First of all, thank you for the feedback! It’s not always easy to solicit quality (and very thoroughly justified) feedback, so I really appreciate it.
Before diving into the specifics, I’ll say that on the one hand—the name could definitely change if we keep getting feedback that it’s suboptimal. That could be in a week or in a year or two, so the name isn’t final in that sense.
On the other hand, we did run this name quite a few people (including some who aren’t familiar with EA). We tried (to the best of our ability) to receive honest feedback (like not telling people that this is something we’re setting up or letting someone else solicit the feedback). Most of what you wrote came up, but rarely. And people seemed to feel positively about it. It’s definitely possible that the feedback we got on it was still skewed positive, but it was much better for this name than for other options we tried.
Now, to dive into the specifics and my thoughts on them:
* The name doesn’t make the function clear: I think this is a stylistic preference. I prefer having a name that’s more memorable, when the function can be explained in a sentence or two right after it. I know the current norm for EA is to name orgs by stating their function in 2 or 3 words, but I think the vast majority of orgs (for profit and non-profit) choose a name that doesn’t just plainly state what the org does. I will mention that, depending on context, what might appear is “Probably Good Career Advice”, which is clearer (though still doesn’t fully optimize for clarity).
* Good can mean quality and morality: Again, I liked that. We do mean it in both ways (the advice is both attempting to be as high quality as possibly and as high as possible in moral impact, but we are working under uncertainty in both parameters).
* Turning people off by giving the message that the product isn’t good or that we’re not ambitious in making it good: I pretty much fully agree with you on the analysis. I think this name reduces the risk of people expecting a level of certainty that we’ll never reach (and is very commonly marketed in non-EA career advice) and increases the risk of people initially being turned off by perceived low quality or low effort.
I also like and agree with your “pitch” and that is more of less how I’m thinking about the issue.
Two relevant points on weighing this trade-off:
1. Currently, I’m 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 people’s perceived certainty in our advice.
2. Most people we ran the name by did catch on that the name was a little tongue-in-cheek in it’s phrasing. This wasn’t everyone, but the people who did see that—didn’t think there was a signal of lower quality.
I do agree there’s a risk there, but I see it as relatively small, especially if I’m assuming that most people will reach us through channels where they have supposedly heard something about us and aren’t only aware of the name.
To summarize my thoughts:
I don’t think it’s a perfect name.
I like that it’s a memorable phrase rather than a bland statement of what we do. I like that it’s a little tongue-in-cheek and that it does a few things at the same time (two meaning or good, alluding the the uncertainty). I like that it put our uncertainty front and center.
I agree there’s a risk of signaling low quality \ effort and that all of the things that I like could also be a net harm if I’m wrong (which isn’t specifically unlikely).
We’ll collect more feedback on the name and we’ll change if it doesn’t look good.
In addition to the other points brought up, I wanted to add that “probably good” has ~4 million google search results, and the username/url for “ProbablyGood” has already been taken on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This may make the name especially difficult to effectively market.
* Good can mean quality and morality: Again, I liked that. We do mean it in both ways (the advice is both attempting to be as high quality as possibly and as high as possible in moral impact, but we are working under uncertainty in both parameters).
For what it’s worth, I liked the name specifically because to me it seemed to advertise an intention of increasing a lot of readers’ impact individually by a moderate amount, unlike 80000′s approach where the goal is to increase fewer readers’ impact by a large amount.
I.e. unlike Michael I like the understatement in the name, but I agree with him that it does convey understatement.
I continue to like how thoughtful you two seem to be! It seems like you’ve already anticipated most of what I’m pointing to and have reasonable reasons to hold your current position. I especially like that you “tried (to the best of [your] ability) to receive honest feedback (like not telling people that this is something [you’re] setting up or letting someone else solicit the feedback).”
I still think this name doesn’t seem great to me, but now that’s with lower confidence.
(Also, I’m just reporting my independent impression—i.e., what I’d believe if not updating on other people’s beliefs—and don’t mean to imply there’s any reason to weight my belief more strongly than that of the other people you’ve gotten feedback from.)
I’ll again split my responses into separate threads.
FWIW: 75 upvotes (as of now) for Michael’s post seem strong evidence that at least a significant fraction of forum readers find the name “weird” or “off-putting” at first glance. In most cases, that might be enough for people not to look into it more (e.g. if it’s one of hundreds of posts on their Facebook timeline).
Even if the other half of people find the name great, I think I’d rather go for a less controversial name which no-one finds weird (even if fewer people find it great).
Finding a good name is difficult—all the best and let us know if we can help! You could e.g. solicit ideas here on in a Facebook group and run polls in the “EA polls” group to get better quantitative feedback.
We’re definitely taking into account the different comments and upvotes on this post. We appreciate people upvoting the views they’d like to support—this is indeed a quick and efficient way for us to aggregate feedback.
We’ve received recommendations against opening public polls about the name of the organization from founders of existing EA organizations, and we trust those recommendations so we’ll probably avoid that route. But we will likely look into ways we can test the hypothesis of whether a “less controversial” name has positive or negative effects on the reaction of someone hearing this name for the first time.
I think this name reduces the risk of people expecting a level of certainty that we’ll never reach (and is very commonly marketed in non-EA career advice)
Just commenting to say that, in my view, it’s really promising for your project that this concern is so front-and-center already.
I’m probably preaching to the choir, but I think that epistemic modesty is absolutely key in EA, and working hard to communicate your uncertainty – even when your audience is looking for certainty – is even better.
Revisiting this just to say that, for what it’s worth, the Danish beer company Carlsberg has been very successful with its slogan of being “Probably the Best Beer in the World.”
I think this name reduces the risk of people expecting a level of certainty that we’ll never reach (and is very commonly marketed in non-EA career advice)
[...] Currently, I’m 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 people’s perceived certainty in our advice.
I agree that:
Many non-EA things market themselves with more certainty than is warranted
EA things that don’t 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)
It’s 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 don’t know enough to say whether there are indeed “very few ways to (effectively) lower people’s perceived certainty in our advice”. (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 you’re 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 you’re right about the above claim, that’s also evidence that the name Probably Good won’t substantially help?
Another framing is that the marginal risk-mitigation from having that name might be relatively small, if you’ll 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:
I’d imagine that for many people, those statements and efforts will be enough.
And for some people, any EAcareer advice provider, and especially any “lists” or concrete suggestions they provide, will be taken roughly as gospel, regardless of that provider’s efforts to prevent that.
So I feel unsure whether there’d 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 doesn’t work out, or the like.
But maybe there would be—I wouldn’t claim to have any real expertise or data on this. And you’ve obviously thought about it much more than me :)
I was thinking of two main things when I said there aren’t many ways to reduce people’s expectation of certainty.
The first, as you mentioned, is 80k’s experience that this is something where claiming it (clearly and repeatedly) didn’t 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 don’t do it immediately at the beginning. So for example, when I do 1:1s—that’s something I go into when setting expectations in the first few minutes. When I didn’t, that was very hard to correct after 30 minutes. This is one of the reasons that I think having this prominent (doesn’t 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 isn’t super important. I think there are specific pitfalls that can be seriously harmful, but besides that—I don’t expect the org name to have a very large effect by itself one way or another.
The name doesn’t make the function clear: I think this is a stylistic preference. [...] I think the vast majority of orgs (for profit and non-profit) choose a name that doesn’t just plainly state what the org does.
Yeah, I think this is true, and reduces the importance of my first “argument against” the name. (I think my second argument seems a bigger deal to me than the first one, but I didn’t make that clear.)
I do agree there’s a risk there, but I see it as relatively small, especially if I’m assuming that most people will reach us through channels where they have supposedly heard something about us and aren’t only aware of the name.
That’s a good point. I think this reduces both the risks and also perhaps the benefits of any particular name (as it makes precisely what the name is less important in people’s overall views or actions regarding the organisation).
I will mention that, depending on context, what might appear is “Probably Good Career Advice”, which is clearer (though still doesn’t fully optimize for clarity).
Yeah, that helps with the first “issue” I raised.
Though reading that sentence made me realise another potential issue with the name (or maybe another thing that was subconsciously part of my initial aversion to it but): I think it sounds to me quite tongue-in-cheek and non-serious, in a way that might not be best for your aims. (You note the “tongue-in-cheek”-ness later in your comment as a positive, and I think it can be sometimes, but in this particular case I currently think it may be more likely to be negative.)
If someone directed me to “Probably Good Career Advice”, it might sound like either some sort of joke/prank/spoof, or something that was real but the name of which is sort-of a joke. And I might assume it was set up by people who are still in college. (It maybe feels like the sort of name the Weasley brothers in Harry Potter would’ve come up with.)
So if what I’m after in this context is advice on how to maximise my impact on the world, I might think these people probably aren’t the sort of people who’ll be addressing that serious question in a serious way. I think this would actually be true for me, and I’m only 24 and did stand-up comedy for several years—i.e., I’m not a very “serious person”, but I’ve got my “serious person” hat on when I’m first engaging with a new org regarding how to make my career impactful. I imagine this issue might be more pronounced on average for people who are older or “more serious” than me, which includes a lot of potentially impactful people.
This is different to e.g. 80k having some tongue-in-cheek parts of some articles or podcast episodes, because that’s not the very first thing someone will see from 80k, and it’s always just a part of a larger thing that’s mostly focused on impact. With the name Probably Good, that’s essentially the first thing someone will see from the org, and it’s not just a part embedded in something else (the name is like its own thing, not a sentence in an article).
But it’s totally possible a higher proportion of your target audience would be attracted to than pushed away by the tongue-in-cheek-ness of the name; I’m just going by my own reaction, which is of course a minuscule sample size.
This is the risk we were most worried about regarding the name. It does set a relatively light tone. We decided to go with it anyway for two reasons:
The first is that the people we talked to said that it sounds interesting and interested them more than the responses we got for more regular, descriptive names.
The second is that our general tone in writing is more serious. Serious enough that we’re working hard to make sure that it isn’t boring for some people who don’t like reading huge walls of dense text. We figure it’s best to err on the other side in this case.
I’m not a fan of the name “Probably Good” because:
if it’s describing the advice, it seems like the advice might be pretty low-effort and not worth paying attention to
if it’s describing the careers, it sounds like the careers recommended have a significant chance of having a negative impact, so again, not worth reading about
First of all, thank you for the feedback! It’s not always easy to solicit quality (and very thoroughly justified) feedback, so I really appreciate it.
Before diving into the specifics, I’ll say that on the one hand—the name could definitely change if we keep getting feedback that it’s suboptimal. That could be in a week or in a year or two, so the name isn’t final in that sense.
On the other hand, we did run this name quite a few people (including some who aren’t familiar with EA). We tried (to the best of our ability) to receive honest feedback (like not telling people that this is something we’re setting up or letting someone else solicit the feedback). Most of what you wrote came up, but rarely. And people seemed to feel positively about it. It’s definitely possible that the feedback we got on it was still skewed positive, but it was much better for this name than for other options we tried.
Now, to dive into the specifics and my thoughts on them:
* The name doesn’t make the function clear: I think this is a stylistic preference. I prefer having a name that’s more memorable, when the function can be explained in a sentence or two right after it. I know the current norm for EA is to name orgs by stating their function in 2 or 3 words, but I think the vast majority of orgs (for profit and non-profit) choose a name that doesn’t just plainly state what the org does. I will mention that, depending on context, what might appear is “Probably Good Career Advice”, which is clearer (though still doesn’t fully optimize for clarity).
* Good can mean quality and morality: Again, I liked that. We do mean it in both ways (the advice is both attempting to be as high quality as possibly and as high as possible in moral impact, but we are working under uncertainty in both parameters).
* Turning people off by giving the message that the product isn’t good or that we’re not ambitious in making it good: I pretty much fully agree with you on the analysis. I think this name reduces the risk of people expecting a level of certainty that we’ll never reach (and is very commonly marketed in non-EA career advice) and increases the risk of people initially being turned off by perceived low quality or low effort.
I also like and agree with your “pitch” and that is more of less how I’m thinking about the issue.
Two relevant points on weighing this trade-off:
1. Currently, I’m 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 people’s perceived certainty in our advice.
2. Most people we ran the name by did catch on that the name was a little tongue-in-cheek in it’s phrasing. This wasn’t everyone, but the people who did see that—didn’t think there was a signal of lower quality.
I do agree there’s a risk there, but I see it as relatively small, especially if I’m assuming that most people will reach us through channels where they have supposedly heard something about us and aren’t only aware of the name.
To summarize my thoughts:
I don’t think it’s a perfect name.
I like that it’s a memorable phrase rather than a bland statement of what we do. I like that it’s a little tongue-in-cheek and that it does a few things at the same time (two meaning or good, alluding the the uncertainty). I like that it put our uncertainty front and center.
I agree there’s a risk of signaling low quality \ effort and that all of the things that I like could also be a net harm if I’m wrong (which isn’t specifically unlikely).
We’ll collect more feedback on the name and we’ll change if it doesn’t look good.
In addition to the other points brought up, I wanted to add that “probably good” has ~4 million google search results, and the username/url for “ProbablyGood” has already been taken on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This may make the name especially difficult to effectively market.
For what it’s worth, I liked the name specifically because to me it seemed to advertise an intention of increasing a lot of readers’ impact individually by a moderate amount, unlike 80000′s approach where the goal is to increase fewer readers’ impact by a large amount.
I.e. unlike Michael I like the understatement in the name, but I agree with him that it does convey understatement.
I continue to like how thoughtful you two seem to be! It seems like you’ve already anticipated most of what I’m pointing to and have reasonable reasons to hold your current position. I especially like that you “tried (to the best of [your] ability) to receive honest feedback (like not telling people that this is something [you’re] setting up or letting someone else solicit the feedback).”
I still think this name doesn’t seem great to me, but now that’s with lower confidence.
(Also, I’m just reporting my independent impression—i.e., what I’d believe if not updating on other people’s beliefs—and don’t mean to imply there’s any reason to weight my belief more strongly than that of the other people you’ve gotten feedback from.)
I’ll again split my responses into separate threads.
FWIW: 75 upvotes (as of now) for Michael’s post seem strong evidence that at least a significant fraction of forum readers find the name “weird” or “off-putting” at first glance. In most cases, that might be enough for people not to look into it more (e.g. if it’s one of hundreds of posts on their Facebook timeline).
Even if the other half of people find the name great, I think I’d rather go for a less controversial name which no-one finds weird (even if fewer people find it great).
Finding a good name is difficult—all the best and let us know if we can help! You could e.g. solicit ideas here on in a Facebook group and run polls in the “EA polls” group to get better quantitative feedback.
We’re definitely taking into account the different comments and upvotes on this post. We appreciate people upvoting the views they’d like to support—this is indeed a quick and efficient way for us to aggregate feedback.
We’ve received recommendations against opening public polls about the name of the organization from founders of existing EA organizations, and we trust those recommendations so we’ll probably avoid that route. But we will likely look into ways we can test the hypothesis of whether a “less controversial” name has positive or negative effects on the reaction of someone hearing this name for the first time.
Sorry if this is not helpful, but I felt like brainstorming some names.
Worthwhile/Worthy Pursuits
Paths of Impact
Good Callings
Careers for Good/Change
Good Careers Advice
Altruistic Career Support
(Impactify, WorkWell seem already taken… and for the latter GiveWell might not appreciate the association)
How about just Good Careers?
The two most widely known EA organizations, GiveWell and 80,000 Hours, both have short and simple names.
Just commenting to say that, in my view, it’s really promising for your project that this concern is so front-and-center already.
I’m probably preaching to the choir, but I think that epistemic modesty is absolutely key in EA, and working hard to communicate your uncertainty – even when your audience is looking for certainty – is even better.
Best of luck!
Revisiting this just to say that, for what it’s worth, the Danish beer company Carlsberg has been very successful with its slogan of being “Probably the Best Beer in the World.”
I agree that:
Many non-EA things market themselves with more certainty than is warranted
EA things that don’t 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)
It’s 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 don’t know enough to say whether there are indeed “very few ways to (effectively) lower people’s perceived certainty in our advice”. (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 you’re 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 you’re right about the above claim, that’s also evidence that the name Probably Good won’t substantially help?
Another framing is that the marginal risk-mitigation from having that name might be relatively small, if you’ll 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:
I’d imagine that for many people, those statements and efforts will be enough.
And for some people, any EA career advice provider, and especially any “lists” or concrete suggestions they provide, will be taken roughly as gospel, regardless of that provider’s efforts to prevent that.
So I feel unsure whether there’d 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 doesn’t work out, or the like.
But maybe there would be—I wouldn’t claim to have any real expertise or data on this. And you’ve 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 aren’t many ways to reduce people’s expectation of certainty.
The first, as you mentioned, is 80k’s experience that this is something where claiming it (clearly and repeatedly) didn’t 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 don’t do it immediately at the beginning. So for example, when I do 1:1s—that’s something I go into when setting expectations in the first few minutes. When I didn’t, that was very hard to correct after 30 minutes. This is one of the reasons that I think having this prominent (doesn’t 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 isn’t super important. I think there are specific pitfalls that can be seriously harmful, but besides that—I don’t expect the org name to have a very large effect by itself one way or another.
Yeah, I think this is true, and reduces the importance of my first “argument against” the name. (I think my second argument seems a bigger deal to me than the first one, but I didn’t make that clear.)
That’s a good point. I think this reduces both the risks and also perhaps the benefits of any particular name (as it makes precisely what the name is less important in people’s overall views or actions regarding the organisation).
Yeah, that helps with the first “issue” I raised.
Though reading that sentence made me realise another potential issue with the name (or maybe another thing that was subconsciously part of my initial aversion to it but): I think it sounds to me quite tongue-in-cheek and non-serious, in a way that might not be best for your aims. (You note the “tongue-in-cheek”-ness later in your comment as a positive, and I think it can be sometimes, but in this particular case I currently think it may be more likely to be negative.)
If someone directed me to “Probably Good Career Advice”, it might sound like either some sort of joke/prank/spoof, or something that was real but the name of which is sort-of a joke. And I might assume it was set up by people who are still in college. (It maybe feels like the sort of name the Weasley brothers in Harry Potter would’ve come up with.)
So if what I’m after in this context is advice on how to maximise my impact on the world, I might think these people probably aren’t the sort of people who’ll be addressing that serious question in a serious way. I think this would actually be true for me, and I’m only 24 and did stand-up comedy for several years—i.e., I’m not a very “serious person”, but I’ve got my “serious person” hat on when I’m first engaging with a new org regarding how to make my career impactful. I imagine this issue might be more pronounced on average for people who are older or “more serious” than me, which includes a lot of potentially impactful people.
This is different to e.g. 80k having some tongue-in-cheek parts of some articles or podcast episodes, because that’s not the very first thing someone will see from 80k, and it’s always just a part of a larger thing that’s mostly focused on impact. With the name Probably Good, that’s essentially the first thing someone will see from the org, and it’s not just a part embedded in something else (the name is like its own thing, not a sentence in an article).
But it’s totally possible a higher proportion of your target audience would be attracted to than pushed away by the tongue-in-cheek-ness of the name; I’m just going by my own reaction, which is of course a minuscule sample size.
This is the risk we were most worried about regarding the name. It does set a relatively light tone. We decided to go with it anyway for two reasons:
The first is that the people we talked to said that it sounds interesting and interested them more than the responses we got for more regular, descriptive names.
The second is that our general tone in writing is more serious. Serious enough that we’re working hard to make sure that it isn’t boring for some people who don’t like reading huge walls of dense text. We figure it’s best to err on the other side in this case.
I’m not a fan of the name “Probably Good” because:
if it’s describing the advice, it seems like the advice might be pretty low-effort and not worth paying attention to
if it’s describing the careers, it sounds like the careers recommended have a significant chance of having a negative impact, so again, not worth reading about