I have a BASc in Philosophy and Psychology. I’m still trying to figure out how I could do anything useful here, so maybe someone could help me out.
I’m 27 years old, and currently work in an after-school program teaching children music. I tend to have a talent for accelerated learning (I am currently teaching piano, violin, guitar, ukulele and drums, and have now been teaching at least two of those instruments for as long or longer than it took me to learn them to a level where I can teach them). That’s sadly coupled with a lack of consistent emotional investment, though, so I have not been able to successfully capitalize on it.
I got 94th percentile on Verbal in the GRE and a perfect 6 in writing, but a 30th percentile on quant (it bothers me personally that a score that would have been an A- in most educational contexts I’ve experienced, or perhaps a B+ in some of the more rigorous ones in absolute terms was so low, as I think that’s misleading, but that is the nature of the skew in the distribution I guess). I had a 3.6 GPA in my last 2 years and a 3.3 GPA cummulative. All from a relatively unremarkable university. I am also disabled in such a way that I cannot count on my own reliability for prolonged periods of time, which makes everything harder, but because I’m “so smart” (according to the people around me) it seems rather wasteful that I haven’t found anything I can have a higher impact on thus far.
This means that, when dealing with 80,000 hours, etc, I find it rather hard to see what is actually applicable to me. I find it rather unlikely that I will get into a “top 20 school”, for example, which is a fairly recurrent pattern in all of the academic paths (which professors told me over and over that I should pursue during my undergrad).
This is not a way of despairing (“Oh no! Can I even make the world better if I don’t have a perfect score on one unnecessarily expensive test?!”) but instead a personal angle through which I can bring up that:
1.) I don’t believe that 80,000 hours provides actually useful advice to people who are not exoribitantly high achievers (or at least, it hasn’t provided it for me thus far and I’ve been checking it out on and off for like 7 years at this point).
2.) I do believe that people here can provide such advice, so it would be nice if I could receive some.
On top of that, I’ve been nursing a notion that it might be a good idea to make “rationality”, “futurism” or even “emotional resilience” summer camps for children, and if anybody is interested in a project like that, please let me know.
In some ways your remind me of myself (well, not the musical talent bit). I did a BA in philosophy/political science from an unremarkable state university, bounced around a bit at some random jobs, then went into a PhD program in philosophy.
I would say, first of all, don’t sell yourself short about getting in to a top 20 school. At least for a MA, it is probably not as hard as you might think. A couple of years ago I applied to several artificial intelligence MS programs. The easiest one to get in to was Johns Hopkins (may not be top 20, but is probably close enough). I have also known many people who got one MA or another from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, or Stanford. Yes they are smart and capable, but not noticeably more so than other graduate degree holders, in my opinion. (I have even known some undergraduates of questionable talent who went on to do a MA in philosophy at Oxford).
In my experience working in (and of course taking courses in) higher education for the past 10 years, the modus operandi of many of the MA/MS programs at big-name universities is to charge a lot of money for the name recognition. Ultimately this is why I turned down Johns Hopkins—I wasn’t willing to spend around $50,000 for an MS when I could get one at another perfectly good (albeit lower ranked) university for less than half the price. For many of the MA/MS programs at top unis, as long as you meet their minimum prerequisites (e.g., a MS computer science program won’t admit you if you never had an algorithms course) and requirements (3.0 GPA usually; they often don’t require GRE), you will get in, so long as you can pay.
Unfortunately many employers do seem to place weight on the school you went to. For MA/MS degrees, though, I think the school you went to says more about your disposable wealth (or tolerance of risk) than it does about your ability or knowledge.
Now, for PhD studies (and maybe the rare funded MA program) it is another situation entirely. Getting into a top-10 or top-20 program is extremely competitive, and, well, good luck with that. I also went to an unremarkable uni, had very good GRE scores, and barely got into a top-40 program in philosophy.
You mention pursuing an academic path (which of course would require a PhD). I would probably recommend against that. (Full disclosure—I am currently a university lecturer outside the US and am looking to leave academia myself.) Yes, I am sure your professors recommend taking an academic path because it worked out for them 20 or so years ago (selection bias!). But it is a high-risk, low-reward path—especially in some fields like philosophy (I am less familiar with the job market in psychology, but I doubt it is much better). Even if you were to manage to get into a top-20 school, you would be facing a saturated job market. In my PhD studies the most qualified job-seeker I met was a post-doc at Yale (don’t remember where he got his PhD) with a book deal from Oxford University Press. He got a position at a not so good university in a really boring part of the US, likely earning less than that typical economics BA holder. It is safe to assume if you don’t have a Yale postdoc and OUP book deal, you will get something worse. In my time in my PhD program, there were a few “successes” who went on to tenure-track jobs worse than the Yale postdoc’s, but far more either (1) accepted an adjunct position somewhere for pitiful pay and no advancement prospects or (2) gave up and left academia after countless job rejections (and learning that their applications were one of 500 or 600 for a single opening).
Given recent trends in higher education (ever higher numbers of graduates from PhD programs, lower numbers of people going to college, more reliance on adjuncts and online learning), it is unlikely that many academic job markets (especially those in the humanities and social sciences) are going to improve any time soon. Don’t get brainwashed into thinking that an academic path is the best (or for that matter even a plausible) route into improving the world. What I would recommend is getting a MA or MS, especially in a more quantitative field (and from as good a university as you can afford, given employer bias on the issue). That will give you a lot more options, both in the EA world and among higher-paying employers.
As for 80,000 Hours, I think everybody runs into difficulty and disappointment there. After just receiving my 20th or so EA job rejection, I came here to read about other people’s experiences… and, well, it seems even the exoribitantly high achievers get rejected. I think 80,000 Hours is are probably doing the best they can, but there is an extreme amount of labor supply (it is good for EA as a movement that so many people want such jobs) but relatively little labor demand.
I think your summer camp idea is interesting and worth pursuing (although it also sounds like a lot of work!). I would just say that while you are pursuing that idea, keep investing in your skills, either through a MA/MS or at least by taking MOOCs or something similar.
Sorry for the long comment. You touched on some personal issues for me. XD
It’s important not to feel as if you are “wasting” your life because people tell you that you are smart. It seems like a pretty good rule of thumb to prioritise the sustainability of your EA actions—making sure you are happy and comfortable in your job, and putting yourself first.
If you are truly intrisically interested in a career change towards something particularly effective, I wouldn’t be super concerned about test scores, they probably aren’t the best metric for how you’d do in grad study or fair in your career. Your GPA is great, and being from an “unremarkable” university won’t matter.
It seems like you may not be so comfortable in more quantitative fields, but 80k recommends heaps of areas that sound like a great fit: Philosophy and Psychology seem like particularly important areas for EAs!
A quick once over on their career reviews section reveals:
Population ethics researcher / policy analyst
Journalism
Research management
Non-technical roles in technical AI or biorisk research
Startup employee
Startup founding
Community building
Just to gauge more closely, it could be worth expanding that list, and running through this article.
80k has a lot of reflecting to do if what you say about them being not useful to most people is true. In my opinion though that they do try and frame things in a way that appeals to the average competent person!
I am currently working in environment education (education for sustainable development) and do community building for EA as a part-time job. There are plenty of opportunities on where you could find your niche. The most important part is wanting to do good, think about where you want to do it and actually get to work. EA gives you a toolkit in hand, but I have already seen that your unique perspective also adds to this toolkit. Get the tools you need, twist them for your use case and give back to the community, so they can learn from it too.
From my own experience as someone who studies forestry, there is no clear-cut way after university to a high impact job. The 80k job board is limited in its design, and that’s okay. It’s not a perfect representation of EA, and it’s not working with a big tent approach with the job board, but with the articles and the career group plan you can find your own niche.
I can only recommend finding a local EA group and engage with people, makes it much easier to find someone to cowork on what’s important for you atm. There are other places too besides 80k where you can get 1o1 advice, and I think you have the potential to achieve much if you put your mind into it (don’t know if this sentence works in English).
Small steps were made into teaching rationality and EA topics for children or teenager. There are more projects, but this is the one that came to my mind. Maybe someone can add to that list:
I don’t consider myself a high achiever, except for the one school the Army sent me to that I did really well at (I had a lot of preparation and mentors before I arrived), but let me tell you how I broke into EA and in turn how I think you could do a lot of good for the community.
I became a writer(later an indie publisher) during the pandemic (also became a dad), mostly because someone nuked my DND campaign, and I now had a son. My son napped a lot and in that time I found that I could write stuff, so I formed/joined two writers groups, and then they beat me up until I read “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”. I would not be here except for that which led me to join rationalist discords and write a whole fiction book where EA is the underlying theme. I’m not Alexander Wales or the Yudkowski fellow, but I do like writing and reading fiction, and if I can get readers to consider the EA/Rationalist viewpoint, then all the better.
You might not feel like you can make a high impact, but if you can write something, fun and compelling to read, then others might follow suit. (That, or write articles here, which reminds me I need to write another one about operations.)
I feel like the interpersonal dynamic of reaching out from EA groups to outside groups is missed a lot, but also I have never been to an EA global event because of the pandemic.
80K is a useful tool to find out where you can do the most good, but often, and especially here it can be very unclear if something will be a fit.
You might not write the next HPMOR, but you could write something similar. Or as will probably happen in my case, be the editor/publisher for the next HPMOR.
Hi,
I have a BASc in Philosophy and Psychology. I’m still trying to figure out how I could do anything useful here, so maybe someone could help me out.
I’m 27 years old, and currently work in an after-school program teaching children music. I tend to have a talent for accelerated learning (I am currently teaching piano, violin, guitar, ukulele and drums, and have now been teaching at least two of those instruments for as long or longer than it took me to learn them to a level where I can teach them). That’s sadly coupled with a lack of consistent emotional investment, though, so I have not been able to successfully capitalize on it.
I got 94th percentile on Verbal in the GRE and a perfect 6 in writing, but a 30th percentile on quant (it bothers me personally that a score that would have been an A- in most educational contexts I’ve experienced, or perhaps a B+ in some of the more rigorous ones in absolute terms was so low, as I think that’s misleading, but that is the nature of the skew in the distribution I guess). I had a 3.6 GPA in my last 2 years and a 3.3 GPA cummulative. All from a relatively unremarkable university. I am also disabled in such a way that I cannot count on my own reliability for prolonged periods of time, which makes everything harder, but because I’m “so smart” (according to the people around me) it seems rather wasteful that I haven’t found anything I can have a higher impact on thus far.
This means that, when dealing with 80,000 hours, etc, I find it rather hard to see what is actually applicable to me. I find it rather unlikely that I will get into a “top 20 school”, for example, which is a fairly recurrent pattern in all of the academic paths (which professors told me over and over that I should pursue during my undergrad).
This is not a way of despairing (“Oh no! Can I even make the world better if I don’t have a perfect score on one unnecessarily expensive test?!”) but instead a personal angle through which I can bring up that:
1.) I don’t believe that 80,000 hours provides actually useful advice to people who are not exoribitantly high achievers (or at least, it hasn’t provided it for me thus far and I’ve been checking it out on and off for like 7 years at this point).
2.) I do believe that people here can provide such advice, so it would be nice if I could receive some.
On top of that, I’ve been nursing a notion that it might be a good idea to make “rationality”, “futurism” or even “emotional resilience” summer camps for children, and if anybody is interested in a project like that, please let me know.
I really enjoyed hearing about you, O Carciente!
In some ways your remind me of myself (well, not the musical talent bit). I did a BA in philosophy/political science from an unremarkable state university, bounced around a bit at some random jobs, then went into a PhD program in philosophy.
I would say, first of all, don’t sell yourself short about getting in to a top 20 school. At least for a MA, it is probably not as hard as you might think. A couple of years ago I applied to several artificial intelligence MS programs. The easiest one to get in to was Johns Hopkins (may not be top 20, but is probably close enough). I have also known many people who got one MA or another from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, or Stanford. Yes they are smart and capable, but not noticeably more so than other graduate degree holders, in my opinion. (I have even known some undergraduates of questionable talent who went on to do a MA in philosophy at Oxford).
In my experience working in (and of course taking courses in) higher education for the past 10 years, the modus operandi of many of the MA/MS programs at big-name universities is to charge a lot of money for the name recognition. Ultimately this is why I turned down Johns Hopkins—I wasn’t willing to spend around $50,000 for an MS when I could get one at another perfectly good (albeit lower ranked) university for less than half the price. For many of the MA/MS programs at top unis, as long as you meet their minimum prerequisites (e.g., a MS computer science program won’t admit you if you never had an algorithms course) and requirements (3.0 GPA usually; they often don’t require GRE), you will get in, so long as you can pay.
Unfortunately many employers do seem to place weight on the school you went to. For MA/MS degrees, though, I think the school you went to says more about your disposable wealth (or tolerance of risk) than it does about your ability or knowledge.
Now, for PhD studies (and maybe the rare funded MA program) it is another situation entirely. Getting into a top-10 or top-20 program is extremely competitive, and, well, good luck with that. I also went to an unremarkable uni, had very good GRE scores, and barely got into a top-40 program in philosophy.
You mention pursuing an academic path (which of course would require a PhD). I would probably recommend against that. (Full disclosure—I am currently a university lecturer outside the US and am looking to leave academia myself.) Yes, I am sure your professors recommend taking an academic path because it worked out for them 20 or so years ago (selection bias!). But it is a high-risk, low-reward path—especially in some fields like philosophy (I am less familiar with the job market in psychology, but I doubt it is much better). Even if you were to manage to get into a top-20 school, you would be facing a saturated job market. In my PhD studies the most qualified job-seeker I met was a post-doc at Yale (don’t remember where he got his PhD) with a book deal from Oxford University Press. He got a position at a not so good university in a really boring part of the US, likely earning less than that typical economics BA holder. It is safe to assume if you don’t have a Yale postdoc and OUP book deal, you will get something worse. In my time in my PhD program, there were a few “successes” who went on to tenure-track jobs worse than the Yale postdoc’s, but far more either (1) accepted an adjunct position somewhere for pitiful pay and no advancement prospects or (2) gave up and left academia after countless job rejections (and learning that their applications were one of 500 or 600 for a single opening).
Given recent trends in higher education (ever higher numbers of graduates from PhD programs, lower numbers of people going to college, more reliance on adjuncts and online learning), it is unlikely that many academic job markets (especially those in the humanities and social sciences) are going to improve any time soon. Don’t get brainwashed into thinking that an academic path is the best (or for that matter even a plausible) route into improving the world. What I would recommend is getting a MA or MS, especially in a more quantitative field (and from as good a university as you can afford, given employer bias on the issue). That will give you a lot more options, both in the EA world and among higher-paying employers.
As for 80,000 Hours, I think everybody runs into difficulty and disappointment there. After just receiving my 20th or so EA job rejection, I came here to read about other people’s experiences… and, well, it seems even the exoribitantly high achievers get rejected. I think 80,000 Hours is are probably doing the best they can, but there is an extreme amount of labor supply (it is good for EA as a movement that so many people want such jobs) but relatively little labor demand.
I think your summer camp idea is interesting and worth pursuing (although it also sounds like a lot of work!). I would just say that while you are pursuing that idea, keep investing in your skills, either through a MA/MS or at least by taking MOOCs or something similar.
Sorry for the long comment. You touched on some personal issues for me. XD
Wow! Beautifully written Jeff!
Thank you for this post!
It’s important not to feel as if you are “wasting” your life because people tell you that you are smart. It seems like a pretty good rule of thumb to prioritise the sustainability of your EA actions—making sure you are happy and comfortable in your job, and putting yourself first.
If you are truly intrisically interested in a career change towards something particularly effective, I wouldn’t be super concerned about test scores, they probably aren’t the best metric for how you’d do in grad study or fair in your career. Your GPA is great, and being from an “unremarkable” university won’t matter.
It seems like you may not be so comfortable in more quantitative fields, but 80k recommends heaps of areas that sound like a great fit: Philosophy and Psychology seem like particularly important areas for EAs!
A quick once over on their career reviews section reveals:
Population ethics researcher / policy analyst
Journalism
Research management
Non-technical roles in technical AI or biorisk research
Startup employee
Startup founding
Community building
Just to gauge more closely, it could be worth expanding that list, and running through this article.
80k has a lot of reflecting to do if what you say about them being not useful to most people is true. In my opinion though that they do try and frame things in a way that appeals to the average competent person!
Hi O Carciente. :)
I am currently working in environment education (education for sustainable development) and do community building for EA as a part-time job. There are plenty of opportunities on where you could find your niche. The most important part is wanting to do good, think about where you want to do it and actually get to work. EA gives you a toolkit in hand, but I have already seen that your unique perspective also adds to this toolkit. Get the tools you need, twist them for your use case and give back to the community, so they can learn from it too.
From my own experience as someone who studies forestry, there is no clear-cut way after university to a high impact job. The 80k job board is limited in its design, and that’s okay. It’s not a perfect representation of EA, and it’s not working with a big tent approach with the job board, but with the articles and the career group plan you can find your own niche.
I can only recommend finding a local EA group and engage with people, makes it much easier to find someone to cowork on what’s important for you atm. There are other places too besides 80k where you can get 1o1 advice, and I think you have the potential to achieve much if you put your mind into it (don’t know if this sentence works in English).
Small steps were made into teaching rationality and EA topics for children or teenager. There are more projects, but this is the one that came to my mind. Maybe someone can add to that list:
https://www.sparc-camp.com/
I don’t consider myself a high achiever, except for the one school the Army sent me to that I did really well at (I had a lot of preparation and mentors before I arrived), but let me tell you how I broke into EA and in turn how I think you could do a lot of good for the community.
I became a writer(later an indie publisher) during the pandemic (also became a dad), mostly because someone nuked my DND campaign, and I now had a son. My son napped a lot and in that time I found that I could write stuff, so I formed/joined two writers groups, and then they beat me up until I read “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”. I would not be here except for that which led me to join rationalist discords and write a whole fiction book where EA is the underlying theme. I’m not Alexander Wales or the Yudkowski fellow, but I do like writing and reading fiction, and if I can get readers to consider the EA/Rationalist viewpoint, then all the better.
You might not feel like you can make a high impact, but if you can write something, fun and compelling to read, then others might follow suit. (That, or write articles here, which reminds me I need to write another one about operations.)
I feel like the interpersonal dynamic of reaching out from EA groups to outside groups is missed a lot, but also I have never been to an EA global event because of the pandemic.
80K is a useful tool to find out where you can do the most good, but often, and especially here it can be very unclear if something will be a fit.
You might not write the next HPMOR, but you could write something similar. Or as will probably happen in my case, be the editor/publisher for the next HPMOR.