Summary

• My sense is some EAs act like/hope they will be assigned the perfect impactful career by some combination of 80,000 Hours recommendations (and similar) and ‘perceived consensus views in EA’.
• But, your life is full of specific factors, many impactful jobs haven’t yet been spotted by other EAs and career advice is importantly iterative.
• Instead of simply deferring, I recommend a combination of:
  • Your own hard work figuring out your path to impact.
  • (Still) Integrating expert advice.
  • Support from the community, and close connections who know your context.

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback from Alex Rahl-Kaplan, Alix Pham, Caitlin Borke, Claude, Matt Reardon, and Michelle Hutchinson for making this post better. Claude also kindly offered to take the blame for all the mistakes I might have made.

Introduction

Question: How do you figure out how to do the most good with your career?

Answer [...]

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Outline:

(00:03) Summary

(01:06) Introduction

(02:58) Why there isn’t an EA sorting hat

(03:24) 1. Your life is full of specific factors to incorporate (aka personal fit)

(05:04) 2. EA-branded jobs are scarce and many impactful jobs aren’t on EA job boards

(05:59) 3. You need to have your own internal model of how to do good

(07:00) 4. Career advice isn’t once-and-done, it's iterative.

(07:55) Why do we expect a sorting hat?

(08:12) 1. Choosing an impactful career is hard, deferring is tempting

(08:48) 2. The 80,000 elephants in the room

(09:41) 3. Givewell and other charity recommendations

(10:33) What are we supposed to do instead?

(10:56) 1. Your own hard work

(11:20) 2. Advice from experts

(12:10) 3. Support from community

(13:09) Final thoughts

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
December 18th, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5zzbzbYZcocoLnLif/there-is-no-sorting-hat-in-ea

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.