Say you have a high schooler (like me), who is completely generic, no specific strengths or weaknesses, equal ability in any field, etc.
What path, or paths, in life best satisfies utililitarian philosophy? Ex. Politician, Activist, Businessman, Economist, Pathologist,...

Hi WAN. It would be amazing if you were really that generic. Even if you have no standout abilities, you'll surely find some things more interesting than others, and you'll therefore be able to work harder at those things, and be more successful in them (not to mention more likely to stick with them since you'll enjoy them more).

That said, Alan Dawrst has quite a persuasive essay arguing for the counter-intuitive idea that utilitarians should aim to make as much money as they can and donate as much of it as their base desires allow them to to the most effective causes, which thanks to people like Toby Ord are getting much easier to identify.

Hmmm, I haven't thought of that. So a lifetime of wealth is worth more than a lifetime of direct service, in that scenario?

There are plenty of interesting options. I've chosen medicine, so I'm open to either pursue a lifetime of wealth (selling plastic surgery in a western capital city) or direct service (infection control in the third world).

There is a third possibility that stands out to me though: the communication of utilitarianism. Consider that if in your entire lifetime, you persuade only two other people to do their best to be utilitarian, that will improve the world twice as much as serving those in need directly. So how should we go about motivating people to be utilitarian?

Politics is an interesting suggestion. But it doesn't seem very utilitarian to me. Getting electing in the first place requires vast amounts of time, resources, and luck. Once you gain a seat in parliament, your vote is only one of many. 90% of the time, you'll have to make popular decisions ahead of tough ones. To put it differently, you'll be at the mercy of your population's prejudices, rather than their wellbeing. Even if you do write some utilitarian policy, it might not last very many years at all. Once some other politician replaces you, they'll undo some of your extreme utilitarian policy. The political climate might even bounce back to a less utilitarian position than before you turned up. That's the nature of politics.

How else could you communicate utilitarianism? You could train yourself in ethics then teach it. You could write books about ethics like Peter Singer. You could try to cultivate a utilitarian sentiment among activists. You could have some kids and raise them to be altruistic.

It seems to me that one utilitarian can do only a little to improve the world but a utilitarian who can communicate utilitarianism to others can improve the world a lot. There's obvious potential in this concept, but I can only speculate on how it might best be realised.

It's a good think you're thinking about this so young, WAN. You should give this question careful consideration because it is likely to be the most important decision you ever make.

If you want to do as much good as possible, here are some paths of life that I'd take seriously.  I'd break the kinds of jobs into three categories: get rich and give jobs, influence jobs, and research jobs. (The distinction between 2 and 3 might be a bit arbitrary, but let's imagine researchers aren't primarily trying to convince people to be researchers or givers.) Anyway, here are examples in each category.

1.Get rich and give (Finance jobs: investment banking, hedge funds, private equity; some lucrative area of law; entrepreneurship)
2.Influence jobs (Philosophy professor preaching ethics; Public health, advise a large organization, like WHO; work for some big international aid organization, and try to get to the top)
3.Research jobs (Medical research (neglected tropical diseases maybe); places like GiveWell or Poverty Action Lab)

If we compare type 1 and type 2, we should ask: could givers pay/convince more people to be influencers or could influencers convince more people to be givers? If the former, 1 beats 2. If the latter, 2 beats 1. Perhaps you could argue that there aren't enough people willing and able to be influencers of the appropriate kind, and thus that it would be better for you to be an influencer.

But it might be questioned whether the influencers are really better at influencing. Compare, for instance, a preaching philosophy professor and a finance professional. As a professor you might interact with more students, but as a financial professional you might have contact with many individuals with a lot of wealth.  Although you'd directly contact fewer individuals, you might be more likely to convince a friend or a colleague to give away income than a student.  Even if you convince fewer people to become do-gooders, it might be better to convince a few rich people than it would be to convince a larger number of students.

3 can only win if influencers can't influence people to do the research as well as you could do it yourself and givers can't hire people to do the research as well as you could do it yourself. If they can't, the question will be very difficult to answer.

I guess my view is that your best bet is to try to get as rich as possible (but this is just a hunch, at this point). If you can do it, and you wouldn't totally hate it, I'd try to get one of the finance jobs mentioned above. To do this, you should aim to get into the best place you can for undergrad, and then you should study a math-heavy discipline (physics, math, statistics, some kind of engineering), perhaps minoring or double-majoring in finance. Then, learn as much as you can, nail all of your classes, and network like hell. At any rate, though, any of these jobs would do pretty well.

Let us know what you decide.

I agree with Alan Dawrst's conclusion: barring special circumstances, utilitarians should make lots of money and buy lots of good with it. This conclusion is particularly important for a young utilitarian considering alternative careers, since the choices one makes at that relatively early age will largely determine one's future earning potential. I don't know what your expected lifetime savings would be as a plastic surgeon, but I'm inclined to think that you could amass a larger fortune by becoming an investment banker or a Wall Street analyst instead. At any rate, that would probably have been my own career choice if I had thought about these issues early enough in my life (instead, I made the mistake of becoming a philosopher). Still, if you are already studying medicine, then perhaps you should to stick to it, and choose the must lucrative specialty within that field.

To do this, you should aim to get into the best place you can for undergrad, and then you should study a math-heavy discipline (physics, math, statistics, some kind of engineering), perhaps minoring or double-majoring in finance. Then, learn as much as you can, nail all of your classes, and network like hell. At any rate, though, any of these jobs would do pretty well.

I think this is overstating it. You have to multiply the expected value of a career in x by the likelihood that you'll be interested enough to get going in x. Financial jobs aren't so lucrative (especially per working hour) that alternatives don't start to look better if you're convinced you'd enjoy them vs lukewarm about finance. The amount you persuade yourself to give is probably correlated with your happiness too, so all things being equalish, you're likely to donate a higher proportion of your income the more you enjoy the job.

Also, financial jobs might become less valuable than, say, certain types of engineering, when the effects of peak oil kick in, depending on how much it screws the global economy. Fortunately, engineering needs maths too, so if you can get into maths at all it's probably a safe bet to stick with it for as long as you can.

If you have trouble motivating yourself...

You have to multiply the expected value of a career in x by the likelihood that you'll be interested enough to get going in x.

I agree with the general principle, but am inclined to think that a career in finance is still the way to go even after factoring in considerations of this sort. There seems to be more variation in the average salaries of different careers than in people's ability to stay motivated in their chosen careers. But it would be interesting to have solid data corroborating this impression.

Another couple of considerations, one in each direction:

* It's difficult enough to get people to accept utilitarianism as it is. Telling them it necessitates their getting a long-hours and potentially unrewarding finance job risks putting off even more.

* It's a lot easier to swap from a lucrative career into a less lucrative one than vice versa. If you suddenly decide an alternative is better, you'll be able to afford to study it without too much trouble.

It's difficult enough to get people to accept utilitarianism as it is. Telling them it necessitates their getting a long-hours and potentially unrewarding finance job risks putting off even more.

Ah, I was assuming an audience of convinced utilitarians. Of course, the greater the sacrifice demanded, the more difficult it will be to convince ordinary people to embrace this moral theory. This relates to the traditional problem of "overdemandingness", though in a slightly different guise: it's not (only) that one is required to donate most of one's wealth; it's (also) that one is required to structure one's entire life so as to maximise the (donatable) wealth that one is expected to amass during one's lifetime. (Actually, Peter Unger notes this contrast in his book Living High and Letting Die, but argues that, since "you can't teach an old dog new tricks", people who have already established themselves in a certain field should move towards the most lucrative activities available within that field, instead of migrating to a different field that is even more lucrative. This relates to my comments addressed to Ryan Carey, above.)

In any case, if people are likely to be put off by learning about the demands of utilitarianism, this is a concern that should be factored in at the stage of designing an optimal public morality--that is, the set of moral views which would best motivate people to act as utilitarianism requires. Given the way human beings are, it would be surprising if this public morality was utilitarianism itself. As far as I'm aware, this problem has received almost no attention in the literature (an exception is Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell's 'Human Nature and the Best Consequentialist Moral System'), largely due to the taboo of admitting that ordinary people may be incapable of following the moral theory endorsed by a small elite (cf. Bernard Williams's "Government House Utilitarianism"). As a matter of fact, this concern is misplaced, since even committed utilitarians may sometimes need to believe in a non-utilitarian moral theory in order to best comply with the demands of utilitarianism. The truth should be kept hidden not only from the ignorant masses, but from the enlightened elite as well.

Wow, what fantastic replies. This is incredible. Forgive me for being awe-struck, but in my neck of the woods, ethics is pretty much defined as what the Bible says, what your family says, and what a "real man" would do.

I will continue to search for the right path, but for what it's worth, my current goal is business/finance/economics. I decide this simply because it holds opportunities for all three of the "main strategies" for utilitarian life. There's monetary power (earning lots of dollars), influential power (what the boss says goes), and direct power (managing a nonprofit or other good organization),

This could easily change... But I'm working on it! I'm still open to suggestions, and you know, by getting me on the right path, you guys are having a utilitarian impact = my lifetime of service

I agree this is a great discussion! A few notes:

Hmmm, I haven't thought of that. So a lifetime of wealth is worth more than a lifetime of direct service, in that scenario?

People often say to "do whatever you're good at," and generally this advice makes sense. In a society where people largely agree on what matters and what needs to be done, specialization of this sort tends to lead to optimal outcomes. (In economics, this efficiency of markets can be rather exact because of a common unit of value.)

However, in cases where your values diverge from those of others or in which people fail to act rationally to achieve their values, market-like efficiency may not be present. This is true in many areas, even ones as concrete as, say, public-health interventions, where cost-effectiveness can vary by orders of magnitude.

As far as careers, take this silly example. Say you're really, really good at packing meat -- in fact, you can do it 1.5 as well as anyone else. Does this mean you should work at a meatpacking plant? Probably not, because you'll still be earning a lot less there than by being a really bad investment banker, lawyer, or doctor.

That said, I do think the "do what you're good at" and "do what you love" rules are usually not bad advice, especially within reason. It's true that trying to force yourself into a career you hate probably won't work in the long run and that, in general, you will tend to succeed more in careers you're good at. (That's other things being equal, of course, so there may be exceptions like the meatpacking one above.) Indeed, one of the nice things about the making-money option is precisely that it allows utilitarians a way to do what they love and are good at without needing to become utilitarian evangelists, activists, or researchers.

If you want to do as much good as possible, here are some paths of life that I'd take seriously. I'd break the kinds of jobs into three categories: get rich and give jobs, influence jobs, and research jobs.

I agree that those basically are the three viable options, in view of the high expected value of utilitarian research and meme-propagation. I also strongly agree with everything else utilitymonster said, including the point that it's probably best to start out in the making-money track, because you can switch out of it much more easily than into it. Studying math, statistics, and computer science is also generally good advice for the same reason: Those skills allow you to work pretty much anywhere. In fact, because such degrees -- accurately or not -- are thought to signal ability, many finance and business employers prefer math majors over finance majors, especially quant shops on Wall Street.

It seems to me that one utilitarian can do only a little to improve the world but a utilitarian who can communicate utilitarianism to others can improve the world a lot.

I agree very much. There is usually an undervaluing of meme-spreading and an overvaluing of direct, tangible helping by society at large, for obvious psychological and signaling reasons. That said, if you can pay others to do the meme-spreading for you, that could be even better, depending on comparative advantage.

This relates to the traditional problem of "overdemandingness", though in a slightly different guise: it's not (only) that one is required to donate most of one's wealth; it's (also) that one is required to structure one's entire life so as to maximise the (donatable) wealth that one is expected to amass during one's lifetime.

Indeed. In fact, it was thinking about Singer's "drowning child" argument applied more broadly that prompted me to write the essay about making money in the first place. If it's immoral to buy an expensive pair of shoes because you could have otherwise donated the money, then it's also immoral to take a job that pays less than you could be earning (again, other things being equal).

You could train yourself in ethics then teach it. You could write books about ethics like Peter Singer. You could try to cultivate a utilitarian sentiment among activists. You could have some kids and raise them to be altruistic.

I think the third of these options is probably best, perhaps followed by the first and/or second. The fourth seems rather costly, consider the high financial and time demands of raising children, unless you intend to do that anyway. In general, though, having children yourself is very expensive: You could influence a lot more people by donating to a research or meme-spreading organization. (Even if your goal is just to give children a good childhood and education, it's much cheaper to do that by donating to, say, a school in India than by raising your own kids.)

You have to multiply the expected value of a career in x by the likelihood that you'll be interested enough to get going in x. Financial jobs aren't so lucrative (especially per working hour) that alternatives don't start to look better if you're convinced you'd enjoy them vs lukewarm about finance.

Agreed. I myself am guilty of not taking a long-hours, intensely stressful finance job in part because I couldn't force myself to do it -- instead, I work in a pretty-good-salary software job that I enjoy much more. Whether this is optimal or just selfish is debatable, I guess.

Givewell's mailing list has an interesting discussion on this topic.

What about law? The potential for utilitarian law change (I'm thinking anti-factory farming) seems to be there, but I don't know much about legal business.
Any thoughts?

Legal careers could be a good option, although you might end up doing more by making money in the process than by trying to achieve good outcomes directly -- that depends on how immediate vs. speculative your intended impact is. For instance, if you think it's most cost-effective to fund research, you would favor the money-making option.

Hi all.

I'm a lawyer, and I strongly discourage people to be a lawyer for "change the law". I actually think lobbying is less cost-effective than another ways of activism, like anti-speciesist outreach.

Lawyers can support AR organizations. It's what I do. To hire lawyers is expensive for those organizations, and lawyers can do this work free. But to get a Law degree takes several years, so it's not cost effective to become a lawyer only for activism. Buf if you are already a lawyer, you can support those organizations.

There are lawyers that make a lot of money, but not all. A good option then is to study a lot and to try enter in a big law firm.

Thanks for the input, Daniel Dorado. I'm still trying to figure this out and I'm open to suggestions

Someone just sent me this link to the best and worst choices for a university degree, expected earning-wise:

http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/14052010/389/be ... grees.html

Thanks Arepo! So what do you guys think of international economic relief? Such as attending the Huntsman program at U Penn and establishing something in the least-developed countries (Muhammad Yunus did something like this).
Or, what'd be the best way to relieve the suffering of these third-world countries? I like the economic perspective because of the whole "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime" aphorism.

Good question, WeAreNow. I won't claim to be an expert on international aid, so I'll defer to the others on this one. In particular, you might check with the folks at GiveWell and Toby Ord of Giving What We Can for some better-informed advice.

As far as evaluating the cause of relieving suffering in developing countries from a utilitarian perspective, you might be interested in our discussion of the poor meat-eater problem. In particular, if you care about existential risk, I think this comment by gaverick is relevant:

Health and development projects might decrease existential risk by increasing social stability, or they might increase existential risk by accelerating technology development and diffusion. In any case, I think the most cost-effective action is probably to donate one's money directly to organizations that aim to reduce existential risks, such as Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and the Singularity Institute.

(As you can see, I'm personally biased in favor of causes like the Singularity Institute myself....)

And I'm strongly biased against them - none of them have done anywhere near the requisite introspection to show why they're very likely to achieve anything - nor is it obvious that they should do so - whereas Giving What We Can's charities, for eg, give them some extremely stiff competition. They might increase or decrease existential risk (the same can be said of Singularity Institute), and they gives a huge, more-or-less guaranteed, short-medium term utility boost.

Ah, so international aid to... Buddhist and vegetarian countries?

'Low hanging fruit' is the phrase often used. If you haven't read it yet, I strongly suggest checking out the Giving What We Can site, particularly this page: http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/resource ... rities.php

I won't claim to be an expert on international aid, so I'll defer to the others on this one. In particular, you might check with the folks at GiveWell and Toby Ord of Giving What We Can for some better-informed advice.

GWWC has recently been doing a lot more work in the area of utilitarian careers as well, giving the following presentation in Oxford a few weeks back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAnh2FAp ... ture=feedf
The talk is very similar in structure to utilitymonster's post. It wasn't a necessarily utilitarian audience so it's a bit basic, but the guys who gave the talk, Will Crouch and Ben Todd, have done much more research into it. Get in touch with them if you're still interested in finding out more!

will@givingwhatwecan.org
benjamin.todd@balliol.ox.ac.uk

LadyMorgana wrote:GWWC has recently been doing a lot more work in the area of utilitarian careers as well, giving the following presentation in Oxford a few weeks back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAnh2FAp ... ture=feedf
The talk is very similar in structure to utilitymonster's post.

I found the talk quite helpful, and I wish I had watched it in my first year of college instead of my last. The bit about sunk costs helped clear up my thinking about this issue. I started out as a math major but switched to music and psychology, neither of which is a lucrative field. In fact, I'll probably give up playing the piano (more or less) since it is time-consuming and doesn't help anybody much. Perhaps I'll brush up on my "maths," go to business school, and get a career in finance. But it's difficult to know what one is capable of. Morality's demands are overriding, but not always especially motivating.

Hi Pat, welcome to the site. The question of career path is an interesting one, and it's a question that we'll all have to look at. I've already begun a path of medicine, but deciding what part of medicine to pursue is an ethical question that I haven't answered yet.

I imagine it's a matter of personality, but I think a career in finance could be a lot of fun. Not as fun as music, but still an impressive challenge, with a world of knowledge that I'd like to immerse myself in!

wow! great points all round!:D

i dont have time to reply fully now but i just wanted to say on the point of communicating utilitarianism i think that if people understood the horrific suffering their lives caused and if an alternative was presented to them they really would change

just watching the giving what we can videos about ethical careers on youtube and wondering about lots of things but one i just thought of is that by being a high earning banker you are still promoting a culture of paying bankers a ridiculous amount of money, which could be argued is part of the problem in the first place

That's a fair question, but I don't think that this would be contributing to the problem. The idea that bankers get paid too much is a socialist idea, rather than a utilitarian one. I don't think paying bankers more detracts from others' happiness really. I think that utilitarians shouldn't believe in 'closing the gap' between rich and poor. We should believe in lifting the income of the poor to alleviate their suffering. But in principle, there's no problem with bankers earning large amounts of money from a utilitarian perspective.

The problem is the richest people donate a smaller percentage of their income than middle-class people. That's what we need to change. How could we do that? We need to infiltrate the culture of the upper classes. We're not going to fix the problem by hating rich people. We'd be better served to gain wealth, to associate with rich people, to enter the upper class, to be a good role model, and to bring about a change from the inside.

I've set a good foundation by studying medicine. You're young, and you can do it too!
You might also find this useful: Peter Singer mentions the topic

so where does democracy fit into all this? what if people want something but its not going to make them happy.

sorry im just thinking aloud, what i mean is you seem to be saying that we should use the system to our advantage rather than changing the system so that it is better?

It is hard to "change the system". Utilitarians would do better to spend their time tackling big problems (poverty, existential risk, animal suffering), rather than worrying about the salaries of bankers.

I invoke the spirit of LadyMorgana to resurrect this thread. (Should I start a new thread? Mods - it's your decision)

Those of you who have a vague idea of who I am will know that I'm an 18 year old first year student studying philosophy at Oxford Brookes. My skills are mostly in philosophy. I got decent A-Levels (BBB). I'm average at maths and haven't studied it for 3+ years. I will give better descriptions if asked.

I want to become a professional philanthropist putting a minimum of 10% of my income to reducing the probability of existential risks - hopefully more than 10%, but we'll see. This is because it seems obvious that my comparative advantage probably doesn't fall into the area of working directly on x-risks or influencing other people - so make money is the best option for me.

So, I have a series of questions and discussion topics. I'm hoping that people can a) offer me valuable advice and b) learn from my experiences. I aim to document references and resources used and so on, so that others may follow in my footsteps - if they so wish.

I've consulted the High Impact Careers people (which means I spoke to Will Crouch). He says research is ongoing - and they aren't sure when the section of their website devoted to career research will be up. He aims to put me in touch with Carl Schulman. He seemed to approve of my preliminary plan to do a Law conversion at the end of my degree and thereafter pursue corporate law or something. It was suggested that I try out computer programming and become a software engineer. I aim to check out the Existential Risk Reduction Career Network. I will update this paragraph when I get more information, and post as much personal communication as is permitted and required.
Resources I've looked at: wetfeet, glassdoor (will ask for employment details, but set browser not to accept cookies and this is no longer a problem) and prospects.

So, my questions/discussion points are:

• What careers earn the most?
• What careers have income scale up the fastest? (I discount future earnings due to possibility of becoming more selfish, humanity going extinct etc.)
• What careers can be done fairly easily with a Philosophy Degree from an average university? (or a simple conversion course)
• What careers have the greatest income variance? (I guess what I'm asking is which have the highest median income)
• What careers require the least training from where I am now? (Discount rates again)
• Is the value of a philosophy degree so low to someone in my position that I should change it? (fairly important)
• What resources should I be looking at?
• Is there anything glaringly obvious I've missed?

Hi Gedusa,

Wow, you're only 18? I didn't even learn what the word "utilitarian" meant until I was 18.

Gedusa wrote:I want to become a professional philanthropist putting a minimum of 10% of my income to reducing the probability of existential risks

Hmm, I'm not sure if I support that. But I'll offer a reply anyway.

Gedusa wrote:It was suggested that I try out computer programming and become a software engineer.

I think that's a good option, but part of the reason is that I haven't tried the other options. Software has the special advantage that, unlike law or medicine or MBA-level business, you don't need to sink lots of money into a degree that will only pay off years down the road. This is a more important consideration if you expect your plans to change, or if you expect to continue making money only for a few years rather than until you get old. My only-partially-informed impression is that software salaries start high but level off sooner than for longer-term professions.

Gedusa wrote:What careers can be done fairly easily with a Philosophy Degree from an average university? (or a simple conversion course)

I guess the obvious ones are law and investment banking. Business, too, I suppose. Programming at startups if you know the technology. There are likely many of which I'm unaware.

Gedusa wrote:What careers have the greatest income variance? (I guess what I'm asking is which have the highest median income)

Median or mean? If you don't care about risk (you may or may not, depending on what you plan to do with the money), then you would aim to maximize the mean.

The two highest are probably startups and Wall Street (both in terms of mean and variance, actually).

Gedusa wrote:Is the value of a philosophy degree so low to someone in my position that I should change it? (fairly important)

Hmm. It depends on how much you get out of the degree. Thinking about these big questions is extremely valuable -- worth many years of lost income. (Indeed, if you neglected them, made money, and then donated to something harmful, that would be worse than not donating at all.) However, studying philosophy as a degree may or may not be the best way to do this thinking. I took just one philosophy course in college, with most of my courses in math, statistics, computer science, and economics, but then I spent much of my free time on philosophically relevant reading and discussion (by which I mean not necessarily studying Henry Sidgwick all day, but things like reading about animal welfare, talking with friends, participating in forums like the Old Felicifia, etc.).

Gedusa wrote:Is there anything glaringly obvious I've missed?

You covered most of it. One other previous thread I'll mention is "Donation Tax Deductions," which discusses Donor Advised Funds and such.

I'm surprised I know what utilitarian means - but I don't really like to dwell on it too much, it makes me feel really abnormal. To paraphrase: "I'm young, but I'm old at heart!"

Hmm, I'm not sure if I support that.

Thanks for offering a reply anyway. And just think - if I become a highly successful *insert here* then I'll be able to donate to causes you consider valuable - if you convince me of their value. Or potentially I'll do really harmful things due to not being convinced. Hmmm. But thanks for erring on the side of being helpful!

Software has the special advantage that, unlike law or medicine or MBA-level business, you don't need to sink lots of money into a degree that will only pay off years down the road. This is a more important consideration if you expect your plans to change, or if you expect to continue making money only for a few years rather than until you get old

Software's looking better and better - I'll put trying to learn to program near the top of my to-do list, if it turns out I'm good at it, that would be really great! I don't really expect my plans to change, otherwise I would've changed them already - and I don't expect to be earning money until I'm old - so quick scaling up is important.

Law is currently top of my list. Investment banking is lower - I think that's because I perceive it as difficult to get into and not enjoyable - though I'm deducing all this from my brain basically saying: "Investment banking - ewww".

Median or mean? If you don't care about risk (you may or may not, depending on what you plan to do with the money), then you would aim to maximize the mean.

I was talking about median - but now I'm intrigued. Bear in mind that I'm not a perfect altruist - so diminishing marginal utility of money still implies risk-adversity for money spent on myself. What altruistic uses of money imply risk-adversity? I will have to think about this more... I was originally meaning that if two careers had the same mean income but one had a higher median income, then I should go for the higher median one. However I recognize that that's utterly artificial, careers with the highest income have the highest variance as you say.

Thinking about these big questions is extremely valuable -- worth many years of lost income. (Indeed, if you neglected them, made money, and then donated to something harmful, that would be worse than not donating at all.)

Yes this is true. I don't think a philosophy degree is very valuable for this purpose though - the course doesn't always prioritize the sorts of questions I'm interested in. I get a whole ton of my philosophy stuff from Less Wrong these days, though that doesn't (yet) give me a complete picture. All in all I'm not really sure about this sort of thing - I'm still inclined to dive headlong into a high-paying career and think about the issues as I go... With the thought that once I'm in the good career I can switch donation destinations, but if I waste time now I might never get into a good career - or I will have less time to scale up income before *insert disaster here* happens.

Donor Advised Funds do seem to be a useful way to simply avoid tax and make sure I can't rise above a certain level of selfishness. I think they'd be useful enough that I might use them, but I'd have to do more research. At the moment though, none of my income is taxed because my income is so low - so I'm worrying about scaling up my income until tax does become a problem!

Alan, can I ask how we know that startups and Wall street have such high pay on average?

Gedusa, it seems likely that you should move towards a job that will have the highest pay over the next ten or twenty years. It's hard to make a start-up without funds and it's hard to switch professions without financial stability. For maximum funds, I'd imagine you're looking at finance, business or law. But that's a general impression, not an evidence-based opinion and it's for Australia not England. I think we're all depending on Will Crouch and High Impact Careers to give us some hard evidence here.

Gedusa wrote:Hmmm. But thanks for erring on the side of being helpful!

Yeah, I feel as though there are rule-utilitarian reasons for doing so, even if the act-utilitarian calculation is uncertain. Or maybe I'm just making up excuses.

Gedusa wrote:Investment banking is lower - I think that's because I perceive it as difficult to get into and not enjoyable

I chickened out of investment banking because I didn't want to work 16 hours a day. I also think I would be pretty bad at it -- doing salesmanship and making deals -- but maybe that's just an excuse. A bad investment banker still earns more than people at the top of their professions in many other fields.

Gedusa wrote:What altruistic uses of money imply risk-adversity?

Well, I think I might be mildly risk-averse to the extent that my future plans may involve living off my savings while I work on wild-animal suffering. I don't need millions of dollars to do that.

In theory, it ought to be possible to eliminate risk aversion among utilitarians. Given sufficient numbers, they could all promise to contribute to an "insurance" fund that would pay out regardless of whether or not they hit the jackpot at their startups. People who made more than expected would pay more to the fund. Needless to say, this would create pretty bad moral hazard unless the utilitarians all agreed completely on what they should do with the money so that they wouldn't mind paying out.

Gedusa wrote:With the thought that once I'm in the good career I can switch donation destinations, but if I waste time now I might never get into a good career

Yes, I think that's the best argument. You can always go "down" to philosophy, but you can't always go "up" to high-paying careers.

RyanCarey wrote:Alan, can I ask how we know that startups and Wall street have such high pay on average?

Oh, mainly popular wisdom. I've talked with dozens of people about high-paying careers (including many people on Wall Street), and this seems to be the consensus. Salaries posted in job searches indicate the same. The SIAI crowd is strongly convinced that startups have perhaps the highest expected returns of all.

You might try Google Scholar searches to find more. I've done some research in the past showing that "entrepreneurs" often have lower expected earnings than people in conventional jobs. But these studies didn't separate restaurant owners from tech-company founders. I would guess the average is higher for startups if you include the Peter Thiels, Mark Zuckerbergs, etc. in the calculation.

You could also visit Glassdoor.com, although that won't help much with the startups.

RyanCarey wrote:But that's a general impression, not an evidence-based opinion

Hard to say which is better. A few real-life data points given by friends may be more valuable than thousands of numbers from studies, because the study estimates may be systematically biased due to lacking the full picture. Of course, asking friends can also be biased if the sample is unrepresentative.

RyanCarey wrote:Alan, can I ask how we know that startups and Wall street have such high pay on average?

I mentioned the high expected earnings of start-up companies in an earlier discussion:

The average amount a founder of a VC-backed start-up receives is $5.8 million—but three-quarters receive nothing.

I didn't read the study that came up with that figure, but here a few caveats anyway. The figure is for start-ups that receive VC funding. I don't know what percentage of start-ups manage to do so, but it's probably well under 100%. In addition, there is doubtless a lot of self-selection. The people who found start-ups are probably smarter, more motivated, and more creative than the average programmer. So it's not clear whether a career in programming is the best bet for people (like me) who have little or no experience. I do hope that the High-Impact Careers people provide some information about this, since I'm spending ~3 hours a day learning programming. (One of them pointed me to that study.)

It would be nice to know how much of start-up success is due to skills vs. how much is due to luck. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs seem pretty smart, and if the bar is set that high, I'd abandon all hope. I also wonder if the start-up route would mean moving to California. I use Remember the Milk, which was developed by Australians, but my impression is that it would easier to get VC funding in the U.S. So willingness to relocate might be an important factor.

Thanks for the source, Pat.

The $5.8 million figure is interesting. But I've thought about it, and the more I do so, the less impressive it becomes. Here is an outline for how this figure could be deflated. Suppose that the overwhelming majority of startups do not attract venture capital and those that do not are far less profitable. This would make the profitability of startups perhaps $2 million. Then, suppose that running a startup involves 80+ hours of work per week for two years. Then, the startup owner is getting paid $1 million for one year of double-hours work. Now, consider that the startup owners are on average highly intelligent and charismatic. They would be expected to earn a lot anyway. The income from a startup has massive year-to-year variance, so you'll have to set aside significant savings or take out insurance.

Excuse my amateurish guesses, I'm just trying to convey a general approach.

Alan Dawrst wrote:In theory, it ought to be possible to eliminate risk aversion among utilitarians. Given sufficient numbers, they could all promise to contribute to an "insurance" fund that would pay out regardless of whether or not they hit the jackpot at their startups. People who made more than expected would pay more to the fund. Needless to say, this would create pretty bad moral hazard unless the utilitarians all agreed completely on what they should do with the money so that they wouldn't mind paying out.

I keep meaning to start a thread about this. It seems like there's a lot of scope for us to help each other out as a community on a large scale, esp as your(?) earning money philosophy starts to take off - and as you say, a lot of scope for it to act as a strong disincentive in many situations. Against that there's also the greater attraction it would have on people feeling loosely utilitarian but worrying that it incurs too much risk to overcome their innate self-interest. Seems worth considering very seriously, anyway.

Arepo wrote:esp as your(?) earning money philosophy starts to take off

Well, it's hardly my idea alone. I think many people even within our circles have come up with it independently. My piece is just cited more often than others.

Part of the inspiration for this approach was my experience with student activism/charity groups during high school. I participated in and then lead an anti-hunger club which spent a good amount of time raising money to donate. We held bagel sales, pizza sales, and lollipop sales, which were a means to convert our time into money. A group of five students manning pizza tables for an hour could typically raise something like $100 after subtracting off pizza costs. Beyond this, however, there were costs to plan the event, reserve space in the school lobby, remind the other group members to participate, order the pizza, leave class a few minutes early to set up, clean up after the sale, and coordinate deposition of the funds into the club's school account. Generously, this might have amounted to, say, $10 per hour of student time. One of the students in the club had a father who earned probably $50-$100 an hour. I often thought, "Why doesn't he just give us an hour or two's worth of his income?"

In another student group, we were raising money to contribute to building a school in Africa. We held several events to solicit donations, including a dance party and a walkathon. We raised, umm, I think around $800 by the end of the year, but as often happens with these sorts of things, most of the donations came from the parents of the students raising money, or even from the teachers who supervised the club. It would have been so much easier if those people had decided to donate the money and be done with it, rather than having a dozen students go through hoops to coordinate activities. Of course, the conventional response might be that "fundraising events serve a broader purpose than raising money -- they also contribute to a sense of community." Sure, that's fine. But students who want to have maximum impact in poor countries, rather than just hosting one more social activity in their neighborhoods, shouldn't find that to be much consolation.

The making-money point was brought home when I began to think about how much good could be done for a given cash total. The first estimate I remember reading was that $500 could prevent one person from getting AIDS. I told my dad when he bought a new tennis racket for ~$75 that had just "killed" 15% of a person, and I took wasting money very seriously. Soon after, I stumbled upon Peter Singer and read much the same argument in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" and Practical Ethics. Singer makes a big point about not wasting money on good shoes, but he doesn't talk as much about wasted opportunities to make money for donation. (The reason he doesn't makes sense: Most people have stronger intuitions about actions, like buying expensive shoes, than inactions, like failing to make more money. So shoes make the drowning-pond argument go through better.)

Also once I discovered Singer, I learned that animals could suffer -- via "Do Animals Feel Pain?" on utilitarian.net. (I had previously assumed that they weren't conscious because they didn't have language!) The rest is history.

Besides (perhaps) having high expected earnings because of start-ups, programming might be more future-proof than most other high-earning careers. The financial sector in general is in a precarious position. Many economists believe that (at least in the U.S.) it is too large for the economy's good. And much of the public believes that shuffling money between corporations and rich people contributes much value to society. If the government puts a tax on financial transactions, or passes stricter regulations, a career in the financial sector could become less lucrative.

A couple of articles in Slate argued that pharmacists and medical specialists are vulnerable to automation and greater efficiency due to technological progress. (The author made the same case for lawyers, but he seemed less convincing there.)

In the future, programmers might be vulnerable to competition from India and China. Right now, most of the work done by those countries is low-end, uninteresting stuff. I haven't heard of any Indian tech start-ups that created products popular in the developed world, but maybe that will change. But soon after computers start programming themselves in interesting ways, either we'll be dead or we'll enter some transcendental technological utopia.

Pat wrote:If the government puts a tax on financial transactions, or passes stricter regulations, a career in the financial sector could become less lucrative.

Hmm, I haven't heard that scenario before. Have people suggested it?

RyanCarey wrote:Suppose that the overwhelming majority of startups do not attract venture capital and those that do not are far less profitable. This would make the profitability of startups perhaps $2 million.

does anyone know what the case as regards this is? seems very important

Alan Dawrst wrote:

Pat wrote:If the government puts a tax on financial transactions, or passes stricter regulations, a career in the financial sector could become less lucrative.

Hmm, I haven't heard that scenario before. Have people suggested it?

According to a paper from the IMF, a tax on financial transactions has been advocated for by Keynes, Joseph Stiglitz, and Larry Summers. The goal of such a tax would be to curb speculation and compensate the government for taking on the risk of potential failures of financial institutions. I suppose the tax would affect quantitative analysts and hedge-fund managers more than investment bankers.

I read two memoirs of people's experiences as investment bankers (The Accidental Investment Banker and Monkey Business) to help me decide whether it was something I could do. The authors of both books believed that the fees charged by banks were too high given the value of their services. The fact that the banks have continued to make a lot of money in the decade since the books were published might mean that the authors were mistaken, or that for whatever reason banks are immune from the pressures of competition.

My main point is that the high-earning careers of tomorrow might be different from those of today. But if you discount your future earnings enough (because of the social rate of return on charitable donations), your salary in thirty years doesn't figure much in your decision about what career to pursue. My discount rate isn't so high, though, because I'm not convinced I'd give the money to the right organization, and the returns on information can greatly exceed the social rate of return (Alan mentioned this in another post).

These are the organizations I've given to, in chronological order: my church, the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, Unicef, the Humane Society of the United States, Population Services International, Vegan Outreach, the SIAI. The expected value of the organizations I've chosen to donate to seems to have increased. A counterargument might be that I've already given to the most effective charity, and that even if I divided my money evenly between, for example, GiveWell, Vegan Outreach, and the SIAI, I'd do more good than if I waited twenty years and gave it to the most effective organization (because of the social rate of return).

Pat wrote:I read two memoirs of people's experiences as investment bankers (The Accidental Investment Banker and Monkey Business) to help me decide whether it was something I could do.

Nice job on such thorough research! I read Monkey Business as well, and it was part of what deterred me from i-banking.

Pat wrote:might mean that the authors were mistaken, or that for whatever reason banks are immune from the pressures of competition.

Yeah, funny how that is. I don't think i-banks have a mono/olig-opoly, yet the employees command higher income than practically anyone else on earth. Maybe it's risk. Or maybe the job requires the absolute smartest people, who can then demand high pay. I suppose you could ask why top lawyers earn so much, too.

Pat wrote:even if I divided my money evenly between, for example, GiveWell, Vegan Outreach, and the SIAI, I'd do more good than if I waited twenty years and gave it to the most effective organization (because of the social rate of return).

Could be, depending on the social rate of return. Of course, it would have higher expected value to give now to what you think is the single best of them -- rather than splitting among the three -- though this carries the risk that your entire life would be wasted, which might be more psychologically burdensome.

Of course, you might very well not yet have found the cause that's better than all of them by orders of magnitude. (Say, a wild-animal-suffering organization? ) Or you might decide that reducing risk of human extinction is net bad, in which case some of the charities may have negative value.

in the case of starting a start up what do people plan on doing with it? selling it and donating or continuing it as a company? it would seem very profitable to start multiple start ups one after another but it seems (to me) not really practical due to the large amount of work.

Ruairi wrote:selling it and donating or continuing it as a company?

I guess either one. The famously successful startup founders have done both.

Ruairi wrote:due to the large amount of work.

Yeah, I shy away from serious startup founding the way I shy from investment banking, because both seem like they require insane amounts of work.

i was just thinking about politics for the lasy few days, if one will have a lot of inspiring influence on the public as a politician then then that would be great (as well as being able to improve efficiency of charitable giving, change animal welfare regulations, perhaps fund research into what organisms suffer, etc), but would one actually have this public figure influence? what other areas do you guys think would have high amounts of influence? journalism? do you guys think is it likely that you would get publicity as a rich banker who gives a lot of their money away?

edit: by the politician thing i mean if you go into politics and openly call yourself a utilitarian and then talk about poverty and factory farming and maybe insects a bit and people will see how lovely utilitarianism is and hopefully be inspired to go and become utilitarians themselves and hopefully also look into less socailly acceptable utilitarian topics too

Update: Still mainly thinking of Law. Uncertain still on whether to change degree to Law as opposed to continuing philosophy and doing a Law conversion course. Banking, programming still on the table. No new ideas.

Investment banking biographies are now on my reading list. Anyone know any exciting books about life as a corporate lawyer?

Startups are interesting - though they mainly seem to be tech related, and these generally require programming skills to work at/start - or am I missing something? I'm going through Khan Academy's videos on programming though, so it's possible I will be able to do that sort of thing/become a software engineer.

I too shy from vast amounts of work and stress. And intuitively I flee from high risk - high reward ventures. My brain screams "gambling" and "gambling=stupid" and makes me run away. I might be able to deal with it though - honestly I've never been under huge stress for longer than a day or two, so I have no idea how I'd cope.

@ Ruiari: I generally regard politics as highly unlikely to be changed due to the actions of an individual actor - given that the system has enormous institutional inertia. And if you wanted to change the world via politics - I still wouldn't want you to become a politician. Lobbyists probably influence policy quite a lot - a utilitarian lobby funded by a rich utilitarian would have better effects than one utilitarian politician. As for careers in influencing - this really depends on your skills. A rich banker would certainly have some influence if they gave a lot of stuff away. Journalism is pretty cut-throat from what I hear - not a lot of capacity to write stories in a way you want until you're in the upper echelons - unless you start your own media company to promote utilitarian ideals or something.

Gedusa wrote: And intuitively I flee from high risk - high reward ventures. My brain screams "gambling" and "gambling=stupid" and makes me run away.

but surely you want to look at the expected value? and just use the average of things?

i meant going into politics not so much to change policy but to push socially acceptable charitable things but also label yourself as a utilitarian so that the two are associated and raise consciousness about utilitarianism.

yea my mum is a journalist and says the same :/

i mean really careers that influence public opinion and could inspire people to be utilitarian, what kind of careers do you think would have the highest impact in this area? i mean like would a altruistic banker get much media coverage for his actions? and would this translate into more people doing utilitarian things?

edit: is the 5.8 million average for vc backed start ups the amount it was sold for or the amount each entrupaneur recieved or the total amount they had to split between all the founders of the start up?

Gedusa wrote:Update: Still mainly thinking of Law. Uncertain still on whether to change degree to Law as opposed to continuing philosophy and doing a Law conversion course. Banking, programming still on the table. No new ideas.

There must be some value to diversifying within the util community - not so much for safety of income as because if you're providing a high-value service, you can also gain by offering it for free to people who share your worldview/goals.

But surely you want to look at the expected value?

Yes. I should be looking at the expected value and making decisions based on that but irrational forces in my brain start to have other ideas. That's probably the reason I don't like those sorts of ventures - not anything rational.

Hmm. I'm still skeptical of how much difference the politician would make. They'd probably just be seen as weird or something. An altruistic banker might be pretty good, ditto for most high earning professions. You might have better luck in professions where others of your profession are already predisposed to altruistic or more rational behaviour or something.. Honestly, I have nothing to say on the subject that you won't have heard already - I suggest maybe contacting High Impact Careers?

There must be some value to diversifying within the util community - not so much for safety of income as because if you're providing a high-value service, you can also gain by offering it for free to people who share your worldview/goals.

This would be if only utilitarians would agree on things that they think are best to do! Otherwise I have less incentive to offer free services.
And I'm still skeptical of the extent to which this would be helpful in the real world. Lawyers could provide free legal services for utilitarians, but if they sacrifice a career as an investment banker to do so it seems like they've made a bad choice. Ditto for many other choices. Sure, if income were the same between two careers, and most utilitarians were one career - then you should go for the less populated career - but that rarely happens.

You also seem to suppose that we couldn't all just contribute to a general fund of some kind - for use on high value services. This would mean it wouldn't matter at all which career most of us were in - except for purposes of diversification between different fields.

hmm but i mean how much are you expecting to make in law anyway? that gwwc video on ethical careers suggests a high earning lawyer could make 700,000 but i havnt seen estimates much over 200,000 (edit: sorry i dunno why i said 200k i was writing without thinking, i meant i havnt seen much over 100k) anywhere

yea im talking to HIC at the moment, im really looking forward to their careers research, does anyone know what percentage of start ups are v.c. backed? im trying to work out the expected annual "wage" from start ups

i really just need to know how rich i can expect to get and then i should be on my way to a decision, at the moment im really just thinking about getting rich and politics, if anyone has any other suggestions please post:)!

There is considerable variance in incomes of Lawyers it's true. If we take corporate Law (and I would intend to) then figures are best out of the U.S. - where a starting salary can be around $125,000 for a junior corporate lawyer - or it can be as low as $40,000. This tends to go nuts if you turn out to be good - salaries up much higher than that are semi-common. I'm not sure how the recession has hurt lawyers (if at at all). Wikipedia claims starting salary is something like $65,000 - rising to $95,000 in 5 yrs and $140,000 after 10-15 yrs.

In essence: Average wages in the UK for Law are higher than most other professions. There tends to be a cluster of wages above £60,000 but below £100,000. If you're really good then you'll break that £100,000 barrier, if you're crap - no one will hire you. (IMO - based on my research). And of course I think I'd enjoy Law more than banking or whatever - though that is definitely an area in which the value of new information is high.

I have no real idea how good I'll be. Realistically - it would seem like I'd be in the upper-middle of the cluster of wages. I'm still considering banking though!

I'm looking forward to their careers research too! I have no idea about startups being V.C. backed - nor do I have any idea how to find this out (sorry!).

hm cool but could you not earn close to that and be in an influencing/inspiring job anyway? the wage for a member of parliment here is €100,000 i think. i dunno how much journalists or something would earn but do you think it it would be worth the reduction in salary for the inspiring/influencing?

Ruairi wrote:what other areas do you guys think would have high amounts of influence? journalism?

Probably most of what it takes to get influence is to actively seek it, e.g., by writing to the general public, holding talks, participating in media events, etc. Activist groups do lots of publicity like this. Your specific private career may not matter too much compared with your extent of outreach efforts and charisma, although career may matter a little bit in terms of bestowing initial credibility. (E.g., a neuroscientist would be taken more seriously than a poet when talking about insect suffering.)

Ruairi wrote:do you guys think is it likely that you would get publicity as a rich banker who gives a lot of their money away?

I bet a banker could get a good amount of publicity with a little work. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have gotten a lot of attention. Of course, you'd almost certainly be less wealthy than they, but the smaller players probably can get good press as well.

Gedusa wrote:Anyone know any exciting books about life as a corporate lawyer?

I was considering law for a while, and I read half of The Lure of the Law. And I hear that One L is a famous book about law school itself.

Gedusa wrote:And if you wanted to change the world via politics - I still wouldn't want you to become a politician. Lobbyists probably influence policy quite a lot - a utilitarian lobby funded by a rich utilitarian would have better effects than one utilitarian politician.

Many years ago, before I realized that animal suffering mattered, my top priorities were to prevent developing-world diseases and reduce environmental degradation in order to help humans. I believed (and still think it's probably true) that lobbying was a more cost-effective way to advance those causes but that it was underfunded because people preferred visible, short-term impacts. Bread for the World has some statistic to the effect that if you divide the international aid given by Congress by the number of letters that people wrote to their Congressmen/women about the issue, it amounts to thousands of dollars per letter. And Bread for the World can gather hundreds of letters at a single event. Of course, letters to Congress probably comprise a small portion of the total causal contribution to the aid, but even after you adjust for that, it's pretty impressive.

The trouble with things like wild-animal suffering is that they could never even enter the political arena without decades more legwork persuading people to take them seriously. So for these we need to start with meme spreading at the intellectual level. That said, maybe encouraging governments to spend more on insect-suffering research is plausible (since they already fund a fair portion of it).

Arepo wrote:not so much for safety of income as because if you're providing a high-value service, you can also gain by offering it for free to people who share your worldview/goals.

Or at least making diverse friends, whatever their ethical stripe, so long as they help you out. One friend of mine suggested getting to know law students because they could then provide free advice that would otherwise cost hundreds of dollars. (I guess that doesn't apply for doctors unless you trust your friend to give you unofficial cardiac surgery at his house.)

Ruairi wrote:at the moment im really just thinking about getting rich and politics, if anyone has any other suggestions please post:)!

My impression is that, even though politicians earn a lot more than most people, they earn less than most people at their skill level, and relative to the effort they put in. I would guess that income accounts for a tiny fraction (<10%) of the total impact you would have as a politician. However, it also seems extremely difficult to become more than a local politician.

If the goal is to enter politics to spread memes, what kinds of memes would you want to spread? It may be easier to spread memes outside of politics, because many of them -- e.g., wild animals, insect pain, etc. -- would be laughed at by most constituents. As you suggest, you could be a really great ordinary politician and then publicize these wacky views after people have grown to trust you, but I'm not sure it's worth the wait, and I don't know if it would have a substantially more positive impact than starting out with the memes you believe in.

If you enjoy and are good at politics, it could very well be an optimal choice in your case. But I think that would be because you enjoy it and are good at it. I don't know if it's inherently one of the best options (though I haven't studied it at length).

Gedusa wrote:Update: Still mainly thinking of Law. Uncertain still on whether to change degree to Law as opposed to continuing philosophy and doing a Law conversion course. Banking, programming still on the table. No new ideas.

Investment banking biographies are now on my reading list. Anyone know any exciting books about life as a corporate lawyer?

Hi Gedusa. I'm a lawyer. I think it's very cost effective to become a lawyer if you act pro bono as consultant to animal charities. It's very expensive for this charities to hire a lawyer.

On the other hand, to be a well-know lawyer of charities is very good for winning respect, and then have an influence. I am a pro bono lawyer for several Spanish animal charities, and there are a lot of people who listen to my opinions about veganism, wild-animal suffering and so on. I guess I would be less influential if most people inside the animal rights movement thaught that I am a selfish freak.

to explain about memes and stuff a bit more clearly (but please disagree if you think other things are a better idea)

i think inspiring more poeple to be and/or think like utilitirians is a really effecitive thing to do.

the ways ive been thinking of doing this is by

1) promoting either utilitarianism iself or similar more socially acceptable ideas

and/or

2) by getting invertebrate pain nresearch done and if it turns out theyc an suffer and we play it right hopefully utilitarisnism could get real famous and lotsa vegetarians might become utilitarian.

yea basically what im thinking is that i can get rich and fund leaflets and lectures and stuff or i could go into politics and talk about what one might call the "softer" (more socially acceptable) utilitarian issues and fund them too (poverty, factory farming maybe a little possibility of insect suffering, im hopefull given that Elwood is supervising several phds in the invertebrate pain area studies which are government funded). this is kinda the way i think of peter singer, i remember reading that when asked about eco system redesign he didnt think interfering in nature was a good idea at all but hes making utilitarianism famous and once people have the central idea hopefully some will extrapolate and come to eco system redesign type conclusions, if i did go into politics though i wouldnt talk about eco system redeisgn or AI or stuff like that.

i might do a degree in agricultural science and then try and get elected,

My impression is that, even though politicians earn a lot more than most people, they earn less than most people at their skill level, and relative to the effort they put in. I would guess that income accounts for a tiny fraction (<10%) of the total impact you would have as a politician. However, it also seems extremely difficult to become more than a local politician.

could you explain what you mean more please?, i think maybe you guys see this as quite different to me because you live in bigger countries with big populatins, i think theres only about 5 million here, i dont wanna sound even more niave than usually but it just really doesnt look that difficult. a lot of the politicians here say exactly the same things, it just becomes a big popularity contest. i think maybe the reason im thinking it migth be great is because im quite charismatic, not that thats bad

I bet a banker could get a good amount of publicity with a little work. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have gotten a lot of attention. Of course, you'd almost certainly be less wealthy than they, but the smaller players probably can get good press as well.

hmm yea hopefully, i really just wanna know how rich i could get, lawyer pay wouldnt cut it i dont think given the similar amout in politics + the influencing policy + being a public figure and influencing the public

Ruairi wrote:2) by getting invertebrate pain nresearch done

Well, you know I love that suggestion.

Ruairi wrote:and if it turns out theyc an suffer and we play it right hopefully utilitarisnism could get real famous and lotsa vegetarians might become utilitarian.

I don't think the invertebrate-pain research would do a lot on its own to promote utilitarianism. But you're right that, coupled with proper PR, it could change hearts and minds, especially about questions like how much suffering occurs in nature.

You suggested the analogy with Peter Singer. Animal welfare isn't inherently connected with utilitarianism, but Singer has made utilitarianism more famous, including in vegetarian circles, through his writings and lectures.

Ruairi wrote:im hopefull given that Elwood is supervising several phds in the invertebrate pain area studies which are government funded)

Yep, or others like him.

Ruairi wrote:i might do a degree in agricultural science and then try and get elected,

Interesting path. Do you known anyone else who has done that? I'm not sure how funding works, but it's possible that some of it is decided by the executive bureaucracy rather than the legislature, in which case it could help to be a civil servant? Or maybe a researcher who gives advice to government agencies? I don't know any details, so it would be interesting to ask people who know more. For example, does Elwood have recommendations on how you could get him more funding?

Ruairi wrote:i think maybe you guys see this as quite different to me because you live in bigger countries with big populatins, i think theres only about 5 million here

Oh, that is quite small. Less than 2/3 the size of New York City! Yeah, maybe your odds would be better there.

You'd have a much better chance at politics if you became a lawyer or a business person rather than an agricultural scientist, surely?

This page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_f ... the_Marine ) says the position of minister for agriculture has been held 39 times,

Michael Woods, Joe Walsh (dairy science), Ivan Yates (seems to), Simon Coveney have degrees in agricultural science,

4 in 39 might not sound significant, but joe walsh has held the position several times, collectively the four of them have held it 9 times and ( i think most importantly ) all of them have been elected after 1992 and after this the 4 of them have held 9 out of 12 seats between now and today.

the ministry for agriculture was the one i was aiming for, foreign affairs might be good too but to fund invert suffering research i think id really need to be in the department of agriculture, what do you guys think? what other areas might be effective?

I'm not sure how funding works, but it's possible that some of it is decided by the executive bureaucracy rather than the legislature, in which case it could help to be a civil servant? Or maybe a researcher who gives advice to government agencies? I don't know any details, so it would be interesting to ask people who know more. For example, does Elwood have recommendations on how you could get him more funding?

well as far as i understand ministers decide where they're funding goes pretty exclusively

a researcher influencing policy would be good but i think definitely no where near the power of the politician actually making the decisions, and an agri science degree would qualify me for a job as an advisor anyway.

i emailed Elwood last week just waiting to hear back but he lives in the north, which is governed separately to the republic.

You'd have a much better chance at politics if you became a lawyer or a business person rather than an agricultural scientist, surely?

to be perfectly honest i really dont understand why you think that, i think where you guys lives politics must be really different! although i was thinking i could go for getting rich and if it doesnt work out then try politics but if im going to want to be agri minister and will be going head to head with agri business who dont like my policies then i would really need to know what i was talking about and i would learn that during my degree and also it says to people that you have that knowledge.

but over here the majority of people have absolutely no idea what our politicians qualifications or histories are!

Ruairi wrote:the ministry for agriculture was the one i was aiming for, foreign affairs might be good too but to fund invert suffering research i think id really need to be in the department of agriculture, what do you guys think?

I would assume so, but I'm no expert on Irish political decisions.

Ruairi wrote:well as far as i understand ministers decide where they're funding goes pretty exclusively

Fascinating. Ministers and presumably their staff?

Ruairi wrote:and an agri science degree would qualify me for a job as an advisor anyway.

Nice point.

Ruairi wrote:to be perfectly honest i really dont understand why you think that, i think where you guys lives politics must be really different!

Yeah, apparently so. 44 percent of US Congresspeople have law degrees, and several others come from business. Few are scientists of any type, much less agricultural scientists.

Ruairi wrote:then i would really need to know what i was talking about and i would learn that during my degree and also it says to people that you have that knowledge.

Makes sense. Also, you'd develop a network of colleagues and might be able to encourage them to think more about insects. There's probably some agricultural scientist out there who's interested in studying insect welfare and humane killing of pests but who isn't pursuing it; maybe you could find him/her and spur him/her to work on it.

Ruairi wrote:i emailed Elwood last week just waiting to hear back

If he doesn't write back, you could also try some of his grad students, who might have more time for replying to questions like these. I bet Elwood gets tons of random emails each day, so he might not answer all of them.

i think yes basically ministers and their staff, but i think mostly ministers, still (always) a lot to learn and ill know more soon.

a lot of our politicians are former teachers,

hmmm perhaps on the agri scientist who might be interested in humane pesticides but this isnt exactly something that would come close the agri science course so if someone was specifically interested in studying invertebrate suffering it probably wouldnt be the field for them and if they were interested in agri science and then got interested in possible invertebrate suffering then they wouldnt have much expertise in that area, but yea definitely a possibility and great for networking

yea thanks for the idea to email his grad students! i emailed him on the 8th, ill probably give him a few more days.

is there much low hanging fruit in the area of fishing? as in are there any easy implented things that could really reduce suffering here? well first we gotta establish if they can suffer or not...

to give you an idea of how people get elected i live in wicklow, the internet tells me the electorate is 95,000, as far as i can remember there were 23 candidates running, this was the largest number of any constituency in the country, 5 of these 23 get elected. one of them was independent of any political party who (as far as i know) was pretty much unheard of before his election posters started appearing. then if you do get elected you probably wont even be a junior minister at first, then at the next election (5 years time) maybe you will, and then you could be an actual minister after that

provided this government and the next one do full terms of office and if i do a 4 year degree then the next election id be over the eligible age and out of my degree would be 2021

Ruairi wrote:a lot of our politicians are former teachers,

Amazing. Like, professors, or grade-school teachers? I don't know if I've ever heard of a teacher running for Congress in the US.

Ruairi wrote:if someone was specifically interested in studying invertebrate suffering it probably wouldnt be the field for them

True. I guess I was thinking of the "humane insecticides" side of the story. Probably ~1/4 of the entomologists at agriculture schools focus their research on pest control, so there's no dearth of expertise in those departments, at least.

Ruairi wrote:is there much low hanging fruit in the area of fishing? as in are there any easy implented things that could really reduce suffering here? well first we gotta establish if they can suffer or not...

After insects, I would guess that fish and chicken are the lowest hanging in terms of gains from humane slaughter, because there are so many of them compared with cows and pigs. Also, poultry and fish aren't protected by the Humane Slaughter Act in the US the way mammals are supposed to be. I'm not sure if the number of fish slaughtered is higher or lower than for chickens, but it's of the same order of magnitude. From "Number of Animals Killed for Food":

In 2009, the average American meat eater was responsible for about 198 deaths:
1/7 of a cow
2/5 of a pig
1 turkey
1½ chickens for eggs
25 chickens for meat
40 fish
130 shellfish

According to that measure, there are more fish killed than chickens, but a later section says

Slaughter Statistics
The number of animals slaughtered in the US comprise only a portion of the total number that die here, as many do not reach the slaughterhouse. Neither do they include animals slaughtered abroad and then shipped to the US, even as they do include those slaughtered here for sale abroad. Nevertheless, they provide a picture of the slaughter industry in this country. The 2009 slaughter included:
22,767,000 ducks
34,467,800 cattle
113,733,800 pigs
245,768,000 turkeys
8,658,860,000 chickens
7.3 billion fish
12 billion shellfish

Here chickens slightly preponderate. Either chickens or fish would be a good bet, I guess.

I give ~0.85 probability to chickens being able to feel conscious suffering, and ~0.7 for fish. Say ~0.4 for insects. And ~0.96 for other people (due to solipsistic simulation scenarios). Those estimates are pulled out of thin air but are based on my memories of reading a good number of articles on these topics.

As far as methods of fish slaughter, I wrote most of the "Slaughter methods" section of the Wikipedia article on fish farming. (As I've mentioned before, contributing to Wikipedia is an excellent way to raise awareness of utilitarian issues, because those articles have such a wide readership.)

Mercy for Animals has a particularly poignant video depicting catfish slaughter in one Texas facility.

Ruairi wrote:then the next election id be over the eligible age and out of my degree would be 2021

I'm looking for the Ruairi '21 election campaign.

secondary school teachers, which is high school teachers which is grade school right?

hm cool with the entomologists thanks!:)

awesome thanks for all the information! haha yea i remember reading wikipedia before and at one point thinking "...Alan Dawrst?"

haha awesome thanks:D! i need to do more research, i need to know how rich i could get (can wait for h.i.c research!:D!:D!), how likely i am to become an influential politician, and how much i could actually get done

so politics, finance/ i banking/ etc and start ups are the things im looking into, and always looking out for other potential ideas:)

Alan Dawrst wrote:After insects, I would guess that fish and chicken are the lowest hanging in terms of gains from humane slaughter,

Hm, in what sense do you consider insect suffering low hanging? Even if we assume 100% confidence that they can suffer to some degree, I don't see anything that we're doing on a large scale, that we might merely stop doing (such as factory farming) that would give a net gain - and programs to avoid insect suffering that we're not simply causing seem much more complicated (and requiring more political will) to implement.

Slightly off-topic, can I clarify what you mean when you use a 0.4 probability of insect sentience, Alan?

It would seem silly to assign a 0.4% (edit: 40%) probability that one insect is equally sentient as one human. I assume you're saying something more like

'A group of insects has a 0.4 chance of being equally sentient to a human given they have equal total brain mass.'
or replace 'total brain mass' with 'complexity' (the number of possible informational states)

Am I getting at least close to your intended interpretation?

Ruairi wrote:secondary school teachers, which is high school teachers which is grade school right?

Yep, that's what I meant.

Arepo wrote:Hm, in what sense do you consider insect suffering low hanging?

Well, yeah, I guess insect suffering isn't low-hanging in the sense of "easily achievable" but rather in the sense of "having high payoff per unit cost overall." For example, if there existed a program to pay farmers to use less painful insecticides, it would likely be more cost-effective than Vegan Outreach in direct suffering prevented. This ignores wild-animal-suffering memes, although I think humane insecticides would be better for memes than VO, too.

Of course, the startup costs of such an operation would be high, but once set up, it would be extremely efficient. And paying farmers directly is probably less efficient in expected-value terms than lobbying or public outreach around the issue.

RyanCarey wrote:It would seem silly to assign a 0.4% probability that one insect is equally sentient as one human.

40% you mean?

Well, I'm not sure it's silly.

I don't know whether I weigh suffering by brain size. I probably do in some measure -- a worm cut in half isn't quite as bad as a human cut in half -- but I don't think it's proportional to number of neurons. I think insects get more weight than their share of neural tissue. It seems as though being a single agent with a unified conscious experience counts for more than the sum of its neural constituents.

If I had to take a stance, I would say that one consciously suffering human is as bad as, say, 5 consciously suffering worms, assuming that worms can suffer. Multiplying this by 0.4 probability for conscious suffering, then the actual exchange rate might be ~0.08.

By the way, do you think men deserve more moral weight because they have bigger brains than women?

Maybe my probability for insects feeling conscious suffering was a bit high. Lower it to 25%-30%. However, if they do experience a coherent, self-reflective awareness of phenomenal badness, I think that's pretty terrible, and 1:5 for humans:insects does seem reasonable.

Hi all,

Just thought I'd share a link to this discussion on the Today programme on Radio 4. The founder of our organization, Will Crouch, is arguing for ethical banking on consequentialist grounds i.e. if a banker gives a high proportion of his/her earnings to charity, then they can have overall positive effects. Think it might genuinely be of interest to members!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/ne ... 645137.stm

We've started a community at Eighty Thousand Hours (http://eightythousand.org) too.

Cheers,

Tom

Thanks, Tom! Welcome to Felicifia. Feel free to share further news from 80,000 Hours or related projects.

Alan Dawrst wrote:I don't think the invertebrate-pain research would do a lot on its own to promote utilitarianism. But you're right that, coupled with proper PR, it could change hearts and minds, especially about questions like how much suffering occurs in nature.

I've been thinking about this, my reasoning goes like this

become a university neuroscience professor -->
do research + supervise several phds in areas in high impact area + reasonably big salary (€100,000?) -->
when its discovered that invertebrates can suffer start a movement out of it promoting humane pesticides and make utilitarianism really famous from this!:D!

but what i just said is pretty optimistic!

its hard to get a job as a professor.

id imagine researching these topics it'll be hard to get funding for phds, but i could move somewhere i might find it easier.

is there anyone here from a research background who might have some ball park estimates for some of the following? would it be more efficient to get rich and fund this research? (then again if im just a banker and not the actual scientist doing the research would i not really be in a position to educate people on the topic? does it matter? could i just pay people to do it?)
Elwood has 6 supervisons going at the moment, 2 of which are in areas id consider really high impact, but if i was only expert in really high impact areas maybe potentially i could have more in high impact areas, plus my own research. how much would 5 or more neuroscientists cost to fund? http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofBi ... pervision/ )

i think 80,000 hours say on their site a banker might earn £200,000 a year (€232,000) so then if we say i live on €30,000 its

a few neuroscientists working on the pain in invertebrates issue + €70,000 donation

vs.

€202,000 donation

so if we presume the invertebrate issue is the most high imapct thing one can do (not saying it is just for arguments sake) then for it to be more high impact to be a banker id have to be able to fund several neuroscientists for €132,000 (bankers salary minus professors salary) it seems unlikely to be possible if i was to actually pay their salaries, but if i was to fund phds? would this be possible? does anyone know around how much it would cost?

and of course what if invertebrates cant suffer! i could still research if brain size and suffering and if we could find some kinda unit to call a utilion.
and of course knowing what can suffer is a really big deal for utilitarians but really i think focusing on inspiring others to be utilitarian is best because of how high impact this is. so maybe this would be an un-adaptive career choice

I agree that inspiring utilitarianism in others is optimal for many utilitarians. To me, that means we have to:
1. get an audience
2. deliver a credible message

So how big an audience should we aim for? You can get a small and unwilling audience by becoming a secondary school philosophy teacher, for example. If you become a researcher or a philosopher, you might have more success because your audience will extent beyond your own class to academics worldwide. If you are truly ambitious, you will tell me that you do not want to be merely an academic who is respected within his own field. You want to aim for something more like the level of recognition of Peter Singer or Sam Harris. What that means, is you have decided, as I think you should, that you want to become a public intellectual.

To become a public intellectual, you need to write a really popular book. For Peter Singer, that book was Animal Liberation. For Sam Harris, it was The End Of Faith. Peter Singer's publication was a founding work of antispeciesism. It presumably sold its first hundred copies on the back of his philosophical reputation. But it sold probably a hundred thousand more because it was a founding work of antispeciesism. Four years later, he wrote Practical Ethics, which applied preference utilitarianism to human ethics. Now think of Sam Harris. In 2004 Sam was thinking about the role of religion in our society. At this moment, three years after the September attacks, so were the American public. So were Dawkins, Hitchens and Dennett. Thus New Atheism was formed. Unlike Singer, he did not publish his book on the back of some qualification to talk about his topic. (I think he might have been about to start a PhD in neuroscience at the time). Rather, his success was because he was the first to apply such an incisive writing style to that popular sentiment of distrust for religion. Six years later, he wrote the Moral Landscape, which asked what morality would be possible for atheists.

So if you or I want to be a public intellectual, what book should we write? If a popular utilitarian emerged today, I think they would be a researcher in positive psychology. This field is massive at the moment, and it's spawning numerous best-sellers. It's relation to utilitarianism is obvious. Moreso than the link between atheism and morality, anyway. Will positive psychology still be such a force ten years from now? Maybe not. Could a neuroscientist who 'discovered' something about happiness enter the public arena in the near future? Who knows. That an insect biologist addressing the topic of insect sentience seems less likely to me. It seems to me that that's a profession that could only enter the public eye fifty or more years from now. But I'd be interested in your opinions.

Now, finally, to the second point. The credible message. Here, I think, I can add a missing piece to the puzzle, Ruairi. It is actually a misleading to say that credibility applies to the message alone. Credibility is, of course, as dependent on the messenger as on the message. Someone who wants to persuade others has to be affable. If you want to persuade someone, by definition, they already don't like what you're going to say. So you are unlikely to have success if they already don't like you either! But credibility doesn't just depend on personal characteristics, it also depends on personal behaviour.

Think of Toby Ord donating half of his salary to charity. He donates half his income to charity. Because he lead by example, his message was credible. Because his behaviour was authentic So much so that he has been published in newspapers across the world, signing up thousands of members to follow in his footsteps. If Toby Ord had merely told people what to do without making such a sacrifice, what would the response have been? He would not have been published once. There would be no story of significance to publish. He would have been regarded as a hypocrite. So, to effectively inspire utilitarianism, we have to be utilitarian ourselves. There are detailed questions to be aske here about how we should divide our time across these topics. I'll leave those unanswered. But what I will say is that the public could easily understand that a neuroscientist who is researching invertebrate sentience is doing his best to find out what suffering is so that we can minimise it.

So my current thoughts on a utilitarian life is that we should aim to inspire utilitarianism in others.
Let's research utilitarian topics. Let's donate what money we have left-over. Let's make sure to stay as friendly (happy) people. Then, let's judge the intellectual environment to decide what needs to be said. Then, let's write a book on that topic, preferably using our expertise. Let's try again and again until we write a book that succeeds. Then, let's use that publicity, along with our personal characteristics and authentic behaviour to promote utilitarianism.

thanks!:D!

a few thoughts on what you said:

you say something in positive psychology would be good but while humans being happy is really important a lot of people are already working on this and its really just not as big a problem as other things, other things where much larger gains can be made. basically id be worried the link isnt actually that strong, and that id influence people to build strong communities and stuff, which is fantastic! but they'll still be eating factory farmed animals and not thinking of invertebrates.

i could keep mentioning utilitarianism loads but then i might aswell be any kind of famous person and talk/write about utilitarianism, if this seems optimal it would seem like something we should try and get someone already famous to do it.
(maybe i should go on big brother? )

did peter singer already have an interested audience or did he really start something from the begining? if the latter then id be more hopefull it could happen with invertebrates too. especially since there are loads of vegetarians now to whom this is really relevant.

this is one of the main reasons i think this could work, the issue is of huge relevance to vegetarians and vegans.

but would the whole thing really make many more utilitarians? has peter singers work? could one talk about utilitarianism more than singer and from this have a bigger impact?

just on another topic a famous utilitarian atheist could be influential too, could talk about how you can have morality thats logical

Great questions, Ruairi.

Ruairi wrote:become a university neuroscience professor -->
do research + supervise several phds in areas in high impact area + reasonably big salary (€100,000?) -->
when its discovered that invertebrates can suffer start a movement out of it promoting humane pesticides and make utilitarianism really famous from this!:D!

I quite like that path, but mainly because I think it'll be good for the insects. I don't think it'll do more for utilitarianism than many other things you could work on. But you may as well do good things while promoting utilitarianism, to kill two birds with one stone.

Ruairi wrote:but what i just said is pretty optimistic!

Yeah. €100K sounds like a lot for the salary of that type of professor, unless you know otherwise.

Ruairi wrote:id imagine researching these topics it'll be hard to get funding for phds

Right. That part is a potential roadblock. Jeffrey Lockwood suggested to me that there's very little funding for research on insect pain in a pure sense.

Another professor said that he can study mechanisms of pain in invertebrates only because invertebrates are model organisms for what happens in people. But maybe you could get those kinds of grants and then put your own spin on the results as far as their relevance to insect suffering.

And apparently Elwood has funding from somewhere, so maybe it's not impossible to find.

More general funding sources are better, because that money wouldn't otherwise have gone toward insect-suffering research. If there's a very specific grant to study whether insects can suffer, then the fact that you get it means someone else won't.

Ruairi wrote:then again if im just a banker and not the actual scientist doing the research would i not really be in a position to educate people on the topic? does it matter? could i just pay people to do it?

It might take some searching, but I bet you could eventually find at least one person who's not now studying the topic but who would do so if given a grant. S/he might not have the same degree of passion that you do, though.

Ruairi wrote:i think 80,000 hours say on their site a banker might earn £200,000 a year (€232,000)

That's probably pretty hard to achieve as well (just like becoming a well known professor is), so keep in mind that both of these are optimistic estimates. However, the comparison should still be valid.

Ruairi wrote:then for it to be more high impact to be a banker id have to be able to fund several neuroscientists for €132,000 (bankers salary minus professors salary) it seems unlikely to be possible if i was to actually pay their salaries, but if i was to fund phds? would this be possible? does anyone know around how much it would cost?

I'm not sure. Grad students are cheaper.

Banker vs. professor is a tough decision, and I don't know which way to go. However, the good thing is that this is a "dilemma of riches," so to speak, in that either one of these would be a great choice. It's hard to decide because they're both compelling.

Ruairi wrote:but really i think focusing on inspiring others to be utilitarian is best because of how high impact this is.

Of course, you could do that to some extent as a banker or professor, but I guess you're suggesting an alternative could be to do that full-time?

Ruairi wrote:you say something in positive psychology would be good but while humans being happy is really important a lot of people are already working on this and its really just not as big a problem as other things, other things where much larger gains can be made. basically id be worried the link isnt actually that strong, and that id influence people to build strong communities and stuff, which is fantastic! but they'll still be eating factory farmed animals and not thinking of invertebrates.

I couldn't agree more.

RyanCarey wrote:So if you or I want to be a public intellectual, what book should we write? If a popular utilitarian emerged today, I think they would be a researcher in positive psychology. This field is massive at the moment, and it's spawning numerous best-sellers. It's relation to utilitarianism is obvious. Moreso than the link between atheism and morality, anyway. Will positive psychology still be such a force ten years from now? Maybe not. Could a neuroscientist who 'discovered' something about happiness enter the public arena in the near future? Who knows. That an insect biologist addressing the topic of insect sentience seems less likely to me. It seems to me that that's a profession that could only enter the public eye fifty or more years from now. But I'd be interested in your opinions.

I'm wary of spending years on a project that we find suboptimal (like positive psychology) just to gather public recognition. As Ruairi suggested, if we need recognition, it might be better to convince others to promote our cause. Plus, the odds of becoming Sam Harris are really low, so on average, it may be that an insect scientist accomplishes as much as a someone who tries to become a public intellectual.

Ruairi wrote:i could keep mentioning utilitarianism loads but then i might aswell be any kind of famous person and talk/write about utilitarianism, if this seems optimal it would seem like something we should try and get someone already famous to do it.

Yeah, getting famous isn't easy, because lots of people are trying to do that.

Ruairi wrote:did peter singer already have an interested audience or did he really start something from the begining? if the latter then id be more hopefull it could happen with invertebrates too.

I think he started from the ground up, but he probably just got lucky. There are loads of other philosophers in his position whom no one has heard of. This isn't to say that being like Singer is a bad idea but just that your odds of success are much lower than they might seem by looking at his case alone.

Ruairi wrote:has peter singers work?

Singer has had more of an impact than a hundred people like me put together. But Bill Gates earned more than a hundred other company founders. Neither is representative of the most likely outcome. (Still, they do drag up the expected value.)

I quite like that path, but mainly because I think it'll be good for the insects. I don't think it'll do more for utilitarianism than many other things you could work on. But you may as well do good things while promoting utilitarianism, to kill two birds with one stone.

! what kinda things do you mean?

to be totally honest while i find neuroscience more interesting than politics and politics more interesting than banking, i didnt have (much) interest in any of them before i realised the possible utilitarian consequences, so whatever you think the most utilitarian thing for me to do is please just say it! it probably wont make me any more happy or less happy than the current things im considering plus id be more happy cause id be stopping more suffering and making more happiness

Elwoods phd students are government funded, (i think)

Ruairi wrote:then again if im just a banker and not the actual scientist doing the research would i not really be in a position to educate people on the topic? does it matter? could i just pay people to do it?

It might take some searching, but I bet you could eventually find at least one person who's not now studying the topic but who would do so if given a grant. S/he might not have the same degree of passion that you do, though.

yea but the kind of thing im thinking of is someone who will do the research, make the discovery, and then publicise it, a lot.

hmm but theres no reason we couldnt pay someone to do the research and then a utilitarain can publicise it right? going back to peter singer hes not a biologist or anything (right?)

thanks!!:D!

Ruairi wrote:to be totally honest while i find neuroscience more interesting than politics and politics more interesting than banking, i didnt have (much) interest in any of them before i realised the possible utilitarian consequences, so whatever you think the most utilitarian thing for me to do is please just say it! it probably wont make me any more happy or less happy than the current things im considering plus id be more happy cause id be stopping more suffering and making more happiness

I would suggest getting in touch with Carl Shulman about this - he's the official 80K careers guy (see this post for both eg and contact).

cool thanks, ive already been talking to richard batty of 80k, although that was mostly about money making careers, has carl shulman spent a lot of time looking into this stuff? why do you suggest him?

I think he and Richard are working together actually. I spoke to both of them, and found the conversations complemented each other.

Yes, Carl has spent loads of time looking into these things and I think he has advised loads of people (perhaps as many as 100?) people on these issues.

Ruairi wrote:

I quite like that path, but mainly because I think it'll be good for the insects. I don't think it'll do more for utilitarianism than many other things you could work on. But you may as well do good things while promoting utilitarianism, to kill two birds with one stone.

! what kinda things do you mean?

Oh, say, writing popular articles and giving lectures. Think, for example, of Dave Pearce's hundreds of websites and thousands of Facebook followers. You could potentially earn money for a few years in order to support yourself while doing that. (This may not be far from my own future plans.)

I don't mean to imply that I think this course is necessarily optimal. I'm not sure what is. The insects might benefit more from your being a professor.

Ruairi wrote:hmm but theres no reason we couldnt pay someone to do the research and then a utilitarain can publicise it right? going back to peter singer hes not a biologist or anything (right?)

Exactly. Outsiders might also have more licence to make strong public statements about the research, statements that would be risky for a science professor who needs to maintain the academic respect of his colleagues.

P.S., This is becoming quite a long thread. I think 5 pages is a record for Felicifia.

Alan Dawrst wrote:Oh, say, writing popular articles and giving lectures.

And it needn't be these traditional academic venues. It could instead take the form of Facebook campaigns, viral YouTube videos, or Vegan-Outreach-style leaflets.

Alan Dawrst wrote:P.S., This is becoming quite a long thread. I think 5 pages is a record for Felicifia.

This thread has gotten some amazing replies! I've even got some of my friends at school reading this

thanks alan!:D!

@Wearenow: i was just going to ask if you were still on the forums as from your posts you seemed to be asking the same questions as me! what are you thinking about doing if you dont mind me asking?

Anyone know how to assess your expected income in different careers based on smarts/interest/any other important factors? Particularly I'm looking at academia, law and finance (oh and maybe being a (rescue helicopter:D) pilot if the wages are high).

There’s lots of stuff online but I don’t know what’s reliable (the stuff on payscale often only seems to have around 50 people as its sample).

Also that’s just the career average, I really don't know how to assess if I’m smart enough (although maybe one can look just compare the average for all careers? doesn't seem very good), but I thought of one possible way;

As regards breaking into i banking what I hear/read is that the economics and finance course in university college Dublin (UCD) is the most useful course for getting into i banking. Last year the minimum "points" (grades) needed to get onto the course was 480, statistics online tell me this puts everyone on the course in the top 12.5% and up of the country academically.

I got in touch (do people who arn't Irish use this saying? just means contacted) with a few people at UCD regarding how many of the econ. and finance graduates break into banking each year, the people I contacted didn't have any statistics on how many graduates break into i banking from the course but they assured me graduates do break in. The clearest answer I got was that "probably more than one graduate would break in but less than 5" (the way he said it makes me want to say much less than 5). There are 20 places on the course each year.

They were always talking about banks in London (that they're graduates got into) it seemed. I dunno if this is less attractive or anything but seemed important to mention.

So I was thinking if i divide 12.5 by 10 (if we say maybe the top two graduates from each year get into i banking) then maybe one would need to be around the top 1.25% academically?

But this is just breaking in, it’s "up or out" so perhaps you'd need to be smarter again to make considerable amounts of money? Then again there's money to be made if you are "out" too.

Also I doubt many (or maybe any, but really I don’t know) of the graduates on the course got the grades to be in the top 1.25% of the country academically, but that doesn’t mean they arn't, quite likely that they just didn’t bother because of the extra study they would have to do.

I hear exams systems in other countries are different (and better) but here it's largely a big memory test, questions are repeated again and again, in English you are supposed to study 6 poets but often people will study less because there is a pattern to which ones come up on the exam paper. So if someone didn’t need the grades they were capable of for the course they wanted I think its very likely they might just study less hard.

As regards academia I think science was actually 480 points as well last year, then after your second year you decide what science to do your degree in, you will only get into the more sought after sciences (neuroscience being one of them) if you are doing well academically, and then after that it seems likely to have a shot at academia one needs to get a good degree, probably a first?? So at the moment I'm trying to find out what percentage of graduates get firsts and then do the same thing as above. But of course, as above, this doesn’t account for career progression or anything.

Any ideas how to do all this better please???

Finally if I want to I can try and get an internship in trinity college with a neuroscience academic sometime this summer, don't really know exactly what this entails but basically I'd get to shadow them and learn about stuff. But if I'm not gonna do neuroscience it seems like a waste of time, I might need to apply soon though, any thoughts on if I should go for it?

Ruairi wrote:There’s lots of stuff online but I don’t know what’s reliable (the stuff on payscale often only seems to have around 50 people as its sample).

I know what you mean about not knowing what numbers to trust. It's not the sample size that's the problem (50 is way more than enough to get a reasonable estimate); the problem is that you don't know the demographic information behind the people in that average (e.g., their percentile academically within the general population, their work ethic, hours worked, drive to make money, etc.). Carl mentioned some other problems with the raw salary averages, many of which you just explained as well.

What to do? You can try to get estimates from several different angles and see how well they hold together.

1. Use Payscale and the like, but don't put very much stock in them.
2. I've found GlassDoor.com to be pretty good. At least, it's quite accurate for software-engineering salaries in the US. I don't know how well it handles Wall Street bonuses that represent much of the income of bankers and hedge-fund managers.
3. Search for job ads and see what kinds of salaries and bonuses are offered.
4. Get books targeted toward working in that career. For example, Vault has a series (and my college career-services department used to pay for student access to all of them for free). There are lots of other good one-off books about how to get into law, finance, software, etc. and what it's like to work there. Often these will have salary surveys or at least will quote a few offhand numbers about what you can expect.
5. Write to people who work in these industries and ask them for ballpark figures. This is easiest if you're in college and have access to an alumni database, but until then, you can ask around among friends, including the 80K Hours folks. Often, just one or two salary point-estimates by someone who you know is at about the same ability level as yourself is better than all the data points in the world from a collection where you don't know who exactly is in the average. (It sounds like you've been asking around a lot already, which is great.)

It's great if you can get a few point estimates of pay at different levels of experience, so that you can do your own line-fitting of "income vs. years worked." I used to have an Excel spreadsheet where I would do present-value computations for various starting salaries, salary-growth-rate assumptions, and discount rates. Tables like these for actuaries are really great if you can find them, but it's rare to get such clean data.

As far as education suggestions, here's one idea. Unless you want to do medical school or you're 100% certain you don't want to make money but instead want to go into cognitive-science research, you could study computer science and/or statistics, with some business/finance and maybe a few math/physics/engineering courses thrown in. (Okay, maybe I'm biased because that's what I did, but I didn't do it for no reason. ) This will keep your options open for pretty much anything: software and quantitative finance obviously, but also regular finance, consulting, business, law (which doesn't require specific undergrad preparation), and essentially anything else. I've heard several business/finance recruiters say they'll always take someone with a math-oriented background, because those people are clear thinkers and can do anything. A lot of it is just for signaling, but that's how the system works.

Make sure to reserve time to study more about the options, attend college career fairs/visits, do industry internships, talk with upper-level classmates and recent graduates about their plans, etc.

If you don't like statistics/CS/math, there might be other options. In general, most of the hard sciences have the property of being a "master key" for careers, although I think it's more true the more quantitative the field is. Also keep in mind that some computer-science jobs can be pretty non-quantitative as far as using math specifically, although I think CS uses similar brain regions as math overall.

Ruairi wrote:I got in touch (do people who arn't Irish use this saying?

Yes.

Ruairi wrote:and then after that it seems likely to have a shot at academia one needs to get a good degree, probably a first?? So at the moment I'm trying to find out what percentage of graduates get firsts and then do the same thing as above.

Yeah, you need a good degree and a PhD for academic jobs, but I don't know much about the Irish system, unfortunately.

Ruairi wrote:Finally if I want to I can try and get an internship in trinity college with a neuroscience academic sometime this summer, don't really know exactly what this entails but basically I'd get to shadow them and learn about stuff. But if I'm not gonna do neuroscience it seems like a waste of time, I might need to apply soon though, any thoughts on if I should go for it?

I think it sounds like a good idea to try because (a) neuroscience is a significant possibility at this point, and it would be useful to get early knowledge about how strongly to pursue it and (b) getting a high-powered money-making internship isn't as crucial now as it will be in your later years of college when you're getting ready to look for jobs after graduation. Many times employers just hire people who did a college internship, rather than looking for fresh graduates who didn't work for them before.

I'm going to stir the boat for fun.
I can think of one job that is high profile. They have a massive media profile often on TV, often directly stating their message to the youth and all generations. If you took this career path you could espouse utilitarianism through your job. They have the potential to make scad loads of money, which they also often donate. They have fun doing their job. People take a great amount of pleasure from their job. In fact often thousands gather at one place just to watch and listen to them doing their job because it is fun. I can think of two of them that have worked to raise millions to help people in Africa, third world debt relief, increased aid contribution by first world countires, AIDs education amongst some of their better known causes. Think about it, you can be a public face of promoting utilitarianism and reducing suffering! Academia rarely shapes the public debate, lawyers unless they become politicians aren't on TV, and neither of these speak directly to young people. Neither of them have jobs that make the broader public happy to see them...

PS: Just for smiles

Wow! I feel honored to have started such a long thread with such awesome replies I'm about to start a new thread, however. Since this one has so many different topics.

Redcarded... Is the job a pastor? a television presenter? A comedian?

Rock star, e.g., Bono? Yes, but the trouble is that thousands of people want to be rock stars. Probably better odds making lots of money in a startup. Still, I won't dismiss the possibility without seeing an expected-value calculation, assuming you have some good initial demographic traits (being attractive, being able to sing, performing well in front of crowds, etc.).

Since you said your comment was just for smiles, here you go:

Damn computer swallowed my response....
Rock star is correct! I tried to convince Arepo once, but he chickened out. However the reason it is not the first utilitarian choice isn't because lots of other people try, millions try and make a fortune in business but that hasn't stopped anyone lately. Likewise because of the requirements. to be a lawyer or doctor or politician has a list of requirements. Every high paying or prestigious job does, it is just that those for rock star or musical talent and charisma. The reasons are more likely to be:

Risk. Music industry is based on finding the next big new thing, this makes it inherently unpredictable. While having talent will certainly get you a fair way in music, there are a heap of larger business factors often outside of the artists control that may mean success or failure. This is the bane of anything creative. It is the equivalent of banking your life on lotto tickets. The utility pay off, as Bob Geldhof and Bob have shown, can be massive. On a scale far beyond anything that an average academic or doctor could achieve by themselves. However, it is not the way most people plan their lives. Although I applaud those that try.

Duration. Unless you can become the musical utilitarian Madonna you'll be lucky to have a decade long stint at the top of the musical and media world. This mean that you have only a short window in which to make a lifetimes worth of rock star income. The hare may be fast, but the turtle will win the race.

Haha!

Redcarded, I'm not sure how we're defining risk, but the statistician in me wants our readers to know that becoming a rockstar is not just risky in the sense of a great degree of volatility between potential outcomes, but also that the chance of success is extremely slim. And it's the latter that seems to me to be the deciding factor. Utilitarians do not try to become rockstars because although the impact of rockstars is 1000x the impact of non-rockstars, the chance of becoming one is 1/10,000, or something along those lines.

redcarded wrote:Risk. Music industry is based on finding the next big new thing, this makes it inherently unpredictable.

While startups are hugely risky too, I think you mean that succeeding in music is more a game of roulette than of poker, whereas startups are the opposite? I don't know how true that is. Certainly there are some pretty strict minimal criteria to even be in the running for being a rock star, but maybe beyond that, there's no simple measure that reliably predicts top success.

redcarded wrote:Duration. Unless you can become the musical utilitarian Madonna you'll be lucky to have a decade long stint at the top of the musical and media world. This mean that you have only a short window in which to make a lifetimes worth of rock star income. The hare may be fast, but the turtle will win the race.

Well, I think the most successful rock stars still beat the majority of bankers in terms of lifetime income, even if they only work a few years. Plus, the possibility for huge media and popular influence has to be at least as big as the value of their income itself.

redcarded wrote:Rock star is correct! I tried to convince Arepo once, but he chickened out.

Don't remember that. Maybe I perceived it differently

An obvious extra factor (for me specifically and in general) would be lack of talent. I'm close to being tone-deaf, and certainly tone-mute...

I definitely tried to convince you once in Melbourne over a few beers, and it is gratifying to see that you have taken to the public performing arts as a responce! Although it isn't quite the 'rock star' type of public performer.

Alan I agree, a rock star has a public face far larger and far more able to shape public debate in a way that is beyond most other careers which is a factor beyond economics that needs somehow to be factored in. While economic contribution is a massive help being a force to change policy, public opinion and mobilise large numbers of people are things that any movement needs

It is a thought I've been tying with recently - advising people to go into celebrity-dominated careers is rarely or never going to be a good idea, but one can imagine that a few people would have gone into them irrationally and got lucky, and now be amenable to utilitarian (or at least GWWCesque) ideas. So perhaps there's some mileage in seeking out the more altruistic megastars to try and win them over as a high risk, high payoff activity. I don't pay much attention to current affairs, so I don't know who'd be on the list, but eg I remember Toby Maguire discussing such things, and Matt Damon and George Clooney are fairly active without seeming too irrational about it.

Has anyone considered working in the food industry? Reaching a position in a business like McDonald's that gives you sway over a lot of farming practice choices?

WeAreNow wrote:Has anyone considered working in the food industry? Reaching a position in a business like McDonald's that gives you sway over a lot of farming practice choices?

Interesting suggestion!

Purely from the perspective of trying to change McDonald's, I think it would be better to work as an activist from the outside, because

1. You could spend your full time on it, instead of a small fraction of a busy job.
2. You wouldn't have to spend decades rising in the corporate hierarchy before reaching a level where you have that kind of influence.
3. Even if you became a McDonald's executive, you would only have a small fraction of the power to decide what the company does. Even the CEO has to answer to the Board and shareholders, and without a business justification, they might not let you get away with it.
4. A "business justification" basically has to come from activists who threaten to hurt the PR and customer base of McDonald's if it doesn't give in, and who can give positive publicity if it makes reforms. This reminds me of a quote (perhaps apocryphal, perhaps genuine) from FDR when he got elected: "FDR told activists in his own party, 'I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.'"

Point #2 in that list is probably the strongest counter-argument.

However, if we consider not just trying to change the policies of McDonald's but the global picture of what you can accomplish in your life, then aiming to become a McDonald's exec might not be a bad route, because even if you don't push any reforms, you still make a lot of money that you can donate (perhaps surreptitiously, lest your peers find out where it's going!). Of course, if you work for McDonald's, you do have to worry about the extent to which you are more productive than your counterfactual replacement, especially if your job is to increase sales or something.

---

BTW, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that just a few activists could play a pivotal role in whether or not a push for McDonald's reform succeeds. For example, Henry Spira was the sine qua non in several of his campaigns. And in modern times, people like Paul Shapiro still do some pretty amazing things singlehandedly. Yes, we have to factor in replaceability here as well, but some people are really exceptional at this work.

Can anyone think of anything relevant/objections to being a advisor to a charities or charities on their movement building and fundraising strategy?

Ruairi wrote:Can anyone think of anything relevant/objections to being a advisor to a charities or charities on their movement building and fundraising strategy?

It sounds like an interesting idea!

In the past, some of us have talked about donor consulting (i.e., advising rich people on where to give their money); this is something that's done by consulting firms, investment banks, and other advisory agencies. However, we haven't much thought about the opposite side of things: Consulting for the charities themselves.

It's well known that consulting firms like McKinsey give advice to charities. However, this is presumably more conventional wisdom, and it would not involve some of the more unusual ideas that are common in our parlance.

In order to get a job consulting for charities, you'd probably need background in the basics of mainstream advice-giving. For example, it might help to work for consulting firms, businesses, or nonprofits for a few years in order to build foundational knowledge and establish credibility. With time, you could seek to slip in some more unconventional ideas into your advice.

That said, consulting isn't the only way to change the priorities of a charity. Donors can have an impact also. For example, this year I persuaded Vegan Outreach to use my donation on veg ads instead of regular paper leaflets. That said, donors can have limited ability to figure out optimal suggestions if they're not as embedded in the day-to-day world of the charity's operations as an employee would be.

Therefore, another way to change a charity is from the inside. In recent years, HSUS has worked more and more on high-impact farm-animal issues compared with pets, and this was partly because of the influence of some employees who helped to realign priorities. HSUS has a $126 million annual budget, so even tiny changes in direction have huge impacts.

Ruairi wrote:Can anyone think of anything relevant/objections to being a advisor to a charities or charities on their movement building and fundraising strategy?

It's not an objection, but you'd want some idea of how likely groups are to use your advice well, and how likely they were to keep it internal - if you come up with some key insight that you teach to SCI, AMF et al and within 6 months all the charities in the world are using it you might not end up getting any more thereafter for the groups you'd targeted.

Arepo wrote:if you come up with some key insight that you teach to SCI, AMF et al and within 6 months all the charities in the world are using it you might not end up getting any more thereafter for the groups you'd targeted.

Hmm, but wouldn't it be a good thing to spread an innovation across charities? Indeed, I'm told that (silently) sharing innovations is part of what consultants are hired for.

In fact, when I've been talking with people about different animal charities, one of the things that I think most needs to change is that each charity does its own internal evaluation (e.g., of the effectiveness of veg outreach) but doesn't share the results, with The Humane League being one outstanding exception. I guess charities might be worried about making studies public that aren't fully peer reviewed or that could be taken out of context or something like that (?), but I think it would be salutary to change the incentive structure to encourage sharing. GiveWell has often lamented this same fact: So few charities share their internal data publicly that evaluation is really hard, not to mention that charities have to reinvent and reevaluate their own wheels.

I'm thinking maybe this would actually be a very good idea, or maybe starting ones own charity and doing it. Then again couldn't someone else just do it? (any takers?)

I've been looking at relevant college courses;
TCD is Trinity College Dublin, 1st in ireland, 65th worldwide, 48th worldwide for sociology;
UCD is University College Dublin, 2nd in Ireland, 134th worldwide.

Sociology in UCD
Psychology in UCD
Social science in UCD

Psychology in TCD
Philosophy, political science, economics and sociology in TCD
Sociology and psychology in TCD (this is part of a "two subject moderatorship" and theres a whole load of stuff I could choose, for example sociology and philosophy )

What do ye think would be most useful for making social change using a chairty(s) as a vehicle?

Can one study "Social Marketing" ?

Doesn't look good...

The courses you choose will depend somewhat on your future plans. For example, if you want to make a lot of money, you would probably take less sociology/psychology/philosophy and more finance/statistics/computer science. For money-making, I would guess that the absolute general reputation of the school matters more.

In contrast, if you actually want to learn things that you'll apply later on, then you might take more of the types of courses you listed, and you might optimize more for the quality of the departments than the raw reputation of the college in general.

Do you have a sense of which you want to do? If you're unsure, I think it's safer to start with the math/computer science and switch as time goes on, because doing the reverse is harder.

When I took Intro Accounting in college, my advisor asked me why, and I said the reason was that "It's more boring than other courses. I'll learn the other stuff on my own because it's fun. Having the discipline imposed by an actual course is more useful for the less fun topics."

[Obligatory joke told by my accounting professor: "Accountants are the LIFO the party."]

Well yeah I was mentioning these as regards being some kind of strategist for some charity I think I might find it hard to do the money stuff, not in itself, but because even if I just became a regular fundraiser, not a manager or anything like that, I might still be making more for my charity than as a pro. phil. I think the knowledge of that would make me super bored studying finance, etc, if it didn't seem like it was neccesary. I meant the above stuff just as regards my previous suggestion about advising charities.

I've been wondering if some antispeciesist charities only employ vegans or something though, that would make it harder to recruit fundraisers, maybe people would freak out about something like that though?

EDIT: that LIFO joke is so sad D:

I have a fairly dim view of sociology, having worked for a publisher that focuses on it for a few years. It seems to have a heavy element of 'social theory', which is basically supplementing incomplete data (which all social science data is) and sometimes replacing it outright with dubious philosophical arguments.

I would think some kind of mathematical approach would be much more valuable - you can do proper data analysis with maths, and as Alan said, switching from hard thinking to woolly approaches if need be is much easier than the opposite.

As far as a career advising charities, I'm not totally sure what path to pursue. The best thing is to find people already doing what you want to do and then trace backwards on how they got there. It may be that some of the most well known charity advisers started out in consulting or finance, so that stuff still might not be useless. But probably most of them started out just working for charities directly, and I would guess you'd have to do the same before you gained credibility. (It seems unlikely a charity is going to take advice from someone with no work experience -- except maybe small, close-knit ones like GWWC or 80K Hours or a potential wild-animal-suffering charity.)

In that case, you might ask people at charities where you might want to work what they studied. But my guess is that your major doesn't matter too much for many charity jobs; probably hands-on work experience is more valued? Definitely double-check on this, since I'm not an expert.

You can similarly try to trace back the paths of people who have fundraising careers that you're interested in. What did they study? What kinds of internships did they do? There seem to be several Master's programs in fundraising and grantmaking (e.g., at NYU, Columbia, etc.), and these might provide insight into the kinds of topics that professionals run into.

That said, I have no idea if you should actually aim to go to one of these programs or if it would be an unnecessary use of time and money when you could just do applied work directly. My suspicion is that these formal programs might be more useful when fundraising for big, well established causes that have large donors. In the case of animal charities and especially wild-animal charities, the donor base is small, and we probably won't be getting bequeathments from multimillionaires any time soon. (sigh)

If you know charities where you might want to work or for which you might want to fundraise/consult, then you could ask people who work there all of these questions. It might be neat if you could do an externship with them and get a sense of how you like the work on a day-to-day basis.

Ruairi wrote:I've been wondering if some antispeciesist charities only employ vegans or something though, that would make it harder to recruit fundraisers, maybe people would freak out about something like that though?

I doubt they would have such requirements. Maybe some extreme animal groups do, but those probably aren't the kinds of places for which you'd be fundraising anyway.

Ruairi wrote:EDIT: that LIFO joke is so sad D:

I don't think so. I think it's just amusing.

Arepo wrote:I have a fairly dim view of sociology

Yeah, I know what you mean. I guess it depends a lot on exactly what type of sociology it is. Some, as you say, is just a guy's random opinion about the construction of hegemonical social relations in a capitalist society written using deliberately obscure language. But other parts can be good, especially when it's based either on quantitative psychology studies, demographic trends, or even just no-nonsense qualitative narratives of people's lives.

Arepo wrote:I would think some kind of mathematical approach would be much more valuable

Yeah, but you don't need a whole lot of math to succeed -- just 1-3 stats courses should be enough unless you're going to work in the field later on. (Dumb joke: Is this what's meant by "sufficient statistics"?)

It's important not to get lost in numbers alone. Sometimes a few real-life anecdotes are worth a thousand statistics.

But only statisticians can tell you which those times are

In September I’ll be going back to school for my final year, the college courses I’m looking at doing require me to get significantly better grades than I currently have, so it’s going to be a year of a lot of studying, but I think I can do it

Because of this I’m going to make my decision of what course to do before I go back to school in September. (The actual deadline isn’t for a few more months but I’m going to have to study (a lot) and won’t have any time to spend on this)

My goal is to apply social sciences to creating social change.

As such I’ve narrowed the decision down to 3 courses; but if you want to suggest something (totally) different please go for it!

--------------

Psychology and economics (TSM) in Trinity College Dublin (click the links for more info on modules, etc, or ask me)

Trinity College Dublin is ranked No. 1 in Ireland and 65th worldwide

4 year course

Modules;

Year 1;

Psychology;

PS1005 Academic Skills Tutorial 1
PS1010 Research Skills and Methodology I
PS1201 Introduction to Psychology
PS1208 Fundamentals of Neuroscience and Behaviour
PS1230 Personality and Individual Differences

Economics;

EC1010 Introduction to economics
EC1030 Mathematics and statistics
EC1040 Introduction to economic policy


Year 2;

Psychology;

PS1011 Statistics and Methodology I
PS1208 Fundamentals of Neuroscience and Behaviour
PS1230 Personality and Individual Differences
PS2005 Academic Skills Tutorials 2
PS2007 Developmental Psychology

Economics;

3 of;

EC2010 Intermediate economics
EC2020 The economy of Ireland
EC2030 The economics of public policy
EC2040 Mathematical and statistical methods


Year 3;

Psychology;

If psychology is my minor or my major I choose six of these;

PS3408 Clinical Psychology, Intellectual Disability and Pervasive Developmental Disorders
PS3421 Memory, Synaptic Plasticity and the Brain
PS3422 Rationality and Reasoning
PS3423 Creativity and Imagination
PS3426 Advanced Individual Differences
PS3427 Embodiment
PS3428 Culture and Health
PS3432 Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology
PS3435 The Social Self: Theory and Measurement
PS3437 Child Development in Changing Family Contexts
PS3439 Applied Issues in Developmental Psychology
PS3440 Psychology of Criminal Behaviour
PS3447 The Neuropsychology of Control
PS3451 Contemporary Symptoms
PS3452 Clinical Case Studies in Child and Adolescent Mental Health
PS3454 Social Neuroscience
PS3458 Preclinical and Clinical Models of Neuropsychiatric and Neurological Disorders
PS3459 Neurological Rehabilitation
PS3460 Consumer Behaviour

And if it’s my major I also do;

PS3001 Research
PS3014 Practicals, Methodology and Stats II (elements)

Economics;

“Students must take courses equivalent to 30 ECTS including at least one of EC3010, EC3021, EC3060 and EC3090. All courses have an ECTS weighting of 10. Students may take Broad Curriculum courses equivalent to 10 ECTS instead of one of their options.”

EC3010 Economic analysis
EC3021 Money and Banking
EC3030 The European economy
EC3040 The economics of less developed countries
EC3050 Investment analysis
EC3060 Economics of Policy Issues
EC3071 Industrial Economics: Competition, Strategy and Policy
EC3080 Mathematical Economics
EC3090 Econometrics

One of the “broad curriculum” modules I could take is BCPS2 Social Psychology sweet!


Year 4; In the last year you only study one subject or the other.

Psychology;

PS4003 Theoretical Issues in Psychology
PS4009 Advanced Academic Skills
PS4014 Project

Students choose five of the following modules:-

PS3408 Clinical Psychology, Intellectual Disability and Pervasive Developmental Disorders
PS3421 Memory, Synaptic Plasticity and the Brain
PS3422 Rationality and Reasoning
PS3423 Creativity and Imagination
PS3426 Advanced Individual Differences
PS3427 Embodiment
PS3428 Culture and Health
PS3432 Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology
PS3435 The Social Self: Theory and Measurement
PS3437 Child Development in Changing Family Contexts
PS3439 Applied Issues in Developmental Psychology
PS3440 Psychology of Criminal Behaviour
PS3447 The Neuropsychology of Control
PS3451 Contemporary Symptoms
PS3452 Clinical Case Studies in Child and Adolescent Mental Health
PS3454 Social Neuroscience
PS3458 Preclinical and Clinical Models of Neuropsychiatric and Neurological Disorders
PS3459 Neurological Rehabilitation
PS3460 Consumer Behaviour

Economics;

(Pattern B) students must take courses equivalent to 60 ECTS. All courses have an ECTS weighting of 15.

EC4010 Economic theory
EC4051 Economics of financial markets
EC4060 Transport economics
EC4090 Quantitative methods
EC4100 International economics
EC4110 Monetary Thought and Policy
EC4120 Economic and legal aspects of competition policy
EC4130 Economics dissertation


I can also study psychology on it's own for 4 years but there didn't seem to be any extra related to the stuff I'm interested in I'd get to do.

-------------

Psychology in University College Dublin (follow the link or ask me for more info);

University College Dublin is ranked 2nd in Ireland and 134th worldwide

3 years;

Year 1;
Psychology;

Brain and Behaviour
Introduction to Social Psychology
Research Methods & Stats I
Introduction to the Psychology of Perception and Cognition

+ 2 more arts subjects in the first year, economics and sociology sound cool, I could pick 6 of;

Principles of Macroeconomics
Introduction to Quantitative Economics
Economics and Society
Principles of Microeconomics
Foundations of Sociological Thought
Introduction to Sociology
Contemporary Irish Culture and Society Sociology in Practice

And 2 “electives” which can be modules from any course at all! There are plenty of results for marketing for example, you can search here: http://www.ucd.ie/students/curriculumarchive.html

Years 2 and 3;

Psychology;

Child & Adolescent Development
Laboratory Practicals in Psychology I
Intro to History of Psychology
Behavioural Neuroscience
Human Intelligence and Personality
Research Methods & Stats III
Research Methods & Stats I
Psychology of Language and Language Acquisition
Visual and Social Cognition
Research Methods & Stats II
Lifespan Developmental Psychology
Laboratory Practicals in Psychology II
Advanced Social Psychology
Psychology Research Project


+ 4 of;

Philosophy of Mind
Biological Psychology
Introduction to Disability Studies
Introduction to Work and Organisational Psychology
Recent Papers in Neuroscience
Psychological Trauma
Clinical Psychology
International Psychology
Introduction to Health Psychology
Psychology and Crime
Advanced Language Development and Bilingualism
Liberation Psychology
Practicing organisational psychology: Diagnosing and solving workplace problems
Introduction to Counselling Psychology
Sport and Exercise Psychology
Career development in psych
Theoretical Psychology

+ 4 electives from any course in the college!

-----------

One other option might be marketing in Dublin Institute of Technology;

http://www.dit.ie/study/undergraduate/p ... tingdt341/

Dublin institute of technology is ranked around 7th in Ireland and 301st worldwide.

-----------

Universty College Dublin's website is really stupid and has more than one version of several pages so some small details might be a little off. I'm going to email them and hopefully that will clarify things.

Anyone else who might know stuff about this/anywhere else I should post this?

Do ye think 3 or 4 years is a better idea?

Massive thanks to Richard Batty and all of you for such excellent advice!:D!

So speak now or forever hold your peas!

Hey Ruairi, where is the marketing in there?

My estimation would be that if you want to be a professor first and use that position of knowledge and authority to persuade others, then psychology and economics are an ideal starting point because psychology and economics are the sciences of utilitarian behaviour.

However, psychology may not be the most practical object of study. If you wanted to work for a philanthropic organisation right away, then the most useful thing to me would seem to be the ability to create an online presence, capitalise on appropriate markets and spread beneficial memes. i.e. marketing. I also think it's neglected by current utilitarians.

RyanCarey wrote:Hey Ruairi, where is the marketing in there?

Do you mean in this http://www.ucd.ie/students/curriculumarchive.html ?

Unfortunately it won't let me paste a direct link so you have to click "2011/12 modules" then "keyword search" then type in whatever you're searching for. However I'm just noticin that most of the marketing courses arn't level 1 :/ which I think means there may be pre-requisites, still I think I could probably find some quite good modules.

RyanCarey wrote:My estimation would be that if you want to be a professor first and use that position of knowledge and authority to persuade others, then psychology and economics are an ideal starting point because psychology and economics are the sciences of utilitarian behaviour.

However, psychology may not be the most practical object of study. If you wanted to work for a philanthropic organisation right away, then the most useful thing to me would seem to be the ability to create an online presence, capitalise on appropriate markets and spread beneficial memes. i.e. marketing. I also think it's neglected by current utilitarians.

Yea, I'm thinking working for a charity or founding a charity and then applying what I've learned in psychology and economics to making social change looks like a cool way to go. So your second suggestion is more relevant? Do you mean that studying marketing is neglected by utils or this approach in general is neglected by utils?

Those courses all sound like a lot of fun.

My sense is that if you're doing nonprofit work, neither of these majors will be especially useful in an applied setting. But that's mainly because not a lot of academic subjects in general will be that relevant to nonprofit stuff, except maybe web development, fundraising, some marketing, some accounting, maybe a small amount of business?

Besides usefulness to your future career, there are two other factors to optimize for:

• Signaling of your intelligence and analytic thinking. Math/science courses are good in this dimension. It's nice that both of the majors you cited have a good amount of stats.
• Expanding your mind so that you know more about the world when approaching utilitarian issues. For this, most natural and social sciences are useful, although I think psychology ranks among the most useful.

If there's any nontrivial chance you might go into finance or business later on, you might do the econ courses for that reason. But if you think those career paths are unlikely, you might get more out of the psych courses for your general edification.

I agree with RyanCarey that marketing could be a really good option too, though Dublin Institute of Technology apparently has less raw signaling value than the other two, based on the ranking you cited.

I suppose you'll probably apply to more than one place (?), so you can always make the final decision later as more info comes in.

Ruairi wrote:Do you mean that studying marketing is neglected by utils or this approach in general is neglected by utils?

I think he meant marketing specifically, but dunno for sure.

Ruairi wrote:So speak now or forever hold your peas!

Can I do both? My peas don't want me to put them down.

yeah I meant marketing specifically. Seems important for helping people to become more compassionate and more rational about who needs help the most.

RyanCarey wrote:Seems important for helping people to become more compassionate and more rational about who needs help the most.

From "Salience and Motivation":

First do the math, and then come up with the "marketing" (feel-good images and unconscious persuasions) to back it up. But don't neglect the marketing: Math alone can't sustain motivation on a day-to-day basis. We also need the help of appropriately designed social and environmental surroundings to keep our emotions in line with our fundamental values.

Brian Tomasik wrote:My sense is that if you're doing nonprofit work, neither of these majors will be especially useful in an applied setting. But that's mainly because not a lot of academic subjects in general will be that relevant to nonprofit stuff, except maybe web development, fundraising, some marketing, some accounting, maybe a small amount of business?

Urgh, but then what do I do?

Brian Tomasik wrote:If there's any nontrivial chance you might go into finance or business later on, you might do the econ courses for that reason. But if you think those career paths are unlikely, you might get more out of the psych courses for your general edification.

The more I think about it the more I think finance is maybe probably definitely not for me...

Brian Tomasik wrote:I suppose you'll probably apply to more than one place (?), so you can always make the final decision later as more info comes in.

Yes

Brian Tomasik wrote:

Ruairi wrote:So speak now or forever hold your peas!

Can I do both? My peas don't want me to put them down.

@Ryan + Brian; But marketing seems like it's just applied psychology?

Btw I just regurgitated this onto my new blog ! http://www.ruairidonnelly.com/?p=39

Ruairi wrote:Urgh, but then what do I do?

Don't fret too much. Most of college is not directly useful later in life, even for people who do the most applied majors. (By saying "directly useful," I'm excluding signaling and general edification. Also networking and making friends.)

Ruairi wrote:maybe probably definitely not for me...

Ha. Ascending order of certainty.

Ruairi wrote:But marketing seems like it's just applied psychology?

Part of it, maybe, but it's easier to learn the applications directly in marketing than trying to guess at them from psychology. Nothing beats direct studies of marketing itself. And then I suspect there's a fair amount of marketing that focuses on running campaigns, using social media, web design, etc. that wouldn't be covered in psychology. I don't actually know because I never studied marketing, so probably better to check with the program directly.

If Ryan's reading this he might have more to say, but if I were applying to university now, I'd probably aim for either some form of engineering or medicine. Both offer high expected career earnings, very low risk of no earnings (not important from a strict util perspective, but likely to matter to you), and a fair bit of flexibility in what you can use them for - including non-prophil paths (eg you could go into research after either in numerous fields). Engineering is probably more flexible, medicine probably higher expected earnings in the standard careers (and even higher job security).

Psychology, marketing, business and so on are all relatively soft skills where you'll need to stand out significantly more in order to get your pick of jobs.

Brian Tomasik wrote:Part of it, maybe, but it's easier to learn the applications directly in marketing than trying to guess at them from psychology. Nothing beats direct studies of marketing itself. And then I suspect there's a fair amount of marketing that focuses on running campaigns, using social media, web design, etc. that wouldn't be covered in psychology. I don't actually know because I never studied marketing, so probably better to check with the program directly.

If I study psychology in University College Dublin I could do quite a bit of marketing as "electives", also it's 3 years rather than 4 which means more time doing good in the "real world"

I agree with Arepo that engineering and medicine (and law) offer the most reliable stream of income with the lowest chance of unemployment. This, as Arepo says, is because they specifically tailor their students to perform a job. Things like psychology and a general commerce degree are relatively non-specific for seeking employment, especially if one has excluded the possibility of becoming a clinical psychologist. Marketing is possibly an intermediate option. In fact, if you are looking to go down the professional philanthropist pathway, I would ask:
1. Would you want to study Law?
2. Would you want to do software engineering and then start up an online business of some sort?

A couple more questions:
3. Would you want to research the ethics of career choice? Or research the best course to study? There will be more people like me, Arepo, yourself and Peter Hurford who will continue to wonder which qualifications and which jobs are the best, year after year until someone performs the appropriate surveys, crunches the numbers correctly, gathers intel regarding the most effective marketing techniques, and so on...
4. Are you able to use your high-school grades to study in Oxford, which I'd call the world-capital of utilitarianism, due to its housing GWWC and 80k Hours?
5. Do you want to influence people by becoming an academic, by joining or starting an organisation like GWWC, or neither?
6. If your goal is to promote important philanthropic ideas, do you think you will be more effective by a) donating money for marketing or b) soliciting money and performing marketing

I'm not sure these have very clear answer but I think these are the correct questions to ask, and I'm sure I and others will also have something to say about them.

RyanCarey wrote:In fact, if you are looking to go down the professional philanthropist pathway, I would ask:
1. Would you want to study Law?
2. Would you want to do software engineering and then start up an online business of some sort?

I don't wanna be a pro. phil. though.

RyanCarey wrote:A couple more questions:
3. Would you want to research the ethics of career choice? Or research the best course to study? There will be more people like me, Arepo, yourself and Peter Hurford who will continue to wonder which qualifications and which jobs are the best, year after year until someone performs the appropriate surveys, crunches the numbers correctly, gathers intel regarding the most effective marketing techniques, and so on...
4. Are you able to use your high-school grades to study in Oxford, which I'd call the world-capital of utilitarianism, due to its housing GWWC and 80k Hours?
5. Do you want to influence people by becoming an academic, by joining or starting an organisation like GWWC, or neither?
6. If your goal is to promote important philanthropic ideas, do you think you will be more effective by a) donating money for marketing or b) soliciting money and performing marketing

3. Hmm... maybe.

4. I've wondered about this, I dunno how good one needs to be to do this, I suspect better than me.

5. I want to start or join an organization and do really effective marketing basically

6. I think quite possibly (b) because people in the non-profit sector seem to be doing this really badly.

Thanks!:D

Happy to help Ruairi.

Have you considered TCD's MODERATORSHIP IN ECONOMIC & SOCIAL STUDIES (BESS)?
As a Junior Freshman,
BU1510 Introduction to Organisation and Management
EC1010 Introduction to Economics
EC1030 Mathematics and Statistics
PO1600 Introduction to Political Science
SO1310 Introduction to Sociology

And one of:
LA1240 Introduction to Law
SS1765 Social Policy Concepts/The Irish Welfare State

as a Senior Freshman, 6 of:
BU2511a+b Management 1 – Organisational Behaviour/Principles of Marketing
BU2520a+b Management 2 – Intro to Accounting/Financial Analysis
BU2541a+b Management 3 – Intro to Finance/Intro to Operations Management
EC2010 Intermediate Economics
EC2020 Economy of Ireland
EC2030 The Economics of Public Policy
EC2040 Mathematical and Statistical Methods
SO2310 Introduction to Social Research
SO2330 European Societies
SO2342 Gender, Culture and Society
PO2610 History of Political Thought
PO2640 International Relations
PO2650 Comparative Politics
SS2750 Social Security Policy
SS2760 Health Policy
SS2770 Housing Policy
SS2780 Crime and Irish Society
SS2767 Irish Social Policy 1
SS2785 Irish Social Policy 2
LA2012 Aspects of Irish Law in a European Context
PI1006 Central problems in Philosophy B
PI2008 History of Philosophy II B
PI2009 Logic and Philosophy of Science B
BC Broad Curriculum Module

As a Junior sophister, potential highlights are:
Marketing Management
Economic Analysis
Economics of Less Developed Countries
Innovation, Entrepreneurship and New Venture Development

As a Senior sophister, potential highlights are:
Advances in Marketing Theory and Practice
Managing Non-Profit Organisations
Economic Theory
Poverty, Inequality and Redistribution

In summary, it seems that the economics content is similar in BESS compared to TSM, as is the slight degree of sociology, but there is much more business stuff with a touch of marketing in place of psychology. I'm not able to make a comment about whether this would be better or worse than TSM.

Ruairi, I suspect our credence in what we'll be like in future is affected by status quo bias, so I would suggest upgrading the credence you have in the possibility that your preferences (including utilitarianism-guided intentions) might change either because you discover (non-/)aptitude for a subject or simply because you get new information.

That's not to say you should completely revise your plans, it's just an argument in favour of doing something more versatile, all things being equal. I don't actually know what 'versatile' means in this context, so this isn't very concrete advice (my first instinct on seeing Ryan's post was that psychology, being further up the conceptual ladder than marketing, would be more versatile, but given that everyone and their dog needs marketing, maybe that's the opposite of true), just a thought thrown out there.

Thanks Ryan!

BESS is cool and also has good signaling value (within Ireland anyway), well actually any course at Trinity or UCD will probably have good signaling value within Ireland.

The more I think about these things the more I think that perhaps psychology in UCD might be excellent. In my first year I get to do two other arts subjects (maybe economics and sociology?) but also a few "elective" modules, of which there seems to be plenty in marketing. In my second and third years I'd do just psychology but could also take electives in marketing.

Also this course is 3 years rather than 4, I'm not sure if this is better or worse but I think probably better as I can start doing good stuff sooner. What do ye think?

Thanks Arepo, I think you're probably right about status quo bias, I'll keep that in mind.

Thanks so much guys!:D!

My own chosen career is journalism, more specifically opinion journalism. By giving people accurate information and analysis from a utilitarian perspective, I hope I can make the world at least a little bit better. Writing is also one of the few things that make me really happy, so I factor that in as well. What are your opinions on journalism as a "utilitarian career"?

If you're really good/lucky and get to write about important issues in widely read publications, then I think it would probably be excellent!

Btw if you have a talent for writing maybe you could speak to Effective Animal Activism and80000hours to see if they would be interested in you writing blog posts for their sites

Agree with everything Ruairi said.

How mainstream are you aiming for? If you'd write for more mainstream publications, you'd have lower odds and would have to blunt some of your messages, but you'd reach a big audience and would be taken seriously. If you'd write for less mainstream publications or, say, would become a professional blogger, you'd be able to say more valuable things that can't be put forward in mainstream circles, but you'd have lower reach and also lower income.

In the past, I actually toyed with a career as a high-impact blogger/writer, but I decided the main limiting factor would be income. It would be hard to make money with blogging, so I decided I should instead earn money more efficiently in a conventional lucrative career for a few years, so that I could potentially retire early and do all the writing I want without constraints. If you can get funding from another organization (like 80,000 Hours or EAA, as Ruairi mentioned), you wouldn't have to earn your own money first.

I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in popularizing things that aren't well known -- e.g., studies of animal welfare and sentience, ecology applied research to wild-animal suffering, scenarios for future computational suffering, etc. You can reach a much bigger audience with popular articles and blogs than by doing original research and publishing toned-down material in scientific journals, although there is a place for the latter as well.

Brian Tomasik wrote:I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in popularizing things that aren't well known -- e.g., studies of animal welfare and sentience, ecology applied research to wild-animal suffering, scenarios for future computational suffering, etc. You can reach a much bigger audience with popular articles and blogs than by doing original research and publishing toned-down material in scientific journals, although there is a place for the latter as well.

That's definitely something I can get behind. While I might not want to be a professional writer*, I can easily work it into the free time of any high impact career I might have, and hope to begin the wave.

*At least not yet. As a college professor, however, I do hope to write popular books someday down the road, and hopefully they can have a utilitarian bent.

That's great, Peter!

Sometimes grad students go to the media or popular blogs with their findings. It's plausible to me that the 10% of their time spent on public outreach has at least as much impact as the remaining 90% of their time. (Of course, the remaining 90% gives them something to do outreach about, as well as credibility.)

This might be less true for science or technology where the main goal is to build the knowledge of experts and advance innovation. But in the realm of changing public attitudes or building movements, outreach is huge.

P.S., I just noticed your signature about ruling with an iron fist -- indeed you have been an absolutely ruthless administrator!

Maybe it could be worthwhile to, in another thread, compile a list of research that we think deserves to be brought to a wider audience, and then see where we go from there? Right now, our reach might just be passing along personal blog essays via social networking or publishing to LessWrong, but that sounds like a good start and hopefully if we can influence more popular people or as we develop ourselves, we can get to even bigger audiences.

Though I imagine different communities are at different places -- people at LessWrong need no convincing of "effective charity" or "utilitarianism" (they seem to already be for it or against it and have heard the basics) whereas readers of, say, the New York Times, could really use some GiveWell 101 (let alone an extension of this to nonhuman welfare!).

...

Brian Tomasik wrote:P.S., I just noticed your signature about ruling with an iron fist -- indeed you have been an absolutely ruthless administrator!

Ruairi wrote:If you're really good/lucky and get to write about important issues in widely read publications, then I think it would probably be excellent!

With the job market for journalists being what it is in Sweden, I could be H. L. Mencken reborn and I would still have to rely on a fair bit of luck.

Ruairi wrote:Btw if you have a talent for writing maybe you could speak to Effective Animal Activism and80000hours to see if they would be interested in you writing blog posts for their sites

I didn't know of either, I'll check them out!

Brian Tomasik wrote:How mainstream are you aiming for? If you'd write for more mainstream publications, you'd have lower odds and would have to blunt some of your messages, but you'd reach a big audience and would be taken seriously. If you'd write for less mainstream publications or, say, would become a professional blogger, you'd be able to say more valuable things that can't be put forward in mainstream circles, but you'd have lower reach and also lower income.

I'm bad at censoring myself, so if I can't express myself properly in mainstream publications I'll probably try and try until I find a channel to say what I want. Though opinion journalism is not the only kind of journalism I have an interest and talent for, I like science journalism and normal, everyday, local journalism as well.

Brian Tomasik wrote:In the past, I actually toyed with a career as a high-impact blogger/writer, but I decided the main limiting factor would be income. It would be hard to make money with blogging, so I decided I should instead earn money more efficiently in a conventional lucrative career for a few years, so that I could potentially retire early and do all the writing I want without constraints.

Out of curiosity, what conventional lucrative career would that be? I've found that I have a hard time doing a job I find boring, unless it is a completely braindead job. Right now I have a part-time job at a small factory, but if I'm doing anything that actually requires my brain (say, most white-collar jobs) I become crazy unless it's something I like.

Brian Tomasik wrote:I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in popularizing things that aren't well known -- e.g., studies of animal welfare and sentience, ecology applied research to wild-animal suffering, scenarios for future computational suffering, etc. You can reach a much bigger audience with popular articles and blogs than by doing original research and publishing toned-down material in scientific journals, although there is a place for the latter as well.

I very much agree. I was actually aiming for a scientific career at first (cognitive science). I tried to force myself to it due to some kind of misguided idea of what I was meant to do (a PhD looks so shiny!), but it wasn't for me. Eventually I just collapsed and had to reevaluate my life's direction. Some people are wired to handle doing the same thing for 40 years, some people would die of boredom. I belong to the second category. I have a hard time keeping interest in a single subject for more than few days, journalism fits me much better. In addition, universities are rotten cesspools of deceit, ambition and corruption. But I guess newspapers are the same, so hey.

Hi WAN,

I just got introduced to this site, and I'm actually volunteering right now for an organisation that tries to help people with exactly this problem. (www.80000hours.org) It's related to Giving What We Can, which Brian mentioned.

It's a tough problem, and it's in practice going to depend quite a lot on your strengths, but there are a few general principles. Like people have been mentioning, don't underestimate the value of earning and donating money. Your focus on the developing world is also probably good - the gains to be had there are just so much cheaper than equivalent gains in happiness in the rich world. It's also worth thinking about the extent to which your work is replaceable. So, for example, when you choose to apply for a job as a doctor you don't create a whole new doctor - someone else would have taken your job if you didn't apply. It turns out that you *do* increase the number of doctors (we have to use some economics to analyse how) but your impact won't be as big as it directly seems. We've got loads of blog posts on those and related topics. You should check us out.

Alkahest wrote:Out of curiosity, what conventional lucrative career would that be?

Sorry, long delay on the reply. Better late than never.

I work at Microsoft on the Bing search engine. If you have a Glassdoor account, you can get an idea here. If you don't have a Glassdoor account, you should.