That’s a fair point except that I certainly did not say nor mean “the median beneficiary” should be within the conversation at EAG and EAG-type contexts. I said that orgs like GiveDirectly and Fistula Foundation could be contacted to see which outstanding people they are in contact with might be ideal to bring to EAGs.
The people I speak of, don’t even necessarily need to be be beneficiaries at all. They should just be, as I said, “people who grew up and/or currently live/work in these places.” They might indeed be beneficiaries who now also work with these orgs in some capacity, or maybe they are not beneficiaries at all. Such people who grow up in a place, generally have way better understanding, and even sometimes out of the box thinking, about problems and solutions, etc.
I have met a very few such people at EAGs, so they sometimes are there in numbers of like 1-3 per conference, they are fairly easy to find and I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one who seeks them out, and if I have met more of these people than anyone else, even though I don’t go to too many conferences overall. Personally I really enjoy speaking to them and have learned a lot from them. (But the fact that I think not too many people seem to care to find them and talk with them, makes me wonder if they themselves would find it worth it to visit an EAG in the first place from their own perspective.)
[edit 2 min after posting: “if you choose exceptional beneficiaries to represent the class of beneficiaries as a whole, that leads to a different set of problems.”—I’m not sure what you meant by this part. surely it seems better to me to have some representation than zero representation.]
Just ideas, thank you so much for commenting back with your thoughts !!
I was just arguing a few days ago on here that your very perspective is needed in EA: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6FLvBaEwiiqf9JGEJ/history-of-diversity-efforts-and-trends-in-ea?commentId=Egczucx2c3uX4qEMo
Something I do like about EA is that while the main ideas that many hold do have value, as you say… there also are some people who find their own way in EA on whatever topic most interests them even if their ideas are NOT held closely by many. (For example, while I am really concerned about AI, 95% of my interest in EA is global poverty, and teaching others some EA basics alongside non-EA ideas… and I mostly just link up with people who have those specific interests.)
That said, EA would be way better off as a whole if more diversity was present, from the high-income country world and especially from the low-middle income country world.
Cheers and thanks for writing this !!!!