FWIW, I wouldn't say I'm "dumb," but I dropped out of a University of Minnesota counseling psychology undergrad degree and have spent my entire "EA" career (at MIRI then Open Phil) working with people who are mostly very likely smarter than I am, and definitely better-credentialed. And I see plenty of posts on EA-related forums that require background knowledge or quantitative ability that I don't have, and I mostly just skip those.

Sometimes this makes me insecure, but mostly I've been able to just keep repeating to myself something like "Whatever, I'm excited about this idea of helping others as much as possible, I'm able to contribute in various ways despite not being able to understand half of what Paul Christiano says, and other EAs are generally friendly to me."

A couple things that have been helpful to me: comparative advantage and stoic philosophy.

At some point it would also be cool if there was some kind of regular EA webzine that published only stuff suitable for a general audience, like The Economist or Scientific American but for EA topics.

I'm really sorry that you and so many others have this experience in the EA community. I don't have anything particularly helpful or insightful to say -- the way you're feeling is understandable, and it really sucks :(

I just wanted to say I'm flattered and grateful that you found some inspiration in that intro talk I gave. These days I'm working on pretty esoteric things, and can feel unmoored from the simple and powerful motivations which brought me here in the first place -- it's touching and encouraging to get some evidence that I've had a tangible impact on people.

I'm going to be boring/annoying here and say some things that I think are fairly likely to be correct but may be undersaid in the other comments:

• EAs on average are noticeably smarter than most of the general population
• Intelligence is an important component for doing good in the world.
• The EA community is also set up in a way that amplifies this, relative to much of how the rest of the world operates.
• Most people on average are reasonably well-calibrated about how smart they are.
  • (To be clear exceptions certainly exist) EDIT: This is false, see Max Daniel's comment.
• If you're less smart than average for EAs (or less driven, or less altruistic, or less hardworking, or have less of a social safety net), than on average I'd expect you to be less good at having a positive impact than others.
• But this is in relative terms, in absolute terms I think it's certainly possible to have a large impact still.
• Our community is not (currently) set up  well to accommodate the contributions of many people who don't check certain boxes, so I expect there to be more of an uphill battle for many such people.
  • I don't think this should dissuade you from the project of (effectively) doing good, but I understand and emphasize if this makes you frustrated.

The Parable of the Talents, especially the part starting at:

But I think the situation can also be somewhat rosier than that.

Ozy once told me that the law of comparative advantage was one of the most inspirational things they had ever read. This was sufficiently strange that I demanded an explanation.

Ozy said that it proves everyone can contribute. Even if you are worse than everyone else at everything, you can still participate in global trade and other people will pay you money. It may not be very much money, but it will be some, and it will be a measure of how your actions are making other people better off and they are grateful for your existence.

Might prove reassuring. Yes, EA has lots of very smart people, but those people exist in an ecosystem which almost everyone can contribute to. People do and should give kudos to those who do the object level work required to keep the attention of the geniuses on the parts of the problems which need them.

As some examples of helpful things available to you: 

• Being an extra pair of hands at events
• Asking someone who you think is aligned with your values and might have too much on their plate what you can help them with (if you actually have the bandwidth to follow through)
• Making yourself available to on-board newcomers to the ideas in 1-on-1 conversations

You seem to be jumping to the conclusion that if you don't understand something, it must be because you are dumb, and not because you lack familiarity with community jargon or norms. 

For example, take the yudkowsky doompost that's been much discussed recently. In the first couple of paragraphs, he namedrops people that would be completely unknown outside his specific subfield of work, and expects the reader to know who they are.  Then there are a lot of paragraphs like the following:

If nothing else, this kind of harebrained desperation drains off resources from those reality-abiding efforts that might try to do something on the subjectively apparent doomed mainline, and so position themselves better to take advantage of unexpected hope, which is what the surviving possible worlds mostly look like.

It doesn't matter if you have an oxford degree or not, this will be confusing to anyone who has not been steeped in the jargon and worldview of the rationalist subculture. (My PHD in physics is not helpful at all here)

This isn't necessarily bad writing, because the piece is deliberately targeted at  people who have been talking with this jargon for years. It would be bad wri... (read more)

On fancy credentials: most EAs didn't go to fancy universities*. And I guess that 4% of EAs dropped out entirely. Just the publicly known subset includes some of the most accomplished: Yudkowsky, Muehlhauser, Shlegeris?, Kelsey Piper, Nuno Sempere. (I know 5 others I admire greatly.) 

On intelligence: You might be over-indexing to research, and to highly technical research. Inside research / writing the peak difficulty is indeed really high, but the average forum post seems manageable. You don't need to understand stuff like Löb's theorem to do great work. I presume most great EAs don't understand formal results of this sort. I often feel dumb when following alignment research, but I can sure do ordinary science and data analysis and people management, and this counts for a lot.

On the optics of the above two things: seems like we could do more to make people feel welcome, and to appreciate the encouraging demographics and the world's huge need for sympathetic people who know their comparative advantage. (I wanted to solve the education misconception by interviewing great dropouts in EA. But it probably would have landed better with named high-status interviewees.)

* Link i... (read more)

To supplement what others have said, I think the long term (few years or more) outcomes of the movement depend greatly of on the diversity of perspectives we manage to have available. Mathematicians and engineers are great for solving some complex problems (ok, I'm biased because I am one), but the current lack of e.g. sociologists in EA is going to hinder any efforts to solve big problems that exist in a social environment. Not only do you have a place here - it's necessary that people like you be part of EA.

Another issue here is that the EA Forum is used sort of as the EA research journal by many EAs and EA orgs, including my employer, Rethink Priorities. We sometimes post write-ups here that aren't optimized for the average EA to read at all, but are more for a technical discipline within EA.

Since sociology is probably an underrepresented degree in effective altruism, maybe you can consider it a comparative advantage rather than "the wrong degree". The way I see it, EA could use a lot more sociological inquiry.

Feel a bit sad reading this. I'm sorry you've felt alienated by EA and are unsure about how you fit in.

Re: your last sentence: you're far from alone in feeling this way. I cannot recommend Luisa Rodriguez's  80000 Hours article about imposter syndrome highly enough.

I don't think super high intelligence, or Ivy league degrees, are a requirement for engaging with EA. But setting aside that question, I do think there are lots of ways to engage that aren't, like, "do complicated AI alignment math". Organizations need many people and skills other than researchers to run well. And I think there are many ways to express EA values outside of your career, e.g. by donating, voting for political candidates who focus on important issues, and leading by example in your personal life and relationships.

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. 

Thank you for writing this up and putting it out there (coming from a non-fancy background I can totally relate!). 

One of the best things for my mental health this year was realising and allowing myself to accept that I am not and never will be a top researcher/EA thinker/ the person with the most accurate AI timelines/.... 

However, I do have an ops background and can see that my work is valuable, and there is no need for me to be the smartest in the room, as long as I get stuff done. 

I'd guess there are small things everyone can contribute (even just being a friendly face at an event and talking to new people can be really valuable). 

Additionally, I wish we had some more socialiogical studies about the EA community (posts like this one by Julia Wise).

Hi Olivia! As a former teacher with a degree in Education from a very low-ranking German university, I understand how you feel. I've been there! I am 100% confident there is an impactful way you can contribute to the EA community. Please reach out to me if you'd like to chat about those options, talk through potential career moves or volunteering opportunities!

P. S. : Your post has inspired me to finally create an account here and start commenting and posting - who knows what impact you have created down the line... ;-)

Aside, which I’m adding after having written the rest of the comment: I think most EAs would agree that intelligence isn’t a moral virtue. Nonetheless, I think there can be a tendency in EA to praise intelligence (and its signals) in a way that borders on or insinuates moralization.

In a more just world, being called “unintelligent” or even “stupid” wouldn’t seem much different than being called “unattractive,” and being called smart or even “brilliant” wouldn’t leave anyone gushing with pride. 

Nice post. I started writing a comment that turned into a couple pages, which I hope will become a post along the lines of:

• No really, what about 'dumb' EAs? Have there been any attempts to really answer this question?
  • There seems to be a consensus among smart, well-connected EAs that impact is heavy-tailed, so everyone but the top 0.1-10% (of people who call themselves EA!) or something is a rounding error.
    • I think this is largely true from the perspective of a hiring committee who can fill one role
      • But the standard qualitative interpretation might break down when there is a large space of possible roles.
  • I know this isn't at all an original point and I'm sure there are better write ups else

Pre-Warning: Please don't read any of this as a criticism of those people who fit into the super-intelligent,  hard degrees at Oxford etc.  If you're that person, you're awesome, not critical of you, and this comment is directed at exploring the strengths of other paths :) 

Tl;dr at bottom of post for the time-constrained :)

This was a really interesting post to read. I wrote a slightly controversial piece a little while back that highlighted that 'top' Universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford have a lot of class and wealth restrictions so that instead of marketing to the 'most intelligent' in society, EA was frequently marketing to the 'intelligent, but wealthy' instead - and missing out most of the intelligent but economically stranded people who went to universities lower down on the rankings because it made more financial sense. It ended up spreading on Twitter a bit. Most people were interested and engaged, one or two got a bit angry (largely by misinterpreting what I said but that's likely on me as the writer, hence the pre-warning), that's life. But I would like to highlight that to you - I know a ton of really, really intelligent people who went to average... (read more)

This resonates a lot with me. I actually studied physics at a pretty good college and did very well in all my physics classes, but I was depressed for a long time (two years?) [ETA: more like two and a half] for not feeling smart enough to be part of the EA community. 

I’m feeling better now, though that’s unfortunately because I stopped trying so hard to fit in. I stopped trying (and failing) to get into EAGs or get hired at EA orgs, and haven’t been reading the EA Forum as much as I used to. I still… have longtermist EA values, but I have no idea of what someone like me can do to help the future go well. Even donating part of my income seems approximately useless, given how longtermism is far from funding-constrained.

Whenever I come on the EA forum I literally feel like my brain is going to explode with some of the stuff that is posted on here, I just don't understand it.

Dude, I have a degree from Harvard but it's in biology and I feel this way about a lot of the AI stuff! I admire your humility but you might not be that dumb.

I think your critique is totally spot-on, and I think a better EA community would have room for all kinds of engagement. When longtermism became dominant (along with the influx of a lot of cash so that we were more talent-constrained than money constrained) we lost a lot of the activities that had brought the entire community together, like thinking a lot about how to save and donate money or even a lot of emphasis on having local communities. We also stopped evangelizing as much as our message got more complicated and we became focused on issues like AI alignment that require specific people more than a large group of people. 

But even though I frequently say we should shore up the community by bringing back some focus on the original EA bread and butter causes like global health, I don't know if the current community is really making a mistake by focusing our limited... (read more)

Was not www.probablygood.org set up to address the large pool of talent that might have a hard time working on the cause areas identified by 80k hrs? Not sure if others mentioned this but ctrl+f did not show me any mentions of this org.

One thing that I think is helpful is to do the best you can to separate "EA the set of ideas" from "EA the set of people." People involved with EA form something akin to a broad social group. Like any social group, they have certain norms and tendencies that are  annoying and off-putting. Being snobbish about intelligence is one of these tendencies. My advice is to take the parts of "EA the set of ideas" that work for you and ignore the parts of the community that you find annoying. Maybe for you that means ignoring certain kinds of forum posts or maybe it means not going on the forum at all. Maybe it means giving 2 percent of your income to an effective charity and not worrying that you don't give more. Maybe it means being on the lookout for a job where you could have a higher impact but targeting organizations that are not EA-branded. The bottom line is that you do not need to be involved in EA the community to take EA the set of ideas seriously. 

This is not at all to concede that you cannot do high-impact things while being engaged in the community. I am happy with the impact I have and I went to a state school with standardized test scores that were nothing to brag about. This is just to say that if you find the community annoying, you don't need it to "Do EA".

I couldn't agree more with this post! E.g. I feel like there should be an "80k for average smart people in the 100-130IQ ranche".

You don't need to have a PhD to give a portion of your income to effective charities and do a lot of good. That's part of what makes effective giving such a powerful idea.

Very good post! Some potential tips how people who have similar experiences to what you described can feel more included: 

1. Replacing visits to the EA Forum with visits to more casual online places: various EA Facebook groups (e.g. EA Hangout, groups related to your cause area of interest), the EA Discord server, probablygood.org (thanks to another commenter mentioning the site).   
2. Attending events hosted by local EA groups (if close by). These events are in my experience less elite and more communal. 
3. If attending larger EA conferences, understand that many people behave like they are in a job interview situation (because the community is so small,  reputation as a smart person can be beneficial), and will consequently e.g. avoid asking questions about concepts they do not know. 

Olivia Addy I'm glad you wrote this post, today my supervisor forwarded it to me regarding our last conversation when I told him that I'm too stupid to work for such a big organization as Anima International. It all had a beginning in that, as a person with a strong interest in insects, I read a discussion on genes of insects and couldn't grasp any of it, although I'm in the middle of Richard Dawkins' book, "The selfish gene" not much in my head cleared up. Then it came to me that maybe I don't deserve this job.

Reading the comments below, I know I'm not st... (read more)

Great post! I think this is a failure of EA. Lots of corporations and open source projects are able to leverage the efforts of many average intelligence contributors to do impressive things on a large scale through collaboration. It seems to me like there must be something wrong when there are many motivated people willing to contribute their time and efforts to EA but don't have lots of avenues to do so other than earning to give and maybe community building (which leaves a lot of people who feel motivated by EA with no concrete ways to easily engage). It... (read more)

In my view one of the most defining features of the EA community is that it makes most people who come into contact with it feel excluded and "less than," on several dimensions. So it's not just you!

To the extent that I'm outside of the general population I think it's because of my giving, but I generally feel squarely inside the box of ordinary people. I can relate to not feeling as smart as many EAs.

I think there are numerous things a typical person could do to take EA ideas and try to concretely make the world a better place:

One action that I think is broadly available is to join some advocacy group for EA-related policies on some local / regional / national level like animal welfare, electoral reform, sane land use policy, or something else. You c... (read more)

I was not very aware about this topic until recently when somebody wanted to discuss outreach towards non-academics with me. We are in contact with an adult education center (Volkshochschule) and might offer an Intro Fellowship there. It might be worth considering starting an EA group for high school graduates (no college) , comparable to EA for Christians, but I haven't thought much about it and this should be founded by people without tertiary education (chicken egg problem).

Seeing a lot of great responses and content in the comments, I love it. You’re clearly not alone! Echoing what others have said, I like to frame the goal as “finding a way to be useful.” There are so many ways to be useful, and intelligence is just one input (keep in mind that smart people are probably especially good at Appearing Useful, especially online). Diligence, pragmatism, humility, sociability, plus a million other abilities are inputs too, and they’re basically all things you can improve at. Getting smarter is obviously helpful to being useful, but we can’t let it be the whole picture. Until we run out of opportunities to do good, there are opportunities for anyone to make a difference.

Thank you so much for writing this.

I feel a very similar way. Every so often I get that feeling and excitement again about doing so much good, and after reading some posts and listening to podcasts for a few days, I get incredibly depressed because I don't study at Oxford and I'm not good at mathematics and I even struggle to make a okay-ish cost-benefit analysis for very basic things and I have no idea how to take all those seemingly complicated things like moral uncertainty into count. It's just exhausting.

But it has also taught me a lot things that I pr... (read more)