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Comment by adbge | Hacker News Reader

> Why is the piece talking about averages, when wealth is distributed as a power curve?

80,000 Hours is explicitly focused on maximizing social good, often by advising people on what career will maximize their "earning to give" potential. That is, earning a lot of money to donate to an effective charity (e.g. high rated charities on GiveWell).

Because of this, their analyses tend to look different than it would if it was optimizing towards a risk-adverse individual maximizing personal utility.

The justification for looking at expected value (averages) is expanded on here: http://80000hours.org/blog/12-salary-or-startup-how-do-goode...

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The key assumption with this line of thinking is that a model built on a population who don't base their decisions on 80000hours principles will perform well on those who do.

That seems unlikely to true if a passion for fixing a particular problem is both a significant factor in predicting a startup's success and unlikely to be present in one who makes decisions by modeling the value-maximizing way to live one's life.

That's a great point. If you read this article and think "Now I'm going to apply to YC and do good!", you've probably got lower chances of success than the average YC founder.

That's one reason we point out that the expected value mainly depends on your chances of being the next Dropbox or AirBnb, which probably involves having a huge passion for fixing a particular problem.

On the other hand, I don't think the information should have no impact on decisions. For instance, I think someone at college could read this, and set themselves on a path towards becoming the type of person who makes a good entrepreneur. They could learn to program, hang out around startup people, try out their ideas. They could find a problem and become passionate about it.

This is interesting, I think you're saying that this advice could be for utilitarian good, ignoring the individual.

From a purely utilitarian perspective, maybe the startup compensation curve is best for philanthropy.

Hypothesis: 1,000 people making $100,000 will give significantly less in aggregate than 1 person with $100,000,000. Therefore, if more people go into a corporate ladder job for the $100k, there will be less total giving.

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