
Show HN: A career test for people who want to have a social impact - BenjaminTodd
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-recommender/
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rdl
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.)

~~~
BenjaminTodd
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.

~~~
rdl
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.

~~~
BenjaminTodd
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?

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guci22
The cutesy answer subscripts are really lame. I really did not want to
complete the survey after the first question.

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

~~~
BenjaminTodd
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...](https://80000hours.org/articles/the-meaning-of-making-a-difference/)

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code_sterling
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.

~~~
BenjaminTodd
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.

~~~
code_sterling
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?

~~~
BenjaminTodd
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...](https://80000hours.org/articles/the-meaning-of-making-a-difference/)

~~~
code_sterling
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.

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kickscondor
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!)

~~~
plaguuuuuu
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

~~~
DanBC
> 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.

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atmosx
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.

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

~~~
plaguuuuuu
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.

~~~
BenjaminTodd
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?

~~~
plaguuuuuu
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.

~~~
BenjaminTodd
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/](https://80000hours.org/articles/cause-selection/)

------
ForHackernews
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...

~~~
BenjaminTodd
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.

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vonklaus
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.

~~~
BenjaminTodd
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.

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kw71
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.

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roneesh
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.

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Aeolun
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

~~~
BenjaminTodd
That means they're all tied.

What responses did you put in?

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overpaidgoogler
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.

~~~
BenjaminTodd
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/software-engineering/) [https://80000hours.org/career-
guide/top-careers/profiles/tec...](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-
careers/profiles/tech-entrepreneurship/)

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

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

~~~
BenjaminTodd
There's some more detail in the profile: [https://80000hours.org/career-
guide/top-careers/profiles/thi...](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-
careers/profiles/think-tank-research/)

