Why do I prefer EA to, say, libertarian student clubs? First and foremost, libertarian student clubs don’t attract enough members. Since their numbers are small, it’s simply hard to get a vibrant discussion going. EA has much broader appeal.
It’s pretty cool that EA has a broader appeal among student clubs than the third most popular political party in America!
Furthermore, while the best libertarian students hold their own against the best EA students, medians tell a different story. The median EA student, like the median libertarian student, like almost any young intellectual, needs more curiosity and less dogmatism. But the median EA’s curiosity deficit and dogmatism surplus is less severe.
I’m surprised that Bryan thinks the best libertarian students are on par with the best EA students, given a) there are more EA students (in his telling) and b) he thinks the median EA student is better. Naively it should be surprising that a group with both more members and a more impressive median won’t have a more impressive top...why does Bryan think EA student groups have a lower variance? And if he’s right, how can we improve this?
Maybe they think that both movements are large enough such that they both ‘top out’ I.e. both movements have some people in the top 0.1% of students or the top 10 EA students are about as good as the top 10 libertarian students.
I’d still expect a larger movement to have more of the top 0.1% people, I’m not exactly sure what Bryan was describing here but if he expects that students are roughly normally distributed with regards to goodness it seems like a reasonably hypothesis to me.
I don’t have a good model of what this topping out will look like. My intuition is that there’s quite a bit of variance in the top 0.1% though I agree that the case is weaker for a normal distribution. My reasoning for why “student goodness” is probably not a normal distribution is partially because if you care about multiple relatively independent factors (say smarts, conscientiousness, and general niceness) in a multiplicative way, and the individual factors are normally or log-normally distributed, your resulting distribution is a log-normal.
One funny hypothesis that someone like Bryan could give is something like “oh, the top EA students are all libertarian (ie, it’s the same picture).
I could maybe buy this, based on the (US-biased, Bay Area-biased) student groups I interact with, and especially if I factor in probably some pro-libertarian bias in Caplan’s judgements of students.
By topping out I just meant that Bryan’s impression of students I saturated at an upper bounded for the best libertarian and EA students they met. This could be either be because the students that they met actually did have a very high and similar performance, or because their model/test for assessing how good people are had the best students scoring very highly (so their test was not well calibrated to show differences in top students).
I think this was probably a bit of an off hand remark, and Stefan is right in it being very weak evidence of the performance of top libertarian/EA students.
I personally agree with all of your comment and agree that the underlying distribution seems unlikely to be normal.
It’s pretty cool that EA has a broader appeal among student clubs than the third most popular political party in America!
I’m surprised that Bryan thinks the best libertarian students are on par with the best EA students, given a) there are more EA students (in his telling) and b) he thinks the median EA student is better. Naively it should be surprising that a group with both more members and a more impressive median won’t have a more impressive top...why does Bryan think EA student groups have a lower variance? And if he’s right, how can we improve this?
Maybe he didn’t meet that many students, or maybe his main point concerned the median students. I think this is quite weak evidence.
Yeah, fair.
Maybe they think that both movements are large enough such that they both ‘top out’ I.e. both movements have some people in the top 0.1% of students or the top 10 EA students are about as good as the top 10 libertarian students.
I’d still expect a larger movement to have more of the top 0.1% people, I’m not exactly sure what Bryan was describing here but if he expects that students are roughly normally distributed with regards to goodness it seems like a reasonably hypothesis to me.
I don’t have a good model of what this topping out will look like. My intuition is that there’s quite a bit of variance in the top 0.1% though I agree that the case is weaker for a normal distribution. My reasoning for why “student goodness” is probably not a normal distribution is partially because if you care about multiple relatively independent factors (say smarts, conscientiousness, and general niceness) in a multiplicative way, and the individual factors are normally or log-normally distributed, your resulting distribution is a log-normal.
One funny hypothesis that someone like Bryan could give is something like “oh, the top EA students are all libertarian (ie, it’s the same picture).
I could maybe buy this, based on the (US-biased, Bay Area-biased) student groups I interact with, and especially if I factor in probably some pro-libertarian bias in Caplan’s judgements of students.
By topping out I just meant that Bryan’s impression of students I saturated at an upper bounded for the best libertarian and EA students they met. This could be either be because the students that they met actually did have a very high and similar performance, or because their model/test for assessing how good people are had the best students scoring very highly (so their test was not well calibrated to show differences in top students).
I think this was probably a bit of an off hand remark, and Stefan is right in it being very weak evidence of the performance of top libertarian/EA students.
I personally agree with all of your comment and agree that the underlying distribution seems unlikely to be normal.
Someone should offer him a bet! Best EA vs best lib in a debate or something.