There is No EA Sorting Hat

By ElliotTep @ 2024-12-18T06:21 (+165)

Summary

• My sense is some EAs act like/hope they will be assigned the perfect impactful career by some combination of 80,000 Hours recommendations (and similar) and ‘perceived consensus views in EA’.
• But, your life is full of specific factors, many impactful jobs haven’t yet been spotted by other EAs and career advice is importantly iterative.
• Instead of simply deferring, I recommend a combination of:
  • Your own hard work figuring out your path to impact.
  • (Still) Integrating expert advice.
  • Support from the community, and close connections who know your context.

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback from Alex Rahl-Kaplan, Alix Pham, Caitlin Borke, Claude, Matt Reardon, and Michelle Hutchinson for making this post better. Claude also kindly offered to take the blame for all the mistakes I might have made.

Introduction

Question: How do you figure out how to do the most good with your career?

Answer: Find an EA sorting hat^[1]. Place it on your head. Let it read your mind. Listen carefully as it assigns you your chosen career track, or better yet, a specific role at a specific organisation. Well done. Work hard at your designated job and watch as the impact rolls in.

Wrinkle: There is no EA sorting hat. There is no omniscient individual or entity that will hear about your degree, your skills, your preferences, and your context, and spit out an ideal career.

Obviously this is a caricature. But I think there’s some truth to it. I think it looks like buying into the ideas of EA, and then hoping or expecting that the community or some organisation in it can match you with the right career path or job role.

Maybe you see some of yourself in this pattern of thinking. Or you might know someone who is making this mistake. I see it happening too much in the EA community, especially among those newer to EA, and earlier in their career. This is a mistake that 80,000 Hours regularly tries to push back against. But their products are just too good so people still (sometimes) hope that an advising call and studious checking of the job board will solve the pernicious problem of how to craft an impactful career.

I don’t think it’s a very interesting anecdote, but I definitely committed an egregious version of this at least once: I updated way too much on literally 5 minutes of advice from someone who worked at 80,000 hours over a beer. I treated his words as some kind of magic insight that I was on the right path. In hindsight, this was obviously bad judgment on my part.

Why there isn’t an EA sorting hat

I heard a lot of smart EAs tell me to take their advice with a grain of salt. For a while, I used to think this was just false modesty. Their advice was gold and much better than whatever silly thoughts I had floating around in my baby EA head. I was a fool. They were right. Here are some reasons why.

1. Your life is full of specific factors to incorporate (aka personal fit)

Reality has a surprising amount of detail. Your life is no exception. You live in a specific country, with a specific degree, network, aptitudes, skills, values, and passions. Basically, personal fit matters (which 80k articulates well here). You will be more personally motivated by some cause areas or interventions than others. You will find some tasks energising, and other tasks mind-numbing. You might have specific constraints like an unusual timezone, needing a role with clear deadlines, need to be remote, can’t be remote, and the list goes on.

And these factors have a lot of context. Context is really difficult to communicate quickly, especially for someone who doesn't know you well nor have a lot of time. For example, it might be that there is a delicate balance between your career ambitions and your partner’s, such that a certain overseas job, in a city that meets several poorly defined criteria, would be one worth taking. This is not the kind of thing a career coach can absorb and spit out an answer in a 60-minute call. If a career coach asked me what I’m good at, I might say something convoluted like that I am good at research and analytical skills by non-EA standards, but I am good with people and have high emotional intelligence by EA standards, except this applies more to networking and advising, and less to managing others and navigating difficult stakeholders. And they would misinterpret this clarification too. Context is really difficult to communicate.

2. EA-branded jobs are scarce and many impactful jobs aren’t on EA job boards

There are many many ways to do good in the world. The 80k job board and ‘jobs at EA orgs’ are a very small subset of ‘impactful direct work’. The same goes for the job boards at Probably Good, Animal Advocacy Careers, the Alternative Protein Job Board, and any other job boards I'm forgetting.

Since EA-branded jobs are scarce and notoriously competitive, there is a good chance that the most impactful job for you is not listed on any of these job boards. There might be a specific role in government in your country where you have a real chance of influencing policy. You might have a pre-existing relationship at a foundation that could make you a uniquely good fit to allocate funds. Or you could start a nonprofit that cannot feature on a job board because the role won’t exist until you create it.

3. You need to have your own internal model of how to do good

I think many people implicitly believe that once they’ve secured an Impactful Job™, they’ve arrived, and impact happens by default. For many potentially impactful roles, getting the job is just the first step.

A job is just a platform for impact. Once you're in it, your actual impact will be determined by myriad, mostly-independent decisions in very poorly scoped areas: what kind of metrics can you get to know if you’re succeeding? Which audience should you target for your marketing campaign? Does your Head of Ops need to understand your movement? The answers to these question require a strong internal model of what doing good looks like.

Maybe this is different to some industries and companies where roles are extremely well-scoped, you're brought on, trained, and merely execute. The upside to all this is that it’s a big bonus to have a thoughtful internal model of how to do good for the jobs you are applying for.

4. Career advice isn’t once-and-done, it’s iterative.

The thing about the sorting hat is that it’s once and done. You’re sorted into a house, and that’s it. The thing about career advice, is it’s so god damn iterative (aka: plans are worthless, planning is essential). You come up with a plan, and it can be a good and useful plan, and yet your career will take twists and turns. Which will require more plans.

So by all means, have a plan, but let it serve as more of a framework than a detailed guide. To complement that plan, you need to maintain situational awareness: what is the state of play of big problems in the world and the organisations and actors aiming to address them? What do those actors most need now? What can you most usefully offer them? Answers to these questions have been and will be in a constant state of flux.

Why do we expect a sorting hat?

So how did we arrive at this point? I’m not sure exactly, but I have a few guesses. Maybe this is helpful if you notice that you yourself have made one of these (potential) mistakes.

1. Choosing an impactful career is hard, deferring is tempting

It’s really hard to figure out what to do with your career if you want to do the most good, or even just a lot of good. Once you buy the core assumptions of EA, it becomes clear that every venture might not be impactful, and that’s assuming you can land a promising job to start with.

This fact makes deferring more attractive. That smart experts can solve this very difficult problem for you. But again, an issue with this is that you need to have your own internal model of how to do good in most jobs and careers.

2. The 80,000 elephants in the room

Unsurprisingly to most readers, 80,000 Hours is a hugely influential organisation for EA career advice. 80,000 Hours offers a bunch of exceptional products, and so many people understandably defer to them. I personally found 80,000 Hours to be an oasis of evidence-based and thoughtful advice in a world of school counsellors armed with Myers Briggs tests and Alain De Botton’s ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’ that thought 10 disjointed anecdotes about people and their jobs would make for remotely helpful career advice.^[2] 

However, my sense is that many members of the EA community might weigh their advice too heavily because they are pretty smart and thoughtful, and offer a variety of great products.^[3] See the section ‘Why there isn’t an EA sorting hat’ on why 80,000 Hours can’t do all the work for you.

3. Givewell and other charity recommendations

Maybe a final reason is that donation advice is a big part of EA and EA intro talks, and people can defer much more when donating. Givewell does a great job of making the case that evaluating which charities to donate to isn’t something you can easily do yourself, and is generally better to outsource. Outsourcing your donation decisions to the right expert is a sound strategy, and a reasonable part of EA (e.g. GiveWell, ACE, and EA Funds).

Don’t get me wrong, career planning requires outsourcing some of the steps. For example, you can’t evaluate all cause areas and interventions yourself. But outsourcing your career trajectory doesn’t make sense in the same way as donation advice (for the reasons I outlined in the section above about personal fit).

What are we supposed to do instead?

Great question. I think the answer is approximately this: Your career planning and choices should be a combination of (1) your own hard work in building and shaping your career, (2) advice from experts, and (3) support from close connections and community who can support you along the way.

1. Your own hard work

As I’ve said in many places, you are the one who needs to build your own career capital, a network, and your own model of the world. You need to apply for your own jobs, excel at those jobs, assess forks in the road, etc. You can’t outsource some of the biggest and most consequential decisions of your life.

2. Advice from experts

Please don’t walk away from this post thinking you should ignore 80,000 Hours. Part of your insights should come from experts in different cause areas, professions, or industries, telling you about the frontier of the field, the skill gaps, etc. You can apply for career advice from a range of organisations, speak to experts at conferences, read their research, etc. You should defer to them on many points. One challenge though is figuring out which experts to trust.

What you should expend more effort on is rigorously grappling with what experts give you to inform your own models of what to do. Mere deference is not what experts want from you. The key is to neither ignore experts nor lazily defer to them, which brings us to the next factor…

3. Support from community

In addition to the community at large, join sub-communities based on where you live, your profession, and cause areas. Build your network with people who can provide advice, and you can push the frontier of knowledge together. Reach out and seek the difficult feedback that will allow you to make better decisions.

For big decisions, build your own personal advisory board, to help you along the way. These advisors should more or less know as much about how to do good in the world as you, and also care enough about you and your career that they’re happy to spend the time supporting you on the journey. Close friends in EA have helped me a tonne in a way that 80,000 Hours couldn’t have.^[4] They know me well. We discussed my career and job opportunities at length. I asked them odd questions at random times. They supported me immensely during rough times. They are an essential piece of my career journey.

Final thoughts  

I think it’s in fact the case that figuring out how to do good with your career is a hard, often rewarding, and sometimes thankless task. But, if you heed the call to do what you can to improve the world, know that while the task is primarily yours, there is an exceptional community of helpful, passionate, and morally serious individuals out there to help you along the way. There are detailed resources on the current state of research. There are a range of free and discounted services to help you along the way. And within the sprawling ecosystem, I encourage you to find some peers, friends, or colleagues to support you in the good times and the bad.

Good luck out there.  

1. ^{^}

    For those of you who don’t know, the sorting hat is from Harry Potter. You put it (him?) on your head, it reads your mind, and puts you in one of the four houses based on your personality. For the Harry Potter nerds who are upset at this butchered explanation of the sorting hat’s role, on this one occasion, the people in the acknowledgments section are entirely responsible.

2. ^{^}

    It was not.

3. ^{^}

    One of the commenters at 80,000 Hours pointed out the wide variation in how strongly people weigh their advice. Typically people who haven’t come across EA before take it much less seriously than members of the EA community.

4. ^{^}

    Shoutout to my friends at 80k who did both :)