âThe EA Doldrums: Drifting for no good reasonâ
A piece exploring why it took me so long to go from âleader of moderately successful student groupâ to âactually applying for jobs in EAâ, and speculating that there may be a lot of other people who arenât aware of how qualified they actually are for direct work (with reference to at least one more anecdotal example of someone who was in the âdoldrumsâ for a while). Includes thoughts on what kinds of prompting might actually get people in these positions to take EA jobs seriously.
I feel I should note that there is an opposite problem happening as well. Robert Wiblin once wrote:
Itâs a problem for 80,000 Hours that people range from wildly overconfident in themselves to wildly under-confident in themselves. The extent of peopleâs inaccurate self-assessments has surprised me and might surprise you too.
As a result, almost anything we say to help people figure out whether they can plausibly pursue a given career path will still lead to some combination of confident but unsuitable people pushing ahead, and under-confident but suitable people not even bothering to try. Both of these are significant costs.
The ideal is to give objective measures like test scores, but i) many roles have no such clear entry criteria, ii) even those that do usually also require some softer skills that are harder to measure, iii) most people wonât have done the test, so weâre back to peopleâs guesses about how well they would do, and iv) some people have such strong positive and negative convictions about themselves even this wouldnât help.
Anyway, the bottom line is that if you could all go and achieve perfect self-knowledge it would make my job slightly easier, thank you.
There are certainly people on both ends of the (confidence /â ability) spectrum. I suspect that âskilled people deciding not to try entering EA workâ is a bigger problem than âpeople trying to push ahead when they shouldnâtâ.
Reasoning:
From an individualâs perspective, âwasting time trying to enter a fieldâ doesnât seem much worse than âmissing your chance to enter a field where youâd have had a much higher impact than you did otherwiseâ.
From an orgâs perspective, itâs much more costly to miss out on a great employee than to say ânoâ to one more person.
But there are a lot of other ways you could look at the issue, and this is just my first impression.
Generally, I would expect more people to overestimate themselves (illusory superiority) than underestimate themselves. I also expect that there is a social desirability bias at play here: itâs more socially acceptable to point out that people underestimate themselves, than that they overestimate themselves.
Unsolicited advice-seeking (respond to all, some, or none, as your schedule and interests permit): Is being the âleader of a moderately successful student groupâ in itself a useful qualification for getting EA jobs? And if so, where do you find openings where itâs relevant? (Iâm the leader of a moderately successful student group! :D) I just finished a bachelors in economics and my very preliminary search of EA-adjacent job postings has turned up a lot of opportunities for grad students, phdâs, or programmers, of which I am none. (Fwiw I might actuallybe overestimating my qualifications, given that I canât code and my only significant paid job experience is tutoring.)
Didnât write it, but have two-thirds of a draft lying around to finish someday.
Leading a group is a good signal, but for most jobs, I think other qualifications will also be important (though these could include âhaving a strong application and doing well on work testsâ). If youâre trying to do something that makes use of your econ knowledge (rather than your ops/âorganizing ability or general research skills), competing with PhDs will be tough.
Iâm an unusual case, because I went to a one-off retreat for people interested in ops work at a time lots of orgs were hiring at onceâit was a bit like a âjob fairâ. Had I not gone there, Iâd have just kept checking the 80K job board, the âEffective Altruism Job Postingsâ Facebook group, and the websites of a few orgs I liked (if Iâd seen that their jobs werenât being added to the board).
FWIW, I think tutoring EAs can be a valuable intervention, though maybe wonât ever be big enough for an org (or possibly even a single person) to work on this full-time.
âThe EA Doldrums: Drifting for no good reasonâ
A piece exploring why it took me so long to go from âleader of moderately successful student groupâ to âactually applying for jobs in EAâ, and speculating that there may be a lot of other people who arenât aware of how qualified they actually are for direct work (with reference to at least one more anecdotal example of someone who was in the âdoldrumsâ for a while). Includes thoughts on what kinds of prompting might actually get people in these positions to take EA jobs seriously.
I feel I should note that there is an opposite problem happening as well. Robert Wiblin once wrote:
There are certainly people on both ends of the (confidence /â ability) spectrum. I suspect that âskilled people deciding not to try entering EA workâ is a bigger problem than âpeople trying to push ahead when they shouldnâtâ.
Reasoning:
From an individualâs perspective, âwasting time trying to enter a fieldâ doesnât seem much worse than âmissing your chance to enter a field where youâd have had a much higher impact than you did otherwiseâ.
From an orgâs perspective, itâs much more costly to miss out on a great employee than to say ânoâ to one more person.
But there are a lot of other ways you could look at the issue, and this is just my first impression.
Generally, I would expect more people to overestimate themselves (illusory superiority) than underestimate themselves. I also expect that there is a social desirability bias at play here: itâs more socially acceptable to point out that people underestimate themselves, than that they overestimate themselves.
Did you ever write this? Iâd love to read it.
Unsolicited advice-seeking (respond to all, some, or none, as your schedule and interests permit): Is being the âleader of a moderately successful student groupâ in itself a useful qualification for getting EA jobs? And if so, where do you find openings where itâs relevant? (Iâm the leader of a moderately successful student group! :D) I just finished a bachelors in economics and my very preliminary search of EA-adjacent job postings has turned up a lot of opportunities for grad students, phdâs, or programmers, of which I am none. (Fwiw I might actually be overestimating my qualifications, given that I canât code and my only significant paid job experience is tutoring.)
Didnât write it, but have two-thirds of a draft lying around to finish someday.
Leading a group is a good signal, but for most jobs, I think other qualifications will also be important (though these could include âhaving a strong application and doing well on work testsâ). If youâre trying to do something that makes use of your econ knowledge (rather than your ops/âorganizing ability or general research skills), competing with PhDs will be tough.
Iâm an unusual case, because I went to a one-off retreat for people interested in ops work at a time lots of orgs were hiring at onceâit was a bit like a âjob fairâ. Had I not gone there, Iâd have just kept checking the 80K job board, the âEffective Altruism Job Postingsâ Facebook group, and the websites of a few orgs I liked (if Iâd seen that their jobs werenât being added to the board).
FWIW, I think tutoring EAs can be a valuable intervention, though maybe wonât ever be big enough for an org (or possibly even a single person) to work on this full-time.
Now on a massive tangent, but maybe you could offer to subsidize people buying tutoring from Wyzant?