Since two comments have understood me as claiming that intelligence doesn’t matter in general, I think I just communicated my point very badly. I accept the general arguments that intelligence matters for people’s achievements and such. My claim is that EA as a movement requires all kinds of skills, not just analytical intelligence.
If you condition on the view that EA is bottle-necked by highly engaged and capable individuals that start new projects or found organizations, selecting for IQ seems as one of the best first steps.
This is not my sense of the bottlenecks in EA. I have the impression that EA has a lot of analytically intelligent people already and is bottlenecked by communicators, organizers, etc—people who have strong social and emotional skills and can grow EA as a movement. But if you are right that this is the most important bottleneck it is, then I would agree that selecting for high IQ individuals is a pretty good step.
Since two comments have understood me as claiming that intelligence doesn’t matter in general, I think I just communicated my point very badly. I accept the general arguments that intelligence matters for people’s achievements and such. My claim is that EA as a movement requires all kinds of skills, not just analytical intelligence.
This is not my sense of the bottlenecks in EA. I have the impression that EA has a lot of analytically intelligent people already and is bottlenecked by communicators, organizers, etc—people who have strong social and emotional skills and can grow EA as a movement. But if you are right that this is the most important bottleneck it is, then I would agree that selecting for high IQ individuals is a pretty good step.
That makes sense; thanks for expanding on your comment.