Division Manager: Forum and Events at CEA. Non-EA interests include chess, TikTok, and applying science to things it isn’t usually applied to.
TikTok: @benthamite
Ben_West
Karma: 3,096
Thanks for sharing this!
Feels like all the top people in EA would have gotten into EA anyway?
Possibly you don’t endorse this statement and were just using it as an intro, but I think your interlocutor’s response (1) is understated: I can’t think of any products which don’t benefit from having a marketing department. If EA doesn’t benefit from marketing (broadly defined), it would be an exceptionally unusual product.
I imagine taking my best guess at the “current plan of meta-EA” and giving it to Paul Graham and him not funding my startup because the plan isn’t specific/concrete enough to even check if it’s good and this vagueness is a sign that the key assumptions that need to be true for the plan to even work haven’t been identified.
For what it’s worth, CEA’s plans seem more concrete than mine were when I interviewed at YC. CLR’s thoughts on creating disruptive research teams are another thing which comes to mind as having key assumptions which could be falsified.
I’m glad I could help. Feel free to quote me in the annual Rethink Priorities impact analysis.
Some things not mentioned above:
- https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9109/w9109.pdf
Baum, Joel AC, and Brian S. Silverman. “Picking winners or building them? Alliance, intellectual, and human capital as selection criteria in venture financing and performance of biotechnology startups.” Journal of business venturing 19.3 (2004): 411-436.
http://www.library.auckland.ac.nz/subject-guides/bus/docs/PickingWinners2004.pdfAgrawal, A., Kapur, D., McHale, J., 2008. How do spatial and social proximity influence knowledge flows? Evidence from patent data, Journal of Urban Economics, 64.
Zacharakis, Andrew L., and G. Dale Meyer. “The potential of actuarial decision models: can they improve the venture capital investment decision?.” Journal of Business Venturing 15.4 (2000): 323-346.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902698000160Keely, Robert H. Determinants of new venture success before 1982 and after a preliminary look at two eras. Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa, Universidad de Navarra, 1989.
http://www.iese.edu/research/pdfs/DI-0173-E.pdfChrisman, James J., Alan Bauerschmidt, and Charles W. Hofer. “The determinants of new venture performance: An extended model.”
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 23 (1998): 5-30.
http://misweb.cbi.msstate.edu/~COBI/faculty/users/jchrisman/files/autoweb/mgt8123/MGT8123(Chrismanetal.,ETP,1998).pdfRoss Levine, Yona Rubinstein, Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes an Entrepreneur and Do They Earn More?, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 132, Issue 2, May 2017, Pages 963–1018,
https://economics.uchicago.edu/workshops/Rubinstein%20Yona%20Smart%20and%20Illicit.pdfJ. Robert Baum, Edwin A. Locke, and Ken G. Smith, 2001: A Multidimensional Model of Venture Growth. AMJ, 44, 292–303 http://www.taranomco.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/247.pdf
Experimentation and the Returns to Entrepreneurship. Gustavo Manso
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Gustavo.pdf
Note that many of these are trying to test some model of venture success, and only calculate things related to EV as a subcomponent of that project. So it might not always be easy to answer the question you’re actually trying to answer here.
Also, it’s surprisingly hard to define “startup”, and some of the variance in these estimates comes from using different reference classes.
This is a really great idea. Thanks for organizing this and writing up the results. A couple questions:
Overall, we feel we managed to achieve deep and positive engagement with tournament participants, but haven’t yet cracked the question of how to properly engage (more shallowly) with the broader debating community.
I’m curious about the “deep” engagement aspect. You mentioned that there was the Facebook group – have people continued to engage in other ways? E.g. attending meet ups or reading this forum.
high probability that within a decade or so we can expect members of this audience to be in global positions of influence makes the community a great outreach target
Do you know of anything which has measured this? I’m imagining something similar to how 80 K analyzed predictors of becoming an MP. It seems plausible to me that top debaters are disproportionately likely to gain positions of influence, but I’m not well calibrated on how big of an effect this is.
I read Command and Control on your recommendation and it inspired my most popular EA TikTok to date. (150,000 views).
Data from the IAP indicates that they can identify the top few percent of successful inventions with pretty good accuracy. (Where “success” is a binary variable – not sure how they perform if you measure financial returns.)
(Although I wonder what evidence indicates they can reliably tell the top 5% from those below, rather than they just think they can).
The Canadian inventors assistance program provides a rating of how good an invention is to inventors for a nominal fee. A large fraction of the people who get a bad rating try to make a company anyway, so we can judge the accuracy of their evaluations.55% of the inventions which they give the highest rating to achieve commercial success, compared to 0% for the lowest rating.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve updated the title
[Job Ad] Help us make this Forum better
I think maybe I was confused about what you are saying. You said:
I think this applies to growth in local groups particularly well… While I’ve no doubt that many of the groups that have been founded by people who joined since 2015*, I suspect that even if we cut those people out of the data, we’d still see an increase in the number of local groups over that time frame- so we can’t infer that EA is continuing to grow based on increase in local group numbers.
But then also:
Fwiw, this seems like more direct evidence of growth in EA since 2015 than any of the other metrics
In my mind, A being evidence of B means that you can (at least partially) infer B from A. But I’m guessing you mean “infer” to be something like “prove”, and I agree the evidence isn’t that strong.
The CEA events team uses a combination (or variant) of these frameworks to design a “canvas” for each event. I personally use both here and at prior jobs. I’m a strong advocate for knowing your users in general, but am less opinionated about those specific frameworks.
Some thoughts on each:
Personas can end up becoming an end in themselves. You can get sidetracked into creating these elaborate back stories and forget that you’re really just trying to figure out if the widget should be blue or green. It can also be tempting to use multiple personas as a justification for complexity (e.g. because you create one feature per persona instead of one feature for everyone). But there are definitely circumstances in which you are serving a genuinely diverse audience, and it makes sense to segment the audience. I also like them as a way of encouraging focus on the most important things – you can ask how (persona) would want you to prioritize. I usually see them more as an adjunct to some other process. E.g. if you are mapping out your marketing channels, you might create one set of channels per persona.
Jobs to be done generally seem more helpful to me because it keeps your focus on what the user thinks is most important. Sometimes talking about the users pain’s makes more sense, e.g. I hire an accountant to reduce audit risk, rather than the “job” of filling out tax forms. I tend to think about pains when first developing a product (because if you aren’t solving some huge pain point probably no one will use your product) but jobs later in the product lifecycle (because people are already using your product so it’s worth thinking about minor improvements).
Especially for early-stage products I like the thought experiment of “hair on fire customers.”
Welcome Tristan!
Welcome Schuyler!
Oh interesting, thanks for sharing. These are compelling counterexamples
Could you elaborate why this violates Pareto? I’m used to that assumption being phrased in terms of sure things, but even if you make it stochastic it still seems fine to say “if A stochastically dominates B for each person, then A > B”.
And for what it’s worth, this is not one of my major intuitions behind utilitarianism. Cluelessness already implies that I need to consider a butterfly flapping its wings before deciding whether to donate to AMF; stating that the butterfly could be outside my light cone doesn’t seem qualitatively different.
(Possibly it is a key intuition that Harsanyi had, not sure. Also I do agree that considering consequences unaffected by my actions is a counterintuitive thing for any decision theory to do, moral or otherwise.)
Layman’s Summary of Resolving Pascallian Decision Problems with Stochastic Dominance
Ask, don’t tell.
This is really good advice, at least for a subset of people.
Whether someone is problem-oriented (“the shortage of widgets in EA”) versus solution-oriented (“find a way to use my widget-making skills”) often gives me a strong signal of how likely they are to be successful.
I’d add on that sharing the answers people give to your questions (e.g. on this forum) is helpful. The set of things EA needs is vast, and there’s no reason for us to all start from scratch in figuring out how to help.
University group members are mostly undergraduates, meaning they are younger than ~22. This implies that they would have been younger than 18 in 2017, and there was almost no one like that on the 2017 survey. And they would have been under 16 in 2015, although I don’t think we have data going back that far. I can think of one or two people who might have gotten involved as 15-year-olds in 2015, but it seems quite rare. Is there something I’m missing?
Congratulations!
Good point