Hi Michelle, thanks for the thoughtful reply; I’ve responded below. Please don’t feel obliged to respond in detail to my specific points if that’s not a good use of your time; writing up a more general explanation of 80k’s position might be more useful?
You’re right that I’m positive about pretty broad capital building, but I’m not sure we disagree that much here. On a scale of breadth to narrowness of career capital, consulting is at one extreme because it’s so generalist, and the other extreme is working at EA organisations or directly on EA causes straight out of university.I’m arguing against the current skew towards the latter extreme, but I’m not arguing that the former extreme is ideal. I think something like working at a top think tank (your example above) is a great first career step. (As a side note, I mention consulting twice in my post, but both times just as an illustrative example. Since this seems to have been misleading, I’ll change one of those mentions to think tanks).
However, I do think that there are only a small number of jobs which are as good on so many axes as top think tanks, and it’s usually quite difficult to get them as a new grad. Most new grads therefore face harsher tradeoffs between generality and narrowness.
More importantly, in order to help others as much as we can, we really need to both work on the world’s most pressing problems and find what inputs are most needed in order to make progress on them. While this will describe a huge range of roles in a wide variety of areas, it will still be the minority of jobs.
I guess my core argument is that in the past, EA has overfit to the jobs we thought were important at the time, both because of explicit career advice and because of implicit social pressure. So how do we avoid doing so going forward? I argue that given the social pressure which pushes people towards wanting to have a few very specific careers, it’s better to have a community default which encourages people towards a broader range of jobs, for three reasons: to ameliorate the existing social bias, to allow a wider range of people to feel like they belong in EA, and to add a little bit of “epistemic modesty”-based deference towards existing non-EA career advice. I claim that if EA as a movement had been more epistemically modest about careers 5 years ago, we’d have a) more people with useful general career capital, b) more people in things which didn’t use to be priorities, but now are, like politics, c) fewer current grads who (mistakenly/unsuccessfully) prioritised their career search specifically towards EA orgs, and maybe d) more information about a broader range of careers from people pursuing those paths. There would also have been costs to adding this epistemic modesty, of course, and I don’t have a strong opinion on whether the costs outweight the benefits, but I do think it’s worth making a case for those benefits.
We’ve updated pretty substantially away from that in favour of taking a more directed approach to your career
Looking at this post on how you’ve changed your mind, I’m not strongly convinced by the reasons you cited. Summarised:
1. If you’re focused on our top problem areas, narrow career capital in those areas is usually more useful than flexible career capital.
Unless it turns out that there’s a better form of narrow career which it would be useful to be able to shift towards (e.g. shifts in EA ideas, or unexpected doors opening as you get more senior).
2. You can get good career capital in positions with high immediate impact
I’ve argued that immediate impact is usually a fairly unimportant metric which is outweighed by the impact later on in your career.
3. Discount rates on aligned-talent are quite high in some of the priority paths, and seem to have increased, making career capital less valuable.
I am personally not very convinced by this, but I appreciate that there’s a broad range of opinions and so it’s a reasonable concern.
It still seems to be the case that organisations like the Open Philanthropy Project and GiveWell are occasionally interested in hiring people 0-2 years out of university. And while there seem to be some people to whom working at EA organisations seems more appealing than it should, there are also many people for whom it seems less appealing or cognitively available than it should. For example, while the people on this forum are likely to be very inclined to apply for jobs at EA organisations, many of the people I talk to in coaching don’t know that much about various EA organisations and why they might be good places to work.
Re OpenPhil and GiveWell wanting to hire new grads: in general I don’t place much weight on evidence of the form “organisation x thinks their own work is unusually impactful and worth the counterfactual tradeoffs”.
I agree that you have a very difficult job in trying to convey key ideas to people who are are coming from totally different positions in terms of background knowledge and experience with EA. My advice is primarily aimed at people who are already committed EAs, and who are subject to the social dynamics I discuss above—hence why this is a “community” post. I think you do amazing work in introducing a wider audience to EA ideas, especially with nuance via the podcast as you mentioned.
Hi Michelle, thanks for the thoughtful reply; I’ve responded below. Please don’t feel obliged to respond in detail to my specific points if that’s not a good use of your time; writing up a more general explanation of 80k’s position might be more useful?
You’re right that I’m positive about pretty broad capital building, but I’m not sure we disagree that much here. On a scale of breadth to narrowness of career capital, consulting is at one extreme because it’s so generalist, and the other extreme is working at EA organisations or directly on EA causes straight out of university. I’m arguing against the current skew towards the latter extreme, but I’m not arguing that the former extreme is ideal. I think something like working at a top think tank (your example above) is a great first career step. (As a side note, I mention consulting twice in my post, but both times just as an illustrative example. Since this seems to have been misleading, I’ll change one of those mentions to think tanks).
However, I do think that there are only a small number of jobs which are as good on so many axes as top think tanks, and it’s usually quite difficult to get them as a new grad. Most new grads therefore face harsher tradeoffs between generality and narrowness.
I guess my core argument is that in the past, EA has overfit to the jobs we thought were important at the time, both because of explicit career advice and because of implicit social pressure. So how do we avoid doing so going forward? I argue that given the social pressure which pushes people towards wanting to have a few very specific careers, it’s better to have a community default which encourages people towards a broader range of jobs, for three reasons: to ameliorate the existing social bias, to allow a wider range of people to feel like they belong in EA, and to add a little bit of “epistemic modesty”-based deference towards existing non-EA career advice. I claim that if EA as a movement had been more epistemically modest about careers 5 years ago, we’d have a) more people with useful general career capital, b) more people in things which didn’t use to be priorities, but now are, like politics, c) fewer current grads who (mistakenly/unsuccessfully) prioritised their career search specifically towards EA orgs, and maybe d) more information about a broader range of careers from people pursuing those paths. There would also have been costs to adding this epistemic modesty, of course, and I don’t have a strong opinion on whether the costs outweight the benefits, but I do think it’s worth making a case for those benefits.
Looking at this post on how you’ve changed your mind, I’m not strongly convinced by the reasons you cited. Summarised:
Unless it turns out that there’s a better form of narrow career which it would be useful to be able to shift towards (e.g. shifts in EA ideas, or unexpected doors opening as you get more senior).
I’ve argued that immediate impact is usually a fairly unimportant metric which is outweighed by the impact later on in your career.
I am personally not very convinced by this, but I appreciate that there’s a broad range of opinions and so it’s a reasonable concern.
Re OpenPhil and GiveWell wanting to hire new grads: in general I don’t place much weight on evidence of the form “organisation x thinks their own work is unusually impactful and worth the counterfactual tradeoffs”.
I agree that you have a very difficult job in trying to convey key ideas to people who are are coming from totally different positions in terms of background knowledge and experience with EA. My advice is primarily aimed at people who are already committed EAs, and who are subject to the social dynamics I discuss above—hence why this is a “community” post. I think you do amazing work in introducing a wider audience to EA ideas, especially with nuance via the podcast as you mentioned.