I like a lot of these ideas, esp. paying attention to issues of affordability to ensure that financial barriers for applicants arenât preventing EA from recruiting top talent early in the pipeline (e.g. internships).
[fwiw, I find the ideology of DEI (and association with, e.g., mandatory âdiversity statementsâ for hiring in US academia) to be a bit polarizing; I suspect that framing in terms of âequality of opportunityâ or the like might appeal more to those of us who worry about DEI overreach in other areas.]
That said, I think itâs also important to consider the trade-offs here. As you note, online conferences arenât really a substitute for in-person ones, so thereâs at least a risk that moving more of them online could do more harm than good.
On hiring criteria: Iâd think the crucial question is whether things like math tests and personal references do a good job of predicting performance or not. You didnât present any evidence here that they donât. So even if they do prove a âDEI problemâ, that doesnât by itself settle the question of whether they overall do more good or harm in helping orgs to hire the best person for the job. Itâs a count against them, to be sure; but we also need to know how strong the reasons in favour of these practices are.
Hey Richard, thanks a lot for reading and for your valuable comment. Interesting note about the DEI vs equality of opportunity point, I havenât thought about it.
I still think that we should continue in-person conferences, all Iâm saying is that we need to improve the quality of online conferences and also help people to travel to offline conferences and events more easily (this is not just an EA issue, all industries who host offline events have this problem due to COVID visa application delaysâwe donât know how long they will last).
Iâm grateful that you pointed out the lack of evidence that removing IQ and maths tests wonât affect the quality of hire. There is certainly a lot of debate about this issue and I think that significantly more research needs to be done into this. I quite like this article that looks like past and most recent studies and summarises the conclusion whether or not we should use IQ to predict job performance:
Perhaps I should have been clearer when I argued this, as my main point is that due to the lack of high quality research and solid conclusions, we donât know if IQ is really a good predictor of high job performance or not. Some still use IQ-like tests anyway and it will have a flow-through effect of poorer decision making due to everyone in the team with the same background and way of thinking.
I like a lot of these ideas, esp. paying attention to issues of affordability to ensure that financial barriers for applicants arenât preventing EA from recruiting top talent early in the pipeline (e.g. internships).
[fwiw, I find the ideology of DEI (and association with, e.g., mandatory âdiversity statementsâ for hiring in US academia) to be a bit polarizing; I suspect that framing in terms of âequality of opportunityâ or the like might appeal more to those of us who worry about DEI overreach in other areas.]
That said, I think itâs also important to consider the trade-offs here. As you note, online conferences arenât really a substitute for in-person ones, so thereâs at least a risk that moving more of them online could do more harm than good.
On hiring criteria: Iâd think the crucial question is whether things like math tests and personal references do a good job of predicting performance or not. You didnât present any evidence here that they donât. So even if they do prove a âDEI problemâ, that doesnât by itself settle the question of whether they overall do more good or harm in helping orgs to hire the best person for the job. Itâs a count against them, to be sure; but we also need to know how strong the reasons in favour of these practices are.
Hey Richard, thanks a lot for reading and for your valuable comment.
Interesting note about the DEI vs equality of opportunity point, I havenât thought about it.
I still think that we should continue in-person conferences, all Iâm saying is that we need to improve the quality of online conferences and also help people to travel to offline conferences and events more easily (this is not just an EA issue, all industries who host offline events have this problem due to COVID visa application delaysâwe donât know how long they will last).
Iâm grateful that you pointed out the lack of evidence that removing IQ and maths tests wonât affect the quality of hire. There is certainly a lot of debate about this issue and I think that significantly more research needs to be done into this. I quite like this article that looks like past and most recent studies and summarises the conclusion whether or not we should use IQ to predict job performance:
Perhaps I should have been clearer when I argued this, as my main point is that due to the lack of high quality research and solid conclusions, we donât know if IQ is really a good predictor of high job performance or not. Some still use IQ-like tests anyway and it will have a flow-through effect of poorer decision making due to everyone in the team with the same background and way of thinking.