Hmmm. EY extrapolates how wonderful the power elite are from his impressions of a group of the power elite self selected to come listen to him.
How many biases can we find in this sample?
EY's bias for people who chose to spend time listening to him. EY's bias toward people interested in the topic. The power elite interested in the topic. The power elite who make time for such events. Then there's all the biases introduced from who actually chose to interact more with EY, and who EY chose to interact with.
I'm sure there are a lot more.
He also may be wholly mistaking signaling and charisma for internal reality. One of the things that helps you to rise to the top is projecting competence and happiness, whether or not you have them.
Now I'd expect to get real correlation between happiness and competence and becoming CEO. My estimate is that he is correct over all, more correct for his particular audience, but likely over estimating the effect for both.
I think that the characteristic "Appears formidable" provides a very great benefit to entering the realm of the elite.
Today's post, Competent Elites was originally published on 27 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Level Above Mine, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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