The privilege of native English speakers in reaching high-status, influential positions in EA

I can readily believe the core claims in this post, and I'm sure it's a frustrating situation for non-native English speakers. That said, it's worth keeping in mind that for most professional EA roles, and especially for "thought leadership", English-language communication ability is one of the most critical skills for doing the job well. It is not a problem that people who grew up practicing this skill will be "overrepresented" in these positions.

There is certainly a cosmic unfairness in this. It's also unfair that short people will be underrepresented among basketball players, but this does not mean there's a problem with basketball.

The actions to address this ought to be personal, not structural. It's worth some effort on the margin for native speakers to understand the experience and situation of non-native speakers—indeed this is one part of "English-language communication ability". I'm grateful to my foreign friends for explaining many aspects of this to me, it's helped me in a fair number of professional situations. Things like your talk at an international conference to educate people about this stuff seems like a great idea. And of course most non-native speakers who seek positions in EA (or other international movements) correctly put a great deal of effort into improving their fluency in the lingua franca.

Thanks for writing this, Alix! 

I just wanted to add some data about two of your empirical claims about the prevalence of native English speakers in leadership positions:

Native English speakers are overrepresented in EA’s thought leadership

One very crude measure of this is to look at the attendees of the 2023 coordination forum. 
AFAICT, based on the LinkedIn profiles of the 31 attendees that are public: 22 are native English speakers, and 7 are not (two I am not sure about). Hence ~22% are non-native English speakers.

The monopoly on funding does not facilitate this – my impression is that it is especially true in community building. Indeed, homogeneity in culture and ways of thinking might strengthen itself with grantmakers selecting projects and people who are closer to them [...]

The three funders I looked up are OP, CEA, and EA Funds. The percentage of non-native English speakers is slightly higher than the percentage attending the coordination forum (7 out of 23 people are non-native English speakers, ~30%): 

1. On the OP CB team ("GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISKS CAPACITY BUILDING"), four out of six people are native English speakers;
2. On the CEA Groups team, three out of six people are native English speakers;
3. At EA Funds, four out of four grant managers are native English speakers, and five out of seven grant advisors are native English speakers;

Alix - Thanks for writing this. I think it is a serious issue in terms of spreading EA from being a mostly Anglosphere movement (in UK, US, Australia, etc) to becoming a global movement,

There seem to be about 400 million native English speakers in the world, plus around another 1.5 billion people who have English as their second language (e.g. many in India and China), with varying degrees of fluency. From my experience of teaching college classes in China, often people there have much higher English fluency in writing and reading than in speaking.

So, roughly 75% of the potential English speakers in the world have English as their second rather than native language. This is a very large, often untapped market for EA ideas -- people who might be able to read Singer, Bostrom, MacAskill, Ord, etc., and read EA Forum posts, but who might feel quite intimidated attention an EAG meeting in person and trying to talk with people.

I think one small, practical step we can take is to be aware of this issue when writing posts and comments on EA Forum. We often use Anglo-American colloquialisms, rather obscure academic vocabulary, and rather convoluted grammar, partly as a coolness-indicator, and partly as an intelligence-indicator. When we use EA/Rationalist in-group dialect, I imagine that might be especially confusing to outsiders.

So, when we're writing stuff on EA Forum, I would suggest that people try to keep in mind a clear mental image of their audience -- and instead of imaging our US/UK in-group friends, we should try to imagine a 22-year from Shenzhen, Mumbai, Beirut, or Prague who's got pretty good English from a few years of school classes, but who's not fully fluent, or familiar with current US/UK pop culture or Rationalist jargon.

Thanks a lot for writing this, Alix. I can only heartily agree. I'm fairly fluent in English, having studied abroad and lived in an English-speaking country for a few years. Still, especially in deep intellectual conversations, I find myself struggling to explain concepts in English more than in German. I notice too that I sometimes find myself having a hard time keeping up with the speed of talking, especially with people from bigger cities like New York or London. 
Keeping in mind that I'm very fluent in English, and now trying to extrapolate that experience to people who have e.g. a B3 level of proficiency, I can see why many people wouldn't be able to engage with the EA community, let alone get into a position of influence. 

native English cultures are disproportionately represented ... in grant-making organizations, and within research institutions.

I'm not sure if this makes it better or worse, but I suspect that part of the explanation for this is less about linguistic ability and more about the combination of a) the heavy overrepresentation of Anglophone institutions on world's top universities lists and b) the tendency of EA orgs to hire people very recently out of university and to bias heavily in doing so towards EAs who've come from top universities.

Thank you for writing and sharing this, Alix! I'm sorry that it was scary for you to post and I'm glad you did. You also linked to so many other useful readings I hadn't seen previously!

I'm wondering how these dynamics play out across different platforms and spaces—e.g. hiring processes for organizations with varying degrees of international staff vs. international online platforms like the Forum or EA Anywhere Slack vs. in-person events—and if there are better moderation mechanisms for acknowledging and accounting for language barriers across each. Online, for example, it's easy to list the languages you speak and some organizations list this on their staff pages (e.g. "You can contact Alix in French and English."). Maybe this could be added to Forum profiles or EA Global Swapcard profiles.

I'm also wondering how we can better account for this as community builders, especially in places with many immigrants. We remind attendees at the start of most EA NYC events that everyone present has a different starting point and we all have something to learn and something to teach. We began doing this, in large part, to make sure newcomers who don't "speak EA" feel welcome. But there might be a benefit to also explicitly noting possible language barriers, given how deeply international and multicultural the community here is. This is also making me want to look into facilitation trainings specifically focused on these dynamics; I'm sure there are non-obvious things we could be doing better.

Thanks for posting, Alix!

I think having lots of native English speakers in top positions at EA-aligned organisations is also explained by founder effects. The effective altruism movement started mostly in the UK and US, which have English as the native language, and top positions will tend to be occupied by people who have been in the movement for longer. In addition, as Arepo noted, EA-aligned organisations recruit from top universities, where students are either native English speakers, or speak English pretty well anyway.

In terms of next steps, maybe it would make sense for the EA Survey to include some questions about to which extent linguistic ability is hindering participation in the movement, @David_Moss and @Willem Sleegers?

You have driven home a point and it's worthy to be reviewed at the thought leaders structure of EA.

Thank you for posting, Alix! I am a non-native English speaking scientist and I have often wondered about it in the context of my own productivity. Working on a manuscript that has 17 previous draft iterations can easily make a biologist think about linguistic bias in academia.

This is actually the good news that I wanted to share - this linguistic injustice within "thought leaders" is an issue that we are already working on. The general idea is that non-native English speakers spend more effort in conducting scientific activities (reading and writing papers and preparing presentations etc), but the experience/insight of the writer overpowers native-speaker status.

A thought leader has to have ideas. Being able to form grammatically correct and aesthetically pleasing sentences is just the final packaging. In the end, it is the community that determines how important the presentation part actually is. Therefore, it has been also interesting to read the replies.

Furthermore, I think in case of "lectures, presentations, chairing etc" native speakers have only a minute advantage. Yes, when I was living in US (and I started 'thinking in English') - presenting got easier! However, the main skill comes with experience. If you done it hundreds of times - so you don't get nervous, can get/keep the attention of the audience and find ways to explain/emphasize key points in that sea of information.

Maybe I am wrong. Cheers!

Thanks for writing this Alix. Something I hadn't been tracking much before this post was how events like EAGs and retreats might be especially tiring if you're doing lots of 1:1s in a different language. I remember being surprised by just how tired I got spending all day in a different language when I worked in France, and can't imagine how much that's multiplied when discussing complicated EA topics and ideas.