By focusing on people “for whom you’ll have useful things to say”, you talk to people who do not need additional resources (like guidance or introductions) for increasing their impact. The contrafactual impact is low.
For example, testimonials on the website include PhD Student in Machine Learning at Cambridge and the President of Harvard Law School Effective Altruism.
I don’t quite agree here. I was counting ‘additional resources’ like guidance and introductions as ‘things to say’. So focusing on people for whom we have useful things to say should increase rather than decrease the extent to which we talk to people who need these resources to increase their impact.
I agree we’re not always good at figuring out which people could most benefit from our providing resources / introductions. We try to keep calibrating on this from our conversations. That’s clearly easier in the case of noticing people we talk to for whom we couldn’t be that useful than the opposite. To counter that asymmetry, we try to do experiments with tweaking which people we speak to in order to get a sense of how useful we can be to different groups.
With respect to your concrete examples:
The descriptions we’ve given of people on that page is actually from where they’re at a year or two after we speak to them. That’s because it takes a while for us to figure out if the conversation was actually useful to them. For example, I think Cullen wasn’t President of HL EA when we spoke to them.
That aside, on the question of whether we should generally speak to people with these types of profiles:
Being a PhD student in Machine Learning doesn’t seem like an indication of how much someone knows about / has interacted with the effective altruism community. So it doesn’t seem to me like it should count against us talking to them. (Though of course the person might in fact already be well connected to the EA community and not stand to benefit much from talking to us.)
It seems like a hard decision to me whether someone running an EA student group should count in favour of or against our speaking to them. On the one hand, they might well be steeped enough in effective altruism they won’t benefit that much from us recommending specific resources to them. They’re also in a better position to reach out to other EAs to ask for their advice than people new to the community would be. On the other hand, it’s a strong signal that they want to spend their energies improving the world as much as possible, and so our research will definitely be applicable for them. It’s also not a foregone conclusion that someone running a student group has had much opportunity to sound board their career with others who feel equally strongly about helping the world, let alone those with similar values but more experience. So I could imagine us being really useful for EA group leaders, despite the caveats above.
I’d like to second the opinion that it is a bit of a turn off that the resources go toward people who already have resources. I understand that “justice” and “equality of opportunity” aren’t core EA concerns, and I also realize that giving an hour of time to a person at an elite university who has received lots of educational benefits in life very well may have a higher ROI than giving an hour of time to a “normal” person (I’m using normal here to indicate a person who grew up in a family with a more median income, and who went to a less outlier school).
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for this. The current practice is very much in line with the career advice on 80,000 Hours, which seems to be primarily applicable to people who are able to get jobs at McKinsey, get into PhD Programs about Artificial Intelligence, and able to earn well-above a median income. Elitism isn’t inherently a bad thing; it can sometimes simply be a way of having high standards.
For context, I’m writing this as a person who grew up in a lower-middle class family, who didn’t live in a big city with lots of opportunities, who went to a university that is not famous, and who has never earned more than the average income. I’m privileged in lots of ways in my life, but because the paths that are highlighted on your website aren’t realistic options (unless I were to spend large amounts of money on re-schooling), it sends a message of “if you aren’t in this particular privileged class of people who have received lots of education at elite institutions, then you probably aren’t the right fit for our club.”
I don’t quite agree here. I was counting ‘additional resources’ like guidance and introductions as ‘things to say’. So focusing on people for whom we have useful things to say should increase rather than decrease the extent to which we talk to people who need these resources to increase their impact.
I agree we’re not always good at figuring out which people could most benefit from our providing resources / introductions. We try to keep calibrating on this from our conversations. That’s clearly easier in the case of noticing people we talk to for whom we couldn’t be that useful than the opposite. To counter that asymmetry, we try to do experiments with tweaking which people we speak to in order to get a sense of how useful we can be to different groups.
With respect to your concrete examples:
The descriptions we’ve given of people on that page is actually from where they’re at a year or two after we speak to them. That’s because it takes a while for us to figure out if the conversation was actually useful to them. For example, I think Cullen wasn’t President of HL EA when we spoke to them.
That aside, on the question of whether we should generally speak to people with these types of profiles:
Being a PhD student in Machine Learning doesn’t seem like an indication of how much someone knows about / has interacted with the effective altruism community. So it doesn’t seem to me like it should count against us talking to them. (Though of course the person might in fact already be well connected to the EA community and not stand to benefit much from talking to us.)
It seems like a hard decision to me whether someone running an EA student group should count in favour of or against our speaking to them. On the one hand, they might well be steeped enough in effective altruism they won’t benefit that much from us recommending specific resources to them. They’re also in a better position to reach out to other EAs to ask for their advice than people new to the community would be. On the other hand, it’s a strong signal that they want to spend their energies improving the world as much as possible, and so our research will definitely be applicable for them. It’s also not a foregone conclusion that someone running a student group has had much opportunity to sound board their career with others who feel equally strongly about helping the world, let alone those with similar values but more experience. So I could imagine us being really useful for EA group leaders, despite the caveats above.
I’d like to second the opinion that it is a bit of a turn off that the resources go toward people who already have resources. I understand that “justice” and “equality of opportunity” aren’t core EA concerns, and I also realize that giving an hour of time to a person at an elite university who has received lots of educational benefits in life very well may have a higher ROI than giving an hour of time to a “normal” person (I’m using normal here to indicate a person who grew up in a family with a more median income, and who went to a less outlier school).
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for this. The current practice is very much in line with the career advice on 80,000 Hours, which seems to be primarily applicable to people who are able to get jobs at McKinsey, get into PhD Programs about Artificial Intelligence, and able to earn well-above a median income. Elitism isn’t inherently a bad thing; it can sometimes simply be a way of having high standards.
For context, I’m writing this as a person who grew up in a lower-middle class family, who didn’t live in a big city with lots of opportunities, who went to a university that is not famous, and who has never earned more than the average income. I’m privileged in lots of ways in my life, but because the paths that are highlighted on your website aren’t realistic options (unless I were to spend large amounts of money on re-schooling), it sends a message of “if you aren’t in this particular privileged class of people who have received lots of education at elite institutions, then you probably aren’t the right fit for our club.”