I think this name reduces the risk of people expecting a level of certainty that weāll never reach (and is very commonly marketed in non-EA career advice)
[...] Currently, Iām more worried about setting too high expectations than the perception of low quality. Both because I think we can potentially cause more harm (people following advice with less thought than needed) and because I think there are other ways to signal high quality and very few ways to (effectively) lower peopleās perceived certainty in our advice.
I agree that:
Many non-EA things market themselves with more certainty than is warranted
EA things that donāt want to be perceived as very confident or as having definitive answers sometimes are anyway (e.g., 80k have often expressed that this happen to them)
Itās worth making serious efforts to mitigate that risk
This name might help with mitigating that
From my current perspective, this might be the strongest argument for Probably Good as the name.
I donāt know enough to say whether there are indeed āvery few ways to (effectively) lower peopleās perceived certainty in our adviceā. (Though I think one bit of evidence in favour of that is that 80k seems to struggle with this despite putting a lot of effort into it.) Could you expand on why you think that?
If youāre right about that, and the name Probably Good would substantially help with this issue, then that seems like quite a strong argument indeed for this name.
But maybe if youāre right about the above claim, thatās also evidence that the name Probably Good wonāt substantially help?
Another framing is that the marginal risk-mitigation from having that name might be relatively small, if youāll in any case infuse a lot of the rest of the project with clear statements of uncertainty and efforts to push against being taken as gospel. I say this (with low confidence) because:
Iād imagine that for many people, those statements and efforts will be enough.
And for some people, any EAcareer advice provider, and especially any ālistsā or concrete suggestions they provide, will be taken roughly as gospel, regardless of that providerās efforts to prevent that.
So I feel unsure whether thereād be many people for whom the name being Probably Good would substantially affect the extent to which they overweight the advice, or get angry if following the advice doesnāt work out, or the like.
But maybe there would beāI wouldnāt claim to have any real expertise or data on this. And youāve obviously thought about it much more than me :)
I was thinking of two main things when I said there arenāt many ways to reduce peopleās expectation of certainty.
The first, as you mentioned, is 80kās experience that this is something where claiming it (clearly and repeatedly) didnāt have the desired outcome.
The second, is through my own experience, both in giving career advice and in other areas where I did consultation-type work. My impression was (and again, this is far from strong evidence) that (1) this is hard to do and (2) it gets harder if you donāt do it immediately at the beginning. So for example, when I do 1:1sāthatās something I go into when setting expectations in the first few minutes. When I didnāt, that was very hard to correct after 30 minutes. This is one of the reasons that I think having this prominent (doesnāt have to be the name, could be in the tagline \ etc.) could be helpful.
Your later points seem to indicate something which I also agree with: That naming isnāt super important. I think there are specific pitfalls that can be seriously harmful, but besides thatāI donāt expect the org name to have a very large effect by itself one way or another.
I agree that:
Many non-EA things market themselves with more certainty than is warranted
EA things that donāt want to be perceived as very confident or as having definitive answers sometimes are anyway (e.g., 80k have often expressed that this happen to them)
Itās worth making serious efforts to mitigate that risk
This name might help with mitigating that
From my current perspective, this might be the strongest argument for Probably Good as the name.
I donāt know enough to say whether there are indeed āvery few ways to (effectively) lower peopleās perceived certainty in our adviceā. (Though I think one bit of evidence in favour of that is that 80k seems to struggle with this despite putting a lot of effort into it.) Could you expand on why you think that?
If youāre right about that, and the name Probably Good would substantially help with this issue, then that seems like quite a strong argument indeed for this name.
But maybe if youāre right about the above claim, thatās also evidence that the name Probably Good wonāt substantially help?
Another framing is that the marginal risk-mitigation from having that name might be relatively small, if youāll in any case infuse a lot of the rest of the project with clear statements of uncertainty and efforts to push against being taken as gospel. I say this (with low confidence) because:
Iād imagine that for many people, those statements and efforts will be enough.
And for some people, any EA career advice provider, and especially any ālistsā or concrete suggestions they provide, will be taken roughly as gospel, regardless of that providerās efforts to prevent that.
So I feel unsure whether thereād be many people for whom the name being Probably Good would substantially affect the extent to which they overweight the advice, or get angry if following the advice doesnāt work out, or the like.
But maybe there would beāI wouldnāt claim to have any real expertise or data on this. And youāve obviously thought about it much more than me :)
I think we agree on more than we disagree :-)
I was thinking of two main things when I said there arenāt many ways to reduce peopleās expectation of certainty.
The first, as you mentioned, is 80kās experience that this is something where claiming it (clearly and repeatedly) didnāt have the desired outcome.
The second, is through my own experience, both in giving career advice and in other areas where I did consultation-type work. My impression was (and again, this is far from strong evidence) that (1) this is hard to do and (2) it gets harder if you donāt do it immediately at the beginning. So for example, when I do 1:1sāthatās something I go into when setting expectations in the first few minutes. When I didnāt, that was very hard to correct after 30 minutes. This is one of the reasons that I think having this prominent (doesnāt have to be the name, could be in the tagline \ etc.) could be helpful.
Your later points seem to indicate something which I also agree with: That naming isnāt super important. I think there are specific pitfalls that can be seriously harmful, but besides thatāI donāt expect the org name to have a very large effect by itself one way or another.