I don’t think any of 80k’s career advice has caused much harm compared to the counterfactual of not having given that advice at all, so I feel a bit confused how to think about this. Even the grossest misrepresentation of EtG being the only way to do good or something still strikes me as better than the current average experience a college graduate has (which is no guidance, and all career advice comes from companies trying to recruit you).
I think the comparison to “the current average experience a college graduate has” isn’t quite fair, because the group of people who see 80k’s advice and act on is is already quite selected for lots of traits (e.g. altruism). I would be surprised if the average person influenced by 80k’s EtG advice had the average college graduate experience in terms of which careers they consider and hence, where they look for advice, e.g. they might already be more inclined to go into policy, the non-profit sector or research to do good.
(I have no opinion on how your point comes out on the whole. I wasn’t around in 2015, but intuitively it would also surprise me if 80k didn’t do substantially more good during that time than bad, even bracketing out community building effects (, which, admittedly, is hard))
As it happens, there are a couple of examples in this post where poor or distorted versions of 80k advice arguably caused harm relative to no advice; over-focus on working at EA orgs due to ‘talent constraint’ claims probably set Denise’s entire career back by ~2 years for no gain, and a simplistic understanding of replaceability was significantly responsible for her giving up on political work.
Apart from the direct cost, such events leave a sour taste in people’s mouths and so can cause them to dissociate from the community; if we’re going to focus on ‘recruiting’ people while they are young, anything that increases attrition needs to be considered very carefully and skeptically.
I do agree that in general it’s not that hard to beat ‘no advice’, rather a lot of the need for care comes from simplistic advice’s natural tendency to crowd out nuanced advice.
I don’t mean to bash 80k here; when they become aware of these things they try pretty hard to clean it up, they maintain a public list of mistakes (which includes both of the above), and I think they apply way more thought and imagination to the question of how this kind of thing can happen than most other places, even most other EA orgs. I’ve been impressed by the seriousness with which they take this kind of problem over the years.
Yeah, totally agree that we can find individual instances where the advice is bad. Just seems pretty unlikely for that average to be worse, even just by the lights of the person who is given advice (and ignoring altruistic effects, which presumably are more heavy-tailed).
I don’t think any of 80k’s career advice has caused much harm compared to the counterfactual of not having given that advice at all, so I feel a bit confused how to think about this. Even the grossest misrepresentation of EtG being the only way to do good or something still strikes me as better than the current average experience a college graduate has (which is no guidance, and all career advice comes from companies trying to recruit you).
I think the comparison to “the current average experience a college graduate has” isn’t quite fair, because the group of people who see 80k’s advice and act on is is already quite selected for lots of traits (e.g. altruism). I would be surprised if the average person influenced by 80k’s EtG advice had the average college graduate experience in terms of which careers they consider and hence, where they look for advice, e.g. they might already be more inclined to go into policy, the non-profit sector or research to do good.
(I have no opinion on how your point comes out on the whole. I wasn’t around in 2015, but intuitively it would also surprise me if 80k didn’t do substantially more good during that time than bad, even bracketing out community building effects (, which, admittedly, is hard))
(Disclaimer: I am OP’s husband)
As it happens, there are a couple of examples in this post where poor or distorted versions of 80k advice arguably caused harm relative to no advice; over-focus on working at EA orgs due to ‘talent constraint’ claims probably set Denise’s entire career back by ~2 years for no gain, and a simplistic understanding of replaceability was significantly responsible for her giving up on political work.
Apart from the direct cost, such events leave a sour taste in people’s mouths and so can cause them to dissociate from the community; if we’re going to focus on ‘recruiting’ people while they are young, anything that increases attrition needs to be considered very carefully and skeptically.
I do agree that in general it’s not that hard to beat ‘no advice’, rather a lot of the need for care comes from simplistic advice’s natural tendency to crowd out nuanced advice.
I don’t mean to bash 80k here; when they become aware of these things they try pretty hard to clean it up, they maintain a public list of mistakes (which includes both of the above), and I think they apply way more thought and imagination to the question of how this kind of thing can happen than most other places, even most other EA orgs. I’ve been impressed by the seriousness with which they take this kind of problem over the years.
Yeah, totally agree that we can find individual instances where the advice is bad. Just seems pretty unlikely for that average to be worse, even just by the lights of the person who is given advice (and ignoring altruistic effects, which presumably are more heavy-tailed).