I love the point about the dangers of “can’t go wrong” style reasoning. I think we’re used to giving advice like this to friends when they’re stressing out about a choice that is relatively low-stakes, even like “which of these all-pretty-decent jobs [in not-super-high-impact areas] should I take.” It’s true that for the person getting the advice, all the jobs would probably be fine, but the intuition doesn’t work when the stakes for others are very high. Impact is likely so heavy-tailed that even if you’re doing a job at the 99th percentile of your options, it’s probably (?) orders of magnitude worse than the 99.9th percentile — meaning you’re giving up more than 90% of your impact.
A corollary is that different roles and projects within each cause area are also likely to be heavy-tailed, and once again, I hear the advice of “can’t go wrong” in pretty inappropriate contexts. Picking the second-best option likely means giving up most of your impact, which is measured in expected lives saved. You can definitely go wrong!
Now, we all have limited cognition and for these kinds of choices; we ultimately have to make choices (and doing nothing is also a choice), and we’ll inevitably make mistakes, and we should treat ourselves with some compassion. But maybe we should reframe comments like “you can’t go wrong” as like, “sounds like you have some really exciting options and difficult choices ahead” — and, if you have the bandwidth to actually do this — “let me know if I can help you think them through!”
I love the point about the dangers of “can’t go wrong” style reasoning. I think we’re used to giving advice like this to friends when they’re stressing out about a choice that is relatively low-stakes, even like “which of these all-pretty-decent jobs [in not-super-high-impact areas] should I take.” It’s true that for the person getting the advice, all the jobs would probably be fine, but the intuition doesn’t work when the stakes for others are very high. Impact is likely so heavy-tailed that even if you’re doing a job at the 99th percentile of your options, it’s probably (?) orders of magnitude worse than the 99.9th percentile — meaning you’re giving up more than 90% of your impact.
A corollary is that different roles and projects within each cause area are also likely to be heavy-tailed, and once again, I hear the advice of “can’t go wrong” in pretty inappropriate contexts. Picking the second-best option likely means giving up most of your impact, which is measured in expected lives saved. You can definitely go wrong!
Now, we all have limited cognition and for these kinds of choices; we ultimately have to make choices (and doing nothing is also a choice), and we’ll inevitably make mistakes, and we should treat ourselves with some compassion. But maybe we should reframe comments like “you can’t go wrong” as like, “sounds like you have some really exciting options and difficult choices ahead” — and, if you have the bandwidth to actually do this — “let me know if I can help you think them through!”