Thanks for taking the time to write this response! We really appreciate the feedback.
A couple of points:
On the first andsecondpoint, I agree that we could have been much more rigorous about the specifics of “what we mean by elitism.” We mostly mean elite institutions and organizations, which we used interchangeably with elite environments (e.g. having worked at SpaceX, or having studied at MIT).
Sometimes (maybe even often?), the best in the field won’t be from an ‘elite’ institution (e.g. Ramanujan). I agree that elite institutions =/= best talent. The claim that we’re making is that elite institutions correlate very strongly with fairly great talent depending on the situation. We mention in the post that elite selection can systematically miss very great people, especially for traits like agency or risk-aversion (entrepreneurial types).
“this is less valuable to draw from as on average these people will have faced fewer obstacles and gained less life experience than equally able peers from different socioeconomic brackets.”
I agree that equally able peers from different socioeconomic brackets could likely be better, for many of the reasons you stated. But the question is how to find these peers? If by equally able, you mean that those students attend the same institutions and the only difference is that they are from a lower socioeconomic bracket, we don’t disagree.
”You mention earlier traits like ‘leadership’ and ‘agency’” It’s hard to speak about these things without concrete numbers, and there’s no doubt that leadership is also formed in people without access to elite environments. On agency, I agree with you. We explicitly mentioned it as a trait that isn’t correlated much with elite environments.
On the last point, I’ve clarified our point and edited the original post. The claim is that people with the affordance to focus a lot of time on EA tend to skew towards people with the privilege to do so. There are certainly many dedicated EAs who haven’t come from places of privilege, and they’ve worked incredibly hard to get to where they are. I think this is awesome! I don’t want to discount any of this. But often, the foundational and basic needs need to be satisfied (e.g. financial, time, etc).
As a final note, I want to emphasize that people from non-elite institutions can, and often do amazing work. Elite institutions don’t ensure the “best” people, or even “better people”, simply a baseline of fairly competent people depending on what your situation is.
Thanks again for writing up your comment! We really want to encourage discussion around topics that are often “taboo” but important and widely present in the movement.
Thanks for taking the time to write this response! We really appreciate the feedback.
A couple of points:
On the first and second point, I agree that we could have been much more rigorous about the specifics of “what we mean by elitism.” We mostly mean elite institutions and organizations, which we used interchangeably with elite environments (e.g. having worked at SpaceX, or having studied at MIT).
Sometimes (maybe even often?), the best in the field won’t be from an ‘elite’ institution (e.g. Ramanujan). I agree that elite institutions =/= best talent. The claim that we’re making is that elite institutions correlate very strongly with fairly great talent depending on the situation. We mention in the post that elite selection can systematically miss very great people, especially for traits like agency or risk-aversion (entrepreneurial types).
“this is less valuable to draw from as on average these people will have faced fewer obstacles and gained less life experience than equally able peers from different socioeconomic brackets.”
I agree that equally able peers from different socioeconomic brackets could likely be better, for many of the reasons you stated. But the question is how to find these peers? If by equally able, you mean that those students attend the same institutions and the only difference is that they are from a lower socioeconomic bracket, we don’t disagree.
”You mention earlier traits like ‘leadership’ and ‘agency’”
It’s hard to speak about these things without concrete numbers, and there’s no doubt that leadership is also formed in people without access to elite environments. On agency, I agree with you. We explicitly mentioned it as a trait that isn’t correlated much with elite environments.
On the last point, I’ve clarified our point and edited the original post. The claim is that people with the affordance to focus a lot of time on EA tend to skew towards people with the privilege to do so. There are certainly many dedicated EAs who haven’t come from places of privilege, and they’ve worked incredibly hard to get to where they are. I think this is awesome! I don’t want to discount any of this. But often, the foundational and basic needs need to be satisfied (e.g. financial, time, etc).
As a final note, I want to emphasize that people from non-elite institutions can, and often do amazing work. Elite institutions don’t ensure the “best” people, or even “better people”, simply a baseline of fairly competent people depending on what your situation is.
Thanks again for writing up your comment! We really want to encourage discussion around topics that are often “taboo” but important and widely present in the movement.