This is such a good post + I agree so much! I’m sorry you feel like you don’t fit in :( and I’m also worried about the alienating effect EA can have on people. Fwiw, I’ve also had worries like this in the past—not so much that I wasn’t smart enough, but that there wasn’t a place for me in EA because I didn’t have a research background in any of the major cause areas (happy to DM about this).
A couple of points, some echoing what others have said:
-there’s a difference between ‘smart’ and ‘has fancy credentials’ -some stuff that’s posted on the Forum is written for a niche audience of experts and is incomprehensible to pretty much everyone -imo a lot of EA stuff is written in an unnecessarily complicated/maths-y/technical way (and the actual ideas are less complicated than they seem) -maybe you have strengths other than “intellectual” intelligence, e.g. emotional intelligence, people skills, being organized, conscientiousness...
I really do think this is a problem with EA, not with you—EAs should offer more resources to people who are excited to contribute but don’t fit into the extremely narrow demographic of nerdy booksmart STEM graduates.
Yeah absolutely! And it’s not always worth experts’ time to optimize for accessibility to all possible readers (if it’s most important that other experts read it). But this does mean that sometimes things can seem more “advanced” or complex than they are.
Thank you for this comment!! The points you make are really great, and I hadn’t considered the importance of other types of intelligence so that’s something for me to think about a bit more.
I agree there needs to be more resources out there, and I hope this is something that changes over time.
I disagree with this comment’s implications, but I do understand why this post and comment was made. The basic problem is status in EA, especially metrics like lives saved (relatively), while arguably necessary to get the money it has now, is a problem. Obviously compared to AI Alignment, pretty much everyone is small in comparison.
But that’s not a good mindset for EA to cultivate, or for individuals to have.
For dumb people, focus on donating money, do a lot of epistemic deference to organizations like Givewell, and ignore the status/relative game. Focus on the absolute numbers of lives saved by your actions, not comparing it to others lives saved.
The default action for most dumb people that works is Earn to give, invest in index funds, and auto-donate with heavy epistemic deference. Accept your limits, but don’t define or break your psychological health on intelligence.
If aiming at dumb (I really just used this as a title, I just meant averagely intellingent) people, I don’t think using the phrase ‘epistemic deference’ is ideal :D
I feel like certain populations (particularly women) tend to underestimate their abilities, so I find this comment pretty discouraging. My current take is that a lot of people think they aren’t good enough for XYZ, but if they take a good stab at XYZ in an environment that is encouraging they may realize that they might be able to do XYZ after all.
I think that a lot of people naturally think that they are “not math people” when they could actually be much better at math.
And I don’t think that you don’t have to be the best at math or XYZ to contribute. I think that as long as you’re willing to put some effort and are open-minded and willing to grow, you’ll probably surprise yourself at how much you’re able to do.
@Olivia I’m honestly very impressed with you because you’ve shown a lot of good traits by making this post. It’s clear that you deeply care about making a difference. You were bold and took the initiative to open up about your insecurities. You were agentic in posting this on the forum. You’re willing to take feedback from the audience Keep it up!
My reason is that the opposite problem usually occurs called the Dunning-Kruger effect, where dumb people or low IQ vastly overestimate what good they can do (in the EA worldview or perspective, not other perspectives) due to not realizing just how bad they are, while High IQ people underestimate themselves due to not realizing how good they are, and IQ/g-factor is both important at the statstical or group level and mostly genetic, so that’s why it can be discouraging to be in an EA job.
But adopting the just-world fallacy helps us nothing here. They can still be psychologically healthy, but they need to recognize their limits and not believe they can do anything they wish they can do.
The implications that I disagree is that intelligence doesn’t matter at the group level, or that a just world where dumb people in the 70-85 IQ range can work too much on complex problems like AI safety exist.
I didn’t mean to imply that intelligence doesn’t matter—more that there are different types of intelligence (some of which are actually underrepresented in EA), or to put it another way, strengths other than IQ can also be very useful.
This is such a good post + I agree so much! I’m sorry you feel like you don’t fit in :( and I’m also worried about the alienating effect EA can have on people. Fwiw, I’ve also had worries like this in the past—not so much that I wasn’t smart enough, but that there wasn’t a place for me in EA because I didn’t have a research background in any of the major cause areas (happy to DM about this).
A couple of points, some echoing what others have said:
-there’s a difference between ‘smart’ and ‘has fancy credentials’
-some stuff that’s posted on the Forum is written for a niche audience of experts and is incomprehensible to pretty much everyone
-imo a lot of EA stuff is written in an unnecessarily complicated/maths-y/technical way (and the actual ideas are less complicated than they seem)
-maybe you have strengths other than “intellectual” intelligence, e.g. emotional intelligence, people skills, being organized, conscientiousness...
I really do think this is a problem with EA, not with you—EAs should offer more resources to people who are excited to contribute but don’t fit into the extremely narrow demographic of nerdy booksmart STEM graduates.
For people with math/technical background the easiest way to express certain ideas may be in a mathy way.
Yeah absolutely! And it’s not always worth experts’ time to optimize for accessibility to all possible readers (if it’s most important that other experts read it). But this does mean that sometimes things can seem more “advanced” or complex than they are.
Thank you for this comment!! The points you make are really great, and I hadn’t considered the importance of other types of intelligence so that’s something for me to think about a bit more.
I agree there needs to be more resources out there, and I hope this is something that changes over time.
I disagree with this comment’s implications, but I do understand why this post and comment was made. The basic problem is status in EA, especially metrics like lives saved (relatively), while arguably necessary to get the money it has now, is a problem. Obviously compared to AI Alignment, pretty much everyone is small in comparison.
But that’s not a good mindset for EA to cultivate, or for individuals to have.
For dumb people, focus on donating money, do a lot of epistemic deference to organizations like Givewell, and ignore the status/relative game. Focus on the absolute numbers of lives saved by your actions, not comparing it to others lives saved.
The default action for most dumb people that works is Earn to give, invest in index funds, and auto-donate with heavy epistemic deference. Accept your limits, but don’t define or break your psychological health on intelligence.
If aiming at dumb (I really just used this as a title, I just meant averagely intellingent) people, I don’t think using the phrase ‘epistemic deference’ is ideal :D
I’ll probably write a top level comment on why I disagree with this.
I feel like certain populations (particularly women) tend to underestimate their abilities, so I find this comment pretty discouraging. My current take is that a lot of people think they aren’t good enough for XYZ, but if they take a good stab at XYZ in an environment that is encouraging they may realize that they might be able to do XYZ after all.
I think that a lot of people naturally think that they are “not math people” when they could actually be much better at math.
And I don’t think that you don’t have to be the best at math or XYZ to contribute. I think that as long as you’re willing to put some effort and are open-minded and willing to grow, you’ll probably surprise yourself at how much you’re able to do.
@Olivia I’m honestly very impressed with you because you’ve shown a lot of good traits by making this post. It’s clear that you deeply care about making a difference. You were bold and took the initiative to open up about your insecurities. You were agentic in posting this on the forum. You’re willing to take feedback from the audience Keep it up!
Thank you so much! I really appreciate this—it can definitely be challening to see good qualities I have sometimes...so thank you for posting this.
My reason is that the opposite problem usually occurs called the Dunning-Kruger effect, where dumb people or low IQ vastly overestimate what good they can do (in the EA worldview or perspective, not other perspectives) due to not realizing just how bad they are, while High IQ people underestimate themselves due to not realizing how good they are, and IQ/g-factor is both important at the statstical or group level and mostly genetic, so that’s why it can be discouraging to be in an EA job.
But adopting the just-world fallacy helps us nothing here. They can still be psychologically healthy, but they need to recognize their limits and not believe they can do anything they wish they can do.
I think Dunning-Kruger is overrated. Don’t have a canonical source for this but here are some posts.
I’ll provisionally retract all comments on this thread, because I think I got it majorly wrong, except this one.
What are the implications you disagree with?
The implications that I disagree is that intelligence doesn’t matter at the group level, or that a just world where dumb people in the 70-85 IQ range can work too much on complex problems like AI safety exist.
I didn’t mean to imply that intelligence doesn’t matter—more that there are different types of intelligence (some of which are actually underrepresented in EA), or to put it another way, strengths other than IQ can also be very useful.