I think you make a mistake to make a generalization of intelligence, you assume a universalized definition when, in reality, there is no single definition of what we mean when we talk about it.
If we assume (and allow me to) that you mean IQ, I wanted to quickly comment on the controversy (and correlation) of IQ tests with white supremacy, and the perpetuation of racism in the United States and in what is commonly known as “the Global South” and the perpetuation of an ableist system that has reached eugenics.
Understanding intelligence as something you are born with and not as a social construction based on trying to categorize and standardize (at the beginning, as I say, with racist and eugenic ways) a biosocial interaction is somewhat problematic.
Honestly, and this is my personal opinion, I don’t think EA people are smart per se. I also believe (or rather, I affirm) that there is a correlation between going to a top university like Oxford or Harvard not with being excellent, but with having had the opportunity to be that. And what I call opportunity also applies to those people who have not gone to university, of course.
Anyway, in EA we have a problem when it comes to identifying ourselves as a group that could be easily resolved by investing efforts in how our dynamics work, and the ways in which we exclude other people (I’m not just referring to Olivia) and how that affects within the community, at the level of biases and at the level of the effects that all this has on the work we do.
I didn’t down/up-vote this comment but I feel the down-votes without explanation and critical engagement are a bit harsh and unfair, to be honest. So I’m going to try and give some feedback (though a bit rapidly, and maybe too rapidy to be helpful...)
It feels like just an statement of fact to say that IQ tests have a sordid history; and concepts of intelligence have been weaponised against marginalised groups historically (including women, might I add to your list ;) ). That is fair to say.
But reading this post, it feels less interested in engaging with the OP’s post let alone with Linch’s response, and more like there is something you wanted to say about intelligence and racism and have looked for a place to say that.
I don’t feel like relating the racist history of IQ tests helps the OP think about their role in EA; it doesn’t really engage with what they were saying that they feel they are average and don’t mind that, but rather just want to be empowered to do good.
I don’t feel it meaningfully engages with Linch’s central point; that the community has lots of people with attributes X in it, and is set up for people with attributes X, but maybe there are some ways the community is not optimised for other people
I think your post is not very balanced on intelligence.
general intelligence is as far as I understand a well established psychological / individual differences domain
Though this does how many people with outlying abilities in e.g. maths and sciences will—as they put it themselves—not be as strong on other intelligences, such as social. And in fairness to many EAs who are like this, they put their hands up on their intelligence shortcominds in these domains!
Of course there’s a bio(psycho)social interaction between biological inheritance and environment when it comes to intelligence. The OP’s and Linch’s points still stand with that in mind.
The correlation between top university attendance and opportunity. Notably, the strongest predictor of whether you go to Harvard is whether your parents went to Harvard; but disentangling that from a) ability and b) getting coached / moulded to show your ability in the ways you need to for Harvard admissions interviews is pretty hard. Maybe a good way of thinking of it is something like for every person who get into elite university X...:
there are 100s of more talented people not given the opportunity or moulding to succeed at this, who otherwise would trounce them, but
there are 10000s more who, no matter how much opportunity or moulding they were given, would not succeed
Anyway, in EA we have a problem when it comes to identifying ourselves as a group that could be easily resolved by investing efforts in how our dynamics work, and the ways in which we exclude other people (I’m not just referring to Olivia) and how that affects within the community, at the level of biases and at the level of the effects that all this has on the work we do.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying “we have some group dynamics problems; we involve some types of people less, and listen to some voices less”. Is that correct?
I agree—I think almost everyone would identify different weird dynamics within EA they don’t love, and ways they think the community could be more inclusive; or some might find lack of inclusiveness unpalateable but be willing to bite that bullet on trade-offs. Some good work has been done recently on starting up EA in non-Anglophone, non-Western countries, including putting forward the benefits of more local interventions; but a lot more could be done.
A new post on voices we should be listening to more, and EA assumptions which prevent this from happening would be welcome!
Thank you for your comment, at the beginning I did not understand about the downvotes and why I wasn’t getting any kind of criticism
I agree with what you say with my comment, I would not contribute anything to Olivia’s post, I realized this within hours of writing it and I did not want to delete or edit it. I prefer that the mistakes I may do remain present so that I can study a possible evolution for the near-medium future.
But reading this post, it feels less interested in engaging with the OP’s post let alone with Linch’s response, and more like there is something you wanted to say about intelligence and racism and have looked for a place to say that.
Actually, my intention was not focused at any time to bring up the issue of racism or eugenics, but more in terms of how within the EA community intelligence is conceptualized and defined as a means to measure oneself between the group and the others. I believe this, thinking about it, is a good idea to write about it in this forum.
I also point out about writing on the subject of EA dynamics, giving voices to other people and criticizing both sides that you comment
I do think intelligence is less clearly defined than it could be, and I’ve complained in the past that the definition people often use is optimized more for prediction than independent validity.
However, I think the different definitions are sufficiently correlated that it’s reasonable to us to sometimes speak of it as one thing. Consider an analogy to “humor.” Humor means different things to different people, and there’s not a widely agreed upon culture-free definition, but still it seems “I’m not funny enough to be a professional standup comedian” is a reasonable thing to say.
And my guess is that the different definitions of intelligence are more tightly correlated than different definitions (or different perspectives on) humor.
I also disagree with the implication (which rereading, you did not say outright. So perhaps I misread you) that intelligence (and merit-based systems in general) is racist. If anything, I find the idea that merit-based measurements is racist or white supremacist to be itself kind of a racist idea, not to mention condescending to nonwhites.
I agree that intelligence has environmental components. I’m not sure why this is relevant here however.
When I brought up the subject of intelligence and its definitions, it came as a result of what Olivia comments about not feeling or looking intelligent for EA and how (in your comment) your fact fourth can be understood. What I mean is, that if she (speaking in ultra-simplified and quite relative terms) is less smart than the average EA, it does not mean that she will always be less smart.
Leaving the door open to the learning and growth of possible intelligence that may be underdeveloped could be a valid option for Olivia, but I do not see that option in your comment. I do not see that you are trying to pull that idea of personal and intellectual growth.
That is, she may not know about something and has the right to learn about it, at her own pace. Perhaps in the future, she will discover in herself an expert in some of all this, but how can we know if we do not give her that option?
I also disagree with the implication (which rereading, you did not say outright. So perhaps I misread you) that intelligence (and merit-based systems in general) is racist.
Here you have really misunderstood what I said, as I mentioned before:
Actually, my intention was not focused at any time to bring up the issue of racism or eugenics, but more in terms of how within the EA community intelligence is conceptualized and defined as a means to measure oneself between the group and the others. I believe this, thinking about it, is a good idea to write about it in this forum.
Lastly, on the merit-based system, I think we can have a more distant opinion, and if you ever want to talk about it in more depth, I think this forum has private messages for it.
”I think you make a mistake to make a generalization of intelligence, you assume a universalized definition when, in reality, there is no single definition of what we mean when we talk about it.”
I think the rest of your comment detracts from this initial statement because it claims a lot and extraordinarily strong claims need extraordinarily strong evidence. It was also a very politicalized comment.
While naturally sometimes things just are political, when things toe a political party line it can sound more like rhetoric and less like rational argument and that can ring alarm bells in people’s heads. I think for political comments especially, more evidence is needed per claim because people are prone to motivated reasoning when things are tribal, I know I am certainly less rational when it comes to my political beliefs than my beliefs about chemistry, for example (I think this is probably true also of things that toe the “EA party-line” but as this is the EA forum, it makes sense that things that are more commonly thought in the EA community get justified less than they would on a forum about any other topic, but I know that I have a bias towards believing things that are commonly believed in the EA community and I really should require more evidence per claim that agrees with the EA community to correct this bias in myself, a thing that maybe I should reflect on more in the future).
I think that your comment could have been improved by 1) making it several separate comments so people could upvote and downvote the different components separately (I am such a hypocrite as my comments are often long and contain many different points but this is something I should also work on), 2) if you feel strongly that the more political parts of your comment were important to your core point, and you strongly suspect that there are parts that are true that could be fleshed out and properly justified, it would be better to maybe pick one narrow claim you made and fleshed it out a lot more, with more caveats on the bits you’re more or less confident on/that seem more or less backed by science (I personally don’t feel like those bits were important to your overall point but that’s maybe because I don’t fully understand the point you were trying to make).
I also wanted to say sorry you got downvoted so much! That always sucks, especially when it’s unclear what the reason is.
It can be hard to tell whether people disagree with your core claim or whether people felt you didn’t justify stuff enough.
I didn’t upvote or downvote but I both strongly agreed with your first sentence and felt a bit uncomfortable about how political your comment was for the reasons stated above and that might be the same reason other people downvoted.
I hope my comment is more helpful and that it wasn’t overly critical (my comments are also far from perfect)!
I thought it was worth saying that at least one reader didn’t completely disagree with everything here even if your original comment was very downvoted.
What we colloquially call “intelligence” does seem multi-dimensional, it would be very surprising to me if many people reading your comment disagreed with that (they might just think that there is some kind of intelligence that IQ tests measure that is not racist or ableist to think is valuable in some contexts for some types of tasks even if there are other types of intelligence that are harder to measure that also might be very valuable).
FWIW, I am both mixed race and also have plenty of diagnoses that makes me technically clinically insane :P (bipolar and ADHD), so if one counter-example is enough, I feel like I can be that counter-example.
I’d like to think the type of intelligence that I have is valuable too—no idea if it easily measurable in an IQ test (I don’t think IQ tests are very informative for individuals so I’ve not taken one as an adult).
Seeing my type of intelligence as valuable does not mean that other types of skills/intelligence can’t be valued too and I, personally, don’t think it makes much sense to see it as ableist or racist to value my skills/competencies/type of intelligence. We should still also value other skills/types of intelligence/competencies too.
I do think that professions that, on average, women tend to do more of and men tend to do less of, for whatever reason, are valued less (eg. paediatricians versus surgeons). I would guess that this is a type of sexism. Is this the kind of thing you were trying to point to?
I could agree with the part where I assume things related to the IQ, but I make those assumptions having previously read other EA members with clearly essentialist and biologist ideas regarding the subject of intelligence, ideas that also are also quite far from being rational. Continuing with that, in the third paragraph I comment on the problem of naturalizing something -intelligence- for which we have evidence and consensus is not as stated.
Understanding the politicization behind my following arguments, where I speak from a perspective beyond rationalist or philosophical could be the most correct thing in which I could reaffirm myself. For the next time, I might start with something about this.
I understand therefore what you say about politicization in the last paragraphs that I expose, for the next time I think I could focus more on possible evidence regarding this, something that I did not think about for a short and brief comment like this one at the beginning.
I think you make a mistake to make a generalization of intelligence, you assume a universalized definition when, in reality, there is no single definition of what we mean when we talk about it.
If we assume (and allow me to) that you mean IQ, I wanted to quickly comment on the controversy (and correlation) of IQ tests with white supremacy, and the perpetuation of racism in the United States and in what is commonly known as “the Global South” and the perpetuation of an ableist system that has reached eugenics.
Understanding intelligence as something you are born with and not as a social construction based on trying to categorize and standardize (at the beginning, as I say, with racist and eugenic ways) a biosocial interaction is somewhat problematic.
Honestly, and this is my personal opinion, I don’t think EA people are smart per se. I also believe (or rather, I affirm) that there is a correlation between going to a top university like Oxford or Harvard not with being excellent, but with having had the opportunity to be that. And what I call opportunity also applies to those people who have not gone to university, of course.
Anyway, in EA we have a problem when it comes to identifying ourselves as a group that could be easily resolved by investing efforts in how our dynamics work, and the ways in which we exclude other people (I’m not just referring to Olivia) and how that affects within the community, at the level of biases and at the level of the effects that all this has on the work we do.
I didn’t down/up-vote this comment but I feel the down-votes without explanation and critical engagement are a bit harsh and unfair, to be honest. So I’m going to try and give some feedback (though a bit rapidly, and maybe too rapidy to be helpful...)
It feels like just an statement of fact to say that IQ tests have a sordid history; and concepts of intelligence have been weaponised against marginalised groups historically (including women, might I add to your list ;) ). That is fair to say.
But reading this post, it feels less interested in engaging with the OP’s post let alone with Linch’s response, and more like there is something you wanted to say about intelligence and racism and have looked for a place to say that.
I don’t feel like relating the racist history of IQ tests helps the OP think about their role in EA; it doesn’t really engage with what they were saying that they feel they are average and don’t mind that, but rather just want to be empowered to do good.
I don’t feel it meaningfully engages with Linch’s central point; that the community has lots of people with attributes X in it, and is set up for people with attributes X, but maybe there are some ways the community is not optimised for other people
I think your post is not very balanced on intelligence.
general intelligence is as far as I understand a well established psychological / individual differences domain
Though this does how many people with outlying abilities in e.g. maths and sciences will—as they put it themselves—not be as strong on other intelligences, such as social. And in fairness to many EAs who are like this, they put their hands up on their intelligence shortcominds in these domains!
Of course there’s a bio(psycho)social interaction between biological inheritance and environment when it comes to intelligence. The OP’s and Linch’s points still stand with that in mind.
The correlation between top university attendance and opportunity. Notably, the strongest predictor of whether you go to Harvard is whether your parents went to Harvard; but disentangling that from a) ability and b) getting coached / moulded to show your ability in the ways you need to for Harvard admissions interviews is pretty hard. Maybe a good way of thinking of it is something like for every person who get into elite university X...:
there are 100s of more talented people not given the opportunity or moulding to succeed at this, who otherwise would trounce them, but
there are 10000s more who, no matter how much opportunity or moulding they were given, would not succeed
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying “we have some group dynamics problems; we involve some types of people less, and listen to some voices less”. Is that correct?
I agree—I think almost everyone would identify different weird dynamics within EA they don’t love, and ways they think the community could be more inclusive; or some might find lack of inclusiveness unpalateable but be willing to bite that bullet on trade-offs. Some good work has been done recently on starting up EA in non-Anglophone, non-Western countries, including putting forward the benefits of more local interventions; but a lot more could be done.
A new post on voices we should be listening to more, and EA assumptions which prevent this from happening would be welcome!
Thank you for your comment, at the beginning I did not understand about the downvotes and why I wasn’t getting any kind of criticism
I agree with what you say with my comment, I would not contribute anything to Olivia’s post, I realized this within hours of writing it and I did not want to delete or edit it. I prefer that the mistakes I may do remain present so that I can study a possible evolution for the near-medium future.
Actually, my intention was not focused at any time to bring up the issue of racism or eugenics, but more in terms of how within the EA community intelligence is conceptualized and defined as a means to measure oneself between the group and the others. I believe this, thinking about it, is a good idea to write about it in this forum.
I also point out about writing on the subject of EA dynamics, giving voices to other people and criticizing both sides that you comment
Nothing to add—just wanted to explicitly say I appreciate a lot that you took the time to write the comment I was too lazy to.
I do think intelligence is less clearly defined than it could be, and I’ve complained in the past that the definition people often use is optimized more for prediction than independent validity.
However, I think the different definitions are sufficiently correlated that it’s reasonable to us to sometimes speak of it as one thing. Consider an analogy to “humor.” Humor means different things to different people, and there’s not a widely agreed upon culture-free definition, but still it seems “I’m not funny enough to be a professional standup comedian” is a reasonable thing to say.
And my guess is that the different definitions of intelligence are more tightly correlated than different definitions (or different perspectives on) humor.
I also disagree with the implication (which rereading, you did not say outright. So perhaps I misread you) that intelligence (and merit-based systems in general) is racist. If anything, I find the idea that merit-based measurements is racist or white supremacist to be itself kind of a racist idea, not to mention condescending to nonwhites.
I agree that intelligence has environmental components. I’m not sure why this is relevant here however.
Hi Linch! Thanks for your comment
When I brought up the subject of intelligence and its definitions, it came as a result of what Olivia comments about not feeling or looking intelligent for EA and how (in your comment) your fact fourth can be understood. What I mean is, that if she (speaking in ultra-simplified and quite relative terms) is less smart than the average EA, it does not mean that she will always be less smart.
Leaving the door open to the learning and growth of possible intelligence that may be underdeveloped could be a valid option for Olivia, but I do not see that option in your comment. I do not see that you are trying to pull that idea of personal and intellectual growth.
That is, she may not know about something and has the right to learn about it, at her own pace. Perhaps in the future, she will discover in herself an expert in some of all this, but how can we know if we do not give her that option?
Here you have really misunderstood what I said, as I mentioned before:
Lastly, on the merit-based system, I think we can have a more distant opinion, and if you ever want to talk about it in more depth, I think this forum has private messages for it.
I strongly agree with:
”I think you make a mistake to make a generalization of intelligence, you assume a universalized definition when, in reality, there is no single definition of what we mean when we talk about it.”
I think the rest of your comment detracts from this initial statement because it claims a lot and extraordinarily strong claims need extraordinarily strong evidence. It was also a very politicalized comment.
While naturally sometimes things just are political, when things toe a political party line it can sound more like rhetoric and less like rational argument and that can ring alarm bells in people’s heads. I think for political comments especially, more evidence is needed per claim because people are prone to motivated reasoning when things are tribal, I know I am certainly less rational when it comes to my political beliefs than my beliefs about chemistry, for example (I think this is probably true also of things that toe the “EA party-line” but as this is the EA forum, it makes sense that things that are more commonly thought in the EA community get justified less than they would on a forum about any other topic, but I know that I have a bias towards believing things that are commonly believed in the EA community and I really should require more evidence per claim that agrees with the EA community to correct this bias in myself, a thing that maybe I should reflect on more in the future).
I think that your comment could have been improved by
1) making it several separate comments so people could upvote and downvote the different components separately (I am such a hypocrite as my comments are often long and contain many different points but this is something I should also work on),
2) if you feel strongly that the more political parts of your comment were important to your core point, and you strongly suspect that there are parts that are true that could be fleshed out and properly justified, it would be better to maybe pick one narrow claim you made and fleshed it out a lot more, with more caveats on the bits you’re more or less confident on/that seem more or less backed by science (I personally don’t feel like those bits were important to your overall point but that’s maybe because I don’t fully understand the point you were trying to make).
I also wanted to say sorry you got downvoted so much! That always sucks, especially when it’s unclear what the reason is.
It can be hard to tell whether people disagree with your core claim or whether people felt you didn’t justify stuff enough.
I didn’t upvote or downvote but I both strongly agreed with your first sentence and felt a bit uncomfortable about how political your comment was for the reasons stated above and that might be the same reason other people downvoted.
I hope my comment is more helpful and that it wasn’t overly critical (my comments are also far from perfect)!
I thought it was worth saying that at least one reader didn’t completely disagree with everything here even if your original comment was very downvoted.
What we colloquially call “intelligence” does seem multi-dimensional, it would be very surprising to me if many people reading your comment disagreed with that (they might just think that there is some kind of intelligence that IQ tests measure that is not racist or ableist to think is valuable in some contexts for some types of tasks even if there are other types of intelligence that are harder to measure that also might be very valuable).
FWIW, I am both mixed race and also have plenty of diagnoses that makes me technically clinically insane :P (bipolar and ADHD), so if one counter-example is enough, I feel like I can be that counter-example.
I’d like to think the type of intelligence that I have is valuable too—no idea if it easily measurable in an IQ test (I don’t think IQ tests are very informative for individuals so I’ve not taken one as an adult).
Seeing my type of intelligence as valuable does not mean that other types of skills/intelligence can’t be valued too and I, personally, don’t think it makes much sense to see it as ableist or racist to value my skills/competencies/type of intelligence. We should still also value other skills/types of intelligence/competencies too.
I do think that professions that, on average, women tend to do more of and men tend to do less of, for whatever reason, are valued less (eg. paediatricians versus surgeons). I would guess that this is a type of sexism. Is this the kind of thing you were trying to point to?
Hi, thank you for your comment.
I could agree with the part where I assume things related to the IQ, but I make those assumptions having previously read other EA members with clearly essentialist and biologist ideas regarding the subject of intelligence, ideas that also are also quite far from being rational. Continuing with that, in the third paragraph I comment on the problem of naturalizing something -intelligence- for which we have evidence and consensus is not as stated.
Understanding the politicization behind my following arguments, where I speak from a perspective beyond rationalist or philosophical could be the most correct thing in which I could reaffirm myself. For the next time, I might start with something about this.
I understand therefore what you say about politicization in the last paragraphs that I expose, for the next time I think I could focus more on possible evidence regarding this, something that I did not think about for a short and brief comment like this one at the beginning.