For personal fit stuff: I agree that for intellectual work, personal fit is very important. It’s just that I have discovered, almost by accident, that I have more personal fit than I realized for things I wasn’t trained in. (You may have made a similar discovery?) Had I prioritized personal fit less early on, I would have explored more. I still wonder what sorts of things I could be doing by now if I had tried to reskill instead of continuing in philosophy. Yeah, maybe I would have discovered that I didn’t like it and gone back to philosophy, but maybe I would have discovered that I loved it. I guess this isn’t against prioritizing personal fit per se, but against how past-me interpreted the advice to prioritize personal fit.
For engaging with people outside EA: I went to a philosophy PhD program and climbed the conventional academic hierarchy for a few years. I learned a bunch of useful stuff, but I also learned a bunch of useless stuff, and a bunch of stuff which is useful but plausibly not as useful as what I would have learned working for an EA org. When I look back on what I accomplished over the last five years, almost all of the best stuff seems to be things I did on the side, extracurricular from my academic work. (e.g. doing internships at CEA etc.) I also made a bunch of friends outside EA, which I agree is nice in several ways (e.g. the ones you mention) but to my dismay I found it really hard to get people to lift a finger in the direction of helping the world, even if I could intellectually convince them that e.g. AI risk is worth taking seriously, or that the critiques and stereotypes of EA they heard were incorrect. As a counterpoint, I did have interactions with several dozen people probably, and maybe I caused more positive change than I could see, especially since the world’s not over yet and there is still time for the effects of my conversations to grow. Still though: I missed out on several year’s worth of EA work and learning by going to grad school; that’s a high opportunity cost. As for learning things myself: I heard a lot of critiques of EA, learned a lot about other perspectives on the world, etc. but ultimately I don’t think I would be any worse off in this regard if I had just gone into an EA org for the past five years instead of grad school.
I very much agree with Daniel’s paragraph on personal fit.
The message on personal fit I got from 80k was basically “Personal fit is really important. This is one reason to find an area and type of work that you’ll be very passionate about. But that doesn’t mean you should just follow your current passion; you might discover later that you don’t remain passionate about something once you actually do it for a job, and you might discover that you can become passionate about things you aren’t yet passionate about, or haven’t even heard of. So it’s generally good to try to explore a lot early on, figure out what you have strong personal fit for, and then do one of those things.”
I wrote that from my remembered impression, but then googled “80,000 Hours personal fit”, and here’s part of their summary from 2017 career guide article on “How to find the right career for you” (which was the first hit):
Your degree of personal fit in a job depends on your chances of excelling in the job, if you work at it. Personal fit is even more important than most people think, because it increases your impact, job satisfaction and career capital.
Research shows that it’s really hard to work out what you’re going to be good at ahead of time, especially through self-reflection.
Instead, go investigate. After an initial cut-down of your options, learn more and then try them out.
I think that that’s great advice, and has been really helpful for me. There are some things I thought I’d like/be good at but wasn’t, and vice versa. And there are many things I hadn’t even considered but turned out to like and be good at.
Unfortunately, it seems like it’s common for people to round off what 80k said to “Personal fit and passion don’t matter”, even thought they explicitly argue against that. (80k’s 2014-2015 review does say that they think they previously hadn’t emphasised personal fit enough; perhaps this common misinterpretation can be traced back to ripple effects from 80k’s early messaging?)
Of course, it’s still necessary to figure out precisely how important personal fit and interest are relative to other things, and so it’s still possible and reasonable for someone to “emphasise personal fit and interest significantly more than 80k does, when giving career advice”. But I’m pretty confident that 80k would already agree, for example, that “passion about a field is a very important component of doing world-class research in it”.
What Michael says is closer to the message we’re trying to get across, which I might summarise as:
Don’t immediately rule out an area just because you’re not currently interested in it, because you can develop new interests and become motivated if other conditions are present.
Personal fit is really important
When predicting your fit in an area, lots of factors are relevant (including interest & motivation in the path).
It’s hard to predict fit—be prepared to try several areas and refine your hypotheses over time.
We no longer mention ‘don’t follow your passion’ prominently in our intro materials.
I think our pre-2015 materials didn’t emphasise fit enough.
The message is a bit complicated, but hopefully we’re doing better today. I’m also planning to make personal fit more prominent on the key ideas page and also give more practical advice on how to assess it for further emphasis.
A related matter: I get the impression from the section “2. I should have prioritised personal fit more” that you (Richard) think it would’ve been better if you’d skipped trying out engineering-style roles and gone straight into philosophy-style roles. Do you indeed think that?
It seems plausible that going in an engineering direction for a couple years first was a good move ex ante, because you already knew you were a fit for philosophy but didn’t know whether you were a fit for things more along the lines of engineering? So maybe it was worth checking whether something else was an even better fit for you, or whether something else was a good enough fit that your comparative advantage (including your interest as a factor) would be things that somehow draw on both skillsets to a substantial degree?
I.e., even if ex post it appears that “exploiting” in the philosophy path is the best move, perhaps, ex ante, it was worth some exploration first?
(Of course, I don’t know the details of your career, plans, or your own knowledge several years ago of your skills and interests. And even if the answers to the above questions are basically “yes”, it’s still plausible that it would’ve been better to explore for less time, or in a way more consciously focused on exploration value—which might’ve entailed different roles or a different approach.)
I’ve had a related experience. I did an economics PhD, and I started with a speculative, exploratory intent: I meant to use that time to figure out whether I was a good fit for a career in academic economics research. It turned out I was not a good fit, and the experience was miserable. I hadn’t minded taking classes or working as a research assistant for other people, but I disliked the speculative and open-ended nature of leading my own research projects. Once I realized that, I graduated as fast as I could. Now I’m much happier as a tech industry economist and data scientist.
I’m still not sure if I made a mistake in choosing to start the PhD. On one hand, I think it was a reasonable gamble that could have had a huge payoff, and I don’t know if I could have figured out I was not cut out for academic research without actually doing it. And it was a good investment; my current job requires an economics PhD or long experience in a related field, as do highly-compensated jobs in other industries. On the other hand, 4-5 years is a very long time to feel like you hate your job. It’s hard to be creative and hardworking and build your Plan B when you’re totally miserable.
If I were to start my career over, I would spend more time thinking about how to “fail early” and make exploration more pleasant and efficient.
I get the impression that you (Richard) think it would’ve been better if you’d skipped trying out engineering-style roles and gone straight into philosophy-style roles. Do you indeed think that?
I don’t think this; learning about technical ideas in AI, and other aspects of working at DeepMind, have been valuable for me; so it’s hard to point to things which I should have changed. But as I say in the post, in worlds where I wasn’t so lucky, then I expect it would have been useful to weight personal fit more. For example, if I’d had the option of committing to a ML PhD instead of a research engineering role, then I might have done so despite uncertainty about the personal fit; this would probably have gone badly.
(Btw, this post and comment thread has inspired me to make a question post to hopefully collect links and views relevant to how much time EAs should spend engaging with people inside vs outside the EA community.)
For personal fit stuff: I agree that for intellectual work, personal fit is very important. It’s just that I have discovered, almost by accident, that I have more personal fit than I realized for things I wasn’t trained in. (You may have made a similar discovery?) Had I prioritized personal fit less early on, I would have explored more. I still wonder what sorts of things I could be doing by now if I had tried to reskill instead of continuing in philosophy. Yeah, maybe I would have discovered that I didn’t like it and gone back to philosophy, but maybe I would have discovered that I loved it. I guess this isn’t against prioritizing personal fit per se, but against how past-me interpreted the advice to prioritize personal fit.
For engaging with people outside EA: I went to a philosophy PhD program and climbed the conventional academic hierarchy for a few years. I learned a bunch of useful stuff, but I also learned a bunch of useless stuff, and a bunch of stuff which is useful but plausibly not as useful as what I would have learned working for an EA org. When I look back on what I accomplished over the last five years, almost all of the best stuff seems to be things I did on the side, extracurricular from my academic work. (e.g. doing internships at CEA etc.) I also made a bunch of friends outside EA, which I agree is nice in several ways (e.g. the ones you mention) but to my dismay I found it really hard to get people to lift a finger in the direction of helping the world, even if I could intellectually convince them that e.g. AI risk is worth taking seriously, or that the critiques and stereotypes of EA they heard were incorrect. As a counterpoint, I did have interactions with several dozen people probably, and maybe I caused more positive change than I could see, especially since the world’s not over yet and there is still time for the effects of my conversations to grow. Still though: I missed out on several year’s worth of EA work and learning by going to grad school; that’s a high opportunity cost.
As for learning things myself: I heard a lot of critiques of EA, learned a lot about other perspectives on the world, etc. but ultimately I don’t think I would be any worse off in this regard if I had just gone into an EA org for the past five years instead of grad school.
I very much agree with Daniel’s paragraph on personal fit.
The message on personal fit I got from 80k was basically “Personal fit is really important. This is one reason to find an area and type of work that you’ll be very passionate about. But that doesn’t mean you should just follow your current passion; you might discover later that you don’t remain passionate about something once you actually do it for a job, and you might discover that you can become passionate about things you aren’t yet passionate about, or haven’t even heard of. So it’s generally good to try to explore a lot early on, figure out what you have strong personal fit for, and then do one of those things.”
I wrote that from my remembered impression, but then googled “80,000 Hours personal fit”, and here’s part of their summary from 2017 career guide article on “How to find the right career for you” (which was the first hit):
I think that that’s great advice, and has been really helpful for me. There are some things I thought I’d like/be good at but wasn’t, and vice versa. And there are many things I hadn’t even considered but turned out to like and be good at.
Unfortunately, it seems like it’s common for people to round off what 80k said to “Personal fit and passion don’t matter”, even thought they explicitly argue against that. (80k’s 2014-2015 review does say that they think they previously hadn’t emphasised personal fit enough; perhaps this common misinterpretation can be traced back to ripple effects from 80k’s early messaging?)
Of course, it’s still necessary to figure out precisely how important personal fit and interest are relative to other things, and so it’s still possible and reasonable for someone to “emphasise personal fit and interest significantly more than 80k does, when giving career advice”. But I’m pretty confident that 80k would already agree, for example, that “passion about a field is a very important component of doing world-class research in it”.
What Michael says is closer to the message we’re trying to get across, which I might summarise as:
Don’t immediately rule out an area just because you’re not currently interested in it, because you can develop new interests and become motivated if other conditions are present.
Personal fit is really important
When predicting your fit in an area, lots of factors are relevant (including interest & motivation in the path).
It’s hard to predict fit—be prepared to try several areas and refine your hypotheses over time.
We no longer mention ‘don’t follow your passion’ prominently in our intro materials.
I think our pre-2015 materials didn’t emphasise fit enough.
The message is a bit complicated, but hopefully we’re doing better today. I’m also planning to make personal fit more prominent on the key ideas page and also give more practical advice on how to assess it for further emphasis.
A related matter: I get the impression from the section “2. I should have prioritised personal fit more” that you (Richard) think it would’ve been better if you’d skipped trying out engineering-style roles and gone straight into philosophy-style roles. Do you indeed think that?
It seems plausible that going in an engineering direction for a couple years first was a good move ex ante, because you already knew you were a fit for philosophy but didn’t know whether you were a fit for things more along the lines of engineering? So maybe it was worth checking whether something else was an even better fit for you, or whether something else was a good enough fit that your comparative advantage (including your interest as a factor) would be things that somehow draw on both skillsets to a substantial degree?
I.e., even if ex post it appears that “exploiting” in the philosophy path is the best move, perhaps, ex ante, it was worth some exploration first?
(Of course, I don’t know the details of your career, plans, or your own knowledge several years ago of your skills and interests. And even if the answers to the above questions are basically “yes”, it’s still plausible that it would’ve been better to explore for less time, or in a way more consciously focused on exploration value—which might’ve entailed different roles or a different approach.)
I’ve had a related experience. I did an economics PhD, and I started with a speculative, exploratory intent: I meant to use that time to figure out whether I was a good fit for a career in academic economics research. It turned out I was not a good fit, and the experience was miserable. I hadn’t minded taking classes or working as a research assistant for other people, but I disliked the speculative and open-ended nature of leading my own research projects. Once I realized that, I graduated as fast as I could. Now I’m much happier as a tech industry economist and data scientist.
I’m still not sure if I made a mistake in choosing to start the PhD. On one hand, I think it was a reasonable gamble that could have had a huge payoff, and I don’t know if I could have figured out I was not cut out for academic research without actually doing it. And it was a good investment; my current job requires an economics PhD or long experience in a related field, as do highly-compensated jobs in other industries. On the other hand, 4-5 years is a very long time to feel like you hate your job. It’s hard to be creative and hardworking and build your Plan B when you’re totally miserable.
If I were to start my career over, I would spend more time thinking about how to “fail early” and make exploration more pleasant and efficient.
I don’t think this; learning about technical ideas in AI, and other aspects of working at DeepMind, have been valuable for me; so it’s hard to point to things which I should have changed. But as I say in the post, in worlds where I wasn’t so lucky, then I expect it would have been useful to weight personal fit more. For example, if I’d had the option of committing to a ML PhD instead of a research engineering role, then I might have done so despite uncertainty about the personal fit; this would probably have gone badly.
(Btw, this post and comment thread has inspired me to make a question post to hopefully collect links and views relevant to how much time EAs should spend engaging with people inside vs outside the EA community.)