Fuzzy ideas, off the top of my head, regarding talent in the EA ecosystem:
It is pretty clear that England produces more EA talent than we would expect from population and wealth. Part of this is probably due to excellent educational institutions, part of it is probably due to a sort of path dependency/founder effects, and part is probably due to bias in selection effects.
China and India have enormous populations (as do Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia to a lesser extent), but many people are still living in fairly strained circumstances economically. Should we expect more Indonesian[1] EAs then we have?
Impressions can be misleading, and the plural of anecdote is not data. Maybe the fact that I haven’t seen much Indonesian EA talent is due to my own limitations and perceptions, and maybe in reality there is an ‘appropriate’[2] amount of EA talent in Indonesia. After all, I don’t recall ever hearing about EA Malaysia or EA South Africa, but a quick Google search suggests they both exist.
Some countries seem to have a fairly strong EA ecosystem and have produced people who make real contributions. Think of EA Philippines (which many of us have heard of) or the EA talent pipeline in Hong Kong and China, both of which have produced people who have gotten jobs in major/central EA organizations. I have vague impressions of Switzerland, Norway, and Germany as a countries with relatively strong/developed EA communities.
A general underlying untested assumption here is that there are opportunities to ‘invest’ in developing talent, which on the margin would be cheaper. A dollar or a pound goes farther in Indonesia than in the USA or the UK. But these are exploratory ideas rather than confident claims, and an hour or two of judicious Googling could probably provide some useful data.
I’m using “appropriate” here to mean something like “the amount of EA talent, interest, and involvement that you would predict (the ŷ value) from a multiple regression that took into account factors like a country’s population, wealth, level of education, etc.” Similar with my use of “expect;” I intend it in the sense of ŷ.
What countries/populations punch below their weight in EA when it comes to producing talent?
Fuzzy ideas, off the top of my head, regarding talent in the EA ecosystem:
It is pretty clear that England produces more EA talent than we would expect from population and wealth. Part of this is probably due to excellent educational institutions, part of it is probably due to a sort of path dependency/founder effects, and part is probably due to bias in selection effects.
China and India have enormous populations (as do Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia to a lesser extent), but many people are still living in fairly strained circumstances economically. Should we expect more Indonesian[1] EAs then we have?
Impressions can be misleading, and the plural of anecdote is not data. Maybe the fact that I haven’t seen much Indonesian EA talent is due to my own limitations and perceptions, and maybe in reality there is an ‘appropriate’[2] amount of EA talent in Indonesia. After all, I don’t recall ever hearing about EA Malaysia or EA South Africa, but a quick Google search suggests they both exist.
Some countries seem to have a fairly strong EA ecosystem and have produced people who make real contributions. Think of EA Philippines (which many of us have heard of) or the EA talent pipeline in Hong Kong and China, both of which have produced people who have gotten jobs in major/central EA organizations. I have vague impressions of Switzerland, Norway, and Germany as a countries with relatively strong/developed EA communities.
A general underlying untested assumption here is that there are opportunities to ‘invest’ in developing talent, which on the margin would be cheaper. A dollar or a pound goes farther in Indonesia than in the USA or the UK. But these are exploratory ideas rather than confident claims, and an hour or two of judicious Googling could probably provide some useful data.
“Indonesian” here is just an example. We could apply the same questions to Vietnamese, or Nigerian, or any other country/population.
I’m using “appropriate” here to mean something like “the amount of EA talent, interest, and involvement that you would predict (the ŷ value) from a multiple regression that took into account factors like a country’s population, wealth, level of education, etc.” Similar with my use of “expect;” I intend it in the sense of ŷ.