish for! Those who claim to seek diversity are also the most likely to be horrified when they find it. As a result most diversity initiatives in WEIRD circles tend to only select members of underrepresented groups from an elite, liberally educated minority within those groups who are rarely representative of the values of the groups as a whole, and much more representative of the values of the diversity seekers. So I more or less agree with other commenters on this post—demographic diversity is a fairly poor proxy for intellectual diversity, especially when it is brought in through a concerted effort to increase diversity, rather than in an organic manner that reflects the changing norms of different groups and the communities they are joining.
Communities are exclusionary by necessity : the questions you ask to determine entry are biased by the perspectives of existing members because they have to be! There is no reason for the community to exist if it is perfectly representative of all opinions in society at large—to paraphrase Syndrome, if you have everyone’s values, you have no values. Would I be happy to meet more EAs who shared my background? Of course! Would I be happy if this happened at the cost of losing the values that make EA such a powerful lens with which to view the world? Hell no! Diversity is good at the margin, but it is not an intrinsic good. There is a balancing point that is best for the overall health of the community—it’s important to try to rigorously determine what that is before making calls for increasing diversity.
One concrete way to do that would be to carry out two very large surveys—one of EAs, and one of randomly sampled people. They would measure agreement with certain values that are generally considered axiomatic to the EA way of thought. We could then statistically determine whether certain values cluster with certain identities, and the degree to which those values/identities are represented within EA. Would be a lot of work and money, but I believe it’s the only rigorous and safe way to run a diversity initiative!
Aditya, thank you for your perspective! I think you have raised some excellent points, especially that movements are by definition exclusive as they would just be the “mainstream” otherwise, and that EA values align with a WEIRD background. I also agree that many people think of diversity as a box to tick and they don’t actually want to engage with a set of truly diverse people. And honestly, I think everyone (including myself) should meditate on their motivations for increasing diversity (e.g. wanting more women in EA to extend one’s dating pool might be a natural instinct but it’s the worst possible driver for a gender diversity initiative).
On the other hand, over 50% of WEIRD people are women (academic participation and success of women now outnumbers men), probably 10% are LGBTQ, a significant number are People of Color and an also significant number vote for conservative parties. If these people don’t show up in the EA community, I think it’s valid to ask ourselves “Why?”. Do we drive them away with sexist and racist behavior? If they are not privileged enough to show up, should we think of raising their privileges as an important cause area? If they don’t share our values, can we be confident that we have the right values or should we open ourselves up to their perspective and reevaluate our values afterwards? It doesn’t mean we have to accept diluting our values, but it would be irrational not to consider the possibility.
I like your idea of surveying people to determine the main differences in values between EA-aligned people and the rest of societies. My only concern, which I’ve voiced in other comments under this post, is that such a survey might already be biased. Which means, we’d already need a somewhat diverse (both intellectual and demographic) panel to get started.
Hi Lukas, thanks for your kind words! I agree with you on most points—my analysis was mostly regarding ethnic identities rather than those relating to gender, sexuality or political orientation, since the former is what I have experience with. I do of course think that EA would benefit from more equal representation of these groups, and my intuition is that it’s more tractable as well (relative to religious or ethnic minorities). I’m not entirely sure why women are underrepresented in EA or even if that is indeed the case. If it is, I’d imagine it’s related to the same reason they’re underrepresented in fields like computer engineering, which EA draws much of its membership from—some complex combination of innate differences, social conditioning and discrimination. I’m not sure how you would fix this, but what I’m trying to do is cautioning against shortcuts—the negative effects of deliberately trying to increase diversity may outweigh the benefits, since any selection mechanism would likely introduce more bias than already exists in the community at large. Decentralized, organic change seems to be the way to go, but that takes time. Curious to hear OP (or other feminist identifying people’s) take on this.
To address your point on opening up to different perspectives, while I think EA’s openness to change is one of its greatest strengths, there is such a thing as being too open to different perspectives; as you’ve recognized, that would eventually just make us the mainstream. You do need to have some degree of confidence in your values. Along the same lines, the survey will of course be biased, because it’s supposed to be! It would not be an effective selection mechanism if it did not already represent the existing values of the community, whether those values originate from the current demographic makeup of EA or are unrelated to it. Creating social norms that are truly unbiased seems like an infinite regress problem, so my preferred approach would be evolutionary—let different local EA chapters adopt different social norms, then promote the norms that are most successful in achieving the broader aims of the EA community.
FWIW, I don’t think your argument goes through for ethnic diversity either; EA is much whiter than its WEIRD base. I agree aiming to match the ethnic diversity of the world would be a mistake.
Are you saying ethnic minorities in the West are less likely to be WEIRD and hence underrepresented in EA, or that ethnic minorities who are WEIRD are underrepresented in EA? The former wouldn’t surprise me at all, given the significant disparities in income and educational opportunity between ethnic minorities in the West. The latter would surprise me, but I’m not sure how you would go about proving it, since it would require you to already have an estimate of demographics of true WEIRDs, and I’m not sure how you’d go about collecting that. Unless the assumption that any educated person from a Western Developed country is WEIRD, which I would disagree with.
I’m claiming the latter, yes. I do agree it’s hard to prove, but I place high subjective credence (~88%) on it. Put simply, if I can directly observe factors that would tend to lower the representation of WEIRD ethnic minorities, I don’t necessarily need to have an estmate of the percentages of WEIRD people who are ethnic minorities, or even of the percentage of people in EA who are from ethnic minorities. I only need to think that the factors are meaningful enough to lead to meaningful differences in representation, and not being offset by comparably-meaningful factors in the other direction. Some of these factors are innocuous, some less so.
But if you’re interested in public attempts to take the direct comparison route, which I fully acknowledge would be stronger evidence if done well, you might find this post of relevance. (Note I’m not necessarily advocating for the concrete suggestions in the post, mostly linking for the counts at the start.)
TL;DR Underrepresented groups are underrepresented because they self-select into EA circles at lower rates due to divergent values. Concerted initiatives to increase diversity are strongly biased towards the values of the people running the initiative. Communities are exclusionary by necessity.
I hope as one of the rare developing world EAs, my perspective is useful here. This post is a nice thought, but like many nice thoughts relating to diversity I believe it collapses on deeper consideration of how it would be implemented. There is a reason EA mainly consists of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people, and underrepresented groups are not underrepresented due to some conspiracy to exclude them. It’s because EA is based on a set of assumptions derived from WEIRD patterns of thought that are not common outside certain groups. For example, statements such as “All people’s lives should be valued equally regardless of their age, gender, sexuality, religion etc.” or “Empirical reasoning is the best path towards truth” would receive very different levels of agreement at Germany universities and Bangladeshi villages. Be careful what you wish for! Those who claim to seek diversity are also the most likely to be horrified when they find it. As a result most diversity initiatives in WEIRD circles tend to only select members of underrepresented groups from an elite, liberally educated minority within those groups who are rarely representative of the values of the groups as a whole, and much more representative of the values of the diversity seekers. So I more or less agree with other commenters on this post—demographic diversity is a fairly poor proxy for intellectual diversity, especially when it is brought in through a concerted effort to increase diversity, rather than in an organic manner that reflects the changing norms of different groups and the communities they are joining.
Communities are exclusionary by necessity : the questions you ask to determine entry are biased by the perspectives of existing members because they have to be! There is no reason for the community to exist if it is perfectly representative of all opinions in society at large—to paraphrase Syndrome, if you have everyone’s values, you have no values. Would I be happy to meet more EAs who shared my background? Of course! Would I be happy if this happened at the cost of losing the values that make EA such a powerful lens with which to view the world? Hell no! Diversity is good at the margin, but it is not an intrinsic good. There is a balancing point that is best for the overall health of the community—it’s important to try to rigorously determine what that is before making calls for increasing diversity.
One concrete way to do that would be to carry out two very large surveys—one of EAs, and one of randomly sampled people. They would measure agreement with certain values that are generally considered axiomatic to the EA way of thought. We could then statistically determine whether certain values cluster with certain identities, and the degree to which those values/identities are represented within EA. Would be a lot of work and money, but I believe it’s the only rigorous and safe way to run a diversity initiative!
Aditya, thank you for your perspective! I think you have raised some excellent points, especially that movements are by definition exclusive as they would just be the “mainstream” otherwise, and that EA values align with a WEIRD background. I also agree that many people think of diversity as a box to tick and they don’t actually want to engage with a set of truly diverse people. And honestly, I think everyone (including myself) should meditate on their motivations for increasing diversity (e.g. wanting more women in EA to extend one’s dating pool might be a natural instinct but it’s the worst possible driver for a gender diversity initiative).
On the other hand, over 50% of WEIRD people are women (academic participation and success of women now outnumbers men), probably 10% are LGBTQ, a significant number are People of Color and an also significant number vote for conservative parties. If these people don’t show up in the EA community, I think it’s valid to ask ourselves “Why?”. Do we drive them away with sexist and racist behavior? If they are not privileged enough to show up, should we think of raising their privileges as an important cause area? If they don’t share our values, can we be confident that we have the right values or should we open ourselves up to their perspective and reevaluate our values afterwards? It doesn’t mean we have to accept diluting our values, but it would be irrational not to consider the possibility.
I like your idea of surveying people to determine the main differences in values between EA-aligned people and the rest of societies. My only concern, which I’ve voiced in other comments under this post, is that such a survey might already be biased. Which means, we’d already need a somewhat diverse (both intellectual and demographic) panel to get started.
Hi Lukas, thanks for your kind words! I agree with you on most points—my analysis was mostly regarding ethnic identities rather than those relating to gender, sexuality or political orientation, since the former is what I have experience with. I do of course think that EA would benefit from more equal representation of these groups, and my intuition is that it’s more tractable as well (relative to religious or ethnic minorities). I’m not entirely sure why women are underrepresented in EA or even if that is indeed the case. If it is, I’d imagine it’s related to the same reason they’re underrepresented in fields like computer engineering, which EA draws much of its membership from—some complex combination of innate differences, social conditioning and discrimination. I’m not sure how you would fix this, but what I’m trying to do is cautioning against shortcuts—the negative effects of deliberately trying to increase diversity may outweigh the benefits, since any selection mechanism would likely introduce more bias than already exists in the community at large. Decentralized, organic change seems to be the way to go, but that takes time. Curious to hear OP (or other feminist identifying people’s) take on this.
To address your point on opening up to different perspectives, while I think EA’s openness to change is one of its greatest strengths, there is such a thing as being too open to different perspectives; as you’ve recognized, that would eventually just make us the mainstream. You do need to have some degree of confidence in your values. Along the same lines, the survey will of course be biased, because it’s supposed to be! It would not be an effective selection mechanism if it did not already represent the existing values of the community, whether those values originate from the current demographic makeup of EA or are unrelated to it. Creating social norms that are truly unbiased seems like an infinite regress problem, so my preferred approach would be evolutionary—let different local EA chapters adopt different social norms, then promote the norms that are most successful in achieving the broader aims of the EA community.
FWIW, I don’t think your argument goes through for ethnic diversity either; EA is much whiter than its WEIRD base. I agree aiming to match the ethnic diversity of the world would be a mistake.
(Disclaimer: Not white)
Are you saying ethnic minorities in the West are less likely to be WEIRD and hence underrepresented in EA, or that ethnic minorities who are WEIRD are underrepresented in EA? The former wouldn’t surprise me at all, given the significant disparities in income and educational opportunity between ethnic minorities in the West. The latter would surprise me, but I’m not sure how you would go about proving it, since it would require you to already have an estimate of demographics of true WEIRDs, and I’m not sure how you’d go about collecting that. Unless the assumption that any educated person from a Western Developed country is WEIRD, which I would disagree with.
I’m claiming the latter, yes. I do agree it’s hard to prove, but I place high subjective credence (~88%) on it. Put simply, if I can directly observe factors that would tend to lower the representation of WEIRD ethnic minorities, I don’t necessarily need to have an estmate of the percentages of WEIRD people who are ethnic minorities, or even of the percentage of people in EA who are from ethnic minorities. I only need to think that the factors are meaningful enough to lead to meaningful differences in representation, and not being offset by comparably-meaningful factors in the other direction. Some of these factors are innocuous, some less so.
But if you’re interested in public attempts to take the direct comparison route, which I fully acknowledge would be stronger evidence if done well, you might find this post of relevance. (Note I’m not necessarily advocating for the concrete suggestions in the post, mostly linking for the counts at the start.)