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).
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.
Yes, though it seems harder to tell whether one can get into such a position ahead of time, with less transparency.
In other words, I think there’s some bias in your judgment of impact.
We’re interested in impact in other contexts as well, but we know less about the subject. We’re interested in learning more.
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.
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.)
You can encourage either of these by respectively:
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.
We’re interested in impact in other contexts as well, but we know less about the subject. We’re interested in learning more.
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.)
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
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.
It seems like most of what you’re doing and planning should give a boost to any kind of achievement,
That’s our hope.
(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.)
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.
Yes, though it seems harder to tell whether one can get into such a position ahead of time, with less transparency.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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”.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
Whatever they seem to have closed their mind to without proper consideration, that’s what you can target for each individual.
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.
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.
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).
Just look at high school, which, for Stanford students and the like, was not a model of perfect competition. It probably looked more like extreme asymmetric warfare; it was machine guns versus bows and arrows. No doubt that’s fun for the top students. But then you get to college and the competition amps up. Even more so during grad school. Things in the professional world are often worst of all; at every level, people are just competing with each other to get ahead. This is tricky to talk about. We have a pervasive ideology that intense, perfect competition makes the best world. But in many ways that’s deeply problematic.
One problem with fierce competition is that it’s demoralizing. Top high school students who arrive at elite universities quickly find out that the competitive bar has been raised. But instead of questioning the existence of the bar, they tend to try to compete their way higher. That is costly. Universities deal with this problem in different ways. Princeton deals with it through enormous amounts of alcohol, which presumably helps blunt the edges a bit. Yale blunts the pain through eccentricity by encouraging people to pursue extremely esoteric humanities studies. Harvard—most bizarrely of all—sends its students into the eye of the hurricane. Everyone just tries to compete even more. The rationalization is that it’s actually inspiring to be repeatedly beaten by all these high-caliber people. We should question whether that’s right.
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.
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.