Thanks for this! Some very quick and somewhat poorly qualified responses:
I agree with this. I have felt that IQ/intelligence is overrated by EA for a long time.
As an analogy, I think that IQ is like the top speed of a single drone. It’s easy to measure the speed of the drone and think that that matters most, but other factors are much more important (e.g., networking capacity, range and efficiency etc). Once you have a drone with a top speed of Xkm, you probably don’t care much about getting it to be higher speed, unless you are doing some particularly speed demanding task. If you have a tough work environment, long term durability is more important. If you have to work with multiple drones then their networking and social intelligence are probably more important . If you are selling the drones, then appearance and brand appeal are probably more important. In many of these cases, however, it may be much easier to just measure the top speed of the drones and use that to extrapolate their performance.
Similarly, I think that EA has a big evaluability bias related to competence assessment—that it probably focuses on IQ/signals of intelligence because these are easier to access and understand than other factors that matter.
This probably sometimes leads to suboptimal outcomes. E.g., If you go to Oxford and excel at writing about EA on the forum, you might be as, or more, likely to be hired as a movement builder for an area than if you get a degree from a less prestigious university where you lead 3+ highly successful social groups and an EA group.
As aside, I worry that EA doesn’t actually optimise well for finding smarts, because it seems to favour selecting people based on signals of intelligence that aren’t as good as getting them to do an IQ or performance test.
Many very smart people I know didn’t really try hard at school, care about prestige, or focus on status building growing up. Many are very humble and bad at the marketing that gets you status. It seems that this situation often condemns them to be disadvantaged by (EA/most) selection criteria. It may also lead to an over-representation of talented self-marketers in EA settings (which is probably the case in all professional settings) and perhaps also a tendency towards more overconfident or arrogant people being hired (I have only very limited anecdotal evidence for this ever happening and could be totally wrong).
Admittedly, there are good reasons to select ‘high intelligence signalling ’people over those who lack those signal but are actually as or more intelligent, as it such signal are persuasive to most audiences. It’s also not normal to post about your IQ scores but fine to imply them via marks, awards or degrees. So maybe this approach makes sense as a part of a larger theory of change focused on EA professionals looking smart/credible.
I will admit that I often make the mistake of instinctively thinking that X person is probably not super competent (or as competent as Y) because of where they went to uni or something like that. It’s very hard to avoid. It also generally a good rule of thumb to think that people who attended x institute are smart etc. So maybe it is unavoidable or something that works on aggregate and saves time over more demanding approaches etc.
Some quick suggestions re: “what additional traits distinct from IQ do you think are important and worth prioritizing more?”
Calibration/Forecasting/betting performance
Sustained performance under pressure
Sustained commitment to EA
Charisma (key for many roles)
Appearance (sadly, this matters much more than it should in social setting)
Network size (e.g., for marketing)
Emotional intelligence/social intelligence (e.g., in face recognition/reading the eyes test, performance)
Extraversion/interpersonal warmth/social novelty needs (key to movement building success)
Risk tolerance (e.g., for starting new project)
Status indifference (e.g., for low status, high importance ‘grunt’ work like being an exec assistant or movement builder)
As a general comment related to the above - I think that EA is going to need a lot of pretty average level intelligence level people for accelerating outputs and spreading messages across networks. I think it should stop holding out for so many elite level members.
As an example, many star performers in research have a huge pool of support from less competent or intelligent researchers, who will produce a first draft etc of a paper for them so that they can spread their genius more widely across many such papers. If someone like will thinks that having an exec assistant can double his output/impact (or something similar) then we might be missing out on a lot of impact multipliers by failing to hire such people.
Related to that, I sometimes feel that we are trying to slowly recruit teams of ‘geniuses’ (who may in fact be particularly poorly suited to work with each other), when we more urgently need large teams of people to help ‘geniuses’.
Thanks for this! Some very quick and somewhat poorly qualified responses:
I agree with this. I have felt that IQ/intelligence is overrated by EA for a long time.
As an analogy, I think that IQ is like the top speed of a single drone. It’s easy to measure the speed of the drone and think that that matters most, but other factors are much more important (e.g., networking capacity, range and efficiency etc). Once you have a drone with a top speed of Xkm, you probably don’t care much about getting it to be higher speed, unless you are doing some particularly speed demanding task. If you have a tough work environment, long term durability is more important. If you have to work with multiple drones then their networking and social intelligence are probably more important . If you are selling the drones, then appearance and brand appeal are probably more important. In many of these cases, however, it may be much easier to just measure the top speed of the drones and use that to extrapolate their performance.
Similarly, I think that EA has a big evaluability bias related to competence assessment—that it probably focuses on IQ/signals of intelligence because these are easier to access and understand than other factors that matter.
This probably sometimes leads to suboptimal outcomes. E.g., If you go to Oxford and excel at writing about EA on the forum, you might be as, or more, likely to be hired as a movement builder for an area than if you get a degree from a less prestigious university where you lead 3+ highly successful social groups and an EA group.
As aside, I worry that EA doesn’t actually optimise well for finding smarts, because it seems to favour selecting people based on signals of intelligence that aren’t as good as getting them to do an IQ or performance test.
Many very smart people I know didn’t really try hard at school, care about prestige, or focus on status building growing up. Many are very humble and bad at the marketing that gets you status. It seems that this situation often condemns them to be disadvantaged by (EA/most) selection criteria. It may also lead to an over-representation of talented self-marketers in EA settings (which is probably the case in all professional settings) and perhaps also a tendency towards more overconfident or arrogant people being hired (I have only very limited anecdotal evidence for this ever happening and could be totally wrong).
Admittedly, there are good reasons to select ‘high intelligence signalling ’people over those who lack those signal but are actually as or more intelligent, as it such signal are persuasive to most audiences. It’s also not normal to post about your IQ scores but fine to imply them via marks, awards or degrees. So maybe this approach makes sense as a part of a larger theory of change focused on EA professionals looking smart/credible.
I will admit that I often make the mistake of instinctively thinking that X person is probably not super competent (or as competent as Y) because of where they went to uni or something like that. It’s very hard to avoid. It also generally a good rule of thumb to think that people who attended x institute are smart etc. So maybe it is unavoidable or something that works on aggregate and saves time over more demanding approaches etc.
Some quick suggestions re: “what additional traits distinct from IQ do you think are important and worth prioritizing more?”
Calibration/Forecasting/betting performance
Sustained performance under pressure
Sustained commitment to EA
Charisma (key for many roles)
Appearance (sadly, this matters much more than it should in social setting)
Network size (e.g., for marketing)
Emotional intelligence/social intelligence (e.g., in face recognition/reading the eyes test, performance)
Extraversion/interpersonal warmth/social novelty needs (key to movement building success)
Risk tolerance (e.g., for starting new project)
Status indifference (e.g., for low status, high importance ‘grunt’ work like being an exec assistant or movement builder)
As a general comment related to the above - I think that EA is going to need a lot of pretty average level intelligence level people for accelerating outputs and spreading messages across networks. I think it should stop holding out for so many elite level members.
As an example, many star performers in research have a huge pool of support from less competent or intelligent researchers, who will produce a first draft etc of a paper for them so that they can spread their genius more widely across many such papers. If someone like will thinks that having an exec assistant can double his output/impact (or something similar) then we might be missing out on a lot of impact multipliers by failing to hire such people.
Related to that, I sometimes feel that we are trying to slowly recruit teams of ‘geniuses’ (who may in fact be particularly poorly suited to work with each other), when we more urgently need large teams of people to help ‘geniuses’.