Thanks for this, I agree with almost all of it. Just one observation, which I think is important. You say “Now one might think that because we have a lot of smart people, we might be able to avoid the worst outcomes here, by just not enforcing extreme standards that seem pretty crazy.”
I think the main factor that could contain craziness is social judgment rather intelligence. So, I think the prevalence of autism in the community means that EAs will be less able to than other social groups to contain craziness.
The 2020 SlateStarCodex survey has some data on this. Obviously it is quite limited by the fact that the sample is pre-selected for the (rationalist-leaning) SSC audience already, which you might also expect to be associated with autism.
This survey asked about identification as EA (No/Sorta/Yes) and autism (I don’t have this condition and neither does anyone in my family/I have family members (within two generations) with this condition/I think I might have this condition, although I have never been formally diagnosed/I have a formal diagnosis of this condition). Unfortunately, these leave a lot of researcher degrees of freedom (e.g. what to do with the “Sorta” and the “never been formally diagnosed” respondents).
Just looking at the two raw measures straightforwardly, we see no significant differences, though you can see that there are more people with a formal diagnosis in the “Yes” category.
I’d be wary of p-hacking from here, though fwiw, with different, more focused analyses, the results are borderline significant (both sides of the borderline), e.g. looking at whether someone said “Yes” they are an EA * whether they are formally diagnosed with autism, there is a significant association (p=0.022).
I have previously considered whether it would be worth including a question about this in the EAS, but it seems quite sensitive and relatively low value given our high space constraints.
This sounds kind of plausible to me, but couldn’t you equally say that you’d expect autism to be mitigating factor to cultiness, because cults are about conformity to group shibboleths for social reasons which autistic people are better at avoiding ? (At least, I’d have thought we are. Maybe only I have that perception?) That kind of makes me think that actually it is just easy to generate plausible-sounding hypothesis about the effects of a fairly broad and nebulous thing like “autistic traits” and maybe none of them should be taken that seriously without statistical evidence to back them up.
Thanks for this, I agree with almost all of it. Just one observation, which I think is important. You say “Now one might think that because we have a lot of smart people, we might be able to avoid the worst outcomes here, by just not enforcing extreme standards that seem pretty crazy.”
I think the main factor that could contain craziness is social judgment rather intelligence. So, I think the prevalence of autism in the community means that EAs will be less able to than other social groups to contain craziness.
Hi John,
Is there concrete data on the prevalence of autism in the EA community?
The 2020 SlateStarCodex survey has some data on this. Obviously it is quite limited by the fact that the sample is pre-selected for the (rationalist-leaning) SSC audience already, which you might also expect to be associated with autism.
This survey asked about identification as EA (No/Sorta/Yes) and autism (I don’t have this condition and neither does anyone in my family/I have family members (within two generations) with this condition/I think I might have this condition, although I have never been formally diagnosed/I have a formal diagnosis of this condition). Unfortunately, these leave a lot of researcher degrees of freedom (e.g. what to do with the “Sorta” and the “never been formally diagnosed” respondents).
Just looking at the two raw measures straightforwardly, we see no significant differences, though you can see that there are more people with a formal diagnosis in the “Yes” category.
I’d be wary of p-hacking from here, though fwiw, with different, more focused analyses, the results are borderline significant (both sides of the borderline), e.g. looking at whether someone said “Yes” they are an EA * whether they are formally diagnosed with autism, there is a significant association (p=0.022).
I have previously considered whether it would be worth including a question about this in the EAS, but it seems quite sensitive and relatively low value given our high space constraints.
Not to my knowledge, though I think it’s pretty clear
This sounds kind of plausible to me, but couldn’t you equally say that you’d expect autism to be mitigating factor to cultiness, because cults are about conformity to group shibboleths for social reasons which autistic people are better at avoiding ? (At least, I’d have thought we are. Maybe only I have that perception?) That kind of makes me think that actually it is just easy to generate plausible-sounding hypothesis about the effects of a fairly broad and nebulous thing like “autistic traits” and maybe none of them should be taken that seriously without statistical evidence to back them up.