Would you be interested in writing a joint essay or perspectives on being Asian American, maybe taking any number of angles, that you can decide upon (e.g. inside liminal spaces of this identity, inside subcultures of tech or EA culture?).
Something tells me you have useful opinions on this topic, and that these are different to mine.
Adding background for context/calibration
This might help you decide whether you want to engage:
I personally have had good experiences or maybe I am blind and unduly privileged. This is basically what I’ll write. I’m OK if my content is small or a minority of the writing.
I personally don’t use the approaches today’s activists use. Instead, I see activism as instrumental to EA cause areas. (Another way of looking at this is that if we thought it was the right thing to do, we could promote the relevant activism/causes to EA causes.)
Based on the two points above, I do not want privilege or attention as a result of the essay or related activity (but I am happy if others seek it).
Something that needs attention are efforts to pool Asian’s with Caucasians, as to cut off Asian (or at least Han Chinese) status as a distinct group with valid opinions on diversity. I have concerns about the activists involved: they use rhetoric/epistemics I don’t like, tend to silence discussion and I suspect they are power seeking. However, I sympathize with the underlying ideas, even though it deletes aspects of our voice (am I a traitor?).
Why write this essay:
This will be interesting, and I think myself and others will learn a lot.
While limited, if done carefully, there might be value in segueing into certain perspectives on China. I think these perspectives have longer term value to EA.
This seems interesting but I don’t currently think it’d trade off favorably against EA work time. Some very quickly typed thoughts re: personal experiences (apologies if it sounds whiny).
1. I’ve faced minor forms of explicit racism and microaggressions, but in aggregate they’re pretty small, possibly smaller than the benefit of speaking a second language and cultural associations.
2. I expect my life would be noticeably better if I were a demographically twin who’s Caucasian. But I’m not confident about this.
3. This is almost entirely due to various subtle forms of discrimination at a statistical level, rather than any forms of outright aggression or discrimination.
3a) e.g. I didn’t get admitted to elite or even top 50 colleges back in 2011 when the competition was much less stiff than now. I had 1570/1600 SAT, 7 APs (iirc mostly but not all 5s), essays that won minor state-level awards, etc. To be clear, I don’t think my profile was amazing or anything but statistically I think my odds would’ve been noticeably higher if I weren’t Asian. OTOH I’m not confident that elite college attendance does much for someone controlling for competence (I think mostly the costs are social network stuff and some elite opportunities being closed to me because I never learned about them).
3b) I failed a ton of tech interviews back in the day before I got a job at Google, which at the time didn’t do culture fit interviews. Looking back, I don’t think Google’s decision on me was particularly close (like my best guess for interview performance was that I was in the top 15% but not top 5% of hires). Maybe I just had the personality of a wet rag in my other interviews, but my best guess is that I would’ve statistically been hired by at least one other company in expectation pre-Google if I were a different race.
3bi) When I looked up studies for this, I think the discriminatory effect against Asians in tech jobs was maybe something like 1 in 8 (like a demographically identical twin would get 1 in 8 jobs more if they were white), which is a much lower degree of discrimination than what my words would imply.
3bii) To be clear, I don’t think getting tech jobs would be difficult for me post-Google.
3biii) I also don’t think tech is unusually discriminatory and would naively guess it’s better for Asians than most other sectors.
3c) I perceive similar and best-guess moderately stronger effects in my personal life. I feel uncomfortable sharing here but can PM you.
d) Though it does not affect me personally, it’s really ****ing obvious that people from India and China have a harder time at skilled immigration than similarly competent people from Europe (and this is statistically racially discriminatory because people from India and China are more likely to be Asian)
4. I think some routes are cut for me as a Chinese-born person with an accent, impact-wise. Again, not conclusive or anything, but some things I just expect to be a lot (>2x) harder for me than other peers in EA (E.g. almost anything in media or politics).
5. My best guess from knowing individuals and how they think and stuff is that EA is less implicitly discriminatory than other upper-middle-class US cultures. (On the other hand, Rethink Priorities does extremely structured rubric-based work trials and interviews, with substantial blinding at multiple stages, and it was the first EA nonprofit I got a job in).
6. If we ignore the discrimination aspect, the other thing that’s difficult for me is that I’m pretty distant from my parents. I don’t really expect them to ever grok EA, and I’m a little sad (in the abstract) about this.
Thanks for writing this, this is thoughtful, interesting and rich in content. I think others benefitted from reading this too.
Also, a reason I asked was that I was worried about the chance that I was ignorant about Asian-American experiences for idiosyncratic reasons. The information you provided was useful.
There is other content you mentioned that seems important (3c and 6). I will send a PM related to this. Maybe there are others reading who know you who also would like to listen to your experiences on these topics.
To put concrete numbers into this, I think I will trade 25% of my counterfactual lifetime consumption if I keep my memories, experiences, personality, abilities, etc intact, but will a) be implicitly read to others as Caucasian unless they explicitly ask, and b) I have a relationship with my family that’s close to that of a median EA. However, I will not be willing to trade 80%.
I suspect this is more than most people of my ethnicity would be willing to trade (and if anything most people won’t make this trade even if you pay them to do so).
(Note that these numbers sound higher than they actually are because it’s harder to trade money for happiness than most people think; also I specified % consumption rather than $s because there’s a ~logarithmic relationship between money and happiness).
This is entirely thinking in terms of happiness/selfish goals. I’m pretty confused about what it means for impact. Like naively I don’t see clearly better options than my current job if I was the same person but a different ethnicity, 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.
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.
Would you be interested in writing a joint essay or perspectives on being Asian American, maybe taking any number of angles, that you can decide upon (e.g. inside liminal spaces of this identity, inside subcultures of tech or EA culture?).
Something tells me you have useful opinions on this topic, and that these are different to mine.
Adding background for context/calibration
This might help you decide whether you want to engage:
I personally have had good experiences or maybe I am blind and unduly privileged. This is basically what I’ll write. I’m OK if my content is small or a minority of the writing.
I personally don’t use the approaches today’s activists use. Instead, I see activism as instrumental to EA cause areas. (Another way of looking at this is that if we thought it was the right thing to do, we could promote the relevant activism/causes to EA causes.)
Based on the two points above, I do not want privilege or attention as a result of the essay or related activity (but I am happy if others seek it).
Something that needs attention are efforts to pool Asian’s with Caucasians, as to cut off Asian (or at least Han Chinese) status as a distinct group with valid opinions on diversity. I have concerns about the activists involved: they use rhetoric/epistemics I don’t like, tend to silence discussion and I suspect they are power seeking. However, I sympathize with the underlying ideas, even though it deletes aspects of our voice (am I a traitor?).
Why write this essay:
This will be interesting, and I think myself and others will learn a lot.
While limited, if done carefully, there might be value in segueing into certain perspectives on China. I think these perspectives have longer term value to EA.
This seems interesting but I don’t currently think it’d trade off favorably against EA work time. Some very quickly typed thoughts re: personal experiences (apologies if it sounds whiny).
1. I’ve faced minor forms of explicit racism and microaggressions, but in aggregate they’re pretty small, possibly smaller than the benefit of speaking a second language and cultural associations.
2. I expect my life would be noticeably better if I were a demographically twin who’s Caucasian. But I’m not confident about this.
3. This is almost entirely due to various subtle forms of discrimination at a statistical level, rather than any forms of outright aggression or discrimination.
3a) e.g. I didn’t get admitted to elite or even top 50 colleges back in 2011 when the competition was much less stiff than now. I had 1570/1600 SAT, 7 APs (iirc mostly but not all 5s), essays that won minor state-level awards, etc. To be clear, I don’t think my profile was amazing or anything but statistically I think my odds would’ve been noticeably higher if I weren’t Asian. OTOH I’m not confident that elite college attendance does much for someone controlling for competence (I think mostly the costs are social network stuff and some elite opportunities being closed to me because I never learned about them).
3b) I failed a ton of tech interviews back in the day before I got a job at Google, which at the time didn’t do culture fit interviews. Looking back, I don’t think Google’s decision on me was particularly close (like my best guess for interview performance was that I was in the top 15% but not top 5% of hires). Maybe I just had the personality of a wet rag in my other interviews, but my best guess is that I would’ve statistically been hired by at least one other company in expectation pre-Google if I were a different race.
3bi) When I looked up studies for this, I think the discriminatory effect against Asians in tech jobs was maybe something like 1 in 8 (like a demographically identical twin would get 1 in 8 jobs more if they were white), which is a much lower degree of discrimination than what my words would imply.
3bii) To be clear, I don’t think getting tech jobs would be difficult for me post-Google.
3biii) I also don’t think tech is unusually discriminatory and would naively guess it’s better for Asians than most other sectors.
3c) I perceive similar and best-guess moderately stronger effects in my personal life. I feel uncomfortable sharing here but can PM you.
d) Though it does not affect me personally, it’s really ****ing obvious that people from India and China have a harder time at skilled immigration than similarly competent people from Europe (and this is statistically racially discriminatory because people from India and China are more likely to be Asian)
4. I think some routes are cut for me as a Chinese-born person with an accent, impact-wise. Again, not conclusive or anything, but some things I just expect to be a lot (>2x) harder for me than other peers in EA (E.g. almost anything in media or politics).
5. My best guess from knowing individuals and how they think and stuff is that EA is less implicitly discriminatory than other upper-middle-class US cultures. (On the other hand, Rethink Priorities does extremely structured rubric-based work trials and interviews, with substantial blinding at multiple stages, and it was the first EA nonprofit I got a job in).
6. If we ignore the discrimination aspect, the other thing that’s difficult for me is that I’m pretty distant from my parents. I don’t really expect them to ever grok EA, and I’m a little sad (in the abstract) about this.
Thanks for writing this, this is thoughtful, interesting and rich in content. I think others benefitted from reading this too.
Also, a reason I asked was that I was worried about the chance that I was ignorant about Asian-American experiences for idiosyncratic reasons. The information you provided was useful.
There is other content you mentioned that seems important (3c and 6). I will send a PM related to this. Maybe there are others reading who know you who also would like to listen to your experiences on these topics.
To put concrete numbers into this, I think I will trade 25% of my counterfactual lifetime consumption if I keep my memories, experiences, personality, abilities, etc intact, but will a) be implicitly read to others as Caucasian unless they explicitly ask, and b) I have a relationship with my family that’s close to that of a median EA. However, I will not be willing to trade 80%.
I suspect this is more than most people of my ethnicity would be willing to trade (and if anything most people won’t make this trade even if you pay them to do so).
(Note that these numbers sound higher than they actually are because it’s harder to trade money for happiness than most people think; also I specified % consumption rather than $s because there’s a ~logarithmic relationship between money and happiness).
This is entirely thinking in terms of happiness/selfish goals. I’m pretty confused about what it means for impact. Like naively I don’t see clearly better options than my current job if I was the same person but a different ethnicity, 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.
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.