I fully agree! It's certainly possible to have a lot of impact if your skills are average! And any amount of impact matters by definition. I suspect that it doesn't always seem like it because people tend to try to have impact in only the more established, direct ways. Or because some average-skilled people don't want to acknowledge that others are more suited for certain projects. I like the framework introduced by Ryan Carey and Tegan McCaslin  here. One of the steps is "Get humble: Amplify others’ impact from a more junior role."

I also like to think of EA (and life in general) as a video game with varying difficulty levels, and if your skills are only average (or you suffer from mental health issues more so than others), you're playing at a higher level of difficulty and you can't expect to earn the same amount of (non-adjusted) points. Upwards comparisons don't make sense for that reason! 

Being judgey toward oneself or others for being only able to contribute an average or below average amount is of course bad.  EA should  be about making the most efficient use of the resources (money, talent, etc.) that you have.  Any other attitude is plainly self-defeating.

I'm not sure how much I agree with the premise that only the top 1% of a field have a major impact though. I think we should all be humble about how much we really know about the influence we have. There are so many unknowns that it is possible that the "biggest impact" interventions will backfire spectacularly. Also, in some fields , the most prestigious positions (professors at R1 universities) are not always the same as the most influential (often in private industry or government).  The most talented people usually go for prestige over influence.  Similarly,  not-particularly talented people might find high degrees of influence in unexpected places. For example, mobilizing your local government to make a positive change can be achievable for many people who don't have any extraordinary skills and can be a catalyst for more widespread change.

Here are two posts from Wei Dai, discussing the case for some things in this vicinity (renormalizing in light of the opportunities):

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ea8pt2dsrS6D4P54F/shut-up-and-divide

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BNbxueXEcm6dCkDuk/is-the-potential-astronomical-waste-in-our-universe-too

Thanks for posting this -- I think this might be a pretty big issue and I'm glad you've had success helping reduce this misconception by talking to people!

As for explanations as to why it is happening, I wonder if in addition to what you said, it could be that because EA emphasises comparing impact between different interventions/careers etc. so heavily, people just get in a really compare-y mindset, and end up accidentally thinking that comparing well to other interventions is itself what matters, instead of just having more impact. I think improved messaging could help.

Individuals in common (or "average") roles can also make having an impact seem to be more accessible — and a more-compelling moral necessity — to others who have typical, or even outstanding, resources to make a difference.

For example, the Washington Post noted that this waiter's and part-time teacher's financial support of low-income students in Ghana inspired both his friends and wealthy  members at the country club where he works to also donate. While bed nets or other investments may be higher value from an EA perspective, this is still an interesting case study of an average-income person (from a U.S. perspective) having impact well beyond his own professional work or ETG capacity:

To help supplement his teaching salary, Quarcoo was working part time as a waiter at Woodmont Country Club, an exclusive golf and tennis club where initial membership costs $80,000.

When some of the members learned about his efforts to help students in Ghana, they asked if they could chip in, said Quarcoo, who has worked at the country club since 1975. He also is a part-time substitute teacher in Montgomery County.

“I have never asked for donations, but people are generous and wanted to help,” he said. “A member would say, ‘Hey, Sam, next time you go to Ghana, let me know. I will try to help you.’ By word of mouth, it took off from there.”

Quarcoo’s humble nature and desire to help is contagious at the country club, said Adrienne Maman, a donor who met him about 35 years ago when he waited on her family’s table.

“His heart is right in front of you — you can see his soul when you meet him,” said Maman, 67, who lives in Chevy Chase, Md.

“Sam is a genuine person who just took it upon himself to help these schools,” she added. “Single-handedly, he worked on his own for many years until people slowly began to find out. He has never wanted anything for himself — everything he does is for the children of Ghana.”

Even though Quarcoo has been furloughed from waiting tables since March because of the coronavirus pandemic, club members still donated $19,000 to his efforts this year, he said. The funds were used to buy supplies for nearly 2,000 students.

I think I basically agree with you here. I don't have much to say by way of positive proposals, but maybe this blog post is helpful: http://mindingourway.com/the-value-of-a-life/ Basically, the value of a life should be measured in stars (or something even bigger!), even though the price of a life should be measured in dollars or work-hours. Thus if you do something impactful but less-than-maximally impactful, you should still feel proud, because e.g. the life you contributed to saving is immensely, astronomically valuable.

Thanks for bringing this up. I've been mulling on this for a while and might write something myself. A couple of thoughts.

If you discover you could be doing a lot more good than you currently are, you could have (at least) two reactions: disappointment that you haven't been doing more in the past and/or excitement that you could do better in the future. Both of these perspectives are valid and it seems you could focus on either one. 

For those who, like me, tend to find it quite easy to be disappointed with and hard on themselves, I might help to think "well, the past has happened. There's nothing you can do about that now. So let's look to the future."

The title of this post made me think you were going to talk about something else, which is whether those who aren't in the top 1% of a given field (I suppose this most naturally applies in academia) have very little impact. I don't know if this is true - it's certainly the sort of thing people believe, but it might just be folk wisdom. 

It does strike me as true that the people at the top of a field have a disproportionate share of the impact. 

What does that imply you should do if you're not in the top 1% and what to do the most good? Well, maybe you should keep going in your field but maybe you should switch. Depends on context.

A totally separate question is how you should feel if you aren't one of those people having a huge impact.

I take it I should be trying to do the most good I can do,  emphasis on the 'I'. I can't be anyone else, so it's irrelevant, in some important sense, whether or not others do more (or less). The right comparison is between how much you do in your actual life compared to the other lives you could have led. The important bit is that I am trying my best.  Nothing more can be asked because nothing more can be given. 

Random thought related to activities that require little skill but feel meaningful and arguably contribute to the broad project of EA: I sometimes find myself wondering how I can be one among at best a handful of people who publicly celebrate and cheer for some EA-related work or project. For example a couple of months ago I was part of a small audience for a public talk by an AI researcher who shared advice and talked about her work. The talk itself was interesting and useful for me, but it also felt really meaningful and positive to spend some thoughts and emotions just celebrating her work, feeling grateful that there’s one more person with altruistic intentions and the competence to do difficult things, and me being able to radiate some positivity and gratitude in her general direction. I have the impression that we would be an even nicer community if we did more of this and that simply doing this is already a meaningful and noteworthy contribution.

ETA: Thanks a lot for writing this, Fabienne. I relate a lot to experiencing drops in self-worth because of comparisons with people that in expectation are able to have much more positive impact than I, and also know of others who experience the same, which as you say is really unfortunate.

I second that this is a problem exacerbated by 80,000 hours. For example, I used to work in biomedical research, and 80,000 hours recommends a career path that involves getting a PhD at a top school. I did my PhD in India, which severely limits my career capital. Eventually, I decided to leave research and move to data science to ETG. To be clear, there were other factors involved and I think it's likely that 80,000 hours is correct that it's only worth being in academic research if you are in the top 0.1%. But it is strangely discouraging nonetheless

Thanks for this post; I do think a lot of EAs would benefit from reading this (or hearing similar ideas).

Michelle Hutchinson's post on Keeping Absolutes in Mind also nicely makes similar points.

And Choosing the Zero Point makes interesting points that I seem to recall are tangentially relevant.

those who are in fact excellent at something but who think of themselves as average. There seem to be a lot of people like this in EA.

Yeah, that seems true to me as well. I imagine such people, or people trying to help such people, might benefit from this post (though I haven't read it yet myself): Countering imposter syndrome. And there's also this lightning talk on imposter syndrome in EA.

I wrote about something similar about a year ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Z94vr6ighvDBXmrRC/illegible-impact-is-still-impact

to have an impact you need to be among the 0.1%-1% best in your field.

This LessWrong post makes an interesting point about 'exploiting dimensionality' to have an impact. 

For example (using the top comment on the post), you may not be the best at AI Safety and you may not be the best YouTuber, but if you combine the two and become an AI Safety Youtuber you may well be one of the best at that and have very high impact! (EDIT: I'd recommend people read the post as there's a bit more too it than this and it's very interesting).

That's a bit of an aside from your point though. I completely agree we need to counter the despair that people feel at not having unusually high impact - it's not helpful at all.

Thanks for writing this, it was really enjoyable to read and I don't see very many short posts like this on the forum.

I agree with most of the points made in this article and I have come across people who have recently come across EA who have had similar reactions to the first paragraph.

I do think that there is a set of people for which the 'vast differences in the goodness of different choices' insight (which can lead to this problem of not feeling like you are doing the maximally good thing) is still very valuable. I don't think this post argues against this but there is probably a trade-off between stressing this point and not making people bad that the thing they are doing may not be maximally good.