I also want to chime in here and say that it was a bit of a shock for me coming into the EA community also: I was one of the more analytical people in most of my friendship groups, yet it was pretty quickly clear to me that my comparative advantage in this community was actually EQ, communications, and management. I’m glad to work with some incredibly smart analytical people who are kind enough to (a) help me understand things that confuse me when I’m frank about what I don’t understand; and (b) remind me what else I bring to the table.
Luke needing to be reminded what he brings to the table I think is evidence that we’re missing out on many extremely talented people who aren’t 99.9th percentile on one particular skillset that we overselect for.
As a counter-example, I am below average in many skills that people in my wider-peer group have that, I believe, would be incredibly helpful to the effective altruism movement. However, I am good at a very narrow type of things that are easy to signal in conversation that makes people in the EA community often think way more highly of me than, I believe, is rational.
I have found easy social acceptance in this community because I speak fluent mathematics. I have higher IQ friends who, in high-trust conversations, are extremely epistemically humble and have a lot to contribute but who I can’t easily integrate into the effective altruism community.
I believe that part of what makes it hard to introduce people who aren’t exceptionally analytical to effective altruism is because there seems to be a stronger prior that intelligence and competence are one-dimensional (or all types of competence and intelligence are correlated) in a way there isn’t so much this prior elsewhere. It does seem true that some people are more intelligent/​skilled than others on many different dimensions we might care about and this is maybe a taboo thing to say in many contexts. However, competence and intelligence are multi-dimensional and different types of intelligence/​skills seem to me unlikely to be perfectly correlated with each other. I’d guess some are probably anti-correlated (we each have a limited number of neurons, surely if those neurons are highly specialized at solving one type of problem then there are going to be trade-offs which mean, at the skill frontier, it seems likely that this scarce brain capacity trades-off against other specialized skills).
To find someone good at marketing, we possibly had to find the one marketing guy who happened to be way above average in pretty much everything, including analytic intelligence (who was only 99th percentile analytic instead of 99.9th percentile and so needs reminding of his value in a community of people that very heavily rewards analytical thinking).
While analytic reasoning can be handy, it is not the only skill worth having and I don’t think you need to have that much of that particular skill to understand the core EA ideas enough to be a very valuable contributor to this community. Being exceptionally good at reasoning transparency and analytic philosophy is not perfectly correlated with many other types of skills or intelligence desperately needed within the effective altruism community for the EA community to maximize its impact. While some types of skills and intelligence have synergies and often come together, I suspect that other skills have different synergies.
If this model is accurate, then some skills are likely to be anti-correlated with the capacity to show large degrees of reasoning transparency and impress in EA-style conversations.
If those are skills we are in desperate need of, saying this movement isn’t for anyone who doesn’t find the forum very easy to read or doesn’t find analytical conversations as effortless might very well cause us to be much lower impact than we otherwise could be.
Comparative advantage is a thing and, as far as I’ve observed, skillsets and personalities do seem to cluster together.
If we want our movement to maximize its impact, then we can’t just select for the people who are exceptionally analytical at the detriment of losing out on people who are exceptionally good at, e.g. marketing or policy (I suspect it could be harder to find top people to work in AI governance without there being room for a greater variety of people who care deeply about helping others).
In short, if my model is correct, being a bit different to other people in the effective altruism community is evidence that you might have a comparative advantage (and maybe even an absolute advantage) within our community and you are paving the way for other people who are less weird in ways people in EA tend to be weird to find belonging here.
I strongly believe that if you care deeply about others in an impartial way, that carving out space for you is very much in the best interest of this community (and that if the EA community is a place you want to be, finding your place in it is going to help others feel like they, too, have a place). It is also fine for you to just do what’s good for you too and if the EA community isn’t healthy for you for whatever reason, it’s fine to bring what you like and discard the rest elsewhere too!
I also want to chime in here and say that it was a bit of a shock for me coming into the EA community also: I was one of the more analytical people in most of my friendship groups, yet it was pretty quickly clear to me that my comparative advantage in this community was actually EQ, communications, and management. I’m glad to work with some incredibly smart analytical people who are kind enough to (a) help me understand things that confuse me when I’m frank about what I don’t understand; and (b) remind me what else I bring to the table.
Luke needing to be reminded what he brings to the table I think is evidence that we’re missing out on many extremely talented people who aren’t 99.9th percentile on one particular skillset that we overselect for.
As a counter-example, I am below average in many skills that people in my wider-peer group have that, I believe, would be incredibly helpful to the effective altruism movement. However, I am good at a very narrow type of things that are easy to signal in conversation that makes people in the EA community often think way more highly of me than, I believe, is rational.
I have found easy social acceptance in this community because I speak fluent mathematics. I have higher IQ friends who, in high-trust conversations, are extremely epistemically humble and have a lot to contribute but who I can’t easily integrate into the effective altruism community.
I believe that part of what makes it hard to introduce people who aren’t exceptionally analytical to effective altruism is because there seems to be a stronger prior that intelligence and competence are one-dimensional (or all types of competence and intelligence are correlated) in a way there isn’t so much this prior elsewhere. It does seem true that some people are more intelligent/​skilled than others on many different dimensions we might care about and this is maybe a taboo thing to say in many contexts. However, competence and intelligence are multi-dimensional and different types of intelligence/​skills seem to me unlikely to be perfectly correlated with each other. I’d guess some are probably anti-correlated (we each have a limited number of neurons, surely if those neurons are highly specialized at solving one type of problem then there are going to be trade-offs which mean, at the skill frontier, it seems likely that this scarce brain capacity trades-off against other specialized skills).
To find someone good at marketing, we possibly had to find the one marketing guy who happened to be way above average in pretty much everything, including analytic intelligence (who was only 99th percentile analytic instead of 99.9th percentile and so needs reminding of his value in a community of people that very heavily rewards analytical thinking).
While analytic reasoning can be handy, it is not the only skill worth having and I don’t think you need to have that much of that particular skill to understand the core EA ideas enough to be a very valuable contributor to this community. Being exceptionally good at reasoning transparency and analytic philosophy is not perfectly correlated with many other types of skills or intelligence desperately needed within the effective altruism community for the EA community to maximize its impact. While some types of skills and intelligence have synergies and often come together, I suspect that other skills have different synergies.
If this model is accurate, then some skills are likely to be anti-correlated with the capacity to show large degrees of reasoning transparency and impress in EA-style conversations.
If those are skills we are in desperate need of, saying this movement isn’t for anyone who doesn’t find the forum very easy to read or doesn’t find analytical conversations as effortless might very well cause us to be much lower impact than we otherwise could be.
Comparative advantage is a thing and, as far as I’ve observed, skillsets and personalities do seem to cluster together.
If we want our movement to maximize its impact, then we can’t just select for the people who are exceptionally analytical at the detriment of losing out on people who are exceptionally good at, e.g. marketing or policy (I suspect it could be harder to find top people to work in AI governance without there being room for a greater variety of people who care deeply about helping others).
In short, if my model is correct, being a bit different to other people in the effective altruism community is evidence that you might have a comparative advantage (and maybe even an absolute advantage) within our community and you are paving the way for other people who are less weird in ways people in EA tend to be weird to find belonging here.
I strongly believe that if you care deeply about others in an impartial way, that carving out space for you is very much in the best interest of this community (and that if the EA community is a place you want to be, finding your place in it is going to help others feel like they, too, have a place). It is also fine for you to just do what’s good for you too and if the EA community isn’t healthy for you for whatever reason, it’s fine to bring what you like and discard the rest elsewhere too!