Jess Whittlestone

Hi Sam,

One way in which you could use your translation skills to do high-impact work might be in communicating morally important ideas, or promoting certain causes, to a wider audience around the world. The communication and spread of ideas is really important for promoting any cause, but often language barriers put limits on how far we can go with this. There are certainly a lot of high impact routes you could go down in communications, too, or perhaps you could combine the two. If you’d like to discuss this in more detail feel free to send me an email (jess.whittlestone@80000hours.org) or, if you’d like a careers advice session over Skype/in person, you can put in a request here: http://80000hours.org/request-a-career-advice-session/

Jess

Hi Peter,

I’ll second Xio’s comment about Ben and Niel both being incredibly busy (plus Ben is actually on annual leave at the moment), but I’d also like to apologise for the fact that you haven’t had a response for over a week - this certainly shouldn’t be happening.

Rather than emailing Niel again (although it doesn’t matter if you have already) - do you want to either drop me an email or forward me your original message, at jess.whittlestone@80000hours.org? Would be great to hear about what you’re interested in helping out with.

Jess

Yes, Michael, you’re right - I’m certainly not saying that likeability isn’t a relevant factor when choosing a candidate. Just that it’s not so overwhelmingly important (in most cases, at least!) to justify substituting the question of who’s best for the job with who you like most. This then links to my broader point, of how it can be dangerous to opt for shortcuts when faced with difficult decisions.

It’s also worth noting that a small difference in how well you get on with a an employee will probably translate, at most, to a small difference in output in terms of the work they produce. Whereas it seems like a small difference in aptitude or conscientiousness could mean a huge difference in output in some cases. The case where you don’t get on with your boss to the extent that you decide to quit is presumably a pretty extreme case!

Thanks Roman!

Anon: this might be true :) - and note the last paragraph about not wanting to underestimate yourself. But the point is that even if you have good reason to think you’re above average, you should still start with the base rate of success as a reasonable anchor, and then update on it given evidence that you differ from average - standardised tests and past successes are definitely going to be useful here. Kahneman and some others have some tips on how best to do this - I’m going to write more about this soon!

Gerald: see footnote 2!

Roman, your point is a good one so thanks for flagging! Brian, thanks: I’ll have a look at Peter’s post and try to refine the estimate to take account of these considerations.

Thanks for flagging this Nick. There should definitely be a confirmation page; I’ll speak to our website developer and check this out.

Fantastic, thanks Brian! I’ll use them to update the estimates in the post.

Hi Gina, I’m pretty sure the source for this is The Animal Activist’s Handbook (second reference above) - although I will double check that.

Great comments, Brian! This post talks about using discussions to get your views across, but you’re totally right that the value of discussion is as much about learning things from other people as well. I should probably emphasise this more - perhaps I’ll write something on how to get the most out of discussions by learning from others in the future :)

Yeah, I think your approach to resolving cognitive dissonance in yourself is one we should all strive for. No-one is perfect, sometimes we’re all going to act in ways we’d class as immoral - being able to accept this without taking it as a blow to your image of yourself as a “moral” person, and so your self esteem, is hard. But as you say, if we can acknowledge that this is better than messing with your beliefs to justify things, it helps. I think it’s really important to emphasise the distinction between “I acted immorally on that occasion”, and “I am a bad person” here as well.

Thanks for your responses, guys!

Chris: Yeah, I think your concern is a common one. I believe Net Impact (or a similar organisation - I think it was them but I might be misremembering) recently did a survey of graduates asking them what was most important to them in choosing a career, and the biggest factor turned out to be maintaining flexibility - which potentially explains why so many go into careers like management consultancy. As you say, though, it’s much harder when you’ve got a more specialised background. What specific information/advice do you think we could provide that would be most helpful in dealing with this? Information about the amount of flexibility different career paths afford so you can think about it in advance? Or information about how much flexibility you have to change later on once you’ve already specialised to some extent, or more practical advice about how to go about making a change? These are all things we’re thinking about a fair amount and hope to look into in more detail. I’d be interested to know if you’ve found any particularly useful books on these topics.

Gerald: Concrete information about salary structures in different careers is definitely a priority, we’ve got some people working on this at the moment. Hopefully we’ll have a post on this soon - in the meantime, if you’ve got any specific questions on this kind of thing, do feel free to send us an emailref=”http://80000hours.org/contact-us”>http://80000hours.org/contact-us</a>) and we might well be able to help.

I’ve been doing a lot of this the past couple of months. Mainly speaking to academics about going into research but some talking to professionals too. I’d agree that this is a really invaluable way to get good careers advice, I’ve found it incredibly helpful.

I’ve been doing a mix of using personal contacts and just cold emailing people. I think both have their virtues: using personal contacts obviously has the advantage that you come with a recommendation, and people might make more effort to help you if they feel it’s doing a favour to someone they know. But at the same time I’ve had some of the most positive responses from people I’ve just found by doing my own research and emailing, I think because it can be more impressive if you appear to have taken the initiative to contact them yourself, and also flattering that you’ve picked them out specifically rather than just through a contact. From my experience if you just email people and say you’re really interested in what they’re doing and are thinking about going down a similar route, people are generally very willing to meet and share thoughts/advice. This might be slightly easier with academics, though, I’m not sure - as they’re perhaps more used to being approached by students and also they may have more to gain personally if you’re thinking of entering their field. I think it should generalise though. I can probably dig out some email conversations that have led to successful meetings if it would be useful.

I don’t take notes when I talk to people (unless it’s on the phone or skype and I can do it surreptitiously), more because I feel like it’s harder to engage with someone whilst doing so than thinking it’s rude, though. I tend to try to write some notes on what I got from the meeting straight away after instead.

The other thing I’d say is that I’ve found it surprisingly helpful even talking to people working in areas that seem interesting to me/overlap somewhat with my interests but that I’m not actively considering going into. This is the sort of thing that has come from personal contacts rather than seeking people out, but I think it’s helped to broaden my horizons in terms of what jobs are out there and you can always learn something from people doing cool things who’ve got more experience than you.

Thanks for your comments Greg! Re. structured interviews, I think there is evidence that these do a fair amount better. (e.g. this meta-study: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/79/4/599) In the next post I’m going to talk about how using multifactor models can be useful when we can’t trust our intuitions, which also seems to point towards the idea of structured interviews. Even here though, I think there’s still a concern that “gut feelings” may end up overriding if we’re not really careful.