Thanks for writing this! A couple days I was also wondering “🤔 could I use janky-statistics to estimate how the number of top N% most ‘promising’ students at X small elite private university compares to Y large non-elite public university?” But I’m glad you used non-janky statistics to evaluate this much better than I would have.
I’ll add a few more ways this could be wrong:
“Intelligence” could come in different qualities in different communities, e.g. maybe MIT tends to be more promising for maths (25% SAT Math = 780 😅), Harvard tends to be more promising for business and law, and yet other universities could be more promising in other things.
As others have pointed out, maybe “intelligence” (as measures by standardized test scores) isn’t the only metric to care about, and maybe we should be selecting for EQ/agency/truth-seekingness/etc. which could be differently distributed among schools than “intelligence.”
We don’t actually need the most “intelligent” students for a lot of things, maybe “medium intelligent” students among decent universities can still robustly understand EA ideas but be more agentic/impact-minded and be good for the community (this updates me more in favor of your point).
Conversely, maybe the bar for certain things (e.g. AI alignment technical researcher) should be much higher. Maybe the small-tail distribution of test scores doesn’t map well to the long-tailed distribution of impact in highly technical things, and we actually care about the 0.01% of students across some metric which could differ more significantly between schools.
I’m not sure how much to believe some of these, and some of them being right could mean the point presented in the post is not strong enough and there could be more “promising” students at non-elite universities than elite ones. Either way, I think it’s reasonable to update away from assuming EA outreach and community building should be focused on elite schools (if you’re a student at a non-elite school reading this, consider learning more about EA, getting mentorship, and starting a university group!).
Thanks for writing this! A couple days I was also wondering “🤔 could I use janky-statistics to estimate how the number of top N% most ‘promising’ students at X small elite private university compares to Y large non-elite public university?” But I’m glad you used non-janky statistics to evaluate this much better than I would have.
I’ll add a few more ways this could be wrong:
“Intelligence” could come in different qualities in different communities, e.g. maybe MIT tends to be more promising for maths (25% SAT Math = 780 😅), Harvard tends to be more promising for business and law, and yet other universities could be more promising in other things.
As others have pointed out, maybe “intelligence” (as measures by standardized test scores) isn’t the only metric to care about, and maybe we should be selecting for EQ/agency/truth-seekingness/etc. which could be differently distributed among schools than “intelligence.”
We don’t actually need the most “intelligent” students for a lot of things, maybe “medium intelligent” students among decent universities can still robustly understand EA ideas but be more agentic/impact-minded and be good for the community (this updates me more in favor of your point).
Conversely, maybe the bar for certain things (e.g. AI alignment technical researcher) should be much higher. Maybe the small-tail distribution of test scores doesn’t map well to the long-tailed distribution of impact in highly technical things, and we actually care about the 0.01% of students across some metric which could differ more significantly between schools.
I’m not sure how much to believe some of these, and some of them being right could mean the point presented in the post is not strong enough and there could be more “promising” students at non-elite universities than elite ones. Either way, I think it’s reasonable to update away from assuming EA outreach and community building should be focused on elite schools (if you’re a student at a non-elite school reading this, consider learning more about EA, getting mentorship, and starting a university group!).