Co-founder and CEO of Probably Good.
Also a co-founder of EA Israel.
omernevo
Karma: 744
Thank you!
Thank you!
Thank you! We’ll take a look.
Thanks for asking!
There are a few ways we distinguish ourselves, and hopefully complement 80K’s work.
Though the cause areas we care about are not mutually exclusive, we often focus on different cause areas (e.g. we’ve done a lot of work in global health and development, and have a talk about this work at EAG London—you’re welcome to come to the talk to hear more).
We aim to cater to a broader audience in terms of worldviews, geographic diversity, and educational background.
There are many differences in how we approach career advice, the most significant is that we are a lot more uncertain about things (as indicated by the name Probably Good) - this influences how we make recommendations, how we engage with advisees, what career paths we’re open to, and more.
Finally, and most importantly, it’s worth noting that we believe that impact-focused career advice is an incredibly large and important field, so we think it’s good to have multiple teams taking different approaches to it. Hence our primary drive for our work at Probably Good is not to be different from 80K (who are great and have been both an inspiration and a huge help in the creation of Probably Good), but rather to do more without necessarily trying to be similar.
No specific deadline currently.
I expect it’ll be at least 2-3 weeks but it could also be longer than that.
Thank you Michelle for posting this!
I wanted to add that when we founded Probably Good, we were also worried of exactly the sort of things detailed here. The reality turned out to be much better than we had even hoped: We contacted 80k and everyone on the team were incredibly supportive. This is both true in their attitude (being happy to see more people in this space) and also in practice (with advice and help along the way).
So I’m very happy to say that I agree. There’s still lots of areas to explore in EA career advice and the people at 80k are far far nicer than you’d expect from someone when you tell them you want to ‘compete’* with them.
Besides that, naturally, if we (Probably Good) can help people with advice or anything else, we’d be more than happy to!
* I know, it’s not really competing. We really are genuienly working towards common goals.
I generally agree with the idea and appreciate the clarity of this post.
One related thought which I think is potentially useful both for thinking of which projects to fund or to start:
Projects usually need to be scalable at advanced stages, but not at the start. It’s ok (and even recommended* in many cases) to start doing things in non-scalable ways that aren’t cost-effective.
A lot of times, the value in information \ experience \ growth is high enough that it’s worth starting out doing things that you won’t be able to sustain as you grow.
Obviously, there should be a plan (or at least ideas on how) to become more scalable later. I’d be looking for projects that have reasonable path(s) to being very scalable down the road.* This link is advice for for-profit startups. It’s only partially relevant for our context but the point I’m making is made there in more detail.
By the way, both Sella and I (Omer) will be at EAG. Feel free to connect, we’d love to chat with people who are interested in Probably Good and hear what you have to say...
Thanks for letting us know!
If that’s alright, I’ll send you an email with some questions to figure out what the problem is...
Just writing a quick comment here that I’ve changed the title of this post to be less confusing.
The previous title: “A New Career Guidance Organization: Probably Good” does sound like this is an evaluation. Didn’t want to it seem like this comment didn’t make sense to people who haven’t seen the previous post title.
That sounds great! Thank you for sharing this.
If that’s ok, I might get in touch soon with some questions about this...
Yes, that makes perfect sense. I think we definitely need to have a system that (1) let’s people know if they’re not going to get coaching even though they asked and (2) doesn’t take up a lot of our time.
Thank you for the input!
I think some of the questions you raised are (at least partially) answered in our documents. Specifically, where we detail the impacts that we hope to achieve—those are impacts that we think we would potentially have a comparative advantage over 80,000 hours. Areas where we think we would be similar to 80,000 hours wouldn’t be areas where we’d expect to have significant counterfactual impact.
Regarding the abstractness and general nature of the documents, that’s completely fair. I expect things will be a lot clearer when we have a website up and some content, rather than documents explaining the principles by which we are creating the content.
As we’ve written in a few places, we’re taking this one step at a time and trying to get as much feedback as possible at every stage. I hope it won’t be very long before we’re able to start publishing some of our materials, which will be a good example of our actual work and will convey the specifics of our focus.
My initial intuition (stressing even more that this is based on no evidence but my best guess) is that the name “Probably Better” would be more confusing to people than “Probably Good”. I’m expecting a lot of people asking “better than what?”
It also loses the meaning of good as in moral good (which I like, but not everyone here did).
Thank you for writing what you’d find most valuable! This lines up well with my thoughts...
Regarding being overwhelmed by requests for advice:
Yes! That’s definitely a failure mode. We’ve discussed how much we can give direct advice (very little in the near future, potentially more later but that’s quite a bit of work to get there) and how to choose candidates (where we have a lot of thoughts but, as with other things, we expect to decide on a criteria and then have to fix it once we see where it fails).I’m cautiously optimistic that we just don’t have enough time to fall into this failure mode and so we’ll stop ourselves before this becomes an issue :-)
That sounds really cool!
I’ll be happy to join! :-)
Thank you!
This viewpoint it really helpful. It seems relatively easy to look at a specific article and figure out who it might be useful for, but creating a generic way to organize articles that would work for most people is quite a bit harder.And I agree that concreteness is definitely something we should be explicitly thinking about when creating content and organizing it.
And I agree regarding both downsides \ risks. They’re definitely something to think about. The first might mean that this is something that might come later if we don’t find a relatively simple way of doing this.
The second can probably be mitigated to a large extent if some effort but requires more thinking in any case. We’ve discussed this in related contexts (making sure we don’t counterfactually cause readers not to engage with other existing quality content), but not in this context.
This is something we discussed at length and are still thinking about.
As you write in the end, the usual “I’ll experiment and see” is true, but we have some more specific thoughts as well:
I think there’s a meaningful difference between someone who uses “shoddy” methodology to someone who’s thoughtfully trying to figure out the best course of action and has either not got there yet or still didn’t overcome some bad priors or biases. While I’m sure there are some edge cases, I think most cases aren’t on the edge.
I think most of our decisions are easier in practice than in theory. The content we’ll write will be (to the best of our ability) good content that will showcase how we (and the EA community) believe these issues should be considered. 1:1s or workshops will prioritize people we believe could benefit and could have a meaningful impact, and since we expect us to not live up to demand any time soon, I doubt we’ll have to consider cases that seem detrimental to the community. Finally, our writing, while aiming to be accessible and welcoming to people with a wide variety of views, will describe similar thought processes and discuss similar scopes to the broader EA community (albeit not 80K). As a result, I think it will be comparable to other gateways to the community that exist today.
The above point makes the practical considerations of the near future simpler. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have a lot to think, talk through and figure out regarding what we mean by ‘Agnostic EA’. That’s something that we haven’t stopped discussing since the idea for this came up and I don’t think we’ll stop any time soon.
This is the risk we were most worried about regarding the name. It does set a relatively light tone. We decided to go with it anyway for two reasons:
The first is that the people we talked to said that it sounds interesting and interested them more than the responses we got for more regular, descriptive names.
The second is that our general tone in writing is more serious. Serious enough that we’re working hard to make sure that it isn’t boring for some people who don’t like reading huge walls of dense text. We figure it’s best to err on the other side in this case.
I wanted to chime in and say that while a lot of people / organizations say things like this, in my experience, 80,000 really does mean it and follows through. When we were setting up Probably Good (and not only then) the amount of encouragement and help we received from Michelle, Niel and others there has been incredible.