Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Personal fit is different from the thing that you already like, published by Joris P on March 18, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This is a

Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked.

This draft lacks the polish of a full post, but the content is almost there. The kind of constructive feedback you would normally put on a Forum post is very welcome.

I wrote most of this last year. I also think I'm making a pretty basic point and don't think I'm articulating it amazingly, but I'm trying to write more and can imagine people (especially newer to EA) finding this useful - so here we go

Last week[1] I was at an event with a lot of people relatively new to EA - lots of them had recently finished the introductory fellowship. Talking through their plans for the future, I noticed that many of them used the concept 'personal fit' to justify their plans to work on a problem they had already found important before learning about EA.

They would say they wanted to work on combating climate change or increasing gender equality, because

They had studied this and felt really motivated to work on it

Therefore, their 'personal fit' was really good for working on this topic

Therefore surely, it was the highest impact thing they could be doing.

I think a lot of them were likely mistaken, in one or more of the following ways:

They overestimated their personal fit for roles in these (broad!) fields

They underestimated the differences in impact between career options and cause areas

They thought that they were motivated to do the most good they could, but in fact they were motivated by a specific cause

To be clear: the ideal standard here is probably unattainable, and I surely don't live up to it. However, if I could stress one thing, it would be that people scoping out their career options could benefit from first identifying high-impact career options, and only second thinking about which ones they might have a great personal fit for - not the other way around.

^

This was last year

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