I agree this is an understudied area, but I also think it will be harder to give generic care advice to people with wildly different experiences than to give generic career advice to 22-year-old Ivy League graduates. That said, I’d welcome any career advice you dig up for mid-career pivots!
Is it possible that the effort that would be necessary to give specific advice versus generic advice is not actually worth the effort? It’s better to try to influence people at the start of their 80,000 hours, and once someone has invested a portion of their life (one third?) it’s better to just flip them to earning to give and move on to the next 22 year old Ivy League graduate?
At the start, say someone with 79,000 hours to go, they are still essentially the same as the 22 year old Ivy League Graduate with 80,000 hours, so the advice is the same.
There’s got to be a tipping point, which probably depends on if the person’s first 10,000 or 20,000 hours built up flexible career capital or more specific. The person who became a pharmacist is more locked in than the person who got an MBA.
Me too. Perhaps we should create a mutual support group ourselves? The “mid-career You can Save”?
However, I’m not so sure about what you guys mean by “harder” in this context. Yes, it might be easier to spot some really promising 22-year-old Ivy League graduates and advise them, and, since they have so many options left, general advice might be good enough. But it doesn’t seem so hard to nudge some mid-career professionals towards optimal options, precisely because there are less alternatives. And wouldn’t it be more scalable? E.g. what’s more likely, that we can advice the right young graduate to get a job in the government, or that we could talk to many potential candidates and convert at least one of them into EA goals?
I should say “scalable” not “harder.” The issue is the advice to a promising young graduate can be rather generic and repeatable for each graduate, with some reference to if they majored in Mandarin or something. The advice for mid-career is going to be more personal, and so it’s not scalable. But I’m sure if you sat down one on one you could do something positive.
The issue is one of transferring career capital. You could limit the pathways to the top tiers identified by EA efforts, but I would argue that if you consider career capital that may not be as transferable to the major efforts (let’s say AI and its associated impacts) it’s possible you would encourage the person to stick with a cause that would not be advisable to a new graduate. Or, if you only stick to the top EA tiers, it may be impossible to get from their current career to something relevant.
So let’s say that AI, bioterrorism, nuclear security, and the tail end of climate change are big problem areas. And you have someone who has done a lot of work on clean water and hand washing campaigns in the developing world, is well networked, fluent in various languages, etc. They may be better positioned to shift into reducing smoking rates in the developed world, which is something I just pulled from the 80,000 hours website as an example, instead of trying to pick up something that’s in the top tier. That’s an example where you can connect someone to a lower EA priority where they may be well positioned to be especially effective.
If you have someone in a government job in, say, State or Defense, you can steer them towards clearly defined EA goals. And some other areas overlap, like Treasury has some counter-terrorism and sanctions enforcement that maybe gets you moving in a more EA direction. But I don’t think EA is well prepared to offer advice for, just naming random Departments, someone in Agriculture, Transportation, Interior, or Education. That’s an example where you would really need to understand the particulars of someone work and develop new research into areas that I haven’t seen EA discuss as detailed.
I agree this is an understudied area, but I also think it will be harder to give generic care advice to people with wildly different experiences than to give generic career advice to 22-year-old Ivy League graduates. That said, I’d welcome any career advice you dig up for mid-career pivots!
Is it possible that the effort that would be necessary to give specific advice versus generic advice is not actually worth the effort? It’s better to try to influence people at the start of their 80,000 hours, and once someone has invested a portion of their life (one third?) it’s better to just flip them to earning to give and move on to the next 22 year old Ivy League graduate?
At the start, say someone with 79,000 hours to go, they are still essentially the same as the 22 year old Ivy League Graduate with 80,000 hours, so the advice is the same.
There’s got to be a tipping point, which probably depends on if the person’s first 10,000 or 20,000 hours built up flexible career capital or more specific. The person who became a pharmacist is more locked in than the person who got an MBA.
Me too. Perhaps we should create a mutual support group ourselves? The “mid-career You can Save”?
However, I’m not so sure about what you guys mean by “harder” in this context. Yes, it might be easier to spot some really promising 22-year-old Ivy League graduates and advise them, and, since they have so many options left, general advice might be good enough. But it doesn’t seem so hard to nudge some mid-career professionals towards optimal options, precisely because there are less alternatives. And wouldn’t it be more scalable? E.g. what’s more likely, that we can advice the right young graduate to get a job in the government, or that we could talk to many potential candidates and convert at least one of them into EA goals?
I should say “scalable” not “harder.” The issue is the advice to a promising young graduate can be rather generic and repeatable for each graduate, with some reference to if they majored in Mandarin or something. The advice for mid-career is going to be more personal, and so it’s not scalable. But I’m sure if you sat down one on one you could do something positive.
The issue is one of transferring career capital. You could limit the pathways to the top tiers identified by EA efforts, but I would argue that if you consider career capital that may not be as transferable to the major efforts (let’s say AI and its associated impacts) it’s possible you would encourage the person to stick with a cause that would not be advisable to a new graduate. Or, if you only stick to the top EA tiers, it may be impossible to get from their current career to something relevant.
So let’s say that AI, bioterrorism, nuclear security, and the tail end of climate change are big problem areas. And you have someone who has done a lot of work on clean water and hand washing campaigns in the developing world, is well networked, fluent in various languages, etc. They may be better positioned to shift into reducing smoking rates in the developed world, which is something I just pulled from the 80,000 hours website as an example, instead of trying to pick up something that’s in the top tier. That’s an example where you can connect someone to a lower EA priority where they may be well positioned to be especially effective.
If you have someone in a government job in, say, State or Defense, you can steer them towards clearly defined EA goals. And some other areas overlap, like Treasury has some counter-terrorism and sanctions enforcement that maybe gets you moving in a more EA direction. But I don’t think EA is well prepared to offer advice for, just naming random Departments, someone in Agriculture, Transportation, Interior, or Education. That’s an example where you would really need to understand the particulars of someone work and develop new research into areas that I haven’t seen EA discuss as detailed.