I do like the idea of creating a community and a bit of an accountability mechanism around career impact. I do have a critique of your suggestion: there’s a big difference between a “donate 10%” pledge and a “maximize the impact of my career” pledge.
You have more than one goal, and that’s fine [1]. Truly maximizing the impact of your career is more like donating 90% of your income than 10% - it would mean giving up all the other goals you have in order to focus on one thing. I don’t see many examples of that even in EA and I wouldn’t encourage it.
In this situation, the fact that we probably wouldn’t want to encourage literally maximizing impact from careers would unfortunately make a pledge even more difficult to operationalize!
Hey Khorton, yeah I think I should have made that clearer with my post. I agree that people can have more than one goal. I was thinking though that one can maximize the impact of their career while generally still having other goals.
Possibly the pledge could be reworded to be about pledging to aim to do a large amount of good with one’s career. I think that could generally have the same effect, without being construed as being too single-minded on impact maximization.
I do like the idea of creating a community and a bit of an accountability mechanism around career impact. I do have a critique of your suggestion: there’s a big difference between a “donate 10%” pledge and a “maximize the impact of my career” pledge.
You have more than one goal, and that’s fine [1]. Truly maximizing the impact of your career is more like donating 90% of your income than 10% - it would mean giving up all the other goals you have in order to focus on one thing. I don’t see many examples of that even in EA and I wouldn’t encourage it.
In this situation, the fact that we probably wouldn’t want to encourage literally maximizing impact from careers would unfortunately make a pledge even more difficult to operationalize!
[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zu28unKfTHoxRWpGn/you-have-more-than-one-goal-and-that-s-fine
Hey Khorton, yeah I think I should have made that clearer with my post. I agree that people can have more than one goal. I was thinking though that one can maximize the impact of their career while generally still having other goals.
Possibly the pledge could be reworded to be about pledging to aim to do a large amount of good with one’s career. I think that could generally have the same effect, without being construed as being too single-minded on impact maximization.