"That article made me angry. All this time was spent on making sure your job was helping others and no time was spent on whether it brought you joy." I assigned high school seniors in our economics class to read Benjamin Todd's summary essay on planning a high-impact career. Some of the students were offended by the essay. Here's how it went.
In general, I teach career advice using the What Color is Your Parachute? framework. I really like the framework, because it provides a lot of direction for thinking about one's own desires and how those can be corralled to serve a higher mission. This year I added two segments to the career advice, one on globalization, and another on EA. This is in the context of an Econ class, remember, so I felt justified this year in leaning in on these frameworks.
MRU has a nice little segment about how to think about a career given globalization. We started with international trade and made our way to a discussion on globalization and the elephant graph and what that means for careers. I thought this was depressing, because of the narrow number of careers in which one can expect to see wage growth. So we also discussed how much easier it is to be the best person with a set of three skills than the best person with one skill, as an example of how one can still be competitive amidst global competition. That combinatorial insight is very helpful.
Next, there is much more to a career than maximizing profit in the context of globalization. And I would be surprised if more than 10% of that class end up in jobs with the term 'engineer' attached, so we talked about other high-impact careers. I gave them this Benjamin Todd essay, and they came to class with a ton of pushback.
In the first ten minutes of class, before I even had said a word, they laid out a series of arguments against the EA approach to career advice. I relished this and took notes as they went. Such good material, such familiar objections! These very normal, American students from median American households in a non-coastal city sensed something deeply challenging about EA, but these are challenges which I think the community has already addressed.
Objection 1: Giving you life to others in this obsessive way will result in burnout.
Objection 2: This type of advice is for "people-pleasers", not independent, self-sufficient people.
Objection 3: This type of advice is for only super-self-sufficient people who want to take on huge responsibilities. I might not want big responsibilities.
Objection 4: This type of advice ignores the indirect value of normal careers, like working in shipping logistics.
Objection 5: If everyone tried to have a high-impact career, then the career wouldn't be high-impact anymore.
Against these objections is the material in the essay itself. Close reading is hard! "You can divide career aims into three categories: (i) personal priorities (ii) impartial positive impact, and (iii) other moral values." And:
Turning to personal priorities, research suggests that people are most satisfied when they have work that’s:
- Meaningful
- Something they’re good at
- Engaging & with autonomy"
Properly understood, these two quotes answer Objections 1, 2, and 3. Burnout is antithetical to what should be a personal priority: personal flourishing with a healthy mind and healthy body. But I found it fascinating that several students, having no previous exposure to EA, immediately worried about burnout. I wonder if the lack of vocabulary about individual psychology sounds an internal alarm for postulants? Secondly, EA is about finding the right fit, and that does mean knowing your own strengths, weaknesses, and desire for responsibility.
A close reading together cleared up these objections.
A student, one of my quiet thoughtful ones, leaned back in his chair and responded slowly to Objection 5. "Well," he said, "There are diminishing returns. If too many people go into a field, it's not a neglected problem anymore."
Then we turned to the final objection - indirect impact. This is one which I only could address because I have been in the EA community for 6 years. A low-key, not consensus, but common enough EA opinion is that "normal" jobs provide goods too, and if you are able to be exceptional at an important "normal" job or be high-impact within that career, that can be good too.
The opinions addressed, they read the next essay on three career stages.
The next day I asked each student if they disagreed with the EA advice here or had any new objections to the previous article.
I was mildly disappointed to find that they no longer resisted Ben's advice. They loved Big EA.
Thanks for sharing this!
I can imagine people coming away from this with the impression that impact-oriented career communications like those of 80K should change their framings to better pre-empt these reactions, e.g. by more strongly emphasizing that taking on big problems is not for everyone (not because the author explicitly drew this conclusion, but because it seems like a natural one). It's pretty non-obvious to me that this is a right takeaway. Arguably, a majority of the impact of places like 80K comes from supporting people who are very dedicated to impact. Catering to audiences with lukewarm interest in impact will have some benefits, but I worry these might come at the cost of e.g. 80K failing to do very well at motivating and guiding people who are most excited to prioritize impartial positive impact. At least personally, I found it very motivating to come across a site that works with assumptions like "of course we're happy to take on big problems/responsibilities--how could we look away and do nothing, when these problems are out there?"
A bit more about where my intuitions are coming from:
This thinking has come up in a few separate intro fellowship cohorts I’ve facilitated. Usually, somebody tries to flesh it out by asking whether it’s “more effective” to save one doctor (who could then be expected to save five more lives) or two mechanics (who wouldn’t save any other lives) in trolley-problem scenarios. This discussion often gets muddled, and many people have the impression that “EAs” would think it’s better to save the doctor, even though I doubt that’s a consensus opinion among EAs. I’ve found this to be a surprisingly large snag point t... (read more)