"That article made me angry. All this time was spent on making sure your job was helping others and no time was spent on whether it brought you joy." I assigned high school seniors in our economics class to read Benjamin Todd's summary essay on planning a high-impact career. Some of the students were offended by the essay. Here's how it went.
In general, I teach career advice using the What Color is Your Parachute? framework. I really like the framework, because it provides a lot of direction for thinking about one's own desires and how those can be corralled to serve a higher mission. This year I added two segments to the career advice, one on globalization, and another on EA. This is in the context of an Econ class, remember, so I felt justified this year in leaning in on these frameworks.
MRU has a nice little segment about how to think about a career given globalization. We started with international trade and made our way to a discussion on globalization and the elephant graph and what that means for careers. I thought this was depressing, because of the narrow number of careers in which one can expect to see wage growth. So we also discussed how much easier it is to be the best person with a set of three skills than the best person with one skill, as an example of how one can still be competitive amidst global competition. That combinatorial insight is very helpful.
Next, there is much more to a career than maximizing profit in the context of globalization. And I would be surprised if more than 10% of that class end up in jobs with the term 'engineer' attached, so we talked about other high-impact careers. I gave them this Benjamin Todd essay, and they came to class with a ton of pushback.
In the first ten minutes of class, before I even had said a word, they laid out a series of arguments against the EA approach to career advice. I relished this and took notes as they went. Such good material, such familiar objections! These very normal, American students from median American households in a non-coastal city sensed something deeply challenging about EA, but these are challenges which I think the community has already addressed.
Objection 1: Giving you life to others in this obsessive way will result in burnout.
Objection 2: This type of advice is for "people-pleasers", not independent, self-sufficient people.
Objection 3: This type of advice is for only super-self-sufficient people who want to take on huge responsibilities. I might not want big responsibilities.
Objection 4: This type of advice ignores the indirect value of normal careers, like working in shipping logistics.
Objection 5: If everyone tried to have a high-impact career, then the career wouldn't be high-impact anymore.
Against these objections is the material in the essay itself. Close reading is hard! "You can divide career aims into three categories: (i) personal priorities (ii) impartial positive impact, and (iii) other moral values." And:
Turning to personal priorities, research suggests that people are most satisfied when they have work that’s:
- Meaningful
- Something they’re good at
- Engaging & with autonomy"
Properly understood, these two quotes answer Objections 1, 2, and 3. Burnout is antithetical to what should be a personal priority: personal flourishing with a healthy mind and healthy body. But I found it fascinating that several students, having no previous exposure to EA, immediately worried about burnout. I wonder if the lack of vocabulary about individual psychology sounds an internal alarm for postulants? Secondly, EA is about finding the right fit, and that does mean knowing your own strengths, weaknesses, and desire for responsibility.
A close reading together cleared up these objections.
A student, one of my quiet thoughtful ones, leaned back in his chair and responded slowly to Objection 5. "Well," he said, "There are diminishing returns. If too many people go into a field, it's not a neglected problem anymore."
Then we turned to the final objection - indirect impact. This is one which I only could address because I have been in the EA community for 6 years. A low-key, not consensus, but common enough EA opinion is that "normal" jobs provide goods too, and if you are able to be exceptional at an important "normal" job or be high-impact within that career, that can be good too.
The opinions addressed, they read the next essay on three career stages.
The next day I asked each student if they disagreed with the EA advice here or had any new objections to the previous article.
I was mildly disappointed to find that they no longer resisted Ben's advice. They loved Big EA.
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.