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).
(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).