It seems not implausible that almost every recruiter has been biased in this way to some degree—bias is usually quite hard to avoid. If this is an under-appreciated pattern in the community, then hopefully, this question will make it more recognized, and EA professionals will try harder to give honest answers to young EAs seeking career advice.
By dishonesty, I mean to include things like not mentioning counterfactuals or the replaceability of the role, or just generally seeming like they are more excited about the impact then they should be given the evidence and crucial considerations.
This question is oddly worded, such that it seems meant to elicit only answers about dishonesty, rather than more nuanced takes on the balance of honesty and dishonesty in recruiting.
When I went through a series of interviews with many organizations in 2018, I mostly remember it feeling really honest:
I had applied for a position as Stuart Russell’s personal assistant. When I spoke to him about the role, he frankly told me that he wasn’t sure the position would work out at all, and that past personal assistants had done very little to boost his productivity.
I applied for an ops position at MIRI, and as far as I recall, they made very little effort to “sell me” on the job, even in the final round — we talked about what it would entail, I did an in-office work test, and we were done.
I applied to AI Impacts and talked to Katja Grace for a while. She was frank about her uncertainty around the impact of the org’s research, and was clear with me that my work would be nebulous and that there wasn’t much in the way of shovel-ready opportunities that would obviously do a lot of good for someone.
In one case, when an org called me to tell me about an offer, I told them I was already considering an offer from a different org. Their response was something like “nice, that also sounds like a great opportunity” (rather than the “nah, you’ll do better here, come work for us” that I’d expect in the private sector).
Not all the places I applied to had conspicuous moments of unusual honesty like this, but I don’t remember feeling like anyone had given me a hard sell.
Now that I’m in the midst of recruiting a new content specialist, I’m trying to avoid impact bias by:
Explaining to candidates how often we end up feeling really uncertain about our counterfactual impact
Telling candidates exactly how many people are left in the process at each stage, so that they get a sense for how many people are around the same level of fit as they are
Portraying the role as very flexible and malleable, such that many different people (or sets of multiple people) could cover it well (rather than the role requiring very particular skills that just so happen to be the same as the candidate’s)
I don’t know if I would call that “oddly worded”—since my intention was to elicit stories about dishonesty, it’s aptly worded.
There is a separate question of whether it is bad to raise negatively biased questions like this, which I’d be happy to discuss. To be honest, I didn’t think of the downsides of a negatively-biased question, I just thought “huh, I wonder how much dishonesty there is in EA; maybe there are others who, like me, expected everyone to be really honest like the rest of EA, and then was surprised that this wasn’t the case”
Also, please correct me if I am wrong, but it feels like you knew that my intention was to raise a negatively-biased question and that it wasn’t “oddly worded,” and that you said this for political reasons (even though in this case, if I am correct, it would have been beneficial to be straightforward since we could have more easily begun the discussion about whether negatively-biased questions are bad to raise on the forum). I know people vary on how they feel about this a lot, but this lack of straightforwardness puts me off (but again, please correct me if I am wrong here). It’s probably because I have the automatic norm of honesty.
If your intention was to elicit stories rather than to get a sense for how common dishonesty was, your wording makes sense.
I had assumed you were trying to do the second thing, and my comment was honest. I try to be straightforward with all of my Forum comments.
Ah I see—sorry for not giving you the benefit of the doubt! That may have been due to the curse of knowledge—it felt obvious to me what I was trying to do with posting this question.
[ETA: Ah hm, when I go back and read the question, it does seem like your interpretation is more reasonable than I thought; I think I was trying to elicit stories, but the wording of the question doesn’t match that intention (as you tried to tell me!)]
My answer: 2
What’s the denominator? How many EA professionals have talked to you about how impactful it would be to work for them?