I don’t have any great solutions to this debate, but I’d like to see less talk of epistemic decline in the EA forum, or at least have people state it more blatantly rather than dressing up their ideas in fancy language. If you think that less intelligent or thoughtful people are coming into the EA movement, I’d argue you should say so directly to help foster discussion of the actual topic.
...effective altruism seems to attract more talented young people than anything else I know of right now by a considerable margin. And I’ve observed this by running my own project, Emergent Ventures for Talented Young People. And I just see time and again, the smartest and most successful people who apply get grants. They turn out to have connections to the EA movement. And that’s very much to the credit of effective altruism.
I agree with Cowen: I think EA has done a great job attracting talented people.
I don’t like the idea of driving those people away.
Like you, I am fairly suspicious of the “declining epistemic quality” idea.
But it seems possible that this idea is correct, and also that “less intelligent or thoughtful people are coming into the EA movement” is an incorrect diagnosis of what’s going wrong.
I don’t think people should jump to the most inflammatory diagnosis.
I mostly agree that EA has done a good job, but don’t see any reason to think that “declining epistemic quality” implies that “less intelligent or thoughtful people are coming into the EA movement,” nor that it disagrees with Tyler’s claim that “EA has done a great job attracting talented people.”
What I think is happening, based on my observations and model of the community, is that a group of EAs (mostly now in their 30s) has spent a decade or more building their internal understanding and improving their epistemics in order to do good, and many of them now see new people (mostly in their late teens and 20s) who are on a similar path, but are not as far along, who haven’t yet managed to do all of the work of improving their understanding. The set of older EAs who are complaining are pointing out, correctly, that bringing in these new people has lowered the epistemic standards of the community.
I think that this explains why all three of the original statements are correct, and why it’s also a bad idea to dismiss the people coming in.
One difference between our perspectives is that I don’t take for granted that this process will occur unless the conditions are right. And the faster a movement grows, the less likely it is for lessons to be passed on to those who are coming in. This isn’t dismissing these people, just how group dynamics work and a reality of more experienced people having less time to engage.
I want to see EA grow fast. But past a certain threshold, I’m not sure exactly where it is, our culture will most likely start to degrade. That said, I’m less concerned about this than before. As terrible as the FTX collapse and recent events have been, it may have actually resolved any worries about potentially growing too fast.
And the faster a movement grows, the less likely it is for lessons to be passed on to those who are coming in.
That’s assuming a lot about what movement growth means. (But I don’t think the movement should be grown via measuring attendance at events. That seems to be a current failure, and part of why I think that investment in EA community building is flawed.)
Tyler Cowen said:
I agree with Cowen: I think EA has done a great job attracting talented people.
I don’t like the idea of driving those people away.
Like you, I am fairly suspicious of the “declining epistemic quality” idea.
But it seems possible that this idea is correct, and also that “less intelligent or thoughtful people are coming into the EA movement” is an incorrect diagnosis of what’s going wrong.
I don’t think people should jump to the most inflammatory diagnosis.
I mostly agree that EA has done a good job, but don’t see any reason to think that “declining epistemic quality” implies that “less intelligent or thoughtful people are coming into the EA movement,” nor that it disagrees with Tyler’s claim that “EA has done a great job attracting talented people.”
What I think is happening, based on my observations and model of the community, is that a group of EAs (mostly now in their 30s) has spent a decade or more building their internal understanding and improving their epistemics in order to do good, and many of them now see new people (mostly in their late teens and 20s) who are on a similar path, but are not as far along, who haven’t yet managed to do all of the work of improving their understanding. The set of older EAs who are complaining are pointing out, correctly, that bringing in these new people has lowered the epistemic standards of the community.
I think that this explains why all three of the original statements are correct, and why it’s also a bad idea to dismiss the people coming in.
One difference between our perspectives is that I don’t take for granted that this process will occur unless the conditions are right. And the faster a movement grows, the less likely it is for lessons to be passed on to those who are coming in. This isn’t dismissing these people, just how group dynamics work and a reality of more experienced people having less time to engage.
I want to see EA grow fast. But past a certain threshold, I’m not sure exactly where it is, our culture will most likely start to degrade. That said, I’m less concerned about this than before. As terrible as the FTX collapse and recent events have been, it may have actually resolved any worries about potentially growing too fast.
That’s assuming a lot about what movement growth means. (But I don’t think the movement should be grown via measuring attendance at events. That seems to be a current failure, and part of why I think that investment in EA community building is flawed.)