I used to expect 80,000 Hours to tell me how to have an impactful career. Recently, I’ve started thinking it’s basically my own personal responsibility to figure it out. I think this shift has made me much happier and much more likely to have an impactful career.
80,000 Hours targets the most professionally successful people in the world. That’s probably the right idea for them—giving good career advice takes a lot of time and effort, and they can’t help everyone, so they should focus on the people with the most career potential.
But, unfortunately for most EAs (myself included), the nine priority career paths recommended by 80,000 Hours are some of the most difficult and competitive careers in the world. If you’re among the 99% of people who are not Google programmer / top half of Oxford / Top 30 PhD-level talented, I’d guess you have slim-to-none odds of succeeding in any of them. The advice just isn’t tailored for you.
So how can the vast majority of people have an impactful career? My best answer: A lot of independent thought and planning. Your own personal brainstorming and reading and asking around and exploring, not just following stock EA advice. 80,000 Hours won’t be a gospel that’ll give all the answers; the difficult job of finding impactful work falls to the individual.
I know that’s pretty vague, much more an emotional mindset than a tactical plan, but I’m personally really happy I’ve started thinking this way. I feel less status anxiety about living up to 80,000 Hours’s recommendations, and I’m thinking much more creatively and concretely about how to do impactful work.
More concretely, here’s some ways you can do that:
Think of easier versions of the 80,000 Hours priority paths. Maybe you’ll never work at OpenPhil or GiveWell, but can you work for a non-EA grantmaker reprioritizing their giving to more effective areas? Maybe you won’t end up in the US Presidential Cabinet, but can you bring attention to AI policy as a congressional staffer or civil servant? (Edit: I forgot, 80k recommends congressional staffing!) Maybe you won’t run operations at CEA, but can you help run a local EA group?
The 80,000 Hours job board actually has plenty of jobs that aren’t on their priority paths, and I think some of them are much more accessible for a wider audience.
80,000 Hours tries to answer the question “Of all the possible careers people can have, which ones are the most impactful?” That’s the right question for them, but the wrong question for an individual. For any given person, I think it’s probably much more useful to think, “What potentially impactful careers could I plausibly enter, and of those, which are the most impactful?” Start with what you already have—skills, connections, experience, insights—and think outwards from there: how you can transform what you already have into an impactful career?
There are tons of impactful charities out there. GiveWell has identified some of the top few dozen. But if you can get a job at the 500th most effective charity in the world, you’re still making a really important impact, and it’s worth figuring out how to do that.
Talk to people working in the most important problems who aren’t top 1% of professional success—seeing how people like you have an impact can be really motivating and informative.
Personal donations can be really impactful—not earning to give millions in quant trading, just donating a reasonable portion of your normal-sized salary, wherever it is that you work.
Convincing people you know to join EA is also great—you can talk to your friends about EA, or attend/help out at a local EA group. Converting more people to EA just multiplies your own impact.
Don’t let the fact that Bill Gates saved a million lives keep you from saving one. If you put some hard work into it, you can make a hell of a difference to a whole lot of people.
I’m Brenton from 80,000 Hours—thanks for writing this up! It seems really important that people don’t think of us as “tell[ing] them how to have an impactful career”. It sounds absolutely right to me that having a high impact career requires “a lot of independent thought and planning”—career advice can’t be universally applied.
I did have a few thoughts, which you could consider incorporating if you end up making a top level post. The most substantive two are:
Many of the priority paths are broader than you might be thinking.
A significant amount of our advice is designed to help people think through how to approach their careers, and will be useful regardless of whether they’re aiming for a priority path.
Many of the priority paths are broader than you might be thinking:
Most people won’t be able to step into an especially high impact role directly out of undergrad, so unsurprisingly, many of the priority paths require people to build up career capital before they can get into high impact positions. We’d think of people who are building up career capital focused on (say) AI policy as being ‘on a priority path’. We also think of people who aren’t in the most competitive positions as being within the path
For instance, let’s consider AI policy. We think that path includes graduate school, all the options outlined in our writeup on US AI policy and the 161 roles currently on the job board under the relevant filter. It’s also worth remembering that the job board has still left most of the relevant roles out: none of them are congressional staffers for example, which we’d also think of as under this priority path.
A significant amount of our advice is designed to help people think through how to approach their careers, and will be useful regardless of whether they’re aiming for a priority path.
In our primary articles on how to plan your career, we spend a lot of time talking about general career strategy and ways to generate options. The articles encourage people to go through a process which should generate high impact options, of which only some will be in the priority paths:
Unfortunately, there’s something in the concreteness of a list of top options which draws people in particularly strongly. This is a communication challenge that we’ve worked on a bit, but don’t think we have a great answer to yet. We discussed this in our ‘Advice on how to read our advice’. In the future we’ll add some more ‘niche’ paths, which may help somewhat.
We don’t think that the priority paths are the only route through which people can affect the long term future.
I found the tone of this comment generally great, and two of my colleagues commented the same. I appreciate that going through this shift you’ve gone through would have been hard and it’s really impressive that you’ve come out of it with such a balanced view, including being able to acknowledge the tradeoffs that we face in what we work on. Thank you for that.
If you make a top level post (which I’d encourage you to do), feel free to quote any part of this comment.
I think this comment is really lovely, and a very timely message. I’d support it being turned into a top-level post so more people can see it, especially if you have anything more to add.
I agree this is a very helpful comment. I would add: these roles in my view are not *lesser* in any sense, for a range of reasons and I would encourage people not to think of them in those terms.
You might have a bigger impact on the margins being the only—or one of the first few—people thinking in EA terms in a philanthropic foundation than by adding to the pool of excellence at OpenPhil. This goes for any role that involves influencing how resources are allocated—which is a LOT, in charity, government, industry, academic foundations etc.
You may not be in the presidential cabinet, or a spad to the UK prime minister, but those people are supported and enabled by people building up the resources, capacity, overton window expansion elsewhere in government and civil service. The ‘senior person’ on their own may not be able to achieve purchase with key policy ideas and influence.
A lot of xrisk research, from biosecurity to climate change, draws on and depends on a huge body of work on biology, public policy, climate science, renewable energy, insulation in homes, and much more. Often there are gaps in research on extreme scenarios due to lack of incentives for this kind of work, and other reasons—and this may make it particularly impactful at times. But that specific work can’t be done well without drawing on all the underlying work. E.g., biorisk mitigation needs not just the people figuring out how to defend against the extreme scenarios, but also everything from people testing birds in vietnam for H5N1 and seals in the north sea for H7, to people planning for overflow capacity in regional hospitals, to people pushing for the value of preparedness funds in the reinsurance industry to much more. Same for climate+environment, same will be true for AI policy etc.
I think there’s probably a good case to be made that in many or perhaps most instances the most useful place for the next generally capable EA to be is *not* an EA org. And for all 80k’s great work, they can’t survey and review everything, nor tailor to personal fit for the thousands, or hundreds of thousands of different-skillset people who can play a role in making the future better.
For EA to really make the future better to the extent that it has the potential, it’s going to need a *much* bigger global team. And that team’s going to need to be interspersed everywhere, sometimes doing glamorous stuff, sometimes doing more standard stuff that is just as important in that it makes the glamorous stuff possible. To annoy everyone with a sports analogy, the defense and midfield positions are every bit as important as the glamorous striker positions, and if you’ve got a team made up primarily of star strikers and wannabe star strikers, that team’s going to underperform.
To annoy everyone with a sports analogy, the defense and midfield positions are every bit as important as the glamorous striker positions, and if you’ve got a team made up primarily of star strikers and wannabe star strikers, that team’s going to underperform.
But the marginal impact of becoming a star striker is so high!
(Just kidding – this is a great analogy & highlights a big problem with reasoning on the margin + focusing on maximizing individual impact.)
I also like the analogy, let’s run with it. Suppose I’m reasoning from the point of view of the movement as a whole, and we’re trying to put together a soccer team. Suppose also that there are two types of positions, midfield and striker. I’m not sure if this is true for strikers in what I would call soccer, but suppose the striker has a higher skillcap than midfield.[1] I’ll define skillcap as the amount of skill with the position before the returns begin to diminish.
Where skill is some product of standard deviation of innate skill and hours practiced.
Back to the problem of putting together a soccer team, if you’re starting with a bunch of players of unknown innate skill, you would get a higher expected value to tell 80% of your players to train to be strikers, and 20% to be midfielders. Because you have a smaller pool, your midfielders will have less innate talent for the position. You can afford to lose this however, as the effect will be small compared to the gain in the increased performance of the strikers.
That’s not to say that you should fill your entire team with wannabe strikers. When you select your team you’ll undoubtedly leave out some very dedicated strikers in favor of someone who trained for midfield. Still, compared to the percentage that end up playing on the team, the people you’d want training for the role leans more towards the high-skillcap positions.
There are all sorts of ways this analogy doesn’t apply directly to the real world, but it might help pump intuitions.
[1] For American football, the quarterback position definitely exhibits this effect. The effect can be seen clearly in this list of highest-paid players.
There are all sorts of ways this analogy doesn’t apply directly to the real world, but it might help pump intuitions.
Yeah, I think this model misses that people who are aiming to be strikers tend to have pretty different dispositions than people aiming to be midfielders. (And so filling a team mostly with intending-to-be-strikers could have weird effects on team cohesion & function.)
Interesting to think about how Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, etc. manage this, as they select for very high-performing recruits (all strikers) then meld them into cohesive teams. I believe they do it via:
1. having a very large recruitment pool
2. intense filtering out of people who don’t meet their criteria
3. breaking people down psychologically + cultivating conformity during training
I found it interesting to cash this out more… thanks!
Ah, so like, in the “real world”, you don’t have a set of people, you end up recruiting a training class of 80% would-be-strikers, which influences the culture compared to if you recruited for the same breakdown as the eventually-selected-team?
I used to expect 80,000 Hours to tell me how to have an impactful career. Recently, I’ve started thinking it’s basically my own personal responsibility to figure it out. I think this shift has made me much happier and much more likely to have an impactful career.
80,000 Hours targets the most professionally successful people in the world. That’s probably the right idea for them—giving good career advice takes a lot of time and effort, and they can’t help everyone, so they should focus on the people with the most career potential.
But, unfortunately for most EAs (myself included), the nine priority career paths recommended by 80,000 Hours are some of the most difficult and competitive careers in the world. If you’re among the 99% of people who are not Google programmer / top half of Oxford / Top 30 PhD-level talented, I’d guess you have slim-to-none odds of succeeding in any of them. The advice just isn’t tailored for you.
So how can the vast majority of people have an impactful career? My best answer: A lot of independent thought and planning. Your own personal brainstorming and reading and asking around and exploring, not just following stock EA advice. 80,000 Hours won’t be a gospel that’ll give all the answers; the difficult job of finding impactful work falls to the individual.
I know that’s pretty vague, much more an emotional mindset than a tactical plan, but I’m personally really happy I’ve started thinking this way. I feel less status anxiety about living up to 80,000 Hours’s recommendations, and I’m thinking much more creatively and concretely about how to do impactful work.
More concretely, here’s some ways you can do that:
Think of easier versions of the 80,000 Hours priority paths. Maybe you’ll never work at OpenPhil or GiveWell, but can you work for a non-EA grantmaker reprioritizing their giving to more effective areas? Maybe you won’t end up in the US Presidential Cabinet, but can you bring attention to AI policy as a congressional staffer or civil servant? (Edit: I forgot, 80k recommends congressional staffing!) Maybe you won’t run operations at CEA, but can you help run a local EA group?
The 80,000 Hours job board actually has plenty of jobs that aren’t on their priority paths, and I think some of them are much more accessible for a wider audience.
80,000 Hours tries to answer the question “Of all the possible careers people can have, which ones are the most impactful?” That’s the right question for them, but the wrong question for an individual. For any given person, I think it’s probably much more useful to think, “What potentially impactful careers could I plausibly enter, and of those, which are the most impactful?” Start with what you already have—skills, connections, experience, insights—and think outwards from there: how you can transform what you already have into an impactful career?
There are tons of impactful charities out there. GiveWell has identified some of the top few dozen. But if you can get a job at the 500th most effective charity in the world, you’re still making a really important impact, and it’s worth figuring out how to do that.
Talk to people working in the most important problems who aren’t top 1% of professional success—seeing how people like you have an impact can be really motivating and informative.
Personal donations can be really impactful—not earning to give millions in quant trading, just donating a reasonable portion of your normal-sized salary, wherever it is that you work.
Convincing people you know to join EA is also great—you can talk to your friends about EA, or attend/help out at a local EA group. Converting more people to EA just multiplies your own impact.
Don’t let the fact that Bill Gates saved a million lives keep you from saving one. If you put some hard work into it, you can make a hell of a difference to a whole lot of people.
Hi Aidan,
I’m Brenton from 80,000 Hours—thanks for writing this up! It seems really important that people don’t think of us as “tell[ing] them how to have an impactful career”. It sounds absolutely right to me that having a high impact career requires “a lot of independent thought and planning”—career advice can’t be universally applied.
I did have a few thoughts, which you could consider incorporating if you end up making a top level post. The most substantive two are:
Many of the priority paths are broader than you might be thinking.
A significant amount of our advice is designed to help people think through how to approach their careers, and will be useful regardless of whether they’re aiming for a priority path.
Many of the priority paths are broader than you might be thinking:
Most people won’t be able to step into an especially high impact role directly out of undergrad, so unsurprisingly, many of the priority paths require people to build up career capital before they can get into high impact positions. We’d think of people who are building up career capital focused on (say) AI policy as being ‘on a priority path’. We also think of people who aren’t in the most competitive positions as being within the path
For instance, let’s consider AI policy. We think that path includes graduate school, all the options outlined in our writeup on US AI policy and the 161 roles currently on the job board under the relevant filter. It’s also worth remembering that the job board has still left most of the relevant roles out: none of them are congressional staffers for example, which we’d also think of as under this priority path.
A significant amount of our advice is designed to help people think through how to approach their careers, and will be useful regardless of whether they’re aiming for a priority path.
In our primary articles on how to plan your career, we spend a lot of time talking about general career strategy and ways to generate options. The articles encourage people to go through a process which should generate high impact options, of which only some will be in the priority paths:
The career strategy and planning and decision making sections of key ideas
This article on high impact careers
Career planning
Unfortunately, there’s something in the concreteness of a list of top options which draws people in particularly strongly. This is a communication challenge that we’ve worked on a bit, but don’t think we have a great answer to yet. We discussed this in our ‘Advice on how to read our advice’. In the future we’ll add some more ‘niche’ paths, which may help somewhat.
A few more minor points:
Your point about Bill Gates was really well put. It reminded me of my colleague Michelle’s post on ‘Keeping absolutes in mind’, which you might enjoy reading.
We don’t think that the priority paths are the only route through which people can affect the long term future.
I found the tone of this comment generally great, and two of my colleagues commented the same. I appreciate that going through this shift you’ve gone through would have been hard and it’s really impressive that you’ve come out of it with such a balanced view, including being able to acknowledge the tradeoffs that we face in what we work on. Thank you for that.
If you make a top level post (which I’d encourage you to do), feel free to quote any part of this comment.
Cheers, Brenton
I think this comment is really lovely, and a very timely message. I’d support it being turned into a top-level post so more people can see it, especially if you have anything more to add.
Seconded.
Thank you both very much, I will do that, and I almost definitely wouldn’t have without your encouragement.
If anyone has more thoughts on the topic, please comment or reach out to me, I’d love to incorporate them into the top-level post.
I think similar areas were covered in these two posts as well 80,000 Hours—how to read our advice and Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations.
I agree this is a very helpful comment. I would add: these roles in my view are not *lesser* in any sense, for a range of reasons and I would encourage people not to think of them in those terms.
You might have a bigger impact on the margins being the only—or one of the first few—people thinking in EA terms in a philanthropic foundation than by adding to the pool of excellence at OpenPhil. This goes for any role that involves influencing how resources are allocated—which is a LOT, in charity, government, industry, academic foundations etc.
You may not be in the presidential cabinet, or a spad to the UK prime minister, but those people are supported and enabled by people building up the resources, capacity, overton window expansion elsewhere in government and civil service. The ‘senior person’ on their own may not be able to achieve purchase with key policy ideas and influence.
A lot of xrisk research, from biosecurity to climate change, draws on and depends on a huge body of work on biology, public policy, climate science, renewable energy, insulation in homes, and much more. Often there are gaps in research on extreme scenarios due to lack of incentives for this kind of work, and other reasons—and this may make it particularly impactful at times. But that specific work can’t be done well without drawing on all the underlying work. E.g., biorisk mitigation needs not just the people figuring out how to defend against the extreme scenarios, but also everything from people testing birds in vietnam for H5N1 and seals in the north sea for H7, to people planning for overflow capacity in regional hospitals, to people pushing for the value of preparedness funds in the reinsurance industry to much more. Same for climate+environment, same will be true for AI policy etc.
I think there’s probably a good case to be made that in many or perhaps most instances the most useful place for the next generally capable EA to be is *not* an EA org. And for all 80k’s great work, they can’t survey and review everything, nor tailor to personal fit for the thousands, or hundreds of thousands of different-skillset people who can play a role in making the future better.
For EA to really make the future better to the extent that it has the potential, it’s going to need a *much* bigger global team. And that team’s going to need to be interspersed everywhere, sometimes doing glamorous stuff, sometimes doing more standard stuff that is just as important in that it makes the glamorous stuff possible. To annoy everyone with a sports analogy, the defense and midfield positions are every bit as important as the glamorous striker positions, and if you’ve got a team made up primarily of star strikers and wannabe star strikers, that team’s going to underperform.
But the marginal impact of becoming a star striker is so high!
(Just kidding – this is a great analogy & highlights a big problem with reasoning on the margin + focusing on maximizing individual impact.)
I also like the analogy, let’s run with it. Suppose I’m reasoning from the point of view of the movement as a whole, and we’re trying to put together a soccer team. Suppose also that there are two types of positions, midfield and striker. I’m not sure if this is true for strikers in what I would call soccer, but suppose the striker has a higher skillcap than midfield.[1] I’ll define skillcap as the amount of skill with the position before the returns begin to diminish.
Where skill is some product of standard deviation of innate skill and hours practiced.
Back to the problem of putting together a soccer team, if you’re starting with a bunch of players of unknown innate skill, you would get a higher expected value to tell 80% of your players to train to be strikers, and 20% to be midfielders. Because you have a smaller pool, your midfielders will have less innate talent for the position. You can afford to lose this however, as the effect will be small compared to the gain in the increased performance of the strikers.
That’s not to say that you should fill your entire team with wannabe strikers. When you select your team you’ll undoubtedly leave out some very dedicated strikers in favor of someone who trained for midfield. Still, compared to the percentage that end up playing on the team, the people you’d want training for the role leans more towards the high-skillcap positions.
There are all sorts of ways this analogy doesn’t apply directly to the real world, but it might help pump intuitions.
[1] For American football, the quarterback position definitely exhibits this effect. The effect can be seen clearly in this list of highest-paid players.
Yeah, I think this model misses that people who are aiming to be strikers tend to have pretty different dispositions than people aiming to be midfielders. (And so filling a team mostly with intending-to-be-strikers could have weird effects on team cohesion & function.)
Interesting to think about how Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, etc. manage this, as they select for very high-performing recruits (all strikers) then meld them into cohesive teams. I believe they do it via:
1. having a very large recruitment pool
2. intense filtering out of people who don’t meet their criteria
3. breaking people down psychologically + cultivating conformity during training
I found it interesting to cash this out more… thanks!
Ah, so like, in the “real world”, you don’t have a set of people, you end up recruiting a training class of 80% would-be-strikers, which influences the culture compared to if you recruited for the same breakdown as the eventually-selected-team?
I really enjoy the extent to which you’ve both taken the ball and run with it ;)
I think a lot of this is right and important, but I especially love:
We’re all doing the best we can with the privileges we were blessed with.