I’m seeing a lot of comments questioning the literature around diversity improving performance. EA prizes accuracy, so that’s a good thing.
However, I’m concerned we’re falling into two very common traps of requiring women to prove themselves more competent than men and status quo bias.
In general, I’d expect teams to be diverse unless a non-diverse team can be proven more effective. Because so many EA leaders are currently white men, I can imagine some reasons why we might have less-diverse teams in the short-term, but my baseline expectation would always be to prefer a more diverse team all other things being equal.
How do you think we are requiring women to prove themselves more competent than men? For example, if A says study X says P and B points at that it actually says Q, is this an example? Or were you thinking about something else?
Status quo bias exists, but there is also a counter-balancing action bias. When someone cares about an issue, they want to do something about it and they often fail to consider all of the secondary effects are reasons why you might not want to take a particular action.
That said, I am doubtful that there is nothing we can do on diversity.
Yeah, this sort of thing is basically always in danger of becoming politics all the way down. One good heuristic is to keep the goals you hope to satisfy by engaging in mind—if you want to figure out whether to accept an article’s central claim, is the answer to your question decisive with respect to your decision? If you’re trying to sway people, are you being careful to make sure it’s plausibly deniable that you’re doing anything other than truthseeking? If you’re engaging because you think it’s impactful to do so, are you treating your engagement as a tool rather than an end?
For what it’s worth, I think if you had instead commented with: “As a newcomer to this community, I see very little evidence that EA prizes accuracy more than average. This seems contrary to its goals, and makes me feel sad and unwelcome,” (or something similar that politely captures what you mean) that would have been a valuable contribution to the discussion.
That being said, you might have still gotten downvoted. People’s downvoting behavior on this forum is really terrible and a huge area for improvement in online EA discourse.
I’m seeing a lot of comments questioning the literature around diversity improving performance. EA prizes accuracy, so that’s a good thing.
However, I’m concerned we’re falling into two very common traps of requiring women to prove themselves more competent than men and status quo bias.
In general, I’d expect teams to be diverse unless a non-diverse team can be proven more effective. Because so many EA leaders are currently white men, I can imagine some reasons why we might have less-diverse teams in the short-term, but my baseline expectation would always be to prefer a more diverse team all other things being equal.
How do you think we are requiring women to prove themselves more competent than men? For example, if A says study X says P and B points at that it actually says Q, is this an example? Or were you thinking about something else?
Status quo bias exists, but there is also a counter-balancing action bias. When someone cares about an issue, they want to do something about it and they often fail to consider all of the secondary effects are reasons why you might not want to take a particular action.
That said, I am doubtful that there is nothing we can do on diversity.
Yeah, this sort of thing is basically always in danger of becoming politics all the way down. One good heuristic is to keep the goals you hope to satisfy by engaging in mind—if you want to figure out whether to accept an article’s central claim, is the answer to your question decisive with respect to your decision? If you’re trying to sway people, are you being careful to make sure it’s plausibly deniable that you’re doing anything other than truthseeking? If you’re engaging because you think it’s impactful to do so, are you treating your engagement as a tool rather than an end?
EA prizes accuracy? Seriously? When? Where? I have zero experience of that being the case so far.
For what it’s worth, I think if you had instead commented with: “As a newcomer to this community, I see very little evidence that EA prizes accuracy more than average. This seems contrary to its goals, and makes me feel sad and unwelcome,” (or something similar that politely captures what you mean) that would have been a valuable contribution to the discussion.
That being said, you might have still gotten downvoted. People’s downvoting behavior on this forum is really terrible and a huge area for improvement in online EA discourse.