Like both Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld of GiveWell, Jon Behar left a lucrative job at a hedge fund to create a startup called “A Path That’s Clear”. Here, he runs “Giving Games” which engage people around the world in discussions about effective giving.

Rob Wiblin and I sat down to interview Jon Behar and learn more about his career choices and what it’s like to leave your job to pursue dreams of running effective altruist projects. Jon’s main points were:

• It can be worthwhile to take some time off to think about things if you no longer are enjoying your job.

• Working on something that you think is important can make you more motivated and more productive.

• When starting an effective altruist project, it could be important to consider how you could partner with an existing organization rather than proliferate the large amount of EA orgs that exist.

• The best way to get into a career in any field is to find people who are already in that field and ask them for advice, even if you don’t know them. You’ll be surprised by the number of people who agree to speak with you.

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Should you “earn to give” or do direct work? Here’s one perspective. Notably, the best people in direct work probably can accomplish a lot of good – the best 10% can do about 8x as well as the bottom 10%.

Wondering whether you’d be the type of person suited for direct work? See Holden Karnofsky talk about who would fit well at GiveWell, Ben Todd talk about who would fit well at 80,000 Hours, or Luke talk about who should work for MIRI.

If you think computer programming is the way to go and are only missing the “how to make it happen” step, here’s “Advice on Getting a Software Job”, “Maximizing Your Donations via a Job”, and some more resources. It would be nice to see this for non-programming jobs.

Regardless of what job you try and land, though, don’t forget salary negotiation.

Also don’t forget to consider academics. Here’s Nick Bostrom on how to make a difference as an academic.

Lastly, here’s a bunch of people on LessWrong giving career advice to a new college student.

Follow up to “Comparing Across My Five Career Categories”, “My Conversation with Satvik Beri”, and 80,000 Hours’s “Interview with Holden Karnofsky”.

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I’ve been having a lot of conversations with various people about career choice, however I frequently have not posted information about individual conversations, choosing instead to publish information in the aggregate, such as “I Now Have Approximately Five Career Categories”, which is built off of information from 26 different people.

One conversation I did have that I chose to publish was a quick email exchange with Holden Karnofsky, a co-founder and co-Executive Director of GiveWell, a non-profit that aims to find “outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give”. Holden asked me to reproduce the email exchange in full rather than summarize it, so I will do so, and then offer my commentary.

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Follow up to “New Years Resolutions: August Edition”

Unfortunately, the huge amount of business prevented me from spending the time that is necessary to do a monthly review. It even got pretty bad – during the first six days of October, I didn’t track anything because I hadn’t set up something new for the month. But everything is good to go from this point and now I look forward to telling you about it.

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Oh, hi there. I didn’t see you. Come on in. The blog is back up and running. Oh, that dust you see there? I’ll have it cleaned off in just a little bit. But, no, it’s ok. Come on in and make yourself at home.

Me? You want to know about me? Well, ok. Yes, the blog did take a little bit of a break as you may have noticed. But I’ve been doing important things, don’t you worry. Just last Saturday I took the LSAT (exam for law school admission) and the Saturday before that I took the GRE (exam for grad school admission) and I had to study for those exams rather than write for this blog. I even sent in a job application. What can I say? I’m keeping my options open.

…I’ve also been doing a lot of work for my classes – it was midterm week. But everything is accomplished now and I should have some time to return to the blog and write some cool things for you.

Stay tuned.

Continuation of Ben Kuhn’s “A Conversation With Satvik Beri”, Satvik Beri’s “Counterintuitive Career Advice for 20-Somethings”, and this LessWrong comment from Satvik.

Follow up to “Comparing Across My Five Career Categories”.

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I’ve been having a lot of conversations with various people about career choice. Because I did not specifically ask most of the people I talked to about whether they wanted to have their thoughts published and because I thought the information was more useful in the aggregate anyway, I’ve mostly refrained from posting information about individual conversations I’ve had. Instead, I’ve published a lot of aggregated advice in “I Now Have Approximately Five Career Categories”, which is built off of information from 26 different people.

However, I do think there is value in publishing individual conversations, something that is done by GiveWell and Nick Beckstead. Therefore, when talking with Satvik Beri about my career choice, we both agreed it would be smart to publish our conversation.

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There seems to be many important questions that need research, from the mundane (say, which of four slogans for 80,000 Hours people like best) to the interesting (say, how to convince people to donate more than they otherwise would). Unfortunately, it’s difficult to collect data in a quick, reliable, and affordable way. We generally lack access to easily survey-able populations and a lot of research has high barriers to entry for completing (such as needing to enroll in graduate school).

However, since the 2005 creation of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, some of this has changed. Mechanical Turk is a website where anyone can create tasks for people to complete at a certain wage. These tasks can be anything, from identifying pictures to transcribing interviews to social science research.

Best of all, this is quick and cheap – for example, you could offer $0.25 to complete a short survey, put $75 in a pot, and get 300 responses within a day or two, and this should be quicker and cheaper than any other option available to you for collecting data.

But could Mechanical Turk actually be useable for answering important questions? Could running studies on Mechanical Turk be a competitive use of altruistic funds?

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Continuation of “I Now Have Approximately Five Career Categories”.

Earlier, I outlined approximately five things I’d consider as my post-college career: grad school, law school, market research, computer programming, and working directly for an effective altruist organization.

But which one should I pick? I don’t actually know yet. In the end, I can only pick one of the five to start with (though I probably could switch easily if I needed to.) So I thought I would attempt to compare these careers across a few different categories, see what happens, and then outline some questions I still have and my next steps.

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Continued from “My Careers Plan”.

As I continue the third week of the school year, I have 7 months and 29 days until I graduate and need a “Thing To Do After I Graduate”(TM) in order to qualify for “The Real World”(TM). Earlier, I outlined a plan to try and get a career that would lead me on a path “that will, taken as a whole, contribute the most to the world with regard to my utilitarian goals to increase total well-being”.

I recognize that my first career very likely won’t be my only career or even the place I spent all that much time at. But it’s important that I have a “first step” or “five year plan” to figure out where I’m supposed to be pointed at in order to make this well-being maximization thing actually happen.

So where should I point? I’ve narrowed it down to approximately five broad categories. In no particular order, they are: law school, graduate school, computer programming, market research, or non-profit work. I say “approximately” because these categories can be combined in some ways to make new opportunities.

Here’s the details. Sorry it’s long, but it’s a complicated question and I have a lot of thoughts. I really appreciate all those people who have taken the time to slog through this with me and give me valuable advice.

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Why do people give to charity?

It seems strange to even ask. Most people would point to the fact that they’re altruistic and want to make a difference. Others are concerned with inequality and justice. Another group points to the concept of “paying it forward” or repaying a debt to society. Other explanations cite various religious or social reasons.

Not too many people cite the fact that giving makes them happier. Even if people agree this is true, I don’t often hear it as people’s main reason. Instead, it’s more like a beneficial side effect. In fact, it seems pretty odd to me to hear someone boldly proclaim that they give only because it makes them happier, even if it might be true.

But if it’s true that giving does make people happier, should we be promoting that publicly and loudly? Perhaps it might make a great opportunity to tap into groups who wouldn’t consider giving otherwise or have misconceptions that giving would make them miserable? I’m a bit worried about how it might affect people’s incentives.

In this essay, I follow the evidence provided in the Harvard Business School working paper “Feeling Good About Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior” by Lalin Anik, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton, and Elizabeth W. Dunn. Overall, in light of potential incentive effects, I think caution and further investigation is warranted when promoting the happiness side of giving.

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