I think the big problem with the narrow focus is that newbie EAs, especially if they’re students, tend to get saturated with the message that the way to do good with your life is to go to 80,000 Hours and follow their career advice. Indeed, CEA’s official advice for local group leaders says to heavily emphasize this. And they get this message relatively early in the sales funnel, long before they’ve gone through anything that would filter out the majority who aren’t good candidates for 80,000 Hours’s top priority paths. So it ought not to surprise anyone that a huge fraction of them come away demoralized.
There’s an obvious sense in which this is still the impact-maximizing approach, in that the global utilitarian cost of demoralizing a bunch of people who weren’t going to change the world anyway, is likely outweighed by the benefit of getting even one person who needed that extra push to start working on a priority program. But it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I feel as though, if EA is going to choose to be a community (as opposed to just a thing that some individuals happen to do), then it has at least some kind of responsibility to take care of its own, separate from its mission to maximize aggregate global utility. And there’s a sense in which setting up expectations that most of us can’t live up to constitutes a systematic failure to do that.
(Incidentally, I think most local group leaders don’t want to send their members through the gauntlet like this. But even if they realize that there’s a problem, it’s still the accepted thing to do and they don’t have any better ideas. EAs want to be doing something impactful, or else they wouldn’t be EAs, and there aren’t a lot of great alternative activities that groups of nonspecialists can do, especially now that fundraising for GiveWell top charities has (rightly) gone out of fashion.)
I’m not convinced it’s the impact-maximizing approach either. Some people who could potentially win the career “lottery” and have a truly extraordinary impact might reasonably be put off early on by advice that doesn’t seem to care adequately about what happens to them in the case where they don’t win.
So it ought not to surprise anyone that a huge fraction of them come away demoralized.
I want to quickly point out that we don’t have enough evidence to conclude that ‘a huge fraction’ are demoralized. We have several reports and some intuitive reasons to expect that some are. We also have plenty of reports of people saying 80,000 Hours made them more motivated and ambitious, and helped them find more personally meaningful and satisfying careers. It’s hard to know what the overall effect is on motivation.
I think the big problem with the narrow focus is that newbie EAs, especially if they’re students, tend to get saturated with the message that the way to do good with your life is to go to 80,000 Hours and follow their career advice. Indeed, CEA’s official advice for local group leaders says to heavily emphasize this. And they get this message relatively early in the sales funnel, long before they’ve gone through anything that would filter out the majority who aren’t good candidates for 80,000 Hours’s top priority paths. So it ought not to surprise anyone that a huge fraction of them come away demoralized.
There’s an obvious sense in which this is still the impact-maximizing approach, in that the global utilitarian cost of demoralizing a bunch of people who weren’t going to change the world anyway, is likely outweighed by the benefit of getting even one person who needed that extra push to start working on a priority program. But it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I feel as though, if EA is going to choose to be a community (as opposed to just a thing that some individuals happen to do), then it has at least some kind of responsibility to take care of its own, separate from its mission to maximize aggregate global utility. And there’s a sense in which setting up expectations that most of us can’t live up to constitutes a systematic failure to do that.
(Incidentally, I think most local group leaders don’t want to send their members through the gauntlet like this. But even if they realize that there’s a problem, it’s still the accepted thing to do and they don’t have any better ideas. EAs want to be doing something impactful, or else they wouldn’t be EAs, and there aren’t a lot of great alternative activities that groups of nonspecialists can do, especially now that fundraising for GiveWell top charities has (rightly) gone out of fashion.)
I’m not convinced it’s the impact-maximizing approach either. Some people who could potentially win the career “lottery” and have a truly extraordinary impact might reasonably be put off early on by advice that doesn’t seem to care adequately about what happens to them in the case where they don’t win.
I want to quickly point out that we don’t have enough evidence to conclude that ‘a huge fraction’ are demoralized. We have several reports and some intuitive reasons to expect that some are. We also have plenty of reports of people saying 80,000 Hours made them more motivated and ambitious, and helped them find more personally meaningful and satisfying careers. It’s hard to know what the overall effect is on motivation.