Iâll cross-link to a comment I just made on the original âEA jobsâ thread, arguing for a point I expect to spend a lot of time expressing in the near future: Earning-to-give is, in fact, cool and respectable and worthy of admiration, even if it doesnât happen to be the highest-impact career you can find.
I havenât heard many people try to conflate âimpactâ with âcoolnessâ, and I try not to do so myself. Even if your job isnât at the top of the 80,000 Hours board, that doesnât mean you arenât doing something incredible with your life, or that your efforts donât matter in the grand scheme of things.
It is true that some work saves more lives in expectation, or further boosts âthe odds of a flourishing futureâ, etc. But itâs not like we spend all our time reproaching ourselves for not starting multibillion-dollar companies or becoming World Bank executives, even though those âjobsâ are probably higher-impact than Open Phil jobs.
If 100 people apply for a research role, all of whom really want to help the world as much as possible, and only 10 people get that role, does that imply that weâve now somehow sorted those 100 people into âcoolestâ and âless coolâ? If someone was having a bad week and submitted a poor work test, are they âless coolâ than they would have been in the counterfactual world where their brain was firing on all cylinders and they got the job?
We should be working on important problems and using money to implement promising solutions. In the distant future, when weâve seen how it all played out, weâll have a good sense for whose work turned out to be âmost impactfulâ, or which donor dollars made the biggest difference. But whether weâre eating algae in a world ruled by ALLFED or celebrating Aaron Hamlinâs election as world president via approval voting, I hope weâll still keep in mind that every person who worked or donated, every person who did their best to help the world through evidence and reason, was a part of the grand story.
Iâll cross-link to a comment I just made on the original âEA jobsâ thread, arguing for a point I expect to spend a lot of time expressing in the near future: Earning-to-give is, in fact, cool and respectable and worthy of admiration, even if it doesnât happen to be the highest-impact career you can find.
I havenât heard many people try to conflate âimpactâ with âcoolnessâ, and I try not to do so myself. Even if your job isnât at the top of the 80,000 Hours board, that doesnât mean you arenât doing something incredible with your life, or that your efforts donât matter in the grand scheme of things.
It is true that some work saves more lives in expectation, or further boosts âthe odds of a flourishing futureâ, etc. But itâs not like we spend all our time reproaching ourselves for not starting multibillion-dollar companies or becoming World Bank executives, even though those âjobsâ are probably higher-impact than Open Phil jobs.
If 100 people apply for a research role, all of whom really want to help the world as much as possible, and only 10 people get that role, does that imply that weâve now somehow sorted those 100 people into âcoolestâ and âless coolâ? If someone was having a bad week and submitted a poor work test, are they âless coolâ than they would have been in the counterfactual world where their brain was firing on all cylinders and they got the job?
We should be working on important problems and using money to implement promising solutions. In the distant future, when weâve seen how it all played out, weâll have a good sense for whose work turned out to be âmost impactfulâ, or which donor dollars made the biggest difference. But whether weâre eating algae in a world ruled by ALLFED or celebrating Aaron Hamlinâs election as world president via approval voting, I hope weâll still keep in mind that every person who worked or donated, every person who did their best to help the world through evidence and reason, was a part of the grand story.