Increasing the pool of people with outstanding accomplishments
In How can Cognito Mentoring do the most good? I included a section on our potential social value. I want to flesh out what we hope to achieve.
Consider the following people:
Scott Alexander. One of Less Wrong’s major contributors, and writes Slate Star Codex. His articles regularly get hundreds of Facebook shares.
Bryan Caplan. GMU economist, blogger at EconLog, inspired the creation of Open Borders.
Alex K Chen. A Quora celebrity who has asked 20k+ questions and written ~2k answers. One of our advisees reported to changing his major based on some of Alex’s Quora answers.
Paul Christiano. Shifted away from doing pure math and theoretical computer science exclusively, and has played a major role in the effective altruist community, doing research for GiveWell, MIRI and 80,000 Hours, and is involved in a miscellany of other related projects.
Anton Geraschenko, Scott Morrison and David Zureick-Brown. They started MathOverflow, one of the first and largest online communities for academic researchers to discuss research-level questions.
Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky. Started GiveWell, which moved ~$17 million to its recommended charities last year, with the money moved growing exponentially over time.
David Jay. Founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network which has 70k registered members.
Paul Niehaus. An UCSD economist who founded GiveDirectly. GiveDirectly appears to be much more cost-effective than most charities that work in the developing world. It’s one of GiveWell’s top recommended charities, and is perhaps the first organization of its kind.
Richard Rusczyk. Founded Art of Problem Solving, which offers ~50 classes at a given time for high potential math students, and which hosts forums that have 144k registered users.
Peter Singer. A philosopher who may be the most pivotal figure behind the animal welfare movement and the effective altruism movement.
Ted Suzman. Cofounded Graffiti Labs while in college, the first product of which has over 1.5 million monthly users, and is earning to give.
Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started MIRI, which could appreciably reduce the risk of extinction from artificial intelligence. He started Less Wrong, which has 8+ million page views per year, has given rise to communities around the world, and which people have described as substantially improving their rationality. He’s writing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (which has high consumptive value and which has raised awareness of MIRI and principles of rationality).
Some of these accomplishments are more impressive than others, but all of them are impressive, and most of the people listed are quite young, and will plausible do more impressive things along similar lines as they get older.
Some common threads that I see in these people are:
They’ve all taken an unconventional path, doing something that they would not have done if they were making their decisions by mirroring the behavior of the people around them.
They’ve contributed much more than have people of their ability level who take more conventional paths. In some cases, the factor by which the value of their activities has increased is perhaps ~2x, in others it may be more like ~100x.
Unconventionality isn’t necessarily a path to success, and there are plenty of people who adopt unconventional paths and don’t get much done at all, but when executed well, it’s possible to pursue an unconventional path with relatively little risk and high potential upside.
We think that we can enable more people to engage in activities like the ones above. Many of those who are well-suited to them are already engaged in them. But there are others who have most of the relevant traits for whom there are only one or two limiting factors. Some ways in which we think that we can remove the limiting factors are as follows
By connecting people with better learning resources and raising awareness of the benefits of learning particular subjects, we can help them pick up relevant subject matter knowledge.
By encouraging meta-cognition, we can help people become more goal-oriented, recognizing when their life aspirations may be better served by departing from conventional routes.
By raising awareness of the sorts of impactful side projects and entrepreneurial efforts that others can engaged in, we can help them get into the mindset of seeing opportunities, and judging when they’re promising.
Through networking, we can help our advisees find collaborators.
According to student feedback we’ve had some success on the first two fronts. We’re continuing such efforts, and are in the process of working on the latter two.
By moving people in the directions suggested above, we hope to tip more people into the high achieving pool that has the above as representative members. We expect that we can enable an average of one additional person per year to get into this achievement range, with the benefits accruing throughout their lives.
Concerning the feasibility of this: The number of people with the requisite traits is not very small. As above, the people on the list have in some cases achieved far out of proportion with their ability, so there are a fair number of people of the same ability level who don’t. So far we’ve had a number of advisees who probably have similar characteristics to people on the list above at the same age. So it’s not necessary to influence a huge number of people to succeed (though we’re casting as wide a net as possible.)
Assuming the estimate here is correct, we get a lower bound on the social value generated by Cognito Mentoring. We have other sources of social value, which we touched on in our earlier post and might elaborate in later posts.
I think there are 2 issues. First, you’re focusing on visible achievements. If some person at big company X streamlined Process Y by Z amount, they could be contributing dramatically to that company, and depending on that company their contribution could be passed on in a way that positively impacts society by a large amount. But by the nature of their work they will remain largely anonymous. In other words, I think there’s some bias in your judgment of impact.
Second, it’s pretty easy to pick out the thread of unconventionality you’ve favored with your examples: Founders of non-profits and bloggers or other successful mass communicators. You can encourage either of these by respectively:
Encouraging dedication to a nonprofit and fostering an understanding of the basics of managing and growing an organization dedicated to a particular cause (Which is fairly distinct from entrepreneurship in general, but with some overlap).
Focusing on writing and communication and marketing skills. Encourage your students to start a blog or get active on some social media or forums. Get them to focus on their communication skills and hone them with deliberate practice. Give them the basic tools to get at least some exposure (I also think that writing a few articles that get a hundred upvotes or shares would be a tremendously happy accomplishment for the average high-schooler/middle-schooler, so consider it from that perspective too).
Move them from thinking of public-facing efforts as something other people do to thinking of them as something they themselves can easily do. Show them how enough elbow grease can yield modest yet targeted responses (that is, get them to think of public-facing efforts in a slow-growth context, not a viral lottery context).
Sure, those are the ones that I know about :-)
Yes, though it seems harder to tell whether one can get into such a position ahead of time, with less transparency.
We’re interested in impact in other contexts as well, but we know less about the subject. We’re interested in learning more.
What are some other categories? (I can think of others, like tech entrepreneurship, but I’m wondering if there are ones that haven’t occurred to me.)
Yes, these are good suggestions. The latter two are things that we’ve been thinking about, but the first one hadn’t yet occurred to me.
I’d hesitate to call your estimate of the social value you’ll generate a lower bound, as you do, if you’re not sure about the value of the invisible/conventional work you might be persuading people away from. It seems like most of what you’re doing and planning should give a boost to any kind of achievement, but I get the sense that much of the Effective Altruist community underestimates the marginal impact of an exceptional person with a strategic mindset and altruistic leanings in a “conventional” career like engineering, management, engineering/management consulting, industrial or basic research, medicine (and likely law and others, though I have less of an idea there). (You don’t seem to rely on it, but I especially don’t think replaceability is the knockdown argument many people treat it as here.)
For conventional careers, income is a proxy to social value of work, and this serves as a base-line. I think that most people with an innovative flair can do better than this. But there may be opportunities to systematically contribute outsized impact relative to earnings – I’d very much appreciate pointers to places where we can learn more about this subject.
We think that there are people who:
Could be using their spare time in much more impactful ways (e.g. writing for the public rather than just for a few friends)
End up in average paying corporate and academic jobs that don’t have an outsized impact relative to earnings
who we can persuade to good effect.
That’s our hope.
Yes, there are major problems with the replaceability argument in full generality.
Even if one is replaceable, if one is replaced, that will divert someone else from something else that’s valuable (in expectation) to fill the role, which will divert someone else from something else that’s valuable (in expectation) to fill the role, etc.
It’s easy to tell ahead of time that you can make an impact as a blogger or a startup founder or a non-profit leader? Hardly—those are all high-risk endeavors, especially in the digital domain: many smart bloggers with something great to say never reach a large audience; many even fail to a modest but interested audience.
Stability and consistency are the rewards of traditional, ordinary careers; and for many people those are excellent virtues. Make sure your clients understand this. Entrepreneurship, in particular, requires a certain degree of hubris. Society as a whole gains from that hubris, and in selected sectors and times and places the would-be entrepreneurs gain in expectation, but “How would I handle failure” should be a question that anyone embarking on such a path should sincerely ask themselves first”.
Non-tech entrepreneurship. And in the domain of non-profits, locally-oriented ones. They can’t impact as many people, but impact is often greater and more immediate, and your impact is more immediately visible to yourself. For some people being able to closely observe their own impact is very motivating.
In general, however, at a young age foundational skills and opening their minds are more important than any particular direction (though a particular cause/direction can be very motivating). Show people who think academics or hard sciences are the obvious path that all sorts of “soft skills” are actually very valuable even in their presumptive careers, but can also open their eyes to other paths.
Whatever they seem to have closed their mind to without proper consideration, that’s what you can target for each individual.
I don’t have subject matter knowledge (and hope to learn more) but intuitively having an outsized impact in a corporate setting seems more conjunctive, with being in the right place at the right time playing more of a role. Can you give some examples of people who have had outsized impacts in corporate settings, and how they did what they did?
Note that many of the people on my list have done what they’ve done on their spare time, while maintaining a stable job. We do raise awareness of the risks to clients who are thinking of deviating from conventional paths. See, for example, Stay mainstream until you have demonstrated success doing unusual stuff.
Yes, these are good examples. We’ve been thinking about non-tech entrepreneurship; have thought less about locally-oriented non-profits. Can you give an example of a locally-oriented nonprofit that’s had an outsized impact? (Not a rhetorical question.)
We encourage our advisees to develop broad knowledge; see for example our Core reading recommendations.
This is in line with what we’re doing; we’re working to communicate the pros and cons of embarking on different paths. For some advisees this may nudge them in less impactful directions, but we expect the overall trend to be in the direction of more impact, because of people’s desire to make a difference.
Okay, good. It seemed like I was picking up a bit of silicon-valley-style-impact centrism, and I leapt on it maybe more than I should have.
Stay mainstream until you’ve demonstrated success in the unconventional is advice I’ve heard from many successful heterodox academics, so I absolutely believe it’s excellent advice.
Harlem childrens’ fund is a very local charity. It’s promoting its ideas globally, but the actual work is going on locally. Any other sort of individual outreach/social-work-like charity tends to be local (think homeless shelter’s women’s shelters, community centers, etc). Many legal aid organizations are fairly local, or are highly autonomous regional branches of national organizations. A lot of aid can only legitimately be delivered face-to-face (even if many of these organizations could benefit from digital technologies, they will still remain face-to-face at their core).
In corporate roles, there’s many ways to make an impact, especially if your organization is fairly functional. If you’re one of the better salespeople in your org, multiply your impact by mentoring others. If you’re in a functional unit serving others inside your business, you probably have more requests than you could satisfy in a lifetime. Figure out which ones will make the most impact for the least effort. I’m not really talking about outsize impact, I’m just talking about better-than-average. In a low risk environment.
Oh yes! I think that expanding people’s imagination of what’s possible.. is really a powerful way of creating impact. To me, there’s honestly no compliment better than someone telling me that I expanded their imagination of what’s possible.. that I’ve changed them. Especially if I didn’t specifically give them advice. I simply motivated them by doing things differently than everyone else, and showing that it’s something that anyone [1] can do, not restricted to the arcane domains of some esoteric genius. It’s like basically changing their “openness to experience”. In general, I do believe that the world would be “better” if more people had higher levels of “openness to experience”.
In fact, it’s also a powerful antidote against depression (and against people going into narrow high people-to-problems ratio fields where unhappiness tends to be very high). Sometimes I think that “lack of imagination” is a contributing factor to many cases of depression (not a causative one, and there are obviously genetic factors as well). But in my case.. I just really really wish that I knew of a world beyond that of school/academia, and that there are people I can respect who aren’t in academia! (sadly, the experience of being in school made me elitist in many ways, which only further increased my neuroticism). But I didn’t know that there were alternative paths that I could still be happy with when I was young (which led me to make some poor decisions in college).
There’s just so much stress and depression.. so much people who are constantly comparing themselves against each other in some imaginary competition, all for the sake of signalling. So much of it completely unnecessary. And it’s frustrating to see it. I think Peter Thiel summarizes it so well here: http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-4-notes-essay
I just think.. if we could maybe convince people to care more about making impact rather than being so obsessive about status… then so much more value can be produced.. And there would be so much less stress, and wasted years.
[1] I’m using the term lightly, but by “anyone” I mean anyone in the top 10% of intelligence, which is still quite a broad range.
Also, by spreading the word about a people who beat the odds, like a neuroscience professor who got into a top grad school with a 2.5 GPA, who is now an assistant professor who is now a rising star).. Seriously.. That type of anecdote is incredibly inspiring for anyone.
Other than Peter Singer and maybe Givewell, are any of these accomplishments really that outstanding? When there are numbers given, the numbers are unimpressive (144k/70k users is tiny—and why do I care how many questions someone’s asked on a forum website?), and when there aren’t, the accomplishments are pretty questionable.
When you say:
...without definiting “contributed” or “value” according to any objective metric, the first thing I assume is that you’re trying to handwave.
Before continuing this project, I would try to answer the following questions:
What is an objective, quantifiable metric that represents your value proposition?
What existing pain point are you hoping to address?
What do you bring to the table that allows you to address this pain point better than the existing solutions?
Why are you alone the people that can deliver the above?
Then, figure out what you’re doing, validate that your idea actualy works, and then come back.
Thanks for the comment.
Some people would disagree with your singling out Singer and GiveWell as standing out above the others.
As I said, most of the people involved are quite young, and can be expected to contribute more value over time.
If 144k people are willing to pay $10 on average for lifetime membership that generates $1.4 million.
Art of Problem Solving probably has revenue at least $2 million / year, is probably far from market saturation, and has positive externalities on account of being educational.
Many of the things listed are side projects, not full-time employment.
I’m not claiming that the value in a given case is more than 2x.
One can’t hope to predict things with such precision ahead of time, and even afterward it’s often not possible to quantify things. One has to rely on more informal measures.
I think I address this in my original post starting with “But there are others who have most of the relevant traits for whom there are only one or two limiting factors.”
The answer to this could be very long, depending on how broadly one defines “existing solutions.” Could you give a concrete example or two of existing entities that you think provide solutions?
We’re not the only people who can deliver the above, and don’t need to be for it to be a worthwhile endeavor – it suffices for us to be the only people who are actually working on it.
There are many entities that have produced relevant materials (e.g. offering information on specific careers), but we don’t know of others who are taking a holistic approach, for example presenting career information about earnings, social value contributed, work-life balance, background preparation required and exit options in juxtaposition across different careers.
It really seems like when you say “outstanding people” you’re really saying:
“People who have accomplished a lot in the world of rationality or effective altruism.”
I could name off the top of my head half a dozen younger people who have blogs that get more facebook shares than slate star codex, have made more money than $1.4 million dollars, or have a bigger audience than Peter Singer. Not to mention other outstanding accomplishments (such as olympic athletes), which you didn’t seem to touch on at all.
By choosing these people as your examples, you’re indicating an implicit social bias towards your recommendations and values, which is not at all clear from the copy on your website.
My choice of examples is partially driven by who happens to be most salient to me.
My list wasn’t intended to be a list of people with the most impressive accomplishments: I intentionally omitted extreme outliers because there’s a strong prior against being able to enable someone to become one.
When I referred to impressive/outstanding accomplishments, I did have social value in mind specifically.
I’m indifferent as to whether the social value is added through involvement with rationality or effective altruism, or through other channels.
My main point being, if you’re going to push people towards specific careers and away from others for your own ideological reasons, that should really be VERY clear in the copy on your website. Same as if a fundamentalist Christian group was offering free consulting on family planning.
To date, our focus has been on producing a holistic package of information to help our advisees attain life satisfaction. The vast majority of the pages that we’ve produced are not about topics directly related to effective altruism.
A number of our advisees have explicitly expressed interest in doing something socially valuable. We’re working to advise them accordingly. Our estimate of our potential impact as described in the original post is based on people in this reference class.
We’re committed to providing unbiased information, and present the pros and cons of all career options under consideration irrespective of their social value.
Nothing wrong with that. MattG is not accusing you, but you are defending (note: defending is a sign of weakness). I recommend that you agree on MattGs point. It is not wrong. It is an improvement suggestion and would make you appear more humble if followed.
Added: I think this is the reason he is upvoted and you are not.
Being an olympic athletes doesn’t prdocue added social value. It’s very much a zero sum game.
You’re right, but adding social value is very different from having an outstanding accomplishment.
My point is, if the point of their organization is to push people towards specific careers due to a specific ideology (which it’s clear based on this list is the case), that should be VERY clear in their marketing copy.
People are willing to pay lots of money to watch Olympic athletes, so by economists’ definition of value they do provide lots of it.
It’s a very crowded market. I don’t think that the value that people perceive rsises significantly if a new athlete that a tiny bit better than the existing ones comes along.
Well, for Olympic athletes proper, who are often amateurs or semi-professionals, this may be true, but for professional athletes who compete in major sports such as association football or basketball, this doesn’t seem to be the case: top-level athletes are able to command salaries in the order of $1M - $10M per year. Assuming the market isn’t grossly inefficient, this implies that there are very few people in the world who can perform these jobs delivering the same level of performance, despite the high demand. Thus, any single top-level athlete in these sports probably produces a significant amount of economic value.
Top-level basketball players get payed based on their skill in comparision to other basketball players.
An action that increaes the average skill level of all basketball players a bit won’t increase the amount of money that basketball fans are willing to pay for watching basketball games.
This means you will lie to yourselves to get whatever answer you want. You should not expect anyone to help you, nor should you expect to succeed.
This is a side-note, but I find it off-putting when people use “impressive” when they want something that’s like “awesome” but more formal-sounding. (This usage seems to be fairly common in the EA community, for some reason.) I’m sure that you understand the difference between the two, and that you actually terminally care about people doing awesome things, not manufacturing resume items, but to a casual reader it might sound like the latter.
Synonym brainstorming:
awesome: useful to humanity, value-generating, vital, wonderful, excellent, marvelous
impressive: radical, sui generis, irreplaceable, important, game-changing, mind-changing
Thanks, it actually hadn’t occurred to me that it might be read that way.
Edit: Changed “impressive” in title to “outstanding.”
“outstanding” still has some of the same connotations to me, although less so. But I may be in the minority here.
Thanks again. I’ll have to think about how we might best frame it.
Probably, compared to the average. What percentile of “people of their ability level” are you aiming for?
I don’t have a concrete percentile in mind (in particular, I don’t know the distribution of impact as a function of percentile). Why do you want to know the percentile?
Just wondering how you plan to measure success.
I tried to operationalize it with the list of people – it seems easier to tell if someone is “like somebody on the list” than it is to tell if someone is at a given percentile. Does the “like somebody on the list” operationalization seem insufficiently specific?
I suppose it’s a start. Not sure how you would tell if someone reached that likeness level.
I don’t understand your question?
Without good ways to overcome selection bias, it is unclear that data like this can provide any evidence of outsized impact of unconventional approaches. I would expect a list of achievements as impressive as the above whether or not there was any correlation between the two.