On fancy credentials: most EAs didn’t go to fancy universities*. And I guess that 4% of EAs dropped out entirely. Just the publicly known subset includes some of the most accomplished: Yudkowsky, Muehlhauser, Shlegeris?, Kelsey Piper, Nuno Sempere. (I know 5 others I admire greatly.)
On intelligence: You might be over-indexing to research, and to highly technical research. Inside research / writing the peak difficulty is indeed really high, but the average forum post seems manageable. You don’t need to understand stuff like Löb’s theorem to do great work. I presume most great EAs don’t understand formal results of this sort. I often feel dumb when following alignment research, but I can sure do ordinary science and data analysis and people management, and this counts for a lot.
On the optics of the above two things: seems like we could do more to make people feel welcome, and to appreciate the encouraging demographics and the world’s huge need for sympathetic people who know their comparative advantage. (I wanted to solve the education misconception by interviewing great dropouts in EA. But it probably would have landed better with named high-status interviewees.)
* Link is only suggestive evidence cos I don’t have the row-level data.
I think people are also unaware of how tiny the undergraduate populations of elite US/UK universities are, especially if you (like me) did not grow up or go to school in those countries.
There are few better ways of illustrating the difference than to look at the top U.S. colleges and compare them to a highly-ranked Canadian university, like the University of Toronto where I work. The first thing you’ll notice is that American schools are miniscule. The top 10 U.S. universities combined (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc.) have room for fewer than 60,000 undergraduates total. The University of Toronto, by contrast, alone has more capacity, with over 68,000 undergraduate students.
In other words, Canadian universities are in the business of mass education. We take entire generations of Canadians, tens of thousands of them recent immigrants, and give them access to the middle classes. Fancy American schools are in the business of offering boutique education to a very tiny, coddled minority, giving them access to the upper classes. That’s a really fundamental difference.
Oxford (12,510 undergraduates) and Cambridge (12,720 undergraduates ) are less tiny, but still comparatively small, especially since the UK population is about 1.75x Canada’s.
(I’m flattered by the inclusion in the list but would fwiw describe myself as “hoping to accomplish great things eventually after much more hard work”, rather than “accomplished”.)
FWIW I went to the Australian National University, which is about as good as universities in Australia get. In Australia there’s way less stratification of students into different qualities of universities—university admissions are determined almost entirely by high school grades, and if you graduate in the top 10% of high school graduates (which I barely did) you can attend basically any university you want to. So it’s pretty different from eg America, where you have to do pretty well in high school to get into top universities. I believe that Europe is more like Australia in this regard.
I can support the last point for Germany at least. There’s relatively little stratification among universities. It’s mostly about which subject you want to study, with popular subjects like medicine requiring straight A’s at basically every university. However you can get into a STEM program at the top universities without being in the top-10% at highschool level.
I appreciate you highlighting that most EA’s didn’t go to top level uni’s—I wish this was out there more!
And I think (from reading other comments too) I was definitely getting a bit too wrapped up in not understanding highly complex stuff (when a lot of EA’s don’t either).
I agree there’s a huge need for more sympathetic people and that’s why I think it’s a shame that the community does feel like it has such a high bar to entry. I hope this changes in future.
This is correct, she graduated but had a hard time doing so, due to health problems. (I hear that Stanford makes it really hard to fail to graduate, because university rankings care about completion rates.)
Note that Kelsey is absurdly smart though, and struggled with school for reasons other than inherently having trouble learning or thinking about things.
On fancy credentials: most EAs didn’t go to fancy universities*. And I guess that 4% of EAs dropped out entirely. Just the publicly known subset includes some of the most accomplished: Yudkowsky, Muehlhauser, Shlegeris?, Kelsey Piper, Nuno Sempere. (I know 5 others I admire greatly.)
On intelligence: You might be over-indexing to research, and to highly technical research. Inside research / writing the peak difficulty is indeed really high, but the average forum post seems manageable. You don’t need to understand stuff like Löb’s theorem to do great work. I presume most great EAs don’t understand formal results of this sort. I often feel dumb when following alignment research, but I can sure do ordinary science and data analysis and people management, and this counts for a lot.
On the optics of the above two things: seems like we could do more to make people feel welcome, and to appreciate the encouraging demographics and the world’s huge need for sympathetic people who know their comparative advantage. (I wanted to solve the education misconception by interviewing great dropouts in EA. But it probably would have landed better with named high-status interviewees.)
* Link is only suggestive evidence cos I don’t have the row-level data.
I think people are also unaware of how tiny the undergraduate populations of elite US/UK universities are, especially if you (like me) did not grow up or go to school in those countries.
Quoting a 2015 article from Joseph Heath, which I found shocking at the time:
Oxford (12,510 undergraduates) and Cambridge (12,720 undergraduates ) are less tiny, but still comparatively small, especially since the UK population is about 1.75x Canada’s.
(I’m flattered by the inclusion in the list but would fwiw describe myself as “hoping to accomplish great things eventually after much more hard work”, rather than “accomplished”.)
FWIW I went to the Australian National University, which is about as good as universities in Australia get. In Australia there’s way less stratification of students into different qualities of universities—university admissions are determined almost entirely by high school grades, and if you graduate in the top 10% of high school graduates (which I barely did) you can attend basically any university you want to. So it’s pretty different from eg America, where you have to do pretty well in high school to get into top universities. I believe that Europe is more like Australia in this regard.
I can support the last point for Germany at least. There’s relatively little stratification among universities. It’s mostly about which subject you want to study, with popular subjects like medicine requiring straight A’s at basically every university. However you can get into a STEM program at the top universities without being in the top-10% at highschool level.
I appreciate you highlighting that most EA’s didn’t go to top level uni’s—I wish this was out there more!
And I think (from reading other comments too) I was definitely getting a bit too wrapped up in not understanding highly complex stuff (when a lot of EA’s don’t either).
I agree there’s a huge need for more sympathetic people and that’s why I think it’s a shame that the community does feel like it has such a high bar to entry. I hope this changes in future.
I’m pretty sure Kelsey didn’t drop out, though she did post about having a very hard time with finishing.
This is correct, she graduated but had a hard time doing so, due to health problems. (I hear that Stanford makes it really hard to fail to graduate, because university rankings care about completion rates.)
Note that Kelsey is absurdly smart though, and struggled with school for reasons other than inherently having trouble learning or thinking about things.
Interesting, I seem to remember a Tumblr post to the contrary but it was years ago.
Maybe she had temporarily dropped out at the time, and later was able to finish?