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.
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.