The EA movement is disproportionately composed of highly logical, analytically minded individuals, often with explicitly quantitative backgrounds. The intuitive-seeming folk explanation for this phenomenon is that that EA, with its focus on rigor and quantification, appeals to people with a certain mindset, and that the relative lack of diversity of thinking styles in the movement is a function of personality type.
I want to reframe this in a way that I think makes a little more sense: the case for an EA perspective is really only made in an analytic, quantitative way. In this sense, having a quantitative mindset is actually a soft prerequisite for “getting” EA, and therefore for getting involved.
I don’t mean to say that only quantitative people can understand the movement, or that there’s something intellectually very special about EAs.
Rather- very few people would disagree that charity should be effective. Even non-utilitarians readily agree that in most contexts we should help as many people as we can. But the essential concepts for understanding the EA perspective are highly unfamiliar to most people.
Expected value
Cost-benefit analysis
Probability
An awareness of the abilities and limitations of social science
You don’t need to be an expert in any of these areas to “get” EA. You just need to be vaguely comfortable with them in the way that people who have studied microeconomics or analytic philosophy or mathematics are, and most other people aren’t.
This may be a distinction without a difference, but I want to raise the perspective that the composition of the EA movement is less about personality types and more about intellectual preparation.
Epistemic status: Pure opinion, but based on a lot of real-world experience
Given the number of non-analytic people involved in EA, I don’t think having a quantitative mindset is a prerequisite.
I’ve known or known of many people for whom the essential concept of “expected value” read as “if you want to buy something good, buy it for a low price when you can”, which doesn’t require any major intuitive leaps from everyday life. Same for “probability”, which reads to many people as “do what has the best chance of working out” (a lot of people seem to understand this when it applies to EA issues like supporting GiveWell-type charities vs. charities with murkier missions).
I think having intellectual preparation of the kind you mentioned can be helpful, but I also think that there are more important reasons EA seems to have such a quantitative concentration:
The types of EA orgs that exist in the public eye tend to have roles that lean very analytical. It’s not surprising that the average GiveWell researcher is very comfortable with quantitative thinking, but this doesn’t tell us much about the average Giving What We Can member (most of whom quietly donate a lot of money to excellent charities without rising to “public attention” among EAs).
People interested in EA tend to promote it more to friends than strangers, which creates a natural bubble effect; people who get involved with EA now are more likely than chance to resemble people who got involved early on (e.g. philosophers, economists, and tech folks). If you look at people who got into EA because they read about it in a mainstream news outlet, or happened to pick up Will MacAskill’s book when it was on sale somewhere, I think you’ll find a weaker quantitative skew than with people who were introduced by friends. (This is a prediction I don’t yet have any way to validate.)
Thanks for your thoughts. I wasn’t thinking about the submerged part of the EA iceberg (e.g. GWWC membership), and I do feel somewhat less confident in my initial thoughts.
Still, I wonder if you’d countenance a broader version of my initial point- that there is a way of thinking that is not itself explicitly quantitative, but that is nonetheless very common among quantitative types. I’m tempted to call this ‘rationality,’ but it’s not obvious to me that this thinking style is as all-encompassing as what LW-ers, for example, mean when they talk about rationality.
The examples you give of commonsensical versions of expected value and probability are what I’m thinking about here- perhaps the intuitive, informal versions of these concepts are soft prerequisites. This thinking style is not restricted to the formally trained, but it is more common among them (because it’s trained into them). So in my (revised) telling, the thinking style is a prerequisite and explicitly quantitative types are overrepresented in EA simply because they’re more likely to have been exposed to these concepts in either a formal or informal setting.
The reason I think this might be important is that I occasionally have conversations in which these concepts—in the informal sense—seem unfamiliar. “Do what has the best chance of working out” is, in my experience, a surprisingly rare way of conducting everyday business in the world, and some people seem to find it strange and new to think in that fashion. The possible takeaway is that some basic informal groundwork might need to be done to maximize the efficacy of different EA messages.
I basically agree that having intuitions similar to those I outlined seems very important and perhaps necessary for getting involved with EA. (I think you can be “interested” without those things, because EA seems shiny and impressive if you read certain things about it, but not having a sense for how you should act based on EA ideas will limit how involved you actually get.) Your explanation about exposure to related concepts almost definitely explains some of the variance you’ve spotted.
I spend a lot of my EA-centric conversations trying to frame things to people in a non-quantitative way (at least if they aren’t especially quantitative themselves).
I’m a huge fan of people doing “basic groundwork” to maximize the efficacy of EA messages. I’d be likely to fund such work if it existed and I thought the quality was reasonably high. However, I’m not aware of many active projects in this domain; ClearerThinking.org and normal marketing by GiveWell et al. are all that come to mind, plus things like big charitable matches that raise awareness of EA charities as a side effect.
Oh, and then there’s this contest, which I’m very excited about and would gladly sponsor more test subjects for if possible. Thanks for reminding me that I should write to Eric Schwitzgebel about this.
The EA movement is disproportionately composed of highly logical, analytically minded individuals, often with explicitly quantitative backgrounds. The intuitive-seeming folk explanation for this phenomenon is that that EA, with its focus on rigor and quantification, appeals to people with a certain mindset, and that the relative lack of diversity of thinking styles in the movement is a function of personality type.
I want to reframe this in a way that I think makes a little more sense: the case for an EA perspective is really only made in an analytic, quantitative way. In this sense, having a quantitative mindset is actually a soft prerequisite for “getting” EA, and therefore for getting involved.
I don’t mean to say that only quantitative people can understand the movement, or that there’s something intellectually very special about EAs.
Rather- very few people would disagree that charity should be effective. Even non-utilitarians readily agree that in most contexts we should help as many people as we can. But the essential concepts for understanding the EA perspective are highly unfamiliar to most people.
Expected value
Cost-benefit analysis
Probability
An awareness of the abilities and limitations of social science
You don’t need to be an expert in any of these areas to “get” EA. You just need to be vaguely comfortable with them in the way that people who have studied microeconomics or analytic philosophy or mathematics are, and most other people aren’t.
This may be a distinction without a difference, but I want to raise the perspective that the composition of the EA movement is less about personality types and more about intellectual preparation.
Epistemic status: Pure opinion, but based on a lot of real-world experience
Given the number of non-analytic people involved in EA, I don’t think having a quantitative mindset is a prerequisite.
I’ve known or known of many people for whom the essential concept of “expected value” read as “if you want to buy something good, buy it for a low price when you can”, which doesn’t require any major intuitive leaps from everyday life. Same for “probability”, which reads to many people as “do what has the best chance of working out” (a lot of people seem to understand this when it applies to EA issues like supporting GiveWell-type charities vs. charities with murkier missions).
I think having intellectual preparation of the kind you mentioned can be helpful, but I also think that there are more important reasons EA seems to have such a quantitative concentration:
The types of EA orgs that exist in the public eye tend to have roles that lean very analytical. It’s not surprising that the average GiveWell researcher is very comfortable with quantitative thinking, but this doesn’t tell us much about the average Giving What We Can member (most of whom quietly donate a lot of money to excellent charities without rising to “public attention” among EAs).
People interested in EA tend to promote it more to friends than strangers, which creates a natural bubble effect; people who get involved with EA now are more likely than chance to resemble people who got involved early on (e.g. philosophers, economists, and tech folks). If you look at people who got into EA because they read about it in a mainstream news outlet, or happened to pick up Will MacAskill’s book when it was on sale somewhere, I think you’ll find a weaker quantitative skew than with people who were introduced by friends. (This is a prediction I don’t yet have any way to validate.)
Thanks for your thoughts. I wasn’t thinking about the submerged part of the EA iceberg (e.g. GWWC membership), and I do feel somewhat less confident in my initial thoughts.
Still, I wonder if you’d countenance a broader version of my initial point- that there is a way of thinking that is not itself explicitly quantitative, but that is nonetheless very common among quantitative types. I’m tempted to call this ‘rationality,’ but it’s not obvious to me that this thinking style is as all-encompassing as what LW-ers, for example, mean when they talk about rationality.
The examples you give of commonsensical versions of expected value and probability are what I’m thinking about here- perhaps the intuitive, informal versions of these concepts are soft prerequisites. This thinking style is not restricted to the formally trained, but it is more common among them (because it’s trained into them). So in my (revised) telling, the thinking style is a prerequisite and explicitly quantitative types are overrepresented in EA simply because they’re more likely to have been exposed to these concepts in either a formal or informal setting.
The reason I think this might be important is that I occasionally have conversations in which these concepts—in the informal sense—seem unfamiliar. “Do what has the best chance of working out” is, in my experience, a surprisingly rare way of conducting everyday business in the world, and some people seem to find it strange and new to think in that fashion. The possible takeaway is that some basic informal groundwork might need to be done to maximize the efficacy of different EA messages.
I basically agree that having intuitions similar to those I outlined seems very important and perhaps necessary for getting involved with EA. (I think you can be “interested” without those things, because EA seems shiny and impressive if you read certain things about it, but not having a sense for how you should act based on EA ideas will limit how involved you actually get.) Your explanation about exposure to related concepts almost definitely explains some of the variance you’ve spotted.
I spend a lot of my EA-centric conversations trying to frame things to people in a non-quantitative way (at least if they aren’t especially quantitative themselves).
I’m a huge fan of people doing “basic groundwork” to maximize the efficacy of EA messages. I’d be likely to fund such work if it existed and I thought the quality was reasonably high. However, I’m not aware of many active projects in this domain; ClearerThinking.org and normal marketing by GiveWell et al. are all that come to mind, plus things like big charitable matches that raise awareness of EA charities as a side effect.
Oh, and then there’s this contest, which I’m very excited about and would gladly sponsor more test subjects for if possible. Thanks for reminding me that I should write to Eric Schwitzgebel about this.