You seem surprisingly confident that you know the “raw general intelligence” of your classes in general and the subgroup of those who would compete for EA jobs in particular. Isn’t there a danger that you are conflating “aptitude for EA ideas” with intelligence? Or even that the aspy intelligence that is associated with EA fluency might be misconstrued as very high general intelligence?
I’m more open to the idea that “EA orthodoxy” is a quality that is very unevenly distributed, and in many jobs would have an outsize impact on effectiveness. Less convinced that general intelligence is one of those things.
Stan—those are legitimate concerns, that there might be some circularity in judging general intelligence in relation to understanding EA concepts, in a classroom context.
I do have a pretty good sense of my university undergrads’ overall intelligence distribution from teaching many other classes on many topics over the last 23 years, and knowing the SAT and ACT distributions of the undergrads.
Within each class, I guess I’m judging overall intelligence mostly from participation in class discussions and online discussion forums, and term paper proposals, revisions, and final drafts.
As I mentioned, it would be nice to have some more quantitative, representative data on how IQ predicts capacity to understand EA concepts—and whether having certain other traits (e.g. Aspy-style thinking, Openness, etc) might add some more predictive validity over and above IQ.
Thanks, Geoffrey!
You seem surprisingly confident that you know the “raw general intelligence” of your classes in general and the subgroup of those who would compete for EA jobs in particular. Isn’t there a danger that you are conflating “aptitude for EA ideas” with intelligence? Or even that the aspy intelligence that is associated with EA fluency might be misconstrued as very high general intelligence?
I’m more open to the idea that “EA orthodoxy” is a quality that is very unevenly distributed, and in many jobs would have an outsize impact on effectiveness. Less convinced that general intelligence is one of those things.
Stan—those are legitimate concerns, that there might be some circularity in judging general intelligence in relation to understanding EA concepts, in a classroom context.
I do have a pretty good sense of my university undergrads’ overall intelligence distribution from teaching many other classes on many topics over the last 23 years, and knowing the SAT and ACT distributions of the undergrads.
Within each class, I guess I’m judging overall intelligence mostly from participation in class discussions and online discussion forums, and term paper proposals, revisions, and final drafts.
As I mentioned, it would be nice to have some more quantitative, representative data on how IQ predicts capacity to understand EA concepts—and whether having certain other traits (e.g. Aspy-style thinking, Openness, etc) might add some more predictive validity over and above IQ.