counterfactual impact is lowkey an infohazard for me
I just need to never ever think about replaceability again, maybe
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to help people with my career.
When I was 8, I wanted to a be a missionary/teacher in Pakistan1, and make people more feminist by teaching all the girls to read.
I got into effective altruism because I wanted people to discuss donation options with, but I was pretty into the careers stuff when I heard about it. I even wrote my Masters dissertation on AI policy before I decided it’s probably not that big a deal2.
There are a lot of problems with getting really into EA career thinking - there’s a great podcast episode about some of them here - but the one that trips me up most often is thinking about counterfactual impact.
I love to have a positive impact! Love to help people. I’ve done that in all of my jobs so far.
But have I had a positive counterfactual impact3? If they had just hired another candidate4, maybe things would have gone better!
This isn’t just me being imposter syndromey and moral perfectionismy - although there’s a great podcast episode about that here - but based on real world scenarios. I took a job knowing I could have a big impact, and also knowing that I was trying to get pregnant. Basically as soon as I got pregnant I was so unwell I couldn’t do any meaningful work for months and the rest of my team had to cover for me. It seems hard to believe that the good work I did in the first six months of that job makes up for being mostly absent for the next nine months - surely the next-best candidate would have been better?
These kinds of thoughts make people crazy and stop great candidates for applying for jobs they’d be really good at.
These kinds of thoughts are why we, as a society, have norms about applying for jobs. Here are three social norms I’m planning to apply to my own job search:
Apply for jobs you’re interested in! Let the hiring manager work out who they want to hire.
You can’t predict the future. Don’t opt out of important jobs because you think you might later take time off for family or for your mental or physical health.5
Be transparent about all your good qualities. It’s easy to think being honest means just telling people why you’d be bad at the job, but for people who are particularly scrupulous, being honest might look more like taking responsibility for the things you did right.
Have you ever worried about messing up at a high-impact job, or even worried about applying? How did you handle it?
I am aware that there are some white saviour overtones here, so I just want to remind you that I was eight
between this and covid, the ea community is 2 for 2 on predicting insane stuff that I was super sceptical of. whoops.
and don’t even get me STARTED about counterfactual impact where you do a bad job but the person who would have had the job would have been even worse. how do I even think about that? can you have a positive counterfactual impact while having a negative impact? skdlsdkslsk;dk
some of you will say “just think, you’ve free up that other altruistic candidate to do other great work!” that’s such a beautiful thought but I don’t work for an EA org and I have no idea what the next-best candidate is up to or what they value
in particular, don’t worry about taking a few months off. over the course of your whole career, being away for a few months is a pretty short time, and you could easily end up in an insanely important and impactful job in your 40s or 50s. but if you avoid impactful jobs in your 20s and 30s because you’re worried about kids or mental health or other career interruptions, you’ll never have a chance to have that impact in the future.
I think this very personal level speaks to the bigger issue of EA as a whole choosing the most effective forms of altruism...first it was the best charities then pivoted to making sure humans are still around in a billion years. The bottom line in all of it at the personal scale and the very big scale is that there are just too many variables to be able to make these decisions with any reasonable accuracy...it just can’t be done because there’s too many random masses and energies in the universe whirling around us and there’s too many individual wills of humans making choices to push things one way or the other.
Your managers choices will hugely effect the quality of your work. If they push the department in a direction you excel in you may become the star, if they push it in the direction you fumble in then back bench for you.
So all we can do is try our best and be of good character and seek to have an awesome and aggressive imagination in all directions and produce children the same.
Which is another way of saying attend to the whole. EA would be better if it did so...do charity and do x-risk and do esoteric philosophy and do research all as a whole, none more important.