Unless you have a good reason to believe otherwise, whatever you are doing now is probably not the most impactful thing that you will ever do. Over time, you will have more career capital, which will open more opportunities for impact. If that’s true, a large portion of the value of your current project is building career capital for future projects.
As a result, all else equal, we should perhaps be slightly skewed towards tractability in the typical ITN framework. A successful project looks better for career capital than a failed one, even if the two projects were equal from a pure EV comparison.
With that said, most people skew risk-averse, so maybe this is already built in?
EDIT: I agree with @Charlie_Guthmann ’s comment that while this may be true, most people already (unintentonally) take this consideration into account due to natural biases, like risk-aversion, MORE than they should.
The all else equal logic is true but its basically fully internalized by normal people ++ to the point where I’d say you should be actively pushing the other way. Literally every kid I want to college with just brain off did like consulting after school largely to preserve option value/career capital (not to necc deploy it for impact later but still). People are extremely risk averse from the POV of a social planner. I’m not saying for any given subset of work you shouldn’t think hard about career capital but if you go job agnostic with this mindset it’s highly constraining. Like i’m pretty sure if I was the social planner god I’d be telling way more smart people to “send it”.
Also re tractability: yes and no. I think early in your career you don’t need to even think that hard about “success” unless you are in an extremely technical / research type thing. Like most jobs if you are consistent, responsible, decent, and good at networking you are gonna get most of the career capital juice there. Yes of course doing something really successfully at 23 is a huge boost but you aren’t going to be heavily punished for not having that. Once you are a couple years into your career, I think the onus to “own” some real successes goes up.
Unless you have a good reason to believe otherwise, whatever you are doing now is probably not the most impactful thing that you will ever do. Over time, you will have more career capital, which will open more opportunities for impact. If that’s true, a large portion of the value of your current project is building career capital for future projects.
As a result, all else equal, we should perhaps be slightly skewed towards tractability in the typical ITN framework. A successful project looks better for career capital than a failed one, even if the two projects were equal from a pure EV comparison.
With that said, most people skew risk-averse, so maybe this is already built in?
EDIT: I agree with @Charlie_Guthmann ’s comment that while this may be true, most people already (unintentonally) take this consideration into account due to natural biases, like risk-aversion, MORE than they should.
The all else equal logic is true but its basically fully internalized by normal people ++ to the point where I’d say you should be actively pushing the other way. Literally every kid I want to college with just brain off did like consulting after school largely to preserve option value/career capital (not to necc deploy it for impact later but still). People are extremely risk averse from the POV of a social planner. I’m not saying for any given subset of work you shouldn’t think hard about career capital but if you go job agnostic with this mindset it’s highly constraining. Like i’m pretty sure if I was the social planner god I’d be telling way more smart people to “send it”.
Also re tractability: yes and no. I think early in your career you don’t need to even think that hard about “success” unless you are in an extremely technical / research type thing. Like most jobs if you are consistent, responsible, decent, and good at networking you are gonna get most of the career capital juice there. Yes of course doing something really successfully at 23 is a huge boost but you aren’t going to be heavily punished for not having that. Once you are a couple years into your career, I think the onus to “own” some real successes goes up.
I agree, and this is a (more thorough and better written) version of the point I was trying to make with the question I asked at the bottom.