I appreciate that many EA’s focus on high IQ and general mental ability can be hard to deal with. For instance, I found this quite aversive when I first got into EA.
But I’m unsure why your comment has 10 upvotes, given that you do not give many arguments for your statements.
Please let me know if anything below is uncharitable of if I misread something!
Focusing on elite universities
[...] why EA’s obsession with elite universities is sickening.
The share of highly talented students at elite universities is higher. Thus, given the limited number of individuals who can do in-person outreach, it makes sense to prioritize elite unis.
From my own experience, Germany has no elite universities. This makes outreach a lot harder, as we have no location to go to where we can be sure to address many highly talented students. Instead, German EAs self-select into EA by finding information online. Thus, if Germany had an elite uni, I would put most of my outreach efforts there.
Returns to high IQ
But I think the returns to lots of high-IQ people in EA are also pretty modest [...]
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.
IQ predicts good performance among various tasks and is thus plausibly upstream of having a diversity of skills.
E.g., a 2011 study of 2329 participants in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth cohort shows no cut-off at which additional cognitive ability doesn’t matter anymore. Participants were identified as intellectually gifted (top 1% of mental ability) at the age of 13 years and followed up for 25+ years. Even within this top percentile stratum of ability, being in the top quartile predicts substantially better outcomes: Among the top 0.25%, ~34% of cohort participants have a doctorate, and around 12% have filed a patent 25+ years after being identified as gifted at the age of 13. This compares to 4.5% of the US population holding a doctorate degree in 2018; I couldn’t find data on the share of US Americans who have filed a patent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s at least one order of magnitude lower.
[...] it’s much more important to get people with varied perspectives/skills into EA.
Looking at the value of I) varied perspectives and II) skills in turn.
Regarding I), I’d also want to select people who reason well and scrutinize widely held effective altruist assumptions. But, I wouldn’t aim to maximize the variety of perspectives in EA for the sake of having different views alone (as this doesn’t account for the merit of each view).
And again, generating perspectives with lots of merit is likely linked to high IQ.
On II), I agree that having EAs with various skills is important given that EA-oriented work is becoming increasingly diverse (e.g., doing AI Safety Research, building pandemic shelters, drafting legislation that governs x-risks).
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.
From my own experience, Germany has no elite universities.
I was under the impression that the Max Planck Society and Helmholtz Association are fairly comparable to elite universities in the US or GB in most but being called university.
I appreciate that many EA’s focus on high IQ and general mental ability can be hard to deal with. For instance, I found this quite aversive when I first got into EA.
But I’m unsure why your comment has 10 upvotes, given that you do not give many arguments for your statements.
Please let me know if anything below is uncharitable of if I misread something!
Focusing on elite universities
The share of highly talented students at elite universities is higher. Thus, given the limited number of individuals who can do in-person outreach, it makes sense to prioritize elite unis.
From my own experience, Germany has no elite universities. This makes outreach a lot harder, as we have no location to go to where we can be sure to address many highly talented students. Instead, German EAs self-select into EA by finding information online. Thus, if Germany had an elite uni, I would put most of my outreach efforts there.
Returns to high IQ
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.
IQ predicts good performance among various tasks and is thus plausibly upstream of having a diversity of skills.
E.g., a 2011 study of 2329 participants in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth cohort shows no cut-off at which additional cognitive ability doesn’t matter anymore. Participants were identified as intellectually gifted (top 1% of mental ability) at the age of 13 years and followed up for 25+ years. Even within this top percentile stratum of ability, being in the top quartile predicts substantially better outcomes: Among the top 0.25%, ~34% of cohort participants have a doctorate, and around 12% have filed a patent 25+ years after being identified as gifted at the age of 13. This compares to 4.5% of the US population holding a doctorate degree in 2018; I couldn’t find data on the share of US Americans who have filed a patent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s at least one order of magnitude lower.
Value of different perspectives/skills
Looking at the value of I) varied perspectives and II) skills in turn.
Regarding I), I’d also want to select people who reason well and scrutinize widely held effective altruist assumptions. But, I wouldn’t aim to maximize the variety of perspectives in EA for the sake of having different views alone (as this doesn’t account for the merit of each view).
And again, generating perspectives with lots of merit is likely linked to high IQ.
On II), I agree that having EAs with various skills is important given that EA-oriented work is becoming increasingly diverse (e.g., doing AI Safety Research, building pandemic shelters, drafting legislation that governs x-risks).
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.
I was under the impression that the Max Planck Society and Helmholtz Association are fairly comparable to elite universities in the US or GB in most but being called university.
Agreed that their research is decent, but they are post-graduate institutes and have no undergraduate students.