High School Seniors React to 80k Advice

johnburidan

59

I really enjoyed this post. I personally feel as though I don't understand our users enough or have detailed enough models of how they are likely to react to our content, and so I appreciate write-ups like this.

Lumpyproletariat

4y

47

This should probably be its own essay at some point, but here's the short and sloppy version:

Against these objections is the material in the essay itself. Close reading is hard.

I think this line touches on something which is important to understand. My college required me to take an English class, and I took it online last summer. This gave me the opportunity to read almost every essay and scrap of writing produced by the thirty-odd people of the class in the context of writing their thoughts in response to essays about better writing, a lovely bit of recursion which I found enlightening. I think I have a better model now of how slightly-above-average (if they were worse they wouldn't be in college, if they were better they'd have skipped the class) people engage with the written word.

The teacher linked an essay begging new college students not to worry about the pointless things high schoolers are graded on, and instead focus on writing compellingly--those pointless things were enumerated, by way of example. This essay was quite scathing, strident! Several students replied by saying that while they'd forgotten those pointless rules they were glad for the reminder--expressed concern that they hadn't conformed to the rules in their introductory essays, and vowed to obey them in the future.

This wasn't an isolated occurrence; there were always people who read something and got exactly the opposite of the author's point. Those who didn't got a point utterly removed, that I'd have to dig through the essay to see what line they'd misread if I wanted to understand them. People who got from the essay what the instructor hoped the class would were maybe a tenth of the total (myself not among them; I learned a lot in that class, but nothing the teacher had set out to teach).

When asked to choose which of three works expressed a particular point best--there was a personal essay, an analytic essay, and an inane video--the class overwhelmingly preferred the video. Detailing why, they said that they could hear inflection and tone in the video, that they didn't have to struggle with individual words and lose their place in the sentence, that they didn't have to reread things to understand what was being said.

My conclusion is that if something is expressed only in writing it cannot reach the absolute majority of the population, any more than a particularly well-written verse in French can permeate the Anglosphere. I think that in many cases where highly literate people think they've identified an important problem, they've instead failed to diagnose illiteracy. (I watched the course instructor struggle with that; they didn't seem any more able to understand that the class couldn't understand them than the class was able to understand them. They were always engaging with them on a level which implied they didn't realize the vast gulf of inferential distance.)

Mart_Korz

4y

7

Fascinating! I would appreciate an essay arguing for this rather strong claim

My conclusion is that if something is expressed only in writing it cannot reach the absolute majority of the population, any more than a particularly well-written verse in French can permeate the Anglosphere.

I have read weaker versions of how hard successful communication is, such as Double Illusion of Transparency and You Have About Five Words – but I think that your example is even stronger than this and an interesting addition.

Personally, I think I also belong to the group of 2nd-order-illiterate people in that I need to push my concentration a lot in order to read with sufficient care. My default way of reading is nowhere near enough and I need to read a text several times until I feel that it doesn't contain 'new thoughts' even if it is well-written. I do profit a lot from podcasts and lectures, even if it is just by 'watching a person think about the topic' and the content is the same as in a text book.

Mau

4y

28

Thanks for sharing this!

I can imagine people coming away from this with the impression that impact-oriented career communications like those of 80K should change their framings to better pre-empt these reactions, e.g. by more strongly emphasizing that taking on big problems is not for everyone (not because the author explicitly drew this conclusion, but because it seems like a natural one). It's pretty non-obvious to me that this is a right takeaway. Arguably, a majority of the impact of places like 80K comes from supporting people who are very dedicated to impact. Catering to audiences with lukewarm interest in impact will have some benefits, but I worry these might come at the cost of e.g. 80K failing to do very well at motivating and guiding people who are most excited to prioritize impartial positive impact. At least personally, I found it very motivating to come across a site that works with assumptions like "of course we're happy to take on big problems/responsibilities--how could we look away and do nothing, when these problems are out there?"

A bit more about where my intuitions are coming from:

I suspect there's lots of motivated reasoning behind objections 1-5 (since 1 & 4 are strawmen, 2 is name-calling, and 5 is irrelevant) . Addressing weak objections that come from motivated reasoning seems like a doomed time sink--if people are looking for reasons to believe something, they'll find them.
I've seen groups that focus on supporting people in getting into high-impact careers spend lots of time trying to engage people who aren't that interested. It doesn't seem to have paid off much--people who aren't all that interested seem to drift away often, and not do very impact-targeted work even when they do remain somewhat engaged.
"if you are able to be exceptional at an important "normal" job or be high-impact within that career, that can be good too"--some version of this seems plausible, but as stated this feels close to watering down career advice in a way that seems very risky (by de-emphasizing the potentially huge difference between different career paths' impacts).

david_reinstein

4y

11

Related to this, I am wondering the extent to which (I'm being slightly hyperbolic here)

they accepted you had won the argument logically, but were looking for ways to recover and marshall another rhetorical attack, and/or
you 'browbeat them' into thinking 'it's easier to agree with this'.

I'd be very curious to know whether these students really follow up on this... .... whether they would take time consuming/costly steps to pursue and learn about impactful careers ... on their own time, after you leave the room, in the future.

freedomandutility

4y

7

In my opinion, objection 4 is a result of some people taking the (good) idea that “all people are equal” and developing the (bad) intuition that “all professions / causes are equally important”.

Subsequently, they’re offended by EA ideas of some career paths / causes being higher impact than others, because “professions / causes aren’t equally important” starts to sound like “people aren’t equally important” to them.

I have noticed this line of thinking with 1 friend but I don’t know how prevalent it is. We could consider adding clarifying statements like “people in lower impact careers do not have less intrinsic value as human beings” to EA careers advice. But my guess is that it would not be worth it, because I think people who’s intuitions are against prioritising between careers and cause areas are very unlikely to ever be influenced by EA ideas.

apatel

4y

9

This thinking has come up in a few separate intro fellowship cohorts I’ve facilitated. Usually, somebody tries to flesh it out by asking whether it’s “more effective” to save one doctor (who could then be expected to save five more lives) or two mechanics (who wouldn’t save any other lives) in trolley-problem scenarios. This discussion often gets muddled, and many people have the impression that “EAs” would think it’s better to save the doctor, even though I doubt that’s a consensus opinion among EAs. I’ve found this to be a surprisingly large snag point that isn’t discussed much in community-building circles.

I think it would be worth it to clarify the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value in career advice/intro fellowships/other first interactions with the EA community, because there are some people who might agree with other EA ideas but find that this argument undermines our basic principles (as well as the claim that you don’t need to be utilitarian to be an EA). Maybe we could extend current messaging about ideological diversity within EA.

That said, I read Objection 4 differently. Many people (especially in cultures that glorify work) tie their sense of self-worth to their jobs. I don’t know how universal this is, but at least in my middle-class American upbringing, there was a strong sense that your career choice and achievement is a large part of your value as a person.

As a result, some people feel personally judged when their intended careers aren’t branded as “effective”. If you equate your career value with your personal value, you won’t feel very good if someone tells you that your career isn’t very valuable, and so you’ll resist that judgment.

I don’t think that this feeling precludes people from being EAs. It takes time to separate yourself from your current or intended career, and Objection 4 strikes me as a knee-jerk defensive reaction. Students planning to work in shipping logistics won’t immediately like the idea that the job they’ve been working hard to prepare for is “ineffective,” but they might come around to it after some deeper reflection.

I could be misreading Objection 4, though. It could also mean something like “shipping logistics is valuable because the world would grind to a halt if nobody worked in shipping logistics,” but then that’s just a variant of Objection 5.

I’m very curious to know more about the sense in which these students gave Objection 4.

Nathan Young

4y

10

You write well. Funny at the end.

Aaron Gertler 🔸

4y

8

This may be the best execution I've seen of one of my EA Forum writing prompts:

Have you tried to explain EA to anyone recently? How did it go? Based on your experience, are there any frames or phrasings that you would/wouldn’t recommend?

Wonderful work!