I’m an advisor for 80,000 Hours, which means I talk to a lot of thoughtful people who genuinely want to have a positive impact with their careers. One piece of advice I consistently find myself giving is to consider working on pressing world problems you might not have explored yet.

• Check out our list of the world’s most pressing problems — or read our advice on how to think about the question for yourself.

Should you work on climate change or AI risk? Mitigating antibiotic resistance or preventing bioterrorism? Preventing disease in low-income countries or reducing the harms of factory farming?

Your choice of problem area can matter a lot. But I think a lot of people under-invest in building a view of which problems they think are most pressing.

I think there are three main reasons for this:

1. They think they can’t get a job working on a certain problem, so the argument that it’s important doesn’t seem relevant.

I see this most frequently with AI. People think that they don’t have aptitude or interest in machine learning, so they wouldn’t be able to contribute to mitigating catastrophic risks from AI.

But I don’t think this is true. There are potentially really impactful roles for reducing AI risk in:

• AI governance and coordination
• Operations management
• Information security
• Communications
• And more

Many roles in these fields don’t necessarily need you to have a background in ML or technical expertise. In general, I think that there are lots of ways to contribute to most problems.

Once you’ve determined which problem you’d like to solve, it’s much easier to try and identify which paths might suit you best.

2. People often fail to explore different issues because they become focused on one problem, such as climate change or AI. They believe, in my view correctly, that these are among the world’s most crucial issues, but then stop looking for alternatives.

This approach can be limiting. This is particularly true for those skilled in operations, fundraising, or policy-making since these skills are applicable across many issues. Others may have strengths that are especially well suited to a particularly pressing problem. If you’re a little flexible with your cause selection, you’ll increase your chances of finding very impactful work.

For example, Gregory Lewis, who has written articles for 80,000 Hours on biorisk, thinks AI risk is probably the most pressing problem in the world. But his reasoning didn’t stop there. In part because he has a background as a doctor, he concluded that he’s best suited to working on preventing catastrophic pandemics.

3. Some people defer too much to other people and organisations like 80,000 Hours who work on cause prioritisation full time.

This came up recently on our podcast. Lennart Heim, who researches compute governance to reduce risks from AI, initially underestimated the value of his expertise in hardware because he assumed that if it were significant, someone else would already be working on the topic. He later realised that important issues can go unnoticed, and he took the initiative to work on it himself.

There are other cause areas — like US-China relations and improving information security — that 80,000 Hours prioritises now much more now than we once did. People with skills in these areas might’ve undervalued their ability to contribute if they had simply deferred to us before we recognised the importance of these areas.

Another way this can go wrong is that some people work on problems they haven’t investigated, leading to low motivation and burnout. I’ve advised people who got jobs working in an area just because they heard it’s important, but once they were there, they found it hard to buy into the organisation’s approach to having an impact.

So, how much time should you invest in your cause prioritisation investigation? That’s a tricky question, but we have a blog post that offers some guidance.

If you’re grappling with some of these questions, we recommend that you apply for advising! We’re here to give personalised advice to help our advisees increase their positive impact.

Learn more:

• Can one person make a difference? What the evidence says.
• What are the most pressing world problems?
• Why the problem you work on is the biggest driver of your impact

The post Why many people underrate investigating the problem they work on appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

We’ve argued that you should approach your career like a scientist doing experiments: be willing to test out many different paths and gather evidence about where you can have the most impact.

More generally, this approach of open truth-seeking — being constantly, curiously on the lookout for new evidence and arguments, and always being ready to change our minds — is a virtue we think is absolutely crucial to doing good.

One of our first-ever podcast episodes was an interview with Julia Galef, author of The Scout Mindset (before she wrote the book!).

Julia argues — in our view, correctly — that it’s easy to end up viewing the world like a soldier, when really you should be more like a scout.

Soldiers have set views and beliefs, and defend those beliefs. When we are acting like soldiers, we display motivated reasoning: for example, confirmation bias, where we seek out information that supports our existing beliefs and misinterpret information that is evidence against our position so that it seems like it’s not.

Scouts, on the other hand, need to form correct beliefs. So they have to change their minds as they view more of the landscape.

Acting like a scout isn’t always easy:

• There’s lots of psychological evidence suggesting that we all have cognitive biases that cloud our thinking.
• It can sometimes be really painful to admit you were wrong or to come to think something unpleasant, even if that’s what the evidence suggests.
• Even if you know you should change your beliefs, it’s difficult to know how much they should change in response to new evidence — the subject of our interview with Spencer Greenberg.
• Having good judgement is actually just a difficult skill that needs to be practiced and developed over time.

But if we want to form correct beliefs about the world and how it works, we have to try.

And if we want to do good, forming correct beliefs about how our actions will impact others seems pretty crucial.

Why are we talking about this now?

Up until a few weeks ago, we’d held up Sam Bankman-Fried as a positive example of someone pursuing a high-impact career, and had written about how we encouraged him to use a strategy of earning to give.

Sam had pledged to donate 99% of his earnings to charity — and a year ago his net worth was estimated to be more than $20 billion. We were excited about what he might achieve with his philanthropy.

On November 11, Sam’s company, FTX, declared bankruptcy, and its collapse is likely to cause a tremendous amount of harm.

Sam appears to have made decisions which were, to say the least, seriously harmful.

If newspaper reports are accurate, customer deposits that were meant to be safely held by FTX were being used to make risky investments — investments which left FTX owing billions of dollars more than it had.

These reported actions are appalling.

We failed to see this coming.

So this week’s thoughts on the scout mindset are as much a reminder for us at 80,000 Hours as anyone else.

In the coming weeks and months, we want to thoughtfully examine what we believed and why — and in particular, where we were wrong — so we can, where needed, change our views.

There are so many questions for us to consider, in order to shape our future actions — here are a few:

• To what extent is the collapse of FTX evidence that it was always going to be hard to earn to give on a very large scale without causing harm?
• The FTX Future Fund was a major philanthropic funder in many of our top problem areas. Is the resignation of the Fund’s staff, and the collapse of the Fund, evidence that we should be more suspicious of very rich donors by default? In what ways might funding sources affect the approaches taken in attempting to solve problems? In particular, how should we make sure our research findings aren’t unduly influenced by our funders?
• How does the loss of potential funding for some of the world’s most pressing problems affect their neglectedness?
• How should this impact our views of which career paths seem highest impact?
• Should we be conducting more research into topics like how people trying to do good can end up making things worse?
• How should the effective altruism community change in response to this moving forward?

There aren’t yet clear answers to these questions.

As we learn more about what happened and the wider effects of the collapse of FTX, we’re going to do our best to act like scouts, not soldiers: to defend beliefs only if they’re worthy of defence, and to be prepared and ready to change our minds.

We’ve released a statement regarding the collapse of FTX, and hope to write more on the topic soon.

We’re optimistic that the work of identifying, prioritising, and pursuing solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems will continue. We hope you’ll be with us in that project.

Learn more

• Rob Wiblin shares his personal reaction to the FTX bankruptcy on The 80,000 Hours Podcast (November 23)
• Why “scout mindset” is crucial to good judgment — Julia Galef’s TEDx Talk
• Podcast (September 2017): Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad
• Ways people trying to do good can make things worse, and how to avoid them
• Considering considerateness: why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate
• Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively, and avoid single-player thinking
• From Open Philanthropy’s co-CEO Holden Karnofsky: Some comments on recent FTX-related events (November 10) and My takes on the FTX situation will (mostly) be cold, not hot (November 18)
• A job matching service for affected FTX Future Fund grantees (November 21)

The post Why being open to changing our minds is especially important right now appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Our list of the most pressing problems has some pretty widely accepted concerns, to be sure: we care about mitigating climate change, preventing nuclear war, and ensuring good governance.

But one of our highest priorities is preventing an AI-related catastrophe, which sounds like science fiction to a lot of people. And, though we know less about them, we’re also interested in speculative issues — such as atomically precise manufacturing, artificial sentience, and wild animal suffering. These aren’t typically the kind of issues activists distribute flyers about.

Should it make us nervous that some of our ideas are out of the mainstream? It’s probably a good idea in these cases to take a step back, reexamine our premises, and consult others we trust about our conclusions. But we shouldn’t be too shocked if some of our beliefs end up at odds with common sense — indeed, I think everyone has good reason to be open to believing weird ideas.

One of the best reasons for this view relates to another of 80,000 Hours’ top priorities: preventing catastrophic pandemics. I’d guess few people think it’s strange to be concerned about pandemics now, as COVID-19 has killed more than 6 million people worldwide and thrown the global economy into chaos.

But 80,000 Hours has been worried about pandemics for a while — we had a podcast episode about the threat in 2017 (with our now-CEO Howie Lempel). It might have seemed odd at that time to be worrying about such an extreme scenario when there are so many important problems to be addressed in the world every day. In fact, 80,000 Hours cofounder Will MacAskill reported in his new book, What We Owe the Future, that he was met with laughter when he pitched pandemic preparedness as a top policy priority to the first minister of Scotland in 2017.

Now, though, it’s clear that failing to heed these warnings was a big mistake; we wish preparing for catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease had just been normal.

And if your goal is to have a big impact on the world, you’d be well-advised to consider at least some weird ways of going about it. A lot of the most obvious ways of doing good in the world already have a lot of people working on them.

If you can find a problem or a solution to work on that seems off the beaten path, you may have a better chance at making a difference. One way to do that is to focus on a population whose moral status is often discounted, such as factory farmed animals (maybe even shrimp) — or future people.

This won’t always work out, but ideas that seem weird are more likely to be unduly neglected.

Looking back, there was a time when the threats from nuclear weapons and climate change — which I listed earlier as “widely accepted concerns” — were completely novel and unconventional. So our sense of what might be weird is highly contextual and, in a sense, parochial. We should be reluctant to give too much weight to ‘weirdness’ concerns when thinking about serious matters.

However, there’s certainly something to be said for keeping yourself grounded. When you follow enough arguments to their apparently logical endpoints, you can end up reaching some very bizarre and counterintuitive conclusions. So if you come to conclusions that seem totally disconnected from what you think is valuable, it may be worth operating under the assumption that something in your line of reasoning has gone wrong, even if you can’t pinpoint it.

It would be most surprising, though, if we’ve just now come to the end of moral discovery. Gender equality, racial justice, religious liberty, LGBTQ+ rights, and democracy all took a long time to gain wider acceptance. New moral ideas always seem strange at first. And many people will resist them.

But if you’re comfortable with being a little weird, you might find yourself on an important moral frontier. And if you’re trying to be ambitious about making the world a better place and improving the prospects for future generations, that’s where you should want to be.

Learn more

• Ajeya Cotra discussed how surprising ideas can influence our practical decision-making on The 80,000 Hours Podcast
• Doing unusual amounts of good requires unusual actions on the EA Forum
• Is concern about AI risk too much like sci-fi to take seriously?
• 7 science fiction inventions that became reality from Popular Science

The post The importance of considering speculative ideas appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

There is (sometimes) such a thing as a free lunch

You live in a world where most people, most of the time, think of things as categorical, rather than continuous. People either agree with you or they don’t. Food is healthy or unhealthy. Your career is ‘good for the world,’ or it’s neutral, or maybe even it’s bad — but it’s only the category that matters, not the size of the benefit or harm. Ideas are wrong, or they are right. Predictions end up confirmed or falsified.

In my view, one of the central ideas of effective altruism is the realisation that ‘doing good’ is not such a binary. That as well as it mattering that we help others at all, it matters how much we help. That helping more is better than helping less, and helping a lot more is a lot better.

For me, this is also a useful framing for thinking rationally. Here, rather than ‘goodness,’ the continuous quantity is truth. The central realisation is that ideas are not simply true or false; they are all flawed attempts to model reality, and just how flawed is up for grabs. If we’re wrong, our response should not be to give up, but to try to be less wrong.

When you realise something is continuous that most people are treating as binary, this is a good indication that you’re in a situation where it’s unusually easy to achieve something you care about. Because if most people don’t see huge differences between options that you do, you can concentrate on the very best options and face little competition from others.

Sometimes the converse is also true: people may treat something as continuous, and work hard at it, despite the returns to working harder actually being very small.

An example that sticks in my mind from my time teaching maths is about how neatly work is presented. Lots of people care about neat work or good presentation, and sometimes there’s a very good reason for this. If work is messy enough that it’s difficult to read, or that the student is making mistakes caused by misreading their own writing, this is important to fix!

The problem is, the returns on neatness suddenly drop off a cliff when the work is clear enough to be easily readable, and yet some students will put huge amounts of effort into making their work look not just clear, but unnecessarily neat.

Worse still, some teachers will praise this additional effort, implying it’s a good thing that someone takes three times as long as they need to on every piece of work just to make it look nice. But it’s usually¹ not — that extra time could be used for learning, or just hanging out with friends!

I remember speaking to some students who were struggling with their workload, only to discover that they were doing each piece of work twice: once to get the maths, and another to copy everything out beautifully to hand in. It broke my heart.

Even when it’s fairly normal to try really hard at something, it’s worth checking that more effort is reliably leading to more of what you care about. That is to say, there are some things you should half-ass with everything you’ve got.

Thinking about these ideas as I tried to help my students — and now as I try to help the people I advise — I’ve noticed two ideas that frequently appear in the advice I give.

1. Try optimising for something.
2. Know what you’re optimising for.

In the rest of this article, I describe how I think about applying these two ideas, and the sort of mistakes that I hope they can prevent. I include lots of examples, and most of these are linked to career decisions inspired by real conversations I’ve had, though none were written with a specific person in mind, and all of the names are made up.

I also try to include some more abstract mathematical intuition, made (hopefully) clearer with the addition of some pretty graphs.

At the end of the article, I try to think of ways in which the advice might not apply or be misleading, though you may well generate others as you read, and trying to do so seems like a useful exercise.

Idea #1: Consider optimising for something

You are allowed to try really hard to achieve a thing you care about, even when it’s a thing not that many people try hard to achieve — in some ways, especially in those cases. You don’t have to stop at ‘enough,’ or even at ‘lots’ — you can keep going. You can add More Dakka.

The thought of trying really hard at something feels very natural to some people, including many who I expect might find useful ideas in the rest of the article. But to many others, it feels gross, or unnatural, or in some way ‘not allowed’ — ‘tryhard’ is a term some people even use to insult others! It’s for this last reason that I framed this idea in terms of permission — I don’t think you need it, but if you found the idea off-putting, now you have permission to do it anyways.

Idea #2: Know what you’re optimising for

This idea is about being deliberate in what you’re trying hard to achieve. It’s about trying to ensure that the subject of the majority of your effort is in fact the most important thing. In some sense, like optimising at all, it’s about permission: knowing that you are allowed to realise that one thing is much more important for you to get than all of the others, and trying to get it (even if it’s not the typical thing people want).

Know what you’re optimising for is also, I suspect, often about picking only one thing at a time, even if multiple things are important. Even in cases where picking one thing doesn’t seem best, asking the question “Which one thing should I optimise for?” seems like it might produce useful insights.

People often optimise for the wrong thing

I first saw people repeatedly optimising for the wrong thing when I was teaching. Students care about many things, from status among their peers to getting good enough grades for university. Many of these things are directly rewarded by people that students interact with: parents will praise good grades; other students will let you know what they think of you; and some teachers will be fairly transparent about who they think the smart kids are (even if they try to hide it).

Importantly, though several of these things are correlated with learning, none of them are perfect indicators of actually learning. Even though most people agree to some extent that one of the major purposes of school is learning, learning has a really weak reward signal, and it’s easy to drift through school without really trying to learn.

There’s a difference between doing things that are somewhat correlated with things you want (or even doing things that you expect to lead to things you want), and trying really unusually hard to actually get what you want. Sometimes working out what you actually want can be really hard — for many, working out what one ultimately values can be a lifetime’s work. However, I’ve been frequently surprised, during my time as an advisor, by how often it’s been sufficient to just ask:

It looks like you’re trying to achieve X here. Is X really the thing you want?

The mistake of optimising for not quite the thing you want can be particularly easy to miss if the thing is useful in general, but in this instance is not useful for you. For one thing, it’s hard to internally notice without specifically looking for it. But you’re also less likely to have others point out this mistake, because things that are useful in general seem more ‘normal’ to have as a goal. For instance, appearing high status seems pretty useful, and it’s a goal that many people have to some extent, so who’s going to stop and ask you whether you really endorse playing as many status games as you are?

Perhaps a more relevant example is that I often see (usually young) effective altruists optimising for impact per unit of time, rather than for the total impact they expect to have over their career. They ask themselves what the most impactful thing they can do right now is, and then do that. This often works well, and there are many worse heuristics to use. Unfortunately, it’s not always the case that trying to do the very best thing right now puts you in the best position to do the most good overall.

People seem to accept this when it comes to going to university. Choosing to do an undergraduate degree is to some extent like choosing to take a negative salary job — which usually doesn’t produce any useful output to others — purely to learn a lot and set yourself up well to achieve things later. For many people, this is a great idea! But then something strange happens when people graduate. For an altruist, taking a role in a for-profit company where you’ll gain a whole bunch of useful skills can look very unattractive, as you won’t be having any direct impact. Taking a salary hit for an opportunity to learn a ton also doesn’t look good (that is, unless the opportunity is called ‘grad school,’ in which case it looks fine again). Neither of these strategies are necessarily best, but they are at least worth considering! The lost impact or salary at the outset might be made up for many times over if you’re able to access more impactful opportunities later.

The law of equal and opposite advice applies in many places, and this is one of them. Just as you might make the mistake of under-investing in yourself, you can also stay in the ‘building up to have a big impact later’ phase for too long. Someone I advised not too long ago referred to themself as “an option value addict,” which I thought was a great way to frame this idea. While the idea of option value — that it can be useful to preserve your ability to choose something later — is a really valuable one, it’s only valuable to keep options that you actually have some chance of choosing. The smaller the chance that you ever take a particular option, the less valuable it is to preserve it — so thinking about how likely you personally are to use it ends up being important.

For example, it might be worthwhile for some people to keep an extremely low profile on all forms of social media in case a spicy social media presence prevents them from later working for an intelligence agency or running for office. But if you have absolutely no intention of ever working in government, this reason doesn’t apply to you! (There are, of course, other reasons one might want to limit social media exposure.)

Trying to optimise for too many things can lead to optimising for nothing in particular

As well as optimising for the wrong things, I often speak to people who are shooting for too many things at once. This typically plays out in one of two ways:

• People try to optimise for so many things that they don’t end up making progress on any.
• People just don’t optimise at all — because when so many things seem important, where do you even start?

In both cases, this often ends up with people trying to find an option that looks at least kind-of good according to multiple different criteria. Doing well on many uncorrelated criteria is pretty hard.² This often leads to only one option being considered… and that option not looking great.

What might this look like?

The examples below have been inspired by conversations I’ve had. Each involves a hypothetical person describing an option which seems pretty good. It might even be the best option they have. But all of these pretty good options follow the pattern of ‘this thing looks good for many different reasons’ — and ‘looks good for many reasons’ misses the importance of scale: that doing much, much better in one way is often better than doing a little better in several ways at the same time. The people in the examples would benefit from considering what their decision would look like if they picked one source of value, and tried to get as much of that as possible.

When facing a situation with multiple potential sources of value, you might be able to get outsized gains by just pushing really hard on one of them. In particular, it’s possible to get gains so big that they more than outweigh losses elsewhere.

It’s not always the case that you can completely trade off different good things against each other — many people, for example, want to have at least some interest in their work. But it is sometimes the case, and it’s worth noticing when you’re in one of those situations. In particular, if the different good things you’re achieving are all roughly described as ‘positive effects on the world,’ you can estimate the size of the effects and see how they trade off against each other. What matters is that you’re doing good, not how you’re doing it. Of course, be careful not to take that last part too far.

The ‘alternative framings’ in the examples above all replace optimising for nothing in particular with just optimising for one thing. The other things either got dropped entirely, or were only satisficed,³ rather than optimised for. This isn’t an accident. Picking one thing forces you to be deliberate about which thing you shoot for, and it makes it seem possible to actually optimise. I think those benefits alone are enough to at least consider just picking one thing.

But I actually suspect that something even stronger is true: often just having a single goal is best.

The intuition here is that when you value things differently to the population average, your best options are likely to be skewed towards the things you care relatively more about. Markets are fairly efficient for average preferences, but when your preferences are different to the average, you might find big inefficiencies. For example, if you’re househunting and you absolutely love cooking but never work from home, it’s worth looking for places that have unusually big kitchens compared to the size of the other rooms. Most people are willing to pay more for bigger rooms, or a home office — if you don’t need those things, don’t pay for them!

Let’s sketch some graphs to try to see what’s going on here. Consider the case where you care about two things — let’s say salary and interestingness. (Often you’ll care about more than two things, but 2D plots are easier to sketch, and I suspect that the effect I sketch below is even stronger in higher dimensions.) You might expect the job market to look something like Figure 1:

Let’s assume that the average person cares equally about salary and interestingness, and rates them by just adding up the two scores. When this is the case, we should expect that higher-salaried jobs that are more interesting will be harder to get.

In Figure 2, I’ve colour coded easy jobs to get as black/purple and harder jobs to get as orange/yellow below. But what if I care much more about my job being interesting than it paying well? In this case, the best jobs for me won’t be quite the same as the hardest for me to get. I’ve shown this preference in Figure 3 by colour coding a different plot from bright yellow (perfect for me) to dark purple (terrible for me). I assumed that I still cared about salary, but that interest was three times as important — so to rank the jobs, I multiplied the interest score by three before adding salary.

I want to look for jobs that are easier for me to get (darker on Figure 2), and that I’ll actually want (lighter on Figure 3). The easiest jobs for me to get are in the bottom left, which doesn’t help much, as I don’t want these. The jobs I want most are in the top right, which also doesn’t help much as these are hardest to get. If my theory is correct, I should get the best tradeoffs between these two things by focusing hard on the thing I care more about than average (interest), while not worrying as much about the thing I care less about than average (salary). This would tell me to look first in the bottom right of the graph.

It’s a little hard to tell from just these two figures exactly how well the theory is doing, so let’s make things a bit easier to see in Figure 4 below. First, I removed the top 10% most popular jobs among the general public, to represent some jobs being competitive enough to not even be worth trying. I then also removed the bottom 50% of the jobs according to my preferences, to represent wanting to look for something better than average. Both of these cutoffs are arbitrary, but the conclusion doesn’t change when you pick different ones.

As expected, the best-looking options I’ll actually be able to get look like very interesting, low-salary jobs.

In practice, all of the tradeoffs above will be much less clean. Preferences about different options probably shouldn’t be linear, for example, certainly not in the case of salary. Despite all this, the conclusion remains that if your preferences are in some way different from the average, some of the best places to look to exploit the differences are the extremes.

When do I expect this not to apply?

Multiplicative factors

In the sorts of situations I describe above, the total value tends to come from the values from each different consideration being added up: my job being interesting makes me a bit happier, and so does being paid more; donating money to effective charities saves lives, and so does working for one of those charities. In these cases, less of one thing pretty directly gets traded for more of another. Even in these cases, it can still be worth getting to some minimum level,³ if you get most of the gains from getting to that level and/or it’s easy.

Sometimes though, success looks more like a bunch of factors multiplied together than a bunch of things added together. When this is the case, it becomes really important that none of those factors end up getting set too low, which can be catastrophic.

In my view, the most important example of something that can be a multiplier on everything else you’re doing is personal health and wellbeing, especially when it is in danger of dropping below a certain level. Burnout is already a big risk when you’re optimising for doing as much as possible to help, especially among people who really care about others. In fact, one of my biggest concerns in writing this piece is that it might make this risk higher.

In some sense, we can frame this problem as a mistake of optimising for the wrong thing: impact right now instead of impact over the long run. But on this topic, the thing I care most about is not what it says about optimisation — I care most that you take care of yourself as your number one priority. These resources provide useful perspectives on this risk, as well as some ideas for how to reduce it:

• I burnt out at EAG. Let’s talk about it
• Aiming for the minimum of self-care is dangerous
• Podcast: Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome (and also see the links in the show notes for this episode)

Very good might be good enough

You’ll often find that as you keep trying to push the envelope further, it gets harder and harder to make progress. At some point then, even after you’ve seen substantial gains from deciding to optimise at all, you may reach a point where effort on the most important thing is going to pay off less than effort on something else.

This might happen because there are fewer and fewer people who you can learn from. It could be that you are in fact now making much fewer mistakes in your efforts, and the fewer mistakes you make, the harder it is to catch and eliminate them. Maybe it’s just that you’re starting to enter the domain of people who are really trying, and competition is heating up. Whatever the reason is, there’s a chance that this is the time to pick a second thing, and push on that too. In particular, when it comes to personal skill development, not only can it be easier to get extremely good at two things than truly world-class at one, in this case your skill set might look quite special.

Next steps

People who know what they are optimising for might ask themselves things like:

• Is what I’m trying to achieve in this situation the right thing?
• Am I trying to achieve multiple things at once? Is that the best strategy?
• Does the thing I’m trying to achieve actually lead to something I want?
• What would it look like if I focused on the most important thing and dropped the others?

It might be worth thinking about some aspect of your life, and ask yourself those questions now. Did one work particularly well, or can you think of an alternative question that works better for you?

After reading this article, you may well think that this kind of mindset isn’t well-suited to the way you think. If that’s the case, that’s fine! Hopefully you now at least have a different perspective you can look at some decisions with. Even if it seems unlikely you’ll use it often, it might shed some light on decisions made by people like me.

The post Know what you’re optimising for appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

In a nutshell: I have imposter syndrome, and I suspect many other people trying to have a big impact with their career do, too. For a long time, imposter syndrome massively limited the impact of my career by causing me to rule out potentially impactful options and affecting my day-to-day job performance and satisfaction — but through talk therapy and other tools, I’ve mostly overcome it. If you think you might struggle with imposter syndrome, tackling it may be one of the most important forms of personal development you can do. It was for me.

I’ve felt like an imposter since my first year of university.

I was accepted to the university that I believed was well out of my league — my ‘stretch’ school. I’d gotten good grades in high school, but I’d never seen myself as especially smart: I wasn’t selected for gifted programmes in elementary school like some of my friends were, and my standardised test scores were in the bottom half of those attending my university.

I was pretty confident I got into the university because of some fluke in the system (my top hypothesis was that I was admitted as part of an affirmative action initiative) — and that belief stayed with me (and was amplified) during the decade that followed.

Throughout that decade, there was evidence that I really was good at my work at different points, but I could always come up with an explanation for why the evidence was unreliable.

For example, as an undergraduate, I was the only first-year student in my biology department to get a research internship at the Mayo Clinic — one of the most prestigious biomedical institutions in the US. But I felt I only got the internship because I’d met the right person at the right time, and tricked them into thinking I was smarter than I was by saying smart-sounding things.

Likewise, during my final year of university, I was given an award for being the top performer in my sociology department. But I believed that was just because the professors ‘liked me’ and thought I was ‘nice.’

My feelings didn’t end at university. They came back when I was offered an internship at GiveWell after graduating. But despite the fact that I had completed multiple work tests and had interviewed with the CEO, I told myself I only got that internship because my resume made me look more competent than I was (because of years of tricking other people into giving me internships and awards!).

More recently, I published a series of blog posts on nuclear war on the Effective Altruism Forum while working at Rethink Priorities, and got a lot of positive feedback. But I also got some negative feedback about some mistakes I’d made in my analysis — which, to me, confirmed that anyone reading my work closely would realise the work was riddled with mistakes and flawed reasoning.

And then when Will MacAskill, apparently impressed by my nuclear war research, asked me to do research into civilisational collapse for his upcoming book, I felt like even more of a fraud — like I’d tricked Will into thinking I was a good researcher by publishing low-quality research that ‘passed’ as good.

Rather than assuaging my insecurities, my successes actually made me feel more ashamed, because they meant that I was fooling more and more people in increasingly high-stakes roles. Now that I was being asked to do things that I thought really mattered, I was going to really be letting people down.

Writing this now, I’m astounded by the mental gymnastics I was performing to maintain the belief that I was fooling everyone. Looking back, I’m proud of the achievements in that list. And even long before I was working on those impactful projects — and even if I’d never worked on things like research for Will MacAskill — there was and would have been plenty of reason to think I had something to contribute.

But somehow, I believed that I was both terrible at my job, and also excellent at the skill of seeming great at it; I believed I was both much less competent than my exceptionally smart colleagues, and also that they weren’t smart enough to realise I was a fake. Some truly ridiculous contradictions.

Thankfully, I’ve come a long way in overcoming my imposter syndrome. But I’ve met a lot of people struggling with the same things in the process — people who’ve noticed ways their imposter syndrome has seriously curtailed their impact (and their wellbeing) — and I’ve come to suspect that imposter syndrome might be especially common, and especially harmful, among people trying to have high-impact careers.

Below, I explore why I think that might be, why it matters, and concrete things my friends, colleagues, and I have found helpful in overcoming imposter syndrome.

How imposter syndrome has capped my impact so far

My imposter syndrome has had really significant effects on my day-to-day work and productivity.

For example, when I first started at Rethink Priorities, I was so worried my manager would realise I wasn’t actually any good at research that I worked long hours to compensate for my perceived incompetence. (To be clear, this was driven by my own anxiety, not by anything my manager did or said.) Working such long hours got me close to burnout, plus a case of repetitive strain injury that still flares up four years later.

Additionally, while doing that research at Rethink, I caveated everything in my writeups so heavily that no one reading them would be able to tell what I really thought. (If they couldn’t figure out what I really thought, they couldn’t realise I didn’t know what I was talking about!)

Similarly, while working as a research assistant for WIll MacAskill, I procrastinated showing him my research drafts for months — which made me lose out on valuable feedback from him early on in my research, when it would have been most useful.

And since joining the 80,000 Hours web team as a writer seven months ago, I’ve avoided writing articles for the website, preferring projects focused on user experience and web analytics instead, out of fear I’d be outed as a bad writer (until now — progress!).

What’s more, my imposter syndrome also made it near-impossible for me to think clearly about how to have the highest-impact career possible — to look at my strengths and weaknesses head on in order to work out which impactful roles I might actually be well suited for.

I simultaneously hoped I was competent enough to have a high-impact career, and was terrified I’d fail if I tried. And the only way to avoid the painful reality that I might not be good enough to have an impactful career was to make sure I wasn’t being too ambitious.

This meant almost never applying for impactful roles I thought I might not get. And it meant shying away from more responsibility in the roles I did get.

For example, after working as Will MacAskill’s research assistant for about six months, Will asked me to be his chief of staff. But I didn’t want the job. I felt that only someone more competent than me should be doing a job that important — someone who wasn’t faking it like me. I ended up accepting the role in the end, but the feeling that I shouldn’t be doing such a high-stakes role stayed with me.

Likewise, when I was given the opportunity to give grants to help reduce the probability of nuclear winter, I turned it down. I didn’t want myself or anyone else to realise I wasn’t any good at grantmaking.

I think it’s possible that these were big mistakes. Rather than pursue an ambitious goal like nuclear grantmaking with some chance of failure, I chose to guarantee failure by not trying in the first place — at least then I could maintain the belief that maybe I’d have succeeded.

How I (partly) overcame imposter syndrome

Despite being promoted to Will MacAskill’s chief of staff, I was more confident than ever that I was a fraud. No amount of positive feedback I got could convince me otherwise (nevermind the fact that this meant simultaneously believing that Will MacAskill was both brilliant and dumb enough to be fooled by a ‘dummy’ like me).

These worries took my anxiety to new heights, and caused my first major depressive episode.

While discussing my fears with a friend, they hypothesised that imposter syndrome — on top of being the root of my depression and anxiety — might also be the single biggest factor limiting my impact.

I was sure that they were wrong: “Sure, that might be the case for people who are really suffering from imposter syndrome, but I’m an actual imposter,” I thought. But the idea that something like imposter syndrome might meaningfully cap my ability to have a bigger impact felt important enough that I decided to explore it.

I started seeing a therapist who specialises in anxiety, depression, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome — which are often linked together, and certainly were for me. My therapist recommended we use cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to understand and address these issues.

First, we explored how the behaviours I thought were protecting me from being outed as an imposter were actually reinforcing the imposter syndrome. By doing things that would ensure no one else would realise I was a fraud (or have it confirmed for myself), I was also making it harder to get and believe evidence that I wasn’t one. For example, by working excessively without telling my colleagues, any praise I got on my work could be chalked up to my long hours rather than my abilities.

Second, we looked at how my low self-esteem biased my thinking in ways that made it really difficult to develop an accurate view of myself. For example, through things like:

• Catastrophising: assuming the worst is true, or the worst will happen without evidence (e.g. I didn’t get the job I applied for, so I’ll probably never get an impactful job).
• All-or-nothing thinking: thinking in black-and-white terms when there’s lots of grey in between (e.g. if I’m not a brilliant writer, I’m a terrible one).
• Unrealistic standards: having an unrealistically high bar for success (e.g. I’m not good at my job unless every project I work on is perfect).
• Selective attention: focusing only on negative evidence (e.g. a mix of positive and negative feedback in a performance review translates to “I’m doing a bad job”).
• Overgeneralising: taking evidence about one thing and applying it to a broader set of things (e.g. I gave a talk and it didn’t go well; I’m bad at giving talks).
• Discounting positive evidence: finding reasons not to believe positive evidence (e.g. I only got into a top-tier graduate programme because I spent twice as long as other candidates on my research sample).
• Scanning: searching for evidence of the thing we fear (e.g. reliving memories of interviews with experts to focus on what went poorly).
• Jumping to conclusions: assuming a certain (often extreme) conclusion from only a small amount of information that could mean lots of different things (e.g. interpreting a lack of explicitly positive feedback from a colleague on your work as a sign that they thought it was bad overall).

I found I was doing almost all of these. I was also applying them asymmetrically: there was one set of standards for myself, and a whole separate set — a more charitable and generous one — for everyone else.

And together, my unhelpful behaviours and my biased thinking meant I was locked into a self-reinforcing imposter syndrome cycle:

After understanding how my imposter syndrome was a self-perpetuating cycle, my therapist and I made a plan for me to start trying to get real, incontrovertible evidence about my abilities. No more hiding behind long hours and caveats and self-deprecation. To do this, we came up with ‘experiments’ that would break the imposter syndrome cycle by abandoning one of my self-protective behaviours, or challenging my biased thoughts. For example:

• Take out all of the unnecessary caveats in my next writeup.
• Share an early outline or draft with my manager.
• Take on a project I’m not sure I’ll nail.
• Ask for explicit negative feedback on my work.
• Tell my manager exactly how long it takes me to do my research tasks this week.

Each time I did these experiments, I got clarity on what my actual strengths and weaknesses were.

• Sometimes, this was in the form of non-feedback. For example, in response to telling my manager exactly how long I spent on a report, they never said what I feared they would — something like “You spent that long on this crap?”
• Sometimes, I got positive feedback. For example, a number of people have told me they liked my 80,000 Hours Podcast episode with Rob Wiblin (even though I was sure it went terribly after recording it).
• And sometimes I got negative feedback. For example, (at my request) my manager gave me some pretty substantial negative feedback about my research ability.

This wasn’t an easy process. Unsurprisingly, the positive feedback felt wonderful, and the negative feedback felt kind of devastating. But both were necessary to develop more accurate views of my abilities.

It took a lot of work to both 1) update the right amount in response to the feedback (internalising the positive, not catastrophising about the negative), and 2) come to terms with the fact that I was sometimes finding out I wasn’t as good at a given type of work as I really wanted to be. (Using the CBT tool called a STOPP really helped with the latter.)

But for better or worse, all of the feedback — feedback I’d been trying desperately to avoid before that point — allowed me to think more critically about how to have a bigger impact, given my actual strengths and weaknesses.

And I made a lot of progress. I learned that I’m a good but not phenomenal researcher (and I worked on accepting that that didn’t mean I wasn’t a good or worthwhile person). I also learned that I’m pretty great at project management and data analysis.

In this way, addressing my imposter syndrome was fundamentally a truth-seeking exercise.

And just like it’s crucially important to be genuinely open, curious, and truth-seeking when forming a judgement on what the world’s most pressing problems are, it’s crucially important to be open, curious, and truth-seeking when forming a judgement about what you might or might not be capable of.

How common is imposter syndrome?

A meta-analysis of 62 studies found that estimates of the prevalence of imposter syndrome ranged from 9% to 82%, and affects both men and women (though it may be more common in women), as well as people of all ages (though it may decrease with age).¹

Some indication that imposter syndrome is common in the effective altruism community is that when 80,000 Hours’ Chief of Staff Howie discussed his imposter syndrome publicly on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, the episode quickly become the podcast’s most popular episode ever — by a long way.

It wouldn’t be surprising to me if imposter syndrome were more common among people trying hard to do the most good they can — for a few reasons:

Ambitious goals. The careers we think are most likely to help as many people as possible tend to require a lot of ambition — often, the more ambitious your career path is, the more likely it is you’ll be able to truly move the needle on a pressing problem. But if you’re aiming that high, it makes sense that you might have a lot more doubt about your ability to achieve your ambitious goals.

An impressive community. We’ve helped build a community of people trying to do a lot of good with their careers. And we’ve focused on reaching especially capable people, with the hope that they’ll be able to use their talents to make progress on the world’s most pressing problems. But being surrounded by such impressive people can mean frequently comparing yourself to exceptionally gifted people — so it’s no surprise that being part of that community can exacerbate imposter syndrome (as well as insecurities of other kinds!).

Personality traits. More speculatively, I suspect people motivated to do as much good as they can with their careers might be more likely to have personality traits that make them more predisposed to imposter syndrome — traits like high intelligence, perfectionism, conscientiousness, ambition, and neuroticism (especially anxiety, guilt, and shame).

Philosophical views. Lots of people aiming to do as much good as possible are inspired by so-called ‘demanding’ worldviews such as consequentialism (the idea that it’s always morally better to do the thing that creates better outcomes). For some people, that can mean self-worth becomes tied to exceptionally high moral standards, which can sometimes (but not always) feed into an imposter syndrome cycle by both raising your standards and making the idea that you might not meet them even more distressing.

Do you have imposter syndrome?

We’re obviously not in the business of diagnosing mental health concerns, and we’re big proponents of seeking professional support.

That said, to get a sense of whether you have imposter syndrome characteristics, you can use an imposter syndrome screening tool like the Clance Imposter Syndrome Scale. You’ll read 20 statements and indicate how often the statement feels true to you (on a scale of 1 to 5), and then calculate your total score.²

A few example statements:

• I have often succeeded on a test or task even though I was afraid that I would not do well before I undertook the task.
• I avoid evaluations if possible and have a dread of others evaluating me.
• When people praise me for something I’ve accomplished, I’m afraid I won’t be able to live up to their expectations of me in the future.
• I sometimes think I obtained my present position or gained my present success because I happened to be in the right place at the right time or knew the right people.
• I feel bad and discouraged if I’m not ‘the best’ or at least ‘very special’ in situations that involve achievement.

Do any of those statements ring true? If so, I’d encourage you to answer the complete questionnaire on your own.

Or does this sound like someone you know? If so, consider sending them this article.

How might imposter syndrome affect the impact of your career?

I know first-hand how terrible imposter syndrome can feel. I spent years feeling ashamed of being inadequate, guilty for tricking people into thinking I was more competent than I was, and terrified of being found out at any moment.

In my view, those painful feelings are reason enough to make addressing your imposter syndrome a top priority. No one deserves to feel that way.

But on top of that, there’s a strong case for addressing imposter syndrome just in terms of increasing the positive impact you can have with your career: imposter syndrome can hold you back from doing the things you are absolutely capable of doing to help others.

To work out how to have the biggest impact possible with your career, you need to answer: how are you best placed to help solve the world’s most pressing problems? What are your strengths and weaknesses, and how do they affect what roles you’d excel in?

Imposter syndrome is fundamentally about a disconnect between your beliefs about your abilities and your actual abilities, so it often makes it impossible to think realistically and accurately about what your career options are.

This has real implications for how impactful your career is.

Imposter syndrome can lead you to (mistakenly) rule out impactful options

80,000 Hours cofounder Benjamin Todd laid out four key reasons to be more ambitious with your career plans if your primary goal is to have an impact.

Because people with imposter syndrome systematically underestimate their abilities, they’re often much less ambitious than they could be. They may avoid applying for competitive roles and internships within a given career path because it’s less painful to not apply for a role than to get rejected from one.

Not only is this a loss in terms of their immediate direct impact — in some cases, the person would have succeeded in the career path, or gotten the job or internship — but it can also reinforce their imposter syndrome, by seeming to confirm their negative beliefs about themselves:

What’s more, for some people with imposter syndrome, this can mean ruling out entire career paths that seem like they’re ‘only for more capable or intelligent people’ (I often hear this about founding new projects tackling top problems). And because some career paths are probably orders of magnitude more impactful than others, ruling out impactful paths because of imposter syndrome could cause someone to leave a lot of impact on the table.

Some concrete examples:

Imposter syndrome can reduce your day-to-day impact

According to a meta-analysis of 19 studies (mostly of healthcare professionals), imposter syndrome is associated with worse job performance, higher stress levels, lower self-esteem, lower overall job satisfaction, higher rates of burnout, less career planning, lower motivation to lead, and lower motivation to take on more responsibility. Given the nature of the syndrome, this makes sense!

Many (perhaps most) people feel all of these things from time to time. Getting negative feedback can often be hard — even for people with robustly high self-esteem — and lots of people struggle with procrastination for a host of different reasons.

But for people who have imposter syndrome, these can be so extreme that they have even more significant effects on job performance — and by extension, the amount of impact they’re leaving on the table.

What does this look like in practice?

• Lower-quality work. People with imposter syndrome often worry that any mistakes they make will out them as imposters. As a result, they are less likely to admit and correct mistakes, and less likely to seek out feedback on their work. And without feedback, their work ends up lower quality.
• Difficulty identifying strengths and weaknesses. People with imposter syndrome might also struggle to overcome their actual weaknesses, if they’re 1) convinced they’re bad at everything, and 2) too anxious to have any of their suspicions about their weaknesses confirmed. Conversely, they’re less likely to leverage their strengths, as they don’t believe they are genuine strengths.
• Lower productivity. Some people with imposter syndrome struggle with procrastination, because they desperately want to avoid working on something they’re sure they’ll fail at. Others work excessively to compensate for their perceived inadequacies, leading to unsustainable work-life balance and sometimes burnout.
• Aversion to responsibility and advancement. Finally, people with imposter syndrome are less likely to work on ambitious projects, take on more responsibility, and accept promotions — all for fear that they (or their colleagues) will realise they’re not competent enough for the more challenging work.

How these behaviours can contribute to an imposter syndrome cycle:

Some concrete examples:

Imposter syndrome has community-wide effects

Back in 2012, we helped start the effective altruism community of people trying to do good for the world. The thing is, the entire community loses out when individuals suffer from imposter syndrome.

Community members with imposter syndrome are less likely to give talks, write publicly, or mentor others, because they’re worried others — their audience, their mentees — will realise they’re imposters. They’re also more likely to defer to others and less likely to critique dominant ideas, because they can’t imagine being able to contribute to a field full of (seemingly) smarter and better-informed people.

Together, this means the community as a whole gets fewer talks, less research, a smaller talent pool, fewer mentors, and less refinement of its ideas:

What’s more, there’s some evidence that imposter syndrome disproportionately affects people of colour, so we are likely to lose out on talent and ideas coming from those already underrepresented communities.

Some concrete examples:

What you can do if you’re struggling with imposter syndrome

If you think you’re struggling with imposter syndrome, you’re certainly not alone (I’d argue you’re actually in pretty good company, as you can see above).

And while it’s not easy, it’s definitely possible to overcome your imposter syndrome.

Lots of people with imposter syndrome have quite deeply ingrained thought patterns that operate pretty strongly to stop them from really internalising true, positive things about themselves. It’ll take some work to recognise and tackle those thoughts patterns head on.

As a starting point, here’s a collection of advice that my friends, colleagues, and I have found helpful — things you can start doing right now to challenge your imposter syndrome:

• To start, I strongly recommend you aim to decouple your self-worth from your productivity and impact — to internalise that you have intrinsic worth no matter how productive you are or how much impact you have. I think this is important for two reasons: 1) it’s true, and 2) by working to cultivate a sense of unconditional self-acceptance, you’ll be better able to look at your abilities with a curiosity-oriented, truth-seeking mindset — instead of with your entire self-worth riding on a particular outcome.
• Talk to your friends, colleagues, and especially your direct manager about your imposter syndrome. Often, your manager can support you in overcoming imposter syndrome by agreeing to: 1) give you honest feedback, 2) challenge you when they think your imposter syndrome is holding you back, and 3) encourage you to approach performance and improvement with a growth mindset. See this post on how managers can support people with imposter syndrome for more ideas.
• Consider working through a CBT-based workbook. I personally found Overcoming Perfectionism and Overcoming Low Self-Esteem extremely helpful.
• If you can afford it and are open to it, consider seeing a therapist. A therapist can help you notice the self-protective habits that you’re using to keep people from finding out you’re an imposter — never sharing early drafts, for example — and then help you experiment with the opposite behaviour to see what happens. It can be hard to find a therapist that’s a good fit for you, so I’d recommend using the Effective Altruism Mental Health Navigator’s list of mental health providers, which has reviews written by members of the community.
• If you can afford it and are open to it, also consider seeing a psychiatrist, especially if your imposter syndrome seems exacerbated by depression and anxiety.
• You might want to experiment with the CBT tool STOPP, which can help you 1) challenge your biased ways of thinking about your ability, and 2) get some perspective if the process of overcoming imposter syndrome ever causes you pain or stress.
• Try being more open to doing ambitious things that scare you — things like applying for jobs that you feel under-qualified for, testing out a new skill you might not be good at, or putting your work out there (be it writing, research, startup ideas). They might go well, they might not; either way, that’s valuable information for you.
• Reduce the financial and professional downside risks of trying out skills and roles by having a backup plan and investing in your financial security, skills, and mental and physical health.
• Once you’ve sufficiently managed downside risks, consider your worst-case scenario and try to get more emotionally comfortable with it. For example, imagine what it’d be like to be ‘discovered’ as an imposter and fired — then realise that, in the scheme of things, you’d probably be OK.
• Remind yourself that it’s someone else’s job to figure out whether you’re meeting their standards as an employee, so you don’t need to constantly feel angst about whether you should quit to save them the trouble of firing you.
• Remember that public platforms like the Effective Altruism Forum, LessWrong, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others usually highlight other people’s biggest strengths and achievements. This makes it easy to (mistakenly) imagine other communities and individuals as brilliant, productive, and free of weaknesses.

None of these steps are easy. They require a lot of strength and a lot of bravery.

But being convinced that you’re an imposter doesn’t just come with a huge personal cost — it might also be preventing you from doing as much good as you are actually capable of.

That certainly was the case for me.

I’m by no means cured of my imposter syndrome. I still feel imposter-y fairly often — including, ironically, while writing this article. Over the course of writing, my lingering imposter fears meant I delayed sharing early drafts (and as a result, spent time ‘perfecting’ sections that were later cut). And when I did share the draft, I was so worried they’d turn around and tell me it was rubbish that I struggled to focus on my other work.

But I’m a lot closer to finding out how to best use my strengths to try to help solve pressing problems than I was two years ago — two-years-ago Luisa wouldn’t have written this article at all.

So, if you think you might be suffering from imposter syndrome, taking some of the steps above to overcome it might just be the most important thing you can do right now.

A huge thank you to Laura Pomarius, Tom Davidson, Jenna Peters, Will MacAskill, and Mikaela Saccoccio, for sharing their experiences with imposter syndrome.

Learn more about imposter syndrome

• Podcast: Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating
• Podcast: Hannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a big impact
• Podcast: Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome
• Countering imposter syndrome and anxiety about work by Julia Wise
• The secret thoughts of successful women: Why capable people suffer from the impostor syndrome and how to thrive in spite of it by Valerie Young
• Feeling good: The new mood therapy by David D. Burns
• Good mood: The new psychology of overcoming depression by Julian Simon
• Managing people with imposter syndrome by Michelle Hutchinson
• A simple checklist for overcoming life and career setbacks by Rob Wiblin
• My positive experience taking the antidepressant Wellbutrin / Bupropion, & why maybe you should try it too by Rob Wiblin
• Have You Ever Doubted Whether You’re Good Enough To Pursue Your Career? by Lynette Bye
• Notes on impostor syndrome by Lizka Vaintrob

The post My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it appeared first on 80,000 Hours.