I tend to agree with him (and with your concern here) that doing outstanding work in any career is more important than abstractly considering “which career is best” when it comes to opportunities to do good.
This conclusion seems weird to me. The space of careers is wide and the space within any career is much narrower, so I’d expect that choosing which career to pursue is one of the most important decisions, similarly to how choosing a cause area is one of the most important parts of choosing a charity. Individual skill sets matter more for career choice, but I’d expect that most people (especially EAs) have many careers they could choose where they’d perform about as well in any of them.
Interesting! I honestly don’t think charity and career choices are all that similar. My impression has been that there are huge differences between positions in the same field, and even between positions with the same employer. What’s the team/management/environment like? How well does it fit your working style and skills? What will you learn, who will you meet? What would the prospective employer do if they didn’t hire you, and what will other applicants do if you take the job? What further opportunities will you be able to pursue that others wouldn’t be able or motivated to?
Holden’s angle as I interpret it is that answers to the first sorts of question might be the difference between doing good work—the level you’d perform about as well as in any career—and doing outstanding work. And doing outstanding work is what often turns up the best further opportunities, which often couldn’t have been known in advance (e.g. new initiatives, organizations, collaborations, leadership positions, policy change), and which make for much larger differences in outcomes than the between-career differences in acceptably good work.
But you can’t really get at the first questions at the level of “doctors may be replaceable” or “an additional PhD researcher gives marginal speedup X to biomedical progress.” At best this can narrow things down slightly from things you think you might be a good fit for, depending on how broad that category is to begin with.
Beyond that, there’s not really a substitute for doing a bunch of informational interviews, taking a variety of internships, volunteering in fields of interest, turning up as many positions as you can through your network, asking important questions during real interviews, and so on; then finally evaluating your specific options. And at that point it should not be surprising to find a better opportunity (for you personally) in what was a “worse” field in a more zoomed-out analysis.
This conclusion seems weird to me. The space of careers is wide and the space within any career is much narrower, so I’d expect that choosing which career to pursue is one of the most important decisions, similarly to how choosing a cause area is one of the most important parts of choosing a charity. Individual skill sets matter more for career choice, but I’d expect that most people (especially EAs) have many careers they could choose where they’d perform about as well in any of them.
Interesting! I honestly don’t think charity and career choices are all that similar. My impression has been that there are huge differences between positions in the same field, and even between positions with the same employer. What’s the team/management/environment like? How well does it fit your working style and skills? What will you learn, who will you meet? What would the prospective employer do if they didn’t hire you, and what will other applicants do if you take the job? What further opportunities will you be able to pursue that others wouldn’t be able or motivated to?
Holden’s angle as I interpret it is that answers to the first sorts of question might be the difference between doing good work—the level you’d perform about as well as in any career—and doing outstanding work. And doing outstanding work is what often turns up the best further opportunities, which often couldn’t have been known in advance (e.g. new initiatives, organizations, collaborations, leadership positions, policy change), and which make for much larger differences in outcomes than the between-career differences in acceptably good work.
But you can’t really get at the first questions at the level of “doctors may be replaceable” or “an additional PhD researcher gives marginal speedup X to biomedical progress.” At best this can narrow things down slightly from things you think you might be a good fit for, depending on how broad that category is to begin with.
Beyond that, there’s not really a substitute for doing a bunch of informational interviews, taking a variety of internships, volunteering in fields of interest, turning up as many positions as you can through your network, asking important questions during real interviews, and so on; then finally evaluating your specific options. And at that point it should not be surprising to find a better opportunity (for you personally) in what was a “worse” field in a more zoomed-out analysis.