Because sometimes, doing good to others, and even doing good to one’s self, is amazingly destructive. Because it’s full of conceit: how do you know what’s good for other people? How do you know what’s good for you? If you say you want to improve, then you ought to know what’s good for you. But obviously you don’t, because if you did you would be improved. So we don’t know.
Alan Watts 1
Early last year, I got a job at the school I go to. When I received my first paycheck, I decided that I wanted to donate some of that money, however little it was. At the time, the most salient organization in my mind Partners in Health, so I went ahead and made the donation. Considering how much that decision was made on a whim, it felt incredible. So I decided to do more research. I’d heard about the Effective Altruism movement before, so that became my starting point. Long story short, it was one of the strongest updates to my worldview. Over the course of two years, I’ve engaged quite a bit with the EA community and rethought multiple aspects of my life.
The biggest among them was my career. I’m super lucky in that I’m enrolled in a Master’s program that’s quite flexible. So initially the motivation was to find an area that seemed like it would be high-impact and then align my coursework to transition into that field. I spent quite some time doing that but the problem with this approach was that it’s too unconstrained. When something resonated with me, my brain would make up an absolute fairy tale about how I’d achieve said thing. Turns out, this is a very common cognitive bias called motivated reasoning. It is a kind of reasoning that is driven by belief rather than reason or evidence.
Have my cake and eat too?
Taking a step back, is it unreasonable to expect so much from my job/career? In broad strokes, I see employment in a through a spectrum of 5 iterations:
- Sustaining yourself
- Sustaining people you care about
- Finding your passion
- Finding a job good enough to fund your passion
- All/some combination of the above and also have a positive impact
If there’s a sixth iteration, I haven’t thought of it yet. But at the moment I’d put myself at number 5. So now, I not only expect my career to fulfill basic needs and do good in the world while providing personal satisfaction, but also enjoy a full life and have hobbies. The irony isn’t lost on me and I haven’t resolved this conflict fully. But that in itself is useful information, and on the whole, striking a balance is a worthy pursuit.
Flipping the problem on it’s head
To get around motivated reasoning. I set a constraint to finding areas or roles that required my specific skills. I have a Bachelor’s in Engineering and I worked in academia for a little bit before I started my Master’s. That experience helped me land my second job during my Master’s and because of that, I had a small evidence that the hard skills I have are useful.
Now, instead of finding the right cause area to work in, I would simply try to find roles that use the skills that I already have and let that guide the cause area I work in. In other words: there would surely be roles that needed someone with my specific background, and anyone else who wanted that job would need to follow roughly the same path I’ve taken to get where I am now. So in that sense, I already have a head start. I had this realization while looking for a research project for my Major, which gave me a chance to test it right away. Sure, it drastically reduced the number of options that were available to me - but this was actually helpful. I cold-mailed 2 Professors and 1 Scientist. Out of the three, two replied, and both offered me an opportunity to work with them.
By the end of two weeks, I had corresponded with both of them and landed a project.
Again, I do wanna undersell my little experiment so that it doesn’t come across as advice. But I’m now towards the end of that project and I really enjoyed it. It has opened up new opportunities for me and I can see myself building career capital and progressing to bigger roles. But I cannot possibly plan or predict that.
Dealing with Uncertainty
One can think of this uncertainty in two broad terms: epistemic uncertainty and aleatoric uncertainty.
- Epistemic uncertainty: It is uncertainty that arises from a lack of information or knowledge. This means that you could reduce it by improving your model or by getting more information.
- Aleatoric uncertainty: Refers to the inherent randomness that exits regardless of how much information you have and how good your measurement methods are.
My first pitfall was buying into this idea that I could somehow apply an epistemic solution to something that is aleatoric. Rookie mistake!
But isn’t the counterfactual actually somewhat freeing? This means that I shouldn’t overthink small decisions and do the best with the information and intuition I have at the moment, then course correct when required. Zooming out, general EA heuristics informs me on those course corrections. At the moment, this seems like a reasonable framework, given that I engage with these ideas reasonably often and update my beliefs.
Boilerplate consolation that I actually find useful
- Earning to give is underrated. It is insane, how much impact one can have by taking a pledge or donating money. 2
- For regular careers, peak impact happens in the later stages of your career.3
- We should approach a career as a scientific experiment.3
- Even if you spend the first half of your career trying to figuring things out. The latter half is more than going to compensate for that.
- Helping other people on the same path, motivating, empathising etc is invaluable. 4