Fwiw, my intuition is that EA hasn’t been selecting against, e.g. good epistemic traits historically, since I think that the current community has quite good epistemics by the standards of the world at large (including the demographics EA draws on). Of course, current EA community-building strategies may have caused that to change, but, fwiw, I doubt it.
I also think that highly engaged EAs may generally be substantially more valuable, meaning that focusing on that makes sense, but would be interested in empirical analyses from community-builders.
Fwiw, my intuition is that EA hasn’t been selecting against, e.g. good epistemic traits historically, since I think that the current community has quite good epistemics by the standards of the world at large (including the demographics EA draws on).
I think it could be the case that EA itself selects strongly for good epistemics (people who are going to be interested in effective altruism have much higher epistemic standards than the world or large, even matched for demographics), and that this explains most of the gap you observe, but also that some actions/policies by EAs still select against good epistemic traits (albeit in a smaller way).
I think these latter selection effects, to the extent they occur at all, may happen despite (or, in some cases, because of) EA’s strong interest in good epistemics. e.g. EAs care about good epistemics, the criteria they use to select for good epistemics are in practice the person expressing positions/arguments they believe are good ones, this functionally selects more for deference than good epistemics.
I think it’s simultaneously true that highly engaged EAs are much more valuable, and that community builders shouldn’t focus primarily on maximizing the number of HEAs. This is due to impact having significant dependence on talent and other factors orthogonal to engagement.
Fwiw, my intuition is that EA hasn’t been selecting against, e.g. good epistemic traits historically, since I think that the current community has quite good epistemics by the standards of the world at large (including the demographics EA draws on). Of course, current EA community-building strategies may have caused that to change, but, fwiw, I doubt it.
I also think that highly engaged EAs may generally be substantially more valuable, meaning that focusing on that makes sense, but would be interested in empirical analyses from community-builders.
I think it could be the case that EA itself selects strongly for good epistemics (people who are going to be interested in effective altruism have much higher epistemic standards than the world or large, even matched for demographics), and that this explains most of the gap you observe, but also that some actions/policies by EAs still select against good epistemic traits (albeit in a smaller way).
I think these latter selection effects, to the extent they occur at all, may happen despite (or, in some cases, because of) EA’s strong interest in good epistemics. e.g. EAs care about good epistemics, the criteria they use to select for good epistemics are in practice the person expressing positions/arguments they believe are good ones, this functionally selects more for deference than good epistemics.
I think it’s simultaneously true that highly engaged EAs are much more valuable, and that community builders shouldn’t focus primarily on maximizing the number of HEAs. This is due to impact having significant dependence on talent and other factors orthogonal to engagement.