All of notarealusername's Comments + Replies
I'm surprised to see this so heavily downvoted - I've also had concerns about EA culture with regards to sex and race and I wouldn't be surprised if it puts off people with some of the soft skills EA is missing. This comment definitely exaggerates and I'm not happy about that, but the underlying idea people who are good at navigating social dynamics are wary of EA, which is contributing to the talent gap, is pretty interesting.
Hi! Like Tessa, I appreciate you sharing your concerns about the EA movement. I downvoted because some of your criticisms seem off the mark to me. Specifically, in the two years I've been highly involved in EA, I haven't heard a single person say that non-white people are "biologically incapable of governing themselves." The scientific consensus is that "claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have been broadly rejected by scientists on both theoretical and empirical grounds" (Wikipedia), so it seems like a bizarre thing for an EA to say. Do you mind telling us where you've heard someone in the EA community say this?
Appreciate you sharing why you have a negative impression of the Effective Altruism movement and aren't interested in joining an EA org; you might be getting downvoted under the "clear, on-topic, and kind" comment guideline, but I'm not sure. In my own experience, there sure are lots of frustrating Silicon Valley memes that are overly dismissive of social factors (or of sexism and racism) out in the world, but they aren't dominant among people actually doing direct EA-affiliated work. As a few recent examples that demonstrate a sensitivity to the importanc...
Sure. To take one concrete example, I know this is an explicit belief of Scott Alexander's (author of SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen and major LessWrong contributor - these are the two largest specific sources of EA growth beyond generics like "blog" or 80k hours itself, per this breakdown, and were my own entry point into awareness of EA). This came out through a series of leaked emails which cite people like Steve Sailer (second link under "1. HBD is probably partially correct") in a general defense of neoreactionaries. Yes, these emails are old, but (a) ... (read more)
Hey, I thought this discussion could use some data. I also added some personal impressions.
These are the results of the 2020 SSC survey.
For the question "How would you describe your opinion of the [sic] the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?"
20.8% answered 4 and 8.7% answered 5.
Where 1 is Very unfavorable and 5 is Very favorable
The answers look similar for 2019
Taking that at face value, 30% of Scott’s readers think favorably of “HBD”.
(I guess you could look at it as "80% of SSC readers fail ... (read more)