One huge barrier to making good career decisions is thinking too narrowly. There are just too many options, and too many different ways to compare them, to possibly hold all of this in our minds at once. But this means we could end up missing valuable options or important considerations. Why do we do this, and how can you broaden your options?
When people say that time is money, they mostly mean that you can earn money with your time. But it works both ways. In a previous post I discussed how we can spend money on a virtual assistant to save time. Here I will discuss some ways that you can spend money on goods or services to save you time.
Ben Gilbert’s an 80,000 Hours member who previously worked as a trader in the City, but now focuses his attention on the effective giving community and the development of charter cities. We met in Oxford to discuss his career, jobs in trading and his plans for making a difference in the future.
Why do the best researchers get almost all the attention? One factor is the Matthew effect, in which “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” In this context, the Matthew effect means that the most accomplished researchers get increasing amounts of credit and attention.
Often when faced with a really difficult question, people “cheat” by opting to answer an easier but related one, without realising they’re doing it. Sometimes this is a helpful tactic, but it can be a huge source of error. Could you be doing this with your career decisions?
People often end up cheating and answering an easier question because the real question is so complex that they don’t even know how to go about answering it. What we’re aiming to do is provide you with the tools and guidance you need to answer the questions “Which career is right for me?” and “How can I make a difference in my career?”, so that you don’t need to cheat.
The power of persuasion for making a difference is often underappreciated. If you can convince just one other person to care about a cause as much as you, then you’ve easily doubled your impact. But people’s efforts at influencing others often aren’t as efficient as they could be. By stepping outside your circle of personal contacts and choosing a strategic approach, your time and influence can go ten or even a hundred times further.
Note: this post has been superseded by our job satisfaction page and supporting research page.
Many people aren’t as satisfied as they could be with their careers. This is a big problem: not only is the person less happy, they also end up making less difference in society. The even bigger problem is that people don’t seem to know what to do about this – how to find a job that they’ll find satisfying. There’s a lot of psychology research on happiness that could be really useful, but people don’t seem to be aware of it or at least aren’t applying it. So we decided to start collecting together the research that seems most useful to job satisfaction, and explaining how it applies to your career decisions.
You want to make a difference. This means being as successful as possible in whatever high-impact path you pursue. In recent posts, I raised a worry that we might overestimate our chances of success. But at the same time we don’t want to underestimate them: something we do have reason to think we’re better than average at something.
There are three ways to contribute to scientific progress. The direct way is to conduct a good scientific study and publish the results. The indirect way is to help others make a direct contribution. Journal editors, university administrators and philanthropists who fund research contribute to scientific progress in this second way. A third approach is to marry the first two and make a scientific advance that itself expedites scientific advances. The full significance of this third way is commonly overlooked.
It’s getting closer to Christmas, and we’re running out of time to get presents for friends and family. It can be hard to work out what presents people will actually enjoy. An increasingly popular option is to make a donation on behalf of someone else as a present. What’s the best way to do that? Does it involve goats? You might be interested in Giving What We Can’s gift cards that let you donate to the world’s most effective charities .
If you want to make a difference in your career, you need to think not just about which jobs have the most impact, but which jobs you’ve got the best chances of success in. This latter point can be easily neglected. It’s all very well working for an incredibly high impact cause, but if you do a rubbish job you won’t make much difference. Judging your chances of success is hard. Knowing the odds: the average person’s chances of success, is a good place to start.
Ben and I spoke with Anders Sandberg, a James Martin research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, about his career and how to make a difference through research. Here are some of the highlights!
Most people think they’re better than the average person: that they’re smarter, more likeable, more attractive. This tendency to think of ourselves as better than average is a well-established bias. But if we need to do this to feel better about ourselves, who cares? The problem is that we’ll also overestimate our chances of being successful. And if you want to work out where to make the most difference, you need to have a realistic idea of where your chances of success are best.
Microcredit has become one of the most popular ideas in charity. 2005 was named the Year of Microcredit.The microcredit charity Kiva has over 800,000 lenders, the highest possible rating from Charity Navigator, and was endorsed by Oprah… The 2006 Nobel Committee boldly claimed that microcredit “must play a major part” in ending global poverty.
Recently, however, criticism of microfinance has been growing. And that’s a good thing, because it’s far from proven that microfinance, on average, has any positive effects at all.
Paramedics appear to make good, fast decisions based on “gut feeling”: knowing what to do without knowing how you know. Along a similar vein, chess grandmasters are able to identify and decide on the best moves incredibly rapidly, moves which mediocre players may not even spot at all.
But this ability to make astoundingly accurate judgements in the blink of an eye isn’t limited to experts. We all do it every day: when we judge what some else wants from their facial expressions, or catch a ball without doing any complex physics calculation. How are these triumphs of intuition possible?
In part 1, I talked about some ways in which we might motivate people to be more altruistic. Providing a personal connection with the victim and appealing to a someone’s emotional responses seem to help. So too can instilling a sense of responsibility to help others, and an understanding that doing so is not futile.
All these observations are incredibly valuable. But I think there’s more to understanding why people don’t help others more, despite the fact they may believe in doing so in principle. A huge factor here is the behaviour of others. Most people appear to have a strong tendency not to want to help more than the other people around them.
As Peter Singer writes in his book The Life You Can Save, “[t]he world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument.” Many people might agree that a social change movement is noble, yet don’t want to do anything about it. Why not? Why don’t people help others more?
Career choice is complex. Could a simple decision rule help us? This idea seems worth paying serious attention to, as there’s a large body of research suggesting rules can improve decision making in other areas.
We’re trying to build the world’s best career advice organisation that helps you make a difference. That’s a big project, and we’re growing fast. If you’d like to help us out, now’s your chance.
Brian Tomasik is a member of 80,000 Hours who has spent many years thinking and writing essays about how to most effectively reduce suffering in the world. Research Director Robert Wiblin sat down with Brian (metaphorically) to learn about his intellectual journey and at times unusual conclusions.