It is a genuine possibility that I will change the entire course of my life as a result of the information on 80k hours. I guess many of you already have. Have you checked all of their reasoning? What percentage ought one to check?
While I don’t disagree that some kind of “independent auditor” might be useful, my advice to people considering a major change (which I make as a young person with relatively little life experience!) is as follows:
As best you can, try to only change your life by an amount proportionate with your trust in the change you plan to make.
If you don’t feel like you really understand 80K’s reasoning about a certain issue, read as much of their relevant work as you can find. If that doesn’t give you enough confidence, reach out to them directly. If they don’t have enough time or coaching slots to respond personally, ask people on the Forum for their thoughts on the likely effects of a given life-change. If you still feel fairly uncertain after that, keep asking questions and looking for better evidence.
And if you still can’t find enough evidence after trying everything you can find… consider not changing your life, or trying out some smaller version of the change (freelancing for a few weeks instead of taking a new job, signing up for Try Giving instead of the full Giving What We Can pledge, etc.)
It may be the case that no career path has truly ironclad evidence for effectiveness, at least not in a way that applies to every job-seeker (since no two people have the same skills/personality/alternative options). If you come to believe that, you may be forced to make a change based on whatever evidence you can find (or based on more concrete information like salary, location, and other things that impact your personal well-being). But overall, I hope that people in EA mostly make life-changing decisions if they have a lot of confidence in those decisions, whether because of personal research or because they think highly of the quality of research conducted by EA organizations.
(I work for CEA, but these views are my own—and, as I mentioned above, they’re being made by someone who hasn’t undergone too many major life changes.)
Thanks for responding (and for encouraging me, I think, to write this in the first place).
Only change your life by an amount proportionate with your trust in the change you plan to make.
Sure. The point I am trying to make is that I would pay to have some of that work done for me. If enough people would then you could pay someone to do it. I don’t think we disagree with the thinking that needs to be done, but I think I am less inclined/less trusting that I will do it well and would prefer and infrastructural solution.
I also agree that some infrastructure would be good. In the meantime, I suggest reading criticisms of EA from both non-EAs and from EAs, and how EAs respond to the criticism (or how one could successfully respond to it). That’s probably the closest you can get to external audits and checking for flaws in EA.
Unfortunately there’s no central repository of EA criticism that I know of (this seems quite valuable to me!). Carl Shulman said on Facebook recently on a post by Julia Galef that he keeps a personal bookmarks folder of criticisms of groups that he has some affiliation with or interest in. If you’re interested, you could try contacting him to see if it’s shareable.
You can also check the mistakes pages of EA orgs, like GiveWell and 80000 Hours (and their evaluations page). That’s only a partial solution since there could be many mistakes by EA orgs that they themselves don’t recognize, but it’s one step forward of many.
Yes, I agree that infrastructure would be better than no infrastructure. I’m not sure who I’d trust to do this job well among people who aren’t already working on something impactful, but perhaps there are people in EA inclined towards a watchdog/auditor mentality who would be interested, assuming that the orgs being “audited” could work out an arrangement that everyone felt good about.
While I don’t disagree that some kind of “independent auditor” might be useful, my advice to people considering a major change (which I make as a young person with relatively little life experience!) is as follows:
As best you can, try to only change your life by an amount proportionate with your trust in the change you plan to make.
If you don’t feel like you really understand 80K’s reasoning about a certain issue, read as much of their relevant work as you can find. If that doesn’t give you enough confidence, reach out to them directly. If they don’t have enough time or coaching slots to respond personally, ask people on the Forum for their thoughts on the likely effects of a given life-change. If you still feel fairly uncertain after that, keep asking questions and looking for better evidence.
And if you still can’t find enough evidence after trying everything you can find… consider not changing your life, or trying out some smaller version of the change (freelancing for a few weeks instead of taking a new job, signing up for Try Giving instead of the full Giving What We Can pledge, etc.)
It may be the case that no career path has truly ironclad evidence for effectiveness, at least not in a way that applies to every job-seeker (since no two people have the same skills/personality/alternative options). If you come to believe that, you may be forced to make a change based on whatever evidence you can find (or based on more concrete information like salary, location, and other things that impact your personal well-being). But overall, I hope that people in EA mostly make life-changing decisions if they have a lot of confidence in those decisions, whether because of personal research or because they think highly of the quality of research conducted by EA organizations.
(I work for CEA, but these views are my own—and, as I mentioned above, they’re being made by someone who hasn’t undergone too many major life changes.)
Thanks for responding (and for encouraging me, I think, to write this in the first place).
Sure. The point I am trying to make is that I would pay to have some of that work done for me. If enough people would then you could pay someone to do it. I don’t think we disagree with the thinking that needs to be done, but I think I am less inclined/less trusting that I will do it well and would prefer and infrastructural solution.
I also agree that some infrastructure would be good. In the meantime, I suggest reading criticisms of EA from both non-EAs and from EAs, and how EAs respond to the criticism (or how one could successfully respond to it). That’s probably the closest you can get to external audits and checking for flaws in EA.
Unfortunately there’s no central repository of EA criticism that I know of (this seems quite valuable to me!). Carl Shulman said on Facebook recently on a post by Julia Galef that he keeps a personal bookmarks folder of criticisms of groups that he has some affiliation with or interest in. If you’re interested, you could try contacting him to see if it’s shareable.
You can also check the mistakes pages of EA orgs, like GiveWell and 80000 Hours (and their evaluations page). That’s only a partial solution since there could be many mistakes by EA orgs that they themselves don’t recognize, but it’s one step forward of many.
Yes, I agree that infrastructure would be better than no infrastructure. I’m not sure who I’d trust to do this job well among people who aren’t already working on something impactful, but perhaps there are people in EA inclined towards a watchdog/auditor mentality who would be interested, assuming that the orgs being “audited” could work out an arrangement that everyone felt good about.