Epistemic status: not certain— a hand-wavy ramble.
Disclaimer: all opinions here are my own, not my employer’s.
Summary
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Language barriers can cause people to be dismissive of writing/speech due to aesthetics or communicative clumsiness rather than the content of the speech.
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This manifests in the EA community in a number of ways, one of which is that the language we speak is informed by our STEM-leaning community and our corresponding tendency to think quantitatively, which creates a context (discursive context?) that is foreign to people who are less STEM-y.
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Harm 1: Good ideas and useful knowledge from these groups get discounted as a result.
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Harm 2: Talented non-STEM people who are into EA get misunderstood when they try to communicate, and don’t get noticed as “promising” (and we do in fact really need the these folks).
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Harm 3: non-STEM folks have a worse experience in the EA community.
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Some suggestions
Pre-amble
My university had a lot of international students. In class discussions and group interactions, I would often notice that the contributions of international students (those whose first language wasn’t English) tended to be dismissed faster and interrupted more frequently than others’, even when the others’ thoughts seemed less insightful. My guess was that this was due to the smoother and more familiar presentation of the native speakers’ thoughts.
This situation was not new to me; I had spent a total of around three years in school in France, experiencing something similar first-hand (as a nerdy American kid). I would frequently have to suppress a mix of anger, annoyance, and shame at being patronized or ignored because my French was halting and awkward.
The point of these stories is that not being fluent (or being less-than-native) in the language of the community with which you are conversing makes everything harder. And it can be unpleasant and discouraging.
I think a version of this happens in the EA community with people who are less STEM-y than the average. (It also happens with other underrepresented groups in EA, but I’m focusing on this one for this post.)
Harm 1: We lose out on ideas and knowledge
I have most frequently seen this phenomenon in live conversations. These folks’ natural speech or writing follows different norms, and they contort their thoughts to make the EA community hear them. They misuse jargon like “updating” and “outside view” in an attempt to get their point across, and their interlocutors decide that talking with them is not worth their time.
More generally, I think experienced (and assimilated) members of the community tend to interpret a lack of fluency in the “language of EA” as a general lack of knowledge or skill. This, together with our tendency to miss writing that comes from outside the community, leads to the community systematically deafening itself to communication by non-STEM folks.
Harm 2: EA is less actively welcoming towards non-STEM people, so we lose out on some of those people
This also factors into the ways promising people (e.g. students) who should be mentored and helped on their way to impact are identified by the EA community. My impression is that currently, this often happens through connections or random conversations where someone’s potential gets identified by someone well-placed in the community. I’m worried that we’re ending up with self-sustaining mechanisms by which interested and talented people who don’t speak numerically (or misuse “outside view”) are considered less promising and are not supported in earlier stages of their career.
(Notice that this can happen both ways: if EA always speaks the language of the STEM-y, less STEM-y people will potentially discount the EA community and think the theories it presents are stupid. This is somewhat related to the idea of inferential distances and this blog post about “Alike minds.”)
Of course, it’s true that a nuanced quantitative model (or even a simple Fermi estimate) of some phenomenon is often helpful, and can be a reasonable signal of quality. But our focus on such quantitative elements misses other signals. Consider, for instance, the effect of illustrations or other visualizations, clarity in exposition, historical anecdotes, moving speech, etc.. Moreover, some aspects of the way the EA community talks are due to the community’s history rather than the inherent usefulness of those aspects. (The archetypal EA Forum post has an epistemic status, some technical terms, and maybe a calculation— which are all arguably useful. But it’s also got some rationalist jargon or a reference to hpmor.) (More on jargon in this post.)
I also suspect that talented less STEM-y people tend to get fewer chances to find out about EA and get involved than talented STEM-y people do, which would exacerbate the problem if true. So I think we should try to notice if we’re unusually likely to be the only point of contact someone has with EA. In particular, if you’re talking to a math major, you’re probably not the only person who can notice that this student should probably join a group and apply to an alignment bootcamp or something. But if you’re talking to a creative writing major who seems interested, you may be the only EA for a while who will get the chance to notice that this person is brilliant and altruistic and should join a group, become a comms person, write EA-inspired fiction, or take on a research project.
I’m not claiming that numerical literacy is not important for EA. I absolutely think it is. But so are other skills.
I think people who are more comfortable writing than modeling, or people who are better at managing interpersonal relations than at establishing a base rate or unraveling some technical issue— people who are not very STEM-y— can significantly help the world the way EA wants to do and are overlooked by the processes we use to notice and support promising people. In fact, all else equal, someone joining from an underrepresented field (like comparative religion) may be able to pick up more low-hanging fruit than someone coming in from a typical field for the community (like math or economics).
(Possible objections to this section. 1. We need to grow the community urgently, and STEM-y people are easier to reach. 2. Non-STEM people don’t have some skills that are fundamentally necessary for doing EA stuff. (As discussed, I don’t think this is the case.) 3. It’s currently too costly to fight Harm 2 for some reason.)
I would guess that non-STEM people tend to have a worse experience in the community for reasons like the ones sketched out in the preamble above. I don’t think that their experience tends to be actively hostile, but I do think that it’s harder than it should be, and that we can improve it.
My suggestions
- Actively try to notice if you’re subconsciously dismissing someone because they speak a different language, not because the content of their thinking is unhelpful.
- Try a bit harder to understand people whose background is different from yours and be aware of the curse of knowledge when communicating.
- Create opportunities for talented-but-less-quantitative junior people who are into EA.
- Hire copy-writers! Notice potential awesome community organizers! Fund creative outreach projects! Etc.
- Some existing/past projects: Humanities Ideas for Longtermists, Social science projects on AI/x-risks, the Creative Writing Contest.
- Promote translation of EA concepts into less STEM-heavy writing or communication. (Conversely, import good foreign-to-EA ideas, e.g. by posting summaries).
- Use less jargon when possible, and help with overuse of jargon in other ways.
- If you’re involved with community building at a university, consider trying to reach out to non-STEM majors (and check that you aren’t accidentally excluding these people with your outreach process).
I would be very excited to hear more ideas on this front.
(Thanks to my brother and to Jonathan Michel for giving feedback on drafts of this post.)
Notes
(Warning: rambly hand-wavy comment incoming!)
Why is any field different from any other? For example, physicists and engineers learn about fermi-estimation and first-principles reasoning, while ecologists and economists build thinking tools based on an assumption of competitive equilibrium, while lawyers and historians learn to compare the trustworthiness of conflicting sources by corroborating multiple lines of circumstantial evidence. Different fields develop different styles of thinking presumably because those styles are helpful for solving the problems the field exists to make progress on.
But of course, fields also have incidental cultural differences -- maybe economists are disproportionately New Yorkers who like bagels and the big city, while ecologists are disproportionately Coloradans who like granola and mountain hiking trails. It would be a shame if someone who could be a brilliant economist got turned off of that career track just because they didn't like the idea of bagel brunches.
I mention this because it seems like there are a few different things you could be saying, and I am confused about which ones you mean:
Personally, I am a pretty strong believer that the unique thinking style of effective altruism has been essential for its success so far, and that this thinking style is very closely related to certain skills & virtues common in STEM fields. So I am skeptical that there is much substance behind claims #1 or #2 in general. Of course I'd be very open to considering particular examples of ways that the "core" EA ideas should be changed, or ways that STEM-ishness makes a poor proxy for EA promisingness.
I am totally on board with #3 and #4, although they don't imply as much of a course-correction for the movement as a whole.
Despite feeling defensive about STEM values in EA, I also see that the growth of any movement is necessarily a tightrope walk between conserving too many arbitrary values, versus throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If EA had stuck to its very early days of being a movement composed mostly of academic moral philosophers who donated 50%+ of their income to global health charities, it would never have grown and done as much good as it has IRL. But it would also be pretty pointless for EA to dilute itself to the point of becoming indistinguishable from present-day mainstream thinking about charity.
Some bad visions of ways that I'd hate to see us move away from STEM norms (albeit not all of these are moving towards humanities):
Some areas where I feel EA has drawn inspiration from humanities in a very positive way:
(My personal background: I am an aerospace engineer by trade, although I have a naturally generalist personality and most of my posts on the Forum to date have been weird creative-writing type things rather than hard-nosed technical analyses. My gut reaction to this post was negative, but on rereading the post I think my reaction was unjustified; I was just projecting the fears that I listed above onto areas of the post that were vague.)
I guess my conclusion is that I am psyched about #3 and #4 -- it's always good to be welcoming and creative in helping people find ways to contribute their unique talents. And then, past that... there are a bunch of tricky fundamental movement-growth issues that I am really confused about!
(Meta: I am afraid that I am strawmaning your position because I do not understand it correctly, so please let me know if that is the case )
I agree with you that it seems plausible that the unique thinking style of EA has been essential to a lot of the successes achieved by EA + that those are closely related to STEM fields.
But it is unclear to me why this should imply that #1 is wrong. EA wants to achieve this massive goal of doing the most good. This makes it very important to get a highly accurate map of the territory we are operating in. Taking that into account, it is a very strong claim that we are confident that the “core” thinking tools we have used so far are the best we could be using and that we do not need to look at the tools that other fields are using before we decide that ours are actually the best. This is especially true since we do lack a bunch of academic disciplines in EA. Most EA ideas and thinking tools are from western analytic philosophy and STEM research. And that does not mean they are wrong - it could be that they all turn out to be correct - but they do encompass only a small portion of all knowledge out there. I dare you to chat to a philosopher who researches non-western epistemology - your mind will be blown by how different it is.
More generally: The fact that it is sometimes hard to understand people from very different fields is why it is so incredibly important and valuable to try to get those people into EA. They usually view the world through a very different lens and can check whether they see an aspect of the territory we do not see that we should incorporate into EA.
I am afraid that we are so confident in the tools we have that we do not spend enough time trying to understand how other fields think and therefore miss out on an important part of reality.
To be clear: I think that a big chunk of what makes EA special is related to STEM style reasoning and we should probably try hard to hold onto it.
Small thing: It is unclear to me whether we get a lot of false positives + this was also not the claim of the post if I understand it correctly.