Show HN: A career test for people who want to have a social impact | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A career test for people who want to have a social impact

80000hours.org

73 pointsBenjaminTodd54 comments

I can support the idea here ("people wanting to have social impact"), but the quiz is probably the worst way to direct people toward that possible.

Just show ~10 ways to have social impact, and what skills/traits/etc. are important to each.

The profiles are good. Lead with those. Give some examples.

You're not going to get people to accurately self assess their skills or risk tolerance. You might get people to see "oh, I want to get involved in party politics", and see what factors are important to success there.

(Also both UK centric and 20-year-old centric.)

That's really interesting. Originally we just had a list, and I had this concern with the test. However, as the list of paths we've reviewed gets longer, it seems useful to provide a quick way of filtering it.

Maybe break it down by decision point. You decide early on about whether you prefer individual vs. group work; you decide later on whether you prioritize personal wealth (those are just strawmen). It's the idea of answering a bunch of things all at once which seems broken to me; if you make it more a "this is how your life has progressed to this point", it's more natural and interesting.

What I'd really like (being neither British nor 20something, and also not looking for advice on careers) would be links to bios/interviews with exemplars of each type of person.

You can alter each of your questions responses individually to see what effect it's having on the results.

We found these questions were the most useful filters when doing one-on-one advice with people, but I can see they'll probably have to change as our age range expands.

We do quite a few interviews within the profiles. Is that what you have in mind?

The cutesy answer subscripts are really lame. I really did not want to complete the survey after the first question.

Thanks, that's useful feedback.

I liked them. Different strokes eh!

I also disliked them and thought they were mainly inaccurate reflections of the preceding question. Being logical is not the same as being a math whiz. Being analytical is completely different to being a grammar and vocabulary pedant.Being willing to work in a competitive field is not the same as having a personally competitive personality.

I agree. I also thought they could have done with more clearly explaining 'social impact'. Not really sure what that means.

That's a good point. We do that elsewhere in the career guide, but I might add it to the intro text.

https://80000hours.org/articles/the-meaning-of-making-a-diff...

If you're bad at math, poor at writing or analyzing arguments, and have the competitive instinct of a Care Bear, you're a 10/10 for a think tank researcher. I find it a little dubious to call this a career test.

Fair. Bear in mind: (i) it's aimed at talented graduates (ii) it's finds which of our top recommended careers you should most strongly consider, rather than which career you'd be best at.

Why is it targeted as such. Agism is a social issue, found predominantly in several of the industries suggested.

edit: I just took a quick glance at your 'Meet the team' page, and it's almost exclusively very young white males (save 3). I'm now not sure what you mean by social change. It can't be equality in gender, nor race, nor age. What are you striving for, and why aren't you practicing it?

They obviously feel that they can maximize their impact by giving guidance to other people. This seems plausible to me.

We're focused on social impact, which means enabling other people to live more flourishing lives. https://80000hours.org/articles/the-meaning-of-making-a-diff...

No, you're not, you're actually the cause of the problem. If you were actually doing what you claim, then more than one person on your staff be anything other than white. You are the problem. And if you figure out how you managed to start a company around social impact, and yet only hired young white males that targets young white males, then maybe you just might figure out how not be the problem. The only correct answer, is "Holy shit, I'm an idiot, how do I fix this". I waited a few days so focus was off this article.

> you should most strongly consider

Based on what?

Our framework and individual career research, like it says at the top of the page.

https://80000hours.org/career-guide/basics/ https://80000hours.org/career-guide/profiles/

Well you’re obviously recommending careers based on the survey, which tests on their strengths and interests, so I’ll say that you’re recommending based on their strengths and interests. You’re basically skirting the question with a vague answer.

I'm a programmer who left startups to go be a teacher at a public elementary school. It told me to be in politics or a tech startup founder. I'm just not sure how those can match both the reward of lighting up little faces with fresh knowledge and the impact of directly working to improve what is (to me) the center of my community.

So yeah can I suggest 'school teacher' as a result? Is it just totally outside of the realm of possibility here? Maybe I just didn't see it. (I did check the box that said I'm okay with a small influence!)

We do consider teaching, and it could be a good path if you're a very good fit, but we don't in general recommend it if you want to maximise your social impact. https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/tea...

I'd suggest considering going back to tech/startups, but trying to join one that's doing positive innovation in an important cause, like edtech or online education.

See and I (personally) think that's the wrong way to go about it. Wouldn't it be arrogant for me to try to innovate education from the office of a startup? Shouldn't I be in the kids' world - letting actual experience guide the innovation? Using the scientific method to discover what works and what doesn't?

I'm glad you have the page in there, though! Best of luck with this project.

If you want to focus on education as a cause, then I agree working as a teacher at some point makes a lot of sense.

I think it'll be hard to work out what works just from that though, because the outcomes of education take many years and are often counterintuitive. You'd need to eventually do randomised controlled trials.

I've written some more here: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/5-reasons-not-to-go-into-educ...

I'd also recommend checking out sources like this: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/about/what-works...

I believe teaching is underappreciated but has a very big impact. Teaching influences people directly. If you have 80 hours or more to make impact sharing your skills in an awesome place look at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Lgzn4eYqlAsWKGQXvk4E...

We're talking SF-centric startup culture here. It's not enough to actually change the world for the better. You need to make millions of dollars and be 'changing the world' by disrupting some kind of market segment nobody actually cares about, and be some kind of Randian uberwhatever, otherwise you're a piece of shit

Millions of dollars seem like pretty good evidence that someone cares.

> 80,000 Hours is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a registered charity in England and Wales, Registered Charity Number 1149828 Centre for Effective Altruism, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Littlegate House, St Ebbes Street, Oxford OX1 1PT, UK.

An English charity recommending people joing the English civil service is pretty far away from SF Startup culture.

What do you teach in the public schools?

IMHO if you wanna have impact, you write. You write theatrical plays, social and political philosophy, satire, comics, songs, whatever.

Anything that will connect someone in 200 years from today, with your mind and soul, can make a difference.

At least, this is how I feel when I read poems, watch a play, read a book or listen to a song.

ps. A prominent example is Tolstoy. The impact his writings had on Gandhi is outstanding IMHO.

Think tank researcher and economics professor? These are good careers for people who want to change things? Citation needed.

Click through to the individual profiles to see the reasoning.

This bothered me. There's enough of these people. Society needs disruptive change in order to save the planet, feed the hungry, end homelessness, end the slave trade, etc.

I was looking for something along these lines.

You could use a think tank or econ phd position to research policies with potential for disruptive change. We also recommend startups highly. What paths do you think we should look into more?

edit: I get what the organisation is trying to do now. Just doing the survey put me off a bit though, even once I read through other parts of the site. IMO there's a lot of hand waving and not enough hard info - particularly keeping in mind the target audience is students - on exactly what sort of social impact each role has. To me it looked like the site was just saying hey... you can become a researcher at a think tank... then doesn't solve the main problem for students, as they still have no idea how that contributes to society in a meaningful way as they aren't presented with any concrete examples.

I do think that more career paths should be featured. The main one that comes to mind is education. I'll note that think tanks have been harping on about it for years with little progress. The attitude towards it in the US is bizarre; people from overseas are shocked when they find out how little money teachers are paid and even more so how teachers are looked down upon as a result. Hence the average quality of teachers is lower compared to other countries and the impacts on society are subtle and widespread. Having police in schools seems completely insane to outsiders.

Becoming a teacher would make a small difference. Convincing talented graduates to enter the field and transform it would make a larger difference. I strongly recommend including some professions that may not be sexy or lucrative, but have the potential to make a difference.

Ok, thanks for taking the time to read through.

I agree another big part of the equation is what causes to focus on. We have separate content on that but it needs a lot of work:

https://80000hours.org/articles/cause-selection/

You need to read this -

http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-i...

Me too. Maybe our skill-set isn't best suited for these problems?

The hungry are being fed without disruptive change. The world currently has the lowest poverty rates in all of human history.

According to this quiz, you can either have small guaranteed impact or bet on something bigger while accepting you might fail.

I wonder what's their take on bootstrapped startups, that have potential to grow exponentially but don't rush it valley-style. Biggest long-running tech companies had positive revenue since very early in their life (if not day 1).

A lot of these suggestions seem really...douchey (for lack of a more precise term). I guess theoretically you can have a great social impact being a hedge fund quant or a startup founder, but the more traditional goal of those careers (and the people who undertake them) is making yourself filthy stinking rich.

I know the 80,000 hours people have this idea of earn-to-give, but do they have any stats on how many people actually follow through with that? It's very easy to imagine a bright, young college grad heading for Wall Street planning to donate 75% of his income, but once he gets there he finds he quite likes the taste of caviar and all his friends and coworkers have a couple BMWs, anyway...

It's true that it depends a lot on what you do within the career.

On stats behind earning to give, of the people we know, 0% have quit, meaning carrying on in a high-earning career but stopped donating at least 10%. Most are still earning to give, and the others have left high-earning careers though to make an impact through research, nonprofits etc instead. I think this is due to the strength of the community - if you were earning to give alone it would be much harder. Also, we only have 3 years of data, so it's too early to get a good measurement.

While that was fun, you get what you aspire to be. The bias is tied to your appraisal of your skills and potential and a few arbitrary pieces of info. That being said, the top 3 choices i got would be my top 3 fav careers in descrnding order.

Ha! I agree it's an issue that people might not assess their skills and preferences correctly, but that seems hard to avoid in a short test. Later we could add more objective measures of skills etc.

I think it's great to encourage these kinds of work.

I'm old and wish I had made my impact in more meaningful areas.

Lots of people here have changed the world. I can't be the only one looking back wanting to have done it for a better cause.

I appreciate the sentiment, that if you look at just gross impact, then a quant/hedge fund/think tank career might actually be more helpful than something more traditionally 'impactful'. But I can't help but feel that in it's quest to say something novel about social impact, it misses the soul of what it means to change the world for the better.

I uh... had 10/10 on all my first 5 results. After that I just closed the page, since it was obviously irrelevant.

I like these tests, if just for fun, but they need to have an actual result :P

That means they're all tied.

What responses did you put in?

If you look at a graph of world GDP, you'll see that it grows steadily and exponentially. The full set of causes is this is not known, but it can be shown not to be merely due to the gradual accumulation of capital. A large part must be due to technological growth.

So if you want to measure social impact I would also include the positive externalities of various jobs including working in technology. Even though I will probably be ridiculed as a typical silicon valley cultist, I think that anything that advances technology, including software, has a big positive economic externality.

That's why startup and software jobs reasonable scores for direct impact. https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/sof... https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/tec...

You're right I should have looked at the website before posting.

I got a think tank researcher answer. How do I get this job, I'm actually really serious.

From what I know, I think tanks reach out to you — or word of mouth.

There's some more detail in the profile: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/thi...

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