Disclaimer: My original goal was to open up a thread relevant for many EAs, and understand the world better. I think your content is interesting, but some aspects of this discussion that I am continuing are (way) more personal than I intended—and maybe discussion is at your personal cost, so feel free not to answer.
I will trade 25% lifetime consumption [in exchange for]
a) [being] implicitly read to others as Caucasian…
b) [having a better] relationship with my family that’s close to that of a median EA.
This seems really important to you.
From a cold reading of the text, my initial impression is that a) and b) are really different in nature. I guess maybe you are implying the situation with b) is related to with your family background and choices as an EA.
That seems valid and important to be aware of. I’m not immediately sure I understand if this is a systemic issue to people with our background, and maybe that is my ignorance.
but clearly there are more options that will open up (and a few that will close) and because impact is so heavy-tailed, anything from −0.3x more impact to 3x seems not-crazy to me.
Those scaling factors seem big to me, and suggest a defect that should be addressed (although there’s many other constituencies or needs for attention in EA).
(Again it is possible I am a traitor but) for myself, I don’t immediately see access to any “leadership opportunity” that is hampered by my background. I suspect the opposite is true. Also, there seems to be several junior EAs moving into positions we might consider senior, and this is plausibly related to their background (in addition to working in the relevant country).
If what you are saying is true, this seems like it should be addressed.
I think that a consideration is that, because of the leadership/funding situation in EA, I expect that you (and everyone else) is basically furiously tapping the shoulders of every trusted, talented person who can plausibly get into leadership, all the time. Maybe Asians are being left out somehow, which is possible, but needs a clear story.
Those scaling factors seem big to me, and suggest a defect that should be addressed (although there’s many other constituencies or needs for attention in EA).
(Again it is possible I am a traitor but) for myself, I don’t immediately see access to any “leadership opportunity” that is hampered by my background. I suspect the opposite is true. Also, there seems to be several junior EAs moving into positions we might consider senior, and this is plausibly related to their background (in addition to working in the relevant country).
I mean to be clear I don’t know if I’m right! But for the relatively offhand estimate, I’m mostly thinking about career options outside of institutional EA. E.g. politics or media. I do basically think things like looks and accent matter enough to give you something like a 2-3x factor change in probability x magnitude of success from race alone, probably more (I haven’t looked at the stats closely but I suspect you empirically see roughly this level of underrepresentation of Asian men in politics and media, when naively based on other characteristics like educational level or wealth you’d expect higher representation).
Likewise for the -.3x I was thinking about losing the option value of doing stuff in China, rather than things within institutional EA.
I do agree that it’s be plausible that it’s easier to advance as an ethnic minority within EA, which cuts against my general point about impact. Main consideration against is that pro-Asian discrimination will look and feel explicit (e.g. “we don’t want 10 white people in the front page of our AI company,” “we need someone who speaks Chinese for our AI governance/international cooperation research to go better” ), whereas anti-Asian discrimination will be pretty subtle and most people won’t even read it as such (e.g. judging how much people “vibe” with you in conversations/at parties to select cofounders over e.g. online output or past work performance, relying on academic credentials that are implicitly racist over direct cognitive or personality tests for hiring). But I do think it’s more likely that the net effect within EA is biased in my favor rather than against, with high uncertainty.
Disclaimer: My original goal was to open up a thread relevant for many EAs, and understand the world better. I think your content is interesting, but some aspects of this discussion that I am continuing are (way) more personal than I intended—and maybe discussion is at your personal cost, so feel free not to answer.
This seems really important to you.
From a cold reading of the text, my initial impression is that a) and b) are really different in nature. I guess maybe you are implying the situation with b) is related to with your family background and choices as an EA.
That seems valid and important to be aware of. I’m not immediately sure I understand if this is a systemic issue to people with our background, and maybe that is my ignorance.
Those scaling factors seem big to me, and suggest a defect that should be addressed (although there’s many other constituencies or needs for attention in EA).
(Again it is possible I am a traitor but) for myself, I don’t immediately see access to any “leadership opportunity” that is hampered by my background. I suspect the opposite is true. Also, there seems to be several junior EAs moving into positions we might consider senior, and this is plausibly related to their background (in addition to working in the relevant country).
If what you are saying is true, this seems like it should be addressed.
I think that a consideration is that, because of the leadership/funding situation in EA, I expect that you (and everyone else) is basically furiously tapping the shoulders of every trusted, talented person who can plausibly get into leadership, all the time. Maybe Asians are being left out somehow, which is possible, but needs a clear story.
I mean to be clear I don’t know if I’m right! But for the relatively offhand estimate, I’m mostly thinking about career options outside of institutional EA. E.g. politics or media. I do basically think things like looks and accent matter enough to give you something like a 2-3x factor change in probability x magnitude of success from race alone, probably more (I haven’t looked at the stats closely but I suspect you empirically see roughly this level of underrepresentation of Asian men in politics and media, when naively based on other characteristics like educational level or wealth you’d expect higher representation).
Likewise for the -.3x I was thinking about losing the option value of doing stuff in China, rather than things within institutional EA.
I do agree that it’s be plausible that it’s easier to advance as an ethnic minority within EA, which cuts against my general point about impact. Main consideration against is that pro-Asian discrimination will look and feel explicit (e.g. “we don’t want 10 white people in the front page of our AI company,” “we need someone who speaks Chinese for our AI governance/international cooperation research to go better” ), whereas anti-Asian discrimination will be pretty subtle and most people won’t even read it as such (e.g. judging how much people “vibe” with you in conversations/at parties to select cofounders over e.g. online output or past work performance, relying on academic credentials that are implicitly racist over direct cognitive or personality tests for hiring). But I do think it’s more likely that the net effect within EA is biased in my favor rather than against, with high uncertainty.