This doesn’t help steelman, because I’m generally sympathetic to the concern that EA is too elitist. The case for elitism, I think, broadly rests on the idea that (a) elitism helps select for more intelligent/​more able talent; and (b) this increase in intelligence/​ability amongst the talents you recruit outweighs the overall smaller talent pool.)
I’m especially sceptical of (a), and I say that as someone who comes from a country where elitism is government policy; where meritocracy is the law of the land and intelligence the measure of a man. Given the global demographics, a lot of the smartest and more able people (in a vacuum) will just be random people in lower and middle income countries, and yet (i) poverty and a lack of access to education means they don’t get to develop to their full potential; and (ii) the limited scope of existing selection systems (e.g. using top universities as a proxy, EA being a rich-world and indeed Anglosphere-focused phenomenon) means we don’t get access to these people.
For (b), the only thing I will say is that it certainly doesn’t hold in a lot of cases where we’re looking to scale—and where greater ability obviously helps, but doubling personnel doubles output in a way that doubling salary to increase quality of personnel doesn’t (e.g. doing mass outreach is a good example of this).
Perhaps more concerningly—and this is the deeper problem with EA—is that if you can’t build popular support and hence a mass movement out of your ideas, it limits your ability to gain and hold political power, which is ultimately where the most impactful things can be done.
(Disclosure: Stan and I are colleagues, though we haven’t discussed this issue before).
This doesn’t help steelman, because I’m generally sympathetic to the concern that EA is too elitist. The case for elitism, I think, broadly rests on the idea that (a) elitism helps select for more intelligent/​more able talent; and (b) this increase in intelligence/​ability amongst the talents you recruit outweighs the overall smaller talent pool.)
I’m especially sceptical of (a), and I say that as someone who comes from a country where elitism is government policy; where meritocracy is the law of the land and intelligence the measure of a man. Given the global demographics, a lot of the smartest and more able people (in a vacuum) will just be random people in lower and middle income countries, and yet (i) poverty and a lack of access to education means they don’t get to develop to their full potential; and (ii) the limited scope of existing selection systems (e.g. using top universities as a proxy, EA being a rich-world and indeed Anglosphere-focused phenomenon) means we don’t get access to these people.
For (b), the only thing I will say is that it certainly doesn’t hold in a lot of cases where we’re looking to scale—and where greater ability obviously helps, but doubling personnel doubles output in a way that doubling salary to increase quality of personnel doesn’t (e.g. doing mass outreach is a good example of this).
Perhaps more concerningly—and this is the deeper problem with EA—is that if you can’t build popular support and hence a mass movement out of your ideas, it limits your ability to gain and hold political power, which is ultimately where the most impactful things can be done.
(Disclosure: Stan and I are colleagues, though we haven’t discussed this issue before).