Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization

First of all, thank you for the feedback! It's not always easy to solicit quality (and very thoroughly justified) feedback, so I really appreciate it.

Before diving into the specifics, I'll say that on the one hand - the name could definitely change if we keep getting feedback that it's suboptimal. That could be in a week or in a year or two, so the name isn't final in that sense.

On the other hand, we did run this name quite a few people (including some who aren’t familiar with EA). We tried (to the best of our ability) to receive honest feedback (like not telling people that this is something we're setting up or letting someone else solicit the feedback). Most of what you wrote came up, but rarely. And people seemed to feel positively about it. It's definitely possible that the feedback we got on it was still skewed positive, but it was much better for this name than for other options we tried.

Now, to dive into the specifics and my thoughts on them:

* The name doesn't make the function clear: I think this is a stylistic preference. I prefer having a name that's more memorable, when the function can be explained in a sentence or two right after it. I know the current norm for EA is to name orgs by stating their function in 2 or 3 words, but I think the vast majority of orgs (for profit and non-profit) choose a name that doesn't just plainly state what the org does. I will mention that, depending on context, what might appear is "Probably Good Career Advice", which is clearer (though still doesn't fully optimize for clarity).

* Good can mean quality and morality: Again, I liked that. We do mean it in both ways (the advice is both attempting to be as high quality as possibly and as high as possible in moral impact, but we are working under uncertainty in both parameters).

* Turning people off by giving the message that the product isn't good or that we're not ambitious in making it good: I pretty much fully agree with you on the analysis. I think this name reduces the risk of people expecting a level of certainty that we'll never reach (and is very commonly marketed in non-EA career advice) and increases the risk of people initially being turned off by perceived low quality or low effort.

I also like and agree with your "pitch" and that is more of less how I'm thinking about the issue.

Two relevant points on weighing this trade-off:

1. Currently, I'm more worried about setting too high expectations than the perception of low quality. Both because I think we can potentially cause more harm (people following advice with less thought than needed) and because I think there are other ways to signal high quality and very few ways to (effectively) lower people's perceived certainty in our advice.

2. Most people we ran the name by did catch on that the name was a little tongue-in-cheek in it's phrasing. This wasn't everyone, but the people who did see that - didn't think there was a signal of lower quality.

I do agree there's a risk there, but I see it as relatively small, especially if I'm assuming that most people will reach us through channels where they have supposedly heard something about us and aren't only aware of the name.

To summarize my thoughts:

I don't think it's a perfect name.

I like that it's a memorable phrase rather than a bland statement of what we do. I like that it's a little tongue-in-cheek and that it does a few things at the same time (two meaning or good, alluding the the uncertainty). I like that it put our uncertainty front and center.

I agree there's a risk of signaling low quality \ effort and that all of the things that I like could also be a net harm if I'm wrong (which isn't specifically unlikely).

We'll collect more feedback on the name and we'll change if it doesn't look good.

I want to briefly second (third?, nth?) this. I'm potentially pretty excited about more EA oriented career advice/coaching/mentoring from an EA perspective, but I think I'd feel kind of embarrassed about referring someone to an organisation called "Probably Good".

When I saw the title of this post I thought it was evaluating whether or not another career guidance organisation would be good or not, and concluding yes. I was pretty surprised to discover this was not the case. That confusion might be kind of funny to some people, I guess, but I don't think it bodes terribly well. In general I think jokey org names are a pretty bad idea.

The quality of this conversation is awesome!

I think Probably good is a great name. What are some other good names you have considered so far? Does anyone have alternative ideas ?

My first understanding of the name was something like "this is a website that will help me have a career that will probably have a good impact", where probably meant something like ~70%-ish. I thought this wasn’t very ambitious, but it also had something intriguing, so I felt curious to learn more.

I’d like my career to be (almost) guaranteed to have some good consequences. I think my odds of doing some good with my career if EA didn’t exist at all would be above 95%. (As many people interested in EA, I already wanted to do good when I discovered the movement.)

So I’d be even more interested in a website which can probably help me do even better than I would have done without its advice.

I’m not sure that “Probably better” would be a better name than “Probably good”. I feel like it preserves the modesty and the catchiness, while also making it sound a little more ambitious. It could also be in line with your experimental approach, trying to make the quality your advice better as you gain experience.

What do you think ? :)

That was also my first thought. My brain autocompleted something like "Probably good, but wouldn't be surprised if bad". I think I don't mind names being more or less informative much, though,  as long as the name is unique and sounds nice (though the EA standard seems to be more discriptive rather than less). 

(And thanks to the founders, I really would love seeing new orgs to cover what 80,000Hours doesn't!)

FWIW, I personally felt like: 

• The lack of examples is totally reasonable at this early stage
• It mostly seemed clear to me what this organisation's scope, aims, and differences from 80k would be
• The important uncertainties I'd have about the organisation's intended scope, aims, and differences from 80k were mostly already in their explicit Open Questions.
• There were some other uncertainties I had, which I raised in other comments. But that process itself seems like an example of why it's ok for the materials to have been fairly abstract at this stage; it's probably more efficient for the authors to (a) produce what they produced, post it publicly, have people ask about the specific confusing bits, and then provide clarity by answering those questions publicly, rather than (b) trying to guess by themselves what will and won't be clear to other people.
  • Then they can adjust their materials in light of public feedback and questions.
  • (It's often hard to guess what will be clear to other people when you yourself have lots of context on what you were thinking and why.)

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.

Great point Pablo.

I think the analogy to ImpactMatters is insightful and relevant, and indeed reaching a broader audience/scope (even at the cost of including less impactful career paths) is part of the justification for this work. I think the difference between inter-cause elasticity and intra-cause elasticity may be even larger when discussing careers, because in addition to people's priorities and values, many people will have education, experience and skills which make it less likely (or even desirable) that they move to a completely different cause area.

I do however also want to highlight that I think there are justifications for this view beyond just a numbers game. As we discuss in our overview and in our core principles, we think there are disagreements within EA that warrant some agnosticism and uncertainty. One example of this is the more empiricist view which focuses on measurable interventions and views speculative work that cannot be easily evaluated or validated skeptically, vs. the more hits-based approach which focuses on interventions that are less certain but are estimated to have orders of magnitude more impact in expectation. These views are (arguably) at the crux of comparisons between top cause areas that are a core part of the EA community (e.g. global poverty & health vs. existential risk mitigation). For many people working in both of these cause areas, we genuinely believe careers within their field are the most promising thing they could do.

Additionally, we not only believe in broader career advice is useful in optimizing the impact of those who would not choose top priority paths, but actually may lead to more people joining top priority paths in the focus areas of existing career orgs in the long run. As we mention in our overview and in our paths to impact, and based on our experience in career guidance so far, we believe that providing people answers to the questions they already care about, while discussing crucial considerations they might not think about often, is a great way to expose people to impact maximization principles. Our hope is that even if we care exclusively about top priority paths already researched by 80K and others, this organization will end up having a net positive effect on the number of people who pursue these paths. Whether this will be the case, of course, remains to be seen - but we intend on measuring and evaluating this question as one of our core questions moving forward.

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 :-)

For the sake of clarity I’ll restate what I think you meant:

We’re not discussing the risk of people taking less impactful career paths than they would have taken counterfactually because we existed (and otherwise they might have only known 80k for example). That is a risk we discuss in the document.

We’re talking specifically about “membership” in the EA community. That people who are less committed \ value aligned \ thoughtful in the way that EAs tend to be \ something else - would now join the community and dilute or erode the things we think are special (and really good) about our community.

Assuming this is what you meant, I'll write my general thoughts on it:

1. The extent to which this is a risk is very dependent on the strength of the two appearances "very" in your sentence "A career org that (1) was very broad in its focus, and/or very accepting of different views". While we’re still working out what the borders of our acceptance are (as I think Sella commented in response to your question on agnosticism), we’re not broadening our values or expectations to areas that are well outside the EA community. I don’t currently see a situation where we give advice or a recommendation that isn’t in line with the community in general. It’s worth noting that the scope and level of generality that the EA community engages with in most other interactions (EA Global, charity evaluation orgs, incubation programs, etc.) is much broader than 80K’s current focus. We see our work as matching that broader scope rather than expanding it, and so we don’t believe we’re changing where EA stands on this spectrum - simply applying it to the career space as well.

2. More importantly, even in cases where we could make a recommendation that (for examples) 80k wouldn’t stand behind - our methodology, values, rigor in analysis, etc. should definitely be in line with what currently exists, and is expected, in the community. I can’t promise we won’t reach different conclusions sometimes, but I won’t be “accepting” of people who reach those conclusions in shoddy ways.

3. This is a relatively general point, but it’s important and it mitigates a lot of our risks: In the next few months, we’re not planning to grow, do extensive reaching out, market or try to bring a lot of new people in. That’s explicitly because we want to create content and start working, do our best to evaluate the risks (with the help of the community) - and only start having a large impact once we’re more confident in the strength and direction of that impact.

In a sense (unless we fail pretty badly at evaluating in a few months) - we’re risking a very small harm of a small unknown org and potentially gaining the benefits that could be quite large if we do find that our impact looks good.

That's really interesting! There are probably quite a few different formats to do this sort of thing (one on ones with people facing the same dilemmas \ people that have faced it recently, bringing together groups of people who have similar situations, etc.)

I think some local groups are doing things like this, but it's definitely something we should think about as an option that can potentially be relatively low effort and (hopefully) high impact.

Hi Manuel, thanks for this comment. I think I agree with all your considerations listed here. I want to share some thoughts about this, but as you’ve mentioned - this is one of our open questions and so I don’t feel confident about either direction here.

First, we have indeed been giving general career coaching for people in Israel for several years now, so in a sense we are implementing your recommended path and are now moving onto the next phase of that plan. That being said, there still remain reasons to continue to narrow our scope even at this stage.

Second, you mention partnering with experts in the various cause areas to ensure accurate content - I completely agree with this, and wouldn’t dream of providing concrete career advice independently in fields I don’t have experience in. In the content we are writing right now we require interviewing at least 7 experts in the field to provide high-confidence advice, and at least 3 experts in the field even for articles we mark as low confidence (of which we warn people to be careful about). So it’s really important to me to clarify that none of the concrete career-specific advice we provide will be based exclusively on our own opinions or knowledge - even within the fields we do have experience in.

Finally, I think at least some of the issues you’ve (justifiably) raised are mitigated by the way we aim to provide this advice. As opposed to existing materials, which more confidently aim to provide answers to career-related questions, we have a larger emphasis on providing the tools for making that decision depending on your context. As community organizers, one of the things that pushed us to start this effort is the feeling that many people, who don’t happen to be from the (very few) countries that EA orgs focus on, have very little guidance and resources, while more and more is invested in optimizing the careers of those within those countries. We believe that doing highly focused work on Israel would not serve the community as well as providing guidance on what needs to be explored and figured out to apply EA career advice to your own context. As such, we want to provide recommendations on how to check for opportunities within the scope that’s relevant to you (e.g. country or skillset), rather than aiming to provide all the answers as final conclusions on our website. This applies most to our career guide, but also to specific career path profiles - where we want to first provide the main considerations one should look into, so that we provide valuable preliminary guidance for a wide range of people, rather than end-to-end analysis for fewer people.

The mitigations described above can be much better evaluated once we have some materials online, which will allow others to judge their implementation (and not only our aspirations). We plan on soliciting feedback from the community before we begin advocating for them in any meaningful way - hopefully that will help make these responses less abstract and still leave us time to collect feedback, consider it and try to optimize our scope and messaging.

Hi dglid, I agree with your comment. I think there is a lot of value by making career guidance more available to the masses, even without 80K personally being involved.

I see local groups as being the primary type of organization responsible for this type of work - making EA information accessible and personalized for new people and communities. We don’t see ourselves taking over that role. That being said, we are interested in being involved in the process. We know there’s a lot of interest in creating content / tools / support in the career guidance space, both because we’ve seen it in EA Globals and group organizers’ groups, and also because we are group organizers ourselves, and it’s this need that has set us on this path (originally in our own local group).

All of this is to say - I think working with and empowering local EA groups to provide these services is a great way to improve careers at scale, and would especially love any feedback, requests and comments from local group organizers or anyone else on what you believe would be most helpful to you in this area.

That sounds really cool!

I'll be happy to join! :-)

Thank you! Both for the thoughts and for the separation into different comments. It is much easier to keep track of everything and is appreciated :-)

I had a similar thought. Though a counterpoint is that feedback given here can be voted on and can be extensively discussed by others more easily (Google doc comment threads can get unwieldy). But that's only really relevant for substantive feedback, rather than e.g. typos.

If Omer and Sella want readers to see clean versions of the docs without comments/suggestions, they could make copies that do allow comments/suggestions, and then link to those copies from the top of the clean versions that people are initially directed to.

Hi Jack, thanks for the great question. 

In general, I don’t think there’s one best approach. Where we want to be on the education \ acceptance trade-off depends on the circumstances. It might be easiest to go over examples (including ones you gave) and give my thoughts on how they’re different.

First, I think the simplest case is the one you ended with. If someone doesn’t know what cause area they’re interested in and wants our help with cause prioritization, I think there aren’t many tradeoffs here - we’d strongly recommend relevant materials to allow them to make intelligent decisions on how to maximize their impact. 

Second, I want to refer to cases where someone is interested in cause areas that don’t seem plausibly compatible with EA, broadly defined. In this case we believe in tending towards the “educate” side of the spectrum (as you call it), though in our writing we still aim not to make it a prerequisite for engaging with our recommendations and advice. That being said, these nuances may be irrelevant in the short-term future (at least months, possibly more), as due to prioritization of content, we probably won’t have any content for cause areas that are not firmly within EA.

In the case where the deliberation is between EA cause areas (as is the case in your example) there are some nuances that will probably be more evident in our content even from day one (though may change over time). Our recommended process for choosing a career will involve engaging with important cause prioritization questions, including who deserves moral concern (e.g. those far from us geographically, non-human animals, and those in the long term future). Within more specific content, e.g. specific career path profiles, we intend to refer to these considerations but not try and force people to engage with them. If I take your global health example, in a career path profile about development economics we would highlight that one of the disadvantages of this path is that it is mainly promising from a near-term perspective and unclear from a long-term perspective, with links to relevant materials. That being said, someone who has decided they’re interested in global health, doesn’t follow our recommended process for choosing a career, and navigates directly to global health-related careers will primarily be reading content related to this cause area (and not material on whether this is the top cause area). Our approach to 1:1 consultation is similar - our top recommendation is for people to engage with relevant materials, but we are willing to assist people with more narrow questions if this is what they’re interested in (though, much like the non-EA case, we expect to be in over-demand in the foreseeable future, and may in practice prioritize those who are pursuing all avenues to increasing their impact). 

Hope this provides at least some clarity, and let me know if you have other questions.

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.

Hi Michael, as you mention - the issue of accurately defining our scope is still an important open question to us. I’m happy to share our current thinking about this, but we expect this thinking to evolve as we collect feedback and gain some more hands-on experience.

I think it’s worth making a distinction between two versions of this question. The first is the longer-term question of what is the set of all cause areas that should be within scope for this work. That’s a difficult question. At the moment, we’re happy to use the diversity of views meaningfully held in the EA community as a reasonable proxy - i.e. if there’s a non-negligible portion of EAs that believe a certain cause area is promising we think that’s worth investigating. As such, all three of the examples you mention would be potentially in-scope in my view. This is not, in and of itself, a cohesive and well-defined scope, and as I mentioned, it is likely to change. But I hope this gives at least an idea of the type of scope we’re thinking of.

The second version of this question is what we actually intend to work on in the upcoming months, given that we are just getting started and we are still constrained in time and resources. This question will dominate our actual decisions for the foreseeable future. Within the large scope mentioned above, we want to initially focus on areas based on two criteria: First, unmet needs within the EA community, and second, cause areas that are easier to evaluate. Both of these are very weak signals for where we want to focus long-term, but drastically influence how quickly we can experiment, evaluate whether we can provide significant value, and start answering some of our open questions. As a concrete example, we believe the Global Health & Development fits this bill quite well, and so at least part of our first career paths will be in this space. 

I hope this helps clarify some of these questions. I apologize if there are more open questions here than answers - it’s just really important to us to experiment first and make long-term decisions about priorities and scope afterwards rather than the other way around.

Thanks!

The intended meaning was that EA materials directed at this need specifically don’t exist. But I think you’re correct and that this wasn’t clear. I also like your version better, so will be updating the doc accordingly. Thank you!

I agree that the statement needs rewording and agree with your re-write for factual correctness. However, I think the case for this is really strong, and many of the reasons for this aren't captured in the original document/what you've said above: 

• The lack of careers advice content is a very big and important gap in the existing resources - based on my own research amongst group organisers & interviews with members of the EA community, it's very rare to find 1) good career advice in general, and  2) apples to apples/consistent comparisons of different jobs, causes etc.
  • It's really hard for individuals to do this research, making it less likely for individuals to do this themselves. It seems really valuable to give people at least a starting point to make it easier to do more research & be more knowledgeable (I think detailed practical knowledge is especially important, and is what is missing currently, where existing content is not targeted at people seriously considering these paths)
  • Although its feasible to get guidance from other sources as you mention, it requires a  lot of (collective) community resources, and could be harder for the person to parse through the information. I don't think this is a very efficient
• Even thought some topics have a lot of content, I think "translating" non-EA to EA content is very valuable. It can be difficult for people to know how to parse outside resources, or where to begin, or have the time to do this. This is especially important for getting people to consider areas outside their current expertise. 
  • For example, it's hard to know, despite the vast literature on climate change, what could be some of the effective things to do within that cause area, or how to compare climate change with scientific progress if you don't have a background knowledge of one or the other. 
• In general, having a well-organized and easy to navigate set of resources that follow a consistent research apporach or style (like 80K's articles) will save a lot of collective time and be a valuable resource for movement builders. 

The guide we're working on is indeed similar in some aspects to 80k's old guide.

We're still working on it (and are at relatively early stages) so none of this is very certain but I expect that:

* The guide will differ in our framework for thinking about it (so things like the thought process and steps you go through to make a decision).

* I expect the guide will differ on some specific areas where we are more agnostic than 80k, but won't differ on most.

* Specifically, 80k have updated their 2017 guide to focus on longtermism more than it originally did. That would be a specific area where we will differ.

* Quite sure we pretty much agree on a lot of the meta-considerations (things like "it's a very important decision and is worth a lot of consideration" or "for most people, making an effort to expand the scope of the search is worthwhile").

Regarding why we're doing this: Even if this was 80k's current guide, I'd think a second general viewpoint on how to approach career decisions would be valuable to a lot of people. Given that 80k consider this their "older" guide, I really think it would be helpful to have another one.

Also (and probably more importantly), a general guide is just a really useful way to put the most important general information that we think is necessary in one place. There's a lot of things we think are important that fit very well into this format.