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Show HN: A career test for people who want to have a social impact

73 points| BenjaminTodd | 10 years ago |80000hours.org

54 comments

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[+] rdl|10 years ago|reply
I can support the idea here ("people wanting to have social impact"), but the quiz is probably the worst way to direct people toward that possible.

Just show ~10 ways to have social impact, and what skills/traits/etc. are important to each.

The profiles are good. Lead with those. Give some examples.

You're not going to get people to accurately self assess their skills or risk tolerance. You might get people to see "oh, I want to get involved in party politics", and see what factors are important to success there.

(Also both UK centric and 20-year-old centric.)

[+] BenjaminTodd|10 years ago|reply
That's really interesting. Originally we just had a list, and I had this concern with the test. However, as the list of paths we've reviewed gets longer, it seems useful to provide a quick way of filtering it.
[+] guci22|10 years ago|reply
The cutesy answer subscripts are really lame. I really did not want to complete the survey after the first question.
[+] parsnipsumthing|10 years ago|reply
I also disliked them and thought they were mainly inaccurate reflections of the preceding question. Being logical is not the same as being a math whiz. Being analytical is completely different to being a grammar and vocabulary pedant.Being willing to work in a competitive field is not the same as having a personally competitive personality.
[+] d_theorist|10 years ago|reply
I agree. I also thought they could have done with more clearly explaining 'social impact'. Not really sure what that means.
[+] bbcbasic|10 years ago|reply
I liked them. Different strokes eh!
[+] code_sterling|10 years ago|reply
If you're bad at math, poor at writing or analyzing arguments, and have the competitive instinct of a Care Bear, you're a 10/10 for a think tank researcher. I find it a little dubious to call this a career test.
[+] BenjaminTodd|10 years ago|reply
Fair. Bear in mind: (i) it's aimed at talented graduates (ii) it's finds which of our top recommended careers you should most strongly consider, rather than which career you'd be best at.
[+] kickscondor|10 years ago|reply
I'm a programmer who left startups to go be a teacher at a public elementary school. It told me to be in politics or a tech startup founder. I'm just not sure how those can match both the reward of lighting up little faces with fresh knowledge and the impact of directly working to improve what is (to me) the center of my community.

So yeah can I suggest 'school teacher' as a result? Is it just totally outside of the realm of possibility here? Maybe I just didn't see it. (I did check the box that said I'm okay with a small influence!)

[+] plaguuuuuu|10 years ago|reply
We're talking SF-centric startup culture here. It's not enough to actually change the world for the better. You need to make millions of dollars and be 'changing the world' by disrupting some kind of market segment nobody actually cares about, and be some kind of Randian uberwhatever, otherwise you're a piece of shit
[+] ryan-allen|10 years ago|reply
What do you teach in the public schools?
[+] atmosx|10 years ago|reply
IMHO if you wanna have impact, you write. You write theatrical plays, social and political philosophy, satire, comics, songs, whatever.

Anything that will connect someone in 200 years from today, with your mind and soul, can make a difference.

At least, this is how I feel when I read poems, watch a play, read a book or listen to a song.

ps. A prominent example is Tolstoy. The impact his writings had on Gandhi is outstanding IMHO.

[+] neilk|10 years ago|reply
Think tank researcher and economics professor? These are good careers for people who want to change things? Citation needed.
[+] aflinik|10 years ago|reply
According to this quiz, you can either have small guaranteed impact or bet on something bigger while accepting you might fail.

I wonder what's their take on bootstrapped startups, that have potential to grow exponentially but don't rush it valley-style. Biggest long-running tech companies had positive revenue since very early in their life (if not day 1).

[+] plaguuuuuu|10 years ago|reply
This bothered me. There's enough of these people. Society needs disruptive change in order to save the planet, feed the hungry, end homelessness, end the slave trade, etc.

I was looking for something along these lines.

[+] BenjaminTodd|10 years ago|reply
Click through to the individual profiles to see the reasoning.
[+] ForHackernews|10 years ago|reply
A lot of these suggestions seem really...douchey (for lack of a more precise term). I guess theoretically you can have a great social impact being a hedge fund quant or a startup founder, but the more traditional goal of those careers (and the people who undertake them) is making yourself filthy stinking rich.

I know the 80,000 hours people have this idea of earn-to-give, but do they have any stats on how many people actually follow through with that? It's very easy to imagine a bright, young college grad heading for Wall Street planning to donate 75% of his income, but once he gets there he finds he quite likes the taste of caviar and all his friends and coworkers have a couple BMWs, anyway...

[+] BenjaminTodd|10 years ago|reply
It's true that it depends a lot on what you do within the career.

On stats behind earning to give, of the people we know, 0% have quit, meaning carrying on in a high-earning career but stopped donating at least 10%. Most are still earning to give, and the others have left high-earning careers though to make an impact through research, nonprofits etc instead. I think this is due to the strength of the community - if you were earning to give alone it would be much harder. Also, we only have 3 years of data, so it's too early to get a good measurement.

[+] vonklaus|10 years ago|reply
While that was fun, you get what you aspire to be. The bias is tied to your appraisal of your skills and potential and a few arbitrary pieces of info. That being said, the top 3 choices i got would be my top 3 fav careers in descrnding order.
[+] BenjaminTodd|10 years ago|reply
Ha! I agree it's an issue that people might not assess their skills and preferences correctly, but that seems hard to avoid in a short test. Later we could add more objective measures of skills etc.
[+] kw71|10 years ago|reply
I think it's great to encourage these kinds of work.

I'm old and wish I had made my impact in more meaningful areas.

Lots of people here have changed the world. I can't be the only one looking back wanting to have done it for a better cause.

[+] roneesh|10 years ago|reply
I appreciate the sentiment, that if you look at just gross impact, then a quant/hedge fund/think tank career might actually be more helpful than something more traditionally 'impactful'. But I can't help but feel that in it's quest to say something novel about social impact, it misses the soul of what it means to change the world for the better.
[+] Aeolun|10 years ago|reply
I uh... had 10/10 on all my first 5 results. After that I just closed the page, since it was obviously irrelevant.

I like these tests, if just for fun, but they need to have an actual result :P

[+] BenjaminTodd|10 years ago|reply
That means they're all tied.

What responses did you put in?

[+] overpaidgoogler|10 years ago|reply
If you look at a graph of world GDP, you'll see that it grows steadily and exponentially. The full set of causes is this is not known, but it can be shown not to be merely due to the gradual accumulation of capital. A large part must be due to technological growth.

So if you want to measure social impact I would also include the positive externalities of various jobs including working in technology. Even though I will probably be ridiculed as a typical silicon valley cultist, I think that anything that advances technology, including software, has a big positive economic externality.