A cheap(er) way to get a less-clear look at the same information would be to find as many aspiring rationalist startup founders as possible (ones who have attended CFAR classes would be preferable, but we’d probably want to look at anyone associated with the rationalist community to have a larger sample), get data on startups without rationalist founders, and compare how well each group did. It would be really useful to know enough about the startups in the control group to control for things that could influence chances of success, especially things where rationalists tend to differ from the general population—IQ, autism spectrum quotient, etc.
So few startups succeed that it might not be possible to get a meaningful result out of this—I’m not sure how many rationalists have founded startups, but probably not enough to make a decent sample size.
A cheap(er) way to get a less-clear look at the same information would be to find as many aspiring rationalist startup founders as possible (ones who have attended CFAR classes would be preferable, but we’d probably want to look at anyone associated with the rationalist community to have a larger sample), get data on startups without rationalist founders, and compare how well each group did. It would be really useful to know enough about the startups in the control group to control for things that could influence chances of success, especially things where rationalists tend to differ from the general population—IQ, autism spectrum quotient, etc.
So few startups succeed that it might not be possible to get a meaningful result out of this—I’m not sure how many rationalists have founded startups, but probably not enough to make a decent sample size.