I’m not exactly sure of the extent to which I’m risk averse. I don’t tend to have super strong views about the kinds of advice I’m giving people, which means that usually I feel able to give my actual view along with how uncertain I am about it. That has the advantage that I can usually be totally open and candid, though the disadvantage that it’s obviously a bit less useful to get an answer along the lines of ‘here’s a reason to think A is higher impact, here’s a reason B is higher impact, on balance I might go for B, but I think there’s a strong case for each...’ than ‘B seems much better’. I also tend to be naturally risk averse, which means that my natural inclination is to suggest people go for the safer of different routes. Eg I’m very hesitant to suggest someone drop out of a degree, and hesitant to recommend someone quitting a job to take time to study or similar, rather than only quitting when they have another lined up. (I’m decidedly more on the risk averse end of the spectrum than some of my colleagues, for example)
There are probably a few cases where I feel the need be extra risk averse though:
In cases where someone would go into debt in order to pursue some course of action, I feel very hesitant to advise them doing that (particularly if they themselves are clearly worried about it). I find this a difficult trade off to make, because particularly for undergraduate it seems really important to me to go to a top university, and I’d definitely expect people to be able to pay off debt they go into in order to go those. But at the same time, I’d never want to push someone into taking on more debt than they’re comfortable with.
I worry about cases where a particular role seems like it might be very stressful, and even possibly lead to burn out. It’s really hard to know for a specific person whether a role will be stressful for them, even if there’s reason to think it would be for some people. It feels emotionally much worse to me to have nudged someone towards a role that ends up being very stressful for them than to have nudged them away from a role that turns out to work really well for them. Some part of that seems right in expected value terms—leading someone to burn out is likely much worse for them than their alternative job, while it’s likely there’s only so much better the role would be for them than the alternative. But I also think as an adviser I have some extra duty of care to make sure I don’t give advice that leads to harm.
Not quite to do with ‘risk aversion’ but related is that I don’t always push people as hard on their values as I might naturally. People don’t typically expect when going into a careers advising session that they’ll end up talking much about what their values are and what they care most about, but that’s critical for determining what the most impactful role by their lights is. For that reason, I usually start advising sessions with a discussion of values—what causes they care most about and why. That mostly involves me trying to work out what a person’s values are, rather than trying to change them. Since my PhD is in philosophy, my natural inclination would be to be a bit more opinionated than that. In particular, when someone says that they don’t care at all about people who aren’t alive yet, I’d usually be interested in pushing more on that (since that was the topic of my thesis). For example, by discussing hypotheticals like ‘if we shouldn’t care about those as yet unborn, does that mean I shouldn’t donate to AMF if it will take a while for a malaria net to be bought with the money, and so it will save the life of a baby who isn’t born yet’. But these are huge questions which people need to read about and think through over a long period of time, rather than trying to argue through in 10 minutes of a 40 minute call.
I’m not exactly sure of the extent to which I’m risk averse. I don’t tend to have super strong views about the kinds of advice I’m giving people, which means that usually I feel able to give my actual view along with how uncertain I am about it. That has the advantage that I can usually be totally open and candid, though the disadvantage that it’s obviously a bit less useful to get an answer along the lines of ‘here’s a reason to think A is higher impact, here’s a reason B is higher impact, on balance I might go for B, but I think there’s a strong case for each...’ than ‘B seems much better’. I also tend to be naturally risk averse, which means that my natural inclination is to suggest people go for the safer of different routes. Eg I’m very hesitant to suggest someone drop out of a degree, and hesitant to recommend someone quitting a job to take time to study or similar, rather than only quitting when they have another lined up. (I’m decidedly more on the risk averse end of the spectrum than some of my colleagues, for example)
There are probably a few cases where I feel the need be extra risk averse though:
In cases where someone would go into debt in order to pursue some course of action, I feel very hesitant to advise them doing that (particularly if they themselves are clearly worried about it). I find this a difficult trade off to make, because particularly for undergraduate it seems really important to me to go to a top university, and I’d definitely expect people to be able to pay off debt they go into in order to go those. But at the same time, I’d never want to push someone into taking on more debt than they’re comfortable with.
I worry about cases where a particular role seems like it might be very stressful, and even possibly lead to burn out. It’s really hard to know for a specific person whether a role will be stressful for them, even if there’s reason to think it would be for some people. It feels emotionally much worse to me to have nudged someone towards a role that ends up being very stressful for them than to have nudged them away from a role that turns out to work really well for them. Some part of that seems right in expected value terms—leading someone to burn out is likely much worse for them than their alternative job, while it’s likely there’s only so much better the role would be for them than the alternative. But I also think as an adviser I have some extra duty of care to make sure I don’t give advice that leads to harm.
Not quite to do with ‘risk aversion’ but related is that I don’t always push people as hard on their values as I might naturally. People don’t typically expect when going into a careers advising session that they’ll end up talking much about what their values are and what they care most about, but that’s critical for determining what the most impactful role by their lights is. For that reason, I usually start advising sessions with a discussion of values—what causes they care most about and why. That mostly involves me trying to work out what a person’s values are, rather than trying to change them. Since my PhD is in philosophy, my natural inclination would be to be a bit more opinionated than that. In particular, when someone says that they don’t care at all about people who aren’t alive yet, I’d usually be interested in pushing more on that (since that was the topic of my thesis). For example, by discussing hypotheticals like ‘if we shouldn’t care about those as yet unborn, does that mean I shouldn’t donate to AMF if it will take a while for a malaria net to be bought with the money, and so it will save the life of a baby who isn’t born yet’. But these are huge questions which people need to read about and think through over a long period of time, rather than trying to argue through in 10 minutes of a 40 minute call.