Thank you so much for writing and sharing this! It’s really useful to get such a thoughtful perspective from someone with long experience of seeking an impactful career.
A couple of the pieces that feel particularly important to me, and actionable for others, are trying to get a good grade in your degree and applying for a broad range of jobs. I would guess it’s a pretty good rule of thumb that doing well at high school and in your degree is going to set you up well for having a broad range of options (though I might be biased by my natural risk aversion). I’d also guess that for most people they should be pushing themselves to apply for more roles than they’d naturally be inclined to. Doing that seems really hard given how horrible applying for jobs is, and that it feels like the way to do well in a particular job process is to get really invested in that specific job, which feels like it precludes applying for many at once.
I’m sad that you found the only way to feel ok about broadening your job search was to distance yourself from EA. It really seems like we’re doing things wrong as a community when we’re not only failing to support people but actively making their lives worse in that way. I’d be interested to hear ways in which you think we could do better, if you’d be up for sharing. I wonder whether increasing the visibility of people taking a bunch of different paths in life would help, as the Giving What We Can blog now is? I also wonder where local meetups fit into this: One thing I’ve often found useful in chatting to people with similar values to me about my career is that they’re less harsh on me than I am on myself. They’re more inclined to remind me that my happiness should be an important consideration in my decisions, and that the advice I’d give my friends is sometimes pretty different from what I tell myself. I don’t know if you’ve found this a useful part of in person EA meetups? Perhaps this is easier to achieve with one-on-one interactions, and that it could be useful do pair up with someone, as this Facebook group facilitates.
The question of epistemics and how much to defer feels pretty tough to me. I strongly feel the pull towards thinking that questions like ‘what problem in the world is most important to work on?’ are too big and difficult for me to possibly answer. That made me really excited to find people who shared my values but were better informed and smart, and who I could learn so much from. I really want this to be a community where people are trying to form their own views rather than simply trusting what others say, plus are debating those views. That seems like how we’ll most likely get to the truth. On the other hand, doing that does often feel really difficult, and I don’t want it to be the kind of place where people feel like they can’t engage unless they’ve personally read and thought through everything relevant to questions of how to do the most good. I guess it feels to me like understanding these things and developing views on them is a work in progress for me, and maybe that would be a helpful framing for others too.
Sorry for being a bit slow to respond. I have been thinking about your question on how the EA community can be more supportive in situations I experienced, but struggled to come up with answers I feel particularly confident in. I might circle back to this question at a later point.
For now, I am going to answer instead what I suspect would have made me feel better supported while I was struggling to figure out what I should be doing, but I don’t feel particularly confident:
i) Mentorship. Having a soundboard to talk through my decisions (and possibly letting me know that I was being silly when I felt like I wasn’t allowed to make my own decisions) might have helped a lot.
ii) Having people acknowledge that I maneuvered myself into a position that wasn’t great from the perspective of expected impact, and that this all kind of sucked.
That said, for the latter one, the bottleneck might have been me. I had quite a few people who I thought knew me well express surprise at how miserable I felt at the time, so apparently this was not as obvious as I thought.
I would expect my first suggestion to generalise, mentorship is likely very useful for a lot of people!
I had a lot of contact with local and global EAs, and without that I probably would have done worse. I particularly appreciated people’s support when I was actually applying to ‘real jobs’ last year. Both when I was trying to decide whether I should accept a low-ball offer from a tech startup (which I rejected) as well as the wide support I received from civil servants in how to navigate the civil service application process.
In the post I mentioned that I mentally distanced myself from EA a bit, but I wouldn’t say that I distanced myself from EA. This was a purely mental shift in how I relate to the community and doing as much good as I can. Please don’t kick me out ;-)
I’m sad that you found the only way to feel ok about broadening your job search was to distance yourself from EA. It really seems like we’re doing things wrong as a community when we’re not only failing to support people but actively making their lives worse in that way. I’d be interested to hear ways in which you think we could do better, if you’d be up for sharing.
I think opinions on how to do better are rather sensitive to broader cause prioritisation and ‘what should the movement look like?’ questions, but some of Denise’s previous writing gives insight into her personal thoughts here, which I happen to agree with. I particularly note the following quote:
Participating in the EA community should make you feel more motivated about the amount of good you are able to do, not less. If it makes you feel less motivated on balance, then the EA community is doing something fundamentally wrong and everybody might be better off somewhere else until this is fixed.
If you have adapted to the belief that you can personally prevent lots of astronomical waste, it is time to go back to having more realistic expectations.
I’d also guess that for most people they should be pushing themselves to apply for more roles than they’d naturally be inclined to.
Fairly minor thing in a big comment, but I’m curious about whether this works if people do this. My own limited experience, and that of a few friends, is that we only got the jobs/roles we really wanted in the end. I wonder if this is because we lacked intrinsic motivation and were probably obviously terrible candidates for the things we were trying ourselves excited for. In my case, I tried to be a management consultant after I did my postgrad and only applied for PhDs because I bombed at that (and everything else I applied for).
One data point: I recently got a job which, at the time I initially applied for it, I didn’t really want (as I went through the interview process and especially now that I’ve started, I like it more than I thought I would based on the job posting alone).
Thank you so much for writing and sharing this! It’s really useful to get such a thoughtful perspective from someone with long experience of seeking an impactful career.
A couple of the pieces that feel particularly important to me, and actionable for others, are trying to get a good grade in your degree and applying for a broad range of jobs. I would guess it’s a pretty good rule of thumb that doing well at high school and in your degree is going to set you up well for having a broad range of options (though I might be biased by my natural risk aversion). I’d also guess that for most people they should be pushing themselves to apply for more roles than they’d naturally be inclined to. Doing that seems really hard given how horrible applying for jobs is, and that it feels like the way to do well in a particular job process is to get really invested in that specific job, which feels like it precludes applying for many at once.
I’m sad that you found the only way to feel ok about broadening your job search was to distance yourself from EA. It really seems like we’re doing things wrong as a community when we’re not only failing to support people but actively making their lives worse in that way. I’d be interested to hear ways in which you think we could do better, if you’d be up for sharing. I wonder whether increasing the visibility of people taking a bunch of different paths in life would help, as the Giving What We Can blog now is? I also wonder where local meetups fit into this: One thing I’ve often found useful in chatting to people with similar values to me about my career is that they’re less harsh on me than I am on myself. They’re more inclined to remind me that my happiness should be an important consideration in my decisions, and that the advice I’d give my friends is sometimes pretty different from what I tell myself. I don’t know if you’ve found this a useful part of in person EA meetups? Perhaps this is easier to achieve with one-on-one interactions, and that it could be useful do pair up with someone, as this Facebook group facilitates.
The question of epistemics and how much to defer feels pretty tough to me. I strongly feel the pull towards thinking that questions like ‘what problem in the world is most important to work on?’ are too big and difficult for me to possibly answer. That made me really excited to find people who shared my values but were better informed and smart, and who I could learn so much from. I really want this to be a community where people are trying to form their own views rather than simply trusting what others say, plus are debating those views. That seems like how we’ll most likely get to the truth. On the other hand, doing that does often feel really difficult, and I don’t want it to be the kind of place where people feel like they can’t engage unless they’ve personally read and thought through everything relevant to questions of how to do the most good. I guess it feels to me like understanding these things and developing views on them is a work in progress for me, and maybe that would be a helpful framing for others too.
Hi Michelle,
Sorry for being a bit slow to respond. I have been thinking about your question on how the EA community can be more supportive in situations I experienced, but struggled to come up with answers I feel particularly confident in. I might circle back to this question at a later point.
For now, I am going to answer instead what I suspect would have made me feel better supported while I was struggling to figure out what I should be doing, but I don’t feel particularly confident:
i) Mentorship. Having a soundboard to talk through my decisions (and possibly letting me know that I was being silly when I felt like I wasn’t allowed to make my own decisions) might have helped a lot.
ii) Having people acknowledge that I maneuvered myself into a position that wasn’t great from the perspective of expected impact, and that this all kind of sucked.
That said, for the latter one, the bottleneck might have been me. I had quite a few people who I thought knew me well express surprise at how miserable I felt at the time, so apparently this was not as obvious as I thought.
I would expect my first suggestion to generalise, mentorship is likely very useful for a lot of people!
I had a lot of contact with local and global EAs, and without that I probably would have done worse. I particularly appreciated people’s support when I was actually applying to ‘real jobs’ last year. Both when I was trying to decide whether I should accept a low-ball offer from a tech startup (which I rejected) as well as the wide support I received from civil servants in how to navigate the civil service application process.
In the post I mentioned that I mentally distanced myself from EA a bit, but I wouldn’t say that I distanced myself from EA. This was a purely mental shift in how I relate to the community and doing as much good as I can. Please don’t kick me out ;-)
I think opinions on how to do better are rather sensitive to broader cause prioritisation and ‘what should the movement look like?’ questions, but some of Denise’s previous writing gives insight into her personal thoughts here, which I happen to agree with. I particularly note the following quote:
Fairly minor thing in a big comment, but I’m curious about whether this works if people do this. My own limited experience, and that of a few friends, is that we only got the jobs/roles we really wanted in the end. I wonder if this is because we lacked intrinsic motivation and were probably obviously terrible candidates for the things we were trying ourselves excited for. In my case, I tried to be a management consultant after I did my postgrad and only applied for PhDs because I bombed at that (and everything else I applied for).
One data point: I recently got a job which, at the time I initially applied for it, I didn’t really want (as I went through the interview process and especially now that I’ve started, I like it more than I thought I would based on the job posting alone).