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:
First, you're focusing on visible achievements.
Sure, those are the ones that I know about :-)
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:
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).
We encourage our advisees to develop broad knowledge; see for example our Core reading recommendations.
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).
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
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.
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.
Other than Peter Singer and maybe Givewell, are any of these accomplishments really that outstanding? When there are numbers given, the numbers are unimpressive (144k/70k users is tiny -- and why do I care how many questions someone's asked on a forum website?), and when there aren't, the accomplishments are pretty questionable.
When you say:
They've contributed much more than have people of their ability level who take more conventional paths. In some cases, the factor by which the value of their activities has increased is perhaps ~2x, in others it may be more like ~100x.
...without definiting "contributed" or "value" according to any objective metric, the first thing I assume is that you're trying to handwave.
Before continuing this project, I would try to answer the following questions:
Then, figure out what you're doing, validate that your idea actualy works, and then come back.
Thanks for the comment.
Other than Peter Singer and maybe Givewell, are any of these accomplishments really that outstanding?
What is an objective, quantifiable metric that represents your value proposition?
One can't hope to predict things with such precision ahead of time, and even afterward it's often not possible to quantify things. One has to rely on more informal measures.
What existing pain point are you hoping to address?
I think I address this in my original post starting with "But there are others who have most of the relevant traits for whom there are only one or two limiting factors."
What do you bring to the table that allows you to address this pain point better than the existing solutions?
The answer to this could be very long, depending on how broadly one defines "existing solutions." Could you give a concrete example or two of existing entities that you think provide solutions?
Why are you alone the people that can deliver the above?
We're not the only people who can deliver the above, and don't need to be for it to be a worthwhile endeavor – it suffices for us to be the only people who are actually working on it.
There are many entities that have produced relevant materials (e.g. offering information on specific careers), but we don't know of others who are taking a holistic approach, for example presenting career information about earnings, social value contributed, work-life balance, background preparation required and exit options in juxtaposition across different careers.
It really seems like when you say "outstanding people" you're really saying:
"People who have accomplished a lot in the world of rationality or effective altruism."
I could name off the top of my head half a dozen younger people who have blogs that get more facebook shares than slate star codex, have made more money than $1.4 million dollars, or have a bigger audience than Peter Singer. Not to mention other outstanding accomplishments (such as olympic athletes), which you didn't seem to touch on at all.
By choosing these people as your examples, you're indicating an implicit social bias towards your recommendations and values, which is not at all clear from the copy on your website.
My main point being, if you're going to push people towards specific careers and away from others for your own ideological reasons, that should really be VERY clear in the copy on your website. Same as if a fundamentalist Christian group was offering free consulting on family planning.
Nothing wrong with that. MattG is not accusing you, but you are defending (note: defending is a sign of weakness). I recommend that you agree on MattGs point. It is not wrong. It is an improvement suggestion and would make you appear more humble if followed.
Added: I think this is the reason he is upvoted and you are not.
Not to mention other outstanding accomplishments (such as olympic athletes), which you didn't seem to touch on at all.
Being an olympic athletes doesn't prdocue added social value. It's very much a zero sum game.
You're right, but adding social value is very different from having an outstanding accomplishment.
My point is, if the point of their organization is to push people towards specific careers due to a specific ideology (which it's clear based on this list is the case), that should be VERY clear in their marketing copy.
People are willing to pay lots of money to watch Olympic athletes, so by economists' definition of value they do provide lots of it.
It's a very crowded market. I don't think that the value that people perceive rsises significantly if a new athlete that a tiny bit better than the existing ones comes along.
Well, for Olympic athletes proper, who are often amateurs or semi-professionals, this may be true, but for professional athletes who compete in major sports such as association football or basketball, this doesn't seem to be the case: top-level athletes are able to command salaries in the order of $1M - $10M per year. Assuming the market isn't grossly inefficient, this implies that there are very few people in the world who can perform these jobs delivering the same level of performance, despite the high demand. Thus, any single top-level athlete in these sports probably produces a significant amount of economic value.
Top-level basketball players get payed based on their skill in comparision to other basketball players.
An action that increaes the average skill level of all basketball players a bit won't increase the amount of money that basketball fans are willing to pay for watching basketball games.
One can't hope to predict things with such precision ahead of time, and even afterward it's often not possible to quantify things. One has to rely on more informal measures.
This means you will lie to yourselves to get whatever answer you want. You should not expect anyone to help you, nor should you expect to succeed.
This is a side-note, but I find it off-putting when people use "impressive" when they want something that's like "awesome" but more formal-sounding. (This usage seems to be fairly common in the EA community, for some reason.) I'm sure that you understand the difference between the two, and that you actually terminally care about people doing awesome things, not manufacturing resume items, but to a casual reader it might sound like the latter.
Synonym brainstorming:
awesome: useful to humanity, value-generating, vital, wonderful, excellent, marvelous
impressive: radical, sui generis, irreplaceable, important, game-changing, mind-changing
Thanks, it actually hadn't occurred to me that it might be read that way.
Edit: Changed "impressive" in title to "outstanding."
They've contributed much more than have people of their ability level who take more conventional paths. In some cases, the factor by which the value of their activities has increased is perhaps ~2x, in others it may be more like ~100x.
Probably, compared to the average. What percentile of "people of their ability level" are you aiming for?
I don't have a concrete percentile in mind (in particular, I don't know the distribution of impact as a function of percentile). Why do you want to know the percentile?
I tried to operationalize it with the list of people – it seems easier to tell if someone is "like somebody on the list" than it is to tell if someone is at a given percentile. Does the "like somebody on the list" operationalization seem insufficiently specific?
I don't understand your question?
Without good ways to overcome selection bias, it is unclear that data like this can provide any evidence of outsized impact of unconventional approaches. I would expect a list of achievements as impressive as the above whether or not there was any correlation between the two.
In How can Cognito Mentoring do the most good? I included a section on our potential social value. I want to flesh out what we hope to achieve.
Consider the following people:
Some of these accomplishments are more impressive than others, but all of them are impressive, and most of the people listed are quite young, and will plausible do more impressive things along similar lines as they get older.
Some common threads that I see in these people are:
Unconventionality isn't necessarily a path to success, and there are plenty of people who adopt unconventional paths and don't get much done at all, but when executed well, it's possible to pursue an unconventional path with relatively little risk and high potential upside.
We think that we can enable more people to engage in activities like the ones above. Many of those who are well-suited to them are already engaged in them. But there are others who have most of the relevant traits for whom there are only one or two limiting factors. Some ways in which we think that we can remove the limiting factors are as follows
According to student feedback we've had some success on the first two fronts. We're continuing such efforts, and are in the process of working on the latter two.
By moving people in the directions suggested above, we hope to tip more people into the high achieving pool that has the above as representative members. We expect that we can enable an average of one additional person per year to get into this achievement range, with the benefits accruing throughout their lives.
Concerning the feasibility of this: The number of people with the requisite traits is not very small. As above, the people on the list have in some cases achieved far out of proportion with their ability, so there are a fair number of people of the same ability level who don't. So far we've had a number of advisees who probably have similar characteristics to people on the list above at the same age. So it's not necessary to influence a huge number of people to succeed (though we're casting as wide a net as possible.)
Assuming the estimate here is correct, we get a lower bound on the social value generated by Cognito Mentoring. We have other sources of social value, which we touched on in our earlier post and might elaborate in later posts.