lexande

Karma: 623

Towards Better EA Career Advice

lexande21 Nov 2018 2:52 UTC

64 points

40 comments3 min readEA link

lexande 8 Feb 2024 13:04 UTC
51 points
10 ∶ 0
on: Introducing the Effektiv Spenden “Defending Democracy” fund
The focus on a particular country would make sense in the context of career or voting advice but seems very strange in the context of donations since money is mostly internationally fungible (and it’s unlikely that Germany is currently the place where money goes furthest towards the goal of defending democracy). The limited focus might make strategic sense if you thought of this as something like an advertising campaign trying to capitalize on current media attention and then eventually divert the additional donors to less arbitrarily circumscribed cause areas (as suggested by your third bullet point), but I think that sort of relating to donors as customers to advertise to rather than fellow participants in collaborative truth-seeking risks undermining confidence in Effektiv Spenden and the principles that make EA work.
How would you handle it if your analysis reached the conclusion that the most effective pro-democracy intervention were donating to a particular political party or other not-fully-tax-deductible group? I’m not familiar with the details of German charity law but I would worry that recommending such donations might jeopardize Effektiv Spenden’s own tax-deductible status, while excluding such groups (which seem more likely to be relevant here than for other cause areas) from consideration would further undermine the principle of transparently giving donors the advice that most effectively furthers their goals.
What links here?
- MRo's comment on Introducing the Effektiv Spenden “Defending Democracy” fund by Sebastian Schienle (10 Feb 2024 13:31 UTC; 11 points)

lexande 29 Apr 2022 23:15 UTC
44 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Increasing Demandingness in EA
the primary constraint has shifted from money to people
This seems like an incorrect or at best misleading description of the situation. EA plausibly now has more money than it knows what to do with (at least if you want to do better than GiveDirectly) but it also has more people than it knows what to do with. Exactly what the primary constraint is now is hard to know confidently or summarise succinctly, but it’s pretty clearly neither of those. (80k discusses some of the issues with a “people-constrained” framing here.) In general large-scale problems that can be solved by just throwing money or throwing people at them are the exception and not the rule.
For some cause areas the constraint is plausibly direct workers with some particular set of capabilities. But even most people who want to dedicate their careers to EA could not become effective e.g. AI safety researchers no matter how hard they tried. Indeed merely trying may be negative impact in the typical case due to opportunity cost of interviewers’ time etc (even if EV-positive given the information the applicant has). One of the nice things about money is that it basically can’t hurt, and indeed arguments about the overhead of managing volunteer/unspecialised labour were part of how we wound up with the donation focus in the first place.
I think there is a large fraction of the population for whom donating remains the most good they can do, focusing on whatever problems are still constrained by money (GiveDirectly if nothing else) because the other problems are constrained by capabilities or resources which they don’t personally have or control. The shift from donation focus to direct work focus isn’t just increasing demandingness for these people, it’s telling them they can’t meaningfully contribute at all. Of course inasmuch as it’s true that a particular direct work job is more impactful than a very large amount of donations it’s important to be open and honest about this so those who actually do have the required capabilities can make the right decisions and tradeoffs. But this is fundamentally in tension with building a functioning and supportive community, because people need to feel like their community won’t abandon them if they turn out to be unable to get a direct work job (and this is especially true when a lot of the direct work in question is “hits-based” longshots where failure is the norm). I worry that even people who could potentially have extraordinarily high impact as direct workers might be put off by a community that doesn’t seem like it would continue to value them if their direct work plans didn’t pan out.

lexande 26 Feb 2021 5:03 UTC
39 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Milan_Griffes’s comment on: Some preliminaries and a claim
This request is extremely unreasonable and I am downvoting and replying (despite agreeing with your core claim) specifically to make a point of not giving in to such unreasonable requests, or allowing a culture of making them with impunity to grow. I hope in the future to read posts about your ideas that make your points without such attempts to manipulate readers.

lexande 10 Feb 2024 11:46 UTC
28 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sebastian Schienle’s comment on: Introducing the Effektiv Spenden “Defending Democracy” fund
As I noted in my first comment, I think this sort of “bait and switch”-like advertising approach risks undermining the key strengths of EA and should generally be avoided. EA’s comparative advantage is in being analytically correct and so we should tell people what we believe and why, not flatter their prejudices in the hopes that “we can then guide to the place where money goes furthest”. I can see other potential benefits to Effektiv-Spenden or other EAs researching the effectiveness of pro-democracy interventions in Germany, but optimizing for that sort “gateway drug” effect seems likely to be net harmful.

lexande 17 Apr 2019 20:47 UTC
28 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: yhoiseth’s comment on: Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations
- The posts I linked on whether it’s worth pursuing flexible long-term career capital (yes says the Career Guide page, no says a section buried in an Annual Report, though they finally added a note/link from the yes page to the no page a year later when I pointed it out to them) are one example.
- The “clarifying talent gaps” blog post largely contradicts an earlier post still linked from the “Research > Overview (start here)” page expressing concerns about an impending shortage of direct workers in general, as well as Key Articles suggesting that “almost all graduates” should seek jobs in research, policy or EA orgs (with earning-to-give only as a last resort) regardless of their specific skills. The latter in turn contradict pages still in the Career Guide and other posts emphasizing earning-to-give as potentially superior to even such high-impact careers as nonprofit CEO or vaccine research.
- Earlier they changed their minds on replaceability (before, after); the deprecated view there is no longer prominently linked anywhere but I’m unsure of the wisdom of leaving it up at all.
Given how much 80k’s views have changed over the past 5-10 years, it’s hard to be optimistic about the prospects for successfully building narrow career capital targeted to the skill bottlenecks of 5-10 years from now!

lexande 24 Nov 2018 9:44 UTC
28 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Towards Better EA Career Advice
Thank you very much for your thoughtful replies.
It seems entirely reasonable if 80k wants to focus on a “narrower” vision of understanding the most pressing skill bottlenecks and then searching for the best people to fill them. (This does seem probably more important than broad social impact career advice that starts from people and tries to lead them to higher-impact jobs, though I have some doubts about its relative tractability.) As I said in my last pargraph, I think my hope for better broad EA career advice may be better met by a new site/organization rather than by 80k. But as you note, many in the community remain unaware of 80k’s narrowing focus and abdication of the ‘broad career advice’ role; my actual trigger for this post was reading articles advocating that a major function of local EA groups should be directing new members to 80k’s writings. I wrote this in the hopes that people would think twice before recommending 80k for such broad purposes, not to criticize 80k’s ongoing valuable work on narrower priorities.
One point of factual disagreement is that I think good general career advice is in fact quite neglected. Most existing career advice is absolutely terrible. It’s often extremely outdated, survivorship-biased, full of signalling, wishful thinking, and outright lies. The incentives of most people who write career advice are fundamentally not well-aligned with most people who want career advice; EA career advice can reasonably hope to do much better (if someone has committed to donate X% of their income, an altruistically-motivated advice-giver has unusually well-aligned incentives to help them maximize their income). I think actually good, rigorously-supported social impact career advice could be a tremendous asset for the EA movement, not only by helping those existing EAs who aren’t a good fit for the most pressing skill bottlenecks still maximize their impact, but also potentially attracting new people to EA on a “come for the career advice, stay for the altruism” basis because the unmet demand for decent career advice is so acute.
Again, I totally understand that 80k doesn’t want to focus on this; at this point it seems like probably I and others disappointed with the lack of broader EA career advice should do the research and write some more concrete posts on the topic ourselves. If you have any easily-conveyed pointers or meta-level lessons learned about the process of researching different careers from back when 80k did more of that I’d be extremely interested to hear them.

lexande 21 Nov 2018 22:50 UTC
28 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: sapphire’s comment on: Towards Better EA Career Advice
I think this actually understates the problem. I studied maths at Cambridge (with results roughly in the middle of my cohort there), and my intuitions informing the above concerns about 80k are in part based on watching my similarly-situated friends there struggle to get any kind of non-menial job after graduating. I’m a ‘normal Google programmer’ in the US now (after a long stint as a maths PhD student) but none of the others I’ve kept in touch with from Cambridge make ‘even’ $200k (though perhaps some of those I lost touch with who went into finance do). So I think 80k’s target audience must be even more rarefied than “top half of Oxbridge”. (Though I’m not sure if it’s “top 10% of Oxbridge” or “top third of Oxbridge plus extraordinary talent in at least one skill that isn’t assessed academically” or “literally like ten people in the whole world” or what; it sure would be nice if they’d specify it explicitly!)

lexande 11 Jan 2023 19:09 UTC
26 points
12 ∶ 0
in reply to: Abundant Output’s comment on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
Nobody will give you an unsecured loan to fund consumption or donations with most of the money not due for 15+ years; most people in our society who would borrow on such terms would default. (You can get close with some types of student loan, so if there’s education that you’d experience as intrinsically-valued consumption or be able to rapidly apply to philanthropic ends then this post suggests you should perhaps be more willing to borrow to fund it than you would be otherwise, but your personal upside there is pretty limited.)
What links here?
- Lizka's comment on AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years by basil.halperin (13 Jan 2023 16:45 UTC; 46 points)

lexande 17 Apr 2019 17:47 UTC
26 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations
1) If the way you talk about career capital here is indicative of 80k’s current thinking then it sounds like they’ve changed their position AGAIN, mostly reversing their position from 2018 (that you should focus on roles with high immediate impact or on acquiring very specific narrow career capital as quickly as possible) and returning to something more like their position from 2016 (that your impact will mostly come many years into your career so you should focus on building career capital to be in the best position then). It’s possible the new position is a synthesis somewhere between these two, since you do include the word “targeted”, but how well can people feasibly target narrow career capital 5-10 years out when the skill bottlenecks of the future will surely be different?
2) In general I’ve noticed a pattern (of which the above two linked posts are an example) where 80k posts something like “our posts stating that ‘A is true’ have inadvertently caused many people to believe that A is true, here’s why A is actually false” while leaving up the old posts that say ‘A is true’ (sometimes without even a note that they might be outdated). This is especially bad when the older ‘A is true’ content is linked conveniently from the front page while the more recent updates are buried in blog history. Is it feasible for 80k to be more aggressive in taking down pages they no longer endorse so they at least don’t continue to do damage, and so the rest of us can more easily keep track of what 80k actually currently believes?
3) Regarding the problem of a diverse audience with differing needs, an obvious strategy for dealing with this is to explicitly state (for each page or section of the site) who the intended audience is. I’ve found that 80k seems strangely reluctant to answer what level of human/social/career/financial capital they assume their audience has, even when asked directly.

lexande 25 May 2022 18:43 UTC
25 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Open Philanthropy’s Cause Exploration Prizes: $120k for written work on global health and wellbeing
Is there a link to what OpenPhil considers their existing cause areas? The Open Prompt asks for new cause areas so things that you already fund or intend to fund are presumably ineligible, but while the Cause Exploration Prize page gives some examples it doesn’t link to a clear list of what all of these are. In a few minutes looking around the Openphilanthropy.org site the lists I could find were either much more general than you’re looking for here (lists of thematic areas like “Science for Global Health”) or more specific (lists of individual grants awarded) but I may be missing something.

lexande 11 Jan 2023 19:29 UTC
21 points
3 ∶ 0
on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
A few years ago I asked around among finance and finance-adjacent friends about whether the interest rates on 30 or 50 year government bonds had implications about what the market or its participants believed regarding xrisk or transformative AI, but eventually became convinced that they do not.
As far as I can tell nobody is even particularly trying to predict 30+ years out. My impression is:
- A typical marginal 30-year bond investor is betting that interest rates will be even lower in 5-10 years, and then they can sell their 30 year bond for a profit since it will have a higher locked-in interest rate than anything being issued then.
- Lots of market actors have a regulatory obligation (e.g. bank capital requirements) to buy government bonds which drives the interest rate on such bonds down a lot, to the point that it can be significantly negative for long periods even when the market generally expects the economy to grow. Corporate bonds have less of this issue but are almost never issued for such long durations.
It’s true that the market clearly doesn’t believe in extremely short timelines (like real GDP either doubling or going to zero in the next 5-10 years). But I think it mostly doesn’t have beliefs about 30+ years out, or if it does their impacts on prices are swamped by its beliefs about nearer-term stuff.

lexande 10 Feb 2024 11:45 UTC
19 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Introducing the Effektiv Spenden “Defending Democracy” fund
I think it’s important that EA analysis not start with its bottom line already written. In some situations the most effective altruistic interventions (with a given set of resources) will have partisan political valence and we need to remain open to those possibilities; they’re usually not particularly neglected or tractable but occasional high-leverage opportunities can arise. I’m very skeptical of Effektiv-Spenden’s new fund because it arbitrarily limits its possible conclusions to such a narrow space, but limiting one’s conclusions to exclude that space would be the same sort of mistake.

lexande 18 Apr 2019 21:22 UTC
19 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Arden Koehler’s comment on: Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations
On career capital: I find it quite hard to square your comments that “Most readers who are still early in their careers must spend considerable time building targeted career capital before they can enter the roles 80,000 Hours promotes most” and “building career capital that’s relevant to where you want to be in 5 or 10 years is often exactly what you should be doing” with the comments from the annual report that “You can get good career capital in positions with high immediate impact (especially problem-area specific career capital), including most of those we recommend” and “Discount rates on aligned-talent are quite high in some of the priority paths, and seem to have increased, making career capital less valuable.” Reading the annual report definitely gives me the impression that 80k absolutely does not endorse spending 5-10 years in low-impact roles to try to build career capital for most people, and so if this is incorrect then it seems like further clarification of 80k’s views on career capital on the website should be a high priority.
On planning: While I expect 80k’s current priority paths will probably all still be considered important in 5-10 years time, it’s harder to predict whether they will still be considered neglected. It’s easy to imagine some of the fields in question becoming very crowded with qualified candidates, such that people who start working towards them now will have extreme difficulty getting hired in a target role 5-10 years from now, and will have low counterfactual impact if they do get hired. (It’s also possible, though less likely, that estimates of the tractability of some of the priorities will decline.)
On outdated content: I appreciate 80k’s efforts to tag content that is no longer endorsed, but there have often been long delays between new contradictory content being posted and old posts being tagged (even when the new post links to the old post, so it’s not like it would have required extra effort to find posts needing tagging). Further, posts about the new position sometimes fail to engage with the arguments for the old position. And in many cases I’m not sure what purpose is served by leaving the old posts up at all. (It’s not like taking them down would be hiding anything, they’d still be on archive.org.)
On article targeting: In your original post you gave the example of 80k deliberately working to create more content targeted at people later in their careers, and this winding up discouraging some readers who are still early in their careers. Surely at least in that case you could have been explicit about the different audience you were deliberately targeting? More generally, you express concern about “screening off people who could benefit from the research”, but while such false negatives are bad, failing to screen off people for whom your advice would be useless or harmful is also bad, and I think 80k currently errs significantly in the latter direction. I also find it worrying if not even 80k’s authors know who their advice is written for, since knowing your target audience is a foundational requirement for communication of any kind and especially important when communicating advice if you want it to be useful and not counterproductive.

lexande 24 Nov 2018 10:12 UTC
18 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Taymon’s comment on: Towards Better EA Career Advice
I’m not convinced it’s the impact-maximizing approach either. Some people who could potentially win the career “lottery” and have a truly extraordinary impact might reasonably be put off early on by advice that doesn’t seem to care adequately about what happens to them in the case where they don’t win.

lexande 18 Apr 2019 21:38 UTC
17 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations
Why don’t you just take it down entirely? It’s already basically non-functional.

lexande 11 Jan 2023 21:17 UTC
14 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: EliezerYudkowsky’s comment on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
Beyond just taking vacation days, if you’re a bond trader who believes in a very high chance of xrisk in the next five years it ~~probably~~ might make sense to quit your job and fund your consumption out of your retirement savings. At which point you aren’t a bond trader anymore and your beliefs no longer have much impact on bond prices.

lexande 11 Jan 2023 19:43 UTC
14 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
I think a fair number of market participants may have something like a probability estimate for transformative AI within five years and maybe even ten. (For example back when SoftBank was throwing money at everything that looked like a tech company, they justified it with a thesis something like “transformative AI is coming soon”, and this would drive some other market participants to think about the truth of that thesis and its implications even if they wouldn’t otherwise.) But I think you are right that basically no market participants have a probability estimate for transformative AI (or almost anything else) 30 years out; they aren’t trying to make predictions that far out and don’t expect to do significantly better than noise if they did try.

lexande 18 Apr 2019 21:33 UTC
14 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vaidehi Agarwalla’s comment on: Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations
These days 80k explicitly advises against trying to build flexible career capital (though I think they’re probably wrong about this).

lexande 24 Nov 2018 10:33 UTC
13 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Towards Better EA Career Advice
Are you able to briefly characterize here who your intended audience is, if we’re mistaken about it being “top half of Oxford” or similar? I guess it varies some between pages.
What links here?
- lexande's comment on Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ research that might help with job-search frustrations by Arden Koehler (17 Apr 2019 17:47 UTC; 26 points)

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