I feel I should note that there is an opposite problem happening as well. Robert Wiblin once wrote:
It’s a problem for 80,000 Hours that people range from wildly overconfident in themselves to wildly under-confident in themselves. The extent of people’s 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 won’t have done the test, so we’re back to people’s guesses about how well they would do, and iv) some people have such strong positive and negative convictions about themselves even this wouldn’t 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 / ability) spectrum. I suspect that “skilled people deciding not to try entering EA work” is a bigger problem than “people trying to push ahead when they shouldn’t”.
Reasoning:
From an individual’s perspective, “wasting time trying to enter a field” doesn’t seem much worse than “missing your chance to enter a field where you’d have had a much higher impact than you did otherwise”.
From an org’s perspective, it’s much more costly to miss out on a great employee than to say “no” 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: it’s more socially acceptable to point out that people underestimate themselves, than that they overestimate themselves.
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 / ability) spectrum. I suspect that “skilled people deciding not to try entering EA work” is a bigger problem than “people trying to push ahead when they shouldn’t”.
Reasoning:
From an individual’s perspective, “wasting time trying to enter a field” doesn’t seem much worse than “missing your chance to enter a field where you’d have had a much higher impact than you did otherwise”.
From an org’s perspective, it’s much more costly to miss out on a great employee than to say “no” 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: it’s more socially acceptable to point out that people underestimate themselves, than that they overestimate themselves.